What I sacrificed to get here…
I built my business on helping other people show up more fully and, for a long time, I did it while slowly disappearing inside my own life — and I didn’t even notice it happening. Well, at least not significantly enough to do anything to change it.
It looked like dedication. It looked like generosity. It looked like someone who genuinely loved her work, her people and her cause — which I did. All of it. But underneath the love was a pattern I hadn’t identified. I was so focused on reflecting light onto others that I had dimmed mine in the process.
My life became about celebrating others — cheering so loudly for them that quietening my own impact felt supportive — more accommodating of someone else’s needs than my own. I told myself that was love. A bastardised version of it, at least. Ultimately, it was also the slow erosion of my own intuition, my boundaries, my right to show up fully.
At the same time, I was running a business, building a charity supporting 40+ beneficiaries without a team, managing other people’s emotions, confidence and crises as though that was simply what I did — probably because it was. I was raised to be strong, to figure things out, to put others first. My parents modelled it and I inherited it. For a long time I wore it as an identity rather than recognising it as a pattern with consequences.
The consequences arrived gradually at first, then as an avalanche of physical manifestations. Temporal lobe epilepsy after losing my mom. COVID-19 three times. Pneumonia. Laryngitis. My body sending increasingly loud signals that I had been ignoring for years because there was always something more urgent to attend to than myself.
And then my marriage ended. In the weeks that followed I stood in front of hundreds of women across back-to-back speaking engagements and showed up — because that’s what I do, right? My life was in pieces behind the professional exterior.
What I sacrificed to get here wasn’t time or money or opportunity in the conventional sense. It was the earlier versions of myself that I left behind — the one who trusted her instincts before she learned to second-guess them, the one who knew what she needed before she learned to defer that knowledge to everyone else’s comfort.
We all have stories and I’m sharing glimpses of mine because I work with leaders and teams every day who are doing versions of the same thing — showing up fully for everyone else while the cost to their wellbeing accumulates steadily.
The work I do now — the nervous system regulation, the identity work, the alignment across Body, BEing, Mind and Business — isn’t something I learned from a textbook. It’s something I needed and found my way to out of desperation. The proof comes from lived experience.
If this is your story too — even a version of it — I’d love to hear it. And if you’re ready to do something about it, I’d love to help.
Image: sydney-latham-fZ2hMpHIrbI-unsplash
