Why It Took So Long

There’s a version of this story I could’ve told years ago.
The polished one. The one where I tied it all up in a neat bow.
The one where I launched before I was ready — just to prove I could.

But that version would have been a performance.

This is the truth.

For a long time, this vision lived only in my mind.

It came in quiet moments, over years — in fragments, whispers, flickers of possibility.
At first, I thought I was receiving individual pieces. But what I didn’t yet understand was that I was being entrusted with a grand design — a living, breathing ecosystem of truth that would take time to reveal itself.

And I wasn’t ready to hold it.

Not because I didn’t want to.
But because my body didn’t yet know how to feel safe holding something that big, that bold, that deeply mine.

I spent most of my life in a freeze response.
Numbed out.
Disconnected.
Not because I didn’t care — but because my nervous system learned that stillness and silence kept me safe.

I’ve had to spend years unlearning that.
Rewiring myself back into presence.
Making it safe in my body to be seen.
To take up space.
To lead.
To create without collapsing.

And that took time.
It took regulation.
It took resourcing.
It took truth-telling, even when no one else was watching.

It also took letting go of the templates I tried to contort myself into.

I thought I needed strategy.
I thought I needed someone else to show me the way.
I thought my vision was too simple, too fluid, too intuitive. Surely it needed to be more complicated. More structured. More branded.

So I tried to force it.
And every time I did, the resistance grew louder.
It didn’t flow. It drained me.
Because it wasn’t mine that way.

I had to remember: my vision doesn’t belong in someone else’s framework.

It wanted to emerge organically, not be squeezed into a pre-approved path.

And then there was the lineage work.
The unraveling of enmeshment and codependency.
The ways I had been taught to shrink, to please, to stay quiet in order to belong.

I had to walk away from dynamics that once made me feel safe — but were really keeping me small.

I had to make peace with being misunderstood.
With stepping out of the roles that kept me accepted.
With making choices that only made sense to my soul.

I had to become the woman who could lead what I was being shown.

Motherhood, too, asked me to stretch.

To find a rhythm that honored both my daughter’s needs and my own.
To stay tethered to my own essence while being fully present for hers.
To listen for what wanted to emerge in me — not just as a mother, but as a woman with a voice, with vision, with art still inside her.

I couldn’t disappear again.
Not for anyone.
Not even for the role I loved most.

For a while, I had all the passion, all the drive, all the readiness in my mind.

But my body?
My body was in concrete.
I could feel the fire in my chest, the forward pull of momentum — but my feet wouldn’t move.

That mismatch confused me.
How could I want something this much, and still feel stuck?

Because the safety wasn’t there yet.
Because I hadn’t yet gathered all the pieces.
Because I wasn’t meant to begin until I had the whole vision — and the capacity to hold it with integrity.

For years, I had armored myself for protection.
Built walls to guard the softest parts of me — the tender, expressive, feeling places where my truth lives.

That armor kept me safe.
But it also kept me hidden.
It numbed me from my own aliveness.
And it cut me off from the very source of what I longed to create.

I had to make it safe to feel again.
To let the tenderness be seen.
To trust that being expressive wouldn’t cost me belonging.
To believe that I could lead and still be soft. Still be vulnerable. Still be me.

And it wasn’t until my heart softened — until I let the mask slip, until I let myself be held in the ache I’d tried so long to avoid — that the creative floodgates began to open.

This time, it’s different.

This time, I’m not forcing anything.

I’m not rushing to the end so I can call it a success.
I’m not launching to prove anything.
I’m not pushing through the discomfort to meet someone else’s timeline.

This time, I’m rooted.

Resourced.
Regulated.
Clear.

My nervous system is on board.
My body says yes.
My heart is soft, and open, and ready.

And what once felt audacious now feels visionary.

The bigness doesn’t overwhelm me anymore.

I know I don’t have to build it all at once.
I know it’s allowed to evolve slowly.
I know the pace of integrity is the pace of sustainability — and that what’s built in truth lasts.

So I’m creating in rhythm with my own becoming.
Not to perform.
Not to prove.
But because I can’t not anymore.

It’s time.

Rhian xx