The grief of a life you can no longer live
There are moments in life when something happens that changes everything.
And then there are moments when you begin to realize that perhaps everything you've ever known about life, love and even yourself was shaped by something that should never have happened in the first place.
And suddenly you find yourself wondering...Who would I have been if that hadn't happened to me? What would my life have looked like? How differently would I have loved, chosen, created and trusted myself?
And perhaps the most confronting question of all...Who am I now, when the life I've always known is no longer the life I want to live?
When you discover there was a whole other world
I've been having conversations with women who, on the surface, are navigating completely different experiences.
Two women who both have spent years in unhealthy relationships and are now experiencing what it feels like to be genuinely loved by a safe, available man.
A woman who has created an incredibly successful business, only to realize that the way she built that success no longer reflects the woman she has become.
Or a woman who has experienced such profound loss that the future she once imagined simply doesn't exist anymore.
Different women. Different stories.
And yet, underneath it all, I recognize something: There comes a moment when you realize that the way you've learned to live your life isn't necessarily the only way you could have lived it…and sometimes that realization is f* confronting.
Because what if there was an entirely different way of experiencing love, success, safety, pleasure or even yourself that you didn't know was available to you?
What if the very things you've spent years learning to navigate were never supposed to be the foundation upon which you built your life?
I've thought about this so many times throughout my own journey.
The life I might have lived
I experienced sexual abuse within my own family when I was a child. And while I have done so much healing around these experiences, I also came to realize how profoundly they shaped my understanding of love, safety, relationships and my own worth.
There were things I had learned about myself and the world without ever consciously choosing to believe them. And at some point, I started wondering what my life might have looked like if none of that had happened.
❤️ Would I have trusted safe love from the beginning?
❤️ Would I have known that I was worthy of being adored, cherished and deeply loved, without having to do anything to deserve it?
❤️ Would I have recognized the breadcrumbs of love for what they were, instead of believing they were enough?
Because I've been that woman, too. The woman who found herself in unhealthy, sometimes deeply toxic relationship dynamics. Who had to discover through lived experience how much of her understanding of love was still being reflected back to her through the relationships she chose.
If you want to know more about my personal journey through love, hop on the waitlist for my book Love, Received and I’ll share more about all of this with you.
And it's not just about romantic love. I began recognizing those same patterns in other parts of my life. The times I believed I had to work harder than I actually needed to. The ways I had learned to earn, prove or create my own sense of worth.
And don't get me wrong. There has always been a beautiful sense of playfulness, intuition and softness in my business…but there was so much more available to me. A whole other world that I didn't even know existed.
And one of the places where this became especially clear to me was motherhood. When Finn was born, I was already on my own journey, discovering and healing parts of myself that had been shaped long before I became his mother.
And I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if I'd already known then what I know today. If I had been able to give him the kind of soft landing I can now see is possible. The kind of softness, safety and spaciousness that I've been able to create under very different circumstances with Luca.
That doesn't mean there wasn't enormous love for Finn. There was, and there is. But I can recognize that I was a different woman then, navigating a different reality. And sometimes I wonder how much gentler that journey could have been for both of us if I hadn't first needed to find my way through so much of my own history.
I look at my sons now, and one of my deepest desires is that they grow up knowing something I had to spend years reclaiming: I am fucking amazing.
Not because of what they achieve. Not because of how much they earn, how well they perform, who they love or what the world thinks of them. Simply because they are.
They don't have to spend the first part of their lives proving their worth to eventually arrive at the realization that they were worthy all along.
And isn't that something? To realize that what you've spent so many years learning to believe about yourself is something you now hope your children will never have to question in the first place.
The grief of what you didn't get to experience
There's a particular kind of grief in that realization. Not necessarily the grief of losing something you once had. But the grief of discovering what you might have experienced if life had been different.
❤️ The relationships you might have chosen and the decisions you might have made.
❤️ The energy you might have spent creating something beautiful instead of trying to make sense of something that hurt you.
❤️ The love you might have been able to receive without questioning whether you deserved it.
And I think we should be able to speak about that without having to immediately turn it into a beautiful lesson about how everything happens for a reason.
Because I love the woman I am today. I love the life I've created. My marriage, my children, my business, the work I get to do and the extraordinary women I get to work with.
I've created a life that once seemed almost unimaginable, and I did that while moving through experiences that asked more of me than I could ever have anticipated. But I can be deeply grateful for the woman I've become without pretending that I needed every painful experience to happen.
I can love my life and still recognize that there were other possibilities I never got to explore. And I can honor the younger versions of myself who did the very best they could with what they knew at the time.
Perhaps that's one of the things that makes this kind of grief so difficult to recognize. You aren't necessarily longing to return to an earlier chapter. You're beginning to recognize what might now become possible.
And sometimes the unfamiliar thing is something beautiful
I see another version of this in women who have spent years navigating unhealthy love dynamics and then finally find themselves in a safe, loving relationship.
Imagine spending so much of your life learning how to anticipate someone else's moods, how to adjust yourself to keep the peace, how to work for affection or how to recognize the smallest signs that love might be taken away…and then you meet someone who simply loves you.
❤️ Someone who is available.
❤️ Who wants to be with you.
❤️ Who isn't constantly making you question yourself.
You may have longed for that kind of love for years. But what happens when it's finally here? How do you receive a love you've never learned how to live inside?
You can understand intellectually that this relationship is different. You can recognize that the man standing in front of you is not the man who hurt you. And still find yourself responding to moments of intimacy, vulnerability or uncertainty in ways that belong to a different chapter of your life. Because understanding something doesn't automatically mean your body knows how to live it.
And I see something similar happening in business. A woman can know, with every fibre of her being, that she's ready to create her next chapter differently.
From her heart. Her intuition. Her deepest connection with herself.
She can be incredibly successful and still recognize that there are ways of operating she no longer wants to carry into the future. And yet, when she steps into something unfamiliar, she may find herself reaching for the very things she's ready to leave behind.
The controlling. The proving. The working harder. The strategies that once made her feel secure. Not because she doesn't know what she wants. But because living from a new reality asks something different from her than simply understanding it.
You can’t bypass the woman who lived through it all
This is something my own life has taught me, and something that has become an essential part of the work I do with women. You can’t simply decide to expand into a beautiful new version of your life while ignoring the woman and the body that have carried you this far.
I'm all for extraordinary possibilities, big desires, pleasure, success and creating the kind of wealth that changes generations. But I'm not interested in making expansion another place where a woman learns to override herself.
I've experienced the darkness. I've experienced extraordinary highs. I've learned what it takes not only to create beautiful things, but to actually allow myself to receive and hold them.
And what I bring into my work comes from that lived experience. I'm deeply intuitive and spiritual, but I'm also a very practical woman, with both feet on the ground, a healthy dose of sarcasm and a pretty f* amazing sense of humor. 😉
I don't believe we need to float into another dimension every time life asks us to grow. Sometimes we just need to come home to the body we're already living in. To feel what's there…all of it. To recognize the stories we've been carrying. To allow the parts of ourselves that learned to live in one reality to discover that another reality is now possible. Without forcing them to open faster than they're ready to.
I've often described myself as an energetic doula. Because so much of my work is about holding space for a woman to move through something profound, while remaining deeply connected to herself.
Not pushing her into the next version of her life as quickly as possible, but honoring everything that comes with becoming that woman. Your heart, body, desire, grief, love, uncertainty, discomfort and all the parts that still need some time.
Because I'm not interested in helping women create another version of success that they can never fully receive or hold. I want you to be able to live it. To let your body, relationships, and future be part of what you’re creating. To build something that doesn't just look extraordinary from the outside, but feels even more extraordinary to live inside.
Who do you get to be now?
I think there is something incredibly powerful about the moment you begin to understand how deeply your life has been shaped by experiences you never consciously chose. Not so you can spend the rest of your life looking backwards, but because it creates the possibility of choosing differently.
❤️ You can have compassion for the woman who accepted breadcrumbs of love without needing to continue accepting them.
❤️ You can recognize why you worked so hard to prove yourself without needing to continue proving your worth.
❤️ You can grieve the life you might have lived without making the life you've actually lived any less beautiful.
And perhaps most importantly, you can stop expecting the woman you were to already know how to live the life that is now becoming available to you. Because of course she doesn't know. She's never been here before. And perhaps that's where an entirely different question begins:
Not, Who would I have been if none of this had happened?
but...
Who do I get to be now that I know there's so much more available to me? And how much of that life am I willing to let myself receive?
Coming next: choosing life without guarantees
In part 3 of this series, we're going one layer deeper. Because what happens when you stop trying to protect yourself from everything life might make you feel?
When you know, through lived experience, that loving fully, trusting yourself and following your heart will never guarantee that life won't break it again? The goal was never to avoid another broken heart.
The goal was to become the kind of woman who would keep choosing life anyway.
And that's exactly where we're going next. ❤️ Haven't read part 1 yet? In “I was a woman who always knew…until life broke my heart”, I share how losing my daughter Anna Sophia changed my relationship with myself, my intuition and the woman I once knew myself to be.
Your body deserves to be part of this journey too.
Because understanding your patterns, your past and even your deepest desires is one thing…allowing your body to come along as you open to a different way of living is something else entirely.
I've created a free womb audio to invite you to soften, reconnect with your body and listen to the wisdom that has always been within you. Not another thing to fix or work through. Just a beautiful moment to be with yourself and all that you are.
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