I Blew Up My Life, and I’d Do It Again…

I used to think happiness lived at the end of a checklist:

• Find your soulmate.

• Build a respectable career.

• Buy the house.

• Have the kids.

• Do the grown-up things in the right order.

• Prove you made it out okay.

Those expectations didn’t come from nowhere.

Photo by Muneeb Babar

I grew up in a home that was chaotic and unpredictable. From a young age, I learned that stability wasn’t guaranteed and that keeping things quiet, private, and controlled felt safer than telling the truth. Secrecy was taught early, and it stuck. I didn’t want anyone to know what my personal life actually looked like. I wanted distance between who I was becoming and where I came from.

So I decided early on that my life would look nothing like my parents’.

That decision, though unknown at the time, gave me an incredible drive. I paid my way through university. I chased independence hard. I wanted the relationship, the career, the house, even the kids… not just because I wanted those things, but because they felt like proof. Proof that I was stable. Proof that I was different. Proof that I had escaped.

And for a while, it worked.

I married a good man. I built a solid career in municipal government. I looked like someone who had her life together. If you only saw the outside, you’d probably assume I was fine… I wasn’t.

Photo by İrem Y

Blowing up my life didn’t start with quitting my job. It started years earlier, with a slow mental decline I kept trying to push through. I was tired all the time, never allowing myself to fully rest. Anxious in a way that never fully shut off, and unwilling to look too closely at why. I felt like I was constantly bracing myself, even when nothing was technically wrong.

My marriage unraveled quietly, as I realized I was getting smaller in order to keep it functioning. I was purposely ignoring myself and my needs in order to make it work. The divorce wasn’t the first thing to break, it was just the first thing people could see.

Then life piled on.

Within months, my father died. Then my mother.

There’s no elegant way to describe what that does to you. Whatever unhealthy coping skills I had left no longer worked. The structure I had built my entire life on collapsed. I had a flood of grief, guilt, and the realization that I needed to face my pain head-on if I was going to get out of this. I hit a point where it was very clear: I couldn’t keep rearranging the surface of my life and pretending the foundation wasn’t cracked. It was fix it at the root, or stop pretending I was okay.

Leaving my marriage was part of it. Letting myself actually grieve was part of it. Admitting that the life I had built to feel safe no longer fit was part of it. Quitting my job, downsizing, moving abroad, letting go of the identity I had spent years protecting, all of that came after.

Those weren’t impulsive decisions. They were consequences.

For most of my life, I used structure as armour. It protected me from chaos, from instability, from a childhood I didn’t want to revisit. When that armour finally failed, I didn’t burn my life down for fun or freedom. I let it fall because I realized it wasn’t for me. From the outside, it probably looked like I was destroying everything I’d worked for. From the inside, it felt like choosing myself for the first time.

Spending six months abroad stripped things down even further. It gave me space from expectations, from roles, from who I thought I had to be. I moved my body. I breathed. I stopped performing stability, and simply lived in the moment. I remembered that life doesn’t have to be hard to be meaningful. And I paid attention to what felt meaningful for me.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

That process is what eventually became Ayana Flow. Not a program, not a before-and-after version of myself, but a place to explore what happens when you stop overriding your body, your grief, and your intuition in the name of looking put together. It’s where movement becomes a way to listen instead of perform, and where growth is allowed to be slow, non-linear, and deeply human.

Now I’m standing at the beginning of another shift. I’m moving to Nanaimo, not to blow things up again, but to keep building something steadier. Slower. More honest. I’m not running anymore. I’m choosing where to land with intentionality.

There was a time when burning everything down was the only way forward. That time has passed.

What I’m figuring out now is how to let go, grow, and move forward without destroying everything to prove I’m alive.

That’s what comes next…

Photo by Vlad Vasnetsov

Over the next year, Ayana Flow will follow this next chapter. Less burning down, more staying. More integration, less reinvention. Writing, movement, reflection, and conversations about what it actually means to build a life that feels safe in your body, not just impressive from the outside.

This next season isn’t about starting over. It’s about learning how to continue, without self-abandonment.

Because how are we supposed to take care of our bodies, if we can’t take care of our minds?

With lightness and curiosity,

Vanessa

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If This Resonated…

If you’re in a season of transition, or finding yourself questioning the life you’ve built, the Flow Journal 2.0 was created as a quiet place to land. It’s not about fixing yourself, but about listening more closely to what’s already asking for your attention.

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