For most of my life, I knew exactly who I was.

I was a violinist.

It wasn’t just something I did – it was who I was.

Music shaped my days, my friendships, my work, my goals and my sense of identity. If someone had asked me to describe myself, violinist would have been one of the first things I said.

Then I became a mum.

Like so many women, my priorities changed overnight. The late nights, the travelling and the unpredictability of freelance performing no longer fitted with the kind of parent I wanted to be. So I stepped away from performing and focused on raising my children.

Before I knew it, Mum had become my identity. And again, it wasn’t just something I did, it was who I was.

For years, life revolved around school runs, meal planning, laundry, appointments, clubs, homework and making sure everything and everyone was where they needed to be. There wasn’t much space left for me. And for a long time, that felt completely normal.

Then my children got a bit older and became more independent. There was a little more space in my life and a little more breathing room. But instead of feeling excited, I felt lost.

I wasn’t really a violinist anymore. But I wasn’t just Mum anymore either. I had built an entertainment agency, which I enjoyed, but it didn’t feel like me in the way performing had.

I found myself asking a question I couldn’t answer:

Who am I now?

From the outside, life looked successful on paper. I had healthy children, a business, a home and plenty to be grateful for. But underneath that, I felt anxious, overwhelmed and exhausted. Some days I felt completely flat.

I couldn’t understand it. I kept thinking, life is getting a little easier so why don’t I feel happier?

For a long time, I assumed I knew what the answer was. I needed to be a violinist again. After all, violinist had been my identity for most of my life. It was the thing that had always made me feel alive, confident and completely myself. So I went back to performing.

The first time I stepped onto a stage after years away, it was everything I hoped it would be. I felt energised. I felt excited. I felt alive. For those moments on stage, I remembered a part of myself that I thought had disappeared and it felt like coming home. But when I walked off stage, something unexpected happened.

Nothing else changed. The anxiety was still there. The overwhelm was still there. The feeling of being lost was still there.

For a while, I felt better because I could say, “I’m a violinist again.” I had a label. An identity. Something familiar to hold onto. But gradually I started to realise that the problem had never really been about performing.

The challenge was that I had spent most of my life defining myself through roles. First I was a violinist. Then I was a Mum. And now neither of those labels fully explained who I was anymore.

The turning point came when I realised I was more than any title I could give myself. More than a violinist. More than a mother. More than a business owner. More than any role I had ever played.

And whilst that sounds liberating, at the time it felt terrifying. Because if I wasn’t any of those things, who was I? I had absolutely no idea!

A few years after this, I started learning about the nervous system and began doing deeper emotional processing work. What I came to understand was that my nervous system had spent years in survival mode.

When we’re under prolonged stress, constantly juggling responsibilities and carrying the mental load of family life, the nervous system becomes focused on one thing: keeping us safe.

Its priority isn’t creativity, self-discovery or figuring out what we want from the next chapter of our lives. Its priority is helping us get through the day. When the nervous system believes we’re under pressure, it directs our energy away from our thinking brain and towards managing what feels urgent and important right now in our body. The bigger questions get pushed into the background.

Questions like:

What do I want?

What lights me up?

Who am I becoming?

For years, there simply hadn’t been the space or capacity to explore those questions. And when there finally was space, my nervous system didn’t just jump back to feeling safe again.

What I discovered through nervous system regulation and emotional processing was that the answers weren’t something I could think my way towards. I couldn’t create them with a pros and cons list. I couldn’t force them through more planning. I couldn’t find them by trying harder.

But, the more regulated my nervous system became, the more connected I felt to myself. The more emotions I processed, the more clarity I gained and the more safety my body experienced, the more curious I became about who I was underneath all the labels.

Slowly, things began to shift. It didn’t happen overnight, it happened gradually. At first I began to feel calmer and clearer, then I noticed I had more energy, my creativity started returning and I began to feel my inner spark fire up which gave me a zest for life again.

And perhaps most importantly, I stopped trying to squeeze myself back into an old identity. Instead, I started exploring who I was underneath all the roles. I finally allowed myself to slow down and become aware of what was happening in my body, my emotions and my thoughts. In doing this I started to discover what really mattered to me, what I valued, what brought me joy and what kind of life I wanted to create moving forward.

I realised I wasn’t lost at all. The real me had been there all along but had been buried underneath years of responsibility, stress and pressure. Once I gave it enough space, safety and attention to emerge again, it felt like the fire in my belly had truly been lit!

These days, I still love performing. Being on stage still lights me up. But it no longer defines who I am. It’s one part of me, not all of me. And that’s been one of the most freeing discoveries of all. And because of all my experiences I trained as a coach 3 years ago and have now added nervous system regulation and emotional processing to my coaching programmes – and this has become a true passion of mine.

If you’ve been feeling lost lately, if your children are growing up and you’re wondering who you are now, or if you’ve realised that the labels you’ve carried for years no longer quite fit, I want you to know you’re not alone.

Perhaps this isn’t a sign that you’re lost. Maybe it’s a sign that you’re being invited to discover yourself on a deeper level than ever before. Not through the roles you play and not through the titles you hold. But through the person you’ve been underneath them all along. And whilst that journey can feel uncomfortable at times, it can also be one of the most rewarding journeys you’ll ever take.