Dusty Wentworth

  There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from illness alone, but from being sent in a circle. Not treated. Not resolved. Simply redirected. It starts with a referral that promises progress and ends with a letter explaining why progress is not possible. Each appointment points elsewhere. Each service draws a boundary around its remit. Somewhere between departments, responsibility quietly disappears, and the patient is left holding the consequences. Being labelled “too complex” is not a diagnosis. It is an administrative decision. It is how care ends without anyone having to say so plainly. Living with PTSD, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder, and acquired brain damage following a ruptured brain aneurysm is not an abstract challenge. These conditions do not exist neatly side by side. They compound each other. Pain intensifies neurological symptoms. Neurological symptoms drain energy and cognitive capacity. PTSD keeps the nervous system perman...

  I did not set out to become a writer. In October 2023, I was admitted to hospital. As with many long admissions, time became distorted. Days blurred into one another, routines were imposed, and the sense of identity I had carried for most of my life began to erode. During that admission, my occupational therapist suggested I keep a diary. It was not framed as a creative exercise, but as a practical intervention, a way to track thoughts, symptoms and emotional changes during recovery. I was sceptical, but I agreed. At first, the entries were short and functional. Notes about pain levels, fatigue, frustration and sleep. Slowly, almost without noticing, the writing changed. The diary became a place to offload emotions I could not articulate out loud. It became somewhere I could process fear, anger and grief without having to manage anyone else’s response. Writing imposed structure on chaos. It helped me make sense of what had happened to me and what was still happening. After el...

  There is a fashionable line in Washington that European NATO members are feckless passengers, forever borrowing American protection while giving nothing back. It is a neat story, domestically useful, and strategically corrosive. It is also false. NATO’s collective defence clause, Article 5, has been invoked only once, after the attacks of 11 September 2001. It was invoked by the United States. European allies responded, not with speeches, but with troops, body bags, and decades of political fallout at home. Yet Donald Trump’s public contempt for EU and NATO partners, coupled with threats of tariffs as a lever to force compliance, treats allies like subordinates and trade like a weapon. That posture cannot be waved away as “tough negotiating”. It is a rejection of diplomacy in favour of coercion. And it is happening again, now with Greenland. Article 5 Was Invoked Once. Allies Paid in Blood. Afghanistan was not a side-show for NATO partners. Non-US NATO forces suffered over...

Resilience is the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, stress, or significant sources of pressure, while maintaining or regaining psychological and physical functioning. It is not the absence of distress, nor is it an inherent toughness that some people possess and others lack. Modern psychological and occupational health research consistently shows that resilience is a dynamic process, shaped over time by skills, habits, relationships, and environments. This distinction matters. When resilience is misunderstood as personal toughness, people are encouraged to endure conditions that are objectively damaging. When it is understood as adaptive capacity, it becomes something that can be developed, supported, and sustained without denying reality. This article sets out what resilience looks like in practice, what the evidence says about its effects on health and performance, and how it can be strengthened at both individual and organisational levels. Resi...

One of the hardest parts of my recovery has not been PTSD, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder, or even surviving a ruptured brain aneurysm. Those things are visible enough. They can be named, diagnosed, measured, medicated, explained. The real fight has been with masculinity. Not in the abstract, but in my own life, my own body, and my own sense of self. That fight came in two parts. Waking Up in the Future After my aneurysm rupture, I regained consciousness with significant memory loss. Doctors, nurses, and family kept telling me I was fifty years old. In my head, I was still in my mid thirties. I had not aged into this stage of life. I had arrived in it without warning or preparation. It felt less like recovery and more like waking up in the future. If someone had asked me in my thirties whether I would like to time travel fifteen years forward, I would probably have said yes. You expect things to improve. You assume progress. Instead, I woke into a reality th...

There are moments in life that do not announce themselves as turning points until long after they have passed. Others arrive with brutal clarity, altering the landscape of what lies ahead in the space of a single sentence.  Tuesday 13 January 2026 was one of those moments. It was my first medical appointment of the new year, and by the time I left the consulting room, I knew that a door I had been moving towards for the last two years had quietly, decisively closed. The appointment was with my neurologist and focused on my Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). FND remains the most debilitating of my diagnoses, not only because of the severity of its physical symptoms, but because of the uncertainty that continues to surround it. Each consultation carries the same fragile expectation: that a new approach might emerge, a different perspective, or a previously unexplored intervention that could offer some relief. On this occasion, that expectation lasted only minutes. Th...

Resilience is often described as the ability to endure, to withstand pressure, to keep going when circumstances are hostile or uncertain. Yet for those who have had their lives interrupted by illness, injury or profound loss, resilience is not an abstract concept. It becomes a daily practice, a series of deliberate choices, and at times a hard won act of defiance against despair. Over the past two years, resilience has been the central theme of my life. It has shaped how I have faced the consequences of neurological injury, institutional barriers and the quiet erosion of confidence that prolonged dependence can bring. This is a reflection on that period, and on my determination to rebuild. In October 2023, I became an inpatient. What was initially a hospital admission extended into a prolonged stay and then into a neurological rehabilitation centre. From October 2023 through to September 2024, my world narrowed to wards, treatment rooms and carefully scheduled routines. Reh...