How cool is my new hat?
I mean it’s purple for a start so matches the front cover of The Princess Without a Crown.

#Writer

That may be my favourite hashtag and it’s certainly my favourite hat.
And I have many hats.
So that got me to thinking about the hats that I wear.

I’ve been wearing a mum hat for more than 30 years and it’s by far the thing I feel proudest of. I have 2 wonderful daughters. I’m not perfect, but I know they are two compassionate, caring and kind humans. They are strong, smart, beautiful and brave and I know I have had some influence on them other the years. I don’t like to say I raised them to be x, y or z because actually I believe the best skill in parenting is letting your children make their own choices and be themselves. They are good people and they are both in my life, even after the incident where the real-life Princess Lottie ate a tube of superglue (bad mother).

I also wear a daughter and sister hat. Families are complicated and mine is no different, but at the heart of it is love. We are fundamentally there for each other, no matter what. We are not scared to tell each other when we have differences of opinions because ultimately, we know that love is what holds us together, and always will. Love with a healthy dose of sarcasm gets us through our shared ups and downs!

Lover, wife, partner, girlfriend, widow. Wow so many of those hats that we wear with our nearest and dearest. Those we show our whole self, intimately. Deepest love, strongest desires and yet maybe the most fragile of hats. Sometimes destroyed in the blink of an eye, a catastrophic ending or a slow withering of love or life. The duality of these hats indicating the complexities of human relationships. I can be a widow and a lover at the same time, these hats are not mutually exclusive.

Many hats we wear in our personal life and many in our professional life, worker, boss, activist, agitator, leader, follower, educator, cheerleader, and of course the #writer hat… the list could go on. I have and still do wear those hats on a daily basis. Yet there is still a hat I wear that I don’t feel comfortable in, it’s tight, constraining, itchy and scratchy. If I look in the mirror the me that wears that hat doesn’t look like the real me.

#Businesswoman

That hat is not my hat. Yet I know if I am to make a success as an author, I must wear that hat. It can’t all be writing and creating beautiful stories and books. I need to be a business woman to get those books sold and in the hands of readers. Not so I can make loads of money. I have no desire to be rich. I have an unshakable desire to tell stories to smash stereotypes. I have an unshakable desire to make sure that people get to read them. I am making a commitment to wear my uncomfortable #businesswoman hat and make sure that my books get into the hands of little people so that they know, they should not let themselves be put into boxes, and that they can wear any hat they choose!