Naming the Reality

This is a story about capability, not deficit.

Throughout the process of creating my practice, my biggest challenge was defining my professional and personal identity. I often found myself asking, who am I?

I am a single mum of a young child. I am a neurodivergent woman living with chronic pain and ongoing health conditions. Despite all of this, I am deeply committed to remaining in the workforce because I am also a highly experienced leader, subject matter expert, project manager, and systems specialist.

Yet time and again, I found myself constrained by employment models and support systems that were not designed for, or genuinely supportive of, people like me.

Through this process, I have come to understand that I am not alone. Many of my friends and colleagues find themselves similarly limited by these embedded models and systems, and utterly exhausted by the effort required simply to participate. I will not pretend this is not a gendered issue. While there are, of course, outliers, in my experience it is predominantly mothers who share these struggles, whether in a relationship or not.

When Systems Aren’t Flexible Enough

Flexibility was framed as an individual accommodation, not a structural reality.

From the moment I opened my eyes in the morning, I was rushing.

Breakfast. Get dressed. Brush teeth. Kinder drop off. Home or office to work. Appointments. Kinder pick up. Dinner. Bath. Bed. Clean up. Sleep. Exercise for pain. Maintain friendships. Be a good enough parent, no matter what.

I was only just keeping my head above water.

Then funding for my role at work ended and I was facing redundancy. Somewhere in my days I needed to find time to apply for jobs. Even though the sector I have almost a decade of experience in claims to be underpinned by feminist values, to value lived experience, and to offer flexibility, I could not find roles that would allow me to maintain the appointments necessary for my health and mental health, manage the responsibilities of single parenting, protect my parenting capacity and connection time with my child, and work from home when needed to manage my ‘spoons’ and avoid burnout.

I had no real choice. It was either a significant drop in income and responsibility, unemployment, or private practice.

Choosing Private Practice as an Act of Self-respect

I did not step out of systems because I lacked commitment. I stepped out because I have integrity.

I began talking with friends and mentors about becoming a private practitioner and was met with nothing but encouragement and support. ‘Private practice is perfect for you!’ and ‘you won’t have a lack of work!’ were phrases I heard often. With my confidence growing, I used my project management experience to create a workplan. I explored the scope of my practice. I built a website, created a logo, a tagline, and a clear set of values.

Before I knew it, I was hyperfixating my way into business ownership. I was becoming self‑managing, someone who could independently decide her workload and hours based on her capacity, needs, and interests. Someone who could be present for her child, work to her strengths, and honour her nervous system and health as the framework holding everything else together.

For the first time in several years, I felt genuinely excited about my work and my life.

Finally, I realised it had not been a ‘me’ issue. It was a systems issue. And what do I do best? Navigate and refine systems to better support the people using them. This was a natural fit.

How Lived Experience Shapes My Practice

I had found both a business model and a purpose. My practice intentionally intertwines lived and professional experience to offer strengths‑based support, empathy without over‑identification, strong boundaries grounded in necessity, practical realism about fatigue, parenting, disability, and systems, and a deep and genuine respect for clients’ autonomy and complexity.

This practice exists because I refused to believe that professionalism requires self‑erasure, or that women with caring responsibilities should be expected to unreasonably compromise themselves or their parent‑child bond.

It’s Not Us, It’s the Systems

I know there are others reading this who recognise themselves in these words. People who are capable, experienced, and deeply committed, yet worn thin by systems that ask too much and offer too little. If that is you, this is not a personal failure. It is a systems mismatch.

This practice was built as a refusal to disappear, downshift, or disconnect in order to remain employable. It was built to prove that professionalism, care, flexibility, and integrity can coexist. My hope is that this work not only supports the people I work with, but quietly challenges the assumption that there is only one acceptable way to be competent, committed, and professional. And finally, I actually get to be the change.

Entering the Liminal Space

There was a time when I thought I knew exactly who I was. Then suddenly, those roles I had relied on to define myself, those categories I had used to structure my life, were stripped away, and I entered the biggest liminal space of my life: matrescence.

A liminal space is defined as a space of in-betweenness, of neither being “here” nor “there”, like an airport, waiting room or hallway. Psychologically, liminal spaces are where you leave one phase of life or identity, but have not quite transitioned into the next. It can be a time of great discomfort, disorientation and emptiness, especially for those of us who struggle with transitions. Liminal spaces, psychologically speaking, can also be times of immense personal and emotional growth. This is a space many people move through at different points in their lives, particularly during significant identity shifts such as parenthood, illness, or loss.

Who I Was

Capable, organised, reliable, active, career-driven, and independent.

My primary focus was either study or work; it defined me. I was productive, autonomous and high achieving. Although these things often came at great cost to my health and mental health, there was no one relying on me. I could go to bed as soon as I got home and spend all weekend recovering from a week of being in the office or on campus, masking and managing pain all day.

We decided to try for a baby, and we discussed that my partner at the time would be a stay-at-home dad. I would return to work and the grand plans I had for my life and career. I would continue on the planned trajectory: up, up, up.

The Shift

Suddenly, I became a parent and entered the biggest liminal space of my life since adolescence: matrescence.

Everything changed. Another person was utterly and completely reliant on me to survive. My capacity disappeared, and my physical and mental health deteriorated.

I fought this transition tooth and nail. I returned to work full-time seven months after giving birth, stepping into a promotion with more responsibility and commitment. But this wasn’t working. I was getting sick all the time, my pain was unmanageable, my partner and I were fighting more often, and I had less emotional capacity for my stepchildren. Slowly, my home life fell apart.

I found myself in hospital for five weeks and realised I could not continue to work full-time. I returned part-time, and my partner went back to work full-time. As time went on, things deteriorated further. I lost friends. I lost my partner and stepchildren. I was very close to losing my job. I was isolated and lost. My life was narrowing and my identity fractured. This was not in my plan. It wasn’t just that my life changed; it was that the version of me who knew how to live it no longer existed.

While the details of my experience are my own, the disorientation that comes with losing capacity, identity, and stability is something many people navigating major life transitions will recognise. It is rarely just one change, but the layering of many, that creates this kind of rupture.

When Roles Fell Away

I was no longer capable. I was certainly not organised or reliable. I was in too much pain to be active.

My career took a back seat, and my independence was gone as I needed numerous professional supports to get through each day.

I had never planned to be at home with a toddler alone, and I felt completely incapable of it. I would get anxious every day it was just him and me. I had never planned to be a part-time employee. I had never planned to put motherhood above my career. This wasn’t me. Who was this? I was no one.

My identity had been so wrapped up in one facet that I had not allowed myself the space or opportunity to be anything else and I felt that I was letting everyone else down.

Self-Worth and External Validation

My self-worth had been so reliant on external validation from employers and peers.

I was the one who was approached when a new role came up. I was the one who was asked to present at external events. I was the one people came to for guidance and information.

When that validation was no longer present, I didn’t know who I was. I became invisible, just another mum doing what mums do, but not even excelling at it.

Grief as a Necessary Process

I grieved. I grieved for a very long time.

I grieved for my old life, for the friends and family I had lost, for the loss of the systems I had spent my life refining to help me feel safe and appear capable and organised. But above all, I grieved for a version of myself that was no longer here, and for a future I had imagined that I would never have. What made this grief more difficult is that this kind of grief is often unspoken, particularly when the loss is not of a person, but of identity, capacity, and imagined futures.

Without the categories I recognised myself to be a part of, without the structure that made my nervous system feel safe, without the labels that defined me, I was flailing. I was grasping at anything I could to give me some sense of stability and safety.

I remember feeling like Sarah in Labyrinth, in the scene where she is falling through the oubliette and grasping at the Helping Hands, trying to stop the fall, not knowing which way to go or where she would end up. Eventually, she decides, based on nothing, to continue falling. It is not an easy choice, and she appears to regret it instantly, but she cannot remain there forever.

This process I was going through was not a choice, but I realise now it was necessary.

Relearning the Self

Slowly, through trial and error, through peaks and troughs, I started to rebuild my identity.

I gained confidence as a mum. I realised that I could still be a capable and reliable employee, just in a different way and with different priorities. I created new friendships and strengthened those that remained. I refined my systems to fit who I was becoming.

I learned to prioritise my health and mental health so I could be the other things I wanted to be. I reassessed my values and steered myself toward them, instead of toward what I thought others wanted me to be. This process is ongoing. I am still re-learning and re-creating, but I have more space to be more things.

I recently heard an analogy about identity as a house. If you spend your whole life living in one room, decorating it, cleaning it, making it everything, what happens if that room burns down? You are left with an empty house.

My room burned down. Now I am decorating not just one other room, but the whole house. I have grown. I feel more aligned with my values. I have more than one identity. I am many things, and my professional identity is just one room in a multifaceted, multi-storey home.

Living in Flux

Today I am this. This hour I am this. This moment, I am this. The next moment, I may be something else.

I have also learned to be more flexible with myself. This is an incredibly uncomfortable place for someone who thrives on structure and routine, but there is also a freedom to it. It allows me to be who I need to be in any moment. I am learning to sit in uncertainty instead of solving it.

Meaning in the In-Between

Liminal spaces are not just crises; they are opportunities for transformation.

They can be uncomfortable or even distressing. They can feel impossible to sit in, let alone to move through. For many people, this in-between space can feel endless, with no clear markers of progress or resolution. But when you come out the other side, you will have grown in ways you could never have imagined.

I am not yet out of my life-altering, redefining, uncomfortable and at times utterly distressing liminal space. I am still becoming, and for the first time, I am learning to let that be enough.