Monty's Gift
When surviving is no longer enough.
Ā Life doesn't always warn you before it changes everything.
Sometimes it arrives in a single shattering moment. A collision. A diagnosis. A phone call. A loss so complete it divides life into a before and an after.
Sometimes it arrives more quietly, in the gradual realisation that somewhere along the way you've drifted into a version of yourself, or a version of life, that no longer feels true.
The circumstances are different. The feeling is the same.
Something has fallen apart, or is beginning to.
For six years, six days a week, Nicola Huelin drove to the same yard, to see the same horse. A Friesian named Monty, who came into her life through what she has since learned not to call coincidence. He taught her to dance, in the arena and in her own life, and somewhere along the way became the place she felt most at home.
On 17 September 2024, on an ordinary afternoon in the Cheshire countryside, a car crossed onto their side of the road and struck them from behind. Monty died at the scene. Nicola survived physically, but with post-concussion syndrome, debilitating fatigue, PTSD, and a grief so total it left no part of her untouched.
What followed was the hardest season of her life and, impossibly, one of the most transformative.
Monty's Gift is the true story of what came after: the strangers who stayed with her for hours on that road, the sixteen-month wait for her case to reach a courtroom, and a discovery buried for more than a century in her own family history: a great-grandfather who had loved and lost horses across two wars, and had never found peace with it.
It is the story of a woman who spent forty-six years searching for home in places, people, achievements and, finally, one extraordinary horse, only to discover through losing him that perhaps she had been looking in the wrong place all along.
Monty's Gift is for anyone who has ever loved deeply, lost profoundly, and wondered whether they would ever find their way home again.
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When Surviving Is No Longer Enough
Stories, questions and reflections for the journey Home.
Monty's Gift is one story. But the questions at the heart of it reach far beyond what happened on that road.
What happens when the ways we've learned to survive are no longer the ways we want to live?
Who are we beneath everything we've learned to become in order to cope, belong, achieve, protect ourselves and keep going?
And what becomes possible when we create enough space to hear ourselves again?
When Surviving Is No Longer Enough is my Substack, a place where I write more personally and regularly about the territory between the life we've known and whatever might be asking to emerge next.
I write about survival and self-trust. Love and loss. Identity and reinvention. The wisdom of our bodies. The lives we build, the things we outgrow, the questions that won't leave us alone, and the sometimes unexpected ways we find our way Home.
Some of what I share grows from my own life and the journey I'm still living. Some finds its way into Monty's Gift. And some simply begins with something I've noticed, wondered about, or found myself unable to stop thinking about.
There are no ten-step formulas waiting for you there.
Just stories, questions, discoveries and an ongoing exploration of one question that has come to sit at the heart of my life and work:
What becomes possible when surviving is no longer enough?
If that's a question you're living too, I'd love you to join me.
Join me on Substack