I don’t remember what triggered it exactly. I think it was a Thursday. I know it was raining, and I know I was standing in my kitchen, and I know my kids were somewhere behind me doing something small and ordinary — and then I just stopped.
Not dramatically. Not in the way people picture a breakdown. I didn’t slide down a wall. I didn’t sob. I just stood there holding a mug I’d already forgotten to drink from, and thought: I am not okay.
The strange thing was how unfamiliar it felt to even think those words. Not the feeling itself — I’d been living in that feeling for months, maybe longer. But to name it, even quietly, even only to myself — that felt like crossing a line I hadn’t known was there.
I had spent a long time being the strong one.
Honestly, I don’t say that to sound noble. It was just the role I’d grown into, the way you grow into a coat that fits well enough that you stop noticing it’s not actually yours. I was the one people called. The one who showed up. The one who kept things moving when things needed moving.
Being okay wasn’t just something I felt — it was something I performed, usually without realizing I was performing it. I smiled at the right times. I said “I’m fine, just tired” with such practiced ease that I believed it myself for stretches of days. I filed the harder things away for later, always later, and later never quite arrived.
I was good at it. That’s the thing no one tells you about high-functioning. People compliment you for it. You get called resilient, capable, inspiring. And every time someone said I don’t know how you do it, there was a part of me that quietly agreed — because I didn’t know either, and the not-knowing had started to feel like a warning I kept choosing to ignore.
What finally got through, on that rainy Thursday in the kitchen, was something very small.
One of my kids said my name and I didn’t hear them. Not because I was distracted by something important. Because I was standing there with a mug going cold, completely hollow, somewhere else entirely. They said it twice before I turned around. And the look on their face — not worried, just puzzled, just Mum, where did you go — cracked something open.
I said it out loud to a therapist a few days later. Not with any particular drama. Just: I’m not okay and I haven’t been for a while.
She didn’t look surprised. Of course she didn’t. That’s the other thing nobody tells you — the people whose job it is to see you have usually seen you long before you can see yourself.
My kids were still young then. Life had that particular density it has when children are small and your time doesn’t quite belong to you and the days blur into each other without clear edges. I was in the middle of it all — holding things together the way I always had — but something had quietly come loose underneath.
Therapy helped me find it. Not all at once, and not painlessly, but it helped me start learning what I hadn’t known I needed to learn: that I had a body that stored things I hadn’t processed, a nervous system that had been running on high alert for longer than I realised, emotions I’d been managing by not quite feeling them.
That season of my life cracked me open in ways I didn’t choose. But it also gave me something I’ve carried ever since.
I’m not seeing a therapist anymore — it’s been years. What I have now is something I built slowly, on my own, through a lot of trial and a lot of error: the ability to actually feel what’s happening in me without immediately trying to fix it or push past it. To notice when the low is coming and meet it with something other than performance. To regulate, to sit with discomfort, to know the difference between a hard day and something that needs more from me.
I didn’t get here cleanly. There was no breakthrough moment that sorted everything out. It was more like a gradual accumulation of small choices — to name things honestly, to rest when resting felt like failure, to stop abandoning myself in the interest of keeping everything else afloat.
I’ve thought a lot about why it took me so long to say those words in the first place.
Part of it was identity, I’d built so much of myself around being capable that not being okay felt like evidence I’d been lying about who I was. Part of it was fear: of being seen as weak, of being too much, of losing the only version of myself I knew how to be.
And the other part of it — probably the biggest part — was that I’d never been taught that not being okay was an option.
I grew up watching people carry things quietly. I learned that you hold it together, you keep going, and you save the falling apart for somewhere private and brief. I absorbed that lesson so thoroughly it stopped feeling like a lesson. It just felt like what you did.
It took me a long time to understand that naming what was real wasn’t the same as failing. That saying I’m not okay wasn’t the end of the story. It was, in fact, the only place where anything could begin.
So, I started this blog because I wanted a space that was just mine. Not a platform, not a resource, not a guide to anything. Just the place where I tell the truth about what it’s actually been like — the parts that don’t make it onto the content calendar, the parts that aren’t neat or resolved or useful in a listicle.
This is one of those parts.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of your own version of that Thursday — going through the motions, holding something heavy you haven’t found words for yet — I’m not going to tell you what to do. But I’ll say this: there was a version of me that thought saying I’m not okay would break something. And there was an after. And the after, however imperfect and ongoing, was worth getting to.