Some details in this story have been changed to protect identity.

Lucy walked into every room the way she walked into mine that last time — bright, warm, a soft Scottish lilt that put people at ease before she'd said a word. Polished, precise, good company. She'd been with us a while by then, in a post funded by a trust with tight deadlines she'd known about from day one. The kind of hire you feel good about.

Every now and then, she'd be gone for a day. Migraines, completely floored — her husband would ring in to say she couldn't get out of bed. It happened often enough that I noticed, not so often that I worried. She always came back with a good explanation and convincing data, so I never pushed.

Then the annual report didn't materialise.

I asked gently at first. Then more directly. When it still didn't appear, with funders to answer to and the whole scheme on the line, I had no choice but to call her in. She arrived exactly as she always did — bouncy, breezy, ready to talk her way through it. But this time I kept asking. Specific questions. The kind that don't leave much room to manoeuvre.

She stood up, told me to f*** off, and walked out. She never came back.

What Was Actually Happening Underneath

I think about Lucy often.

At the time, I was frustrated — we had a report that simply didn't exist and people we answered to. Looking back now, with everything I've since learned, I see it completely differently. I wish I'd asked more about those down days. What was actually happening on the days she couldn't get out of bed? Was there something we — me, HR, anyone — could have offered, some proper support that might have made it possible for her to say what was really going on, whether that was menopause, depression, or something else entirely?

She never got the chance to say. And that, I now understand, is the real loss in this story.

My best guess: emotional overwhelm. Possibly menopause — for someone as sharp and articulate as Lucy, suddenly finding she couldn't focus or produce work to her own standard would have been its own kind of devastating. Possibly depression. Quite possibly both, tangled together. But underneath either label there's usually something more specific at the core.

In my work now, I see this pattern again and again: someone becomes so closed down, so unreachable, that nothing — no deadline, no consequence, no amount of asking nicely — gets through. It isn't a discipline problem. It's the nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do: protecting you from something it has decided, somewhere below conscious thought, is too dangerous to face. That's what brain fog actually is, more often than not — not laziness, not a lack of willpower, but a closed-down position your body has taken to keep you safe.

And in that meeting, when I finally pushed too far for her to deflect any further, Lucy's body did exactly what bodies under threat are built to do. She fought, with her words, and then she fled. That wasn't rudeness. That was fight-or-flight, playing out in real time, in my office. She was protecting herself from something either unknown to her, or known and wrapped tightly in shame. The ego will do almost anything to keep us from that kind of exposure, even when the cost of the protection ends up higher than the thing it was protecting us from.

There's Nothing Wrong With You

It would be easy to read this and think: what an unsupportive workplace, what an impossible situation. Organisations do carry responsibility for looking after their people — that's not in question. But it cuts both ways. Disclosure takes courage from the person living it too. Confiding, confronting, breaking a pattern you've maybe held for years — none of that is easy, and very few of us manage it without somewhere safe to land first.

So here's what I most want you to hear, if any part of Lucy's story feels close to home: there is nothing wrong with you. Your body is doing exactly what it thinks is necessary to protect you. And whatever it is you're protecting yourself from — nearly everyone, at some point, is carrying something. We just don't talk about it nearly enough.

If you can do one thing today, do this: acknowledge that something is going on. That's the first hurdle, and often the hardest one. There may well be a medical piece to it, so get that checked out properly, by someone qualified to look. But also look to yourself for the deeper cause. Sometimes you just know, underneath, that something isn't quite right, even before you can put a name to it.

Try This Right Now

It sounds almost too simple to matter — breathing is something your body already does without being asked. But learning to breathe with intention, rather than just automatically, takes real practice, and it's the first proper foothold back into your own body.

Breathe in slowly for a count of four, low into your belly, so it gently rises rather than your chest. Hold for a count of four. Breathe out slowly for another count of four. Place a hand on your belly if it helps — you'll feel it rise as you breathe in, and fall as you breathe out.

As you do it, ask yourself one honest question: is there something getting in the way of my life right now? More often than not, the answer is yes.

For some people, that's enough to start working through what surfaces, step by step, alone. But what I've come to understand — from my own experience and from the people I now work with — is that there's often so much internal noise happening at once that it becomes almost impossible to make sense of it by yourself. The answers are still in there. Sometimes it just takes someone else, sitting alongside you, to help you find them.

Breathe

If there's something getting in the way of you living — really living, doing brilliantly in your work, having the kind of relationships with yourself and the people around you that actually mean something — that's worth paying attention to.

Breathe. Properly, deliberately, today.

Because the only thing standing between you and that life is not yet seeing it for yourself. Once you do, you don't look back. Joy and meaning have a way of turning up again, in exactly the places you'd stopped expecting to find them.

I'm not saying any of this to make you feel you should be further along than you are. I'm saying it as a plea, more than anything: open yourself to the possibility of really living again. Lucy never got that chance. You still have yours.

Struggling to settle your nervous system? Learn more about Breathe and how nervous system regulation can help you find your focus again.