A bit about me.
It was 2 August 2019. I was fifty-five years old and, overnight, I had lost my home, my relationship, my livelihood and my sense of purpose. In a single day, the life I had known for twenty-three years was gone.
I had finally left. And I want to tell you what that felt like, because no one talks about this part: the part after the door closes.
It was not relief. It was not clarity. It was three words, circling me like the weather.
FEAR. SHAME. GUILT.
My two oldest children had been estranged from me for six years by then. The friendships I had let go dark one by one, because keeping them would have meant explaining, and explaining would have meant admitting. My professional identity, fifteen years as a medical negligence solicitor, named in Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners, a partner at one of the most respected firms in Manchester, had been quietly set down years before. Now there was no income. No direction. No structure to hide inside.
So I did what I imagine you might recognise: I threw myself at everything. I was desperate to make up for lost time. I moved fast so I did not have to be still. I chased purpose the way you chase sleep when you are desperate for it. The harder you try, the further it eludes you. The harder I pushed, the less I found.
I felt completely broken. Hollowed out. The longer I was out, the more I looked back at the woman who had stayed and thought: who was she? Not with cruelty. With genuine bewilderment. She had tolerated things I could no longer imagine tolerating, and called it normal. It wasn't until I left the relationship that I discovered what a boundary was. Up until then, I thought a boundary was something that defined the land around the house you owned. It had never once occurred to me to apply it to myself.
The turning point
And then, somewhere in the wreckage of that soul searching, I came across a small story about a statue in Thailand.
For centuries, a Golden Buddha had sat in a temple, covered in clay. Unremarkable, overlooked, forgotten. Then one day the clay cracked, and underneath it was solid gold. The monks had covered it centuries earlier to protect it from invaders. The gold had always been there. It had simply been hidden for so long that everyone, including the monks themselves, had forgotten it existed.
I read that story and something shifted. A quiet, almost imperceptible shift. I stopped asking what I had lost. I started wondering what might still be there.
I went back through newspaper cuttings of my old cases and began to find evidence of her: the woman I had been so certain had disappeared.
She had not disappeared at all. She had been covered over, layer by careful layer, because staying small had kept me safe. And now that the danger had gone, I was still doing it. Out of habit. On autopilot. Without realising.
The thread
I found a woman with a love for life. One who had stood in a courtroom and fought for people who had been failed, not because they wanted compensation, but because they wanted accountability, and truth, and to make sure it never happened to someone else. I found a woman who had climbed Kilimanjaro at thirty while practising law and raising children, and cycled 350 kilometres across the Jordanian desert. That instinct, the one that looks beneath the surface and asks what justice really means, it had never gone anywhere. I had just buried it.
Slowly, I rebuilt. I trained as a coach. I rebuilt the relationships with my children that I once feared were beyond repair. I became a grandmother. I learned to be still. I stood in a frozen waterfall in the Polish mountains and discovered that strength is not about pushing harder. It is about the belief in yourself that you can achieve whatever your heart truly desires.
I was not broken. I was buried. And everything I had been is still here, just excavated, gradually, back into the light.
The work
That is the work I now do with other women. Not because I studied this from the outside. Because I lived it from the inside and then found my way through.
I am not here to fix you. There is nothing to fix. I am here to help you see what is already there, beneath everything you built to survive, and then, at your own pace, with intention and without fear, to help you choose differently.
If something here has landed, if you recognise yourself somewhere in these words, the door is open. No pressure. Just a conversation.
I am she, and she is me.