At some point, the fly on the wall became more interesting than the meeting I was running.
I was good at my job. People said so. I had the career, the salary, the credentials. I knew how to show up, how to read a room, how to find the right words at the right moment. I had been learning that since childhood — as a pastor's daughter, as a Yale student who figured out the rules, as a woman who understood early that it was safer to deliver what was wanted than to risk being truly seen.
The performance had become so fluent I barely had to think about it anymore. And that, I would eventually understand, was the problem.
What followed was a collapse I didn't have a name for.
My nervous system, it turned out, had been barely coping for years. Underneath the performance were decades of scripts I'd been living so long I'd forgotten there was a self underneath them.
And underneath that: an ADHD diagnosis at forty-two that reframed my entire life, and perimenopause arriving earlier than I expected, quietly dismantling the coping mechanisms I had left.
I couldn't sleep. I felt purposeless. To sit down at my computer I had to bribe myself with coffee, chocolates, and gummy bears. I knew I was strong. I knew I was capable. And yet I couldn't function.
I didn't find my way back through a framework.
I found it by stopping. By learning to listen to what was happening in my body before I tried to think my way out. By giving myself permission, slowly, imperfectly, to become exactly who I was.
What I came to understand, slowly by slowly, was that this hadn't been a failure of will or strength. It had been my nervous system in full collapse after years of barely coping. And slowly I began to see the scripts I had been living — the consummate professional, the good little woman who did all the right things — that had taxed me to the point of burnout.
What I bring that no credential can name.
I have spent twenty years holding space for people in hard situations across four continents. I started this practice because I know this territory from the inside — not just professionally, but personally.
What I bring that no credential can name is this: I have been exactly where you are. The exhaustion. The disconnection. The quiet terror of not recognising yourself anymore. And I know — not theoretically, but from the inside — that there is a way through.
Not the light at the end of the tunnel. The one that travels with you through the dark.
Lucerna means lantern. The name is intentional. This is not a practice that promises transformation or arrival. It is a practice of accompaniment — of sitting beside you in the dark, holding the light steady while you find your own way forward.
If you've found this page, you may be where I was not so long ago. It would be my privilege to travel alongside you as you find your way back to yourself.