I recently sat down to put together a CV because I needed to find work, and as I began going through my professional life, I was amazed by how much I had forgotten. There were conferences, lectures, collaborations, students I had trained, products I had developed and almost forty years of working with people, essential oils, health and wellbeing. I had worked with thousands of people, helped them through difficult times and contributed to a profession that was barely recognised when I started. Seeing it all written down made me immensely proud, but it also made me wonder how I could have lost sight of so much of my own life.
I had always known my professional worth. I knew I was good at what I did, and I had never doubted my knowledge or my ability to make a difference in people’s lives. Yet somewhere during the years I had been ill, I had lost contact with that part of myself, and reading through my CV brought back a woman I had almost forgotten.
When I became ill with hypothyroidism and autoimmune Hashimoto’s disease, I discovered that I wasn’t invincible. I had always been massively capable, proud of my ability to solve problems, learn whatever I needed to learn and find my way through difficult circumstances. Then my body fell apart, and suddenly I was struggling with things I had always taken for granted. The illness affected every aspect of my life, physically, mentally and emotionally, and I spent years trying to understand what was happening to me, while dealing with exhaustion, brain fog, sleepless nights and the fear that I might never get well again.
I was also living alone in a new country, without family or the professional network and connections I had built elsewhere, and my world became increasingly small as everything revolved around just existing, keeping my head above the water and trying to recover. I studied my illness, monitored blood tests, food, medication, supplements, sleep and energy, and became so absorbed in finding answers that my entire life turned into one enormous healing project.
As I began to see small improvements in my health, I realised that I needed to change the way I thought about myself. I had spent years concentrating on healing, but as long as I saw myself as someone who was healing, I was still seeing myself as sick. I wanted to start thinking of myself as being healthy again. That change in perspective was important to me, even though I still had a long way to go.
It was frightening to give up the constant monitoring that had given me a sense of control, and my physical recovery was still a long way off, but mentally I began moving in a different direction.
What I didn’t understand at the time was how much of my identity had disappeared along with my health, and why it had been so easy to lose sight of it.
When I started working with aromatherapy in the late 1980s, very few people took it seriously. I was laughed at, dismissed and told to get a proper job, and I soon learned that talking about my work outside my professional circle could be an unpleasant experience. Within that circle, however, I was respected. I taught, lectured, collaborated with other professionals and built a successful career doing something I loved, but I gradually stopped speaking about it to people who didn’t understand or appreciate what I was doing.
Later, confidentiality became another reason for keeping my professional life to myself. I protected my clients’ privacy, and some of my other projects were covered by nondisclosure agreements,
Over the years, my professional life had become a large and important part of my life, full of activity, people, learning and accomplishments, yet so much of it remained invisible to the people around me. It was a huge part of who I was, but very few people outside my professional world knew what I actually did or how much I had accomplished.
Even my children had no idea of the extent of my work, and when I recently told them about some of the things I had done, they were surprised.
I had always been proud of my work, but I had become so accustomed to keeping it within its own boundaries that when I became ill and could no longer work, there was very little around me to remind me of that part of myself. The clients, lectures, projects and professional connections were gone from my everyday life, and with them went much of the recognition that had accompanied my work for decades. I had spent years staying silent about my accomplishments, and when illness took away my ability to work, I gradually lost sight of them too.
When my health finally began to improve more noticeably, I realised how far from myself I had come and I felt such deep loss. My energy, my creativity, my work…all of it was lying under a thick layer of dust and I found myself empty, sad and very lost.
That was what led me to put together my CV, and as I looked at everything I had accomplished, I realised that I am approaching my future from scratch when, in reality, I am carrying an entire lifetime of knowledge and experience, along with the curiosity and determination that has been my driving force from the beginning.
I am still that girl, the happy, trusting girl who wanted to learn everything she could and who threw herself into opportunities without worrying too much about whether she was supposed to be doing them. She was always there, buried under the grey dust of upheaval and crisis, and I am finding her again.
I understand illness, healing and the experience of losing contact with yourself in ways I never could before. Living through this has deepened my respect for what women go through, and how even the strongest and most capable among us can lose sight of ourselves when circumstances overwhelm us, especially in a world that doesn’t always recognise our value.
This understanding has brought a new focus to my work, combining almost forty years of professional knowledge and experience with everything these last years have taught me. And at the heart of it is what I call the Inner Queendom, finding our way back to the wisdom, knowledge and authority that have been ours all along.
Anna
P.S. Sadness, irritation and anger are the feelings women bring to me most often. So on Wednesday 4 November I’m holding a free workshop on Zoom about three essential oils that have helped every woman I have guided with exactly these: Orange, Geranium and Ylang-ylang. Come and smell them with me, and bring a friend if you know a woman who could use it.
18:00 CET · 17:00 UK · 12:00 New York · 09:00 California
Join here: https://claude.ai/artifact/Yaw8RtDeHEEi7mDcdxndWE