I know what I’ll do. I’ll move to Australia and start again there. Then I’ll be happy.
This was a genuine thought I had probably about 5 years ago. London is the issue. The grey skies are the problem. If I could move to Australia everything would be better. Everything would be happier then, I’d become a surfer babe and magically have blonde hair and be super confident and everyone would want to hang out with me. I’d be happy in my job and probably just be like perfect in every way. Australia is the answer. I’ll do that.
I remember very clearly my brother turning around to me and, lovingly, saying… Lucy.. the thing is, feel free to move to Australia, but you realise that moving across the world doesn’t suddenly mean you will have had a brain transplant. You’ll still have your brain when you’re there. You can’t escape yourself.
Oouuuuuf.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T ESCAPE MYSELF?!! I’m stuck with this brain forever?! You mean that’s why whenever I book a holiday and imagine myself feeling free and liberated and able to strike up conversations with strangers I end up disappointed that I’m still just the same old version of me but in a different place? You mean that’s why why everyone gets excited about Christmas and then when it comes around is somehow surprised that everyone in their family hasn’t magically turned into some form of human Christmas elf with absolutely zero flaws and that for some bizarre reason the things that annoyed us in our family dynamics on December 23rd still annoy us on December 25th?!
How DARE my brain do this to me.
Brutal realisation isn’t it.
We can’t escape ourselves.
Damn you advertising industry!! You’ve spun us a lie. You told us that all we needed to do was buy that dress, go on that holiday, get a bigger house, make more money, get married, get more followers, do all the stuff and THEN we’d be happy.
It’s all a lie.
A deep. Painful. Gritty. Lie.
The only way to find peace in this little old thing called life is, rather than try to escape ourselves, is to dive deeper INTO ourselves. Dive deeper into all the grittiness, all the triggers, all the lack of self belief, the imposter syndrome, the feelings of failure, the loneliness, the disconnection. Dive into all of it and start to work WITH it rather than perpetually trying to escape from it.
You can’t escape from your belief systems. Your hurt. Your ‘stuff’. You can try, and no doubt you have been trying. But my guess is that you know it hasn’t been working. You know it in your gut. Something is missing.
The thing that’s missing is self intimacy. The deepest understanding of who you are. All the depth, the grit and the beauty of YOU. It’s only in diving into all of that that we can truly find the peace and flow that we all keep trying to buy off Amazon.
You know it in your heart, don’t you?
L x
Some more recent words...
May 5, 2026
What Is Somatic Coaching And Why Does It Work?You have probably tried to think your way out of it.
Whatever it is for you, the anxiety that arrives on Sunday evenings like an uninvited guest, the relationship pattern you can trace all the way back to childhood but somehow keep repeating anyway or the low hum of something missing that no promotion, no holiday, no amount of self-improvement has ever quite reached.
You are smart, you are self-aware and you have probably read the books, done the therapy, listened to the podcasts - you understand your patterns, you can explain them to someone else over a glass of wine with impressive clarity.
And yet, nothing has actually shifted.
May 5, 2026
Signs You're A High Achiever Who Has Lost ThemselvesYou are doing so well.
Genuinely. By every external measure, your life is a success, the career, the flat, the social life, the holidays. The ability to hold a room, meet a deadline, handle a crisis with the particular calm that comes from having handled many crises before.
From the outside, you are completely fine.
From the inside, there is a question you keep almost asking and then putting back in the drawer.
Is this it?
September 4, 2023
The curse of the helperEverything felt infused with irritation. I was doing all the things for everyone else that I thought I should be doing. I was doing all the acts of service. I was, technically, loving those people. And yet. It felt like every act I did, rather than being infused with love, was infused with a shards of glass shooting out of every plate I stacked.
June 15, 2023
Why burning down my 'successful' life was the best thing I ever didIt was a Thursday back in February 2018. The rain hadn’t stopped for months and London was right in the depths of what felt like the longest winter we’d ever had. The dark, damp days had started to getting to me so I’d taken refuge in a hot yoga class to warm up. The scent of palo santo blended with the sweat of 50 people pervaded the room. It was bonus day at work. They’d told us it had been a bad year and not to expect much. I peaked into the envelope, hopeful, as soon as they slid it across the table: £130k. But there I lay, in savasana, with hot, salty tears streaming down my face: I’d never felt emptier.