Meet Rhian Budd

This space was born from a quiet reckoning. The kind that arrives not in a single dramatic moment, but in the accumulation of days — the laundry, the decisions, the giving, the weight that settles so gradually you barely notice it at first. Until one day you look around and realise you can’t remember the last time you felt like you.

I know that moment well. It’s what brought me here.

I’m a solo mumma to my daughter Emilia, a homebody and a lifelong student of what it means to live from the heart. I write for women who are remembering themselves again — not by striving or reinventing, but by softening. By slowing down enough to listen. By coming home to what’s always been there.

This journal lives in the space where woman and mother meet. Where identity is allowed to breathe. Where healing happens quietly, through truth and presence rather than performance.

I grew up in the Waikato, New Zealand — a sensitive girl in environments that valued resilience, silence and fitting in. I learned early how to read a room, how to adapt, how to belong by becoming smaller. By my twenties, I was fluent in other people’s expectations and largely disconnected from my own inner voice.

In a long-term relationship that led to an engagement, I slowly edited myself down. I became quieter, more contained, easier to place. Even my joy felt negotiated.

Leaving that life was the first time I chose myself.

What followed was travel — Cambodia, China, Italy, Portugal, the USA, Canada. Not as escape, but as retrieval. Travel didn’t heal me, but it reminded me that I existed beyond the roles I had learned to perform.

In 2018, I came home and discovered I was pregnant. Motherhood arrived suddenly and completely — fierce, tender, disorienting. It cracked me open in every direction.

Postpartum stripped me bare. I lived alone with a newborn, overwhelmed and exhausted in ways I had never known. There was a morning — Emilia was nine months old — when I realised I had disappeared again. Not into a partner this time, but into motherhood itself.

I didn’t want to lose myself to love.
I wanted to grow alongside it.

So I began the slow return — not to a “new me,” but to something truer. To the woman underneath obligation, expectation and inherited scripts. The woman who still wanted, still felt, still dreamed, still knew.

Motherhood became the portal that led me back to my heart.

And that’s the story I share here — not as instruction, and not from a place of having arrived, but as lived experience. As resonance. As someone walking the path while writing from inside it.

This is a space for slow feminine living, emotional reconnection, embodied womanhood and the quiet work of becoming whole again.

I believe that returning to our truth isn’t selfish — it’s restorative. That healing through motherhood is both inevitable and sacred. That we grow with our children, not at the expense of ourselves. And that the world doesn’t need more perfect mothers — it needs more present, honest, embodied women.

I don’t write because I have everything figured out. I write because I’m living it — and because I believe no woman should have to walk her becoming alone.

For a long time, I couldn’t find writing that felt human enough. Everything seemed aspirational or aesthetic, polished but hollow — all surface, very little soul.

So I created what I was longing for.

A place where women can slow down, breathe deeper, reconnect emotionally and rediscover who they are — without needing to fix or improve themselves first. A place that honours the bridge between woman and mother. A place where story comes before strategy and resonance matters more than answers.

If you’re in the quiet unraveling, the messy middle or the first flicker of coming home — this space was made with you in mind.

You’ll find intimate, embodied storytelling. Reflections on motherhood and womanhood. Writing about slow living through an emotional and psychological lens. The lived experience of self-reclamation — imperfect, nonlinear, deeply human.

Think of it as a quiet conversation. One that meets you where you are and doesn’t rush you anywhere else.

I love working with aligned brands, founders, platforms and creatives who share values around slow living, emotional wellbeing, embodied womanhood and meaningful storytelling.

This can look like sponsored editorial, podcast conversations, speaking engagements, commissioned essays or collaborative creative projects.

If you’d like to connect, you can reach me at
[email protected]

I didn’t create this journal because I had the answers.
I created it because I was still becoming — and I sensed others were, too.

If you’re here, you’re welcome.
Take your time.

Rhian xx