WORDS: AMY SESSIONS
Brave & Beautiful
What do your first 30 mins of the day look like, your morning routine? I usually get up around seven in the morning. I struggle with insomnia so it’s super important for me that I have a fairly regular sleep-wake routine. If I’m in the same city as my dogs the first thing I always do is go and wake them up and cuddle them. Then I drink my lemon water to rehydrate. I have a rebounder which is like a tiny trampoline. Most days I’ll put on some music and go gently jump on that for 10 minutes to stimulate my lymphatic system and have some really gentle movement in the morning. I can’t handle other forms of exercise but rebounding really doesn’t require much, it’s very low impact and easy. No matter how much sleep I’ve got the night before my morning always tends to look this way because even when I’m struggling these are the practices that re-centre me. Can you tell us in your own words what changed for you in 2018? I had just moved to New York to start studying Psychology at NYU. I was only beginning to settle in when about three weeks into being there I suddenly had acute pain in my abdomen. I was living in the East Village and I took myself to the nearest emergency room. It’s a strange moment to recount because I was so unaware at this point how drastically my life course was going to be altered. After many hours of morphine and the most astonishing amount of pain, I was diagnosed with volvulus of my colon that needed immediate emergency surgery. I should have been back at school fairly quickly, but it soon became clear that I wasn’t recovering as expected. I spent that week hallucinating, tachycardic, and hardly lucid and received an incredibly low quality of care during this time. I had contracted septi-
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IMAGE: SUPPLIED
Esme Rose Chapman is a tough cookie. Illustrator, model and daughter of MATCHESFASHION Founders Ruth & Tom Chapman, she’s a true testament to beauty and the steely determination and drive that can exist beneath
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9/30/21 1:55 PM
