# The Words, Sentences and Chapters That Shape Us

Blog 

Mental Health Health & Wellbeing 

By Guest Blog

23rd September 2026

***With thanks to our member, Fiz Rawlings, for this article.***

Turning 40 in lockdown was not quite the milestone celebration I had imagined.

Plans shifted from celebrations abroad, to a city break, to a small gathering of friends and family in outdoor pods. The night before, at the televised briefing that made everyone gravitate towards the screen as though reassurance or certainty would somehow emanate from it if we hoped hard enough, came the challenging, but understandable, news that all restaurants and pubs would be closing completely. Moments later, a spate of cancellation emails flooded my phone. And that was that.

Something interesting happened in the days that followed: my mind shifted from celebration to contemplation, and I started to really consider what turning 40 meant for me.

I started to take stock of my life, looking at my career of nearly two decades, my relationships and what I wanted the future to look like. The questions that hum away in the background, the quiet soundtrack to everyday life. One of the few positives of Covid was allowing the space to stop and actually listen to the lyrics.

And so, change began. It wasn’t just about those immediate turning-40 reflections. Experiencing the immense hole left by losing someone who deeply influenced my upbringing to Covid made me reevaluate how I wanted to spend my time. It transpired that it wasn’t spending endless hours feverishly writing feedback in the permitted purple pen on mountains of mock exams, while the rest of my family demolished various tubs of confectionery and watched their way through the bumper edition of the Radio Times during the Christmas holiday.

I reconnected with a friend who had been the sort of friend I’d meet up with perhaps once a year on an obligatory online call that, once alien, became familiar to all during those strange times. It was a sultry Wednesday night in August, and I remember thinking about how we’d managed to be friends for two decades but somehow hadn’t really known each other. The connection grew and was intrinsic to me rediscovering parts of myself that had been sleeping for a long time: the part that liked to dress vibrantly, the part that liked to lose herself in music at an unnecessarily loud gig and even the part that liked to immerse herself in nature on autumnal walks. It was this friend who first said to me that I really listened, had a real capacity for containment, and asked whether I had thought about becoming a counsellor.

Fast forward six years and I’m very grateful for that exchange. And those difficult conversations I had with myself when I turned 40 have facilitated explorations with clients who are struggling with their own ageing milestones. This could mean supporting their navigation of, in John Mayer’s prescient and poignant lyrics, a ‘quarter-life crisis’ as Gen Z figure out how to live independently and forge their futures after experiencing the freedom of university, but then having to return to chore lists on the fridge and sharing a space with their teenage brother (and his offensive laundry hamper), or balancing what it takes to make partner in their firm with that ever-ticking biological clock.

But it’s having lived my four decades and then some, and having experienced the highs and the lows, that allows me to hold my clients, empathise with their pain, and offer, where appropriate, the insights that a life lived fully can bring. You carry the scar tissue from great and painful loss, the learning from different occupational roles, the knowledge from years of postgrad study, the skills developed through CPD and the reflections on relationships: the giddiness, the heartbreaks and everything in between.

Would it be nice to creak a little less in the mornings? Yes. Fewer grey hairs? Completely. Do I miss the loved ones I have lost during my journey? Absolutely. But I feel the reassuring echoes of their influence in me every day.

And these people, experiences and moments are the words, sentences and chapters that make up my narrative and have shaped not only the person I am, but the therapist I am able to be with my clients today.