A couple of weeks ago I wrote how I was suffering with the weather and down moods. I have since turned a corner, and now my mental health is improving.

And the reason for this, I believe, is catching up with a friend and talking about writing. It was as simple as that. We hadn’t been able to catch up over the previous few weeks because of weather related issues, or kids, but last Friday, we managed to catch up and mostly, we talked. We talked about writing, but we also talked about how we felt guilty because while we’d both been affected by the floods, we still had our homes and our properties survived unscathed, unlike a lot of our friends, and as a result, we have survivors guilt. Because we didn’t get the damage as bad as it could have been we felt guilty for feeling pleased that it hadn’t affected us.

We spoke about the trauma we both suffered having to evacuate and not knowing what we would be going back to, how the kindness of people we barely knew made it easier to cope. How we both emotionally broke down after it had all passed over because we were trying to be strong for our kids.

And then we talked about the power of writing, how cathartic it had been to write about our sadness and pain in various stories we’d written, and how it was our ‘therapy’, and how we felt so much better, mental health-wise, when we were able to find time to write.

I only spent two hours with Serena, but in that time, we found a companionship that went deeper than our writing friendship. We both had similar experiences and experienced the same emotions about the same things. And it was nice to know that someone knew how I felt.

It wasn’t until Sunday I realised just how uplifted I felt. How much lighter and brighter the world seemed. I was relieved that I’d finally turned the corner, because I wasn’t looking forward to spending another two or three weeks in that melancholy state, because even I don’t like myself when I’m in that kind of mood.

But sometimes, just spending time with someone who has a similar interest to you, can be all you need to was someone to shine a light so you come out the other side of the darkness, and realise that it was only a tunnel you were travelling through, and not a journey to the middle of the earth.