Mind the Gap

(12 minute read)

Knowing something needs to change and actually changing it are two completely different things. Most people live in the space between them. This is about what that space actually costs - and what it feels like when you finally leave it.

The gap has a strange quality to it. It feels uncomfortable - sometimes painfully so - and yet there is something oddly comforting about it too. You haven't leapt yet. You haven't stepped into the uncertainty. Whatever is waiting on the other side hasn't happened, which means it can't go wrong. Not yet.

There is a particular kind of paralysis that lives in the gap. It isn't laziness, although it can look a lot like it from the outside. It is more like being frozen between two versions of yourself - the one you are and the one you suspect you could be. And all whilst a quiet voice somewhere underneath all of it keeps asking, gently at first and then somewhat less gently, are you going to move, or what?

And the painful thing? We often know. That's the bit nobody really talks about. It isn't that we don't have a clue what needs to change. It's that we know - and we stay anyway.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to sound like someone who has never had a real problem in their life. Some people face genuine barriers. Circumstances that are not simply a matter of mindset or motivation, and I am not about to stand here and tell anyone that all they need to do is believe in themselves and the universe will sort the rest out. Despite what all the manifestation ‘experts’ say, that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that sometimes - not always, but sometimes - the reasons we give ourselves for not moving are doing a very convincing impression of the truth.

Perhaps I need more information. Perhaps I need better qualifications. Perhaps once the kids are a bit older, perhaps once work calms down, perhaps once I feel ready. And these things can be true, let’s face it, timing matters, preparation matters, but there is a fine line between due diligence and finding increasingly sophisticated reasons to stay exactly where you are.

Waiting to feel ready is just staying, but with better excuses. 

And before the big things, there are always the small ones. The ones that seem trivial but aren't, because they're quietly telling you something the whole time, if you're willing to listen.

The moment I knew

There were two things that arrived close enough together that their weight became impossible to separate. The first was my son leaving. Not dramatically as such, and certainly not badly, just the natural and right thing that children do when they are ready, and that mothers grieve without fully letting on quite how much it costs. But keeping a brave (ish) face whilst he left, then walking back into the ordinary as though the one constant in my life for the last 20 years hadn't just gone, hit hard and deep inside.  

I was fortunate enough to catch up with him a month later in Italy, and what I saw took me a while to understand. He looked lighter. Taller somehow, although not in stature as such. A weight was gone. And it was only in its going that I could finally see it had been there at all. I was so happy for him. But somewhere underneath that gladness, quiet and uninvited, was a longing I hadn't expected - not for him to come back, but for what he had found. That feeling of being in a life that fitted. Of something being set down. I wanted that. I just didn't know yet that wanting it was the beginning of something. 

The second thing was a rejection. I had spent eight months working through a police selection process. Eight months of applications, assessments, preparation, genuine hope and excitement for a new direction, only to be told no. The reason given was that I was too vulnerable.

In hindsight, and as a professional myself, I understand the decision. The role involved twelve months on the beat in unpredictable, often distressing situations - the kind of sustained exposure that could plausibly have triggered a relapse, or worse. The police could not mitigate that risk, and they were right not to try. Part of me has always agreed with it.

But understanding a decision doesn't stop it from hurting. Nor does it quiet the "you're not good enough" voice much. This, after more than thirteen years of recovery. After rebuilding, carefully and with considerable effort, a life that had once come apart so completely I wasn't sure I would survive it. After a degree, a PGCE, roles as a mental health home manager, and a safeguarding lead. Years of working alongside some of the most complex and difficult situations imaginable, and helping hundreds of people through things I hadn't just studied - I had survived. After all of that, the answer was still no - because I was too vulnerable.

It didn't land as a professional setback or as protection from potential harm, even though that is exactly what it was. It landed somewhere older, in the part of me that had never quite stopped wondering: was I simply not enough?

So I did what I have always done. I got on with it. Picked myself up, put the mask back on, and kept going - because that is what I do, what I have always been quietly praised for. You handle things so well. You're so strong. And I am, in a way. But strength and suppression can look identical from the outside, and I had spent a lifetime confusing the two. I told almost nobody. I did not want to cause a fuss, did not want to ask for too much, did not want to be the person falling apart again after all the work I had done not to be “her”. So I carried it. Quietly, and mostly alone, in the way I knew best. 

A couple of months after this, I went to the Lake District, my favourite place in the UK. Alone, which was what I needed. A new tent, a paddleboard, long walks, no expectations and nothing to perform. On the outside it was peaceful. And in many ways, genuinely, it was. But I could not eat. I could not get food to my mouth, and when I managed to, I could not swallow it. My oldest response to pain, the most honest one I have, telling me more reliably than anything else that something has broken. But this time, maybe for the first time, I didn’t try to silence it. I listened.

And underneath all of it, quiet and heavy, was something I recognised and had hoped never to feel again. An emptiness. A nothingness that - cruelly - felt heavier than anything I had ever carried. I had been here before. And I had worked so hard, for so long, never to come back. 

It was that trip that made me come home and take time off work. Not a holiday, not a long weekend, a proper stop. Harder than it sounds, because compassion for myself has never come naturally, especially where my mental health is concerned. Physical illness is easier. You can point to it, ask for care, and rarely have to explain yourself twice. This was harder to name and harder to admit, and so at first I didn't, not fully. I told work something, but not everything, because the old fear was still there. That if they knew the real reason, they would decide I wasn't fit to help anyone. That somehow needing help yourself disqualifies you from giving it; and I wasn't sure I entirely disagreed. 

And yet somewhere underneath all of it, a small and stubborn part of me said - stop sweetheart. Just stop. So I did.

What keeps us stuck in the gap 

That voice - the one that agreed with every reason to stay stuck - was not new. It had been there for years, well-practised and fluent in exactly the arguments that would land hardest. The same one that said I wasn't fit to help anyone. The same one that had kept me exactly where I was for longer than I care to admit. 

Who do you think you are? You'll fail. You'll never make it. You're being selfish. You're making a mistake. Why can't you just be happy with what you have? Millions of people would kill for this. Spoilt. Entitled.

I want to say something about that voice, because I think it matters more than people realise. Almost none of those thoughts were originally mine. They were things that had been said to me, or about me, at various points across a life. Opinions picked up and turned inward until they sounded like my own conclusions, my own reasonable assessment of my own limitations. The voice was convincing precisely because it had been rehearsed for years, in someone else's register, until I could no longer hear the difference.

It wasn't telling the truth. It was telling a story. And for a long time, I let it narrate.

What it actually costs

I’m not talking about the dramatic moments here - those are easy enough to name. It's the quiet daily cost that nobody talks about, and it's what makes the gap so corrosive over time, because it happens so slowly and so ordinarily that you stop noticing it's happening at all.

This is what an ordinary day looked like. Up early (ish), four or five cigarettes with my morning coffee, sometimes through tears of pain I couldn't properly locate or name. A quick walk with the dog. Then the armour on - literally, with makeup, respectable clothes - and into work to be cheerful and present and genuinely helpful, because helping other people was the part of the day that felt most like solid ground. Then home. Evening meal. A walk, sometimes an activity, but more often than not, the settee, Netflix, the particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with tiredness. Food restricted in ways I mostly half-denied to myself - the old patterns surfacing quietly, disguised as not being that hungry, not feeling like it, maybe later. Too many cigarettes. Smoking in an attempt to feel nothing. Then bed. Then the same again. 

Numb, perform, sleep, repeat. 

That is what the gap costs. Not in one dramatic moment, but daily, and quietly, and without end. You know the metaphor about the frog in the pan of slowly boiling water. Well, I lived that. The temperature rises so gradually that you don't notice, and by the time you do, you realise you have been slowly cooking and calling it normal. 

Eventually, the discomfort of staying became louder than the fear of going. That was the moment - not readiness, not certainty, not some sudden clarity that made the decision feel clean and obvious. Just the point at which remaining where I was felt harder than whatever might come next. That was when I leapt.

Just not ready

I did not feel ready when I quit my job. I did not feel ready when I sold my house, gave away most of my belongings, and said a tearful goodbye to friends, family and my dog - decisions that still cost me something every time I think about them. I definitely did not feel ready when I boarded a flight to Thailand, approximately half the way around the world from Lancashire, with a one-way ticket and an inner monologue that went something like...

What the actual fuck are you doing?

There was fear, and plenty of it. There were people I loved dearly who called me selfish, or worried, or both. And there were others - dear friends mostly - who called me brave. I appreciated this although I didn't quite know what to do with it, because it didn't feel like bravery. If anything, staying had started to feel like the braver choice - or the more exhausting one, at least. And underneath all of that noise there was still this stubborn, inconvenient, quietly insistent feeling that there was more to life than the version I had been living. 

My son had something to do with it. He had been travelling for a few months when I got the rejection from the police. And as I found myself once again in familiar territory - struggling to eat, smoking with the optimism of someone who genuinely believes the next one will be the one that helps - his advice was beautifully, almost offensively simple. 

Get yourself to Thailand. 

Four words. Brilliant, as it turned out. 

The first glimmer

About six weeks in, I found myself at some hot springs in Pai. I had ridden my motorbike there, an action in itself that, a few months earlier, would have been its own kind of unthinkable. I was lying in warm water with the sun coming through the palm trees above me, the breeze kissing my exposed skin, the sound of an elephant’s trumpet in the distance. 

The eating, the smoking, the harder things, they hadn't gone away, and they weren’t ‘fixed’. But in that moment they were quiet, and that quietness was something I hadn't felt in longer than I could accurately remember. 

Something settled. Not happiness exactly, not relief - something quieter than both, and deeper. A sense of calm that didn't feel constructed or borrowed or performed, just present, real, arriving without announcement and asking nothing of me in return. There were tears somewhere behind my eyes, not sad ones, just the kind that come when something releases that has been held for too long. The first glimmer. Not arrival, just a glimmer - but after everything, that was more than enough. 

And then, very quietly, a thought that needed no polish and no careful framing and absolutely no coaching language whatsoever.

Holy fuck. This is my life right now.

And for the first time in a very long time, it felt like exactly that - a life. Not the same day on repeat. Not autopilot and endurance and getting through. A life, actually feeling lived, that was undeniably and finally mine.

And I felt, quietly and without fanfare, at peace. Not fixed. Not finished. Just at peace. 

Just this.

Just here.

Just now.

If you're in the gap right now

I know some gaps are harder to cross than others. I've sat with enough people in theirs to know that circumstances matter, that support matters, that not everyone is starting from the same place. I'm not talking past it.

Thailand was my leap - the shape it happened to take for me, in that particular season of my life. It isn't a blueprint. It isn't a prescription. The leap looks different for everyone. For some it is a one-way ticket. For others it is a conversation they have been putting off for two years, a relationship they have quietly outgrown, a job they stay in because leaving feels impossible, a version of themselves they keep meaning to get back to. The destination is never the point. The point is the decision to stop settling for a life that no longer fits - and to trust, even without certainty, even without guarantees, that you are capable of more than the gap has been telling you.

The funny thing is that the leap didn't end the gap. It just changed its shape.

I wonder sometimes whether we are always in a gap of one kind or another. Whether this is simply what growth looks like. The uncomfortable space between who we were, what we knew, and who we are becoming. Perhaps the goal was never to escape the gap entirely. Perhaps it was always to stop being paralysed by it. To choose it consciously, rather than fall into it by default.

There is a difference between a gap that holds you hostage and one that sets you free.

I am eight months into a life I couldn't have imagined a year ago. Sitting in a coworking space in Chiang Mai writing these words, knowing I am still in a gap and still without all the answers. Some days I feel settled. Others I feel untethered. There are moments where I miss what I left behind, moments where I question whether I made the right decision. And then there are the moments where I feel, with a certainty that's difficult to describe and the deepest gratitude for the version of me who took the leap, that I absolutely did.

There are still days when I am figuring out who I am without the roles, routines and identities I carried for so long.

But there is one important difference.

I no longer feel stuck.

The uncertainty is still here. The paralysis is not. And now that I can see a broader picture, I understand something I couldn't see from inside the gap. The uncertainty was never the thing that was hurting me. Staying in a life that no longer made sense and was no longer mine - that was.

I think I'd hoped action would eventually lead to certainty. It hasn't. Life remains gloriously unwilling to provide guarantees. What I got instead wasn't certainty. It was movement. Possibility. A life that finally feels like mine. And on top of that I got proof. Proof of my own courage. My strength. A quiet certainty in what I'm willing to fight for.

And for now, that is everything I need.

If you are sitting somewhere right now - maybe with a coffee, maybe too late at night when your brain won't quieten - and something in this felt familiar, I want to say this to you. Not as a coach, not with any professional framing. Just as someone who sat in that same place for longer than she should have, and found a way through.

It can get better. You can make it better. You have more power than you think.

Whatever it is you keep almost doing - do it. It won't be easy. But I promise you, it is worth it.

If any of this resonated, I'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you're navigating a gap of your own and would like someone to walk alongside you, you're welcome to book a conversation with me through my contact page.