My Origin Story

I spent most of my 20s and 30s being the person everyone expected me to be.

Top of the class, well-liked, reliable. The one who got results. I built a life that matched that identity perfectly — a stable, respectable career, long-term relationships, a social life that looked fun from the outside.

And I was drowning.

My career was suffocating me. Not at first, but years in I started to feel it. Sunday nights were the worst. That dread that would settle in my chest and tummy before the week had even started. Monday mornings I’d wake up and feel it immediately — before I’d even gotten out of bed. I’d sit in meetings with my heart racing, feeling physically sick, thinking about how much I didn’t want to be there. I’d cry on the way home. Sometimes I’d get angry at nothing. I felt nothing for the work I was doing and that scared me, because I used to care. I used to be the person who cared more than anyone.

The guilt made it worse, because I was good at my job and it paid well. People even told me how lucky I was to have found my purpose. So I stayed and told myself I was being ungrateful.

My relationships weren’t much better — I just couldn’t see it yet.

I stayed in relationships for the other person, not for myself. I made myself smaller so I wouldn’t trigger them, so they’d accept me, so I’d be enough. I built friendships and relationships around going out, drinking, being the fun version of myself — because that version was easier than the real one. In reality, those relationships were draining me. They were hard work and left me feeling resentful.

I told myself that was just what love looked like. That adapting yourself for someone meant you cared about them.

And through all of it, I considered myself very self-aware.

I journalled, meditated, read every self-help book I could get my hands on. I did the courses, the workshops, the podcasts. I could see everyone else’s situation with total clarity and couldn’t work out my own. I kept thinking: why can’t I figure this out? I should have this figured out by now.

At the same time I was using alcohol to manage what I couldn’t name.

My “fun lifestyle” was binge drinking in disguise. My “healthy habits” were controlling my food because it was the one thing I felt I could control. But deep down I felt completely out of control, and a lot of shame around it.

Then I developed ulcerative colitis.

A few years after being diagnosed, I landed in hospital due to the severity of my condition. After having a procedure, I was told the disease had spread significantly. The doctor delivered the news and left. And I was completely alone in that room with it.

I cried. I felt hopeless. I remember thinking — why me?

And then something shifted.

I don’t know how else to describe it except that it felt like a switch flipped. Like waking up after years of being half asleep. In that hospital room, alone, I suddenly knew — with a clarity I had never felt before — exactly why I was sick.

I was sick because I had been completely disconnected from who I actually was. For years. Every choice I had made — the career I stayed in, the relationships I shrunk myself for, the drinking, the control, the relentless self-improvement that never actually helped — had been built around who I thought I should be. Not who I was.

The misalignment hadn’t just cost me my happiness. It had cost me my health.

I felt high for about a week after that.

I know that sounds strange. But I was flooded with awareness — about my life, about my choices, about who I actually was underneath all of it. For the first time in years I felt like myself. Really myself. Not the achieving version, not the fun version, not the reliable version. Just me.

And in those moments I made a decision. I was going to rebuild my life into one that actually fit me.

I got sober. I left the career. I rebuilt my relationship with my body. I healed. I came back to the spiritual practices I’d always pushed aside when life got hard. I had a child. I moved to the coast — to a little beachy town I’d always felt pulled toward but never let myself choose.

And slowly, the life I was living started to actually fit the person living it.

I share all of this because the women I work with are where I was.

Successful, self-aware, and secretly disconnected from the life they’re living. Women who look like they have it together and feel completely off on the inside. Women who have tried everything to figure out why and are exhausted from not finding the answer.

I know that you’re not broken, ungrateful or failing at self-awareness.

You’ve just been living a life that was built for a past version of you. And some part of you has known that for a while.

I found my way back to myself. And I’d love to help you find yours.

If this resonates, the Alignment Audit is a free 5-minute quiz that helps you pinpoint exactly where the disconnection is coming from so you know what to actually focus on.