There is a version of this story where I call it inspiration.
The truer version involves a toddler who wouldn’t sleep, a mind that wouldn’t either, and me, at 1 a.m., googling “why can’t I stop thinking,” which is, if you think about it, a fairly ironic way to spend that particular one hour.
Twelve years as a Chartered Accountant had taught me plenty about pressure: deadlines, audits, and that particular boom of silence a client screams, when the numbers have just confessed something they didn’t. However so, none of it prepared me for a toddler who would not sleep and a brain that would not stop auditing itself.
I wasn’t writing a book. I was doing what Darcy did after proposing to Elizabeth the first time (damage control, that is) on a demanding career, a small child, and a mind working unpaid overtime, one exhausted night at a time. The pages are just what the paperwork turned into.
Six months of research went into figuring out what actually works, and the source list reads less like a wellness blog and more like a very strange bibliography. CBT’s reframing and ACT’s defusion, for teaching a thought that it is not, in fact, a court order. James Pennebaker’s decades of work on expressive writing, which is really just proof that scribbling about your day is therapy nobody bills you for. Affect labelling, the oddly simple discovery that naming a feeling gets you halfway to surviving it. A few grounding skills lifted from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, the one modality that hands out actual homework. And somewhere in the middle of all the clinical literature, the Stoics “stoiced” their way in, armed with nothing but their “stoicness”: healing, soothing, grounding, and utterly unbothered about it, so I put them in too, alongside (thank you, Kristin Neff’s) self-compassion work and, yes, spoon theory, borrowed from chronic illness circles and repurposed for chronic Mondays. None of it is folk wisdom wearing a nice font. Every line had to earn its place the way a number earns mine, sourced, checked, and argued with until it held.
Break Loose is what came out the other side: a guided journal-book built in four phases, moving from calming down, to letting go, to finding clarity, to simply getting through the day, each one grounded in research rather than good intentions. It launched on Amazon with no ad spend and no publisher behind it, and sold copies within its first week anyway.
I’m not a therapist, and I’m not pretending to be one. What I am is someone who spent six months treating overthinking and overwhelm that comes with it, the way I’d treat a set of accounts: sourcing every claim, cross-checking every method, refusing to file anything I couldn’t back up. Break Loose is what passed the audit.