The Authentic Space

I wanted to write about why I chose to name this The Authentic Space, because it was born from a lived decision.

2025 was one of the most challenging years of my life. It came with a lot of loss, not necessarily the typical kind, but the loss of a career that had been my everything, the loss of health (albeit temporarily), and the loss of relationships. It would have been easy for this year to have crushed me, but that’s not who I am.

It was also the year I received my ADHD diagnosis. I’d suspected it for a long time and had self-diagnosed for years. When I started my ADHD coaching course, it felt like the right time to know for sure. It didn’t feel right to be supporting others with something I hadn’t fully understood in myself.

Around June or July, I looked back at my New Year’s list. I don’t like New Year’s resolutions, but I do like setting intentions. What struck me was that long before any of this unfolded, I had written one simple thing: to be more authentic. At the time, it felt aspirational, even vague. Looking back, it feels quietly significant.

If you’d told me what that would actually involve, I don’t know that I would have chosen it. But here I am, at the end of 2025, starting a business I’m deeply passionate about. I’ve walked away from a career that, quite honestly, was hurting me. I’ve let go of relationships that no longer aligned with my values. And my health is finally on the up.

I now understand that the glandular fever I experienced was part of a much bigger burnout story. It had been building for years. When I look back, the warning signs were everywhere. It’s unsettling to see how clearly they show up in hindsight, and even harder to recognise them in people around you.

There’s a part of me that wishes I could go back to that version of myself and shake her, tell her that her body was talking and it was time to listen. But it took my body screaming before I was ready to hear it.

Glandular fever forced me to come to a full stop. I had to stop working. I had to stop socialising. I had to stop life. All I could do was be, get better, and look after myself. Recovery wasn’t simple. My nervous system was in chaos, and I had to help it learn to trust me again. Slowly, it is. And slowly, I’m learning to listen to the quieter signals instead of waiting for everything to fall apart.

Before that stop, life was fast-paced and always on the go. I was constantly busy, constantly planning, constantly moving. The morning I was diagnosed with glandular fever, I’d just run an 8k and was training for a 10k race. I was doing yoga, but it was performance-focused rather than restorative. I wasn’t really listening to my body.

I missed flare-ups. My skin, my eyes, my immunity. I was ill all the time, fighting one thing only to catch the next. Emotionally, I was overwhelmed, spiralling, crying frequently, having outbursts that felt disproportionate but uncontrollable. Being “high functioning” hid just how unwell I really was.

What’s striking now is how different things look. We’re deep into winter, and I haven’t been constantly sick. My body is calmer because my life is calmer.

Authenticity, for me, isn’t about values written on a page. It’s about living a life that actually works for you. I spent years in a profession centred on caring for others, often at the expense of caring for myself. Working long days within rigid systems left very little space for rest, recovery, or listening inwardly. Over time, that way of living simply stopped being sustainable.

I needed autonomy and flexibility over my time. I needed not just time, but space. Space to think. Space to be. Space to enjoy rest rather than collapse into it. Space to work with my body instead of constantly pushing against it.

I’ve always been someone who strived for growth, achievement, progression, and success, and by many measures, I had that. What I hadn’t realised was that success can look different. Success can be pacing yourself. Success can be recovery. Success can be learning to trust your body again.

Practically, life now is slower, but it’s still productive. I’ve learned that with ADHD, I work best in sprints rather than marathons. But sprints require recovery. The burnout came from treating every day like back-to-back sprints with no pause in between. Now, I work with my brain instead of fighting it.

The Authentic Space exists for people who recognise themselves somewhere in this story. Burnt-out professionals. Neurodivergent and non-neurodivergent people alike. People who have chased a version of success that the world tells us to want, only to find it doesn’t quite fit.

This space is about creating lives that feel sustainable, honest, and aligned. Lives where success includes health, self-trust, and enough room to breathe.