Julie Helen: 'March has always been my second chance of a reset'

March has always been my second chance at the new year, a restart. My birthday is the impetus to reflect and reset.

I can hear my husband on the phone trying to source the best prices for diesel that he can. Fuel is a key component in his business, and he is conscientious and very forward-thinking. I admire that quality so much in him. He has a great problem-solving brain, and so, with the world in flux, he is dealing with it as best he can, while also turning off every light he comes across and warning me that because of the war now, we won’t have the business year we had hoped we would.

I hear him. I understand, and I can hear my parents in my head telling me the stories of how they survived high interest rates in the ’80s. The electricity bill comes to my email account, it is the only financial thing that does, and I am not going to lie, I gasped at the number, and no longer will I laugh at himself reaching for a rogue light left sparkling longer than it should.

Part of my March reset is to be mindful of cutting the cloth to measure; maybe the amount of cloth is changing more drastically now.

I have the best partner I could wish for in that he will talk to me about finances. It’s a joint escapade, even though our work outside the home is very different. I think the lesson in it all is that things can be uncertain. Ways of doing things might need to change, things might not be the way they always were, but that might not be a bad thing either.

I had two recent, unrelated experiences that seemed small but made me think at the same time.

When we were children, one of my brothers developed an allergy to paracetamol. I remember the instances of the fever going wild, his body burning up, him flailing in a crazy, unwieldy flood of tears and panic about the wolves he was seeing in hallucinations. It was genuinely scary, and he was sworn off the drug for life. The everyday painkiller is administered in a hospital setting very frequently, so he always had to be very careful.

On a recent visit to my house, he asked nonchalantly for a paracetamol for a headache. I thought he was joking. He explained that the medical professionals had trialled it recently, and in his case, he has grown out of the allergy as a man in his thirties.

After he swallowed the pills, I couldn’t help but watch him out of the corner of my eye, and sure enough, he was grand altogether. A lifelong belief was changed.

I spoke at an event recently, a pure joy in the work that I do. As other speakers made their contributions, they were telling serious and really important stories of inclusion and why it is worthwhile. I scanned the room and could feel the heaviness. I made a split-second decision to be the comic relief, to be funny. In this room, it was not my job to impart the important messages; I could bring people along in a different way. I have spoken very often in public since the age of 16. I have never been funny or light-hearted. It was new and my life experience allowed me to take flight.

It felt brilliant that I could adapt and trust myself to show up in a new way, and you can too.