I couldn't find her,
so I became her.

I spent a long time outrunning my own body.

For over a decade I was excellent at a job while my nervous system quietly paid the bill. I was the reliable one, the one who absorbed the deadline and held the room and re-read the email at 9pm and called it high standards. From the outside it looked like composure. From the inside it was bracing, and bracing compounds.

I also believed, for a very long time, that I had no power. I learnt it young, and the message followed me into adulthood in different clothes. So I chased approval, shrank to keep the peace, and took what was offered instead of choosing what I wanted.

The powerlessness was never real. It was the glasses I had been given.

The turning point was not a breakdown. It was a slow realisation that no framework I had ever been taught addressed the body that was carrying all of it. So I went and learnt what does: the chakras, the nervous system, Aromatic Kinesiology, reiki, yoga, and the science of how a woman's cycle actually works.

And then I built the thing I needed at thirty, because the woman I used to be did not have time for a retreat. She had fourteen minutes and a full calendar.