How to Find Yourself Again When You’ve Lost Yourself in Over-Giving

My story of burnout, misalignment, Hecate and the birth of She Who Knows Heals.

I think many of us spend our lives moving outward.

Into roles.

Into expectations.

Into survival.

Into performance.

Into over-giving.

Until one day, we realise we no longer really know who we are inside.

And perhaps healing is not about becoming somebody new.

Perhaps it is about gathering ourselves back in.

If you have spent years caring for everyone else, over-giving and pushing through, losing yourself doesn't always happen dramatically. Sometimes it happens quietly. And finding yourself again may not be about reinventing yourself at all. It may begin with becoming still enough to hear what you already know.

The version of me that looked right on paper

I have been doing healing work for years, although for a very long time I struggled even to call myself a healer.

My work has always been difficult to explain.

It is spiritual. Intuitive. Energetic. Deep.

And I have always known that whatever healing happens through me is not by me. I am the vessel for something greater.

Last year, I created Cambridge Tarot.

And I loved it.

I have loved tarot since I was a teenager, sneaking off with a friend to have tarot readings. I love the cards. The symbolism. The imagery. The ancient knowledge. The possibility of seeing something we couldn't see before.

Cambridge Tarot also gave me something I hadn't had before: a neat way of explaining what I did.

Psychic readings.

Tarot.

People understood it.

My healing work was much harder to put into a tidy sentence.

And there was another piece to it too.

Calling myself psychic publicly was huge for me. Through my own spiritual healing, I had come to understand that I carried a deep fear around being seen for this part of myself — what I experienced as a persecution imprint from another lifetime.

So stepping forward and saying, Yes, I am psychic, felt like healing.

It mattered.

Then I started trying to make it work

At the beginning of 2026 I decided I was really going to put myself out there.

Until then, most of my healing work had come through referrals. I wasn't particularly visible online. I wasn't making videos about what I did.

But something inside me kept saying:

You need to speak.

So I joined Instagram properly.

I Googled how to make a Reel.

Honestly.

I didn't know what I was doing.

I began turning up, making videos, pulling cards, trying to do what I could see other tarot readers doing.

Then came the strategy.

Find the niche.

Make it clever.

Make it relevant.

Perhaps Cambridge Tarot could specialise in entrepreneurs. Business has always been part of my life, so that made sense.

And on paper?

It was perfect.

Except I wasn't enjoying it.

That was the problem.

When something fits on paper but not in your soul

After the initial terror and excitement of putting myself on camera had worn off, something became increasingly clear.

I felt boxed in.

The content didn't feel like me.

Pulling a card of the day and trying to turn it into something clever or strategic wasn't the work I really wanted to do.

My work is deeper than that.

The women who come to me aren't usually looking for a clever answer.

They're exhausted.

They're disconnected.

They're carrying too much.

They have spent years trying to hold everything together.

And underneath so much of what I see in women is misalignment.

They have moved so far outward — caring, doing, mothering, working, fixing, surviving — that somewhere along the way they have lost their relationship with themselves.

I knew that territory intimately.

Because I had done it too.

My body eventually made me listen

Then I became ill.

Nothing dramatic. I had a horrible sinus infection.

But I couldn't work.

I couldn't do readings. I couldn't do energetic work. I couldn't push through it in the way I might once have done.

And this time, I chose not to.

That was important.

Earlier versions of me would have had a very simple response:

Get on with it.

Push through.

Mind over matter.

I had lived much of my life from that very masculine place of deciding what I wanted, choosing an outcome and forcing myself towards it.

And there is nothing wrong with action.

We need our minds. We need strategy. We need to get things done.

But action without listening had taken me into burnout before.

I knew where that road went.

So this time I stopped.

I rested.

I prayed.

And I asked:

What is this asking me to see that I am not seeing?

Learning another way

Over the months before this, I had begun very gently developing a relationship with the Goddess Hecate.

This was new territory for me.

My spiritual life had previously been much more centred around the Archangels and a way of relating to the Divine that, looking back, often felt quite removed from my body and from my womanhood.

I was learning to listen differently.

To soften.

To receive.

To allow the Divine Feminine into my spiritual life.

I asked Hecate to help me have the capacity to hold the women I work with without losing myself while doing it.

That matters to me deeply now.

Because what good is being able to hold everybody else if we abandon ourselves in the process?

What good is being a healer if our own life is asking for healing and we refuse to listen?

I did not want to keep teaching women to honour themselves while quietly overriding myself.

I wanted to walk my walk.

The moment I admitted the truth

The illness wasn't shifting as quickly as I expected.

So I kept listening.

And eventually there was a truth I couldn't avoid any longer.

Cambridge Tarot was no longer aligned with me.

That did not mean it had been a mistake.

It wasn't.

It had helped me own my psychic gifts.

It had helped me become visible.

It had helped me cross a threshold I needed to cross.

But I had begun trying to fit the whole of myself into a box that was simply too small.

My healing work.

My spirituality.

My relationship with the Divine.

My psychic work.

My experiences of karma, past lives and energetic healing.

My devotion.

My womanhood.

My own messy, imperfect story.

I couldn't squash all of that into something tidy simply because tidy was easier to explain.

And the moment I admitted that to myself, there was peace.

Not a business strategy.

Not a five-year plan.

Peace.

Sometimes I think that is how we know.

She Who Knows Heals

During that period I spent a lot of time in prayer and connecting with my higher self.

Sitting.

Asking.

Listening.

And then, one day, through my devotional relationship with Hecate, the words came:

She Who Knows Heals.

And something in me immediately knew.

Yes.

That was it.

Because underneath everything I had been experiencing was the same lesson:

I had known.

My body knew.

My intuition knew.

My soul knew.

The problem was not that guidance wasn't there.

The problem was that I hadn't been listening to it.

And how many women know that feeling?

We know something isn't right.

We know we're exhausted.

We know we're unhappy.

We know a boundary needs to be drawn.

We know something has ended.

We know we are being called towards something else.

And then the mind arrives.

Don't be ridiculous.

You should be grateful.

Other people have it worse.

Just keep going.

Don't upset anybody.

Make do.

Compromise.

Try harder.

So we override the knowing.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until sometimes our bodies, our lives or our circumstances become loud enough that we can no longer ignore them.

Perhaps you aren't lost

This is one of the deepest things I am beginning to understand.

Maybe we aren't as lost as we think we are.

Maybe beneath the exhaustion, the disconnection and the self-doubt, there is still a part of us that knows exactly who we are.

A woman can have a beautiful life and still feel disconnected from herself.

She can love deeply.

She can be grateful.

She can mother.

Work.

Care.

Nurture.

Hold everything together.

And somewhere in all that outward movement, lose contact with her own voice.

That doesn't mean she is broken.

It may simply mean she has forgotten to listen.

And perhaps the way home begins much more quietly than we imagine.

Not by fixing ourselves.

Not by reinventing ourselves.

Not by becoming a better, shinier, more spiritual version of ourselves.

But by becoming still enough to hear what is already there.

This is why I created She Who Knows Heals

I hadn't intended to make this podcast.

I thought I was going to make something completely different.

But here she is.

And, strangely, it feels as though I am birthing her rather than building her.

I want She Who Knows Heals to be a place where I can speak truthfully.

Not from a perfect version of me.

From the woman who has cried.

The woman who has loved.

The woman who has over-given.

The woman who has pushed herself too far.

The woman who has made mistakes.

The woman who is still learning.

And the woman who knows that we have within us an extraordinary capacity for healing.

I want to explore intuition.

Healing.

The Divine Feminine.

Our spiritual guides.

Our bodies.

Boundaries.

Menopause.

Over-giving.

The things we know but are frightened to say aloud.

And above all, that return to ourselves.

Because I don't believe you need to have everything figured out.

I don't.

What I am learning is simply to listen when something inside me speaks.

And perhaps that is enough of a beginning.

So if something in these words has moved you, don't rush past it.

Just notice.

What do you already know that you keep trying not to know?

You don't have to fix it today.

Just listen.

Because perhaps you are not broken.

Perhaps you have simply forgotten who you are.

And together, we will remember.

Listen to Episode 1 of The She Who Knows Heals Podcast

If you would like more reflections on healing, intuition, inner knowing and returning to yourself, you can also join The Thread at shewhoknowsheals.com.