I used to be the kind of person who said yes to everything. The promotion. The longer hours. The extra responsibility. I thought that's what you were supposed to do, right? Work hard, keep progressing, be grateful.
And for a long time, I was.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped checking in with myself. I was so busy building a life that looked good from the outside, that I didn't notice I was slowly disappearing on the inside.
It all came to a head one Sunday night.
I remember sitting on the sofa, scrolling through my emails, feeling this wave of dread for the week ahead. And I just thought, I can't do this anymore. It wasn't one dramatic event, it was the realisation that I had been feeling unhappy for so long, I had almost forgotten what happy felt like.
That night, I wrote a list. Not a practical to-do list, but an honest one. What do I actually want? What makes me feel alive? What would I do if I wasn't so scared?
It was the first time in years I had allowed myself to really ask those questions.
The answers didn't come all at once, but that night was the beginning of everything changing.
