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Inside us

Every woman is made up of what I like to call our ‘juicy bits’. The bits we find once we strip back all the outside layers and delve deep into our centre – our core.

We’ve all heard, ‘Oh don’t worry, it’s just all going on in my head’ … Wellllll that’s because it is, but we need to talk about it. Our brain’s function is to think – she’s the powerhouse, she’s the boss. Our juicy bits are our feelings, our emotions, our likes, our dislikes, our hormones, our thoughts and our unique personalities. Those sensations we feel have the power to dictate our days, our entire lives. Our feelings and emotions are the realest thing we have, they’re unique to us. They’re how we connect with ourselves and with people’s souls, but they’re invisible – so no one in the world really knows what’s going on inside there. Not our partners, our sisters, our parents who’ve known us since day one, our friends – and sometimes not even us.

You know those people who don’t yawn when you yawn, like they’re immune to the infectious, contagious yawn? Well, I’m not one of those, I’m totally the opposite … I’m extremely empathic. I can’t walk past another human crying without wanting to make sure they’re okay and have a good cry with them. As I’ve got older, my feelings have deepened, my emotions have developed, and my hormones … well, I’m still trying to make friends with them.

My coping mechanism to deal with painful, harder, more complex feelings used to be to cram them out of sight in a metaphorical box. But that ended in an exhausting emotional extravaganza whenever the box got too full and burst open. I thought the only emotion I was allowed to feel was happiness, that crying was a weakness and everything else was unnecessary. In my early twenties, I morphed into a robot – an empty, emotionless, ‘I’m tough, I got this’ kinda gal. I was presenting on a red carpet most evenings, working silly hours on top of that and giving up my spare time to surface-level relationships with absolutely no grit about them whatsoever … plus I don’t think drinking eight coffees a day to make up for the lack of food helped at all. I lost a chunk of myself while giving so much to my work, funding the coffee industry (with what probably added up to £20+ a day) and pouring energy into boys who covered up their cheating by saying they were dedicated to the ‘polymonogamous life’ (which I have absolutely nothing against … when both parties are aware there’s more than just you two involved – which I wasn’t for 5 months!). Oh I definitely learnt a huuuuge amount from all of it – but it took suddenly losing my hearing and becoming partially deaf at 23 to realise I need to release these emotions when I feel them.

With the help of people talking about their mental health and sharing their own stories, I’m much more aware of my emotional self. I’m forever checking in and learning about what’s going on inside me, understanding what I can do to harness a feeling or how to give myself a little bit of extra love when I need it.

SO THIS ISN’T ABOUT ‘FIXING’ YOUR EMOTIONS – I’M NOT BOB THE BUILDER. IT’S ABOUT:

 Recognising them

 Harnessing the power of the fiery ones

 Helping out the more complex ones

And most importantly, if you thought you were the only one feeling 26 different emotions a second then hopefully, reading this, you’ll start to see I’m feeling it, your best friends are feeling it, your cousins, your boss, your work colleagues … we’re all feeling it.

In this section, we’ll delve deep into our cores. We’ll zoom in and uncover the layers that we’ve built up. I want to help you peel them back and hopefully get to know your most authentic self, your cake before all the toppings were added. We can learn to trust and accept our emotions – the good, the bad and the messy … they are a way of celebrating ourselves, expressing ourselves and trusting ourselves.