Greetings! I’m Leah – a highly sensitive, multi-passionate writer and poet living in a tiny hamlet on the far western edge of the English Lake District. Because of my high sensitivity and inability to conform, I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling out of place.
Perhaps you have, too?
C.S. Lewis said “Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’ ” He also said “We read to know we’re not alone.”
And that’s what I hope you’ll find here – something that makes you feel less alone. Something that will comfort, encourage or inspire you as you journey through this mystery of life.
You’ll learn a lot about me through my writing and I hope you’ll join me and others in the comments on the blog because it’s there, through the comments and community, that we all come to know that there are others out there who see and feel the world in the same way we do.
Subscribe to my weekly Sunday newsletter here. (I’m sporadic with social media at best, so my newsletter is the best place to keep in touch.)
How I came to be living in the rural English Lake District
I grew up with my dad growing vegetables, my mum’s home cooked food and handmade clothes, and weekends spent visiting nature reserves or hiking up fells. But despite what was really an idyllic childhood, I spent my teens longing to escape what felt like a stiflingly small existence. I wanted a bigger, more exciting life.
I lived and worked in France for a while before moving to London where I worked in administrative jobs for large financial companies. But I soon realised that any kind of ‘normal’ life wasn’t for me. Though I was always a model employee, eager to please and prove my worth, inside a quiet rebellion rumbled: I felt suffocated having to follow someone else’s rules. So I quit.
A few weeks later I started my first blog and have been at it ever since. I fell in love with writing and sharing immediately. For the first time I felt like I had a place where I could be myself as I pleased. Though my journey has taken many twists and turns, writing has been the thing that’s stayed with me throughout it all.
In 2016 I moved back to my hometown in the north west of England and lived there for a few years but little by little my desires were changing, this time in the reverse direction. I wanted a smaller, simpler life! I wanted to be closer to the earth and her seasonal rhythms. I wanted to be outside more. I wanted to grow food, to hear the birds sing and be surrounded by nature.
I had come full circle. From the girl who longed for something bigger and more exciting, to the woman who found that the most exciting thing was the simple life her parents had shown her so many years before.
And so in 2021 I moved here, to this small house in this tiny hamlet, 60 miles north of where I was born. I came here with a dream of creating a beautiful home and garden and making a living from my writing and creativity. This is the dream I’m working to achieve, little by little, one day at a time.