Hello beautiful soul
I want to show you something really personal today.
Two photos of the same woman, taken fourteen years apart.
Two versions of me.
Two very different lives.
One is my UK driving licence from 2011 — the year I finally left my first husband after twelve years of domestic abuse.
The other is my New York licence from 2025 — taken in the city I chose, in the life I built, in the body of a woman who finally came home to herself.
If you didn’t know better, you’d never believe these two women were the same person.
In the 2011 photo above, I see a girl who was terrified.
And she truly was. My first husband was incredibly volatile, and for many years after leaving I lived with the fear that he would find me and do something.
But there was another layer too — the quieter one, the one you can’t see in a photograph.
In 2011, I had zero self-esteem.
I thought I was unattractive.
I thought I wasn’t that smart.
I genuinely had no idea what value I brought to the world.
I was a woman who looked “fine” on the outside — always early for work, always remembering everyone’s birthdays — while internally disappearing.
A woman who had learned to survive by becoming very, very small, and avoiding the truth of her life because the truth felt too dangerous to hold.
Avoiding pain.
Avoiding conflict.
Avoiding her intuition.
Avoiding the terrifying possibility that she deserved more.
Avoidance wasn’t weakness.
It was the strategy that kept her alive.
And I am so deeply proud of her.
But I am ecstatic that she chose to stop avoiding the truth of her life and found the courage to leave.
The price of avoidance — even in far less extreme circumstances — is always the same:
you lose yourself.
And that’s the part most people never talk about.
Avoiding the truth doesn’t just keep you stuck.
It keeps you living a life that was meant to be a doorway, not a destination.
In the 2025 photo above, I see a woman who is fully claimed.
She is confident.
She is courageous.
She sees every ounce of her value.
She is living a life that feels vibrantly aligned with who she really is.
The woman in my 2025 licence didn’t appear because I suddenly became confident or brave.
She appeared because I stopped abandoning myself.
I stopped avoiding the conversations that made my stomach drop.
I stopped avoiding the parts of me I had been taught were too much.
I stopped avoiding my own knowing — the knowing that kept whispering, Ruth, this life doesn’t fit you anymore.
And once I stopped avoiding the truth, something extraordinary happened:
My whole life rearranged itself around who I was becoming.
It didn’t happen quickly.
It didn’t happen neatly.
It didn’t happen without grief.
It is a process, not an event.
But it did happen — and it continues to.
Because once you stop avoiding the truth, you create space for a new future to find you.
What most people don’t realise is this:
my life changed (and continues to change) at the speed of my honesty.
One of the biggest shifts in my entire life — personal, professional, spiritual — happened the year I stopped drifting and started reviewing my life with intention, around a decade ago.
Not performance.
Not resolutions.
Reflection. Truth. Choice.
Eight or nine years ago, I started setting a theme and an energy for each new year.
What energy do I need to cultivate in the year ahead?
Not goals. Not targets.
Energy.
Who do I want to be in this next season of my life?
That single question changed everything about how I showed up.
It stopped being about outcomes.
It became about identity.
About alignment.
About becoming the woman who could hold the life she said she wanted.
The process evolved each year.
Last year I invited Clarissa into it for the first time, and it was transformational for her.
This year I have gone even deeper — and for the first time ever, the whole experience is automated so you get me coaching you through it step by step.
Which means you get to do it too — for free.
Sign up and away you go: Bloom in 2026 — a guided reflection and visioning process created for Women Who Lead.
This is where you close out the year with clarity and step into the next one with intention, purpose, and power.
Where you stop passively repeating the same year with different dates.
Where you stop avoiding your own life and start choosing the woman you’re becoming.
If you’re tired of staying small,
tired of living on autopilot,
tired of drifting into versions of your life you don’t fully want…
try this instead.
Before you go, I want to leave you with the question that changed everything for me: What truth are you finally ready to stop running from?
Write it down.
Don’t overthink it.
Let it land.
Rooting for you always
Ruth x
Ps. If you are in London this week and want to say hello, come and join me and some of the Sisterhood for lunch and vision setting IRL on Thursday December 11th at 12.30pm. Sign up here: https://luma.com/27ooreeo
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