I’ve often suffered from buyer’s remorse; the last time it happened was when I bought my new rug in Marrakech. Did I just buy it in the fervour of the moment? Would it actually fit in at home? How was I going to get it back home on the plane? Would it fit in my suitcase? Did I pay too much? I did haggle for it, but did I haggle enough? Had someone else bought something similar and paid a lot less? If they had, how would that make me feel? Whilst I appreciate that the worth of something is what someone is prepared to pay for it, everything is so much simpler and fairer when there is a fixed price.

I experienced a new feeling recently – blogger’s remorse. Should I have posted ‘Three Conversations With My Mother’? In the moment it felt right, but as is always the case with me, the doubt started to creep in. The phrase ‘act in haste, repent at leisure’ could have been coined for me.

I’ve already mentioned that I seem to be a person of extremes – I’m either very guarded or a total oversharer, particularly after a couple, after which I’m plagued by cringe inducing thoughts. I had one such cringe whilst having a shower the other morning. I suddenly thought, everyone who sees my blog (I’m not kidding myself – it’s not that many!) now knows the most personal information about my relationship with my mother in her last days. Also, how would I feel if I saw my images elsewhere in the public domain? In all honesty, I felt a bit panicky and decided just not to think about it.

But not thinking about things and hoping they will just go away is not an answer. So, later that day I decided that I would process this sudden feeling of regret. I’ve always known, in the back of my mind, that I have to deal with that period of my life in order to move forward. Memories of it have taken my head hostage and I needed to offer a swap – somewhere else for them to inhabit, to free up my mind so that I have the space to remember all that was good. In essence, I have emotionally vomitted the negative and harmful feelings onto the page, and I can now look at them and still feel the way I did, but when I put them away, hopefully, they will stay away.

This course is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, and I need to wring everything I possibly can out of it. I’m trying to find out who I am, and in so doing I need to be fully committed to the process. To avoid sharing parts of my life because they are too personal would be to cheat myself, and so, I’m all in.