That is the wrong sentence. Let myself is too generous. What I did was scroll, and keep scrolling, and feel myself shrink, and keep scrolling anyway.

I am only a few days into my own publication. Two posts up. Six subscribers, most of whom I added myself. I had been feeling, the day before, the small private satisfaction of having begun. By the time I put the phone down, I was certain I should not have begun at all.

The first thing that happened was the writing. Other women, writing better than I do — relatable and authentic, humorous and with an element of authority. The kind of voice that sounds like it has earned the right to be heard. Scrolling past one beautiful sentence after another I felt my own sentences getting smaller and smaller in my head.

Then there were the numbers. 2,500 subscribers. 8,000. 14,000. New Substackers introducing themselves with a confidence I do not have, gathering restacks and comments in a single afternoon. I have six subscribers. Five of whom are my own family and friends – who I unknowingly added myself during set up. They didn’t even choose for themselves.

Then I read a sentence about giving yourself permission.

There it was - the exact sentence Dare to live! was founded on, eleven years ago, in another country, by a younger version of me who did not know how to monetize what she had built. The same sentiment. The same words, more or less. Written by a woman I have never met, in a publication that has 12,000 subscribers, dated last week.

And the thought landed, fully formed: I waited too long. Someone else built it. The thing I held onto for ten years has now been built without me.

I lay there with my phone in my hand and a small, panicked grief moving through my body. None of this is original. None of this is mine. I am late.

Here is what I want to tell you, because I suspect you have had some version of this moment too.

It is not true. I am not late – I am on time.

The line about permission is not anyone’s. It belongs to every woman who has ever realized, alone in a kitchen or in the loud silence of her mind, that she is allowed to choose her own life. The woman who wrote it last week did not steal it from me. I did not steal it from anyone before me. It is a truth that gets rediscovered, in private, by every woman who is ready to hear it. And every woman who writes about it is writing about her own rediscovery, in her own life, in her own voice — which is the only thing that has ever made a piece of writing matter.

I am not late. The woman with 12,000 subscribers is not ahead of me. She is doing her work. I am doing mine. The reader who needs her voice will find her. The reader who needs mine will find me. We are not in the same race because there is no race. There never was.

But that is the answer my morning, caffeinated self can give - that my midnight self could not.

My midnight self lay in bed and felt very small, and very behind, and very alone in a way that was familiar from much earlier in my life. The loneliness of being the girl who never quite fit in the group, who watched other girls move easily through the world and could not understand how. Comparison, I have come to think, is just that loneliness in a digital form. The feed is the new playground, and the girl who felt like she never belonged is still the woman who scrolls.

I did not put the phone down because I had a healthy realization. I put the phone down because my daughter, asleep beside me, stirred and whimpered mama. She was barely awake, not in need of anything, other than to know I was there.

I turned to her in the dark, put my hand on her back and pulled her closer. Scrolling done.

There is a thing I keep having to relearn, and I will probably keep having to relearn it for the rest of my life: comparison is a thief, and it works at night, and the only thing that breaks the spell is something real in the room with you. A child’s voice. A hand on a back. The sound of a kettle. A piano in the corner. Whatever is here, in the place you actually exist, that the feed cannot touch.

I am here. The writing I am doing is mine. The six subscribers are real. The voice I have, that I am still learning to trust, is the only one I can offer.

I do not have to be unique. I have to be honest – and that as it turns out is a much rarer thing.

Much love,

Ceili

Andrea Bocelli was playing. Vivere. I remember the moment the name came to me — those two words, in that order, with the exclamation mark already attached. I did not know what it was yet. I just knew it was something, and that I had to leave.

A few weeks later I got on a flight. Playing on my iPod as I took my seat and fastened my seat belt as instructed, was How to Save a Life by The Fray, and I understood that whatever Dare to live! was going to be, it was going to be for women like my friend. Women in the thick of something nobody around them could fully see. I had lost a close childhood friend who could not hold on, and I was consumed with the thought that if only there had been a place — a moment, a room, a hand — that she could have reached for, maybe it would have held her.

I travelled for four months — Canada, Alaska, Vancouver Island. I was working it out as I went. For a while I thought the brand might be called something else entirely, something built around her name. But on the side of a mountain in Alaska, looking out over a meadow of wildflowers, I felt the strongest flood of inspiration I have ever felt in my life, and I knew. Dare to live! It had been the name from the puzzle. It always had been.

I travelled to Ireland, where I’d lived previously for 11 years. I gave it 2 years. I gave it my soul. The brand was built; culminating in two retreats. Mostly designed for content and feedback. The local paper covered one of them. The women who came opened up to each other in ways that both astonished and moved me. I held onto every note they sent afterwards.

And then I hit the wall founders often hit. Levelling up.

The retreats had to become fully paid retreats. The paid retreats had to be premium, because of the cost of running them properly. And I could not yet articulate, out loud and in plain language, who exactly this was for. I had the what. I did not yet have the who.

At the same time, my own life was pulling me in another direction. I was exhausted. I was homesick. My father needed help with the family business in Cayman. I told myself I would go back for a few months and pick this up again when I returned. I packed the marketing materials and the supplies into a box. I kept the website running. I held onto the name and to the dream.

I never picked it up again. Not until now. Almost exactly ten years.

For a long time I called that a failure. I do not anymore. It was a pause. A waiting. The thirty-something-year-old woman trying to sell a premium retreat to a market she did not yet understand would not have built what I am about to build now. The pause was not the end of the dream. The pause was the part where the dream got to evolve.

So this time I am building it slowly, on purpose, and I want you to know why.

This time it is online first, not retreat first. The retreats will come, but they are not the product. The product is the writing and the digital experiences and eventually the community. Retreats become the crown of a thing that already exists, not the entire thing being asked to carry itself.

This time I know who it is for. It is for the woman who holds everyone together and has quietly disappeared inside the role. It is not for someone looking for a yoga retreat or a wellness break or a girls’ trip. It is for the woman who is tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

This time the newsletter eats first. If the writing slips, everything else pauses. The writing is the foundation that everything to come is built on.

I am not in a hurry. I have ten years of waiting already invested in this. I know how to wait. A few more months of building carefully is nothing, and everything.

If you are reading this, you are reading it early. The list is small. The newsletter is new. I am writing it carefully, because the slow build is the whole point. I am glad you are here.

There is more coming. Slowly, deliberately — I am building.

Much Love,

Ceili

I have a race.

The alarm. The kettle. The coffee made while my son is still sleeping. Twenty minutes to get him up and out — homework bag, water bottle, breakfast in the car if it has to be. Between 6:35 and 6:40 we are in the car. By 7:05 at the latest he is at the school gate. By 7:10 I am at my desk. That is the morning.

I drive him in. We listen to the same radio station every morning. I ask him how he slept and what he dreamt about, and then we both zone out into the music. When the door closes behind him at school, the radio goes off and the car goes silent. The hum in my head starts — the things I forgot to do, the thing the accountant said yesterday, the email I need to send, the thing I am worried about, the thing I am quietly hopeful about.

Some mornings I get to the office car park and I do not get out.

Not every morning. Just the mornings I am a little more tired than usual. The mornings something is weighing a little more heavy. I sit there for five extra minutes. Sometimes ten. Not doing anything. Not on my phone. Not listening to anything. Just sitting in the car, in the silence, with my second coffee getting colder in the cup holder. Just a few minutes before I open the door and become the person everyone in the building needs me to be.

Those five minutes are one of the only pieces of my morning that nobody owns.

I used to feel guilty about them.

I used to think a morning routine was supposed to look a certain way — a meditation, a journal practice, a workout before dawn, a green smoothie, a list of intentions written out the night before. I tried all of it. None of it stuck. What stuck is a race against the clock. The day has not even started and I am already trying to catch my breath.

Here is what I have stopped trying to pretend.

I do not have time for a sacred morning. I have a baby and a nine-year-old and a business and a household that runs on me, and the morning is not the moment in my day where I get to be a woman who has herself together. The morning is the moment in my day where I just keep us all moving.

My quiet time is somewhere else. It is at the gym three times a week, where I sing along to the music and joke with my trainer and dance a small move in the mirror when nobody is looking. It is in the recent evenings I have just rearranged, so that my daughter goes down at half seven, which gives me an hour, maybe two; to be alone in my newly set up living room just for me — soft lamps, a blanket, my books, the laptop open. There is a piano in the corner of that room that I have not sat at in months. I can still play. Some evenings I think about lifting the lid.

It is the ninety-minute mobile massage I booked myself for my birthday, in my own house, in my own room. That was sacred. Not the five-thirty alarm.

I think one of the quiet lies of the wellness world is that the answer is somewhere out there in a system you have not yet bought — a new app, a new framework, a new morning routine designed by someone you have never met. And what is true for me, and I suspect for a lot of women, is that the thing that actually steadies us is not a perfect morning. It is the small unowned moments we already have, that we have been dismissing because they do not look like a ritual.

The five minutes in the car park, on the mornings you need them, is a ritual.

The walk from the gym car park into the changing room, with the song still in your head, is a ritual.

The hour with the lamps and the blanket after the children are down is a ritual.

The massage on your birthday is a ritual.

The lid of the piano you have not lifted in months, that you might lift tonight, is a ritual waiting for you.

Stop chasing the five-thirty version of yourself who has never existed. Find your version of the five minutes in the car park, and protect it like it is sacred — because it is.

Much love,

Ceili

I used to write almost daily. I haven’t, for a long time. I used to live my passions with genuine joy. I used to have a dream that I then put down, to follow life down a very different path. In this past version of my life I started to create, what was in essence a beautiful, authentic space for women in need of both momentary escape and meaningful connection to come together.

I have lived many versions of myself, and the past almost decade has been the version I have enjoyed the least. Despite the turmoil and frequent episodes of raw silent anguish- and often anguish that was loud and messy- one small flickering light remained. This flicker, though faint and distant, was a reminder that the pieces of the truest version of me were still there. Just a reminder, not yet a call to action. Something to hold on to when all I could hold on to was hope.

One of the foundations of the brand created over 10 years ago is about giving yourself permission. Permission to fall apart, to heal, to be true to who you are. Essentially, to grab life by the horns and just live it as you are – Dare to Live! The flicker has gotten brighter, more distinct and now I find myself pulled upright to attention again, to a calm, certain voice, reminding me to give myself permission to try again.

Over the past 10 years I have barely read a book let alone put finger to keyboard – as it were- for my own writing. One day you have talents, and interests, passions and daily habits that are comforting and self-driven and the next day you can’t remember the last time you sang out loud, finished a book you enjoyed, cooked a new meal you came up with yourself, or laughed hysterically and genuinely felt it. There came a point when I woke up to a life that felt heavier, a few shades darker, conversations a little more forced; relationships of all sorts still there, but with a slight brush of strain or an undertone of forced effort. Not like before.

A lot of life has happened, and I have lived and survived through much difficulty. Along the way I believed I had lost my passions and talents of previous versions of me; lost my flair for the creative, believing my struggles and oftentimes giving in to them, meant I no longer had anything of value left to offer; believing that it just wasn’t me anymore. Maybe I have lost parts of me along the way; this may be true. However, more than one truth can exist at the same time. I am here now with the same passion and focus, just a different lens. The same drive, but on a different platform. The same desire to give, but with a different - stronger, more resilient version of me doing the offering.

The grittiest courage is not in the start- but in the re-start. The return. The coming back.

Today I stand taller; changed yes, a work in progress yes – as I hope always to be – in a life that looks very different to where I was 10 years ago. While I stand with a few more edges, I also stand with reclaimed dreams, drive and the truest pieces of who I am holding me tall. There has been a pause on the dream not a giving up. A waiting not a failing. Two truths, always in co-existence that I have worked around to get me here - fear and power.

This was always the version of me that would be ready. Dare to Live! Reimagined.