It’s not like I don’t know that I’m a boom-and-bust character, it’s just that it still seems to take me by surprise when I emerge from any intense period and then slump.

It’s like a light malaise descends. Yes, there’s a fatigue, but it’s more than just being a bit weary. My body and mind are completely drained.

Take last week. I read at a Spoken Word event on Thursday evening. A lovely, supportive group and I read a five-minute piece about mum’s wake, an extract from a longer essay about mum’s funeral that I tweaked for the spoken word event.

Sitting here on the sofa almost a week later and it’s obvious, isn’t it? That immersing myself in that day would leave me drained. And that’s before I get to the bit where I walk up to the microphone and face a room full of people and quietly berate myself afterwards because I spotted things that weren’t quite right. Observations I should have included and wonder, did I do mum justice? Did I do myself justice?

And I wonder, if this is how I feel after reading just one short extract in front of friends, then what am I doing? Why am I doing this, writing about these difficult times and I start to doubt myself. Who’s interested in my wittering on and what is the point?

But then I tune into a faint bell ringing in the back of my head, because this is how I feel after sharing my words. Not these reflective, this is what I’m thinking, feeling articles. But sharing what happened, describing it, painting the picture in my head and finding a way to translate that onto the page. It takes its emotional toll and if I learned one thing from my years with ME it’s that emotional and mental fatigue can be as, if not more debilitating, than physical fatigue.

The reality is that I spent last week inhaling the incense in the church, feeling the lumpy ground of the natural burial site beneath my feet. Listening to the Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee playlist playing in the background, looking at mum’s paintings and sketches. Sensory overload.

It brings it all up to the surface but it’s not in a bad or sad way. I wasn’t aware of sadness as an emotion when I was writing but I did feel myself sinking back into those days and weeks.

I was aware of tightening the writing, trying to get to the point and hitting the word count whilst being authentic and faithful to mum, my siblings. Painting that picture as vividly as I could and bringing people into the room with me. To help them hear the music, picture the artwork and walk alongside me. But sadness, anger, denial and those other inconvenient emotions associated with grief? No, not last week, but maybe I’m having a delayed reaction. Maybe that’s the fatigue I’m feeling this week.

It’s inevitable isn’t it that in the writing and editing, in the scratching of pencil across paper I reveal myself and my grief. That I see mum, my family and our shared history through other peoples’ eyes and that can be uncomfortable, challenging even.

But I also know that in speaking those words out loud, in feeling them vibrate as they exit my body, move through my throat, touch my mouth, my tongue and teeth and float into the air that they are leaving me. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it? That yes there is an intensity and release that comes with this life writing that brings fatigue, but isn’t that grief too?

Grief and waves are often mentioned in the same sentence, and I remember acutely those knock you to the floor panic attacks, the shallow breathing and emotional outbursts in the immediate aftermath. Those waves of grief that tossed me around.

But I’m in a different phase now – eight years on – that I don’t know how to describe but I do know that this writing helps. It helps me to remember and to acknowledge this loss rather than push it aside.

And there’s also something about living in a place, even if it is a place with strong family ties, surrounded by people who never met mum that urges me to find a way to keep her with me, and maybe writing is how I do it.