When the life you’ve built stops fitting

I want to tell you a story – not the neatly packaged version we’re used to sharing online, but the real one. The one that usually comes out only in late-night voice notes to close friends or in those moments where you finally stop pretending everything’s fine.

For most of my adult life, I did everything you’re supposed to do. I worked hard. I built a career that mattered. I moved from corporate to NGO, from small local campaigns to international ones.

I collected degrees, led teams, travelled across continents. I worked in places that changed me – interviewing former child soldiers, sitting with women who’d survived trafficking, visiting communities carrying more resilience than resources.

From the outside, it all looked purposeful. Impressive, even. And honestly, for a long time, it was.

But somewhere between all the “impact” and the endless striving to do good, something in me started going quiet. The kind of losing-yourself you don’t notice until you suddenly do. I’d spent years helping organisations find their voice while mine was barely a whisper.

When my son was born in 2019, the cracks started to show. Little ones at first. I’d come home from work so depleted I’d sit on the floor and stare at the wall, too tired to play with him. Too tired to talk. Too tired to feel like myself. But I kept going. Because that’s what women like us do – we keep going.

Then in 2022, my mum died. And grief has this brutal way of stripping your life back to the studs. It doesn’t care about your job title or your “potential” or the version of yourself you’ve been performing. It just asks the only question that matters:

Is this your life… or is this the life you’re performing for everyone else?

And the honest answer for me was:

No.

It wasn’t my life anymore. Not the life I wanted, anyway.

The role that once felt meaningful had become misaligned. The career I’d built so carefully no longer fit the woman I’d become. My confidence was thinning. My voice was getting quieter. My sense of self kept slipping through the cracks.

Everything didn’t collapse in one go. It was more like a slow unravelling – a relentless reminder that something had to change.

And eventually, I listened. I stepped away from the security of full-time work. I started up my consultancy. I trained as a coach. I started again – slowly, quietly, with grief sitting in the room beside me.

And when life opened a door, we moved back to India – to Goa – a place that had held me once before and still felt like a home I hadn’t finished living in.

I’ll always remember the moment I knew we’d made the right decision. It was my son’s birthday, just after we arrived. We walked down to the beach at dusk – the sea warm, the sky full of bird kites, tiny sand crabs sprinting across the shore. Zach ran straight into the water, laughing from his belly. I stood there with my toes in the sand and felt a deep exhale I didn’t know I’d been holding.

Oh. This. This is the life that fits. Not the one I was performing my way through. This one.

Not perfect. Not polished. Not the kind of life that wins awards or impresses anyone at a networking event. But it was mine.

When I stopped performing and started listening to myself – properly listening – pieces of me began to return. My voice. My clarity. My humour. My North-East bluntness. My ambition, but on my terms. My ability to take up space again. My actual self.

It wasn’t reinvention. It was remembering.

And that’s where OffScript was born.

Not out of a desire to create a “brand,” but out of a need to tell the truth – to stop performing and start living. To help other women do the same. To create the space I wish I’d had before everything collapsed.

Here’s what I know now:

The rules are fake.

You are allowed to want what you want. You’re allowed to change before things break. You’re allowed to rewrite your story from a place of agency, not aftermath.

So let me ask you the same question that changed everything for me:

Where in your life are you still following a script that was never written for you?

Don’t force an answer. Just notice what rises first. It’s usually the truth.

Sarah x