Nobody knows how tired you are.
Not properly. The people closest to you think you’re just busy. Your clients think you’re brilliant, and you are — that’s rather the point. The work happens, the standards hold, everything runs beautifully.
And there’s that minute in the car.
You’ve arrived somewhere — the meeting, the office, the school gate, the supermarket car park — and instead of getting out, you sit. Engine off. Nobody else in the car. A few breaths before you go in and become useful again.
A client mentioned hers to me in passing once. Not in a session — just in conversation, the way you’d mention the weather. And I recognised it immediately, because I’d been doing exactly the same thing in a Sainsbury’s car park the week before.
Almost nobody mentions that minute to anyone. But a great many of us are having it.
And then there’s the other one, at 3am, when you’re awake with your heart going and the thought underneath all the other thoughts finally surfaces. Is this it? Twenty more years of this?
And then, immediately, the guilt — because the life is good. Objectively good. You chose every single thing in that diary.
I want to say something about that particular tiredness, because I think it gets misdiagnosed.
It isn’t a rest problem.
You can rest inside a life that doesn’t quite fit. You can sleep beautifully for a week and land back at Heathrow and feel the audit resume somewhere over Kent.
That’s why the holiday didn’t touch it. That’s why the spa weekend lasted a fortnight and then didn’t. Nothing was wrong with the rest. The rest was never the thing.
What actually helps is quiet that lasts long enough for the questions to surface on their own. Not pushed. Not performed. Not squeezed into a Sunday afternoon between one obligation and the next.
Long enough that on about the third day you stop composing yourself, because there’s nobody there you need to be composed for.
That is what the week in the Rhodope Mountains is for.
5–12 September. The first landscape hotel in Bulgaria, designed by the Norwegian studio Gartnerfuglen Arkitekter, built into the hillside at 1,500 metres, in ancient pine forest, where the silence has actual weight to it. Yoga in the mornings. A walk through forest that people have been walking for centuries.
Facilitated sessions that go after what you actually want, underneath what you think you should want.
Hand analysis if you’d like it. A private hour with me. And a great deal of time that belongs to nobody but you.
If something in this landed somewhere true, everything is here:
And if you’d simply rather ask me something first, reply to this.
Warmly,
Rosaleen
P.S. If there’s someone you’d want to come with — a friend, a sister, someone you’ve been meaning to have a proper conversation with for two years — say both names and I’ll hold the two places together.