Morag Grant is sixty-seven years old, lives in a terraced house on the south side of Inverness, and will tell you, with complete cheerfulness, that three years ago she was in a bad way. Not dramatically so — she had not been hospitalised, had not had a crisis. She had simply, over the course of a decade of caring for her late husband and then her elderly mother, stopped paying any attention to herself. By the time both had passed, she found herself alone, overweight, sedentary, and — in her own words — not really sure what she was for any more.
"I'd been a carer for so long that I'd completely lost track of who I was apart from that," Morag explains, sitting at the kitchen table where she now hosts a weekly coffee morning for four neighbours she met through our programme. "When it was finally over, I didn't know what to do with myself. I was tired all the time, my knees were terrible, and I think I was quite depressed, though I wouldn't have said so at the time."
Morag was referred to Vibrant Health Advocates by her GP, who had noticed that her blood pressure and weight had both crept upward across several appointments and that she was presenting with low mood. She came along to one of our Inverness wellbeing drop-in sessions in February 2023, largely, she admits, because it got her out of the house on an otherwise empty Wednesday afternoon. She was not expecting much.
What she found was a room full of people in broadly similar circumstances — retired, recently bereaved, living with long-term conditions, or simply at a stage of life where health had stopped feeling straightforward. The drop-in runs without agenda: there is tea, there are health advocates on hand to answer questions, and there are leaflets about local services. But there is also, Morag says, something harder to name. "It felt like being in a room where it was acceptable to say that things were hard. Nobody was trying to sell you anything or fix you. They just wanted to know how you were getting on."
Over the following months, Morag joined the walking programme, attended a cookery workshop focused on affordable nutrition for people living alone, and started volunteering at the very drop-in session where she had first been a participant. Her GP, at a check-up nine months after the referral, told her that her blood pressure had returned to a normal range and that she had lost a meaningful amount of weight — but Morag is more interested in talking about how she feels than about clinical measurements. "I feel like myself again," she says simply. "I'd forgotten what that felt like."
Morag's story is one we hear in various forms regularly at Vibrant Health Advocates. The circumstances differ — a redundancy, a diagnosis, a bereavement, the slow drift of a difficult few years — but the shape is often similar. People arrive uncertain, leave feeling slightly more held, and gradually, over time, find that small changes accumulate into something that feels like flourishing. It is not a dramatic transformation. It is something quieter and more durable than that.
If Morag's experience resonates with yours, or with someone you know, we would encourage you to come along to one of our drop-in sessions. There is no referral needed, no form to fill in before you arrive, and no obligation to do anything more than show up and have a cup of tea. Details of all our current sessions are available on this website and through the NHS Highland community health team. The door is always open.