Gum on My Shoe

When I come home feelin’ tired and beat I go up where the air is fresh and sweet (up on the roof) — Carole King / Gerry Goffin. “Up on the Roof.” Beep Beep Beep The messages arrived late afternoon my time. Three photos. Two of a canted shingle roof strewn with dried leaves and other garden debris. The third showed a steel ladder leaning against the side of a house I recognised immediately. “Gary’s going up on the roof. He will wear the life alert. He cleaned the gutter yesterday.” Gary is Fran’s stepdad. “Fingers crossed,” I replied. “That looks like a decent ladder but I wouldn’t want to be on the roof itself.” “He is fearless and full of faith.” My mind went back some thirty-five years. A friend’s house in Nottinghamshire. An invitation to help repair the roof of an outbuilding. It was an invitation I felt incapable of declining. It was ever that way. Gary might be fearless and full of faith but I was neither. Not then, not now. I climbed the ladder and shifted myself...

By Aimee McCarthy, Project Lead of Gracie’s Way Turn your wounds into wisdom. — Oprah Winfrey A few weeks ago, on September 28th, I launched the newest resource on Gracie’s Way: Trust Tillie, which now has its own page on the website. On seeing and supporting this, as well as the entire heartache around the loss of Tillie, Martin Baker (co-Creator of Gum on My Shoe) offered me a chance to write this guest post with some additional insight into the resource and how losing Tillie inspired each of the parts or pages. So, before I run through each of the sections in the resource and discuss how each was inspired, informed, and influenced by what happened to Tillie, I’ll talk about the largest influence on Trust Tillie; losing Tillie. Losing Tillie On August 31st 2026, I realised that the last time I’d seen my five-month-old bunny; Tillie, eat had been the previous day and after she passed some soft stools in front of me (if she hadn’t, because I have another rabbit — Luna — I m...

By Andrea Marie For most of the first decade of the new millennium I lived a short block from the beachfront in a small borough on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, called Surf City. Having grown up just a few miles from New York City I visited the Jersey Shore countless times but never dreamed I’d be offered the opportunity to live “down the shore” as we called it. Surf City is roughly an hour and half from NYC, without traffic, which MUST be said. I lived in a single apartment above Island Earth, an art gallery storefront on Long Beach Boulevard, next to the bright yellow laundromat. The entrance to my apartment was around back, up a well-aged wooden staircase the top of which looked out over the flat roof extending over the gallery to The Boulevard. The small wooden deck led to the left to the entrance of a great little apartment. There were windows on all sides of the apartment making for great light and great ocean and bay breezes. The mighty Atlantic Ocean lay a short block e...

By Sophie May Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing. — Dolly Parton. “Love Is Like a Butterfly.” I’ve always loved butterflies (although I was afraid of them flapping near me when I was young) — the beauty, symmetry and even throughout my Mariah days (if you know, you know) 🦋 Throughout the hardest times of my life, butterflies have always appeared and taken me to a place of calm, most poignantly when my grandad was in hospital for the last time and there were two that just wouldn’t leave where I was sat 🤍 A butterfly tattoo later and they’ve become even more important. Whenever I’m struggling they appear. Not just that but when Bloomin’ Mindful hadn’t even reached social media, I got a message from a shop to say they wanted to stock my Butterfly watering stations (now the Bug Oasis) 🐝 🦋 That day I cried as it was the lifeline and boost of confidence I so needed! All of a sudden I felt my grandad with me and it w...

By Lisa Judson Sometimes, the people you never expected to meet become the people you can’t imagine your life without. Friendship is a funny thing. We spend our lives collecting people. Some stay for a season. Some for a chapter. Some disappear for years and somehow walk back into our lives as though they’ve never been away. And then there are the ones who become your people . Friendships are the lifeblood of life. They bring laughter, tears, support, comfort and solidarity. They bring a kick up the backside when you’ve wallowed for long enough, or a good-natured correction when you need one. Honesty, reliability and love bring it all together. I often wonder how I’d manage without my tribe. You see, I know lots of people. From all kinds of times and places in my life — school, work, church, the lake where I swim. And yet, I’ll admit, my inner circle is small. You know what I mean. Those friends who are your ride or dies . The ones you can call at any time of the day or ...

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Does your friend live with bipolar disorder? Do you know how to help? We wrote HIGH TIDE, LOW TIDE: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder for you both. Our first book was published in September 2013, but Fran and I have always celebrated the anniversaries of our launch party rather than the publication date. On that basis, October 1, 2026 is our book’s tenth birthday. My first thought on realising this was “Wow!” closely followed by “How on earth did that happen?” I wasn’t sure how to mark the occasion. I’d left it a bit late to organise anything major. A reprise of our 2013 launch party — held simultaneously online and in person at Fran’s apartment in Maine — was too daunting to countenance. A conversation with our friend Aimee who blogs at I’m NOT Disordered helped enormously. “Could you do ten things you learned from writing the book?” she asked. “Ten reasons to buy it? Ten things someone could learn from it?” Her third suggestion really appealed to me. (Thanks, A...

I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned. — Richard Feynman This post was inspired by a conversation with my friend and fellow blogger Aimee Wilson. Aimee said she likes question and answer posts because the structure makes them easier to put together. I agreed but said I find it hard actually answering the questions. Aimee seemed surprised. “But we’ve done them together and you’ve always done really well!” It’s true. We’ve collaborated on several Q&A posts here at Gum on My Shoe and on Aimee’s blog I’m NOT Disordered . I’ve used the format on other occasions too, including Every Grey Hair Is a Badge in response to fifteen life prompts by Holly Hatam. That doesn’t mean I find them easy or straightforward. The conversation left me wondering where my issues might lie. Aware of the irony of using the Q&A format to explore my problems answering questions, I reached out to ChatGPT. “I find Q&As challenging to answer,”...

Wake up and live your life on your own terms, you are a king in your own kingdom, a god in your own universe. — Bangambiki Habyarimana We’d been discussing life stuff. End of life stuff, actually. Wills and obituaries and eulogies and celebration of life arrangements. That kind of thing. The kind of thing I’d scarcely thought about until a few years ago. A day may come when I have it all in order. But — as Aragorn might say — it is not this day. This day I have something different in mind. Related, but different. Because all this end of life talk got me thinking about what’s most important about a person. How can we hope to capture the essence of a lifetime, a life, a whole entire person, in a few hundred words? A “standard comprehensive obituary” is somewhere between two hundred and four hundred words. A eulogy is usually longer, between five hundred and a thousand words, “lasting approximately three to five minutes when spoken.” Forgive me for thinking this is scarcely en...