How Burnout, ADHD and a Cold Dip Built Be Wild & Well

I never planned to leave teaching

That’s the bit people find hardest to believe.

I loved my classroom. I was good in it. For years it was the thing I knew how to do — even on the days when everything else felt like wading through wet sand. I gave my whole self to those kids and most days they gave it back.

What I didn't know was that the wading-through-wet-sand bit wasn't normal. I thought everyone felt like that. I thought I just needed to try harder. Sleep more. Drink less coffee. Drink more coffee. Get up earlier. Go to bed earlier. The usual menu of things women tell themselves when their body has started keeping a list of complaints.

The commute finally broke it

We'd moved out to Kent. The school was still in London. And somewhere in the middle of that commute, my body decided it had had enough.

I started pulling into motorway services to sleep in the car. Just for twenty minutes, because I physically couldn't keep my eyes open the rest of the way. I'd wake up, drive on, get to school, do the day, drive home, repeat. And I told no-one. For months.

I thought it was a deficiency. I thought I was lazy, or weak, or not coping the way other people seemed to be coping. The truth was that my nervous system had been running on fumes for years and the commute was the thing that finally outran my ability to push through it.

Two diagnoses, in the right order

The burnout diagnosis came first. That made sense. It was the obvious one.

The ADHD diagnosis came after. And that was the one that rearranged the furniture.

Because suddenly the whole of my life made a different kind of sense. The masking — the constant low-grade performance of being a calm, organised, on-top-of-it person. The exhaustion that came from holding all of that together. The needing to be excellent or invisible, with nothing in between. The way I'd give my whole self to my job and have nothing left for my own family at the end of the day.

The guilt that came with that — the mum guilt, the wife guilt, the friend guilt — was its own kind of weight. I was kind to a hundred and twenty children every day and I had nothing left over for the three people who actually lived with me. And I didn't know why.

It turned out there was a reason. And the reason had been there my whole life.

Choosing to be uncomfortable

Here's where the story turns, and here's the bit I want you to hear properly.

I didn't fall into wellness. I didn't drift into it. I chose it, on purpose, when I was at my lowest. I'd just moved to Kent. I didn't know anyone. And instead of waiting until I did — instead of waiting until life felt easier and I felt braver — I started turning up to things on my own.

A sound bath first. I left properly perplexed. I'd gone in exhausted and run-down and I came out calmer and clearer, with the mental space to actually take a breath. I couldn't explain what had happened to me. I just knew something had physically shifted in my body and it was real. (For what it's worth, there's a lot of science underneath sound — vagus nerve, parasympathetic nervous system, brainwave entrainment — but I didn't know any of that yet. I just knew I felt different.)

That cracked something open.

A women's circle next. I made myself speak — really speak — to a room full of strangers. I told them things I hadn't told people I'd known for years. I left feeling liberated and heard in a way I'm not sure I'd ever felt before.

Then, in early January, a charity cold dip for a children's cancer charity. I was massively underprepared. I stood in that water — sea so cold it took the breath out of my chest — with people I'd just met, and I understood the thing about community that everyone bangs on about. The dopamine afterwards. The way your body sings for hours. The bonding that happens between people who've gone through something physically hard together. I was hooked.

My inner introvert recoiled at every single one of these. The night before, every time, there was a voice in my head telling me to stay home, stay small, stay safe. But the discomfort was the point. Pushing through it was what showed me there was another way to live — braver, bolder, more open. Ready to actually be in my own life instead of just getting through it.

So I left. Properly.

I handed in my notice. And I gave myself six months.

Six months to figure out what a life built with my ADHD might actually look like — instead of one spent fighting it. Six months to stop performing. Six months to find out what I was for, on the other side of being a teacher.

It was a wildly impractical decision and the most sensible one I've ever made.

I walked. Every day the kids were at school, I walked in the woods. I started my sound practitioner training. I read. I journaled. I sat on a lot of beaches in the rain. I let my nervous system come back online slowly, properly, without being asked to be anywhere or be useful to anyone.

And Be Wild & Well started to take shape

Slowly at first. Then with more conviction.

Wellness walks in the Kent countryside. Sound baths for nervous systems that had forgotten how to rest. Women's circles for women who'd forgotten how to take up space. Cold dips for the dopamine and the laughing and the shared shock of it. Retreat days for women who needed permission to put themselves down for a few hours and find out what was underneath the exhaustion.

All the things that had put me back together. Offered to other women who might need them too.

Because I know I'm not the only one. I know there's a version of me out there — running on empty, holding it together on the outside, wondering if she's the only woman who feels like this. White-knuckling it through her own life and waiting for someone to tell her there's another way.

There is. I promise there is.

If any of this lands for you

Come and find out what it's like.

Be Wild & Well runs wellness walks, sound baths, women's circles, cold dips and retreat days across Kent and the South East. They're for women who are tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Women who suspect there might be more to life than getting through it. Women who'd quite like to feel like themselves again.

Or if you're not quite ready yet — that's allowed too. Come and say hello on Instagram first. I'll be the one telling you, gently and repeatedly, that you don't have to do this alone.

🤍