Me, Myself and I

On self-sabotage, supporting everyone else, and designing a life that feels like your own

Today I started clearing out some old notebooks and found a familiar version of myself staring back at me.

Page after page of plans, ideas, ambitions, false starts, little promises to myself. And what struck me was not that I had no direction. It was that, for the past 12 years or so, I’ve been trying to get from what I could do to what I actually wanted to do.

And they are not the same thing.

I’ve always had things I was good at. Administrative roles. Support roles. Organising, managing, helping other people shine, helping things happen behind the scenes. I could always fall back on that. It was sensible. Respectable. Useful. It paid. It made sense to other people. It made sense to me, too. But it was never the dream.

The dream was always somewhere else, slightly out of reach, embarrassing to say out loud. Post-grad in gender and critical theory. A literary agent. An artist’s agent. A writer. Something closer to the live wire of things. Something with excitement and ideas and risk in it. Something where I was not just helping someone else do the thing, but doing the thing myself.

But somehow those versions of my life never quite came to be, despite the fact that the opportunities were there, glimpses of another life.

It wasn’t because I wasn’t clever enough, or talented enough, or hardworking enough.

It was confidence and self-esteem. Well, the lack of it. Not in the shallow sense - not just “believe in yourself” written in curly writing on Instagram. Something more foundational than that. I couldn’t see myself in the starring role. I couldn’t see myself taking the lead, making decisions, being the one who backed her own ideas and expected other people to take them seriously. Because I didn’t take myself seriously. Now, assisting, I could do that. Supporting. Making someone else’s life run more beautifully, more efficiently, more successfully.

And because I could imagine that, I became very good at it.

The problem with being good at supporting everyone else

I even used to make it my USP when applying for senior assistant roles that I didn’t really want and knew I would get sick of within six months. In interviews I would say, quite sincerely, that I preferred being behind the scenes. That I was there to support them to get their work done.

And of course I would get THAT job.

Because I was telling the truth. Or a truth. Just not the whole truth. The whole truth was that being behind the scenes was not just a preference. It was also a hiding place.

So instead I tried to combine things. To have one foot in the sensible world and one foot in the world I actually longed for. To have some kind of creative life, although I wouldn’t have called it that then. A creative practice sounded far too grand. A business even more so. How could I be a businesswoman? The word itself felt faintly ridiculous in relation to me. Then add motherhood to that, and suddenly I was trying to be three people at once, all while not properly allowing any of them to take up full space.

Looking back now, I can see that a lot of what I thought was pragmatism was actually self-sabotage in a respectable coat. What self-sabotage looked like for me

Not the dramatic kind. Nothing cinematic. No spectacular implosion. Just the quieter kind that can pass for being sensible, or busy, or humble, or realistic. To paraphrase Thoreau, Living a life of quiet desperation with the song still in me.

Repeating patterns I already knew, from experience, led to burnout. Undercharging, or not charging at all, for things that took real skill and energy. Not using the goodwill, support, contacts or opportunities I had built up over time. Doing the same things and expecting a different result, which sounds absurd when you write it down, but is probably how lots of lives get built. Telling myself I wanted one thing while continuing to organise my days around another.

I think that is what strikes me most. Not that I got it wrong, exactly. More that I kept circling. Circling the thing I wanted. Circling a bigger life. Circling my own agency.

What I didn’t realise I was learning

Yet, I didn’t realise I was gathering the exact material I would later need. What I didn’t realise then was that this would become the basis of the work I now do with clients.

I know what it feels like to be a freelancer and undercharge for your services because you don’t quite believe you’re allowed to ask for more. I know what it feels like to underestimate your value, to struggle to say no, to not take yourself entirely seriously, to keep behaving in ways that do not support the life you say you want.

I know what it is to be bright, capable, full of ideas, and still somehow not fully on your own side.

And that, to me, is part of what makes me qualified to help people. Not because I emerged from the sea fully formed with a perfect life and a laminated answer sheet. But because I know these patterns from the inside. I know how subtle they are. I know how easily they masquerade as personality, or circumstance, or just the way things are.

I also know that when I have backed myself, things happen. Good things. Surprising things. Brave things.

I opened a women-only gallery here in Lewes, East Sussex, and worked with my dream artist, Jennifer Binnie. I arranged for her to connect with Jennifer Higgie, who wrote the introduction to the show catalogue. When I think about that now, what strikes me is not just the fact of it, but the evidence. The evidence that I was never incapable. The evidence that I could make things happen. The evidence that somewhere in me there has always been someone with vision, taste, boldness and initiative.

Why this matters in my coaching work

But so often, women like me are much better at applying those qualities in service of other people than we are in service of ourselves. That is something I notice all the time in the people I work with. They are brilliant at helping their clients see the bigger picture. They can spot talent, potential, growth edges. They can market, organise, support, encourage, strategise. They can often see exactly what someone else needs to do next.

But when it comes to their own lives, their own work, their own dream, something holds them back. They lose perspective. They downplay what they want. They tell themselves they’re being realistic. They get stuck in old roles long after those roles have stopped fitting.

This is one of the reasons I love coaching. Not because I think people need fixing. Quite the opposite. Often the person in front of me already has almost everything they need. The intelligence is there. The sensitivity is there. The talent is there. The desire is there. What is missing is not worth, but permission. Clarity. Structure. Someone outside the pattern who can help them see it.

Someone to help them see: this is the bit where you keep abandoning yourself.

And this is the bit where you don’t have to.

Patterns, habits, and the life you are actually living

That, to me, is what habit change is really about. Not a shinier planner. Which I have many of. Not waking up at 5am and drinking green juice while pretending not to hate it. But the deeper patterns. The loops you live inside. The ways you keep proving an old story to yourself. The identities you cling to because they once kept you safe. The behaviours that made sense once, perhaps, but do not make sense now.

I am interested in that moment when someone begins to see the connection between their daily habits and the life they are living. Or not living. The moment they see that burnout is not random. Undercharging is not random. Procrastination is not random. Hiding is not random. There are patterns. And patterns can change. There is choice.

Design your life

I think that is why the phrase design your life means something very particular to me. Not a glossy, optimised, colour-coded life. Not a life arranged to look good from the outside. I mean a life that is consciously made. A life that reflects who you are, what you want, what you value, and what you are no longer willing to keep repeating. A life that feels like yours.

That is different from coping. Different from getting through. Different from being useful to everyone else while privately feeling like your own life is happening in the wings.

So perhaps this is what all those notebooks were really documenting. Not failure. Not inconsistency. Not another abandoned plan. But the long, messy, sometimes painful process of trying to come back to myself. Trying to become someone who could stop waiting to be chosen. Trying to become someone who could take her own desires seriously. Trying to become someone who no longer confused being needed with being fulfilled.

Me, myself and I

And I think that is why this work matters to me so much now.

Because I know there are other women living in that same tension. Highly capable. Deeply thoughtful. Good at many things. Reliable, supportive, creative, full of ideas. And yet somehow living just to the side of themselves. Slightly displaced from their own centre.

Helping them return to that centre — that is the work. Helping them notice the patterns, change the habits, trust themselves more, and take the next step towards the life they actually want. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But honestly.

Me, myself and I.

Three people, for a long time.

Perhaps now, finally, becoming one.

A gentle invitation

If any of this feels familiar, you are not alone.

A lot of capable women are brilliant at holding everyone else up while quietly losing touch with their own direction. Sometimes what is needed is not more pressure, or more self-criticism, but a bit more honesty, a bit more support, and a bit more help seeing the pattern clearly.

That is the space I try to offer in my coaching. A place to untangle what is keeping you stuck, understand the habits and beliefs underneath it, and begin moving towards a life that feels more like your own.

If this speaks to you, you’re welcome to explore my coaching work.