Nobody Warns You That Falling Apart Can Look Like This

I was standing in my kitchen. Guests gathered in the garden. My son’s second birthday party in full swing around me. And I could not move.

Not even one step. I didn’t know what to do first, or where to start. Me! the woman who always knew what to do first.

From the outside, nothing was wrong. Three boys, a husband, a full life I’d built with my own hands in my husband’s country. But from the inside, something had just switched off. My nervous system, after years of holding everything, had kept score.

That’s what I want to talk about. Not burnout – you’ve read a hundred articles on burnout. I want to talk about unravelling. The specific, disorienting experience of doing everything right and still coming apart at the seams, at exactly the age you were told you’d have it figured out.

How I got to that kitchen

I wanted a big family. Four or five kids, everyone home for Christmas one day, grandchildren underfoot. My older sister made it look easy – six kids, multiple jobs, never a complaint – so I assumed it was in our genes. And I could do it too.

By my third pregnancy I was running a mothers’ group, a playgroup, fundraising, managing two boys under five with no family nearby and a husband who travelled too often for work. I was also, as I’d later understand, a self-confessed control freak and a chronic people pleaser, who hadn’t yet been diagnosed as one.

That pregnancy brought an exhaustion I didn’t recognise – irritability, anger, a rage that frightened even me. Blood tests found a thyroid condition. Luckily medication quickly helped with the mood. Unfortunately, it did nothing for the guilt that followed. Then placenta praevia ruled out the birth I’d planned. At 32 weeks I started bleeding and landed in hospital, I was physically stopped for the first time in years while my mind kept sprinting.

None of that broke me outright. What broke me – or rather, what finally got through to me – was standing in my own kitchen months later, capable and organised and completely unable to take a single step.

What I know now that I didn’t know then

It took me a few years to understand what had happened that day. Longer still to find my way back.

Here’s what I’d tell the woman I was, standing frozen at that party: that moment wasn’t weakness. It was your nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems are built to do! Shutting a system down once it’s absorbed more than it can carry. Dr. Porges calls it a polyvagal response. Dr. Van der Kolk calls it the body keeping score.

Dear one, the feeling of off – the gap between a life that looks right and a life that feels right – isn’t ingratitude. It isn’t you being difficult, or asking for too much, or failing at something everyone else finds easy. It’s a signal, information. Something important to you isn’t being honoured, and your body has run out of subtler ways to tell you.

Once all the boys started school, I went back to corporate after the motherhood/business owner burnout. It gave me a sense of purpose, an income, and it gave me the means to invest in learning this work on deeper level. When corporate started to feel just as overwhelming, I left again – wiser this time about where my energy actually goes.

I’m 44 now, five months back into running this practice full-time, and some days the old voice still shows up: you should be further along by now. I still have to catch it. I still have to choose, deliberately, to meet myself where I actually am instead of where I think I should be.

The unravelling isn’t the problem

If you’re capable, driven, the one everyone relies on – and something in you has started to come loose despite doing everything “right” – I want you to hear this clearly: that’s not you falling apart. That’s your body finally getting your attention.

The woman underneath the performance, underneath the roles you’ve been managing so well for so long – she hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s been waiting for you to stop long enough to hear her.

That’s where this work begins. Not with another system to bolt onto an already full life. With a return.