The Life That Wasn’t Mine

Before I was anyone’s mother, I was an environmental engineer. Logic, research, evidence, that was my language. So, when my husband and I decided I’d stay home until our boys started school, I didn’t sit still. I just couldn’t. I threw myself into running our local Polish mums’ group, the Polish playground, Saturday school. Yes, achievement had always been how I proved my worth, I just moved the achievement indoors.

Then baby #3 arrived. A troubled pregnancy. A caesarean. A recovery that refused to hurry. Everything about it was the opposite of the woman I thought I was – someone who performed, who produced, who kept moving. Fast.

Postnatal depression didn’t feel like a diagnosis. It kind off felt inevitable. I was doing the most important job of my life – raising three boys – and some part of me had filed it under “doesn’t count.” Not an achievement. Just upkeep. I felt worthless while doing the one thing that mattered most, and I couldn’t see the contradiction until years later.

I tried talking to the people around me. But they were walking nervous wrecks too, running on the same overloaded systems I was. Nobody could hand me a way out because nobody I knew had found one. I thought that the exhaustion, the numbness, the going-through-the-motions was just what motherhood for expats was.

Then I found yoga and meditation.

For the first few sessions, I understood the words but not what they meant. I was an engineer and I trusted logic and research, so I found a teacher that had all the knowledge science backed. But this didn’t move like logic. But I kept showing up anyway, and slowly it started working on me whether I understood it or not. It stirred things loose. My old grief, old rage, unprocessed years, all of it started surfacing. I cried more than I thought a body could hold.

Here’s what I didn’t have language for at the time:

My nervous system was in chronic overload. Polyvagal Theory describes this well – when the body perceives sustained threat (and depletion, isolation, and unmet needs absolutely register as threat), it shifts out of the calm, connected state where clear thinking is even possible. I wasn’t lacking willpower or resilience. I was in a physiological state where “seeing another way” was neurologically off the table.

That’s also why resistance to change wasn’t a character flaw. A nervous system under chronic load will fight to keep things familiar, even when familiar is hurting you – predictability reads as safety, even bad predictability. I was stuck because my body was doing exactly what an overloaded nervous system is built to do: conserve, resist, hold the line.

What yoga did wasn’t spiritual, even though it felt that way. Repeated practice – breath, movement, stillness – is how the nervous system slowly relearns that safety is possible. Neuroscientist dr Donald Hebb’s neurons that fire together, wire together applies here: every session was a rep, subtly building a new pattern underneath the old one. Not a lightning-bolt awakening. A rewiring, one uncomfortable session at a time.

I started calling it an awakening because that’s what it felt like from the inside – waking up to a life that had stopped being mine and slowly understanding why. But underneath the language, it was regulation. My body finally had enough capacity to let me see what my mind had been too flooded to notice.

It’s been nearly a decade.

I still practise daily. I’ve had more of these awakenings since – more moments of realising a piece of my life wasn’t fully mine, more layers to work through. That’s the part nobody tells you: there’s no final session where you’re done. Every emotional charge that moves through your body is information, not a problem you’ve already solved. The work isn’t linear. It’s ongoing.

If you’re reading this and something in you recognises that first feeling – that subtle sense that your life doesn’t feel like yours – that’s not a crisis. That’s your system finally finding enough safety to tell you the truth. What you do next is the only question that matters. You can numb it and keep moving. Or you can let it move through you.