When Life Cracks You Open: My Journey of Connection and Reinvention

There are moments in life when everything we thought we knew fractures.

The tidy plans, the well-rehearsed roles, the careful masks, all of it begins to splinter, sometimes quietly, sometimes with a force that brings us to our knees.

For me, those cracks didn’t appear all at once. They crept in slowly, disguised as long nights of insomnia, the hollow comfort of achievements that felt empty, and the gnawing sense that I was living a life designed for someone else. On the surface, I looked as though I was keeping pace. Inside, I was losing ground.

In my early career, I lived as though on a conveyor belt - ticking boxes, climbing 'ladders', doing the things that were supposed to add up to success. But beneath the polished exterior, I felt an ache I couldn’t name. Couldn't understand.

I lacked clarity.

I lacked belief in myself.

And perhaps most deeply, I lacked the kind of support that allowed me to pause and ask: Who am I, really? Why couldn't I be happy? Why am I in my own way?

The result was a slow unravelling. Anxiety, depression, exhaustion. A body that carried the weight of misalignment even as I powered through it all.

Despite being supported with love that can only be described as pure and fierce, I couldn't find my way through those moments. Moments that I would refer to as 'the darkness'.

I see it now with a tenderness I didn’t have back then: I wasn’t broken. I was simply out of step with myself.

Sometimes transformation doesn’t begin with a grand plan. Sometimes it begins with a whim.

Mine was a move abroad. It wasn’t conscious or sensible. It was messy, frightening, and fuelled by the desperate need to breathe again. I remember boarding the plane with a very obvious overweight carry-on, alone and unsure.

Without my usual safety nets, I stumbled into unfamiliarities: reconnecting with a cousin, listening to my "instincts" - or more truthfully, ignoring them, just to see what happened. I did the opposite of what I’d always done. If my first response said no, I would force upon a yes. If habit said hide, I chose visibility.

I've said it before: being able to rediscover yourself is liberating. When there's no one from your past to judge, question or observe you - that can give you wings. My anonymity in a new city led me to yoga and mindfulness. I picked up a book by the Dalai Lama at the market, and found solace in the pages. It taught me the strange, nourishing texture of solitude. It reminded me that silence isn’t emptiness but a canvas for healing.

For the first time, I began to see myself not as fixed but as fluid and capable of being retrained, reframed, reimagined.

Time can pass quickly when you've found your place in the world. Your new you takes hold, and that becomes the norm. But just when the dust settled, a big one came our way and threw everyone of us off kilter.

When Covid upended the world, loss arrived in a way that broke me open again.

I lost a dear friend suddenly, quietly. The holiday plans we had to celebrate our fortieth birthdays together, gone. That milestone, which we had once dreamt of marking with holidays together and laughter, instead became a quiet celebration with loved ones.

Instead of a holiday, I realised all I wanted was to spend this milestone with my parents. It was in a way, a gift for myself. It was then I realised I longed for home. After more than a decade in Australia, I returned to Malaysia.

But life has a way of its own. Within months of returning back to Malaysia, I lost my father suddenly.

No one prepares you for that kind of rupture. It leaves a crack that never closes. But within that fracture, I also found something else: clarity, courage, and an urgency that I had never known before.

Loss has a way of teaching us what no textbook ever could - that life is fragile, that time is finite, and that living aligned cannot wait for “someday.”

Learning to navigate life without my father has been its own journey.

In the wake of grief, I felt a quiet determination to live in a way he would be proud of. I began with the relationships closest to me, the ones that anchor my days. I made more time. I created space for memories. I put in the kind of effort that turns ordinary moments into something lasting.

And then, when I turned towards myself, I felt drawn to a goal I had spoken of for years but never acted on. Climbing a mountain on my own.

It turned out to be more than a physical challenge. It became a mirror reflecting back truths I had circled for so long: that self-belief is forged in discomfort, that transformation rarely moves in a straight line, and that awe has the quiet power to reset a weary soul.

Standing there, with the world stretched wide beneath me, I felt the puzzle pieces click into place. Coaching was no longer a gentle whisper at the edges of my life. It was the path I had been walking toward all along.

The mountain reminded me of something I now hold close in my work: we are capable of far more than we imagine when we choose courage over comfort.

Today, my work is rooted in guiding others through what I call connection and reinvention.

I know the weight of misalignment. I know the dull, hollow ache of wearing the mask. I know the restlessness of feeling unworthy, unseen, or uncertain.

And I also know the quiet power of curiosity, the liberation of courage, and the deep meaning that comes from living aligned.

What I offer isn’t complicated. It's intentionally simple:

• To reconnect with yourself and with others.

• To step off the conveyor belt of “shoulds.”

• To discover reinvention that feels authentic, not performative.

This isn’t just my story. It’s the story of midlife personal transformation in all its rawness: the cracks, the loss, the quiet shifts, the climbs.

If any part of this resonates with you, perhaps this is your moment to pause.

To reconnect.

To ask yourself gently: Where am I misaligned, and what might reinvention look like for me?

Because sometimes, when life cracks us open, it’s not an ending at all.

It’s the beginning of who we are becoming.