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I had a one-year-old and a two-year-old, fifteen months apart. COVID struck. My husband's business stopped overnight. I was studying for my therapy qualification at the kitchen table after the kids went to bed. And I was completely, utterly exhausted and lost.

Not in a way anyone could see. From the outside I was coping — I was always coping. So I kept performing a competence I no longer had. When people found out I was at home with two tiny children and simultaneously training to become a psychotherapist, they called me superwoman. I felt like a complete fraud.

I was studying, at that exact time, the theoretical impact of a mother's mental health on her children. Reading it at midnight. Quietly applying it to myself. Concluding I was damaging them.

I had three sisters and a mum, all within an hour. One sister lived five minutes away.

I didn't tell any of them.

The moment I remember most clearly: sitting in my car on the driveway — the only place I could get any privacy — on Zoom with my own therapist. She asked me a question that stopped me completely.

What do you do for fun?

I sat with it. I genuinely searched. And there was nothing there. I had disappeared — not dramatically, but quietly, gradually, one small self-abandonment at a time.

Eventually something surfaced. I'd go to a funfair. I'd go on a roller coaster. I wanted to feel like the version of me that existed before I became somebody's mother.

It was my therapist who helped me see it — not just the exhaustion, but underneath it, a whole interlocking system of rules I'd been following my entire life without once knowing they were rules. Be Strong. Be Perfect. Try Hard. Rules that had looked like resilience and capability and strength — until they were pulling me under.

When I finally understood what was happening, I made a call I'd been putting off for months. I called my sister.

I'm a therapist who trained while drowning in this. I know the gap between understanding the theory and still feeling like a failure — because I lived in that gap. I know what it costs to follow rules you never chose. And I know what changes when you finally see them clearly.

I'm not here to tell you that you're doing great. Even though I know you are.

I'm here to help you see what's actually going on — with honesty, a fair amount of dark humour, and the kind of directness that either makes you immediately trust someone or immediately close the tab.