We are Back!
Today’s episode begins Season 2 with a reflection on the gap in episodes, my personal reinvention, and a discussion of expectations, uncovering roots, and the mismatch between internal and external steps.
Your reinvention will not look from the outside as it feels on the inside. And that’s how it’s meant to work.
|| LINKS MENTIONED||
– How We Define Brokenness Wrongly: The Pressure We Put On Ourselves | #56
– Listen to this episode on Youtube.
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Episode 57 Transcript:
Hi there, I’m Katy-Rose and welcome to the Rooted Reinvention, a podcast exploring the real-world journey of reinventing who we are without burning out or burning our whole life down.
I teach people how to make lasting change by melding my Masters of Neuroscience and my Cognitive Therapy qualification with common self-help tools, spiritual concepts, and my personal experience.
Because being yourself doesn’t need to feel so damn hard.
To get more information on podcast episodes, please visit RootedReinvention.com/podcast.
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This is officially the first episode of season two, or episode 57 if you’re running through from the previous season.
I did not expect the gap between seasons to be quite this long, so I guess apologies, or you’re welcome for that silence.
It is 2026, and it is almost six years to the day since I uploaded the very first episode of the first season, and that season ran for just over a year.
So there has been almost a five-year gap between uploads, which feels mind-blowing, quite frankly.
I think we all know that a lot changed across the year of sort of 2020, 2021, even into 2022 with sort of global events.
But a lot happened for me, particularly in 2021 through to 2025.
I’m not going to go into particular details about things, but I thought it may be helpful to share a little bit of reflection on my own rooted reinvention in the hope that sharing my own experience will both help share the sort of lessons that I’m hoping to share through this podcast, but also give a little bit of insight into what has been happening on my end of things.
I think it can be helpful to consider that a rooted reinvention looks very different from the outside than on the inside, and also, this changes over time.
So this is not me sharing snippets of what has happened across the last five years: It is me looking back with hindsight, with the increased understanding, being able to see things that I wasn’t able to in the moment.
So to give a little bit of context in case you’ve not been following me with my newsletter, I am no longer living in the home that I was living in for the first season.
I’m not even in the city anymore. I no longer have the pets and people around me from that time. I now have two house rabbits named Bramble and Hawthorn, who are about five and a half now. They are rescues, and I am at least their third home and hopefully their final home.
Despite these changes, there are a lot of things which I wouldn’t say they haven’t changed, but they are roots.
I suppose I feel more connected to myself than I was in 2021.
But the spark that I was connected to when I began recording the first season is also still here.
So it may have morphed a little. Things have changed, but there is still that very same feeling that I had when I recorded the first season around the importance of sharing this information and the fact we’re not taught how to manage our spark and to sort of even identify our roots.
I think it’s important to recognise that my reinvention to other people does not necessarily look rooted, especially as the person that I was and how I behaved and how I thought in 2021 was very different from the person sitting here now.
And that’s not to say that I wasn’t still me, but being able to connect with those roots, being able to really align with my values and then act accordingly: being able to set the boundaries that I believe in, being able to question the things or speak up where I feel there needs to be clarity, that looked like a brand new change to many people in my life.
Although I would also argue that the people who have known me the longest could see what they described as the old me come back. And I think that’s something about roots and rooted reinventions is that it’s not about creating a brand new you. It’s about unearthing and uncovering the roots that we could have followed but didn’t.
And for myself, I know that the things that diverted my attention from those were society’s expectations, family and friends’ sort of expectations, what was actually physically available to me in terms of the choices and options I had, my own mindset, the experiences that I’d had and how that shaped what I believed.
There’s so much to it, which is why I feel like psychology and neuroscience and even some of that sort of cognitive therapy that I’m trained in, around kind of questioning our thoughts and really looking at where our beliefs have come from and what we’re believing, how all of that comes together and how that shapes us and shapes who we are.
And I think particularly reflecting on my experience growing up as a woman in Western culture and that kind of expectation that people had, certainly in the time I was growing up, where you had to be quiet, you needed to accept things, you didn’t question things, other people told you how the world worked.
And it’s not like I was ever unable to query this, but there is a lot of conditioning that we go through from society, from the media, from social media now, from adverts, from the people around us, particularly those of a different generation, whether they are older or younger.
There’s a lot of different viewpoints, and our brain is not a computer. It cannot take every single input, analyse it, compare it and come out with what feels like the most true. Humans are not biologically able to take in all the information we are given. And I would say in 2026, we are given more information than ever before.
And that’s why a lot of the recommendations around coming to your roots is about figuring out you and who you are without social media, without the TV, without your parents’ voice in your head from when you were a child telling you what is expected of you.
So from the outside, I know my reinvention did not look like a swan swimming along, gliding. It did not look smooth and beautiful, even though I’m like paddling underneath it frantically.
I have always said that a rooted reinvention is one where you don’t need to burn down your whole life, you don’t lose everything, completely change who you are, you don’t need to leave where you’re currently at.
The phrase has been used: “you don’t need to eat, pray, love your way to a rooted reinvention.” And there are two things I guess I want to say about that.
First is that, for some people, that is the type of reinvention that works for them and that they want. For some people, they realise they are so far off track that they need a fresh start; they need a clean slate. This is how they work, this is what they want and need from themselves. If that works for you, that’s fantastic.
The second thing is that I know my reinvention certainly looked like a ‘drop everything, eat, pray, love your way to a new person’, at least on some level. And I can see that. I can see the outside picture of it and recognise, hey, I’m not living with the person I was living with in the town I was living in. I’m not in the job that I was in back then. I’m not doing this, I’m not doing that. The things I used to do, I’m not doing now. It looks like I’ve had quite a personality shift and a life revamp.
And I would say that’s because my kind of Persona, the outer Persona that I was living in, had become very separated from the roots of who I wanted to be and who I feel I am underneath. And I think it’s important that even if someone looks like they are having a brand new, fresh start, clean slate, reinvention that you don’t always know what’s going on underneath.
So I’ve got my best friend from school; I’ve got people from university who have started to say, you used to be like this, and you’re now like this again. It feels like you’ve got that spark back. It feels like those things that mattered to you back then, you’re now openly saying matter to you again.
And it wasn’t that they didn’t matter to me. It was just that I lost my voice.
And at the time, I did not think I was missing something. I didn’t think, “Oh, I’ve lost my voice on this.” It wasn’t a conscious decision. It wasn’t something that I had specifically not prioritised. But in my current state, I can see and sort of feel that, that connection that I lost.
I think all of life transitions do test us a bit, and we have to prune ourselves as we go through. We have to make a choice on which things we follow and which ones we set down for a period of time.
I guess in one way you could say this podcast is something I put down for a while, and then I’ve been able to pick up.
And I’ve used the analogy of a butterfly before, but essentially I feel like I’ve got into my chrysalis, become a soup, and then forcing my way out of the chrysalis gets all those blood vessels into my wings to make the wings work. Then you have to let your wings dry when you come out as a butterfly before you can attempt to fly off.
And while I’m not yet at the place I 100% want to be, I’m not in that future that I’m envisaging. That’s okay. I was not a bad caterpillar just because I decided to go into a chrysalis and become a butterfly. And I think honouring the different stages of our life and the lessons they teach can be a really helpful cognitive tool.
You know, the past is done. How we think about it, how we speak about it to ourselves, how we reflect on our experience shapes our feelings, shapes how we feel about what’s happened.
It’s one of the little powers that we do have. I think there’s a real difference between sort of positive thinking, no matter what’s happening, and just taking a realistic view of ‘this wasn’t how I wanted things to be’.
There’s a part of me that wishes I hadn’t become that type of caterpillar at that time. But then there’s also the part of me that knows that if that caterpillar hadn’t gone into the chrysalis, I wouldn’t have come out as this butterfly with all the experience and knowledge they now have.
So honouring the different stages of our life and the lessons that it’s taught us can be a really helpful sort of tool for us to consider. And when we look back on something that happened, whether we feel good or bad about it, to at least recognise where we grew, where the positives may have come from, what we may have learned from that can just help it feel a bit more meaningful.
And when we feel like we have meaning, it does affect our, our mental health. It affects our emotions.
And I have had many plans to get back to this, and I’ve recorded this podcast episode, specifically this coming back, episode 57, I think four times now across the last two and a half years.
But this is how reinventions work. You take an attempt, you take the next step, you try to open those wings, you think, I’m going to try and fly now; you see what works, you see if you’re ready, you see if the time is right, and that’s okay.
And this is something particularly in the self-help realm, we don’t see enough of. I definitely feel like, oh, do or do not. There is no try.
“What do you mean you’ve gone through all this reinvention, you’ve ended that relationship, or you’ve chosen to do this new course, and you don’t have the outcome yet? What are you doing? What are you doing with your life, almost?”
There’s almost a ‘How dare you try things? What do you mean you haven’t reached the end yet? How, how can you possibly tell people about reinvention when you’re still reinventing yourself?’
And I would say to that that the end of life is death, mate.
And my goal here is to live a full life. I think it’s important when we’re in any reinvention, any transition, any change, that we are able to be aware of internal shifts and then those external shifts, and they don’t move in time together; they’re not in sync.
My decision to make a change did not have me go and announce to the world I’m making this change.
It was “When am I going to start this? Well, maybe tomorrow morning I’ll try and do that first bit of that step of that little bit and see how that feels.” Okay. And then a few weeks later, “Okay, this feels like it’s in the right direction. What’s next? What’s not working? What is working? Is there a route here? Yes. How do I nurture this route before I try and put my whole life on it?”
There were many people who sort of told me or advised me to do things on the outside, and it took months for me to actually do because I had to come to terms with what that change was internally.
I had to check for me whether it was right. I had to make that plan. I had to weigh up all the options, particularly when I had multiple people telling me even the same kind of concept, but again, maybe different ways of doing it.
So I guess today’s episode is a focus on that kind of mismatch between the outer and inner, or of continued reinvention and redefinition that we all go through just by living every day.
And I’m not even going to go into, like, progress.
How many words did I write this week? None. Oh, no, I’m not making progress like I want to. How far closer have I got to that goal? That timing is never quite what we planned because life isn’t a computer algorithm with all these nice set timetables.
Life, you know, nature works at its own pace. The leaves on the trees don’t all fall off at once. That flower may not bloom as early as it did last year, but that’s nature, that’s life.
It’s just part of the seasons. And we, as humans, also the transitional changes we go through every moment, every day; they are seasons of our life.
So if you need a reminder today, if you need any advice, want a nugget of truth?
I guess today’s message here is that it’s okay for your rooted reinvention, your internal changes, your decisions, or even your contemplation of what could be different will not look on the outside as it feels on the inside.
And I want to say that’s almost right. That is how it works. That is not a problem. That is not something you need to fix. For lack of a better word, I guess there is that sacred timing of everything, and it’s right.
It’s okay that it doesn’t follow this manmade schedule.
So let it take time, and where you can, just try to hold onto those roots, try to sit in that process, be that eye of the hurricane wherever you can. Because there’s nothing wrong with trying to find a bit of peace and space and calm.
When everything is moving around you and feels out of control, it’s okay to take up time, to take up space, to go at your pace.
Thanks for listening. And as always, you can find out more at RootedReinvention.com.
Take care. Remember, you are more capable than you often realise.
And I’ll see you next time. Bye.