You’ve become incredibly good at knowing what everyone else needs. But when someone asks what you want from the next chapter of your life, the answer isn’t always so easy. Maybe you haven’t lost touch with what you want. Maybe you’ve simply become so used to filtering your desires through what’s practical, responsible and expected of you that you’ve forgotten how to hear yourself before the editing begins.

Have you ever wanted something so badly, only to find yourself listing all the reasons you shouldn’t do it? Sometimes fear doesn’t feel like fear at all. It sounds like responsibility, practicality and waiting for the “right” time. This is a personal reflection on desire, self-doubt and what happens in that tiny space between the moment your heart says YES and your mind begins talking you out of it.

Growing up surrounded by strong women, I learnt that love looked like sacrifice and that rest was something you earned after everything else was done. Years later, sitting with a cup of coffee and feeling guilty for doing absolutely nothing, I realised I'd been living by a belief I never consciously chose. In this deeply personal reflection, Alka explores where our guilt around rest begins, why so many women struggle to slow down, and the question that changed everything: Who told us we had to earn rest?

We spend so much of our lives being everything to everyone else that we quietly forget what it feels like to simply be ourselves. In this first entry of The Shift Journal, Alka reflects on a sunrise in the African bush, the unexpected gift of silence, and why perhaps what we're longing for isn't another holiday—but a way back to feeling truly alive.