It’s 23 years ago to the day since my — our — baby was born full‑term stillborn, perfect in every way except she was dead. The circumstances of her conception and the events that followed are written elsewhere, in a piece I’ll publish one day. Suffice to say life hasn’t been easy. Needless to say, she was the baby of me and my ex‑wife.

Today I’m in a new home, and it’s the first time this anniversary has arrived in a place with no memories, no ghosts, nothing to soften the edges of what will always be a reflective day — a day of remembrance, a day when you realise time does heal but it never erases the scars. Nothing does. No cream, no ointment, no love, no therapy erases the scars of life.

They say time is a great healer, and it is, but maybe because I’m in a new town — the first new town since my adoption into the old one 55 years ago — this anniversary hangs heavier. Like the memories are mine alone to carry. Nobody around me has those memories or those scars. Nobody around me was shaped by the weight of not only losing a baby girl that day, but then needing the steel to drive five miles home and tell your excited eight‑year‑old that her baby sister is dead. Tough? Yes. You bet. And then to be the one who tells all the relatives — the mums, the dads, the grandparents — the same story: how my now‑ex‑wife had to give birth to a dead baby. People say the mother’s loss is worse. Trust me: the loss is the same, but very, very different. As my ex‑wife once said, “I had the pleasure of feeling her alive. You only held her when she was perfect but not breathing.”

I’m not writing this to talk about my baby girl, but to talk about something I’ve never quite grasped until today. I’ve beaten myself up all my life for not being “normal,” not dealing with X the way Y does, not being good enough, not being this or that, or being this or that and it not suiting someone else. But last night, as we returned from the emergency vets at 3am — on the anniversary of my baby dying — with our 13‑year‑old collie suddenly struck by some severe neurological disease, on this night when my dead daughter decided she didn’t want the dog for herself after all… on this night I realised we all carry scars. Some large and disfiguring on the soul, like mine. Others mere paper cuts in the day‑to‑day.

People will say, “Yeah, that’s obvious,” and it is, but my point is slightly different. These events shape us — the big ones and the small ones. We may process the trauma, pack it away neatly, label it “this happened then and I’ve moved on,” and maybe you have moved on in a way. But each event whittles us, sands us, puts edges where there weren’t any. They temper our character, shape our opinions, our coping systems, our sense of self. They shape us in ways we don’t see because they end up being us.

I’ve always understood that on the surface, but I think I’ve missed the deeper layer. There’s this instinct to compare ourselves — a natural human reflex — but in this age of boxes and labels, the comparisons feel louder and the judgements louder still. You hear: you should cope with this, you should be adaptable, you should this, you should that, this is normal, this is what people do these days, why can’t you deal with X or Y. The system shouts through the people it moulds, and those people — the mouthpieces — say, “You’re not normal,” “You have issues,” “You must be this or that.”

Today I could scream a massive expletive at them, but I know it never works. Instead, I sit with the knowledge that if you take the major trinity of my life — adoption, baby death, gender reassignment — that alone gives me a very different perspective from my partner, my kids, anyone I know. Sure, I know people who’ve been adopted — my adopted sister, for one — but she isn’t transgender and she hasn’t lived through baby death. And I haven’t lived her life either. Add in infidelity from my ex‑wife, the loss of best friends, moving house, redundancy — the usual life stuff — and you start to see the shape of it.

I once sat in a group therapy session at The Priory — the NHS sent me there to “fix” myself — and the therapist said we all needed to talk about why we were there. She reminded us that no matter what our issues are, they’re all relative to our own experiences. I listened: “I’m terrified of spiders.” “I’m terrified of dying.” “I believe I’m going to be kidnapped each day.” Then it came to me. I said, “I was taken from my mother at 14 days old. I carried my dead baby into the crematorium. I’m struggling with gender dysphoria. And I’ve had enough of carrying the weight of it all.”

That day I realised she was right: mental health problems are relative to the individual. And so is life. So is our ability to cope, to grow, to live. We know this intellectually, but in practice we struggle to apply it — to ourselves and to others. I know highly experienced mental‑health professionals who still prefer to slap a label on symptoms rather than step back and appreciate the shape of the person in front of them.

I’m a keen gardener, and I always look to nature on days like today. Recently I pricked out six pepper seedlings. Five are thriving, straight and true. One is growing at an odd angle — the one I accidentally damaged lifting it from the tray. And guess what? It’s still a pepper plant. It’ll still grow peppers, just at a slightly wonky angle.

I know today I have a lot of wonky angles. My scars mean I walk with a spiritual limp, a wonky‑eyed perspective on things many people see clearly with their own equally wonky eyes. What I know now, deeply, is that the internet has given voice to billions but also catalogued us. Many have walked into their labelled boxes and, from the safety of those boxes, pointed at the people who don’t fit and shouted “FREAK.”

We all carry scars. Some reopen each year with anniversaries; others lie quietly gathering dust. I have physical scars from 40 years ago and still see them on my hands. Today I see that all of these scars shape me, give me character, and yet don’t define me. They give me a different lens on the world, a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve said this often about mental health: if any one of my significant life events had resulted in a physical amputation, I’d be sitting here typing with one hand and no legs. That’s how powerful these events were. People would see my missing limbs and make allowances. They’d never ask me to dance a fandango or run a marathon — and I wouldn’t ask it of myself either.

A psychiatrist once said to me, “Cut yourself some slack.” Maybe it’s time I did. And with a fair wind, maybe society — and those around me — will cut me some too.

“Somewhere over the rainbow.”  

For my baby girl. Never forgotten.