Celebrating a Decade of Healing, Hope and Each Other

When I started Prue's Place ten years ago, I had no idea who would read it. I only knew I needed somewhere to put the things I was learning about healing, the quiet, hard-won lessons that don't fit neatly into a conversation over coffee. I hoped a few people might find them useful.

What I didn't expect was you.

Over this decade, this little corner of the internet has become something I never could have planned. It has been a place where we've sat with grief, illness, uncertainty, and change, sometimes all at once. Some seasons I was writing to you from a steady place. Other seasons, if I'm honest, I was writing to myself as much as anyone, trying to find words for things I was still in the middle of. And every time, someone wrote back. That is what turned a blog into a community.

I've been thinking a lot about my daddy lately. He was an engineering surveyor in New Zealand, and a lover of nature long before it was fashionable. When I was a young girl, he took me to a piece of land where he'd been asked to survey a cul-de-sac for twenty-five homes. The developers wanted it cleared quickly. Bulldoze the trees, flatten the creek, get the houses up. My dad refused. He designed every home around the trees, the creek, and the plants that were already there, and he put the power lines underground so nothing would spoil the view.

I remember him standing there, looking at what seemed to me like a tangle of bush, and saying, "I'm going to make this cul-de-sac one of the most beautiful places to live. It has so much potential, Prudie. You will see."

Years later I went back after he had sadly and accidently been killed by a teenage driver at the young age of 52. Children were playing among the gardens and the trees he had protected. It had become exactly what he said it would be. ❤️

That's what ten years of Prue's Place feels like to me. Nothing here was built by clearing away the hard parts of life. We built around them. We learned to make room for the pain rather than bulldoze it, to let the creek run where it wanted to run. And somehow, slowly, something beautiful grew in the spaces we protected.

Here is some of what I've learned alongside you.

Healing is not a straight line. Some of the posts you've told me mattered most weren't the hopeful ones. They were the honest ones, the ones that admitted I didn't have it figured out.

Receiving help is its own kind of strength. I've written about this, I still have to relearn it. Many of you have taught me this lesson through your comments and email feedback more gracefully than I've managed to teach it.

We cannot heal what we refuse to feel. Ten years of stories, yours and mine, have only made me more certain of this.

Community is medicine for the spirit. Not a replacement for good care from a doctor or therapist, but something that sits alongside it. Knowing someone else has walked the same road, and is still walking, makes the next step possible.

The world has changed enormously in these ten years. Many of us are now facing new pressures, including uncertainty about work and livelihoods as technology reshapes so much of daily life. I'll be writing more about that soon, always through the lens of what it does to our bodies, our minds, and our sense of worth. Because that's what this place is for.

You may have noticed that Prue's Place has a fresh new look to mark the occasion. For ten years, the header featured a younger version of me, and I'll admit she served us well. But a decade on, it felt only honest to let her grow up a little. So I've welcomed the woman I am today: a little older, a lot wiser, and, as you can see, now proudly blonde. I like to think of it as the same heart with a new hairdo. After all, if ten years of writing about healing and change has taught me anything, it's that we're allowed to become someone new and still be exactly who we've always been.

To everyone who has been part of my well-being coaching programs, read, commented, shared a post with a friend who needed it, or simply come back week after week: thank you. You have been my companions through some of the hardest chapters of my life, and I hope I've been a small comfort in some of yours.

My dad was right about that cul-de-sac. It had so much potential. So did this place. And so do you.

Here's to the next ten years, growing together, trees and all.

With love and gratitude.