Last week was a heavy week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The kind where everything feels harder than it should. Where doubt gets louder. Where old versions of you start knocking at the door, asking whether you\u2019d like to come back to something more familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know that woman well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She expects the worst. She searches for what\u2019s missing. She believes she must work everything out alone because relying on anybody else has never felt entirely safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She uses fear, scarcity and control to protect me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a few days, I wondered whether I was becoming her again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I realised, I\u2019m not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had simply come back to see whether I still needed her. And for the first time, I didn\u2019t let her take over. I opened up to my husband. I allowed myself to be supported by the women around me. I stood in the uncertainty without immediately trying to escape it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I thanked her for coming. She was only trying to keep me safe in the only way she knew how, but I lovingly closed the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She survived every day that brought me here. I will always be grateful for her. She got me here, but she doesn\u2019t need to lead me anymore<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And once the heaviness began to lift, I realised I had been standing at another door too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One I\u2019ve been knocking on for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The door marked: THE SOLUTION.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I Have Spent A Long Time Searching For The Thing That Will Explain Everything<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The right qualification. The right practice. The right book. The right person. The right belief. The right business strategy. The right way of understanding myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Counselling gave me one language. Coaching gave me another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reiki offered something different. Astrology helped me see patterns from another angle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neuroscience gave me language for the brain, beliefs, attention and behaviour. Nervous-system work helped me understand why knowing something intellectually doesn\u2019t always make it feel safe inside the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each time I discovered a new way of seeing myself, something opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And each time, part of me wondered: Is this it? Is this the answer?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t think I\u2019m alone in that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We live in a world filled with people promising to show us the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Follow this morning routine and you\u2019ll change your life in 21 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regulate your nervous system, change your beliefs and heal your trauma then, hey presto, you\u2019re fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Find your purpose, think positively and raise your frequency, and everything will fall into place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Build better habits, surrender but also take action and you\u2019ll be living the life of your dreams next week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every doorway seems to come with somebody standing beside it, vigorously pointing at it and telling us that this<\/em> is the one we need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I\u2019ve started to wonder whether I\u2019ve been asking the wrong question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if there isn\u2019t one door?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n There Are Too Many Ways To Be Human<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There are too many histories, bodies, brains, cultures, relationships, losses, beliefs and experiences for there to be one way of understanding a human life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One woman may understand herself through therapy. Another through faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another through neuroscience, spirituality, creativity, movement, motherhood, philosophy, community or time spent alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One woman may find EFT transformational. Another may feel nothing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One woman may feel deeply connected to herself during meditation, while another may find that sitting still makes her feel more uncomfortable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone else may find clarity while running, writing, praying, travelling, painting or lifting weights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our needs can change across different seasons of the same life, so there really is no one-size-fits-all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There isn\u2019t a solution. There\u2019s only what works for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that may change at the rate of the British weather. And that. Is. Ok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There have been practices that supported me for years and then stopped feeling right. Things I once dismissed have later found me at exactly the right moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I tried reformer Pilates and expected to love it. I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That doesn\u2019t make reformer Pilates ineffective. It simply means it wasn\u2019t my answer. And that distinction matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because when something helps another woman but doesn\u2019t help us, we often assume we are doing it incorrectly. We decide we aren\u2019t committed enough, healed enough, spiritual enough or disciplined enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what if it simply isn\u2019t our door?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I Don\u2019t Want To Give You My Answer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve realised something about myself too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whenever I discover something that helps me, I immediately want to share it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is love in that. Excitement too. The relief of finding language for something I\u2019ve felt but couldn\u2019t previously explain, but my answer cannot automatically become your instruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can tell you what helped me. I can introduce you to a woman whose work made me think. I can explore the research, ask questions and show you the different ways people understand the same human experience. But I don\u2019t want Becoming Her to become another voice telling women what they should believe or which door they need to walk through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the moment I decide that my answer must also be yours, I remove something important: Your agency.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n You are allowed to hear an idea and find it fascinating without adopting it as your truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are allowed to try something and decide it isn\u2019t for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are allowed to change your mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are allowed to be deeply interested in spirituality and still ask for evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are allowed to value science while recognising that science does not yet have language for every part of human experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are allowed to take what helps and leave what doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No elaborate justification required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I\u2019m Changing How I Explore<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of trying to build one enormous framework that explains how women become who they are, I want to follow the individual threads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does neuroscience tell us about belief?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does psychology tell us about identity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happens inside the nervous system when change feels unsafe?<\/p>\n\n\n\n How does language affect the way we understand ourselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does grief alter?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does motherhood reveal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n How do our relationships, clothes, homes, workplaces and communities influence who we believe we\u2019re allowed to become<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does spirituality offer that science may not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where do different ways of understanding overlap?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where do they disagree?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what happens when we place them beside one another without demanding that one of them wins?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to speak to the researchers, practitioners, founders, doctors, psychologists, artists and women who have lived these questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I don\u2019t only want the polished conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to know what happened before anyone could see the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Show Me The Woman Before The Breakthrough<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Show me the woman before she built the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before she wrote the book, created the method, or before she became the person other women now look towards for answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who was she before? What happened? What did it make her question? What did she try? What did she reject? What did she choose? And who did she become because of it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t want five tips extracted from the life she created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to understand the transition<\/em> that created her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because her life is not an instruction manual. It is evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think about Melanie Perkins<\/a>, co-founder of Canva<\/a>. Today, we see Canva. We see the global company, the scale, the success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But there was a Melanie before any of that existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She spent years trying to convince investors of an idea she could already see, collecting rejection after rejection along the way. She has spoken about returning to Australia from one fundraising trip feeling like a \u201ccomplete and utter failure\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet the idea she could see still existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was living in the gap between what she could imagine and what she could prove.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n And then I think about Whitney Wolfe Herd<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before Bumble<\/a>, something else had ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After leaving Tinder, she found herself in an intensely public and painful period of her life. Bumble wasn\u2019t sitting neatly on the other side waiting for her. Her initial idea for what came next was something different entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was living in the gap between what had ended and what she hadn\u2019t imagined yet.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the part I\u2019m interested in. The woman before the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The woman who doesn\u2019t yet have the reassuring retrospective story that makes every decision look inevitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes she can see exactly where she wants to go but has no evidence she\u2019ll get there. Sometimes she only knows she can\u2019t stay where she was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n