Again and again.

Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?

That depends on what you mean as ‘who we are’. The question suggests a character or personality that’s innate and set in stone, clearly distinguishable from our life experiences. My life is a series of chapters, each one informed by those defining moments where my path can be clearly divided into before and after. Does my character stay exactly the same through all of that? No. Experience changes us.

I broke my back when I was eleven years old, in the last few weeks of primary school in the early 1980s. Our cottage hospital was so basic that I had to lie still on the ward for the weekend, because there was no specialist to review the x-rays till Monday. I remember looking at the ceiling as I was wheeled from room to room, wondering if I would be able to walk. Every time the bed banged against a corner or skirting board a jolt of pain went through my shoulder blade. I didn’t even get a collar or blocks to protect my spine. I broke two vertebrae and crushed a disc, but was sent home with paracetamol and told to rest. There was no physio. No rehabilitation. No spinal unit.

I just got on with it and avoided things that were painful. A couple of years ago I had an MRI of my whole spine because I’ve been suffering pain for forty years. Where my back was broken there’s a lesion in the spinal column and something called a vertebral hemangioma, a benign vascular tumour that forms from clusters of blood vessels. Then there’s scar tissue formed around the injury, caused by the body trying to protect the site but causing stiffness and nerve impingement. Our emotions are like this. Something happens to us and we try to heal. The things we do to cope are like scar tissue, lying over what happened to protect us from the pain.

Each experience teaches us. Did what happened at 11 years old affect me?Yes. I was so scared and I was alone until my parents were called. The school secretary Mrs Boot was sat nearby so I wasn’t alone, but she was no comfort. I wanted someone to tell me it was going to be okay but all the adults seemed more scared than me.

Am I resilient because of what happened then? Or does some essential ‘Hayleyness’ mean I’m able to pick myself and dust myself off? An innate optimism. I think we assume our character is whole and fixed because the alternative is scary. When Princess Diana died the outpouring of grief was a surprise, but the conspiracy theories started very quickly. It’s easier to believe there’s a secret service plot or that the Royal Family had a hand in her death, rather than accept that such a dazzling woman, a princess, could die in a car accident at only 36. It’s too mundane and ordinary. It means she was mortal. Just flesh and blood like the rest of us. It means we have to accept how random life is. That it can end in a moment.

Similarly it’s scary to accept that who we are shifts according to each new season of life. Virginia Woolf probably best captured how fractured and complex our inner worlds are and how changeable. We shift and flow, open to new possibilities and ways of being. I think I’ve learned to enjoy that ebb and flow. To discover new parts of myself all the time. To take on each new challenge and embrace the change within me. Again and again and again.