Special Edition. A Confession.

A friend told me she’s tired of pretending she’s okay.
Her coffee had gone cold while she kept nodding. That detail broke me.
Because I knew that kind of tired, the one that sleep doesn’t fix.

She wasn’t talking about burnout.
She was talking about holding up too many worlds at once.
The work world. The family world. The emotional world where she holds everyone else together.
And somewhere in between, she disappeared.

I get it.
Two businesses. Two kids. One marriage.
And the impossible dream of doing it all well.

Some days, life feels like a maths equation that never balances.
You try to give each part of yourself what it needs, but the numbers don’t add up.

You can’t pour into your kids, your work, your relationship, and your dreams without running dry.
But you do it anyway. Because people depend on you.
Because you’ve been taught that exhaustion is proof of love.

The world applauds women who make impossible things look effortless.
And so we perform.

We perform calm while our minds are spinning.
We perform gratitude while quietly resenting how heavy it all feels.
We perform energy when our bodies are pleading for stillness.

The kids don’t care how tired you are or how much money you made that day.
They just want you to show up, fully, lovingly, endlessly.
And we do. Even when there’s nothing left.

But lately I’ve started wondering, what if the applause isn’t worth the exhaustion?

That’s the cruel paradox of womanhood today: we’ve been told we can have it all, but no one warned us what it would cost to hold it all.

So we keep smiling, keep producing, keep performing.
Because the alternative, dropping the act, feels like failure.

But what if it isn’t?
What if it’s the first honest thing we’ve done in years?

No one teaches women how to stop performing.
We learn early that survival depends on being what other people need.
So we become fluent in adaptation.

As girls, we learn to be agreeable.
As students, to be impressive.
As partners, to be understanding.
As mothers, to be everything.

By the time we reach our thirties or forties, the act is seamless.
We don’t even notice it anymore; we call it strength.
But strength built on suppression isn’t strength. It’s control.

Performance is control disguised as competence.
It’s how we keep the world comfortable with our pain.
We smile so no one worries. We over-function, so no one leaves.
We call it coping, but really, it’s containment.

I remember standing in the kitchen one morning, holding a cup I couldn’t lift to my mouth, my hands shaking from exhaustion I wouldn’t name.
I wasn’t weak. I was terrified.
Terrified that if I slowed down, everything I’d built would crumble.

But the body always keeps the score.
The headaches. The sleepless nights.
The quiet resentment that simmers beneath the smile.
That’s not weakness, it’s honesty trying to find a way out.

Healing can’t happen in performance mode.
Because healing isn’t efficient. It’s messy and unpredictable.
It’s crying at the wrong time. It’s cancelling plans.
It’s saying, “I can’t do this today,” without apology.

We think healing means rebuilding faster.
But sometimes it means sitting in the rubble long enough to understand why it collapsed in the first place.

Real strength isn’t how tightly you hold everything together.
It’s how gently you let it fall apart, and still trust that what remains is enough.

1. You don’t owe anyone your composure.
Falling apart isn’t failure, it’s feedback.
It’s your body asking for honesty in a language your mind keeps ignoring.

2. Rest isn’t rebellion.
It’s repair.
It’s the invisible work that keeps you human when the world keeps asking you to be more than that.

3. You can stop performing now.
No one will vanish.
The world won’t fall apart. Only the mask will.
And what’s left, raw, unfiltered, ordinary you, is finally real enough to breathe.

If you’ve been performing strength for too long, consider this your permission slip to stop, just for a moment, or even for one honest breath.

You don’t need to be radiant or relentless today.
You don’t need to keep earning your right to rest.

Somewhere, between the meetings and the meals and the tiny acts that hold your life together, you’ve already done enough.
You don’t need to prove you can carry it all. You already have.

The world will keep spinning if you put something down.
The people who love you won’t love you less if you let yourself be seen tired.

So if you wake up tomorrow and the only thing you can manage is being gentle, with yourself, with your body, with the day, let that be enough.
Because maybe healing doesn’t start with doing more.
Maybe it starts with doing less, and finally meaning it.

What would it look like if, for once, you didn’t hold it all together?

I’ve been writing these pieces in the quiet, between school runs, work, and late-night thinking, but I’ve started sharing more of the journey in real time too.
The reflections, the systems, the messier parts of reinvention that never make it into the newsletter.

If you want to follow along, you’ll find me here:
LinkedIn
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Come say hi. It’s less about followers, more about finding the others who are doing the invisible work too.

If something in this email made you pause, think, or feel seen, send it to a friend who’s been quietly trying to make a change, too.
You never know what might land at the right moment. Link here.

And if you’d like early access to the eBook I’m writing, the real systems, mindset shifts, and habits that helped me lose 50kg and rebuild my health, you can join the waiting list here. “You’re not behind. You’re building, and that takes time.”