A couple of days ago it was the 2nd of April. Three years ago on that date, I walked out of my school for the last time after 21 years in school leadership, packed up a life that looked perfectly fine from the outside, and took a leap of faith so terrifying I can barely describe it now without feeling it all over again.
I didn’t move to Italy immediately. That came later. But the 2nd of April was the day I stepped off the conveyor belt. The day I stopped.
And honestly? I felt like a chicken that had just escaped the chop.
Shellshocked. Disoriented. Standing in a yard I didn’t recognise, blinking at the light, not quite sure what I was supposed to do with all this sudden, terrifying freedom.
The Dread Disappeared Immediately
Here is the thing nobody tells you about leaving a life that is making you miserable.
You expect the relief to build slowly. You expect to feel guilty first, then sad, then slowly, gradually better.
That is not what happened.
The heavy feeling of dread, the one that had been sitting on my chest for years, the one I had normalised so completely I thought it was just what being an adult felt like, lifted the moment I made the decision.
Not when I arrived in Italy. Not when I found a flat in Rome. Not when I finally got my residency sorted after approximately one thousand trips to the comune.
The moment I decided.
That told me everything I needed to know about how long I had been living against myself.
The Day I Cried and Didn’t Know Why
The end of the holidays came around. Schools went back.
I stayed at home.
And I cried.
Not because I was sad. Not because I missed it. But watching the world return to a rhythm I had followed for over two decades, I felt the full weight of what I was grieving.
Not the job. Not even the colleagues, though I missed some of them deeply.
I was grieving an identity.
For 21 years, I had been a teacher. A leader. Someone with a title and a timetable and a clear answer to the question “what do you do?” I knew exactly who I was inside that structure, even when that structure was slowly crushing me.
And now I didn’t.
I didn’t know what I was becoming. What would become of me felt completely unknowable. But I knew one thing – I had to take the leap before I got completely swallowed up by the misery of the life I was living.
That grief was real and it was necessary. But it did not mean I had made the wrong decision.
What Joy Actually Feels Like
Three years on, I live between Rome and Lago di Bracciano. I am buying a house on the shores of a lake so beautiful it still makes me stop on the way to the supermarket and just look at it.
I work for myself. I coach women who are standing exactly where I stood. I write. I record. I build things that matter to me and guess what? I do a little bit of support work in a primary school in Rome! It’s a million miles away from the life that I had. And I’m so glad of that.
And I have learned something about joy that I wish someone had told me before I spent so many years without it.
Joy is not happiness. It is not a feeling you arrive at and then keep.
Joy is the absence of dread. Waking up on a Tuesday morning without that heaviness before you have even opened your eyes – that is joy. Making a decision because you want to, not because you are afraid of what happens if you don’t – that is joy too.
It is small. Quieter than you expect. And completely unmistakeable once you know what you are looking for.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then
I have spent the last three years not just rebuilding my life but understanding why the old one felt so wrong.
I trained as a life coach. I studied positive psychology. I became a certified menopause coach, because so many of the women I work with are navigating the physical and emotional upheaval of perimenopause at exactly the same time they are questioning everything else.
And through all of that, I kept coming back to the same framework. The same map.
It is called PERMA-H. Psychologist Martin Seligman developed it to describe the six pillars of genuine human flourishing. Positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment, and health.
When I look back at my life three years ago, I can see exactly which pillars were missing. I can see where my energy was going and where it quietly drained away.
And when I work with women now, that is always where we start. Not with grand plans or dramatic reinventions. With an honest look at where they actually are.
This Is Not a Story About Italy
I want to say this clearly because I think it matters.
Moving to Italy did not fix me.
The decision to stop living against myself did that. Italy is where I chose to do it. Italy is the backdrop, the beauty, the daily reminder that life can feel genuinely good. But the work, the real work, happened inside me.
Which means you do not need to move to Italy to find your version of this.
You need to be honest about where your life energy is actually going. Naming the things that drain you is the first step. And stop treating joy as a luxury you will get to eventually, when everything else is sorted, when the kids are older, when you retire, when the moment is finally right.
The moment is not coming. This is the moment.
Where to Start
If any of this is landing somewhere real for you, I want to offer you something.
I have created a free life assessment based on the PERMA-H framework. It takes five minutes. It shows you exactly which areas of your life are flourishing and which are quietly starving. And it gives you personalised prompts to help you start moving.
It is not a quiz. It is a map.
And it is where I would have wanted to start, three years ago, before the leap.
You can take it free at the link below. And if you want to go deeper, come and join us inside the Becoming an Unapologetic Woman community, where a growing group of women are doing exactly this work, together.
It is not too late.
Three years ago I was a shellshocked chicken blinking in the sunlight, not sure what came next.
Today I live by a lake in Italy and I help women find their way back to themselves.
If that is not proof that everything can change, I don’t know what is.