I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello, how are you?

I am going to share something with you that I am going through at the moment.

I think it is so important to talk about experiences like this because I remember how my younger self used to feel like if somebody said to me in my teens even in my early 20s that I would talk about my feelings that I would open up about feeling that I have failed at

something or actually admitting that I have failed at something I I'd have been like, no way. I have been raised to believe that, you know, talking about your business is not a good thing.

It's very much a part of my culture.

That, you know, it's not good to talk about your feelings.

It makes you a bit of a nuisance in some respects.

I'm trained to be a strong black woman.

That's actually like a thing. And so you don't ask for help. You you don't admit how much you're struggling and I buck against all of those things and that's not because I'm going, oh, well, I want to be weak, because the opposite of doing those things doesn't make you weak, it just makes you human.

And humans feel strong sometimes, and they feel not so stronger at other times, but it's all part of being human.

And humans do all of us, whether we have made it or not, struggle with rejection, disappointment and loss.

Something that I have most definitely experienced this week. A couple of days ago I got up and I wasn't feeling very well. It was just one of those days

I've been grappling with this weird sort of ears, nose and throat thing for a couple of weeks

and combined with having tinnitus, well, you know, I've been feeling a bit up and down.

What I find is I will have a day where my throat and my ears in particular

I feel like they're struggling

Maybe a couple of days of that and then I feel fine. I will feel as if I'm coming down with the flu and then I'll feel fine and then it's like back again. Anyway, so on Wednesday I got up and I had a terrible terrible headache and sometimes it would feel like it was about to go and then it would just flash back up again. I was like, am I getting a migraine? Am I getting a migraine?

And I was already due to go for an osteopath session, so I thought, well, I'll just hold off on taking something for that.

So I went there, ended up taking paracetamal as I was leaving, and you know she had said to me look, just take the rest of the day off and just rest, you know, don't stress at your head with anything, just relax.

So I'm lying in bed and watching a Russian doll on Netflix, amazing series, watch the whole thing in one day.

That's the joy of deciding not to do very much.

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