When Life Goes Off Script

A decade of Evoking Grace—and the story looks nothing like I thought it would

What happens when life goes off script—and you’re left living a story you don’t remember choosing?

You stop. You place your hand on your heart. And you let everything go—so you can start to live again.

Marking Evoking Grace’s 10th anniversary has been an undeniable invitation to put myself—and my site—under construction. The instructions were clear: no writing (apart from my new book—but that’s a story for another time), no social media, and no fluff. Just radical honesty, plenty of kindness, and lots of soft tissue. Because tears were expected. And tears were cried. A lot of them.

When I published my very first post on May 29, 2015, I believed I had life in my hands. I felt strong, unstoppable—I was going to eat London in one bite. Ten years later, all I could see was a disappointed, tired, and disenchanted woman.

The world—that big place I thought I could control—has changed dramatically. And how dare it, without consulting me first? London—the city I’ve called home for more than half my life—feels like a different place altogether. The noise, the messy realities, the relentless motion... it’s taken the shine off what once felt like its own universe. And the girl whose words were going to change lives and move hearts? She was recently called to accept that whatever she thought was meant to be… may not be. Not now. Possibly not ever.

It’s not easy to look back at your life and welcome the lows as the highs.

But if I was going to make all this deconstruction worth the tears and heartache, I had to get completely okay with how things unfolded over the last ten years: the dreams that quietly died, the people I may never see again but will always carry with me, and the future I thought I had bagged—but never arrived.

I didn't just want a better life — I wanted the damn masterpiece. I worked for it. Left everything behind for it. And at the end of it, what was I left with? Reality. A life that can only make sense in her messiness. A world that can only do what it can. And a body, now perimenopausal, that’s still learning how to carry me with grace—even on the days when hormones are raging and everything aches.

That loss brought a silent grief. One I found hard to share without shame or frustration. I clung to a story of injustice, disappointment, and resentment for a while. Until one day, the sad chant I had been singing to myself for far too long became more painful than the truth: life just hadn’t turned out the way I hoped.

We want to tell the world that we overcame, we transformed, we made it out stronger. We want the success story. The applause. But sometimes the most we can get out of life is the trust that we are held as everything around us falls—and make that enough as we birth new dreams.

Have I evoked grace over the last ten years? Honestly, I think grace has been evoking me all along.

We imagine it as this gentle, loving presence that guides us softly. But what I’ve learned is that grace is also a fierce force that gets us going when we don’t know how, keeps us standing when we want to crumble, and still believes in a new day—even after a night of torment.

Grace gives us the words someone, somewhere needs to hear. And the courage to walk alone when we’re afraid.

My first post was about living in the now. And isn’t it just perfect that it took ten years to truly learn what that even means? When we meet life right where we are, we offer our presence to beautiful and brutal moments alike. We trust ourselves so fiercely that, come what may, we know we’ll find a way through.

We embody grace when we sense wellness inside the discomfort and find hope tucked inside defeat.

I’m not the same girl who woke up in 2015 with the words 'Evoking Grace' whispered to her out of thin air. I’m not even the same woman who accepted the call to be dismantled and rebuilt. I am in the making. And I will be—until I’ve got enough hope in me to grow a little more and the joy that allows me to thrive in my very ordinary way.

Beloved Friend, if you, too, saw the dream fall along the way, know that the journey never ends. If you woke up after a night of despair and found in you what it takes to greet a new day, trust that you have been living well. And when the horizon is not in sight, be sure that you are already there.

May you dare to believe in the way ahead, even when it's blurry. May you tend to grief like a wise and gentle friend. And when disappointment comes to visit, may you offer it the treasures you stored away.