The Bit I Don't Put in My Bio
There's something I don't talk about much, because honestly, for a long time I was too embarrassed to.
About five years ago, I was waking up at 2am most nights. Not just stirring and drifting back off. Wide awake, heart tight, reaching for my phone. Scrolling mindlessly, trying to outrun thoughts that were already going a million miles an hour.
I'd been a Legal PA and team leader for twenty years. I was good at it. I was the person people came to for support, when things needed sorting, when there was a crisis or a tricky situation. I held everything together at work and prided myself on it.
And at home I was trying to do the same. My daughter Abbey is everything to me, she is my absolute why. But in those 2am moments, worrying about this, that and everything, replaying every mistake I'd ever made, the thought that kept creeping in underneath everything else was: I don't want her to grow up feeling this way about herself.
But in the daytime? I was fine. Smiling, holding everyone else and everything together, while quietly hating myself and living in constant fear of being found out.
I had wanted to retrain as a therapist for years. But every time I got close to doing something about it, the voice in my head would start. Who do you think you are? What if you're not good enough?
So I stayed stuck. Capable and stuck. Performing and stuck. Waking up at 2am wondering if I was going slightly mad, while also knowing, in my heart, that something had to change.
What shifted things for me was really understanding what was going on underneath all of it. Not trying to push through it or manage it better, but actually going back to where it started. Something in me finally let go. For the first time in years, I stopped blaming myself. I started seeing those patterns as old stories that had simply stopped working for me.
The moment I knew everything had changed was when I walked into a room full of complete strangers on my own, absolutely terrified, to start my RTT Live training. I would never have done that before. But something in me knew I had to. And that week genuinely changed my life.
That's why I do this work.
And that's why, if you're reading this and thinking nobody would understand, I genuinely do. 💗
Jess x