You can love your life completely and still feel completely lost inside it. For me that loss started showing up in handfuls.

Nobody talks about that part.

With my first baby I knew I was putting myself last. Honestly? I was fine with it. Baby comes first. That felt right. I gave myself full permission to disappear for a while.

Second time around though? My body had a very different opinion. 😅

Turns out you can only ignore yourself for so long before everything you quietly pushed aside decides to show up uninvited. Loudly. All at once. Classic.

My hair was falling out. Totally normal postpartum stuff, I knew that. But when you already feel like "you" have "gone" ... when you look in the mirror and genuinely don't recognise the woman looking back at you... losing your hair stops being about hair.

It becomes a symbol. Another piece of yourself that feels taken.

And here's the wild part. From the outside? Life looked beautiful. Two gorgeous girls. Amazing support around me. I was smiling.

But depression can look so different when you see someone smiling.

The anxiety. The overthinking. The mental load that never switched off. I was burning out slowly and quietly and I just kept going. Because stopping felt selfish. Because I told myself that pushing through was what good mothers did.

I didn't want to bounce back. I hate that phrase honestly.

I wanted to bounce forward.

To find a new version of myself on the other side of this. To stop waiting for permission to exist again. To honour how far I had actually come rather than punishing myself for not being further ahead.

So I started small. A ritual. Something just mine. Ten minutes that belonged to nobody else.

And from that small, imperfect, very unglamorous beginning... Elevana was born.

Not as a brand. As a friend. The one I needed and couldn't find. 💛