Are you unable to move forward? Never been much of a risk taker? Finding it difficult to shake feelings of struggle, stagnancy or being stuck?

I hear you. That's been my game for the last six months. After my Mum passed, I felt lost and without any purpose or motivation. I had gladly and wholeheartedly given so much love, care and attention to my Mum that after the funeral, and with everyone going back to their own lives, I remember feeling empty, that there was a enormous void in my life that I was never going to be able to fill.

I spent the last dozen years or so dedicating my life to my Mum, supporting her through her long-term mental health diagnosis, helping to make the small changes that would hopefully bear long-term fruit. We would also go shopping together, have trips away together, eat out together, my Mum was my best friend and the partner I never had, and I wouldnt have changed it for a second.

So what do I do now? I continued to ask myself…what do I do with all this love and devotion I have to give? How do I move forward? Do I want to move forward? Whats the alternative?

Being self-employed and after having a month off and with a precarious bank balance, I through myself into work, I also had a second job that I had put on hold, so for the next four months solid, I worked two jobs, mostly Monday to Sundae every week. I knew that both contracts were ending in December 2023 so I had the motivation during that time to keep going, knowing that there was light at the end of this particular tunnel…

I woke up on 30 December 2023 feeling free, but the overwhelming feeling was tiredness. Having only taken approximately 18 days off in 4 months, I was most happy about not having to set an alarm and to just chill…but within a few days, all those feelings of overwhelm that I had managed to park back in August slowly but surely began to rise to the surface of my consciousness and attached themselves to the forefront of my mind.

What now? What shall I, can I, do I want to do with my life? The chasm Mum left, still as big as ever, consumed me, and so I spent the first two weeks of the new year (when everyone is turning over new leaves and facing 2024 head on), eating, vegging and scrolling…

I was grateful that I had this time to myself, and was aware that I had also earned due to the last 4 months of non-stop work, but I was still finding it difficult to move out of first gear (and most days reverse). Who or what was now my motivation? I had told myself come January I would first concentrate on my health and fitness, in the hope that everything else would just fall into place.

Guess what…I didn't even have the motivation for walk 10 minutes to my local gym, or drive the 2 minute journey — ZERO MOTIVATION.

So what changed? I couldn't motivate myself, but I could motivate myself for others.

Mum's mental health was so severe that she spent most of our childhood in and out of hospital, sometimes in for long periods of time, and was deemed unable to look after her children when back home. Those with mental health diagnosis in the 80's in U.K. were subjected to experimental 'treatments' that we would struggle to subject to animals today. Some, including Mum, were overdosed as they were unable, or chose not to, find more holistic ways to treat patients. But through her own sheer will and determination, Mum was fully discharged when I was approximately 12 years old, and was only re-admitted twice in the next 30 years, on both occasions only for a week or two.

So what shifted inside Mum? During a conversation, Mum told me that despite her diagnosis and the trauma of being held in a mental health, the only thing that kept her going was her children. Even when Mum's mental health was at its worst, she kept saying to herself "My kids need me, I've got to get better for them…"

When I remembered this conversation, I said to myself "If I cannot do this for me in this moment, after everything my Mum went through for us, then I can definitely do this for Mum…"

I also thought of my Nan, my paternal grandmother who, having raised 8 children of her own and was in her mid-fifties, took care of her grandchildren when my Mum was admitted.

When you can't motivate yourself to move forward in life, and every day seems like a struggle, bring to mind someone who birthed you, raised you, gave you a second chance, gave up their time to be with you, someone who had faith in you when you had little faith in yourself…someone who checks in on you, calls you, spends time with you…do it for them.

A parent, grandparent, caregiver, sibling, care worker, friend, colleague, stranger, for anyone who has put an arm around you, sacrificed for you, someone who smiled at you, if you can't do it for yourself, do it for them.