Part 3: Choosing Scary Over Safe

Coming back from rock bottom meant looking honestly at the life I had built — and asking myself for the first time what I actually wanted.

Not the life I thought I should have. The one I truly craved.

For 15 years I clung to a career that looked safe from the outside, but inside it was draining me of energy, joy, and my mental health. I had loved my work for many of those years, but after Joe’s loss it became too close to home. I knew I couldn’t support other people in the way I wanted to anymore.

So, I did something terrifying. I left.

I had no plan. All I knew was that I couldn’t go back, and that returning to that job wouldn’t support my healing.

"For 15 years I clung to a career that looked safe from the outside."

As someone who had always been risk averse, I can’t explain the anxiety this triggered. Safe felt predictable. Scary felt like standing on the edge of a cliff with no idea what was waiting below. But I knew I couldn’t keep living the way I was.

I tried another job that fit better around the kids, but it quickly became clear that what I really needed wasn’t just another job. I needed to put myself first, for the very first time in my life.

That came with guilt. So much guilt. But for the sake of my kids, my husband, and my own wellbeing, I had to start doing things differently if I wanted to stay.

I wanted to create work that felt meaningful. To bring together my lived and professional experience in a way that supported others, while also looking after me. It felt like a pipe dream that only other people got to have. But I knew I had to go first.

That’s when Scribbles of Sanity was born.

"It quickly became clear that what I really needed wasn't just another job."

It started with me sharing poems in the rawest stages of grief, writing as a way of survival. But it grew into something more. For the first time I recognised that I didn’t want this to be a “maternity leave project” that gathered dust. I wanted it to be the start of something different — a chapter I could be truly proud of.

Scribbles of Sanity became a way of weaving together my love of words, my lived experience, and the lessons that loss had etched into me. It’s about taking the messy scribbles of life — the fears, the losses, the unravelings — and shaping them into something healing, hopeful, and real.

I never could have predicted the opportunities that would come my way, or the incredible people I would meet simply by following my dreams. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t chosen to take a leap of faith.

Faith in myself. Faith in the universe. And faith in what everyone else saw in me, but I refused to see in myself for 34 years.

"Scribbles of Sanity became a way of weaving together my love of words, my lived experience and the lessons that loss had etched into me."

Choosing scary over safe isn’t easy. It comes with doubt, fear, and a lot of unknowns. But it’s also the choice that gave me my life back.

It’s the choice that has given my kids the best version of their mum, my parents a more grounded daughter, my siblings a calmer sister, and my husband a wife who is present and happy in her soul.

It’s also the choice that lets me honour Joe’s legacy, and keep his memory alive, while doing something I truly love.

And now it’s the choice I get to help others make too.

Are you ready to start doing things differently?

👉 If you’ve ever felt trapped in “safe” when your soul craves more, know you’re not alone. Scribbles of Sanity exists to remind us both that even in the unraveling, a new story is waiting to be written.