WHEN MY LIFE STARTED FALLING APART, I TRIED TO FIX IT AND PUT IT BACK EXACTLY AS IT WAS...
I didn’t think I was entering some profound new chapter of life.
I thought things had just gone badly wrong.
But in reality, my marriage was ending. My family was breaking apart. My children were suddenly living on another continent. My career had disappeared. The future I thought was still in front of me was becoming harder and harder to recognise.
I was left with fragments of what had once felt whole.
I desperately tried to put the pieces back together.
The marriage. The work. The relationships. The future I had planned. The money.
I wanted my old life back.
Even though I hadn’t been happy with the life I was living.
I had always assumed life would somehow continue in one direction. You adjust the plan, change jobs, move countries, solve the next problem — and eventually things fall back into place, as they always had before.
But this time was different.
The old way I knew how to live stopped working.
And with it went something I hadn’t expected to lose: my sense of who I was.
I had known myself through the life around me. Husband. Father. Career. Family. Home. The person who knew what came next.
Without those things around me in the same way, I was no longer so sure.
IF I CAN’T GET MY OLD LIFE BACK, THEN WHO AM I NOW?
That question is where Reauthoring Life began.
I started noticing what I do when life becomes uncomfortable.
I think. I plan. I analyse. I try to fix things. I imagine another future.
I can become very good at being somewhere other than where I am.
And I began to wonder what all that thinking and fixing was protecting me from feeling.
NOT KNOWING
Not knowing what comes next.
Not knowing who I am becoming.
Not rushing to fill the empty space simply because it makes me uncomfortable.
But not giving up either.
Not drifting wherever life happens to take me.
I am trying to find the space between those two things: staying open to what is happening without giving up responsibility for where I go next.
WHAT ELSE IS HERE?
Beneath all the loss, something else has begun to appear.
Curiosity.
I don’t want to spend the years I have left arguing with what happened.
I want to know what it may have opened.
What still feels alive?
What am I resisting because it doesn’t fit the person I thought I was supposed to be?
What keeps asking for my attention?
And what if I stop trying to force life back into its old shape?
What is true now?
What am I actually feeling?
What am I holding onto because it is genuinely mine — and what am I holding onto because I am frightened of who I might be without it?
What am I avoiding saying?
What can I change — and what do I need to accept?
When do I need to take the helm?
And when do I need to stop fighting the wind?
WHO AM I WITH OTHER PEOPLE?
I am beginning to look at that differently too.
Can I listen without preparing my defence?
Can I stay present when I want to withdraw, explain or fix?
Can I say what is true for me without needing the other person to agree?
Can I allow somebody else to have their experience without trying to make it easier for myself?
Maybe reauthoring my life isn’t only about finding a different direction.
Maybe it is also about learning to meet life — and other people — differently.