04. She Was Always Going to Find Her Way Back

 Part Two: The Emergence of Kara — how healing, spirituality and the courage to begin again brought a woman home to herself. 

 There is a moment she keeps coming back to, in the telling of her own story. 

She is sitting at home. She has just finished a coaching call that felt wrong, uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t name. She felt like she hadn’t held the right space. Like she had somehow failed. She spent the next week feeling ill with it, over-preparing for the next session, arriving with backup plans for her backup plans. 

And then the next call with the client - a therapist, someone who had done a great deal of her own work, said something at the end that Kara did not expect. 

“I’ve done quite a lot of therapy and coaching and different things. But I don’t think I’ve ever been held as well as you held me.” 

Kara had spent a week convinced she had failed. Her client had experienced something she described as the best holding; she had ever received. 

The lesson she took from it - and she is someone who takes lessons from everything, who has built her entire life around the belief that nothing happens without a reason - was this: what I perceive is not always what is real. And what I bring to a moment matters more than whether I feel ready for it. 

It is a lesson, she acknowledges quietly, that she has been learning in various forms her entire life. 

She is nearly fifty. And she is only just beginning. 

*

The Healing 

When the marriage ended, really ended, not just legally but psychologically, the long unravelling of who she had been inside it - Kara did what she had always done in the hardest moments. She went back to the thing her grandmother had given her. 

She went to church. Not out of conventional faith, she is clear about that, but because church gave her something she hadn’t had in years: a room where she wasn’t anyone’s mother, anyone’s ex-wife, anyone’s employee. A room where she could just be Kara. She loves singing. She would stand in the pews and sing, and for an hour she wasn’t holding anything. 

Her children came eventually - lured initially, she admits with a laugh, by the free muffins and flapjacks the church laid out for the congregation and the local homeless people who came in for hot drinks. They met people living on the street. They saw, perhaps for the first time, what it looked like not to be as blessed as they were. She was planting seeds she hoped would take. 

And then she found her healer. 

She has been seeing her for eight years. At the beginning during the divorce, the chaos, the period she describes as the worst of her life - she went every month. She could not, she says, cope without her. The healer works with energy. She has massive gongs. She reads past lives. She tells Kara things that Kara has not told anyone. 

It was this woman who first told Kara she should become a life coach. 

Kara’s response, immediately and completely, was to dismiss it. 

* 

Five or Six Times 

She is honest about the dismissal. It was a limiting belief, she says the kind she has spent years learning to identify and dismantle in herself and in the clients, she now works with. She heard the suggestion and thought: that’s not for me. That’s not something I can do. 

And then someone else said it. 

She was between jobs. She was cleaning for someone to make ends meet. One of the other cleaners was going through a difficult separation and broke down one day while they were working. Kara sat with her. Talked her through it. Drew on what she had 

been through herself - the divorce, how it feels, the thing about not rushing, about giving yourself time. 

When it was over, the woman said: you could be a counsellor. You really should. 

And then someone else. And then someone else. Five or six times in total, from completely unrelated people in completely unrelated contexts. The same thing, arriving in different mouths. 

“I kind of laughed one day and I went, okay, like, the universe. You keep thrusting this in my face. I’m gonna stop pushing it away and ignoring it.” 

She started listening. 

She went back to her healer last October. Told her she had decided to start the coaching. Her healer already knew. She smiled and said: I know. And then she said something that Kara holds very carefully: her guide had told her that Kara was one of them. 

She does not say this to impress. She says it the way she says everything about her spiritual life - matter of factly, without apology, as though it is simply true. Because for her, it is. 

* 

The Mum She Thought She’d Be 

There is something she says about motherhood that stays with me long after she has moved on to the next thing. 

She says she is not the mother she thought she would be. 

She loved the baby years. She was in her element. What she didn’t anticipate was how much harder it would get, how the capacity required would grow faster than the support available, how being effectively a single parent to three children while running a business while navigating a controlling ex-husband would eventually mean she had less patience than she wanted, less presence than she intended. 

She says this not as a confession but as an honest accounting. She knows why. She was never supposed to do it alone. And doing it alone changed things. 

But then she describes what she has given them. 

She has taught them to manifest. She calls it cosmic ordering in their house — write down what you want, sleep with it under your pillow. Her daughter now asks for vision board sessions. Her fifteen-year-old son, who used to tell her she was nuts, has started reading books. His girlfriend thinks Kara is wise. He is coming around. 

She took them to church. She puts podcasts on in the car and makes them listen even when they complain. She talks about gratitude until they roll their eyes, and then her son sends her a message when he’s poorly saying he doesn’t say it enough, but he loves her, and he appreciates everything. 

And she did for her younger sister what nobody did for her at boarding school. She protected her. She made sure she had everything Kara hadn’t had. And when Kara left, she refused to leave her sister behind. Her sister has no particularly negative memories of the school. Kara made sure of that. 

“I gave her everything I didn’t have. So, I supported her. I’d go down and make sure she was in bed and brushed her teeth. I was quite motherly. So, she didn’t have to… But I wouldn’t leave her.” 

That is the mother she is. Not the one she imagined. But the one her children actually have. And the one who, when her eldest - now nineteen - comes up to her out of nowhere and says they are really glad she’s their mum, knows that the seeds took root somewhere, even in the hard years. 

* 

What She Found When She Cleared the Bedroom 

She and Tim were clearing out the bedroom recently - the kind of sorting through you do when life has finally settled enough to let you look at what’s accumulated. And she found some old letters. 

Manifestation letters. Things she had written years ago, in the years after the divorce, when she was living in a three-bedroom semi with the children and barely enough. She had written down what she wanted. In detail. The house. The layout. The dressing room and the ensuite. The open plan kitchen and the garage and the garden. 

She looked around the house she is living in now. 

It doesn’t look like the house she visualised. But it has everything on the list. Every single thing. The garage, the open plan kitchen, the courtyard garden, the dressing room, the ensuite. Three floors. The bedrooms. Everything she wrote down, she has. 

“I could draw you a floor plan. I could decorate it. I literally knew every detail. And I look at it and this house isn’t how I imagined it, but it’s got every single thing I wanted.” 

She also found an old spider diagram she had made after the divorce - a detailed map of everything she wanted in a partner. Every quality, every characteristic. She went through it point by point against Tim. 

He ticks every box. There is one thing she forgot to put on the list. He is, she says, very hairy. She specified a lot of things. She did not specify a clean chest. 

She laughs. She means it too, the frustration. But the laughter is the laughter of someone who knows that the things that matter - the real things, the values, the energy, the way someone shows up - she got exactly right. 

She has been doing this since she was fourteen. Her grandmother taught her and she never stopped. She is living, quite literally, in the life she wrote down. 

* 

One of Us 

She coaches people now who went to boarding schools. Some of them went at six. Some of them were abused. She sits with them and helps them understand why they behave the way they do, where the patterns came from, what the boarding school did to the nervous system of a child who was not supposed to be separated from their family but was. 

She does not find this painful, she says. Or rather she finds it the opposite of painful. She finds it purposeful. Because she knows now that she was supposed to go. That the ledge and the bullying and the silence and all of it was preparation. That she couldn’t help people navigate that particular darkness unless she had lived inside it herself. 

She talks about her coaching the way other people talk about a calling. Not a job. Not even a passion. Something more fundamental than either of those. 

“When you find something that’s really aligned, that’s what it feels like. I don’t feel like I’m on my own. I feel like I’m just the one delivering it. My guides and my grandma and the universe, my angels — I feel like they’re all there as part of it.” 

She celebrates her successes quietly. She does not tell Tim how much she earns. She doesn’t need anyone’s validation that what she is doing is right. She knows. That knowledge, that particular quality of certainty - is new. It has taken her decades and a great deal of pain to arrive at it. 

Her first paid coaching client felt like a milestone she marked privately, in the quiet, just for herself. 

That is enough. That is more than enough. 

* 

The Apology 

Her mother saw the messages Kara had been putting out about her coaching work. The things that clients said. The stories Kara told carefully, without naming anyone - about what she had been through and how she had come out the other side. 

And her mother came to her. 

She said: I’m really sorry. I didn’t believe you when you used to tell me things about what you went through at school. I thought you were lying. I thought you just wanted to leave. 

And then she cried. 

Kara had not been seeking this. She had not confronted her mother, had not demanded an accounting. Her mother had arrived at it herself, through seeing who her daughter had become and understanding, belatedly, what it had cost to get there. 

They have always been close, she says. But this felt different. Like something that had been sitting between them quiet, unresolved, taking up space had finally been named and set down. 

“It’s almost put that to bed, which feels really nice. We’ve never not been close, but it just feels different. We can lay that to rest. I don’t need to hold that anymore.” 

She does not need to hold that anymore. This sentence, I think, is the key to all of it. The whole arc of Kara’s life — from the girl on the ledge to the woman on the sofa — is a story about what she has been carrying and what she has, piece by piece, learned to put down. 

* 

The Chrysalis 

She turns fifty today. She had grand plans for it: a girls’ holiday, a celebration, all the things. She has decided to do none of it. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because 

she is going through menopause and her energy is precious and she does not want to spend her fiftieth birthday going to bed at half past eight, exhausted, not fully present. 

She will celebrate next year. When she feels well. When she can enjoy it. 

She describes this, the current period, the two jobs and the health challenges and the coaching business being built in the margins — as a chrysalis. She is in a transition. She knows what is on the other side. She is not there yet. 

In the meantime, she and Tim make micro moments. They have a book of fifty things to do in their fiftieth year. Some of them are grand. Most of them are small - take a flask somewhere, get in the car with no planned destination, go down to the beach after work and watch the sunset. Build the ordinary days into something worth remembering. 

She still does her morning practices. She still meditates. She still journals. She still goes to the gym or walks first thing, to set herself up for the day, to get into the right energy for whatever is coming. 

She still sleeps with her intentions under her pillow. Her grandmother taught her that. 

* 

What She Would Tell You 

I ask her what she wishes she could tell every woman. She doesn’t hesitate. 

“Follow your path. Whatever it looks like for you. Find something that makes you light up. Find something that doesn’t feel like work. If it is your sole purpose, it then begins to feel easy. It doesn’t feel like you’re fighting.” 

She says that when you’re on the wrong path, you feel resistance. Things are harder than they should be. You are always pushing. And when you find the right one, really find it, not the one you think you should want but the one that makes your soul sing — something shifts. Doors open. People appear. Things begin to move. 

She knows this is true because she has lived both versions. 

And she knows something else, which she says simply and with complete conviction: women are stronger than they know. The experiences that feel like they are breaking you are building something. The boarding schools and the marriages and the businesses and the dark drives past post office lorries, all of it is material. All of it can be turned into something that helps another person find their way through. 

You just have to be willing to look at it that way. And that, she says, is a choice. One she makes every day. 

I am a woman who is constantly trying to be the best version of myself I can be. And with that, being an example to other people. 

She is in her chrysalis. She is building her coaching practice. She has her retreats planned, her courses mapped out, a future she can see in as much detail as the house she once wrote down on a piece of paper and slept with under her pillow. 

She has her grandmother’s books on the shelf, some of them annotated in handwriting that is not hers. She has the notepad on the bedside table for messages that come in dreams. She has the guides and the angels and the healer and the gongs and the ice bath at Wembury on a Tuesday morning. 

She has at nearly fifty, finally found the path she was always supposed to be on. 

She is going to help a great many people find theirs. 

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