First, the context: in April 2024, while covering a French lesson at the school where I worked, I fell over backwards and hit my head on the back wall. I still haven’t figured out how that happened, but in the months since, I have learned quite a lot. Bumping my head was a turning point in my life and I’m ever so thankful it happened.

So I fell over in front of maybe 25 twelve and thirteen year olds. This was mortifying, but those kids were amazing. What happened next changed my life forever.

The brain is incredible at protecting us from things we cannot handle. When I fell, I crashed directly into the back wall. I felt this as a huge crash and I don’t remember the moments before or after it. A boy went next door to get another teacher to come in. At some point later, I ‘woke up’ to discover there were no kids in the classroom, only several members of staff. I touched the back of my head and my fingers came back covered in blood. I freaked, like you do.

I was taken by wheelchair into the front office, where somebody called 999 to request an ambulance. People kept asking me if my neck hurt, and not realizing at all why they were asking, I said it did not hurt but joked it would likely hurt tomorrow. Even at A&E, I was asked about my neck and the nurse kept feeling around my neck. In my mind, it was my head that was banged up, so why is everybody so worried about my neck?

It took three weeks or so before my brain allowed me to know the answer to that question, and when the thought appeared, I sat up and listened. Then I thought about nothing else for at least a week. My emotional response was at once understandable, but also surprising. You see, I have suffered from moderate to severe depression my entire life and have struggled these past few years from suicidal ideation and intrusive thoughts. I found healing in October, but by April I was just coasting through a job that was far beneath my qualifications and dreaming of bigger things but without much motivation to make the change.

Then I realized something important: I could so easily have broken my neck and been paralized or killed. Right in front of a room full of impressionable children who would have been traumatized for life. But I wasn’t hurt at all (aside from the three tiny lacerations from my claw clip and my fairly significant and slow-healing concussion). You were spared, Bishop, so what are you doing to do about it?

I suddenly and for the first time in my life realized just how short and just how precious life is. So what did I do? I quit my dead-end job (a job I loved, but a truly dead-end role) and I decided to devote the rest of my life to spreading joy and inspiration to young girls everywhere. 

Yesterday was the last day of school and my last day of work. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. And you know what? I feel like myself for the first time in decades, maybe ever… 

(NB what happened in the interim is different story for another day… watch this space!)