Despite having been born and raised in Barbados, surrounded by water, and having a father and grandfather who built and sailed boats, I really was a landlubber. Once he had kids, my Daddy no longer sailed, so I grew up going to the beach and swimming, but not venturing out on the water. So ‘finding my sea legs’, a metaphor given to me by my friend, the remarkable artist Cara Brown, wasn’t something I did until much later in life.

	My Papa’s boat under sail in quiet Caribbean waters

However, I didn’t need to go to sea to be impacted by what another friend and colleague Lyn Allen so powerfully named the ‘rogue waves’ of life. Those events that (like rogue waves on the ocean) are the enormous challenges that seem to come out of nowhere, rolling through and over our lives – often with significant impact.

The first big one hit when I was 7. In a way, my childhood ended abruptly when Lotta, my Nanny who had lived with us since I was born, left to go care for her mother who had been injured. The loss of the power of her loving presence was like a huge rogue wave that rocked my life, leaving me untethered and bereft. In my child mind, I figured I must’ve got things all wrong. If I was as wonderful as I thought I was, she’d not have left. Though I didn’t know why or how, I decided I must have been too much trouble. I not only lost her, but I lost confidence in my capacity to know things. It was here that a lifetime of being hypervigilantly attuned to the needs and wants of others, and the disappearing of connection with, and attention to, my own needs and desires began. While this meant I developed all kinds of valuable skills, what I was really trying to do was control everything in a futile attempt to never be too much trouble and risk another painful loss.

In fact I became very skilled in many areas. From the outside, my life looked pretty together, but the personal cost in terms of my relationship with myself was high. Though I couldn’t acknowledge it, by my mid-30s, the tension and exhaustion from trying to hold everything together, and make sure everyone around me was taken care of, began to be noticed by a good friend. But it took being hit by the second enormous rogue wave – my becoming pregnant after having had a tubal ligation – to shake me into consciousness. I could no longer deny that even my best efforts as controlling things couldn’t be counted on, and I truly began to recognize and acknowledge the pain and terror I’d been trying to stave off all along.

At that point even I realized something had to change. Rather than continuing to try to hold myself rigidly still in an attempt to avoid the natural rocking we all experience when sailing along in life, I was ready to begin to allow myself to practice rolling with the waves. Out of desperation, this landlubber was finally open to risking saying ‘yes’ to finding her sea legs.