The long way back to myself.

My own turning point came during the hardest season of my life, the kind of season you don't really understand until you're on the other side of it. After five years of trying, I finally had my daughter, and by the time she was 18 months old I had wanted her for so long that it almost didn't feel real, and yet I was so depleted that I couldn't enjoy her the way I had always imagined I would, which is its own particular kind of heartbreak.

On paper I was managing everything, holding down a management role in the not-for-profit world that used to light me up but had started to quietly drain me, working a second job just to make ends meet, moving through a divorce, grieving the loss of my mother, and disconnected from one of my dearest friends all at the same time.

What nobody could see was everything happening underneath.

I was burnt out and had grown cynical about work I used to find so deeply rewarding, I couldn't find a moment for myself anywhere, and somewhere beneath all of that exhaustion I knew I needed to reinvent my whole life but had absolutely no idea where to begin. I was depressed and going through the motions, tired and stressed every single day, crying more than I would have admitted to anyone, functioning on the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside.

I did what so many of us do, throwing myself into every self-help book I could find and trying everything in every possible way, and still I ended up feeling just as depleted, sad, and depressed as when I started. It honestly took me close to fifteen years to truly find my way back to myself and to a life that felt like mine again.