I was sick after I did it

I was sick after I did it.

I want to tell you something I don’t talk about enough.

I was an addictions specialist. I built a service for the NHS, from nothing, single-handedly, while raising a young son alone, caring for my disabled father, and holding together a life that looked, from the outside, like someone who had it handled.

I was exhausted in the way that doesn’t show up as tired. It shows up as numb. As efficient. As the person everyone calls because she always knows what to do.

And underneath all of it, something kept pulling at me.

Movement. Music. My body, which I had been quietly rediscovering after my divorce,  not as a project, but as the one place I still felt like myself.

I ignored it for a long time. I was good at my job. I had a mortgage. I had a son with no maintenance coming in. I had a father who needed me. I had responsibilities that didn’t care about callings.

And then one day,  after a particularly hard day,  I walked into my manager’s office, and I handed in my notice.

I had no job to go to, no business plan, and no safety net. I had never run anything outside of an institution in my life.

I was sick afterwards. Genuinely, physically sick.

And I want to be honest with you about something: the permission never came.

I didn’t wake up one morning feeling ready.

The fear didn’t lift.

The practical reasons didn’t disappear.

The voice that said who do you think you are didn’t go quiet.

I just stopped waiting for it to.

That’s what crossing your edge actually looks like, not bold, or certain. Just a woman, a shaking hand, and a decision made before she could talk herself out of it again.

A year or so later, I had the idea that would become my women’s outdoor fitness business—built from that leap, from that terror, from that one afternoon in my manager’s office.

I sold it in 2017.

I tell you this not to impress you, but because I talk to women every week who tell me they can’t go for the thing because of the mortgage, the children, the timing, the fear.

I recognise every single one of those reasons.

I used them too.

They felt completely true. They were completely true.

And they were also the way my body had learned to keep me safe by keeping me still.

This is what I know now: the permission you are waiting for is not coming from the outside. It never was.

It lives on the other side of the edge, and the only way to find it is to cross.

If something in you is still feeling the pull to come to Crete next month, there are two beds left for the woman who has been circling this long enough.

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Have courage, dear heart