It Started with an Omelette

I didn’t start with a vision board or a grand plan of what I wanted life to look like. 

Honestly, my concept of what was possible for me as a new mum navigating this season of life solo was still so narrow and limited. The postpartum fog was still thick, and my beliefs were tangled up in everything I’d been told to expect from life, and what I could expect for and of myself. I only knew what I was currently doing wasn’t working anymore, it no longer felt like it fit. 

I reached the point where I couldn’t force myself to squeeze into moulds or expectations anymore. I couldn’t keep pretending or performing, and I definitely couldn’t keep blindly following the status quo. 

But I also didn’t have a plan or a map. 

The ability to dream expansively, to visualise a different life or even believe that the life I desired might be possible, only came later. It came after something much quieter and less dramatic began to happen, it came after I started to actually hear myself. 

When I began slowing down, tuning out other voices and influences, taking care of my body, cleaning up my mind, honouring my needs and turning inward toward my spirit, something slowly shifted. That was when the vision began to arrive. Not as a grand revelation, but more like a quiet orientation. Suddenly there was a direction, a kind of internal compass and once that compass appeared it became much easier to see what in my life was aligned with it and what was not. 

With the vision clearer, I knew where I wanted to go and I knew what actions to take. But none of that was available to me in the beginning. 

In the beginning, I didn’t know where to start. I only knew I wanted something different. 

In the years before motherhood arrived, I had already navigated my own hormonal health journey but the additional demands of motherhood and breastfeeding on my body added another layer of depletion. I was eating when I could, often quickly and without much thought, grabbing at whatever was available and convenient. Things had slipped back into my diet I knew didn’t feel good in my body and I also knew I wasn’t getting enough nutrients in the quick and convenient excuses for meals.  

So I started with something I already knew how to do: I prioritised nourishment. 

It was something familiar, something I had a template for, something I already understood about my body and what helped me feel steady again. And so, it began in a very simple way. I started getting up before Emilia in the mornings, even if it was only fifteen minutes before she woke up, and I made myself breakfast — a proper breakfast. 

Usually, an omelette filled with spinach and leftover roast vegetables from the night before, something warm and grounding that felt like it was actually feeding me. It sounds almost laughably simple when I look back on it now, but beginning the day with that kind of nourishment changed something. It was a small act of tending to myself before tending to anyone else. 

It started with an omelette. 

Around the same time, I also began retreating from certain environments and conversations that no longer felt good to be in. I was noticing how much casual negativity and judgement floated through everyday interactions — commentary about other people’s lives, opinions about choices that weren’t ours to make, criticism of people brave enough to put themselves out there. 

Something in me quietly recoiled from it. 

I began withdrawing from those spaces and spending more time by myself. Not in a dramatic or isolating way, but simply by creating more moments where I could be alone long enough to hear my own thoughts. I started journaling, though at first it was wildly inconsistent, and sometimes the most valuable part wasn’t even the writing itself but simply being in my own presence without anyone else’s energy or expectations in the room. 

Those quiet pockets of time became a place where my own voice slowly became clearer. 

Meditation came later, and if I’m honest, it was incredibly difficult in the beginning. My body was not used to stillness. It felt safer in motion, in activity, even in chaos, than it did sitting quietly with nothing to do. So I started very gently. 

I would sit with a simple music track on Insight Timer, 10-minutes long, though in those early days even 3 minutes felt like a stretch. When my body wanted to fidget or shift or wriggle, I let it move a little while still remaining seated. I didn’t force myself into a rigid version of stillness, I simply stayed with the practice long enough to build tolerance for it. 

Three minutes became five. Five slowly became ten. 

Over time I realised I could feel my breath moving through my body in a way I had never really noticed before. The inhalation expanding my chest and reaching my belly, the feel of the exhalation through my nostrils and the quiet, cyclical rhythm of it. And as my body grew more comfortable in stillness, the noise in my mind began to settle just enough that I could distinguish between the constant mental chatter and something deeper underneath it. 

That deeper layer was where my own voice lived. 

From there journaling became easier, because I could recognise which thoughts were simply noise and which ones felt like something true emerging from within me. I wasn’t always able to act on those insights straight away — there was still doubt to work through, still self-esteem to rebuild, still conditioning and people-pleasing and all the invisible weight we carry in our metaphorical backpacks. 

But the small practices themselves began to shift something inside me. 

Nourishment, quiet contemplation, time alone, learning that stillness was safe, journaling, listening to my intuition, allowing self-awareness and self-inquiry to slowly deepen. None of it happened all at once.  

It evolved gradually, beginning with the simplest possible step and expanding from there. Eventually that path led me toward something I now think of as radical self-honouring, a way of living that places my own needs, truth and integrity at the centre of my life rather than somewhere on the outskirts. 

But the beginning was almost absurdly small: it started with an omelette. 

And sometimes that is all it takes. Not a grand vision, not a perfectly mapped out plan, but one small act of care that reconnects us to ourselves. From there the path begins to reveal itself. 

If you find yourself in that place where something no longer fits but you don’t yet know what direction to take, check out these posts I wrote about the small practices that helped me begin again.

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