Ten years ago today, Dreaming of a Life Unlived came into the world. I’ve spent this anniversary looking back, and I’ve realised something I didn’t see at the time: that book wasn’t just the thing I made. It was the first time in my adult life I said something true about myself without apologising for it first. Everything that’s happened since traces back to that one act of not saying sorry.
The Sorry I Carried First
Before the book, I’d spent time apologising. For my grief. For my presence at baby showers, and for my absence from them. For not being further along whatever road I was supposed to be on. Mostly, I was apologising to myself — for taking up space with a loss the world had never quite agreed to call a loss.
I was quiet at work. Quiet at Christmas. Quiet in rooms full of women talking about their children or grandchildren while I arranged my face into something that looked like nothing at all, a face that hid my pain. That quietness was its own kind of apology, repeated so often I stopped noticing I was making it.
Writing It Was the First Not-Sorry
The book didn’t arrive as courage. It arrived as anger and desperation — anger at not being listened to, desperation for the story to matter. It took my coach, Helen Tucker, looking at my unfinished sentences and telling me my story was worth telling. Not one day, when I felt braver. Not one day when it was polished and acceptable. Now, as I was.
That’s the part I didn’t realise until much later: writing the book was the first time I let a true sentence about my life stand without softening it, without qualifying it, without a “sorry, but” I was terrified doing it. My legs actually shook the first time I stood up and spoke about it in public. But I said the true thing anyway, and nobody in the room decided I deserved what had happened to me. Instead, women came up to me one by one and said some version of: I thought it was only me.
That was the moment when I realised I had nothing to be apologise for.
What the Not-Sorry Led To
None of what came next was the plan. If you’d told me ten years ago where one book would lead, that’d I’d be where I am today, I’d have laughed you out of the room. But once I stopped treating my story as something that needed an apology attached, it stopped staying contained to a book.
It became facilitating the Gateway Women Reignite weekends, standing in rooms with women exactly where I’d been. It became The women We’ve Become Healing Hearts Circles, a space that didn’t exist until I’d found the nerve to build it. It became the spaces I was invited into to tell my story and it became an invitation from Confidence magazine to write about the day I stopped saying sorry for good – a piece that took me back to that same shaking-legs feeling backstage in 2017, and to two stories I’d carried quietly for twenty years, held together only by shame.
Writing that piece, I picked up a book on my shelf, Donna Lancaster’s Wise Words for Women, and landed on a chapter called “Sorry, not sorry.” Reading it, something clicked: the apologising was never mine alone to fix. It’s conditioned into most women, long before any of this began. For those of us carrying the unrealised dream of motherhood, it just has somewhere very specific to land – we end up apologising for a life that didn’t take the shape it was supposed to.
Once I saw that the apologising was learned and not earned, I stopped asking the world to validate my loss before I let myself feel it. The grief didn’t disappear. It’s still here, further down the road with me. But I stopped identifying with the shame the moment I understood it had been given to me, not grown by me.
That’s the piece I keep coming back to when I try to explain what these ten years actually did for me. It was never really about the talks, or the circles, or the magazine piece – those are what got built once the apologising stopped taking up all the room. What the not-sorry actually gave me was the story itself, back in my own hands.
For years I’d told a version of my life shaped by what I thought other people could bear to hear. I’d trim it, hedge it, soften the edges before anyone had even asked me to. That’s a strange kind of theft – not of the facts, but of the authorship. Someone else’s imagined discomfort was writing my sentences for me. The moment I stopped apologising, I took the pen back. Not to make the story prettier or more palatable, but to tell it in the shape it actually was: messy, unresolved in places, still unfolding. Owning it didn’t mean resolving it. It meant I got to be the one holding the pen, deciding which parts mattered, instead of handing that job to whoever might be uncomfortable in the room.
I look at that frightened woman with the unfinished sentences, ten years on, and I want to tell her: the fear doesn’t disappear, it just stops being the only thing in the room. What replaces it isn’t confidence exactly – it’s ownership. The story is mine now in a way it wasn’t before, not because it hurts less, but because I stopped waiting for permission to claim it.
So, here’s what I’d ask you to sit with this week: what part of your story have you been apologising for – quietly, reflexively, to family, to friends, to yourself – that was never yours to apologise for in the first place?
You don’t need permission to stop. I didn’t either. I just needed a book to teach me that.
To the Women Who Listened
None of this was mine alone. To the women who contributed their own stories to my book, and to the women who believed, before anyone else did, that stories like ours needed telling – thank you. And to every woman who has sat in a room, or read a page, and simply listened: thank you for that too. Listening was never a small thing. It was the thing that let the sorry go.
Peace and Joy
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