I’ve lived both sides of the high-functioning woman.

The one who keeps everything ticking along: career, image, responsibilities.

And the one who quietly falls apart the second the door closes.

For a long time, I lived almost entirely in my head with a constant, brutally critical narration accompanying my every waking hour.

I focused almost all my energy and time meticulously managing how I looked, how I seemed to other people, how to avoid being too much of anything, while feeling like I was never enough.

I was bullied at school, later diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder, and spent most of my twenties in therapy and on medication, convinced there was something terribly, deeply wrong with me.

I tried everything: books, courses, psychotherapy, CBT, medication and alternative therapies and techniques.

All in the hope of finding something that would finally make me feel okay about who I was.

But it was all so utterly exhausting.

Each new approach felt like another thing to get right. Another reason to feel like I was failing.

Eventually, I stumbled across a very simple but quietly radical understanding of how the mind works.

Not a tool or belief system. Just something that helped me see myself and life differently. 

It was a seemingly simple shift in my perspective from outside-in to inside-out, but it changed everything.

For the first time, I stopped asking “WHY am I like this?” And “What the hell’s wrong with me?”

I stopped trying to fix myself. And having less of myself on my mind made all that pressure and panic just drop away. And I hadn’t had to DO anything. In fact I did so much less than I ever had. 

That’s what I offer now.

Not a programme. Not a list of steps in a complicated strategy.

Just real, honest conversation with women who are tired of holding it all together.

Women who are capable and sensitive. Often successful on the outside, and quietly disconnected on the inside.

Women who feel like they should be fine, have done all the ‘work’ to try and figure themselves out, but still suspect that deep down, there’s something broken.

There’s no goal-setting or traditional life-coaching techniques here. 

No pressure to optimise or improve.

Just space. To take the weight off.

To hear yourself again and what it is you really want. 

To remember what’s always been there underneath all the noise. All the thinking.

I live by the sea in Hove, and try to soak up as much sky and salt air as possible.

I love beautiful things: art that moves me, writing that makes me stop and reread, great lighting and French style.

I paint now and again – usually with a cat on the table and another trying to knock over the water jar, and I’ve got two boys who keep me grounded, curious and often doubled over with laughter (when I’m not complaining about their ‘floordrobe’, wet towels on the bed and the seven glasses/cups left in bedrooms at any given time).

Life is messy and wildly out of our control. Not unlike a teenage boy’s bedroom.  But it’s where all the growing happens after all. And that thing you thought had been lost forever? Your aliveness? Your peace of mind? All just temporarily hidden under a pile of crap.