I Was Thriving on Stress. It Was Slowly Killing Me.

My son was three and because he had been diagnosed with celiac disease, I'd made it my personal mission to make sure he never felt different at daycare. So I was recreating their whole four week meal rotation in gluten free versions, portioning everything into containers, separating his bread with cellophane so the slices wouldn't freeze together.

One evening, exhausted and completely maxed out, I went to put the bread away and the freezer drawer wouldn't close. It was too full. And I lost it. A loud, raw, ugly outburst directed at an appliance. When I looked up, I was staring into the eyes of my three year old son.

That wasn't the life I'd pictured. My husband and I had tried for seven years to have kids. I'd imagined something simple. A family that eats dinner together and plays board games and feels happy. A mom who's calm and present. Instead I was screaming at a freezer, and I'd just let my little boy see a version of me I never wanted him to meet.

You might recognise a version of this. Not a freezer, maybe. Maybe it's the moment you snapped at someone you love over nothing, or sat in your car in the driveway for ten extra minutes because you couldn't face going inside yet. The specific thing is never really the thing. It's just where something bigger finally cracked the surface.

For me, that freezer wasn't about willpower or discipline at all. It was the moment I finally saw that I wasn't coping, even though from the outside my life looked like it was working. I had the career, the kids, the busy full schedule that looked like success. What I didn't have was any idea how far from okay I actually was.

Not long after, I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. My body had been running on stress hormones for years, and I hadn't just tolerated that, I'd built my whole identity around it. I was good in a crisis. I was the one who could handle anything. I told myself that was a strength. What I didn't understand yet was that I was thriving on stress in the way a fire thrives on fuel, and it was slowly burning through everything underneath.

That freezer was the moment the life I was living finally met the life I'd actually dreamed of, and I saw the gap between them clearly for the first time. So I did something that terrified me. I walked away from a high paying job to find myself and start over.

That decision is the reason I do the work I do now, and it's why I don't just do one kind of coaching. Some of the women I work with need the deep unconscious mind work, NLP and Timeline Therapy, to release a pattern at the root. Others need health coaching to understand what their body has been trying to tell them. Others need life or career coaching to figure out what they actually want underneath what they think they should want. I offer all of it because I lived all of it, and because I want to help women see the gap before it takes a freezer, or a diagnosis, to make it undeniable.

Where in your own life have you been calling it thriving, when it might actually be very well managed depletion.

If that question is landing somewhere real for you, let's talk about it directly. I bring my own experience of this, not just questions back at you, and real strategies that have helped me and the women I work with. You can book a conversation here: wellnesswithwisdom.com/discovery-call

Cheers,
Alison