Grief, Growth and Rebuilding a Creative Life, with Natty Harris

0:06Katy:Okay, so this one might catch you off guard a bit because this week I sat down with Natty Harris, a senior designer based in Bristol, and we ended up having one of those conversations that just goes somewhere deeper than you might expect. Because we talk about grief, not just loss in the obvious sense, but we get into what it does to you as a human being, how it changes you, maybe even changes the way you see your life and your work and even yourself. Natty shares the story of her brother Thomas and what it was like growing up alongside him, then losing him and then figuring out how to carry on afterwards.

0:46Katy:And honestly, there's so much in this about being human, the messy bits, the strength you didn't know you had and that weird, surprising dose of hope that shows up out of nowhere along the way. If you've ever felt like you're just trying to keep going while something heavier is sitting underneath, and my goodness, I can resonate with that so much from these last few years, then this one will probably speak to you.

1:19Katy:This episode is sponsored by Adobe, provider of the AI-powered creative tools that are changing how we edit images. Whether you're a photographer, designer, marketer, or just someone who wants their photos to look incredible, new AI tools in Photoshop and the Firefly Image Editor make it easier than ever to bring your ideas to life just by describing what you want. Find out more at the link in the show notes.

1:46Katy:We're probably going to be talking about quite a heavy theme today Natty looking at the emails that have been going back and forth but yeah today we're talking about grief aren't we? Yeah I think obviously like caveating that I probably will cry at some point because that's just a natural part of grief and all that kind of stuff but also that grief is not just when you lose someone grief can be a season a stage of life uh you know a result of a epic change that you weren't expecting or you know and even people really dismiss it but pets are massive um when we lose our pets and stuff so um I'm speaking from a position of you know grieving someone in particular but I've also had that grief of a pet and a stage of life and feeling like I've missed out on stuff and that I'm sad that those things aren't there anymore but also how does that become the cornerstone of how you move forward and how you carry on when those things aren't there anymore and you know the hope that sits within um so yeah I think yeah it's going to be a bit heavy but hopefully it's not all doom and gloom no hopefully not gosh no it's an awful thing to go through grief but there is a sort of light at the end of the tunnel isn't there and you can you go through all the processes and one of them weirdly is laughing and remembering all the good times and and you feel you feel awful that you might be like oh my goodness you know um I remember that time do you remember that time when they did that and yeah it's it's it's honoring their memory isn't it I mean can you absolutely can you talk about who who you've lost yeah um I 10 years ago my brother Thomas died suddenly and unexpectedly um and it came to a certain extent without any warning um Thomas was uh 24 at the time um but he he was severely autistic and epileptic and the type of epilepsy that he had we always knew from the beginning that you know there was a risk and there's always that chance that things don't go the way that you hope and that his last seizure might be his last seizure and so um that's what happened he died of something called SUDEP which is sudden and unexpected death by epilepsy and I guess the one of the few things that we can take away from it is that you can't be resuscitated from it so it's not like you know we tried and we didn't get we didn't try hard enough it was always that you know this was going to be it and also that he wasn't suffering it happens very quickly the brain just goes I've had enough I don't want to do this anymore I can't do this anymore I'm overcharged um and that's why you know it just it happens and it's sudden and it's unexpected um but he I love talking about him he is my favorite one of my favorite people to talk about and he had such a huge impact on my life like just in general beyond you know him dying and how I've sort of rebuilt my life as a response to it and how it's informed every kind of decision we've ever made as a family.

5:21We moved to the UK when I was four and a half, about to turn five. And a huge part of that move was because he was diagnosed autistic. And we were from Brazil, in Rio, where, you know, life can be really tough there. and it's not necessarily especially in the 90s like you know it feels like the world was a very different place in the 90s it's just not a place for necessarily for people who aren't the cookie cutter mold like you know that they've got additional needs or they have they need a bit of help along the way or the world's not built for them and my parents made the really brave decision to go across the Atlantic and figure it out here um yeah so and we stayed in the UK because of him and everything was about him and everything all the decisions we ever made and his autism was very very routine led and he was not particularly like I don't want to say he's he was non-verbal because he was able to speak with you know voice etc but he couldn't have had a conversation with me so if you think about a toddler in a 24 year old body that's the kind of level of cognitive we're talking about so I could ask him Thomas are you hungry and he'd go hungry which was always the answer he was always hungry even if you'd just eaten um but you know he as his older sister and the only other sibling a huge part of my life was also being his best friend and also being his carer and also being his kind of communicator and representative to the world and I had a kind of language with him that nobody else had and so you know it that being his sister is the biggest honor and the biggest privilege of my life it was massively sort of directionally pushed me into where what I ended up doing for a living because I'm so I care so much about stories being told and I think being a designer is one of the greatest jobs in the world because you get to be a storyteller you get to tell people's stories all the time and how exciting is that like it can't be boring and I'm nodding along when you were telling me all about Thomas because I've had um spookily I've had a very similar um experience

7:54Katy:my mother's um sister veronica she had down syndrome so she had the mind i i do like worry about saying it this way but it's the only way i can think of saying it that other people might understand but she had it was like she was eternally three or four years old yeah with occasional um crosses over into adulthood you know especially if patrick swayze was on the television excellent choice absolutely and and everything you said I resonate with I had exactly the same experience she was my best friend and I really do think she shaped who I am today and I'll forever be grateful for the time I had with her yeah yeah oh yeah these people that make us I know and I think that was one of the first things that you know when Thomas died and he died not at home which I think in a way is a huge relief.

8:50He died where he lived at the time. It was a residential care centre who had a medical centre on site. So it was like the best place to be all the time. And obviously, I really grieve for those people that were there that had to do it. And that's part of their job. They know that there's a risk all the time with people that live there. It's an amazing place called Young Epilepsy. They specialise in that area. When Thomas died, And a lot of the people that worked with him at Young Epilepsy came to his funeral. Thomas didn't really have friends. I was, you know, his only friend. And that's not a sad thing.

9:32It was the nature of the beast in a way that, you know, friendship wasn't a natural thing that he could have sustained on his own. and you know when his carers and his teachers and his assistants and everyone came and they came to my parents home which is where the wake was and we went into his playroom which was a designated space downstairs with soft furnishings and everything that was his own room covered like head to toe in Disney because that was that was his thing I remember saying to the mall like he shaped me I can't like I will forever be this natty shape because of him and how could I ever ever spend a day for the rest of my life not acknowledging the shape that I occupy in the world because of him like it would be such a disservice to then say oh that was then and this is now like it's just the forever thing isn't it does it make you

10:32Katy:fearless do you sort of like crack on and say for god's sake natty get out of your own way like like doing public speaking or you know going to a job interview or even just being the first on the dance floor at a wedding uh i was sort of that person before the dance floor definitely you will always find me at a wedding dance floor um and i my philosophy is if you don't look like a muppet you're not doing it right um if you're trying to impress people you've done it very wrong um but i think grief and bereavement and that roller coaster and the whirlwind of it and the tornado and the tsunami of it all taught has taught me that life is really short and actually my window of tolerance for bullshit is much smaller than what it might have been before because actually you know sod it just do it just you know obviously be sensible what's the worst that can happen prepare for it do all of that stuff but at the end of the day I know I'm just a huge muppet I am a huge muppet and and I'm not trying to be more impressive than I am I'm not trying to be someone I'm not I totally acknowledge the fact I get it wrong a lot but I am I recognize a bravery that I sort of a tone of bravery that I didn't have before and I think that's in an odd way the gift that grief gives you is that ability to go I didn't recognize it as bravery at the time because it felt like survival but actually looking back being human is incredibly brave and to be I don't know wild enough to experience the full spectrum of human emotion and not immediately go I feel sad therefore I'm depressed it's no feeling sad is really important it's so important that we feel sad because every time we squash it down I remember the doctor that I saw not long after my brother died because I wasn't sleeping and I wasn't coping and everything else.

12:43He said, grief is like, you know, those beach balls. And the more you push it under the surface, when you finally release, the higher it will jump up and it will become unbearable and you won't be able to hold it at all. So he was like, let the ball be buoyant on the water. Let it be, don't try and squash it down because it would just be worse the next time. And those are words that I've carried with me for a really long time for, you know, 10 years of life after is, don't like feel sad feel happy feel angry feel all those things because that's what being human is about and that's how we connect with each other and that's how we navigate this mad thing

13:24Katy:called life it's so true um yeah you you have to just let it let it be something it's part understand that it's part of the process i mean we could apply that logic to anything in life particularly our creative careers can sometimes feel like we're grieving when we're in the midst of a project oh my goodness yes totally like and I think the odd thing about creativity is that especially in well I can only speak for design because that's you know the field that I'm I'm in is you've got to do that thing of removing yourself from it and saying I don't own this anymore I've created this thing here you go do you like it did it fill the brief yes or no okay move on carry on or whatever but at the moment we're so obsessed and like craving that the work that we do makes us feel something so how are we supposed to navigate that tension of being human but not feeling too much when it gets rejected or when it gets approved but also making sure that we leave something of humanity in it so that it then resonates with people and I think that's one of the hardest things that I found you know in the early stages of grief was you know going to work but also doing creative things in my own time the tank was empty like I was barely surviving I was barely like you know breathing eating sleeping doing all those things and then expecting me to be vulnerable at work to create things it it you know it was it felt impossible and it felt like it was so out of reach um and you just have to come up with new strategies of going okay what's the last thing that I remember that worked and going back on you know your the latest revelation that you had that sort of still resides in your brain you know like okay no that I know to be let's carry on from there and then hope that at some point you continue to take steps in your life that you get new revelations or you get new things that you've learned and then you're slowly building up as you go along but yeah it's it it can feel chaotic in all of it can't it absolutely and I think there's like things in that what you're saying that people resonate with right now because I talk to a lot of creatives as you know and I get the impression that everybody is really tired they're just absolutely shattered like we we can't mention what happened five six years ago you know that's forgotten everybody's like don't mention that no but i think we're still sort of finding our way and um i don't know maybe it's just the winter that we're coming out of maybe it's um that the way the world's changing so fast and all of the new complication complicated changes that are coming our way and already here in the industry it's just quite overwhelming so I think people are showing up and doing what they can but and I you know I talk to a lot of people but I get the sense that there's not a lot of hope at the moment which is quite depressing um yeah try and try and cheer people up and say you know we've still got lots to celebrate and cling on to And yes, the world might feel uncertain, but essentially a lot of it's out of our control and we have to.

16:52Katy:Yeah, we have to crack on, really. Yeah. And, you know, that's such a really great parallel to what it feels like when you're in the early stages of grief, where the world is feeling like it's running away from you and it's not grieving. Why isn't it grieving like how I am? How is it that I feel stuck in time and everybody else is just happy to move on and happy to run the rat race? happy to do it all when my pain is it just feels like I'm going through treacle like I'm just trying to like take a step forward and I feel like I can't and I've made no progress and then obviously thanks to hindsight and time you go oh no I made loads of progress I made you know I made it and I think you know I'm sure you can find moments in your life where you've felt like you've literally hit rock bottom and then rock bottom suddenly has a basement and you're like oh it got more crap and you just think okay today wasn't my day but I've got tomorrow and that hope of tomorrow I think was always the thing that like carried me forward and reminded me that today might not be my day today I might not leave the house because you know my social anxiety was so devastating immediately afterwards and I just had this like permanent panic that everyone I loved was going to die which is totally irrational because you know they hadn't until that point why were they suddenly all going to drop like flies um I know but it's the funny thing that your brain does and you've got to have those people around you going you're going to be okay like it's going to suck it's going to suck like nothing else you've known but you will get through it and you will get the other to the other side and or you will be able to move past today and And like, if you just take it one day at a time, one minute at a time, one hour at a time, whatever capacity you have, there is always tomorrow.

18:51And tomorrow's got hope written all over it. And we just don't know what it's going to bring. And that sometimes feels a bit anxious inducing. And you're like, oh God, I don't know. But you've done all these tomorrows until this point. So carry that as your kind of, I don't know, maybe your lantern or your, the spark that carries you forward that you've made it this far you know yeah how dare anything try to like

19:19Katy:derail you now it's true it's so true and I love that quote where it's um something like you know um don't worry because uh don't think that it's over because it's already tomorrow in Australia oh wow that's perfect that's so good that is so good I also think when you're at rock bottom um in my case on the floor with a back injury a couple of years ago now with yourself um going through the most awful grief and and huge loss sorry for you for you and your family um but uh there's there is a sort of a bit of hope that comes out of that because um there's a quote and it's by Rumi um it's uh um the wound is the place where the light enters you wow and it's kind of the philosophy that you know when we go to that dark place when we're broken we can find that these things start happening to us so in your case I'm sensing a huge ton of emotional intelligence and compassion and kindness um and how that will have helped in your relationships and your um career no doubt but also you will have like realized what you're made of and become more resilient so you know even though we have to go through these awful inevitable things in life the the silver lining is if it's not so crude to put it that way but the silver lining is that we do um you know see some benefit there is like life after death I guess is what I'm trying to say yeah yeah absolutely and I think so I the timing of everything was totally bonkers um about maybe it was 18 months two years 18 months before Thomas died I started having therapy art therapy and um I did it because I was doing a course at the time at my place of work at the time I worked for an amazing charity called the Trauma Recovery Center and my boss the incredible Betsy DeTerry who's just been awarded an MBE for her services for trauma recovery like incredible stuff I joined her like maybe a year after graduating and did her branding and did all of that stuff and you know it was wild and she trusted me and like we did it together and it was brilliant and she started a course called the Therapeutic mentoring certificate which I or the certificate in therapeutic mentoring is one of the two I can never remember the order of words but I did it because I wanted to understand people better I'm going to work with people for the rest of my life I should probably know how some of them work and part of the course requirement was that you did therapy and coincidentally we were having one of the class days and one of the topics was autism and I reacted in a way I didn't expect and I ran out of the room I was in tears I was shaking I hid behind the sofa in the staff room and she found me and she was like pop it I think it might be time we start having a chat about it And you go maybe see therapist and maybe see someone about it because this is quite an extreme response to a topic that you knew was coming.

23:06And that is a very normal conversation to have when we're talking about people. And I sort of sat there in tears going like, OK. So I start going to therapy and I thought, oh, the minimum requirement, I think like is 12 weeks. I'll bash that out. Fine. A year and a half later. Good grief. I was still going and uh but it was actually such divine timing and so perfect because I finished my art therapy like receiving therapy a month before my brother died and it was it meant that I was I resolved so many pains and hurts and confusions and all that stuff before Thomas died so I dealt with that bit and then I could just deal with him going rather than trying to deal with like the life that we led together and the things that didn't go well because you know he wasn't perfect and my childhood was very turbulent and at times violent and all that kind of stuff and to be able to get through all of those complications before the big complication showed up um yeah was was a real miracle I can only say it like that because I don't know how I would have coped had I not done the therapy and had I not done the MOT on my life and, you know, investigated all of those feelings and tried to navigate those, you know, eight-year-old Natty and 10-year-old Natty and 12-year-old Natty and all those, like, key points where I then forgave her for doing the best that she could with what little she had at the time.

24:55And, you know, those emotional, that emotional literacy, like, in the 90s, what was that? in the noughties even less so so it was just you know doing all of that and doing the hard work and it was hard work got me into a place where I was almost ready in a really weird way to grieve and yes I understand not be afraid of the extremities of those feelings because I'd already dealt with them do you does that yes make any sort of sense 100 % because you would have I

25:28Katy:presume you would have gone through the kind of feeling of guilt for um recognizing I suppose that your parents had it pretty tough and I can't imagine what it must have been like to to be the sister of somebody like Thomas because it's how do I put this gently you know what I'm trying to say say it say it absolutely say it yeah not sidelined but just sometimes thomas obviously took priority because of his uh medical medical needs so you know sometimes you would have felt fed up maybe and left behind i don't know i'm maybe assuming all sorts of things i'm just going on my own experiences of my childhood you're very spot on i did you know and i think therapy helped me I knew already like I'd never resented my parents for being my parents and how they parented me like even before therapy and everything else because I knew I was malleable I could bend I could be flexible Thomas his routines and everything else like his needs I it was so visible and it was so physically visible there was no way I could ever sort of say well what about me or anything else but you had to grow up pretty quickly right oh I was a registered young carer at age eight so you know and Thomas was epileptic from when he was sick so yeah I was about seven or eight when that started I was with him on his first seizure um and uh you know and I remember it like it was yesterday but you know and he was having seizures although he was on medication and a bunch of medication he was having seizures once a week and you know his record was 56 days which we were ever so proud of him for not that you know he had to try hard or anything else it's just medically that's what happened that time um and we were in Disneyland Paris when he had his seizure on the 56th day and we we'd sort of there was a sort of a sense of relief because it was like oh okay now the cycle will begin again we know the cycle we know how it works after day seven eight nine ten you start to go like okay we're in uncharted territory we don't know what this means and all of that kind of stuff and you know working through all of those incidences and all of those experiences in therapy gave me a new level of respect for my parents because they had no, they didn't have Google to figure it out.

28:11They didn't have anything. And being here as immigrants and as expats, all of our family was abroad. So the village that helped raise me and my brother and supported my parents was really small. And there weren't that many people that were like my parents. And, you know, they were ever so brave to do what they did and to sacrifice all that they did to make sure that you know Thomas got the best care and the best chance at this thing called life and um I can only ever be grateful even though sometimes it did really suck.

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29:29Katy:Generative fill, generative remove, background removal, generative upscaling, all in one place. Supporting over 25 third-party AI models so you're never locked into one way of working. It's one of those tools where once you try it, going back feels very slow. Link in the show notes. And your parents, I mean, how are they? Are they okay? Are they still around? Yeah, I think, yes. Yeah, I've just come back from three weeks in the States with them and my husband. And we were seeing my mum's sister while we were out there and we were skiing in the bits in between. And I have such a, I'm really honoured for the relationship that I have with my parents and that we have, you know, travelled these waters together and figured out the grief together.

30:21and we all grieved so differently and my dad would characterize himself as a not creative and my mum would probably call herself quite creative and then I'm you know right on the end and my dad always jokingly said oh I've got two kids one's autistic and the other one's artistic which is you know his biggest dad moment yeah absolutely but it was just so interesting when we were grieving together we handled it so differently and I think it only represented the fact that we all had unique and individual relationships with my brother you know we we grieved his loss so differently and today that they're doing great but there are days that really suck and you know Christmas is really hard because he loved Christmas like he couldn't last a whole year we'd get to June July and he'd have to start watching Christmas films just to have like you know a little a little something to get him through the 12 months um and he was incredibly cheeky and had a cracking sense of humor so he'd ask my mum to wrap toys he already had and ask them to be labeled to Thomas from Thomas so then on Christmas Eve when we would do presents uh he always had the most to get through and to unwrap and he would always act so surprised like oh wow you know it was just a super extra about everything so Christmas is really tough and and his birthday is on the 2nd of January so it's it's just quite a big chunk of time where we're just feeling quite vulnerable um yeah even 10 years on and you know maybe that doesn't go away But and sometimes some years it's easier, some years it's harder and there's no rhyme or reason to it.

32:16It's just it's the ebbs and flows of grief and missing someone.

32:21Katy:Yeah, it's the songs that get to me. Oh, a certain song will come on and then suddenly it just hits you, doesn't it? And then you're taken back to Christmas's past. And yeah, it's very painful. Nat King Cole, that when that sort of. And then I'm like, oh, no, turn it off. and I can't listen to it. It's just too many memories, too many happy memories. Do you ever find that you want to marinate in that feeling though? Like, because that's, you feel that closeness to that person because that was the last kind of thing you had. I feel like my grief is constantly sort of, like I said, ebbing and flowing between no, turn it off to no, I actually need to watch a Disney film because I need to feel that sense of closeness and I need to I need to get to a point where I know I'm going to inevitably cry or whatever it is because I just need that sense of closeness that I haven't had in so long or the air will feel thin and you know suddenly he'll feel closer than he has been in so long but it's just a really hard thing to describe to people like sorry I need to lock myself away and just properly like yeah marinate in this moment i think it's healthy i think it's dealing with your feelings and it's it's part of the grieving process i remember when my grandma died my little brother was only young and i um was for some reason angry with him and i shouted at him the poor thing i'm seven years older than my brother and we were only young i think i was 17 so he would have been 10 and i said i shouted at him and said why aren't you crying why aren't you upset and stormed off and we talked about that many years later you can't remember but I was just like mad with him and I think I remember talking to my mum about it at the time and she was like darling everybody deals with death in different ways and sometimes it can take many many months and sometimes it can take many years but you always love them and you always remember them and I mean yeah it's um I understand what you mean with Veronica she was such a character such life and laughter I I just remember the giggling fits we used to have like we would absolutely cry with laughter we were such best friends that we would just have all these private little jokes so it'll be like little triggers that remind me of those moments like um we'd be out in a shopping center and people would stare because she looked a bit different and back in the 90s and the 80s they weren't particularly friendly most people were lovely but if she found like um a railing she would stand next to it and start practicing ballet so i would join in just so that people would stare at me as well yeah or she'd dance and shops I mean she just had so much joy um and fun and kindness and and so much emotional intelligence she basically taught me not to take myself seriously or life seriously because she would sit down next to me with her lovely soft hands and a squishy gorgeous oh just gorgeousness and she would say what's wrong with her what you doing you know and then she'd stroke your cheek and say you're gorgeous and she she was just amazing she was she had very very many different sayings and little kind of routines and rituals um and um she may have been uh limited in what she could say but she was very emotionally intelligent and she was probably the most beautiful loving person I've ever known in my life so yeah I understand yeah completely I think Thomas being mostly non-verbal I'm not sure if that's the right terminology but it's the one that I use um it taught me that he didn't say much organically but when he did it was powerful and it was important and it was it mattered and it always if I think about him like the impression that the legacy that he has left behind and he said very few things and it would the legacy really is also about the way he made people feel and he was just love overflowing and because he didn't know how to hate people he didn't know how to do that he didn't know how to hold a grudge or anything else um and sometimes I chat too much and sometimes I am too much or whatever like those silly things that go in your head and I always think like be a bit more Thomas make sure that what you say is important and it it carries weight and it's you know it's going to build people up not destroy them and I don't always get that right and but every now and then you know I've got his picture like this wall is littered with stuff he's right there um but I've got his picture everywhere here and you know what I look at when I'm working and every now and then I just catch myself and I'm like be a bit more Thomas now we just need to be a bit more Thomas this is this is so resonating because I always say be more Veronica yeah yeah and my granny as well so my dad's mum she was an assistant teacher at a um at a school in Rio the British school and she and my brother were thick as thieves like they were best pals and when she passed away two years ago it was a real it was it was a really different grief because she'd she had Parkinson's and dementia so it was quite a long process to you know say goodbye to her and all that kind of stuff and she was living still living in Brazil so I could only see her like once a year when I had enough annual leave and all that kind of stuff and I'm not saying that one is harder than the other they're just different um but that grieving process of losing her and also the fact that she was older so in your head there's that like social construct that says oh that's fine like that's you know it doesn't feel as unjust or injustice you know when Thomas died at 24 like she was 84 so she you know she led the life um but losing her it was huge as well and and you know always thinking like be a bit more Lillian like be you know like Mrs Lillian and she she loved people and she had this just endless hope for people um when we cleared out her flat when she moved to the care home we found boxes and boxes of grateful parents just saying thank you you know their son or their daughter's name didn't was really struggling to read and you took the time to make sure that they could and they now have so much confidence and we can only thank you and you know she just had all these boxes in the back of the wardrobe I don't know how often she ever looked at them but I'm it was so I was so proud to find that box and go yeah that's my granny I'm that's the person I know as well so you know these people that matter or these seasons of life that we might grieve or whatever they are all teaching us something and they're all shaping us like I said before like it's a real disservice to not say people's names or not to acknowledge the impact and how it changes the trajectory of your life or you know so often people say like oh it's a new chapter when someone goes and it's like I don't think it's a new it's a new bloody book the thing that might be similar is you know maybe the paper stock or the font on the inside but is it there's a real cutting point of like before and after and trying to like hold the bits that are really important from before but knowing that actually there's a huge adventure waiting for you in the after because you're figuring out how to rebuild and design your life again and um who are you now when everything else feels like it's gone like what's left behind and those are the bits that matter yeah too often or not we can get so caught up in our careers that we when we do come across something big that you know whether it's a personal injury in my case or um grief loss in yours it does make you stop and think actually who am I like I'm not a graphic designer I'm not a founding editor you know what what am I beyond that and then you start to realize that whilst whilst work is important it you know it's important that we pay the bills and all that jazz and do something we love as a bonus um really why are we here and and what matters at the end of the day and it's not brand identities and and messaging it's the people we love and the very precious time that we have you know yeah absolutely and how we make people feel like do we make is the impact that we have on others building them up or is it crushing or is it you know and I don't know maybe there's that sort of bit of me that's like as a kid I was permanently trying to make sure people were laughing because everything was very serious all the time and all that kind of stuff and you you just end up taking on the mantle of class clown because you just want to sort of relieve a bit of tension and stuff but um maybe that's not a bad thing maybe it isn't at all and there's so much other themes we can talk about in this but i get the sense that the biggest takeaway that you've had is that you've you've found found yourself and you've found what you're made of.

42:39Katy:And it's given you a really amazing blueprint in which to live your life. Yeah, I think so. It took a long time to get there. Like it wasn't an overnight thing. I think, you know, we're coming up to, yeah, we are 10 years this summer. and I feel like this is maybe the first year I look in the mirror and I know who's looking back at me and yeah it was really hard work and it wasn't pretty oftentimes it was really ugly and it wasn't glamorous and it took a really long time to dig deep and do the work and you know work on the healing and and figuring it out and I'm not saying that I'm over it absolutely not um but you do you do rebuild and it's important that we just keep trying even if today isn't like I said not today's not the day that's okay there's always tomorrow um and being proud of what is in there because it's got you this far and it helped you navigate the worst and hopefully set sail on the best yeah that's a lot to offer everyone a nice big dollop of hope for um what has been a tough time for the many creators well thank you it's it's been amazing chatting with you and uh i feel like it's just flown by um yeah i'm very much looking forward to coming down to Bristol this summer and meeting you in person yeah it's like I'm like this all feels so surreal because we've been chatting online for like what a year now and um yeah it just it's I also can't thank you enough for you know you carried me through uni I I was struggled to read for years and Creative Boom was the only thing I read and it was the only thing that I actually felt like oh I can I can visualize myself in this industry because I'm reading something that feels real and it feels tangible and it feels like it's real life and it's not this thing of like oh I'm a graphic designer over there and you know only like really cool people end up doing it it's no it's the creative industry is for everyone and yeah I must I'm a big fan as you can tell I'm like I'm getting emotional because i'm just the thing i'm thinking of more than anything is we've got thomas and veronica to thank haven't we yeah yeah absolutely well thank you so much for joining me and chatting about this very difficult um topic but very very valuable to to it's very kind of humbling to see that you've come out the other side and there'll be lots of people listening who will resonate and be thankful for just such a generous offering of what you've been through and maybe maybe somebody out there's in a bad place right now and what would you say to them like if they're struggling and going through going through what I presume is hell yeah yeah it will probably feel like hell um it's really important to say that it is feeling like hell don't do it alone um the phrase it takes a village is is not just about a child it's about all of us we're meant to do it together and um you've got this it's it's not it will feel like it was the death of you but it's not and it will suck at the time but it allow it allow that that pain to be the fuel that you need to keep going oh thanks Nat that's been that's really beautiful thank you thank you no thank you so much I mean yeah that one stays with you doesn't it how can it not Natty thank you so much you're so generous um and you've been through a lot um yeah thank you I think what I took from this personally is how grief doesn't just disappear it actually becomes part of you and shapes you and in Natty's case it's definitely shaped how she sees the world and how she connects with people even how she approaches her creative work there was also something really comforting in what she said about just letting yourself feel it all not rushing it not trying to tidy it up or make it something else just let it be what it is and you'll get there.

47:14Katy:I know there'll be people listening to this who are going through something right now, maybe not the same thing, but perhaps something heavy. And if that's you, I think this episode is a bit of a reminder that you're not alone in it. And also that there is still something ahead, even if you can't quite see it yet. We'll be back on Thursday with Natty for The Spark. We'll see you then.