After leaving teaching earlier this year, I started rethinking how I wanted everyday life to feel.
My old life was busy in the way many women’s lives are busy: work, children, responsibilities, logistics, remembering everything for everyone, functioning on low-level adrenaline and calling it coping.
And to be fair, I was coping.
But I was also permanently tired.
Burnout had become my norm, and I stopped questioning it because there simply wasn’t time to. I kept going until I had nothing left to give and eventually started making the changes that, deep down, I already knew I needed to make.
Teaching had once been the career I’d dreamt of, but over time it had become the thing that was draining me. After years in schools, I was constantly thinking ahead, carrying things mentally and anticipating what came next. Add solo motherhood into the mix and eventually I became frighteningly good at functioning while overwhelmed.
It’s now been a good few weeks since my last day in the classroom, yet I still catch myself waiting for the next crisis. The next impossible week. The next unrealistic deadline. I still find myself wondering what’s going to knock everything sideways again because, apparently your nervous system doesn’t immediately pack its bags and leave just because your circumstances improve.
Now that I’m no longer living at such a relentless pace, I’ve started noticing the parts of everyday life that previously slipped under the radar. Not because they were insignificant, but because I was too busy to pay attention.
And instead of thinking about what I want my life to look like, I’ve started paying attention to how I actually want it to feel.
I want mornings that are calm instead of frantic. A home that supports me instead of visually stressing me out. Work that fits into my life rather than consuming it entirely. I want enough space left over for family days out, long walks, fresh bedding, flowers on the table and all the small things I never seemed to have time to notice before.
I’m rejecting survival mode disguised as ambition.
And finding that, strangely, the slower my life becomes, the more ambitious I actually feel.
Not in the hustle-culture sense. I have absolutely no desire to optimise my morning routine at 5am while drinking mushroom coffee and listening to a motivational podcast. That is very much somebody else’s life.
What I do feel is something I haven’t experienced for a long time: the capacity to build my life intentionally instead of simply reacting to it.
Most of that isn’t happening through life-altering decisions.
It’s happening through ordinary ones.
Rearranging my bedroom because I realised my environment affects me more than I thought. Buying myself flowers to celebrate a milestone nobody else would have known existed. Wearing my natural curls again because they feel more like me.
Little decisions that align with the life I actually want to live.
None of those changes would look particularly significant to anybody else. But they feel significant to me.
