What Happens When You Finally Press Pause

We’re taught to push through.

To keep going.

To hold it all together.

So when I told a friend I was thinking about leaving my job — walking away from 34 years in a successful career — she replied with kindness:

“You’re the strongest, most resilient person I know. You’ve got this.”

And I knew she meant well. But what I wanted to say — what I was screaming inside — was:

“I don’t want to be strong anymore.”

I was tired of being resilient.

Tired of performing capability.

Tired of being seen as some sort of superwoman — when, truthfully, I often felt the exact opposite.

Because when you’re known for holding it all together, people don’t always notice that you’re unraveling underneath.

Or that what you really want… is to stop.

What We Carry Without Realising

Without realising it, I was carrying everything — and everyone.

I was so used to being the solutions-focused one, the person who stepped in, fixed things, made things happen.

It was like my brain had a switch:

Problem? → Solution.

Need? → Me.

And I kept doing it, without stopping to ask whether it was sustainable — or even aligned.

I didn’t see how much I’d been holding until I stopped.

Until I hit the brakes.

There wasn’t a dramatic breaking point.

No health scare. No big meltdown.

Just a quiet, unignorable truth:

I’d run out of gas.

And the energy I did have was being spent on things that didn’t bring me joy.

I wasn’t falling apart.

But I wasn’t living either.

I was managing life — not experiencing it.

What the Pause Revealed

Hitting the brakes didn’t spark a grand revelation.

What it gave me… was quiet.

A quietness I hadn’t heard in years.

For the first time in a long time, I craved stillness — not stimulation.

I wanted to be outdoors, to breathe differently, to move slower.

Nature became something I didn’t just enjoy — I needed it.

It was as if being outside confirmed what my body already knew:

I wasn’t caged anymore.

I began to hear things again — birdsong in the morning, the wind in the trees.

And I realised how many mornings I could have listened…

But instead, I’d thrown myself onto the hamster wheel.

For clients. For colleagues. For everyone else.

The pause didn’t just slow me down.

It showed me that I’d changed.

I was older.

Wiser.

More honest.

And I no longer wanted to “power through” — I wanted to feel alive.

I wanted a life that felt aligned — not just efficient.

I wanted my days to feel like mine.

What Becomes Possible

The quiet gave me time to think.

To breathe.

To remember.

It gave me possibility — where before there had only been pressure.

It gave me creativity — ideas, words, sparks I thought I’d left behind.

It gave me connection — to other women who were feeling exactly the same way, but had never been given the space to say it out loud.

It gave me a new kind of purpose.

Not one defined by metrics or titles.

But by meaning. By energy. By alignment.

I began to shed the hustle.

The commute.

The performance of resilience I’d wrapped myself in for years.

And in that soft unraveling, I found something I hadn’t expected:

Peace.

My love of writing returned.

That creativity? It sparked The Wild Becoming Journal — my first self-published book.

A small act, maybe. But for me, it was a new beginning.

I realised I could still do hard things.

I could still be brave.

Still take up space.

Still stretch beyond my comfort zone — but without the push, the proving, or the performance.

The pause didn’t make me smaller.

It made me clearer.

It helped me regulate, reimagine, and remember who I truly was — beyond all the noise.

The Real Invitation

Every day, we are offered an invitation.

An invitation to greet the day as we want to live it.

To experience it in a way that feels honest.

To shape it according to what we need — not what’s expected.

But most of the time, we don’t take it.

We rush. We serve. We repeat.

We move through life as if we’ll always get another go.

And then midlife arrives.

And we realise: we can’t go back.

Things happened the way they did.

We can’t rewrite the past.

But we can change how we meet the present.

We can choose how we breathe into this moment.

We can choose how we show up — for ourselves, first.

And that is what happens when you’re brave enough to press pause.

You open the door to a life that’s yours.

You say yes to the chapter that hasn’t been written yet.

One breath.

One word.

One experience at a time.