Hey, I’m Mia.

After the burnout, after the breathwork, after I finally felt like I had some tools - life handed me a rather impressive list of things I didn't choose.

Infertility. The particular grief of it - the uncertainty, the constant disappointment, watching everyone around you seem to do effortlessly what your body won't, the physical relentlessness of tests and procedures and hoping and not hoping. The grief of the life you thought you were going to have, slipping through your fingers a little more each month.

Then my brother Bez was diagnosed with cancer. From diagnosis to death: two months. I spent ten days and nine nights in the hospice with him at the end, holding space for someone I loved as he left. That kind of vigil changes you. Quietly, permanently.

While I was still at the hospice, my eyesight started doing something strange. I put it down to grief and exhaustion. It wasn't. Over the months that followed, I was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome - a genetic connective tissue condition - and discovered that my eye lenses were dislocating. In January 2023, I woke at 3.30am knowing something was wrong. I was blind in one eye. Emergency surgery that day. Four months half blind, not knowing if my sight would come back. Not knowing if I'd lose the other eye too. (Spoiler: I didn't. But it was a long year of not knowing.)

While I was navigating all of that, my marriage ended. My husband made a choice that changed everything for our family. The relationship had been - let's say - more complicated than it looked from the outside. There is a particular grief in discovering that the life you thought you had wasn't quite what it seemed. A grief not just for the relationship, but for your own sense of reality.

Then my Dad got poorly. I spent his last two weeks staying with him, supporting him to die at home the way he wanted to. He died over Christmas. My sister and I cleared his house and organised a funeral in a dazed January blur. Three weeks after the funeral, my Mum died. We did it all again.

People sometimes say to me: you've been through so much. And yes. It has been - as my son would say - very extra.

But here's what I want to say about that.

None of this is unusual. Not really.

Infertility affects one in six couples. Grief comes for all of us. Diagnoses arrive uninvited. Relationships end - sometimes badly, sometimes in ways that rewrite the story you thought you were living. Parents die. Sometimes close together. Sometimes when you're already on your knees.

These aren't glitches. They're features. This is life - in all its relentless, inconvenient, occasionally devastating humanity.

What I've learned - the hard way, and I mean the hard way - is that having somewhere to land when these things happen is not a luxury. It's not self-indulgent. It's what makes the difference between being slowly hollowed out by it all, and finding your way through with something still intact.

The tools I found in that festival tent - and everything I've learned since, through training, research, working with clients, and a frankly obsessive quest to understand what actually helps - I have tested all of it. Against real things. Extensively. They work.