How to Live Well in Tough Times With Grace Quantock
Grace Quantock
“We must hand back what isn’t ours to hold, pick up what has been taken from us, and reclaim the aspects of our agency.”
This week, I’m joined by psychotherapeutic counselor, Grace Quantock. Grace is an amazing coach and writer who specializes in helping people live well in tough times, and manage complex trauma and chronic illness without burnout or blame.
In this episode, Grace joins me for an insightful conversation about what it means to live well in trying times, the importance of reclaiming your self-agency, and how to navigate burnout while you fight for social change.
Talk Topics Included:
How Grace discovered her life’s work
How you can live well—even in the midst of traumatic circumstances
The idea of reclaiming self-agency and handing back what isn't yours to hold
Practicing activism and figuring out the role you play in your community
Grace Quantock’s official bio:
Grace Quantock is a psychotherapeutic counselor, coach, and writer. She specializes in helping people live well in tough times, and manage complex trauma and chronic illness without burnout or blame. Grace has won multiple awards, and has been featured in The Times, The Guardian, Marie Claire, New York Magazine, The New Statesman, and many more.
Links:
Pre-Appointment Pep Talks with Grace: free pep talks to help you through a scary medical appointment.
Show transcript:
Nikki Groom 00:00
Hello, Grace. Hello. Hello. It's so good to be talking with you because it has been a minute.
Grace Quantock 00:10
What a minute it has been for this world about us. But yes, I am delighted to be here.
Nikki Groom 00:17
What a minute. Indeed. It's interesting recently, every single time I have a conversation with a friend, and we're talking about some incident or event that happened, it's like, oh, that was years ago now like that feels like common reference of time. Like, yeah, that was a really long time ago. Or if it wasn't a long time ago, it kind of feels that way. So yeah, it's been an interesting time. So it's wonderful to reconnect with you. For those listening. Grace has been someone that I have known for years and years, who actually was extremely helpful in some very difficult and transitional periods of my life. And I always so appreciate her wisdom, and thoughtfulness. So Grace, I'm delighted to have you here and excited to be sharing some of that with the audience today.
Grace Quantock 01:10
Thank you absolutely honored, honored to be included among the amazing people you're interviewing. And to be part of this gathering that you're pulling together and sharing and disseminating in this wonderful way. I think it makes it so accessible and beautiful and a similar tool, and I'm really excited to be part of it. Yeah,
Nikki Groom 01:26
I was so thrilled to have you here. I guess just to get the listeners on the same page. If they haven't heard about you before, I obviously lead into this episode with a little bit of an intro. But we tell us a little bit about the work that you do, and really how you got started on that path in the first place.
Grace Quantock 01:47
Absolutely. So I am a psychotherapeutic counselor, and a writer, and researcher, I am based in Wales, in the UK, in the south Wales Valleys. I specialize in working with complex trauma, and multiple people with multiple marginalized and oppressed identities. I have a business called travelers and wellness. And I offer support to people to live well in tough times, to live well, in the midst of it, of whatever it is for you. Whether it is through trauma, through illness and pain, through life crisis, through caring through whatever's got through this world, when we just just just at World burning through whatever it is, and wherever we are, how we can live well through that, particularly with things that are not something which we see a concrete simple end to. It's not the kind of thing where somebody can send you a get well card. And in you know, kind of four to six weeks, you're going to be back to where you were previously. And so I started when I came off my own path. And I got very sick. So I was in my teens. And I had a plan. And my plan for my life was University academia, research. And when I was a child, I had like a sketch of what my bedroom was going to look like when I was at university on my RSPCA note paper. I was I was kind of ready. And then I got very, very sick with an autoimmune illness. And it really threw me off the path and the life that I had planned for myself. And I was just into that medical maelstrom of tests. And of course, often when we have more rare conditions or conditions that are less well known or chronic sometimes off, especially the beginning, a lot of the tests come back negative. And so it can be really scary time things wrong, but you don't know what's happening. And no one's giving you any answers. Same time, everything you knew about yourself, the way you were in the world, the way you trusted your body to be able to help you cross the road or just a banana or sips of water. None of that is there in the same way anymore. That's when I really tried to kind of forge a path through this and try and hold on to myself my identity through it because I was in a place where people would ask me about my diagnoses before my name, there was very much a lot of it, and still is in many ways, many hospitals, unfortunately, taking the medical model approach to it very much kind of suggests that like, your body is broken, you know, something is wrong with you like you're a faulty car, or you're a car but you haven't taken care of properly and then the mechanic is struggling to fix it. And it can be really dehumanizing and really depersonalizing. It can be a very psychologic if it's a physical illness, it can also have a huge, huge mental emotional impact and component. And of course the same if you're struggling with mental illness, which really oriented the issue in you and your body. Whereas a lot of my work asked who's where are these issues? Who's Who do they belong to whose responsibility a lot of the responsibility might be collective rather than it being an individual difficulty that I am socially spected to fight hard and overcome and be a fighter, and when, when against what my own body, this is where I began. And what I did was I had to wait, I'd finish my first degree and I was six months, I could take my second degree, or master's. And I thought, well, you know, what, we don't have a lot of answers. What if I try and do some self experimentation? What if I actually see if I can put together a plan? And just basically, everything that I know makes me sicker? Can I minimize or reduce that? Obviously, there are things that I can't change, I can't magically magic myself to a beautiful kind of Spa in the Alps living in a council flat, that was mold and whatever, you know, we were kind of dealing with things that we couldn't necessarily easily magically suddenly shift. But what can I minimize of that, and then what helps me that I can accentuate that I can get, take more of that I can go further with. And the six months, became six years and became my work in the worlds and I ended up doing the Masters a little bit later and doing it in psychotherapy instead of art history. And I'm totally honored to be working with amazing people and seeing people shift and grow. That is
Nikki Groom 06:10
so amazing to hear. And, and so tough to hear as well, you know, particularly with sharing about how dehumanizing Of course, it was to sometimes get these diagnosis before someone had even asked your name or, and I hear you as well on this idea. And it's so funny, isn't it as a society, oftentimes, it's this idea of, yeah, let's fight through and fight to overcome and you have the power. And it's like, but it's my body, you know, so I really hear you on that. And I also absolutely loved the concept that you shared about helping people to live well, in tough times, or through tough times. And that sort of gave me a little chill of anticipation, because I thought, gosh, yes, and I know you particularly work with marginalized and oppressed identities. And I think that the idea of living while in tough times is probably something that speaks to a broad audience right now, myself included, what is some of the things that you oftentimes talk to people about? Help them with? mentor them around when it comes to living? Well, what does living well really mean to you? And how do you help people in that pursuit?
Grace Quantock 07:31
Some fantastic questions, guess exactly this thing is that there are tough times we look at a lot of what's happening, climate wise, socio economically wise, politically. And, you know, for many people, there's an Crabeater Ballantine's, they have been for huge amount for a long, long time. And it looks like there are it, there's more coming, but for many, many people, particularly, but I think for all of us to a greater or lesser extent, particularly with kind of climate crisis. I don't know how wealthy one would have to be to be able to insulate oneself and climate crisis. Obviously, there's a great difference between, for example, the position I'm in and people in the Global South, who are, you know, already dealing with extreme impacts of climate crisis? But I think for everybody, there is this level, like in in Wales, you know, we have we have more flooding, we now basically have a flood season. Earlier this summer, I was talking to a French so we have, you have brain, I can't remember when we last had rain. And of course, this is Wales, we basically, as a child just continuously had rain, you know, we're already seeing the impacts. And as a disabled woman, I've already found that climate crisis is impacting my ability to be at liberty to be free, because of course, I can't go out it's in flooding. And of course, if there's more extreme snow that's or ice that's more unsafe, me to go out, and not so wheelchair accessible. And of course, in the summer, in the extreme heat, my body doesn't regulate heat well, because I just blackout. So obviously, in the hotter days, I can't do that. So already, I'm kind of starting to get limited in the last 10 years or so, to spring and autumn being the times when I can be more at Liberty. And that's just a very visceral sense of being like, oh, yeah, there are now months in which I can't really leave the house as much. I mean, of course, there's a level of COVID and COVID. Risk is a whole other level on top of that. And so just being really aware that there are tough times. And so one thing I think we often do with this is start by trying to kind of map the ground, what's happening there and try and locate things well, because as we said about the fighting really often in difficulty, there can be a sense where socially and perhaps unconsciously, people will orient the issue in our body. So we are the ones who are struggling. And this can kind of give a sense that we are the problem. I can't manage the stairs, I need you to do it on Zoom because I can't be exposed to COVID. So it's me that's got the University of comms problem there. Or I'm struggling with something and it's difficult to get help for it or a crisis is happening in in my Life in inverted commas in our lives. But I always find that really interesting. Because firstly, I always think well, who does it, benefit it to orient that problem in me as an individual. So firstly, it often benefits people around me. Because if the issue is that I use a wheelchair, and if we could kind of, if I could, I mean, it's not actually going to, it literally isn't an option for me, but say it were, and if I could, like, fight to my body and try harder, then maybe I could, you know, learn to walk again. And then it wouldn't be a problem. Or if it's not actually an option that's available for my body. But even for many people, it's presented, and it's still not a reliable option. But I would ask, you know, say somebody's struggling to mobility struggling to go out, perhaps they can't afford a wheelchair or a power chair, I can't afford transport access, accessible transport access. So there was a little bit smaller, they can't go and do the platelet things in places where they want to go, they're struggling with that, I'd be starting to say, well, what if it's not that we aren't trying hard enough to heal? Because I don't believe that. That's true. What if there is something that's blocking a clear rehab path that we could have? What's happening there? You know, what's going on with that? That's interesting, let's spend some time there. But for many people, I think instead, what we've oriented it say, in the issue in my body, then that means that nobody has to take responsibility for the fact that why are the cities for the stairs, because think about a flight of stairs? Who stairs good for? Well, I believe that they are suitable for a small amount of people for a small amount of time in their lives. Because let's see, infants can't use stairs, babies, little ones, often older people, people carrying heavy chopping. People are heavily people who are pregnant, people who maybe have broken limb, people who might be caring for so many people with Alzheimer's. So many people struggle to use stairs. And a lot of those people aren't the ones who are actually designing the built environment because of historical lack of representation in architecture in building. And because their star blocks to entering those professions in many, many ways. And so really, they're suitable for just a few people for a small time in their life. And instead, I might we might ask, Well, why don't we instead build in places that can support everybody that actually are accessible to many, many people. And so in doing that, we orient the issue where it blocks rather than us, because it can feel almost empowering in a weird way to believe it's us. Because if I think that the problem is me, then there's kind of a hope that one day, if I'm really, really good, I try very, very hard, I do everything the doctor says, and I eat right or control my diet in a certain way, which obviously would also potentially feed into fat phobia, or disordered eating, depending what's going on there. Or if I pushed hard and ignored my body's cues, in this way, I tried to really make myself you know, kind of beneficial to capitalism in this way, and try to really ignore this soft animal of my body, then maybe I could get to the point where I could be in a vertical as normal and do this stuff. But the problem with that is, it gives us almost a little bit of hope, it's almost easier to believe that it's my fault, because if it's my fault, we just can almost say that will motivate ourselves. And that will basically be mean to ourselves enough that we will one day solve the problem, then it won't be there anymore. And that in some ways be much easier than to accept that to think, wow, actually, I live in a society which is really inequitably designed, and in which wealth and power are really inequitably distributed. And that feels much more scary potentially than thinking, I'm just going to try really hard on Monday, that can be much easier than to really recognize, wow, this is not okay. And it's been going on for centuries. And it's been affecting me for a long time. And, and my family and we maybe have seen it, but haven't been able to articulate it or have just been told again, it's our fault. But the problem with doing this is it sets us up to fail. Because as I can be as motivated and as determined and as hopeful as I like, I'm not going to personally offset the impact of decades of austerity under the government we have in the UK at the moment. I'm just not going to do it. It's just not it's not possible as talented and brilliant. So maybe I'm not going to magically compensate for historic underfunding the NHS and historic underfunding of community resources, green spaces, hospitals, social care, everything. That's not something that I can make up for. And if I try to then I just set myself up for failing and I start to judge and blame myself for having failed and then I start to lose trust in myself. Because I think, well, you couldn't do it and you said you wouldn't, you didn't. And this just starts a spiral where we just struggle and struggle and struggle more. Whereas instead in this in my work, a lot of what we do is we map out and say okay, well what is ours and what isn't ours, so it's not under my control that for me pretty COVID times to get a bus into the local art center of town where I would see clients, I have to cross, you know, half a mile of broken pavement which isn't safe for me to cross in my wheelchair, then I have to wait at a bus stop without a shelter, and often not get picked up by a bus because they don't want to bother to stop to put the Rampart long enough. as lovely as I can be as active as I can be, I can't make the roadsmith I can ask the council, I can complain, I can make reports. But I'm not going to magically overcome those things. But what can I do? What is mine? What is mine to kind of play with. And perhaps actually, there's some agency that I lost when I was with the doctor, perhaps somebody overrode my thoughts, or they dismissed my concerns, or they told me that you can't do something. And perhaps they broke a boundary with me or I had some trauma, head trauma there. And I lost some sense of my agency in my own capacity. So we almost hand back isn't asked to hold. And we try and pick up that which has been taken or stolen from us. We try and reclaim the aspects of our agency. And perhaps I think, well, actually, as a disabled woman, I do know about responding creatively to things. I do know about adapting things and making them possible. So for example, in terms of the pandemic, everybody was in lockdown. Well, guess what, I actually wrote a book called beyond the boundaries, living well within the four walls, which has in it 500 fun things to do when you're stuck in bed and at home. So actually, was I barely equipped to live well at home during lockdown? And the pandemic? I absolutely was, that was something I could do. And I was able to find the bits that are ours, and find the possibility and where we can play within.
Nikki Groom 16:41
That is so beautiful. And I did see that you wrote that book. Congratulations. I love that idea of reclaiming self agency and handing back what isn't yours to hold. And it's such a simple concept. On the one hand, like you are not the problem. But I'm sure when you really help people to see that it's such a huge weight off their shoulders.
Grace Quantock 17:06
Yes, and but sometimes Exactly. And it can, it can be a lot we moved through very carefully. Because when I went kind of came to the realizations myself, and I acknowledged that a lot of what we're talking about here is a social model of disability, we're talking about it from personal perspective, but we're recognizing the issues and the built environment, rather than orienting them in our bodies, like the medical model does, or saying that kind of we are lesser or in need, of, of charity in some way, like the charity model previously would have done. And, you know, it can be a lot to kind of suddenly look around and go, Oh, wait. So when they said that, actually, that wasn't fair. And actually, that that wasn't me. And it is this symbiotic processes and ways of realizing Hang on, I can put that down. And away also, I can pick that up, and really doing that examining and questioning and saying, Well, what is Living Well, to me, and what is living well within the limits. So recognizing that, you know, maybe our bodies do have impairments, maybe we are living within limits, I have done kind of wild swimming and things and it's lovely. But could I go swimming every day? Well, it'd be a 45 minute car journey. So I can't move my flat closer to the sea, I can move closer to the sea. But if I want to keep living here, then we can't kind of make the sea complex, hopefully. And so I can recognize that. There may be something that I that feels like what living well is for me, but it's not, it's easily on the cards to me at the moment. So then we have to kind of think well, what is the priority, what is most meaningful, and how I can get access to that this time, because quite often we're fed a lot of images about what meaningful life looks like about what pleasure is about what fun is about what delight is, and a lot of those don't include my experience the disabled woman, we are seeing some more inclusion of people with marginalized and oppressed identities, and what different people in different intersections may experiences pleasure and joy. But still very often, the senses we have of them are in many ways kind of what what can be sold to us, you know, these, these certain images of what we're told, is pleasurable. And so when we actually start examining them for ourselves, sometimes these images come up, like you know, I don't know, I want to write a hot air balloon or I want to abseil. Okay, that's great. Tell me about that. You know, what, why do you want to upsell what's happening that so I don't know. It's just, it's kind of that that's adventurous right? I don't know. Is that adventurous to you? Does, does that sound like something you would like to do? What is it about maybe adventure to you is trying a new ingredient every week in a different cooking meal? What is it for us that is resonant and that is whole and that involves an include It's our bodies and the way it is today. Because I can do various things, of course, but I am still going to be me. And so I'm probably never going to super love parties. So instead I can release myself from the image of this is what is what fun looks like or what meaningful life looks like. And instead, I could figure out what a meaningful life looks like for me for my neurodivergent brave my disabled body for my plate living in this working class area, and really figure out what is valid and true and meaningful that,
Nikki Groom 20:32
yes, I love that. And it's interesting, as you're speaking, I'm thinking about pulling through some of the threads of some of the things that you've been talking about, including how I love that question. First of all, what is living? Well, to me, it's like, oh, now I have to really think about that. And that could be extremely personal to me, just before we began recording this cool, I was sharing with you that I've been experiencing a bit of burnout recently. And one of the ways that I've been responding creatively to that is delving into writing fiction, which I haven't done for many, many years, perhaps not since I was a kid, when I used to write tons of stuff all the time. And so I love the idea of, first of all, mapping the grounds, you know, not orienting the problem in yourself, being so aware of what it is that you can control, and then responding creatively, and understanding that your response can be completely your own and does not have to be defined or prescribed by anybody else. So I love that. And so I was thinking about my own experiences with burnout. I was wondering, because of course, this podcast is called movement makers, for those of us including you who are in very much in the business of social change, and you have various governance roles. And I believe you are on the board for Social Care Wales, is it? Yes. So I just wondered, when you think about people who are in the business of social change, knowing what you know, and I'm sure perhaps have experienced in terms of how exhausting it can sometimes be? Do you have any advice for people who are trying to navigate some of that? What have you found works really well, in terms of that return, I guess, to self care, when you're trying to live a meaningful life?
Grace Quantock 22:23
Search? Good questions. Yeah, absolutely. So I do also do governance roles. So I'm an executive director. For that I work across social care and health. So I'm with a patient, national patient advocacy organization, I vice chair that, and also, as you say, the social care in Wales, which is our governing body, the social care, and also on to an NHS role as well, and which is the National Health Service, the hospitals here, and other allied health professions. And I suppose me in many ways, it was actually really useful to have roles, because it gives it a shape and a limit, though, I then have a specific thing to work on. So one of the reasons I actually started doing this was when Trump was elected in the US, obviously, you know, I work with people across the world and have watched people in the US. So it's really specific experience to see the rise of right wing politics, the election of have such a horrendous and damaging violent, elected official through the experiences of people who are marginalized, who my job is working with them. And as I saw Trump being elected, I started thinking, Well, you know, obviously, I'm thinking about how I can support people and but from a very personal perspective, my thought was, if somebody like that is elected here, bearing in mind, we kind of seem to be a few years behind the US in our kind of swing of politics. What will I wish that I had done before we get such a horrible leader here? And I, you know, it was, it was very scary time, as I'm sure you remember. And so to kind of cope with that, I made a list. And I made a list of basically it was like, if you get a terrible leader, and or war breaks out, what will you wish you had done in peacetime? And can you do that now? So I made a list. And the list had really specific things on it, like, learn how to support and counsel, LGBTQ plus people, especially trans people, very specifically, because my sense at the time was that this is a community that's probably most going to suffer and did the way the politics ago and it had other things like buy a bicycle because what if petrol is rationing? I've met some of this was basically coming from my reading of Second World War novels. So you know, but I just thought put it on a list and work through it and the other one was like, I wanted to get EU citizenship so that I would have multi citizenship so I could have multi citizenship and have more options of where I needed to stay because I'm have EU citizenship through my immigrant grandparents. emigrated from Ireland. So some of them are things that took years. And some of them are things I could do very quickly. And one of the things was to think about what I am going to kind of safeguard, as I read an article by a historian who specializes, researches despotic regimes, what he said in the article was, start noticing how things are now, kind of put a pin in how the judiciary works, how the school system works, how the media works, notice it and log it, because it will change. And it will change subtly at first, and that will change drastically. And you won't notice it and you'll become used to how skewed it is. So you need to notice how democracy is now and you need to watch it. And he also said, Pick a piece of it, pick something, pick your local school board, pick your library, pick the museum, pick the hospital, pick something and make that your thing, figure out how it is now research, read about it, figure out how to volunteer for it, join the board, safeguard it make that the thing that you are taking care of. At the same time, I was doing painting classes with Shiloh, Sophia MacLeod, who's a wonderful art teacher. And she did these workshops with with a thread where you kind of had a thread for the screen that you're held and use this connection. And when Trump was elected, she cut the thread and one of the classes and I was really struck by it, it really shocked me I've never studied her for years and never seen her cut it I didn't know she would look good. What she said was, we should all have a piece of it. And she said if you know you don't try and spend all your time gathering everybody else's pieces or trying to make sure they're doing what they're doing with their piece if you figure out what your piece is. And if we can all figure out what our piece is of our communities. And we can hold on to them and safeguard them, then collectively, we might get through this. And so I really thought about this, and I thought about what I wanted to pick as my piece. And so I started by picking social care. So I applied to join the board. And actually at the start when I was appointed by the Minister, I was very surprised. And the cycle oh my goodness, I know a 13th responsible for the social care of a nation. How did that happen? What and then I thought, well, actually, it's a lot more nuanced than that. It's not, it's not quite like that. But for actually, for the first year at every meeting, I wore a piece of the thread from the art classes around my wrist to kind of remind myself that this was all I had to do is figure out what my piece was, and then do my absolute best at that. And trust collectively, I was being locked into the individualistic sense, but from a sense that instead of being overthinking, or kind of spiraling about the collective rise of fascism, I instead kind of tried to pull my energy back from that and put it into this specific work in this specific role that I was doing this the safeguarding attention to do my best in that particular piece. And that's one of the ways I've done this is it gave me something to focus on. So instead of it being a very diffuse sense of the world, instead of breaks down to something very specific, like how are we making sure that social workers are more representative of the communities they serve across weights? Or how are we making sure that social care training is appropriately is sufficiently anti racist? And so it got down to very specific questions, which, at least for me, were easier to focus on than a kind of wider diffuse sense of Oh, my god the world. So that that that's one way. And the other thing I suppose I do is I try and get a balance because when I used to do activism, climate crisis, and also animal welfare, there were people who would do change. So they would, for example, like be rescuing animals from puppy farms, or trying to close labs or redirect stuff. And there'll people who ran the animal sanctuaries, and they would be taking care of the animals who were abused. And I was sure you can guess in the direct action Change Group, we're kind of directly trying to influence and make things different in that moment, we all just burned out, really, people just went out. And it was incredibly painful, incredibly difficult and, and brutal to kind of be in such tough fights. But I knew that if I went to kind of just taking care of abused animals, or like trying to reforest places that have been devastated that I also would emotionally burn out as well, because I would just look and think I'm just gonna live and die and I will never be able to finish this. So for example, one of my friends was rescuing chickens. And this one breeder said look, because chickens lay and then they have a pause, and they often they don't lay so much afterwards they send them to slaughter. So the one breeder said it was a huge breeder across the southeast of England. And they said, Look, we won't send our chickens to slaughter we will give them to you and you can rehome them. It was a 23,000 chickens. There was huge numbers. And this was happening like more than once a year. My friend My friend was trying to find hosts that when we got to the point where I think she just reached pig chicken saturation across the UK, there was just nobody she could persuade to have rescued chickens that would have any more because of course we can't indefinitely rehome chickens they live quite a long time. And the last I heard, she was trying to kind of sell stately homes and having these groups of flocks of chickens rather than flocks of peacocks, you know, it's really demoralizing because you know that if you can't find homes for them, they'll die. But there just aren't any more homes. And it's just you're looking down the pipeline and thinking, the stream of people who need support is never going to end. And so I knew I kind of couldn't just do that either. So this is why I try and do my role. In some ways, you know, I'm caring for myself, and working with people who have been harmed by systems, and obviously, people who have also been harmed by systems. And then in some way, I'm looking at nonexecutive work, where I'm looking at changing things, changing policies, changing the way things are done. So I'm kind of trying to have foot in both camps at the moment. So it means that I don't have too much of one or the other. And I guess for me, really, it was a narrowed what was an incredibly diffuse, trying to do everything all of the time, to giving myself very specific tasks that I could focus on seeing changing. And that allows me to see something of progress. And of course, turn support and self care around it. 100% doing it or being community, with other disabled people with other queer people, or whether people work and trust backgrounds, you know, a huge amount of this is doing in community being part of a wider change.
Nikki Groom 31:21
So inspiring grace, thank you so much for that, I think that that perspective is incredibly helpful, especially when it can be so overwhelming to see, all the things that should be done need to be done all the people that are hurting and are in pain and suffering, all of the things that we had talked earlier again, before we started recording about the world feeling like it's burning in so it can be so hard. And I think that that can be the very thing that leaves us feeling burned out. And I love this idea of really focusing on specific roles with shape and limits, and really getting intentional about where it is that you want to help and surrounding yourself with that really supportive community as well. Yes,
Grace Quantock 32:06
thank you.
Nikki Groom 32:07
So I promised you at the beginning of our conversation again, before we started recording that I would keep this conversation within the hour, but I couldn't already tell I could talk to you for hours and hours. And that actually does not surprise me because again, I've known you for a really long amount of time. And I always love listening and learning from you. But I want to begin to wrap up with a question about something that you talk about a lot in the work that you do, which is this idea of blazing a trail to a truer you? What does that phrase really mean to you? And what are some of the ways you see that playing out in the lives of your clients as well?
Grace Quantock 32:52
Absolutely, thank you. So this actually is beautiful, you're ending on this because this does link back to what I was talking a little bit about at the beginning, which was where, you know, I had kind of my plan to go to university into work in his in as a historian academia, and you know, got really got thrown off that track. And when you're thrown off track in your life, which can happen to us because of grief because of pain, because of trauma because of so because because of geography because of climate crisis, you have so many different things. It's saying that we have to find a way forward, we had to find a way forward to ourselves sometimes to find a way to be in the world and who and how we're going to be because the body we knew the life we recognize just isn't accessible to us anymore in the way that it was. And so I'm saying in this that none of us asked for this. It's unfair. It's unjust, it's not okay. It's not our fault. It's not what we wanted. I don't believe we manifested it. I don't believe it's a lesson from anybody if it is a lesson, it is pretty poor pedagogy in my in my book, now it's here. Now we find ourselves in this situation. We are asking now, as things are, where can we go from here? What can we do what is still possible? And can this be an opportunity? When we have been taken from the life we knew what we knew? Can we also use this as an opportunity to slough off to unpick to unhook from the things that were also holding us immersed in in projects for us that we have swallowed from society that actually don't fit us? So we never asked for it but as it's here, can we use it to let go of what we don't want as an opportunity to put that down and find a true us within inside ourselves going forward? That's that to me really is it you are blazing your own trail you're figuring out a new path. In community we are scarred we Allegiant you are not alone in this 1000 people have walked this path before you. We are walking alongside each other. I very much feel myself doing this in community with other people. But as we are doing it, can we do this together? And can we do it in a compassionate way, where we find the best possible way to take care of ourselves and to be with us fails and to be who we are. And to play the trail to a true you.
Nikki Groom 35:16
Oh, my goodness, that made me feel quite emotional. And it began with that lesson that we're not the problem. But now that we're being presented with certain things, like we have choices around what we want to do next. So I think that's such a wonderful message to to end on. And again, I could just talk to you for hours now. Not just saying that grace, I appreciate everything that you share, and you just have such wonderful perspectives. Where can people read more of your work? Find out more about what you're up to in the world? How can they stay connected to you?
Grace Quantock 35:46
Absolutely. I'm delighted I would love to be connected to your fantastic listeners. So you can find me at my website, Grace quantock.com. That's gra CE qu A n TOC koat.com. And also Grace underscore Quantock at your social media platform of choice. And also, if you go to bat dot L y forward slash appointment to pep talk. So Bitly forward slash appointment pep talk. I have a free guide for 10 days of pre appointment pep talks, where you get me in your ear talking you through how to make the most of hospital appointments, how to take a trauma informed approach. And I will talk to you every day through it right up until your appointment and after it to help you get through any scary appointments that are on your calendar.
Nikki Groom 36:40
Amazing. I can't think of anything better race. I'm so grateful to know you and you're just such an incredible individual again, it's always so wonderful and nourishing to speak with you. I so appreciate it. Let's stay in touch. I would love to hear about what's next for you and hear about how I might support you and thank you again for being my guest.
Grace Quantock 37:01
Thank you 100% And I you exactly i Your questions are insightful and deep and wonderful. And I love your podcast. I'm delighted to be here. And yes, I can't wait for the next steps. Yeah.
Nikki Groom 37:16
Thank you so much for rice.