When life falls apart: finding your next step in the chaos

I opened this conversation by reading Sarah McDermott her own opening line, because it was the thing I needed to hear at the time:

When everything collapses, embrace the pain, lean into it, learn from it, ride it like a wild dragon and it will, in the end, be the making of you.

Sarah wrote her book from inside the collapse, not after it. That's what makes it different.

Feeling overwhelmed by everything going wrong

The book began on a chair in a hospital waiting room, where Sarah was waiting to hear whether she had pancreatic cancer. As she sat there with catastrophic thoughts in her head, imagining telling her children, she was also in financial crisis. Her business had been defrauded earlier that year, and she was in the process of potentially losing the entire property portfolio she'd spent six years building, and possibly her home.

And in that chair, she realised something uncomfortable: she had got herself into that position. Not the illness, but the life. Six years of extreme stress, striving and driving, trying to prove herself in a male-dominated industry. She'd left a happy job as a private investigator, lured by the promise of a rich life of freedom, and jumped from one treadmill straight onto another.

She picked up her phone and wrote a poem about everything that was wrong with the business world. Then she analysed her own writing, and one word jumped out: they. They did this, they did that, all the way through.

Hang on a minute, Mrs. The they is you. I have been my own taskmaster. I've been the puppet master all along. And in that moment I realised it was all me, I also realised I was the only one who could change it.

How to cope when life falls apart: the truth fairy

In the book, Sarah writes about the truth fairy: a bit like Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket, the conscience that wallops you round the face when you've been avoiding the truth of a situation. Most of us go through life assuming life happens to us, blaming circumstances, other people, world events. It's the natural human condition, and it's deeply unempowering, because it means everything and everybody else controls your mood. If it's raining, you're in a bad mood because of the weather.

Flipping it doesn't mean controlling everything that happens. It means controlling how you react. Two people can miss the same bus and fall over on the same pavement: one comes home blaming the world, the other laughs at their choice of shoes, gets the next bus and enjoys the day. If you blame the world, you give away all your power. Sarah even takes accountability for the fraudster who nearly destroyed her business, not because it was her fault, but because she's the director, and without accountability she has no way of controlling the outcome.

Accepting difficult emotions (without acting from them)

Sarah has a rule: never act from a place of negative energy. That doesn't mean denying the emotions. If someone has really annoyed you, allow the annoyedness to be there. Let it out, in private. Have a cry, have a scream, rant to yourself, write a letter to the person and tear it up. Then get yourself back into the right space, and only then deal with the situation. You can't operate from a negative space and expect a positive outcome.

She's also honest about down days. As women, especially in perimenopause, there are days when you feel sad for no apparent reason, or can't stop crying, or want to murder everybody. Those, she says, are the days to keep yourself to yourself: a bath, a candle, chocolate, something on the telly that makes you laugh. Don't go on a first date. Don't try to raise finance. The most important thing in any bad situation is to make yourself feel better first.

Sometimes that means accepting sadness for a whole day and having a right good cry. There's no shame in that. It's really good for you. Don't keep emotions in, because holding them in only means they come back out later.

Coping with uncertainty in life: feel better first

Sarah talks in the book about energy and frequency: the idea that we're all bundles of energy, and that you can feel the atmosphere in a room before anyone has spoken. That's her personal and spiritual framework, and she shares it openly. What I found useful, whatever you believe about frequencies, is the practical bit underneath it.

When you're in a low state, don't start worrying about why you feel anxious or sad, because you're just adding worry on top of the feeling and spiralling further down. Admit it, accept it, and then ask: what do I love doing? For Sarah it's a chanting meditation, a walk in the fresh air, a run, or banging out 1990s house tunes like she's at an old-school rave. I recognised myself in the opposite instinct: when I'm low, I get my head down and push through, which is the antithesis of what I actually need. As Sarah put it, when you're in that state telling yourself you're really busy, you're just producing things you don't want. The only thing to do right now is feel better. Then, from a calm space, take action.

Building emotional resilience: recognising your patterns

The part of the book that gave me an oof moment is pattern recognition. Most of our ingrained beliefs are taken in before the age of seven, and we replay them time and time again. Sarah describes doing a full patterning workshop, an intense four-day event with trauma coaches on hand, where you trace your patterns back to their source. It can be something tiny: a brother pinching your ice cream when you were five can become a best friend pinching your boyfriend at 13, and the same story playing out again in adulthood.

For Sarah, every pattern ended in the same place: shame. Different circumstances, different life stages, same steps, same ending. You can't stop the patterns coming, but you can recognise them. Now, when she spots one, she zooms out and watches it like a casual observer: ah, I'm in the pattern. This is exciting. What's going to happen next? And being a casual observer of your life, she says, is a lot more pleasurable than feeling like life is happening to you.

Finding your next step in a crisis

I asked Sarah the question I imagine on every listener's lips: when you're in the middle of your chaos and everything feels hard and overwhelming, what's the first step? Her answer: there is a clear path, and there is a next step, but you can't see it while you're cloaked in fear and anxiety. So the first step is the reset. Feel good first, then move forward from a calm space.

From that calm space, get honest. Ask why this happened, what part you played in it, and what the opportunity is. A collapsed business or relationship usually means a massive misalignment somewhere, and most people have been putting up with it for a long time, in denial that it isn't right. The work is getting out of denial and into admission: heartbreaking as it is right now, this is for the best. Then look at the people pleasing, the things you threw yourself into that were never really your lane, the parts of yourself you've been denying, and re-orchestrate the situation to make life better in every direction.

On people pleasing, Sarah has the analogy from the book that resonated with everyone who pre-read it, me included. Some people love peanuts. Some people hate peanuts. Some people are allergic to peanuts. The peanut doesn't think any differently about itself. It's just a peanut.

Just carry on peanutting.

Starting over in midlife

While Sarah was sitting in that hospital chair, a friend sent her a WhatsApp message: Sarah, you were born to party and flounce. She realised how utterly un-her she had become. She's a joyful, fun-loving person whose favourite thing is throwing parties, and somewhere along the way that had disappeared. The other regret, if she was going to die in three months, was that she'd never written a book, despite writing her whole life: school plays, poetry, a dozen started novels and cookery books that never got past a couple of chapters.

So she decided to write the book from within the eye of the storm, as an experiment, going into every horrible conversation with receivers, finance companies and investors with joy and the right attitude, and turning the lessons into something that would help other people. The cancer tests came back clear: some curable health issues, nothing life-threatening. A few days later, her dog Ralphie jumped at a dog on the telly and smashed the brand-new TV. In financial crisis, they couldn't replace it, so instead of numbing out in front of mind-numbing episodes each evening, she wrote. Every single night. They didn't get a new telly until the book was finished.

She's now living her best life as an author, which was her lifelong dream, and it wouldn't have happened if she hadn't used the chaos and converted it into a book. Chaos is inevitable; it's going to happen to all of us, in many guises. The choice is whether you're drawn into the fear and the shame, or whether you face into the discomfort, speak your truth, accept that not everyone will like it, and let it become the catalyst for what comes next.

If you've got a rain cloud coming after you, turn around and walk into it. Fling your clothes off and walk into it naked. Get rained all over. Just feel it.