I want to be honest with you. Actually honest. A few years ago, I was sitting in a leadership meeting at a global tech company, a room full of smart people, high stakes, everything I had worked toward for nearly two decades. And I remember thinking: I have no idea who I am anymore, why I am doing this job and where I am headed to?

Not in a dramatic way. But, like something had been slowly leaking out of me for years and I'd only just noticed the tank was almost empty.

I was exhausted. Not the tiredness that a weekend fixes, the tiredness that lives in your bones. I was waking up at 3am with my thoughts racing and no idea why. I'd walk into a room and forget why I'd come. I was snapping at the people I loved most over nothing, then crying in the car on the way to work. I had this low-level anxiety that I couldn't shake, all the time.

And here's the part that still stings a little: I'm a trained doctor. But when it was happening to me, I told myself the same things women tell themselves every day:

It's the job. It's the pace. It'll pass. I just need to push through.

"I tried supplements from the health food shop. I tried therapy. I tried yoga and silent retreats. Some things helped. But nothing stuck. Because I was trying to solve an inside problem from the outside."

What I didn't understand yet was that my hormones had started shifting. That what I was experiencing had a name: perimenopause and that it had been quietly dismantling my nervous system while I was busy pretending everything was fine.

As a doctor, I had always known a principle: every disease begins as a "dis-ease" of the mind. A disturbance long before it becomes a diagnosis.

I started to look at what was actually happening biochemically. The cortisol cycles. Magnesium depletion. The B-vitamin drain. The way perimenopausal hormonal fluctuations don't just cause hot flashes, they disrupt your entire nervous system, your sleep, your neurotransmitter production, your stress response. And I started to understand why women go to their GP feeling like they're falling apart, and come home with antidepressants and advice to "get more rest."

"The system was not built for this moment in a woman's life. And the women living it were being told it was their fault."

I had a good salary. A title I'd worked hard for. A career I genuinely loved. But I was feeling empty within. And I decided to walk away from it.

Not impulsively. Not dramatically. But deliberately, because I kept seeing the same thing everywhere I looked, in the women on my team, in my friends, in the forums I read at 3am when I couldn't sleep. Women who were losing themselves. Gradually! A relationship getting quieter. A promotion not pursued. A spark that used to be there, just... gone. And most of them didn't know why. They thought it was them.

I kept thinking: if I, a doctor, someone who knows this territory, missed this for years, how many women are sitting in that same meeting room right now, thinking the same thing I thought that they just need to push through.

I didn't want to build another business. I wanted to build the thing I needed and couldn't find. Every woman in that moment deserves a product made by someone who has actually been in it, not just researched it, who understood what it felt like to be competent and successful on the outside, and hollowed out on the inside.

That is why ShiLives exists to help women find themselves back again!