What Else Might Be Possible?

I’m 58, a mum, a wife, a business owner and a lifelong learner.

And the older I get, the more fascinated I become by just how many versions of ourselves we get to experience in one lifetime.

I’ve already been many versions of me.

The ambitious corporate woman. The woman exploring spirituality and consciousness. The daughter who lost both her parents. The woman who became a mum at 46. The woman who walked away from a successful career. The woman fascinated by nutrition, health and the human body. The woman building something of her own.

And countless quieter versions in between.

For a long time, I thought of those versions as stepping stones, each one taking me closer to the woman I was eventually supposed to become.

I don’t see it that way anymore.

They were all me.

All important. All complete in their own time.

As I move closer to my next decade, I’m less interested in becoming some future, better version of myself and far more interested in discovering what else might be possible.

Two sides of me

My life has never followed one neat path.

I spent many years in banking, operations, contract and account management, working in senior roles and carrying significant responsibility. I was capable, driven and very good at getting things done.

But another part of me was developing at the same time.

While still in corporate life, I studied kinesiology. It opened a completely different door and began what I think of as my spiritual journey.

I became fascinated by energy, frequency, consciousness and the connection between our inner and outer worlds.

That was more than 30 years ago, and the curiosity has never left me.

I’ve always had these seemingly different parts of myself: the practical woman who loves evidence, science and understanding how things work, and the intuitive woman who is completely comfortable exploring spirituality, energy and the things we may not yet be able to neatly explain.

For many years, I happily lived as both.

Then, at 46, I became a mum.

And life shifted again.

Questioning the life I thought I should have

Motherhood changed my priorities enormously.

Over time, I left corporate life and became increasingly fascinated by nutrition, plant-based living, health and the extraordinary capabilities of our bodies.

But I was also beginning to ask a much bigger question:

What do I actually want my life to look and feel like?

Eventually, those different threads led me to create Raw Inspired Living.

And while nutrition, health and ageing differently are huge passions of mine, I’ve realised that what fascinates me most goes even deeper.

It’s the invisible structures we live inside without realising they’re there.

The things we’ve been taught.

The things we’ve absorbed.

The shoulds and should-haves.

The expectations attached to being a woman, a mother, getting older, being successful, having a certain kind of body or living a certain kind of life.

We repeat some of these assumptions for so long that eventually they stop sounding like assumptions.

They simply feel like truth.

And I think they can become even louder in midlife.

“I’m too late”

I recently caught myself thinking:

I’m too late.

Other women know more than I do.

Certain kinds of success happen to “other” people, not people like me.

Instead of trying to push those thoughts away or replace them with an affirmation I didn’t really believe, I became curious about them.

Who said that?

Where did I learn that?

Is it actually true for me?

And then I started asking myself one question whenever I felt that sense of constriction:

What else might be possible?

I love that question because it doesn’t tell me what the answer should be.

It simply opens the door.

It takes me away from thinking I should already be somewhere else or someone else and permits me to imagine possibilities I may not have considered before.

There will be another version of me

I know there will be another iteration of me.

And probably another one after that.

But I no longer believe the next version needs to make this version inadequate.

It has taken me a long time to reach that point.

I still doubt myself.

I still compare sometimes.

I still catch old beliefs trying to decide what is possible before I’ve even had the chance to find out.

For me, becoming doesn’t require any of those things to completely disappear.

It’s about noticing more.

Choosing more consciously.

Remaining curious.

And there’s another reason this matters deeply to me.

I’m raising a daughter who is watching me do all of this.

I don’t want to hand her my definition of an extraordinary life any more than I want the world to hand her one.

I want her to know she can question the picture altogether.

I want her to discover her own.

I want the next generation of women to feel that freedom earlier,  to step beyond the structures and expectations and discover their own kind of extraordinary.

To the woman who thinks it’s too late

If you’re thinking you’re too old, too scared, too late or somehow not the kind of woman who gets to do the thing you long to do, become curious before you decide that thought is true.

Where did it come from?

Does it actually belong to you?

Is that how you want to think?

And what might become available if you stopped automatically allowing that thought to decide what happens next?

For me, Becoming Her isn’t about leaving our current selves behind so that we can finally become someone better.

Every version of us has brought us here.

Becoming is simply what happens when we remain open,  to life, to ourselves and to everything we haven’t discovered yet.

At 58, that’s what excites me most.

I have no idea how many versions of me are still ahead.

And I’m very happy not to know.

I’ll just keep asking myself:

What else might be possible?