The beginning you’ve been waiting for is never going to arrive

It was a mid-week lunchtime in the City. I was in the middle of some big transaction at work, standing in line to pick up yet another takeaway lunch. It was an office day meaning that the children had been dropped off at breakfast club, and I had commuted nearly 2 hours into London. I felt like I’d done a morning’s work even before arriving at my desk, such were the logistics of trying to get to the office. Back then I would crowd onto the busy Waterloo & City Line in the morning, making the mental shift from Mummy to Legal Counsel, trying to compartmentalise the two parts of my identity. Exhaustedly shifting back at the end of a long day. My emails were piling up, as was my to do list, but it was a great role with a fantastic team at a prestigious company and I loved working in the City. Everything on paper was completely fine.

However, I remember thinking on that particular mid-week lunchtime, “What am I doing with my life, I can not keep doing this?”.

Not with any particular drama. No tears, no crisis, no obvious thing that had gone wrong. Just a quiet, nagging feeling that something didn’t feel quite right about my path any more. However, I picked up my order, brushed the feeling off, returned to my desk and got on with my afternoon’s work. I know that I went to bed that night carrying the same feeling that had come to me in the lunch queue and told myself, as I had been telling myself for longer than I could care to admit, that things would settle down soon. That once this transaction was done, once the school term ended, once I got to the weekend, in other words once life got a little less full, I would have time to think about all of this properly. Perhaps write out a pro’s and con’s list.

Back then, I did not have a word for what I was waiting for. Now I know that I was waiting for a beginning.

The idea that a fresh start or a new chapter requires the right conditions is one of the most quietly persuasive lies we tell ourselves. I say “we” because I don’t think it’s just me. I have spoken to enough women to know that this particular story is almost epidemic among those of us in midlife who are, by any external measure, doing well. We are competent. We are reliable. We show up. And somewhere in the accumulation of all that showing up, we have quietly filed our own needs under “later”. Not permanently, just temporarily, until conditions improve.

The problem is that conditions do not improve on their own. The diary does not empty. The demands do not diminish. The version of yourself that you are waiting to become does not arrive in the post one morning with a note that says “you’re ready now”. Life continues at exactly the pace it has always moved, increasing more often than not and the beginning you have been promising yourself keeps sliding to the next month, next quarter, next year, in other words the next time things are a little less full.

I know, because that is precisely what happened to me. I was very good at it. I could justify it in my sleep. I had a career. I had a family. I had commitments and a mortgage and a diary that ran several months ahead. What I was waiting for, that elusive sense of spaciousness, of having finally arrived somewhere where I could breathe, was always just around the corner. And you know what, just around the corner is a very comfortable place to wait, because it means you never have to admit you’re standing still.

The thing that broke the pattern was not a dramatic event. There was no rock bottom, no crisis, no epiphany on a hilltop. It was smaller than that, and stranger. It was an email from a friend introducing me to a Women’s leadership organisation, “One of Many”. I signed up for their coaching qualification. Partly out of curiosity, partly because I thought I could learn my way out this nagging feeling, and mainly because I realised there was a different way of approaching life, and leadership. Here was somewhere I could learn how to apply a different set of tools to living my life. And somewhere in that process of becoming a coach, in the questions I was being asked and the framework I was learning to apply, I realised something that I have not been able to unknow since.

I had been waiting for permission.

Not from anyone specific. Not in any way I could have named if someone had asked me directly. But permission nonetheless to take up space, to have needs, to matter in my own life in a way that wasn’t defined by my usefulness to everyone else in it. I had been waiting for the circumstances to align in such a way that wanting more felt reasonable, felt justified, felt safe. What I understood, is that those circumstances were never going to arrive. Because permission is not something that comes from outside. You have to grant it to yourself.

That was my beginning. It did not look like a beginning. It happened in the middle of an ordinary life, on an ordinary day in the lunch queue, where nothing particularly changed and everything quietly shifted.

This is what I built Irissa around. Not the idea that transformation requires the right moment, or a clean slate, or a period of your life when things have finally settled. But the understanding that the beginning you are waiting for is available to you right now, inside the life you are already living. The work does not require you to have everything sorted first. It requires only that you are willing to start, in whatever small way is available to you today.

I am in the early stages of building this brand. I am doing it in public, in real time, alongside my career and a family and all the ordinary complexity of a life that is full. I am not waiting for the conditions to be perfect. I am building the conditions as I go.

If something in this post resonated, if you recognised that feeling of waiting, of deferring, of telling yourself that later is when you will finally begin, then I would gently suggest that later is  really now. Not because everything is in place, but because it never will be, and you are worth beginning anyway.

So here’s my invitation to you, join me! Follow along as Irissa takes shape. As the community grows, and the resources are built. There will space for you here, whenever you are ready.

The work is yours. We build the conditions for it to happen.

Irissa is a coaching and lifestyle brand for mid-life women ready to design a life that is authentically and unapologetically their own. Follow for regular content on identity, joy, and the inner work that changes everything.