And thus, this series is born!

Every two weeks, I will be speaking with some incredible Substack creators and hearing all about how their last week was - what worked, what didn’t, what are they taking into next week? I finally get to peek behind the curtain of how others are shaping their non corporate lives. So whether you’ve left traditional work, are thinking about how to shape life differently, or are already far along the path, this conversation and this series will have something for you in it!

Episode 4 with Lucia Fontaina-Powell, writer and accredited transformative coach

For episode 4, I sat down with the wonderful Lucia Fontaina-Powell, a Substack writer, accredited transformative coach, and the voice behind Messy Work - a newsletter for the deep thinkers, big feelers and recovering high achievers who suspect there’s more to life. Lucia also runs her own coaching practice, More To Life, and recently launched Messy Club, a small group container for women self-authoring their careers. I adored this conversation, loved hearing how Lucia approached her week last week, and am excited for you all to watch/listen. Enjoy!

Messy Work

A Substack about the messy work of creating a life that feels like yours.

By Lucia Fontaina-Powell

Key themes from the conversation

• The buffer between things

Lucia spoke about how she doesn’t tend to book different types of sessions back to back. Copywriting and coaching require two different versions of her - one in a deep flow state, one fully relational and present - and moving straight from one into the other without space in between doesn’t serve her best. Her buffer isn’t a fixed ritual, just at least an hour to ground and shift headspace before the next thing asks something different of her. She noted that this is often the first thing to slip when a call runs long or the week gets busy, and that it’s usually the first thing she notices the cost of - a feeling I know too well from a career of overloaded diaries and barely room for a bathroom break!

• Excavating and self-authoring your career

Lucia described self-authoring your career as rewriting the script most of us were handed by school, by our parents, by the traditional nine-to-five. Underneath that is what she called the excavating: digging into inherited beliefs about time, productivity and worth. She was clear this isn’t a one-off process. It’s ongoing, and typically slower and harder than people expect when they first leave a traditional career and something that I also have first hand experience of.

• Girl boss residue

I loved the phrase from one of Lucia’s coaching clients: girl boss residue describing the tendency to leave a high-output, high-pressure environment and unconsciously recreate the same pressure while working for yourself. Lucia was candid that four years after going freelance, she still catches this pattern in herself - most recently around booking, busyness and equating her worth with how much revenue she was generating. She described it as something you get better at noticing and interrupting, not something that fully disappears. I also like to think of it as a girlboss hangover!

• Substack growth and chasing the wrong metric

Lucia shared that when she first launched her Substack, she went into growth mode - chasing follower numbers because that’s what the platform rewards - before recognising it wasn’t aligned with why she’d started writing in the first place. We spoke about this as a common trap on a platform that still runs on an algorithm, and said the more useful question is whether the growth you’re chasing is actually what you need right now, rather than what you’re conditioned to want. I fully related to this given this exact thing happened to me last month and I wrote about how substack was starting to feel like work here.

• Embracing seasonality

Lucia spoke about wanting to bring more cyclical, “feminine” energy into how she works - not in a gendered sense, but as a counterweight to the linear, always-progressing model most people are trained into. In practice, that looks like leaning into copywriting for a stretch and coaching for another, or doing five hours instead of eight during a heatwave rather than forcing her usual output. She also flagged the trap of turning slow living into its own aspirational, optimised goal - swapping one form of pressure for another.

• Integration over strict balance

Lucia no longer holds a rigid nine-to-five boundary. Because much of her work - coaching, writing, deep creative thinking - doesn’t register as effortful in her nervous system, she’s moved toward a more integrated rhythm rather than a fixed one. Admin and outreach feel like work; presence with a client or writing in the garden on a weekday afternoon doesn’t. She distinguished this from a lack of boundaries - it’s a different way of deciding where the boundaries need to sit.

We would love to know your thoughts - what resonates with you? Leave a comment and subscribe for the next instalment in the series in on Friday 11th September.

Leave a comment

Thank you for being here and thank you for everyone who contributed to my survey data about life in the in-between. If today’s post resonated, I would be very grateful for a like, comment or restack!

If you’re in a season where your old life no longer fits but the new one hasn’t appeared yet, you’re not alone. That uncertain, liminal space is where much of my writing lives.

I write about identity shifts, endings, and the periods between life chapters - the seasons where we’re becoming someone new but don’t yet know who that is.

You can subscribe below if you’d like to receive free new essays every week on a Friday or upgrade to paid to go deeper - a private community, monthly live sessions, and the full research report built from all 130 of these responses.

Subscribe now

For more reading on a similar subject:

• Ambition at what cost? Rethinking success

• When the goal becomes gentle ambition

• When momentum disappears, what do you do?

• What if slow living isn’t the answer?

Thank you for tuning in!

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Our wedding is only a few weeks away, my family and relatives from Ireland are about to land in Sydney and we have less than three months before our baby boy is here. To say that I have a to-do list that’s never-ending and multiplying by the second feels like an understatement. We’re right in that sticky stage of wedding planning where every invoice is flooding in, every detail needing consideration and every email is urgent.

We’re having an 80 person wedding, bringing everything into a surf club on the beach in Byron Bay, a small coastal town in NSW Australia, and I will never again attend another wedding without understanding and appreciating the level of decision-making that goes into every single element of the day. We’re working closely with an amazing wedding planner, but there is no stone left unturned in how we want to put our stamp on it. My brain loves coordinating and planning this way - far more than say house renovations (which is actually something else we have on our plate thanks to a moisture issue in our bathroom, but that’s another story), but between almost-third-trimester energy, low iron, and generally feeling pretty tired in the cold Sydney winter, the overwhelm has felt very real at times.

It’s so easy to slip into “life is busy, I’m overwhelmed and stressed” mode and I’m working hard to spot the patterns that come up and actually enjoy the moment, a moment that is exactly what I’ve dreamed of, which is finally coming to be. It can be hard though when our nervous systems are feeling the pressure. I can tell that I’m slightly frazzled by how I’m in a total phone addiction phase - checking my emails every two minutes, refreshing them even when no time has passed, opening Trello, my organiser app, and generally just watching my brain behave like a manic mad woman’s. It’s all behaviour that I’m very familiar with after years of running a busy business, but they’re also habits that I had mostly squashed out after a year of slower, more intentional living. Needless to say, I’m back in my old ways, but trying to add a new lens given how much I’ve learnt this past year.

In case I’m not alone, I thought I’d share some of the things helping me get out of this mildly stressy state. For any of you going through stress or overwhelm too at the moment, here are list of the things that help me when I’m feeling pulled in a million different directions:

1. Meditation. My nervous system is one of the first things to go when I’m overwhelmed. I have a sensitive constitution and things pile up quickly for me. I’ve been trying my best to practice twice-daily TM meditation, and without fail, every time I come out of it I feel more grounded than when I went in. Note the word trying. Today I woke up at 5am, couldn’t sleep and when faced with the choice of meditation to soothe my system or bring my laptop into bed and plow through the seating plan, I chose the later. I will try again later today.

2. Journaling. There are a lot of prompts you could follow, but I usually start my brain-dump journaling with “how am I feeling today?” That question alone usually brings on a cascade of awareness and insight, and I feel so much clearer and lighter afterward. Journalling for me truly has been paramount to feeling like I’m shedding heaviness and working through things.

3. Focusing on my nutrition. Minimising sugar and eating a balanced diet always helps ground me into the earth and makes me feel more like myself. It’s not always possible in pregnancy between the tiredness and the busyness, but it’s worth prioritising because it does make a difference.

4. Sleep. It’s getting harder with my reliance on pregnancy pillows to prop me up, but for me, getting a good night’s sleep - early bed, minimal evening screen time - helps keep my nervous system calm and grounded. My ultimate treat (which I plan to do tonight) is to get into bed at about 7.30pm with a good book and spend a few hours reading before actually sleeping. Absolute indulgence.

5. Napping. On the note of sleep, if I haven’t had a good night’s sleep, or I’m feeling wrecked, having a nap during the day when I can makes a huge difference to feeling well rested. It’s not something I would have ever allowed myself to do in normal life, but in pregnancy the need has been greater and so I’m learning to give in to my body’s demands.

6. Reading. See also point 4. The number one thing that calms my nervous system is getting off my phone and being engrossed in a book. I am working my way through literary pregnancy and early motherhood memoirs - some of my recommendations below, but I’ve read many more since. I find it such a helpful way to understand others’ experience without the instructional nature of so many of these baby books.

7. Conversation. Talking through life stress and overwhelm - the feelings, the way we deal with it, what’s coming up and why - and hashing it out with close friends or Ant really helps me understand myself, my responses, and my reactions. I always find that I process things once I say them out loud and I find these conversations can help build resilience during crazy times.

8. Getting out in nature. A walk by the beach, sun on my face. My energy feels low and it can be hard to find the motivation sometimes, but this is something that inevitably always works for me and calms my body and brain immediately.

9. Playing classical music, softly. My nervous system is super sensitive, and anything loud or intense will always overstimulate me, particularly during times of stress. Putting on a calming classical Spotify playlist at a soft volume always makes me feel calm and makes my body sigh a big exhale.

10. A clean environment. This one’s extremely obvious, but when the house is clean, everything’s in its place and a candle is lit, I just feel calm and ordered. My brain might not be but at least my space is!

This list might not be rocket science but they’re what I’m pulling on right now that I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. No matter what stage you’re in in life, hopefully there’s a good reminder in here for you too. Thanks for reading.

What are your go-to rituals or practices for when you’re feeling overstimulated or overwhelmed?

Leave a comment

Have you tuned into my latest series What does your week actually look like? Released every two weeks with some of Substack’s best creators as guests, these conversations light my soul up. I leave each chat feeling so inspired by these amazing minds and am obsessed with the fact that I get to pull back the curtain on the weeks that can be possible when you leave traditional office work behind. If you haven’t yet watched or listened to episode 3 with the wonderful - you can do so below or on Spotify or Apple podcasts - ENJOY and let us know your thoughts!

I created this series because since I resigned from my own business a year ago and left corporate office work, I have spent my time rebuilding and redesigning what my weeks look like. I have been gifted a blank slate and total freedom to decide what goes into my weeks, but have also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a template for this type of solo working. I have had many trial and error moments and continue to uncover patterns and ways of thinking that creep back in from my corporate days. It’s a lesson in refining and tweaking but I recently had the realisation that I, surely, must not be alone. There must be others who have stepped off the traditional path and have also had to put work and energy into figuring out how to make their weeks work for them. So, I went looking for them!

And thus, this series is born!

Every two weeks, I will be speaking with some incredible Substack creators and hearing all about how their last week was - what worked, what didn’t, what are they taking into next week? I finally get to peek behind the curtain of how others are shaping their non corporate lives. So whether you’ve left traditional work, are thinking about how to shape life differently, or are already far along the path, this conversation and this series will have something for you in it!

Episode 3 with Iwana Johannsen

For episode 3, I sat down with the wonderful , a Substack writer and portfolio careerist writing about the future of work, the impact of AI on jobs and around themes of identity and purpose. I am a huge fan of Iwana’s writing and I absolutely adored this conversation. Joining me from Lisbon, I loved hearing how Iwana approached her week last week and am excited for you all to watch/ listen. Enjoy!

Afterwork

Afterwork helps you navigate the biggest shift of our time as AI disrupts work. From portfolio careers to deeper questions of identity, purpose, and life after jobs.

By Iwana Johannsen

Key themes from the conversation

• Flow within a plan, not a rigid schedule - Iwana plans her big topics for the week on Mondays, but stays flexible on when and how she actually executes. She’s committed on the decision layer, loose on the execution layer - which is such a useful distinction and really aligns with how I work myself, so I loved learning more about how she schedules and plans her week.

• Energy dictates the day, not the clock - Mornings are for deep work and anything Iwana needs to show up fully for (mentoring calls, complex writing). Afternoons are for lighter tasks - admin, reading, coffee catch ups. Evenings are off entirely, because if she works past 7pm her brain won’t switch off enough to sleep, again which I can fully relate to!

• Knowing what’s actually work vs what isn’t - Reading, researching, deep thinking, building something from scratch, aligned mentoring conversations - none of that registers as work to Iwana, even though it’s the core of what she does. Which is an admirable place to get to! What does drains her is the performance side: posting on schedule, replying to comments, marketing herself. The product she loves; the promotion of the product is where energy can get drained. Knowing this, having the self-awareness and then managing your week around this is crucial when you’re your own boss and Iwana talks through it so well.

• Do Not Disturb as a boundary - Iwana realised she was carrying her phone room to room out of habit, so she has set it to Do Not Disturb all day, with two or three set windows to check messages. It’s given her back the choice of when to engage, instead of being pulled out of focus every time something pings. It’s a simple one but I know myself, I can so easily fall into the dopamine trap of just checking my phone so frequently out of habit. It’s so useful to break this habit intentionally.

• No scheduling links - Iwana doesn’t facilitate potential clients to book directly into her calendar which is different to a lot of ‘productivity’ advice that you’ll read. It might be less efficient, but it means she decides what her week holds rather than handing that over to whoever wants a slot. A boundary that costs a bit of convenience to protect a lot of control. This is something that I used to battle with in my corporate days - my EA and I spent SO much time coordinating meetings, but I felt so strongly that I needed to approve where my energy was going before it took up a slot in my day.

• “Most days, not every day” - Borrowed from Brie Groff, this is the frame Ivana uses for everything from posting to writing to putting her phone down. She is committed to the habit but not punishing herself when she slips. It’s the difference between a sustainable practice and a rule she’ll eventually break and abandon altogether. Again, this really landed for me because I think we can put too much emphasis on consistency and every single day when really we just need to try our best and aim for most days.

• Self-employment as a mirror that keeps making you look again - Iwana’s big reflection in her last week was noticing she’d slipped back into old performance patterns after months of having them sorted. She shared that the patterns don’t fully disappear, you just get faster at spotting them. Running your own business means there’s no external structure hiding that from you - it just keeps surfacing and so there is so much opportunity for self reflection and growth when you are doing this week.

Thanks again to Iwana for joining me for this stimulating and fascinating discussion -we would love to know your thoughts and what resonated with you? Leave a comment and subscribe for the next instalment in the series in on August 28th.

Leave a comment

Thank you for being here and thank you for everyone who contributed to my survey data. If today’s post resonated, I would be very grateful for a like, comment or restack!

If you’re in a season where your old life no longer fits but the new one hasn’t appeared yet, you’re not alone. That uncertain, liminal space is where much of my writing lives.

I write about identity shifts, endings, and the periods between life chapters - the seasons where we’re becoming someone new but don’t yet know who that is.

You can subscribe below if you’d like to receive free new essays every week on a Friday or upgrade to paid to go deeper - a private community, monthly live sessions, and the full research report built from all 130 of these responses.

Subscribe now

For more reading on a similar subject:

It started as a two gals in their late twenties who went into partnership with four English blokes - who provided financial investment, moral support and recruitment industry expertise. The early years saw my co-founder decide to move on, with me taking on the sole Director/ CEO role. The following years the team and I rode the tide of start up success - appearing in fast-starter lists, 30 under 30 lists and disrupting an industry with tired practices and often poor standards. I led the business through rapid growth and then through the brutal COVID years - with reduced revenue, huge uncertainty and ridiculous responsibility for the people and the business itself. As we rebuilt post-COVID and entered a new era of success, I bought the business out entirely from our initial investors, marking the next iteration fully out on our own.

I can’t emphasise enough how high the highs were - friendships for life, personal growth beyond a level you could imagine and more laughs than is normal or reasonable in a workplace. The opportunities it provided me, the people I got to work with and the rooms I got to be in can never ever be replaced. But the more recent years were when it started to feel misaligned - when my own energy stopped matching the businesses, when the pace, speed and grind started to weigh heavily on me and on my body. Through much deliberation, fear and anxiety and through personal lows that brought me onto Substack with the compelling need to write in the first place, I decided to resign and move on - a process far more complicated and lengthy that a brief summarising sentence allows for.

Since coming off payroll last July, it’s been a year of settling into my life since no longer working as an employee in my own business. I’ve been dealing with unravelling identities, uncertainty, financial unknowns and much else, all of which I’ve written about at length on my Substack. Primarily the feeling initially was one of fleeing - fleeing the level of responsibility I had, fleeing the fact that my time never felt like my own, fleeing the extroversion required of me. I wanted to pull so far away from where I was, and have spent a year assimilating back into a version of myself that feels more true and real. There has been mild trauma around how BIG those years were and how weighty the responsibility was, as well as how large my need to be away from it all was.

But as I sit here at my laptop over a year later, living a slower life with a hell of a lot more space, I realise that I can finally start to tap into a feeling of pride and gratitude. I haven’t been able to access these feelings before now, but with the distance and the personal growth, I can now safely say how proud I am of what we built. My best friend and I had an idea to do the best possible work, to impress and delight everyone we worked with, to raise the bar in the industry and to create something that would outlast us.

And looking back, we did exactly that.

We created something that has lasted market dips and a pandemic, we created something that has started countless successful careers, we created something that has facilitated thousands and thousands of people getting jobs and we created something that is now being run by a different team of women, who have stepped into their power and are putting their own stamp on it.

It’s taken a while to settle somewhere more neutral, given my experience of burnout and the toll it started to take personally, but I can now see that what we created will leave a legacy, and on the 11th anniversary, I can be truly proud that we brought something so potent to life.

Reflecting on this makes me realise that sometimes, no matter what you’ve left and under what circumstances, you may just need to put enough distance between your experience and the weight of it all to start to see it for what it really is. It takes time to stop defining yourself by what you left behind but I think if you give it long enough, you might also start to feel gratitude and maybe even something closer to wonder at what you once made possible.

I’d love to know if this resonated and if you have felt the same in leaving something behind?

Leave a comment

Have you tuned into my latest series What does your week actually look like? Released every two weeks with some of Substack’s best creators as guests, these conversations light my soul up. I leave each chat feeling so inspired by these amazing minds and am obsessed with the fact that I get to pull back the curtain on the weeks that can be possible when you leave traditional office work behind. If you haven’t yet watched or listened to episode two with the hugely impressive - you can do so below - ENJOY and let us know your thoughts!

I am beyond excited to share this series with you all - I created this because since I resigned from my own business a year ago and left corporate office work, I have spent my time rebuilding and redesigning what my weeks look like. I have been gifted a blank slate and total freedom to decide what goes into my weeks, but have also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a template for this type of solo working. I have had many trial and error moments and continue to uncover patterns and ways of thinking that creep back in from my corporate days. It’s a lesson in refining and tweaking but I recently had the realisation that I, surely, must not be alone. There must be others who have stepped off the traditional path and have also had to put work and energy into figuring out how to make their weeks work for them. So, I went looking for them!

And thus, this series is born!

Every two weeks, I will be speaking with some incredible Substack creators and hearing all about how their last week was - what worked, what didn’t, what are they taking into next week? I finally get to peek behind the curtain of how others are shaping their non corporate lives. So whether you’ve left traditional work, are thinking about how to shape life differently, or are already far along the path, this conversation and this series will have something for you in it!

Episode 2 with Olivia Wickstrom, Substack bestseller

For episode 2, I sat down with the formidable , a Substack creator with over 25,000 subscribers. If you don’t know Olivia, she runs the thriving publication and community ‘Petal and Hearth’ which is all about creative living, entrepreneurship and her life in France. Olivia is living proof that you can design any life you want when you leave traditional work and could easily make me question if I am thinking big enough!

I am a huge fan of Olivia’s writing - I just loved this chat and loved getting some real insight into how Olivia’s weeks run and what she does to prioritise balance, spontaneity and fun alongside running a Substack publication full time! Enjoy the conversation and let us know your thoughts below.

Petal + Hearth

I share stories and strategies to help you design a life you love and a creative business that supports it. Bestselling Substack coach living in the south of France, here to help you romanticize the everyday and step into your 💫 main character energy 💫

By Olivia Wickstrom

Key themes from the conversation

• No universal template - Olivia spoke about how her week is usually quite structured by design, but she has built it that way through trial and error and by what suits her, not by copying anyone else’s routine.

• Energy budgeting looks different for everyone - for Olivia, the concept of energy budgeting means noticing what is filling versus draining her cup. As an introvert, she knows she has to be boundaried around face to face work and zoom meetings and she is focused on building a sustainable business that works with her energy in the long term.

• When work doesn’t feel like “work” - writing articles and notes on Substack don’t register as work for her at all (and this shows in the quality of what she puts out!) Knowing the difference between what drains versus nourishes is so important as well as leaning into the bits that light us up.

• Spontaneity is the antidote to over-planning - despite being type-A, the best moments Olivia kept returning to from her week were all unplanned: an impromptu afternoon by a river in France (dreamy), a last-minute dinner with her partner. She speaks about how her life is more joyful when she prioritises spontaneity and it was certainly a theme throughout our chat.

• Protecting fun has to be deliberate too - Olivia’s “perfect day” practice (where she treats herself to her ideal day!) fell away when she got busy, and she’s now putting it back on the calendar on purpose. I love this and will definitely be incorporating this into my weeks!

• All about balance - when there’s no boss overseeing your week and no fixed hours, it seems that the real work is learning to trust that rest, spontaneity, and unstructured time are all part of a well lived life - a powerful reminder that I am fully in support of!

We would love to know your thoughts - what resonated with you from this chat? Leave a comment and subscribe for the next instalment in the series in on August 14th.

Leave a comment

Thank you for being here! If today’s post resonated, I would be very grateful for a like, comment or restack!

If you’re in a season where your old life no longer fits but the new one hasn’t appeared yet, you’re not alone. That uncertain, liminal space is where much of my writing lives.

I write about identity shifts, endings, and the periods between life chapters - the seasons where we’re becoming someone new but don’t yet know who that is.

You can subscribe below if you’d like to receive free new essays every week on a Friday or upgrade to paid to go deeper - a private community, monthly live sessions, and the full research report built from all 130 survey responses.

Subscribe now

For more reading on the topic of home and travel:

Work in the old sense.

Work that was focused around what I should be doing and how I should be showing up and work that was focused more on the end result, rather than the enjoyable creative process that it has been for so long.

I noticed that I was becoming a bit more performative; focusing on which subject lines seemed to gain the most traction, which notes got the highest engagement and converted the most subscribers, and how I could optimise my content and notes scheduling calendar. All of this is fine and completely normal and necessary if you are in growth mode and ready to build. But what I realised this week is that I'm not there yet and I’m not ready for that phase, and it felt like I was trying to force it, despite not being ready. And trying to operate from that place when I'm not ready for it doesn't serve anyone - least of all me.

For me, Substack has always been a place where I have shown up and written from the heart. I have written through very personal experiences, being vulnerable and open about what I'm going through, writing about whatever feels most alive for me in any given week. From that place of vulnerability and openness, I have connected with so many wonderful souls and like minded people. My words have resonated far beyond what I could have ever imagined - recent posts have been read by thousands of people and my audience continues to grow as I receive supportive and kind messages from all over the world. All of this has come from a place of authentic connection and I want to work hard to make sure that what I’m doing here continues to feel fully aligned.

I left my business last year because it no longer felt aligned. Although I will want to build something meaningful again in future, I also want to make sure that I don’t bring in similar patterns and energy from that phase of my life. I noticed during the last few weeks that I have been putting unnecessary pressure on myself. Being more focused on growth has seen me revert back to old metrics of success and high performance but I know that when I write from the heart, it allows me to connect with people who I admire and respect and the work feels alive and inspiring to me, and my creativity flows.

Once again, I am reminded about the importance of seasons and timings. Forcing something sooner than it is ready will not create the ideal circumstances for something to grow. Right now is not the time for me to focus on building something. The next few months see me planning a wedding, getting married with 80 of our loved ones, welcoming relatives to Australia, planning for a baby and getting our house in order and ready for said baby! To layer unnecessary achievement and pressure on top of all of that feels not just unwise, but unkind to myself.

Life is full of life things that I want to be really present for, and at the same time, I want to be fully intentional and open hearted in what I create and write here on Substack.

I know that when I truly connect with what I'm writing, it has the biggest impact. So I'll be shifting my strategy. Not in any outwardly obvious way, but before I think about what title might perform best or what subject my audience most wants to hear about, I'll be tuning into myself, my body, my heart and asking myself - what feels most true to me right now.

What I end up writing might not always be perfectly on-theme or optimised for growth, but I know from experience that when I write from full alignment, that’s when the magic happens so that’s the metric I’ll be using from now on.

Have you noticed this yourself? The moment old patterns start to creep in and something you love starts to feel like work?

Leave a comment

More reading about rethinking purpose and ambition:

I am so proud of my newest series - What does your week actually look like? Released every two weeks with some of Substack’s best creators as guests, these conversations light my soul up. I leave each chat feeling so inspired by these amazing minds and am obsessed with the fact that I get to pull back the curtain on the weeks that can be possible when you leave traditional office work behind. If you haven’t yet watched or listened to episode one with the formidable , you can do so below - ENJOY and let me know what your biggest takeaway was - there are many to choose from!

I am beyond excited to share this with you all - I created this series because since I resigned from my own business a year ago and left corporate office work, I have spent my time rebuilding and redesigning what my weeks look like. I have been gifted a blank slate and total freedom to decide what goes into my weeks, but have also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a template for this type of solo working. I have had many trial and error moments and continue to uncover patterns and ways of thinking that creep back in from my corporate days. It’s a lesson in refining and tweaking but I recently had the realisation that I, surely, must not be alone. There must be others who have stepped off the traditional path and have also had to put work and energy into figuring out how to make their weeks work for them. So, I went looking for them!

And thus, this series is born!

Every two weeks, I will be speaking with some incredible Substack creators and hearing all about how their last week was - what worked, what didn’t, what are they taking into next week? I finally get to peek behind the curtain of how others are shaping their non corporate lives. So whether you’ve left traditional work, are thinking about how to shape life differently, or are already far along the path, this conversation and this series will have something for you in it!

Episode 1 with Megan Schnarr, Life Design Coach

For episode 1, I sat down with the wonderful , a Substack writer, a life design coach (very apt!) and someone navigating new parenthood (to twins!) as well as her own business. I adored this conversation, loved hearing how Megan approached her week last week and am excited for you all to watch/ listen. Enjoy!

Megan Schnarr

I write for women in the in-between to get clear on what they want, understand what’s holding them back and start building a life that feels aligned. I’m a Life Design Coach sharing frameworks, personal stories, and honest reflections.

Key themes from the conversation

This conversation with Megan explored what it really means to design a life outside traditional work, and how creating your own schedule requires far more self-awareness than simply replacing a 9-to-5.

At its heart was the idea that there is no single “right” way to work. Megan spoke about how she thrives on detailed structure - she sets themed days and loves time blocking, while I work best by following my energy and allowing space for choice in any given work day. It highlighted the importance of following your own style over copying someone else’s routine, something that has taken us both a while to learn and discover.

Similarly, we also discussed the importance of working with your natural energy rather than against it, recognising that productivity looks different for different people and that sustainable success often comes from honouring those differences rather than fighting them.

Another major theme in our chat was the hidden realities of entrepreneurship. Building a business isn’t just doing the work you love; it’s about balancing creative, meaningful work with administration, operations and countless other responsibilities that are perhaps less visible. Megan spoke about how one of her articles last week had built some great traction when she had a “mini-viral” moment, resulting in a huge influx of new coaching discovery calls. It was a reminder for her that even exciting growth brings new challenges, highlighting the need for systems and boundaries that protect your energy.

Throughout the conversation, boundaries emerged as an essential leadership skill. Without a manager telling you when the workday ends, it can be hard to fully switch off. Megan spoke about how she has put a hard finish time in place so she can fully switch off and then context switch into her other roles at home. We both agreed that to let go of the belief that every available hour should be productive is often one of the hardest - and most valuable - parts of designing a fulfilling working life.

Ultimately, the conversation with Megan suggested that freedom isn’t found in having an empty calendar or perfect productivity system. It’s found in intentionally building a week that reflects your energy, values and priorities, rather than someone else’s expectations. I adored our conversation - Megan is super impressive, highly organised and really open about what the peek behind the curtain looks like for her.

We would love to know your thoughts - what resonates with you? Leave a comment and subscribe for the next installment in the series in on July 31st!

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Thank you for being here and thank you for everyone who contributed to my survey data. If today’s post resonated, I would be very grateful for a like, comment or restack!

If you’re in a season where your old life no longer fits but the new one hasn’t appeared yet, you’re not alone. That uncertain, liminal space is where much of my writing lives.

I write about identity shifts, endings, and the periods between life chapters - the seasons where we’re becoming someone new but don’t yet know who that is.

You can subscribe below if you’d like to receive free new essays every week on a Friday or upgrade to paid to go deeper - a private community, monthly live sessions, and the full research report built from all 130 of these responses.

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For more reading on a similar subject:

When you have fallen off any traditional path, in whatever form that takes, it really does bring up a lot of feelings. No matter what your particular situation is, there are consistent themes that tend to show up for most of us.

When I reflect on the data, the common experiences are described as follows:

An emotional rollercoaster

Respondents frequently describe the transition period as an unstable, exhausting rollercoaster of highs and lows. If I could analyse my own writing over the last 18 months, I would say the word rollercoaster appears an unreasonable amount of times. It just really did feel like the appropriate word to sum up that feeling of surrendering to waves - peaks and troughs - that were outside of my control. The data shows that living in the in-between often encompasses contradictory feelings, simultaneously presenting as exciting, freeing, and expansive yet also terrifying, scary, and filled with uncertainty. All words that I would absolutely use to describe my own life over the last while.

Disorientation and loss of identity:

Many individuals in my research shared that they often feel unmoored, untethered, and lost. For those leaving long careers or corporate roles, there is a prominent sense of grieving their old identity and feeling a lack of confidence outside of a traditional structure. This is also completely non linear - in my experience, I have been so sure in my choice to leave my career and yet, there have been unexpected moments that have made me feel the identity loss and uncertainty so acutely that it’s felt deeply disorienting.

Isolation and freedom:

Respondents also noted a deep sense of loneliness and isolation, feeling as though others do not understand their situation. This is such a huge element and it came up again and again. In my experience, some people can’t fully understand why you’re walking away from a stable career, as an example. However, in the data, this feeling of isolation is often paired with a genuine appreciation for newfound freedom, peace, and control over their time. Again, it’s non linear and not necessarily predictable either - it just shows the vast range of emotions we can all go through when we’re in this phase of life.

What we’re not saying about life transitions

So given how consistent these feelings are, I also wanted to understand why the conversation around transition so rarely reflects any of it.

When I asked 130 people what was missing from the conversation about life transitions, the general sentiment was that what they were seeing online and reading about wasn’t necessarily reflecting their own lived experiences.

One respondent shared:

“No-one gets into the weeds. They describe the before, the sudden change, and then the moment of clarity. It’s a storytelling format, it’s not real life. They don’t detail the dark gloopy mess of waiting and hunkering and crying and masking that you’re stuck in until something shifts.”

I think that sometimes the way we collectively tell the story of transition as a neat start, middle and end just isn’t accurate - not when the people living through it know that it’s far messier, longer, and far less resolved than that.

Several people touched on this but in different words:

“We speak about transition as if it should be productive and transformational, but often it is lonely and repetitive. Sometimes it looks less like growth and more like standing in the kitchen unable to decide what to do next because your inner world has shifted before your outer life has caught up.”

“Transitions are treated like bridges to cross quickly rather than places to sit in and work through.”

“Language for becoming is missing. Not self-improvement language. Honest ‘this is where I am at’ language.”

It’s true - we have so much language for improving, optimising, growing, fixing but we have almost none for the in-between state itself - for being partway through becoming someone new without knowing yet who that is. It’s just a harder place to sit and a harder place for others to understand.

It seems to me, in reading through all of this data, that what people are looking for is the opportunity to feel seen and to be recognised in their messy states. We know that transitions take a lot longer in reality versus our initial expectations, and so being seen when you’re going through it seems to help considerably.

One person put it as simply as:

“I wish more content existed that felt more like a hug and less like a lecture.”

And another said what would help is:

“More people writing from the middle or candidly about the journey.”

I’ve been writing from the messy middle for just over eighteen months. The thing I mostly hear from people, is just how helpful it is to read about people going through a similar journey. And I know I have felt so supported by stories and articles written by others as they name things I haven’t yet understood for myself. I think that’s what the data is telling us - how important it is to actually connect, whether it’s through words or in person or online, I think focusing on making these tricky life transitions less lonely is where the real work is.

What's been missing for you in the conversation around transition? I'd love to hear in the comments

Leave a comment

Thank you for being here and thank you for everyone who contributed to my survey data. If today’s post resonated, I would be very grateful for a like, comment or restack!

If you’re in a season where your old life no longer fits but the new one hasn’t appeared yet, you’re not alone. That uncertain, liminal space is where much of my writing lives.

I write about identity shifts, endings, and the periods between life chapters - the seasons where we’re becoming someone new but don’t yet know who that is.

You can subscribe below if you’d like to receive free new essays every week on a Friday or upgrade to paid to go deeper - a private community, monthly live sessions, and the full research report built from all 130 of these responses.

Subscribe now

But the uncertainty and lacks of guarantees have been doing funny things to my brain. When thinking about my financial and working future, I oscillate between overwhelm and panic, and acting like someone has a gun to my head to start a business in the next two weeks.

This past Wednesday, these feelings compounded and, after a quick cry to Ant who reassured me that we had a plan and not to put pressure on myself, I decided to actually try to dig into what was coming up for me and why I was so worried all of a sudden about our financial future, when really, nothing had changed.

Inevitably, so much of our reality comes down to the stories we tell ourselves and I couldn’t quite pick out fact from fiction but I knew I needed to figure out where the gap was between money facts and money feelings.

I’m aware of the language surrounding money beliefs - scarcity mindset, abundance thinking, limiting beliefs. But knowing the vocabulary isn’t the same as doing the excavation. And until I actually spent some time putting pen to paper (digitally speaking), the old stories will just keep running underneath everything.

What I did next helped immeasurably - I didn’t follow any specific guidance, I just decided that I wanted to get these whirring thoughts out of my brain.

So I opened a blank google doc and wrote down four categories and just started typing. This is what I wrote:

1. My money beliefs - inherited

2. My money beliefs - now

3. My money reality - today

4. A summary of what all of this means

I wrote and wrote and whenever I thought I was finished, I paused and waited for more to come, then kept going. I wrote about my fears around money scarcity, how I always believed that there wasn’t enough money, about how earning well for a decade had masked those fears, how my identity, self worth and security was being impacted now that I am in a different earning position.

When I finally stopped typing, about an hour later, I could feel the relief in my body. The exercise was hugely cathartic - I brain dumped and externalised thoughts that I didn’t even know were swirling. It created instant clarity and once I’d spent about an hour on the exercise, I could see exactly why I was grappling at some semblance of control, despite having a solid plan in place.

Instead of just worrying about earnings, I was also tying in my self-worth and my identity as someone who has always earned good money. I was trying to control my current situation by projecting out into the next five years, in a window of time where I have very little capacity and space for new business building.

No wonder I was anxious.

I felt better once I had completed this exercise but I knew that so much of this anxiety was living in my body - I felt drained and heavy from it. And so I sensed that in order to properly embody and clear the tension surrounding this, I had to get outside and move my body. I decided to jump in the car and take myself to the coast - the place where my soul always resets - and did a long, blustery coastal walk and dipped myself in the bracing cold ocean.

It was exactly what I needed to clear these blocks - by no means are they fully gone and I’m sure I will be triggered again, but doing this exercise - both the mental and physical side - cleared the overwhelm, the weight and the stress that I had been feeling.

My unique situation is such that I will have to continue to learn to live with the uncertainty about my financial and working future, and I feel very grateful that I am finally entering our new chapter of parenthood, but do I have to keep reminding myself that right now is not the time to reinvent myself and start a brand new business.

I was reading a book called Design Your Life by Erifili Gounari the next day and this quote by Anne-Laure Le Cunff jumped out at me. I read it out loud to Ant as it was exactly the messaging that I needed to hear in that moment.

I personally think that nowadays, it’s impossible to really know where your career is going. So instead of trying to cling on to this ideal version of what your career will look like in the future, I think it’s really important to optimize for your wellbeing today. And this is actually a really good compass: if you’re feeling alive, excited, you’re working with the type of people who inspire you, where you lose yourself in conversations and you leave with more energy than you had when you started talking to them… Even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, you can trust that you’re in a path of personal development that is going to lead to somewhere interesting. Even if you don’t know what it looks like!

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments

It was exactly what I needed to read.

My bigger picture plan is that my next chapter is motherhood. I am about to head into a couple of months of hosting visiting relatives, planning and having our wedding, then welcoming our much wanted baby boy. It’s a season of retreat, in a way it’s another season of wintering - albeit with a different flavour. So, yet again - I will just need to continue to learn to adjust and to surrender, relinquishing the desire to control.

If you find yourself in a similar situation and are feeling stressed or overwhelmed about money or the future, you’re not alone. According to my survey respondents, 62% of respondents named financial instability as one of their biggest challenges in the in-between, second only to uncertainty about the future at 67% . If that is you too, I couldn’t recommend this exercise more. It’s quick and simple but super effective.

Just write it all down.

Write down the stories, the beliefs, the blocks. Brain dump it all onto a google doc and watch as the shift happens, as it literally leaves your body.

Leave a comment if any of this resonates, I’d love to know.

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I recently opened up paid subscriptions here - a space where we go deeper into all of this. Paid subscribers get the full research report from my recent survey of 130 people, access to a private chat, and an invite to upcoming live zooms where we talk through the messy bits together. If that sounds like the kind of room you want to be in, I’d love to have you.

Subscribe now

It’s a basic premise, but something about peeking behind the curtain into the mundane nature of people’s days is deeply thrilling to me. And I’m not the only one who thinks so, it’s really taken off.

I even discovered a subscriber of mine, , a New York based Irish writer, loves the show and has been inspired to share her own time-stamped days on her Substack, Notes from New York. She's hilarious, well worth a read.

Notes from New York

Entertaining updates from life in New York

By Aisling Marron

So much of what I write about, for myself and for public consumption, is about figuring out life as I go. I've been living in a state of flux - in my career, my identity, and how I design my days. I write through the chaos, the feelings, the learnings, and I keep experimenting and growing. I don't always get it right, but I'm documenting it all, and I know that although there will always be some uncertainty in this life, things will stabilise too.

So, inspired by both the podcast and by Aisling's detailed days, I'm going to start sharing even more insight into my life - the struggles and the small revelations of the in-between. For a glimpse into my day, what I did, thought, and felt yesterday, keep reading below.

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Sunday 28th June 2026

6:00am

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Trigger warning* I write this post from the perspective of pregnant person about my recent experiences of pregnancy - I am well aware that some of my readers may be navigating pregnancy loss or trying to conceive and so please feel free to return to this in the future instead. Sending so much love to anyone in this position, always.

It’s been an almost two year wait before I officially “entered the club”. Now that I’m finally pregnant and in the room, I’m watching, absorbing and taking it all in and I have so many thoughts to synthesise and so much meaning to take from the experience so far. My primary sense is that pregnancy is the ultimate state of living “in-between”. You live in a place of waiting, watching the weeks tick by, seeing your stomach expand as your growing baby works his way through a list of fruit and vegetables (mango this week, if anyone was wondering), monitoring your bizarre list of symptoms and waiting for the eventual moment which everyone tells you your world is about to be blown apart.

The early days, first trimester

I have been documenting my experiences week by week, a reference point I can refer back to for when I’ve moved from one phase to the next. Each stage feels never ending at the time, but it is fascinating how it can be so quickly forgotten. I see now why it is hard to find stories about the first trimester. It is so all consuming for so many women, and yet, we emerge from it with higher energy and it gets relegated to a sickness of the past, a distant memory. But when I was in that phase, I felt as if I had had a total personality overhaul - I felt so deeply unwell, had so little energy that I was often sofa bound, was so turned off food (one of the true loves of my life) and genuinely survived off frozen electrolytes and bread and cheese. This is an actual shopping list from that time, ridiculous.

Writing this newsletter - a creative task I enjoy immensely - was akin to climbing Everest every week and, usually active, I retreated indoors to a horizontal position. I also battled with myself about how other people felt like this AND had to go to work, and while I was incredibly grateful to have the space to just move through it, I wondered if a distraction like work would have helped during this time. (I don’t believe that now, the time and space to rest and be flexible with work throughout this time has been the ultimate gift).

I found it hard, during this time, to speak kindly to myself. It felt like I was choosing laziness and was being proactively unproductive, but my god - looking back, I feel nothing but self-compassion for that exhausted, sick gal who was forming the foundations of a new human!

Along with all of this, I also needed to manage my anxiety associated with our previous losses. The first scan, I remember vividly sitting in the waiting room next to Ant, just staring at the perfectly plumped cushions willing our doctor to hurry up, with the most visceral physical anxiety symptoms - my heart beating loudly in my chest, my mouth dry, my hands clammy. Those early milestones were so scary, but I genuinely feel like the sickness took so much of me that it meant that there was little room for worry too. In week 10 when the nausea started to fade, I felt more panicked than I had done the entire time, wondering if the fading sickness meant that it was no longer happening. Thankfully, we had reassurance scans and I did a number of meditations that allowed me to lean into the overarching trust that this was happening.

The emerging, the second trimester

Coming out of the first trimester was a gradual graduation from various different ailments. Week to week, I said goodbye to the nausea, welcomed back my love of food and cooking, started to regain my energy (week 18 was it for me - delicious energy levels), started to incorporate my old exercise routines. As I feel more myself, I feel inspired, creative and have mental and cognitive capacity to write and to use my brain, which has been lovely. Despite feeling happy and well at this stage, I have been blown away from my extensive list of bizarre pregnancy symptoms that I had never even considered.

From heightened allergies (pregnancy rhinitis - who knew?) to increased thirst to headaches to inflamed sinuses to bone deep fatigue to swollen gums to nose bleeds - it blew my mind how some random new experience would pop up week to week, and is still going - who knows what’s coming for me next! Contributing to my overall experience was also the cocktail of supportive medication that I was on. Despite this being a natural conception, my doctor wanted to progress with the IVF immune protocol that we would have used next. So those first 16 weeks were peppered with progesterone (energy draining), steroids (insomnia and jitters) and blood thinning injections every single day. It was a wild ride, but again - a distant memory as soon as you’re past that stage.

Pregnancy literature

After two years of trying to conceive, one of the most joyous parts for me about pregnancy has been the ability to finally revisit tabs in google chrome that I have been collecting and saving for years. These tabs have included everything from pregnancy books, information, products, long-reads - things I wouldn’t have been able for, or wanted to look at when I was in that last chapter, but that I’m now excitedly consuming. I spent a wonderful evening, late into the first trimester, going through all of the tabs, reading, ordering books and feeling elated that I was finally able to move into this next stage.

I have always relied on the stories of others to get me through life stages and I have found deep joy in reading memoirs and books by extraordinary women about their pregnancy and new motherhood experience. The concept of matrescence - the becoming of a mother - keeps coming up and I find the knowledge of how much is going to change in my brain and body completely reassuring.

The next stage

As I am learning, motherhood and pregnancy is littered with judgements and varying opinions - whether it’s how to give birth or feed your baby or how to approach sleep, it seems as if it’s an absolute minefield of conflicting information and preferences and I personally find reading completely neutral stories like the ones above crucial in understanding others’ perspectives and approaches. We are currently at the stage where well-meaning friends are offering lists of items and products that we must buy and thinking about cramming more stuff into our already small home feels entirely overwhelming. As I did in the first trimester, I think the best way to navigate this is to just trust my own instincts - block out as much noise as possible and go with my gut on what feels like the right approach for us. If I try to over-engineer or perfect the birth, the feeding, the sleep situation with all of the techiest gear, I feel like that is a sure-fire way for me, personally, to end in overwhelm and burnout, before it’s even begun.

It’s the strangest thing, this waiting bit - I am certain that no amount of literature is going to prepare me for what comes next. I know that there will be the highest highs and the lowest, sleep deprived lows, but I also know that if the last two years have taught me anything, it’s that I have a deep reserve of strength to pull from. Ant and I are such a strong team and we have weaved our way through some of the trickiest things life can throw at you. We have known deep grief and heartache, and we are entering this next phase with a solid foundation and a huge appreciation for how lucky we are to be here. I have also spent these recent times unravelling different layers of identity - figuring out who I am without my old career, who I am in uncertainty and I know that, as this next significant identity shift occurs, this will stand to me.

We are often confused and frustrated when living in the in-between, in life transitions with no clear path, but we forget about the skills that we gain - we are becoming so deeply resilient and self-aware, with the ability to be flexible and change course when needed.

Skills that I don’t doubt will stand to me in new motherhood.

Now I’m half way through at twenty weeks, with lots more information to take in, symptoms to discover and lessons to be learnt, but it has been a joyously grounding, brilliant experience so far - nausea and all. After the journey it took to get here, I still am in disbelief at times. I pass a mirror and go - oh yea, wow - I’m pregnant! But grateful beyond words too. No matter whether you’re in or have been in this phase of life, it’s been a helpful reminder to me that the skills gained in the messy middle start to become really useful as we move through to the next phase of life.

Does any of this resonate with you and your own experiences? I’d love to hear. Also, book recs - hit me up!!

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I recently opened up paid subscriptions here - a space where we go deeper into all of this. Paid subscribers get the full research report from my recent survey of 130 people, access to a private chat, and an invite to upcoming live zooms where we talk through the messy bits together. If that sounds like the kind of room you want to be in, I'd love to have you.

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We seem to have access to so much language now for identity loss, for grief, for the disorientation of becoming someone new. Based on what I’m reading, and writing about on Substack, we’re getting better, slowly, at naming the emotional experience of transition. But money is still the thing that a lot of people want to know more about from others. It’s usually the biggest consideration when we’re facing any big life change - financially, how can we make this work?

One of my survey respondents wrote: “There are days when I feel devastated that I have not created a new income for myself in the 2 years since I left. I thought it would take 6 months max.”

This misalignment of expectation versus reality is exactly what I wrote about last week - the idea that we completely underestimate how long a transition will take. The timing is one thing, but when we start to think about the shame often associated with earnings, or lack thereof, it makes sense that this misalignment can feel devastating.

Last week I officially launched paid subscriptions here for the first time and it has brought up lots of thoughts and rumination about my earnings and worth and how closely they are linked. I had poured weeks into doing my recent research, building a value-add report and planning my launch, and I was so excited to shift into the next phase of Substack growth. I pressed send, managed the couple of inevitable technical glitches and waited to transition into a paid Substack writer. But as I watched the numbers for the following days I realised that, like anything, paid subscriber growth wasn’t going to come quickly, or easily! Of course it wasn’t - despite what many Substack newsletters tell you, overnight success anywhere contains a whole of graft and grit in the background. My ego took a bit of a hit - that particular flavour of hit where you start spiralling into the bigger story: “of course you can’t make money from this, building your $12m business was a fluke, you’re never going to earn again”. A wave of brutal self-talk that we could only get away with with ourselves because if anyone else spoke to us like that, they’d be asked to leave immediately!

But what I’m sitting with this week is the question underneath the initial ego-bruise. It’s not “why didn’t this work instantly” but “what am I actually building, what do I actually want to create and on what timeline” and also “what is the connection for me around earnings and my identity?”

I have over 800 free subscribers now, which still feels enormous. I’m being reminded that everything in this phase of my life is an experiment and at every obstacle, I have the flexibility to adjust course. It’s exciting and nimble and I’m grateful that I get to play around doing things I really love - writing and building community and testing! And I’m having to relearn, again, that the version of success I’m used to - fast, visible, validating, financially lucrative - isn’t the one that I’m chasing right now.

Fundamentally, I’m excited to be writing on here, am grateful to everyone who reads my newsletter and am passionate about continuing to add value where I can. But this is what I think is really happening underneath all of this financial fear, mine included, and it isn’t really about the money.

It’s about identity.

So many of us tie our worth - perhaps almost without noticing - to our ability to earn and to be financially successful. When the income changes, or doesn’t show up the way you expected, it isn’t just the bank balance that takes the hit, it’s the story you’ve told yourself about who you are. For me, the long game is to build a portfolio career of varied income streams encompassing my writing, my business strategy skills, my love of building community. I have the luxury of not being in a rush and being able to focus on parental leave next year, with all of the particulars of my future career completely unknown right now. But this is why it is so important for me to unlink my worth to any particular idea of how this journey will go. All I can do is continue to follow my interests and remind myself consistently that I am in my experimental era.

One respondent in the survey shared “I’ve just hit burnout so hard. Mentally I am relieved that chapter is over - but worried about money and anxious about healing and trying to build something at the same time.”

This is very relatable and I don’t really have a solid response, because I’m still working my own way through it. I am still coming to terms with the fact that my earning capacity right now is very different to how it used to be, and how little certainty I have around when or how that will change. But I do think understanding the link between financial fear and identity is extremely necessary. Separating the practical problem - what does the budget actually look like - from the identity problem - who am I if I’m not earning what I used to, at the speed that I’m used to. Those are two different conversations and we so often collapse them into one, which makes everything feel heavier than it needs to.

If financial fear is part of your in-between right now, you are not bad with money and you are not behind, you’re just living a less visible, but very common part of of transition.

Where does money show up in your own transition right now? I’d love to hear in the comments.

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If you would like to join the community and read the data collected from 130 amazing respondents, you can upgrade now!

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It was that 83% of people navigating a major life transition have been in it for six months or more.

Reading through the responses, messages and comments, it was clear how much comfort people took from that number - many felt the relief in realising that others are having such similar experiences. The data showed that we are not alone in this, and sometimes that’s the most reassuring thing that we can hear. And yet, so many of us still struggle with how long we are spending between chapters, without clear, visible progress.

It seems as if we fall victim to arbitrary timelines of our own making. We sense social pressure, we fear conversations with others asking about our progress, we question why things aren’t happening faster and if we’re falling behind. And, I speak from experience here, those thoughts can compound, making the inner critic even louder as time goes by. When I was officially one year out of full time work, I felt it viscerally in my body - it was like I checked the calendar and the date and my brain went - Well, it’s been a year and what have you got to show for yourself, what have you achieved in the last year?

According to author Bruce Feiler in his book Life Is in the Transitions - (a worthwhile read), major life disruptions - which he calls “lifequakes” (divorce, relocation, career change, redundancy etc) - lead to transitions that last an average of five years. Because people experience three to five of these lifequakes in their lifetime, individuals will typically spend about 25 years, or half their adult life, in a transitional state, according to Feiler. Five years per transition. Twenty five years in total. This is such a long time, and yet we put so much pressure on ourselves to come out the other side of any upheaval quickly.

One of my subscribers, Heather Harris, put me onto the concept of the neutral zone, which is a similar concept to the “messy middle” and absolutely applies during these times:

According to William Bridge’s transitional model, the Neutral Zone is the disorienting, in-between period when the old reality or identity is gone, but the new one isn’t fully operational. It is the core psychological phase of transition where people experience ambiguity, fluctuating morale, and the heavy internal work of recalibration.

While often feeling like a chaotic or frustrating “no-man’s land,” the neutral zone is critical because it is a seedbed for creativity, innovation, and genuine transformation. Because old constraints and habits are loosened, individuals are uniquely positioned to experiment with new ways of working and thinking.

If I think about most of my suffering in relation to establishing a new career and trying to start a family, most of it will revert back to timelines - why hasn’t it happened yet, why haven’t I figured it out yet, why is it taking this long? The uncertainty of the timelines, the lack of access to a crystal ball, activates our fear centre and has us grappling for some control. We can feel like we’re free-falling which can be terrifying but perhaps if I had just settled into the idea that this all may take a whole lot longer than I want it to, perhaps it would make the journey a little easier. The issue is that, despite this knowing, we expect these seismic shifts to be neatly wrapped up within a short time period.

No matter what the life transition is that we’re experiencing - and my survey respondents were experiencing many different changes, often a few at once - it is very easy to feel like you are failing and it’s very easy to feel like you want to push harder to make things happen faster. But often, surrendering and trusting that things are unfolding as they are meant to, is the release and softening that allows the next chapter to unfold. If we continue to grip tightly and lead from a place of fear, it is as if we are resisting the process but the transition itself may be quicker, and easier, if we surrender to the elongated timeline.

With our own journey to fall pregnant, I had to work so hard to soften against a timeline that I absolutely did not want. It was hard, and we had to wait almost two years in the unknown, but I also know that I made the experience easier on myself by trying to control what I could (looking after myself) and releasing what I couldn’t (basically everything else).

In relation to my other huge life transition - dismantling my career with no idea what comes next, that is something that I never could have predicted how long it would have taken. I could make plans but the element that I couldn’t control was my own capacity - my energy, my mental load, my emotional state. I have spent a year adjusting to a very different life, and now I am pregnant, and then I will be a mother. I can plan to build the 2.0 version of my career all I like, but realistically, this season of life is going to offer a very different level of capacity (and awareness) than when I was building my business in my late twenties. And that’s okay - this extended period of transition is offering me so much more than the clarity or certainty of a new career. It’s giving me space to learn about myself, space to experiment with how I design my week and life. It’s giving me a longer stretch of living between chapters.

Whatever transition you are navigating right now - and perhaps you’re navigating more than one - I want you to know that the length of it is not a measure of how well you’re doing. The messy middle is supposed to last, it’s supposed to garner lessons and it’s supposed to challenge us. The disorientation isn’t a sign that you’re doing it wrong. It’s just what being between versions of yourself actually feels like.

You’re not behind. You’re right in it. And that’s exactly where you need to be.

I would love to know what resonated for you here - what is your relationship with timelines during transitions?

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One thing that stayed with me from the survey data was how clearly people named community as what they need most - just a space to be with others who are going through the same thing. Over half said that would help them most.

I have spent my career building and nurturing community, it is where I am happiest and where I want to continue to put my energy. So this week I’m launching a paid tier to Life Between Chapters. I will continue to share my weekly essays but for those who want to go deeper - I’m creating a private community space with monthly live zoom sessions where we talk through the messiness of transition together, a private paid chat, a new monthly guest series, and my weekly recommendations of all things books, podcasts and long reads. And as soon as you subscribe, you’ll receive the full research report built from all 130 responses - the one referenced throughout this piece.

I’ve been writing here every week for eighteen months. This community has meant more to me than I can properly articulate. The paid tier is how I invest more time and care into it.

As promised, here is the full research report, built from 130 real stories of people living in the in-between. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Read more

Firstly, anyone going through any sort of fertility struggles, my heart goes out to you. From my extensive reading and research and myriad of conversations on this topic, I am so aware of how differently everyone deals with it - some choosing to power through and keep busy and others (it’s me) detonating their lives to create space to heal and process and grieve. Whatever camp you sit in, if you have found yourself experiencing infertility, pregnancy loss or fertility struggles, it is a particular kind of pain, heartache and life disruption that can be very hard to articulate and understand, unless you’ve been through it. I wrote the post below in the hopes that my words may find someone who needs to see it.

With my own experiences, I last wrote about how our IVF transfers at the end of last year failed. While the last couple of years have been the definition of a rollercoaster, these couple of months were the epitome of the highest highs and lowest lows. Having successfully created (how to decide on the terminology here!) three embryos the previous August, we were ready for a November transfer with the immune protocol recommended by our specialist. Given that we had three frozen embryos, we were convinced that we would fall pregnant from that round - the odds were in our favour and we had new information and medication that we were certain would allow it to finally happen.

But we were then hit with a few setbacks - our specialist decided to move clinics and his departure coincided exactly with our transfer, we found out on transfer day that one of our embryos didn’t survive the thaw and so, heading into our first transfer, the odds were looking less favourable.

When people ask, I tell them that both transfers, in November and December, failed. Which is true - but what is more true is that they worked for a little while. For both transfers, I felt some very early pregnancy symptoms and had multiple days in a row of positive early tests. Both transfers resulted in a call from our nurses to say that HCG (the pregnancy hormone) was present and wishing us congratulations, allowing us to hope that, despite everything we’d been through, it was finally happening. This was quickly followed by a call to say that sadly my HCG dropped quickly, the nurses sending their apologies. The second time, we got a few days further along. It was Christmas and my mum was visiting from Ireland to be there with us and we got the good news call while having a waterside picnic in the sunshine. We all celebrated and were so ecstatic that, with our last embryo, it was finally happening. A couple of days later, having had bloods drawn that morning, we were packed into the car on a day trip with my in-laws and mum, jubilant from the recent good news. We had the phone on loudspeaker in the car expecting more good news before the nurse started apologising, the hormone had dropped again and the pregnancy wasn’t progressing. It was heartbreaking; a scene I’ll never forget as we were all crying - my father in law stoic, eyes on the road driving us home. I had sadly had two chemical pregnancies with both transfers.

It was a devastating experience to go from thinking that this IVF round was going to be ‘the one’ to knowing, two short months later, that we were back to the drawing board. Although we had been through so much already, this was a new grief, and it was very hard to hold on to hope. It truly felt like we had depleted our resilience reserves.

After this experience, we decided to take a true, proper break - we agreed to focus on planning our wedding in September (something that felt very controllable in comparison to creating a child) and just generally healing our hearts. January and February was spent in Sydney summer; going to the beach, seeing friends, taking mini breaks and day trips, and generally trying to enjoy life. It was extremely healing, and extremely refreshing to not be focused on conceiving.

Now, I have to say at this point, one of the most frustrating things you can hear or be told as someone who is struggling to conceive is this - “it’ll happen when you least expect it”. I heard endless stories of people who “took a holiday”, “stopped trying” and “stopped stressing about it” and then it just happened.

It was the hardest thing to hear when you are trying everything in your being to balance this yearning desire with releasing control and ensuring your body is in the optimum state.

And yet.

This is exactly what happened to us.

My period was a few days late. I did a pregnancy test. We were in disbelief when it was positive - it was a complete surprise. But we had been here before and knew that we had many hurdles to jump through - many blood tests, many early scans, many milestones to get past before we’d allow ourselves to get our hopes up.

But in March and April this year, we got through them; the dating scan, the chromosomal blood tests, the early anatomy scan, the first trimester.

And we are now seventeen weeks pregnant with our baby boy, due in November.

To even write that, I still feel total disbelief. I watch my growing bump in awe, genuinely stunned that it is finally happening.

There has been anxiety and fear that I have had to work through, naturally, given everything we’ve been through and everything that I know can go wrong. But I am choosing to trust that this is our time.

I have so many thoughts and feelings and words to share on pregnancy, on transitioning out of one waiting room (trying to conceive) into another (waiting to give birth) but they will be for another article.

For now, I wanted to share our good news. I have found so much hope in the stories of others’ who have been through something similar, and hopefully our story can be that hope for someone else. I am also so aware of the tricky, messy, complex emotions that come for anyone on their own fertility journey so know that I am thinking of you and sending love your way, if that is you.

I read a post recently by the wonderful , where she called her three year journey to conceive her “fertility initiation journey”. The entire article is wonderful but these words really stayed with me:

The path is often not easy. It brings up emotions, fears, and doubts we didn’t even know we had. It brings to light parts of ourselves we may have rejected or exiled. It illuminates where we are out of alignment with our highest selves. It highlights where we may not have been honest with ourselves, where we haven’t been taking care of our mind, body, or spirit.

The fertility initiatory path is not meant to punish or test us. It is meant to shape and liberate us.

She describes so beautifully how this whole experience has been for me. It’s been challenging beyond belief, but there has been so much change, a need to reckon with what my life was and how I was going to live moving forward. I followed the call and have made massive changes in my life and I feel like everything we’ve been through will give us the strongest foundation as parents and partners.

I wouldn’t wish what we’ve been through on anyone, but I have known since the beginning that I wouldn’t waste the lessons learnt, and now that we are shifting to a new phase, I am determined to integrate what we’ve been through in order to allow us to take on this next stage.

“The messy middle is all about what happens when we’re in the state of in between. It involves a complicated alchemy of giving up old ways and experimenting with new ones, moving beyond what’s past and beginning to define what’s coming. In butterfly-speak, it’s cocooning; in hero-speak, it’s getting lost.” Bruce Feiler

For the past 18 months, I have been writing on Substack about my experiences navigating big life changes - pregnancy loss, trying to conceive, leaving my established career, wrestling with identity loss and all of the chaos that comes with any major life upheaval.

The more I write about my own experiences living between chapters, the more my words seem to resonate with others. There are so many people, especially at this particular time with everything going on in the world, who are navigating big transitions, identity shifts and looking to the words of others in order to see themselves - I am one of these people too. But given how many of us there seem to be - I mean, look at the engagement on my note below - there is still a lot of isolation and uncertainty that plagues us when we walk off the typical societal path. I decided to delve deeper in order to understand more about how others are experiencing these periods.

For the past month, I have asked my audience on Substack to share their insights about life in the in-between and about how they are managing and coping with big life transitions. 130 of you responded to my survey (THANK YOU!) and I have such rich data and quotes that I am very excited to share over the coming weeks.

So, let’s start with the data.

First of all, I found it incredible to learn just how similar many of our experiences are. As I navigate my own life transitions there is so much that comes up for me around fear and uncertainty and walking into the unknown without a map, but reading through all of the responses I felt very reassured by how many people are experiencing such similar things. This made me feel both seen and less alone - I hope it does the same for you.

Duration of transitions

61% of you have been in this phase for between six months and two years, which struck me as being very long, but which also aligns with my own experience. We don’t expect these phases to take up so much time, but to process the messiness of it all and to take on the lessons and redirections, it can’t be a quick process.

The transitions

Most of you are navigating more than one transition at once - as if one wasn’t enough! The most common being ‘starting something new’, but it makes sense that as one domino falls, we are forced to make more changes in our lives. For me, pregnancy loss was the catalyst to leaving my career which has led to 18 months (and counting!) of disruption and change.

The challenges

I asked you to tell me your biggest challenges about life in the in-between. Two things came back almost equally at the top - uncertainty about what comes next and financial instability. Our brains are so wired for certainty and control that we can really struggle when we don’t have that. I have felt lost, unmoored, and adrift throughout this time despite knowing that deep down, I am making the right decisions, in line with my gut. I have written a lot about the emotional and identity dimensions of transition but I think in general we talk far less about the financial fear that sits underneath. When I wrote honestly about my own experience of earning significantly less over the past year, the response was huge, showing that clearly this is a conversation many of us are desperate to have.

A third of respondents citing isolation as a challenge doesn’t surprise me either. The isolation when you’re going through a big change is very specific - it’s the kind where your life looks fine from the outside, where people mean well, where you can’t quite explain what’s wrong but you’ve just outgrown something. It’s a time where you are doing deep inner work which can be very hard to articulate or explain, leading to a feeling of isolation. This was definitely reflected back to me in the words of the respondents.

What has helped

This is is what I was so excited to know about - what is helping you get through this? What has helped me is seeing myself and my experiences in other people’s words and stories. When we experienced our first pregnancy loss, I digested book after book on the topic. I have trawled Substack looking for women who burnt down their careers and started from scratch. I joined mentorship programs, courses and followed creative pursuits that I never had time for. I have used this period as a time for growth, learning and personal development. In fact, I have relied on all eight of the options below in the past 18 months to get me through many difficult times.

What hasn’t helped

What has been less helpful for me was listening to the opinions of others. Someone suggested that I go to an co-working space to get some structure back to my week and I listened but I hated it so much that I left at lunchtime, immediately annoyed at myself for trying to recreate my old environment and absorbing the opinions of others. This definitely seemed to be the case for many of you, with lots of frustration towards the generic advice you’ve received, content from people without the lived experience and the “hang in there” type platitudes.

There were four distinct categories that these fell into: The Dismissive Fix, Toxic Positivity, The Guru Blueprint and Missing The Point. I can confirm that I have experienced feedback/ advice that fell into each of these categories so I was unsurprised by these results but amazed to see how often they came up, just in different words. What stands out to me as the best support during that time was simply presence - loved ones just sitting with me and my pain.

What do you need?

When I asked what would genuinely support you through this season, the answer that came back most clearly - from more than half of respondents - was a space to connect with others navigating the same thing. I was surprised to see how little people wanted to do one on one work and it seems like they want to move away from experts and coaches and actually be with other people who get it. Community has been a key pillar of my recent time - friends who are present, processing by speaking thoughts out loud, leaning on others, so it makes sense to me that this is what we’re craving. Particularly with people who are going through the same thing.

What’s next?

There is still so much in this data that I want to share. Over the coming weeks I'll be going deeper into some of the themes that came up most strongly. If any of the findings resonated with you, I'd love to know which ones. Drop a comment below - your response is genuinely part of what shapes where my writing goes next.

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Naturally, this research wouldn’t have been possible without everyone who responded to my survey. Thank you to anyone who was involved for your openness, vulnerability and time - I am very grateful!

I write and think at length about progress in uncertain times, about how we navigate through unchartered periods of life without a roadmap. I have spoken at length about how the journey is non-linear; how it can be two steps forward and three steps back, how it tests us and challenges everything we know and everything society expects of us.

And yet, it’s still so easy to fall victim to the trappings of what we should be doing.

Last week I had a week of ‘shoulds’ following me around - voices that I’ve internalised somewhere along the way that seem to have overtaken my sane, rational mind. I opted for a week of calm, of listening to my body, which was asking for a bit more rest than usual. I had slow mornings, spent time cooking nutritious meals and curled up on the sofa more than usual reading lots. It was a cozy week, one that is also a luxury - to be able to lean into what my body needs, which on this particular week was to be quiet and still and have minimal screen time.

And yet, AND YET - that voice, the one that really at this point is just quite boring, followed me around during this lovely week, questioning my output. Questioning my worth, questioning the structure of my week, questioning if I’m making the right choices at any given moment. This constant low level analysis creates a fatigue in and of itself so perhaps it wasn’t as restful a week as it seemed. How could it be with the constant questioning - should I be doing more exercise, should I be doing more writing, should I be doing more?

But really, what I did last week was total nourishment - through food, through naps, through minimal screen time, through connection with friends, through nature, through reading, through listening to what my body needs. But it still left me feeling slightly flat - wondering if I’m doing it right and if I’m doing enough. Not because my week wasn’t fulfilling or enjoyable, but because I have been conditioned to have extremely high expectations of myself and have been conditioned to measure success by my output.

This internalised voice, this inner critic, it is an amalgamation of so many different voices and it is fair to find it entirely frustrating - when you honour your needs in a quieter week, and yet still find yourself battling with an irritating inner monologue. I imagine it diminishes the whole exercise of nourishment when you can’t turn off your brain’s incessant ramblings. And to find that it still happens, despite the very strong understanding that this is not what success is about. It’s not what we’re taught it is - outward, shiny, obvious. Success is not based on these false metrics of achievement. I now define it so differently to how I would a year ago, but it is still so ingrained in our conditioning.

The data shows that I am not alone in this. I have spent the last month or so gathering research from those living in the in-between. I have so much amazing data that I will synthesise when the survey closes this week and I am beyond excited to share it all on here. As a very quick sneak peak, currently 41% of survey respondents said pressure to be further along is one of their biggest challenges of living in between transitions. Someone even shared: "I still feel the pressure to be further along. But I'm also aware that this pressure is manufactured”. We can know, deep down, that this pressure is external and that it’s not serving us, and yet that noise can feel so loud.

Join 120 others in completing my survey

So, as of today, I am going to start measuring my days in a different way, rather than based on my output. I’ve decided to run an experiment - I will check in with my notes app at the end of the day, and will write a few lines on how I deem the day to have gone - based on my own metrics of success: how did I feel, how fulfilled was I, did I have connection and movement and good nutrition? Was my nervous system regulated? By these measures, my days usually go really well. By the measures of time spent at my laptop, words written, workouts done, things achieved or accomplished, that’s where things start to get noisy for me, so I’m throwing them out for a while.

In a time where I have a lot of spaciousness, it’s important to make sure that I have check ins to feel as if I’m on track. If left to my own devices entirely, I seem to tip into old patterns and habits of wanting to achieve. But I’m also aware that, despite being able to build my weeks around my energy and what my body needs, structure and routine is also important.

As I reflect on all of this, I consider how much easier a 9-5 is in many ways. It gives you somewhere to be with clear deliverables and focus. To walk the pathless path, to choose an unorthodox route, comes with the need to spend a lot of time thinking about how you intentionally want to design your life - to learn and understand what works for you, your energy, your needs. It’s an ongoing experiment, testing and trialling and tweaking and refining, it’s not necessarily easy or straightforward, but I am certain that it is worth the effort.

I’d love to know - where does your inner critic come from? And what does a genuinely good week look like for you, on your own terms?

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I am currently conducting market research about life in the messy middle to inform future writing and content. The data so far is fascinating and the more respondents, the more meaningful the results - please take 3 minutes and complete here. Survey closes on May 29th.

Complete survey on the messy middle

When you blow up your old life and start from scratch, you get a rare gift - a blank slate. But the danger is that you fill it back up on autopilot, defaulting to old habits and old patterns before you've even noticed what’s happened. The real work of rebuilding isn't the big decisions. It's the small, daily ones - what you protect, what you add back in, and why.

I’m at a particular stage in my journey where I can feel myself emerging, wanting to be a more active participant in the world.

It’s like I’ve created the ultimate social experiment for myself - what happens when you make so many life changes that your world is completely freed up. Internally, there’s been a lot happening (enough to write extensively for over a year here on Substack!), but externally, it’s been a quiet season.

It has been a year of healing, retreating, wintering and taking stock. My world got smaller. My social circles got smaller. All of it was totally necessary, but I’m starting to reemerge and put the building blocks in place to redesign a life that feels far more aligned.

In doing this, I am actively expanding my circle - meeting like-minded people in my local neighbourhood, connecting in person with Substackers in Sydney as well as seeing contacts I haven’t seen in quite a while.

And as I start to say yes to more invites, and add a few more social things into the diary, I have noticed some old patterns starting to show up. As I coordinate local catch ups, I find myself replying saying - “I can do any time!”, “I’m not working at the moment!”, “I’m flexible!”, “I’ll work around you!”

Now, this may be true - I do have more time than ever. But why am I instantly defaulting to the hyper-flexible, easy going gal who makes life easy for others and prioritises their preferences? I did spend fifteen years in a sales job where face to face meetings where our main metric of success and you would say yes to a meeting no matter how inconvenient or at capacity you were. So there is some strong conditioning there.

But that’s not my life now.

It’s such a small thing, yet such an important thing to notice. Why shouldn’t I have preferences and vocalise them? One year into my new non-corporate life, why shouldn’t I have a say in when I want to meet people?

Of course my entire week isn’t empty, waiting for other people to pop meetings in. I’ve landed on a structure for my weeks that brings me joy and flows with my natural rhythms - I like Mondays to be free days for either writing and working, or cooking and grounding at home or personal appointments like acupuncture and wellness things. I don’t like seeing people on Mondays, it’s a heads-down “me” day. Wednesdays have started to become core hour days - days where I get my head down, write, focus and on Thursdays I have my volunteer shifts, with Tuesday and Friday being my favourite socialising days.

So why do I have the reflex to share that I am “always available”? I’m not! Which makes it essential to notice - and take action - when these small patterns creep back in.

Small and hard to spot at first, when they build up and start to compound during a busy phase of life, these are the things that can topple us - suddenly, I’m saying yes to everyone else, with no regard for my own needs or schedule, never leaving a second spare in the diary and I’m right back where I started. Sure, the meetings look different, the shape of the days look different, but my nervous system will experience it in the same way.

The default patterns that I have to watch are people pleasing - again, an entire career in a service based industry has left me with the strong desire to make others feel seen and at ease, often at the expense of my own needs. Another pattern that is deeply imbedded, that I want to work so hard to remove, is over extending myself beyond my capacity. Doing things and saying yes because it sounds fun, but in reality not having the emotional or physical bandwidth for it. The same patterns that came up again and again in my career are starting to poke their heads out in this new version of life, and I will have to work hard to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself.

The first step is awareness and now that I am conscious of this, I can be more intentional about how I shape my weeks and how active a participant I am in what they look like. And that first step is powerful because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. The “I’m flexible!” reflex and the instinct to make myself easy, it’s not just “being laid back about plans”, it’s conditioning. Conditioning that I know no longer serves me.

I want, so deeply, to learn from this very specific time in life and I don't want to leave this season without taking its lessons with me.

Once I started noticing, then it became about protecting - protecting my slow mornings, my heads-down days and the parts of my week that fill my cup. I was such a slave to my diary, to constant output and extraversion. I’ve lived that version and my nervous system remembers it even when my brain forgets.

If you’re rebuilding - entirely, like me - or slowly but surely, then this is the work that seems subtle but is crucial. Being mindful of the tiny decisions that reflect what you need, not just what suits everyone else.

I would love to know - where do you see old patterns showing up in your life?

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I am currently conducting market research about life in the messy middle to inform future writing and content. The data so far is fascinating and the more respondents, the more meaningful the results - please take 3 minutes and complete here.

Complete survey about the messy middle

I have written a lot about the thought process that led me to redesigning my life and taking up residence in the in-between. Leaving an established career can bring up many worries but when I made the decision to leave my role as CEO of the business I founded, one of the primary considerations, naturally, was my income. I had spent ten years building a business which facilitated a lifestyle that I had become accustomed to. I’m not talking designer bags or fancy stuff - that type of spending was never something I had any interest in. But my actual lifestyle was absolutely supported by my business. As a business owner I ubered everywhere - time is money after all, I easily gathered airline points resulting in platinum level frequent flyer status and business class flight upgrades, I don’t think I paid for a single coffee out of my personal bank account in ten years and through networking and client/ staff lunches and dinners, I was familiar with all of the best and newest restaurants in Sydney.

Founder-lifestyle perks aside, I was also used to earning a decent income. I started working in recruitment - a sales job which paid regular performance-based bonuses - at 23 and had become extremely used to a stable income and regular commission payments. Earning this income at a young age meant that I was financially stable from the very start of my career. It allowed me to buy my current home before I turned 30, entirely on my own. It meant that I could jump on a flight to meet friends and family in the US, Canada, Ireland, anywhere really, for catch ups and adventures, as long as my diary allowed. It was a privilege that I was well aware of and despite feeling frequently run down and burnt out, I really did enjoy every minute of these adventures.

So when my body started to signal to my brain that this next season of life was going to be need to be different and changes were going to have to be made, one of the considerations that I really had to grapple with was the change in income and lifestyle. I had to do a lot of reckoning with my fears and beliefs around money, security and safety. Mainly, that if I didn’t have a secure income, everything would all fall apart. I had (have) a mortgage, a business loan and absolutely zero access to a crystal ball to how the chips would all fall. But I realised quite quickly that I couldn’t allow these fears to be the thing that dictated my next move. I sat down with a pen and paper and drew out every worst case scenario:

• what happens if the business goes under because of my resignation?

• what happens if I can’t contribute to the mortgage and we have to sell our house?

• what happens if I can’t secure another source of income?

• what happens if I can’t afford to visit family in Ireland?

Considering your financial situation during any big life change or transition is essential, but I found that so much of my thinking was from a place of panic rather than from the reality of what lay ahead. After much discussion with Ant, I kept coming back to this fact:

money is not everything.

It is important, essential for survival - of course. But if my body and soul were telling me that I couldn’t do this anymore, and I had options, then something had to change. Ant and I discussed the fact that even if all of the worst case scenarios were to unfold, we would still have ways to move forward - we could downsize, move out of the city, and make some drastic changes but, we concluded, at the end of the day, we would be okay. We have savings, we have enough, we have each other, we have our health. I knew that staying somewhere that no longer felt aligned solely for a stable income was not the life that I wanted to choose.

My imagined outcomes were quite extreme - because fear and panic were absolutely in charge at that time - but a rational part of my brain also knew that I would adjust to spending less and to making more budget-conscious choices. I was aware of the term ‘the hedonic treadmill’: the more we have, the more we become used to, the more we think we need.

But by being intentional in our spending and in our choices, we could make adjustments that would allow me to make this huge decision. Our budgeting system works really well - we have direct debits set up to various “bucket accounts” - fixed costs, groceries, holidays, joint account spend, wedding savings etc, which allows us to allocate what we have. Seeing what is going where and having a system that supports our spending allows us to have clarity and oversight with everything finance related which has been hugely helpful, and makes me feel a lot more in control.

At the time of making the decision to leave, I had no concept of how much, if anything, I could earn from the business in future. I didn’t know if it would run without me, make money without me or fall apart without me. There were many risks in my departure, but through a solid succession plan with a strong team in place, the business has continued to run smoothly. This has meant that I have been able to maintain a portion of my earnings through dividends and business profits, although my income is variable and never guaranteed. I couldn’t have relied on this and, at the time, my brain thought only in extremes - “I will never have money again. I will never earn well again.” But, thankfully, that isn’t how has worked out.

A lot has changed for me in a year since leaving. I feel grateful that I stuck to my guns and followed my instinct that the way I was living was no longer sustainable. To stay somewhere where I was no longer happy, where my body was screaming signs of burnout, nervous system distress and misalignment just for money comes with a lot of sacrifices.

Only a year later, it is surprising to me how easily we can adjust to a simpler way of living. My daily spending habits were relatively easy to nip in the bud: I take less ubers, I buy less coffees, I eat out (a lot) less and I am far more aware of what I spend. But that absolutely has not impacted my quality of life. I have missed spending money on people - a part of my identity was being successful and generous. I loved picking up the bill at dinners and shouting friends and family whenever I could and that was threaded through my identity in ways I hadn't fully examined. Stepping back from my income and from that freedom was something that took a little bit longer to adjust to.

The most unexpected joy from the whole year is just how much time I now have. Ant works in a career that is very flexible and this has seen us go on an endless amount of morning and evening dog walks, coffee shop visits, early visits to the beach during Summer and long evenings cooking together. The quality time that has come from both of us having capacity, energy and time has been next level. That presence in our relationship is unquantifiable but I know that we have never been happier.

The reality is that I think about money a lot more now - we have our budgets and we have to stick to them and mindless splurges are just not an option for now. It’s been an exceptionally expensive year between planning a destination wedding and our ongoing journey to start a family, with a lot less income flowing in, but it’s helpful for me to remember that it’s okay to have seasons where we’re not “getting ahead”. I am grateful that I bought my home at a younger age, that I have a business asset that I can take a return from, that I worked my arse off for years to set myself up for this quieter season. The next chapter will be a slower chapter, not just in my energy and in how I spend my days, but also financially - and that’s okay. I will earn again, I will enter into a different season, but for now, accepting this fact is an act of self-compassion.

I would love to know how your relationship with money has changed throughout life transitions, and what in this piece resonates for you?

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Complete survey about the messy middle

I am currently conducting market research about life in the messy middle to inform future writing and content. The data so far is fascinating and the more respondents, the more meaningful the results - please take 3 minutes and complete here.

Complete survey about the messy middle

For a while now, the in-between has been my whole world. It’s the place I’ve been occupying while my life has been fairly uncertain - career, fertility, identity - I’ve thrown it all up in the air and seem to be waiting to see how it lands.

It’s been an intentionally quieter time in life and I have felt a deliberate need to retreat - to winter, as I’ve written about many times before. I have felt compelled to pull back from the noise and the busyness of a life that used to be so very full to the brim.

This chapter of slowness has been essential in order to figure out what’s next - I have created spaciousness in order to fully stop, take stock and look around. If you’ve ever found yourself in this messy middle, you will understand the importance of slowing down and reflection on questions like: what was working? What do I want to bring forward? What am I actually bringing with me into this next season?

For me, that reckoning has required my world to get a bit smaller. I’m less social, my days are quieter, my circle seems smaller and I make fewer plans. I write, go to pilates, take walks and hang out with my partner, dog and close friends. And it’s been perfect. It’s been so healing and so necessary and so lovely. I’ve been so grateful that I’ve been able to do this, and that I have close relationships that nurture my soul and who support me so well during these strange times.

But sometimes, it seems like the old version of me, the old version of my life was some sort of fever dream. I was travelling non-stop for work and for pleasure, I would host and attend networking events, work functions and team bonding evenings constantly, my weekends were jam packed and I was just far far more extroverted. I was tired a lot of the time, usually running on empty but I also had a huge amount of fun - thriving off new environments and new people.

Sometimes this current slower version of me seems unrecognisable from that gal. But I suppose when the pendulum swings hard in one direction - away from a life that was big and noisy and full - it makes sense that it lands somewhere very far in the opposite direction for a while.

And I don’t doubt that that is what I’ve needed - the calm, the routines, the stillness.

But I’ve also started to wonder if the version of me that eventually emerges from all of this is perhaps a version that combines both aspects of my personality. Not the full madness of my old life, not the pure quietness of these current times, but something in the middle.

This past weekend I felt this stronger than I have throughout all of this change.

My partner Ant’s sister hosted her engagement party at her in-laws’ family home. A family of ten children, all with partners, many with kids - before any guests even arrived there were already more people in that house than I’d spent time with all month - and it was wonderful.

I spent the whole weekend flitting from conversation to conversation, meeting new people, learning about them, asking questions, laughing. It was like a little extrovert light had been turned on, and off I happily went.

“She really can talk to anyone,” my father-in-law observed at one point, watching me dart around the room, chatting.

I built a recruitment business because of my love of connection and people - a business firmly based on relationships. Over time, I depleted my inner resources and it no longer fit, forcing me to want to flee, to crave control over my energy and my time. Somewhere in that fleeing, I think I started to confuse what I needed to recover from with who I actually am.

Because - I still love people. I love learning about them, meeting them, hearing their stories, making new connections in a room full of strangers. That part of me didn’t leave when I handed in my resignation. It just needed a rest, and this weekend was a heartwarming reminder to come back to that part of myself during this time of change.

It was good to remember that we, as complex, messy humans, contain multitudes.

While this is a very specific moment in time that has required me to pull back, there are still many parts and sides of me that should integrate fully in order for me to be the most real version of myself, as with all of us. Different seasons call for different versions, but it is worth remembering that, even if they lay dormant, all of our parts are still us.

When you’re deep in the in-between, it’s easy to start believing that the parts of you that have gone quiet are gone. That the loudness, the brightness, the big energy - that must have been the old you, the one you’re supposed to be moving away from.

This weekend reminded me that the pendulum doesn’t have to rest at either extreme - it might, temporarily - but even in the depths of wintering, even in the quietest season - you’re still in there. Dormant, maybe. Resting, definitely. But not gone.

I’d love to know where the pendulum has swung for you. Is there a part of yourself that’s gone quiet lately that you’re starting to miss?

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Complete survey about the messy middle

I am currently conducting market research about life in the messy middle to inform future writing and content. The data so far is fascinating and the more respondents, the more meaningful the results - please take 3 minutes and complete here.

Complete survey about life in-between

‘Most people dream of a positive pregnancy test. For me, that’s when the fear begins.’

Published in mamamia in April 2026

Most people dream of seeing two lines on a pregnancy test when they’re trying to conceive.

For me, that’s when the fear kicks in.

Two years ago, on my birthday, my fiancé, Ant, and I got a much-wanted positive pregnancy test. We were ecstatic, but only a week later I miscarried.

As our hearts broke for the first time, I had no idea this was going to be the beginning of a long, complicated journey of trying to start a family.

Since then, the theme of our fertility journey has been repeated chemical pregnancies — a term I had never heard before.

A chemical (or biochemical) pregnancy is essentially a very early miscarriage. You get a positive pregnancy test early on, accompanied by early pregnancy symptoms, before your period arrives a few days later.

My doctor reassured me that everything was fine, that we wouldn’t have even known if we weren’t testing early and trying to conceive.

But we were trying to conceive, so I did know.

Every time we got a positive result on the early tests, we allowed ourselves to get our hopes up — only to be quickly crushed soon after, when my period arrived. Early pregnancy loss is a very specific type of grief. It is grief for something that you only had for a few days, or sometimes even a few hours. But in that short time, you’ve already imagined a future — checked due dates, looked at timelines and pictured how everything would change.

Of course, the last year, the month we weren’t actively trying was the month we fell pregnant again — and this time we got further than we ever have before.

We allowed ourselves to think that this time, the month we weren’t tracking and looking out for symptoms, was the month that it would actually happen.

But at our seven-week scan, our hearts broke yet again. As we sat there waiting, full of nervous excitement, our hope disappeared almost instantly. The room went quiet as the doctor spent what felt like far too long looking at her screen.

She said she wanted a second opinion and stepped out to get someone else. Ant and I looked at each other knowingly and grabbed each other’s hands tightly, both of us bracing for the worst possible news.

When they came back, she confirmed that the pregnancy had stopped growing and there was no heartbeat.

We had experienced a missed miscarriage — where you only discover the pregnancy is no longer viable during a scan, often requiring surgery afterwards, which I had to go through. It added another layer of grief to an already heartbreaking experience.

After a much-needed break, where we travelled and took time off, we decided to go down the road of IVF. Our specialist was incredibly thorough, and it felt like a relief to hand over the reins to someone clearly so competent. Feeling grateful that doing a round of IVF was an option and something that we could afford, we allowed ourselves to believe this would finally be it for us.

But late last year, both of our transfers also ended in chemical pregnancies.

It is a strange place to sit — going through the process of IVF, where many people struggle to conceive at all, knowing that our experience is so different.

Pregnancy itself hasn’t been hard for us. Staying pregnant has.

This whole experience has been heartbreaking for both of us. Sometimes I think back to our engagement — travelling around Greece, completely high on life and our future, waving my engagement ring around out of pure happiness, and it makes me sad to think how much we’ve had to endure since then.

There have been so many tears, so much grief to work through; a heaviness that can be hard to describe, and even harder to carry.

But, if there is a silver lining, it’s how strong we’ve become as a couple.

Throughout the hardest moments, we’ve held onto each other.

When we need to — we cry, we talk, we process, and we discuss everything that’s happened.

Being open about our emotions — the pain, the frustration, the sadness — has brought us closer together. We remind each other constantly that we’re on the same team, and we make a lot of space for how the other is feeling.

There have been times when we’ve felt overwhelmed by the weight of it all, where we have not wanted to leave the house or face the world. But in those moments, when we are feeling so overwhelmed by grief, we have learnt that presence matters far more than words. Neither of us try to fix the other one. We just remind each other that we’re still here, we still have each other, and we’ll get through this, even if the future feels so uncertain.

But we’ve also learnt that we need lightness too — we make each other laugh every day. We prioritise fun. We get to the beach, our happy place, as often as we can. We even dance around the living room to Taylor Swift. Whatever it takes to lift the weight.

But the hardest part of all of this isn’t the injections or the appointments — it’s the uncertainty.

We’ve thrown timelines out the window and are living in the unknown — in a weird in-between place where it’s almost impossible to plan ahead.

The uncertainty seeps into everything — holidays, finances, career decisions, how we imagine the next few years. We’ve had to become comfortable in this liminal space. That loss of control is confronting, but it has also forced us to live more in the present than we ever have before.

Despite the lack of a clear path forward, we try to focus on and appreciate the life we do have, rather than only what we don’t. Each night before we fall asleep, we share three things we’re grateful for that day. It helps us to stay connected to each other’s small moments of joy.

Throughout this experience, we’ve learnt that hope and fear can exist together.

But the fear is real.

Fear about not knowing if and when we will start a family. Not knowing how long this will go on. Not knowing what our future will look like.

We’ve had to learn to live without guarantees, which is uncomfortable in a world that constantly promises outcomes if you just try hard enough.

The best way we’ve found to cope is by shrinking our focus — one step, one decision, one day at a time. And by coming back, over and over again, to the one thing that is certain: we have each other.

As our friends around us share pregnancy announcements and move forward in their lives, we are focusing on living one step at a time.

I’m also focusing on things I can control, like planning our wedding in September. Something joyful that I can plan and control with a definite outcome.

We don’t know what happens next.

But we do know we’ll face it together.

Complete survey about life in-between