Must love dogs

Have you ever ever bought something thinking it would “fix” your life.

I didn’t buy a miracle cream or a juicer.

I got a dog.

By the time Joey arrived, my life had already split into a before and after. Before: sunny South Africa, a familiar career, a known identity. After: grey British skies, a dissolved marriage, a non-verbal autistic son whose needs were still new terrain, and a version of myself I barely recognised.

On paper, things were “working.” I had a job. We had a roof over our heads. My son was in the care system I’d crossed continents to access. I was doing all the things I was supposed to do.

Inside, I was desperately lonely. Immigration had stripped away the easy scaffolding of my old life: family who could drop by for tea, friends who’d known me since school, the casual chats in places where everybody knew my name without spelling it back to me.

I was surrounded by people, and yet I felt like I existed behind glass.

Then Covid arrived and sealed the edges.

The isolation that had been mostly emotional became physical too. Suddenly, there were no pub plans to cancel, no school gates to awkwardly navigate, no office small talk. Just me, my son, our small corner of the UK, and my own thoughts echoing louder than ever.

At some point in that blur of days, a thought surfaced: I need something that loves me back.

It wasn’t a fully formed plan, more of a quiet nudge, but it stayed. I found myself looking at dog rescue sites, scrolling through photos of hopeful eyes and floppy ears at 2 a.m. I told myself I was just browsing.

You can guess how that went.

Joey didn’t arrive with fanfare. One day there was no dog; the next day there was a chaotic, joyful, slightly confused bundle of fur sprinting around my living room as if it had always belonged there.

He was part Labrador, part unfiltered enthusiasm. If my life had become small and careful, his was the opposite. Everything was interesting. Every ball was the best ball he had ever seen. Every walk was a festival.

Our first outings together were short and perfunctory. Five minutes around the block. Out, wee, home. I would stand there with my hood up, counting the seconds until I could go back inside, away from the unfamiliar streets and the feeling of being so visible in a place where I felt so unknown.

But Joey didn’t see it that way.

For him, those five minutes were the highlight of his day. He trotted along, tail wagging, as if we were on some grand adventure. He paused to sniff lampposts with the seriousness of a detective. He looked up at me as if to say, Isn’t this great?

It was hard to stay entirely numb beside that kind of enthusiasm.

Five minutes slowly became ten. Ten turned into twenty. The short loop around the block stretched to the park and back. I started to notice things I hadn’t before: a tree that blossomed overnight, a neighbour’s front garden that exploded in colour, the way the light changed from one week to the next. Somewhere along the way, our 20-minute walks became 40. Forty became an hour.

And one day I caught myself doing something that startled me.

I wanted to go.

Not because I “should move more” or because my fitness tracker nagged me, but because that hour outside had quietly become the part of my day where I could breathe.

Walking with Joey created a kind of moving confessional. There was no pressure to make conversation, no need to perform. I could just walk, feel my feet on the ground, and think.

At first, my thoughts circled the practicalities: my son’s appointments, work deadlines, shopping lists. But the more I walked, the more the deeper questions crept in.

Who am I now, if I’m not the woman I left behind in South Africa?

What do I actually want, besides surviving this week?

Am I allowed to want anything more?

It sounds dramatic to say a dog saved you. But Joey did something both smaller and more radical than that: he got me out of the house and back into my body, one reluctant walk at a time.

Before Joey, movement felt like a punishment or a chore – something I “should” do to control my body, to shrink it, to earn my rest. With him, movement became something else: a doorway. Every time I clipped on the lead, I wasn’t just taking him out. I was taking myself out of the stuckness I’d been marinating in.

Little by little, I became a woman who moved every day. Not in a dramatic, Instagram-friendly way. There were no sunrise runs along the Thames, no matching sets, no “couch to 5K.” Just me, in whatever mismatched outfit I grabbed, walking the same paths again and again, clearing a path back to myself.

Reinvention doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it sneaks in as a habit you barely notice forming. A walk. A journal page. A decision to drink a glass of water instead of another coffee. The kind of tiny, almost invisible choices that say: I am still here. I still matter.

Looking back, I can see that those walks with Joey were my first act of self-rescue.

Long before I picked up a kettlebell, before I discovered “strong over skinny,” before I had language for what I was doing, I was quietly proving something to myself:

I can do hard things in small doses.

I can show up even when I don’t feel like it.I can build a life that includes me, not just the people I care for.

It didn’t fix everything. Life was and is still complicated. Autism didn’t become easier overnight. Immigration didn’t magically soften. But I no longer felt quite so powerless inside it all.

The woman who dragged herself out of the house for a five-minute lap around the block is not the same woman who now chooses to move her body every day. But one would not exist without the other.

Joey doesn’t know any of this, of course. He just knows that walks are wonderful and that I am his person. He knows the sound of his lead being lifted and the exact cupboard where the treats are kept. He doesn’t know that he arrived in my life at the exact moment I needed something – someone – to pull me forward.

I do.

I’d love to know: What small, almost silly thing became your first act of self-rescue?