I started this blog in 2021. If you've read that first post, you'll know the version of me who wrote it: curious, a little self-conscious about putting herself out there, juggling a demanding day job with a half-finished manuscript and a habit of writing things down to figure out what she actually thought. That person was real. She just didn't know what was coming.
The year everything stopped
In 2022, I burned out. Not the tired, overwhelmed, needs-a-holiday kind. The kind that ends with you in a hospital bed, unable to find your own words, wondering if you've had a stroke. I've written about that year elsewhere, because it deserves its own space, but the short version is this: I had been pushing for so long that my body eventually made the decision I wasn't willing to make for myself. It stopped. I lost my ability to speak for over fifteen hours. It took close to nine months before I could acknowledge what stress really was and how it was the cause of my health scare. Then I learned what it actually meant.
That year is the reason this blog went quiet for a while. I didn't have it in me to write thought-provoking observations about human behaviour when I was busy relearning how to trust my own body. Writing, which had always been the thing that helped me process the world, suddenly felt like one more thing I couldn't manage. So I stopped, for longer than I meant to.
Burning my life down to find out what was actually mine
What came after surprised me more than the burnout did, because the truth is, I didn't just recover. I had to take the whole structure of my life apart to see what was actually load-bearing and what had just been decoration. The job title. The promotion I'd wanted so badly it nearly cost me my health. The version of myself who looked great on paper was quietly running on empty. None of it survived the year intact, and for a long time I genuinely didn't know what would be left once I stopped holding it all up by force.
What was left, it turned out, was almost nothing I expected and everything I needed. It wasn't a graceful unravelling. It was closer to demolition, the kind where you don't get to choose which walls come down first. I had to sit with the parts of myself I'd spent thirty years avoiding: the need to be perfect, the fear of being seen as weak, the quiet belief that my worth was tied to how much I could carry without complaint. That introspection was not gentle. It was some of the hardest, most disorienting work I have ever done, and there were months where I genuinely didn't know what I was rebuilding toward, only that the old version of building wasn't available to me anymore.
Rebuilding, piece by piece, with no blueprint
Recovery asked me to actually live the things I'd only ever written about. Rest. Boundaries. Listening to the body instead of overriding it. There was no five-step plan for this part. I rebuilt slowly, mostly by trial and error, often getting it wrong before I got it right.
Yoga was the first piece. It had been in my life for years already, but somewhere in that process, it stopped being something I did for fitness or stress relief and became something closer to a practice of paying attention. I trained as a yoga teacher from 2024 onwards and have been teaching since, which still surprises me some days, because teaching asked me to embody the regulation I was only just learning myself, in real time, in front of a room.
From there, it kept building. I went on to study meditation facilitation, then sound medicine, then breath work, each one teaching me something further about how the body holds what the mind can't always name. None of this was planned in any strategic sense. It built itself out of necessity, one training leading honestly into the next, because each one answered a question the last had raised.
What the blog has become, and where the app fits
The blog that exists now is shaped by all of that. It's no longer a thought journal squeezed into the gaps around a demanding job. It's become something closer to the centre of how I work and what I believe: that the body knows things before the mind catches up, that depth matters more than reach, that wellness content doesn't have to perform calm to actually offer it.
Words & Contemplations grew out of that belief, and so did the practice work I do through Move with Fai. The Contemplations app, which is coming, is really just this same instinct translated into audio: a place to slow down and listen to what's actually happening inside you, before it has to make you listen the hard way, the way it made me.
Why I'm telling you all of this
I share the burnout story not because I think my experience is unique. Unfortunately, it isn't. I share it because I wish someone had told me, before that day, that doing everything "right," the yoga, the journaling, the healthy food, good job, the great marriage, doesn't protect you if you've never learned to be honest about what you actually need. I learned it the hard way, through a kind of introspection I would not have chosen if my body hadn't forced the issue. I'd rather you didn't have to learn it that way too.
So if you're new here: welcome. This isn't the blog I started in 2021, not really. It's the one that came after I stopped being able to outrun what I was avoiding, took the whole thing apart, and rebuilt it slowly, piece by piece, into something truer. I'm still learning. I imagine I always will be. But I'm glad to be doing it here, with you, rather than alone.
