Every now and then people ask where Gap Life came from, and I never really know how to answer. There was no entrepreneurial-searching-for-gaps-in-the-market story, no moment where I sat down with a spreadsheet, spotted a commercial opportunity, and decided to build a brand. If I'm honest, it feels less like something I created and more like something that followed me around for years until I was finally ready to listen.
The clues were there early. When I was twenty-five I started a Facebook page called Your Soul Choice — which sounds exactly like something a twenty-five-year-old who'd just discovered personal development would create. The name was cringe, the wisdom underneath it was questionable, but the questions were real.
I'd just been promoted at work and had become fascinated by people — I wanted to be a better leader, a better communicator, someone whose team left conversations feeling bigger than when they walked in. So I enrolled in a coaching course expecting leadership training and got introspection instead: conversations about beliefs, identity, potential, meaning, possibility. It felt like somebody had opened a window. For the first time I genuinely believed people could change — that I could change, that life wasn't nearly as fixed as I'd assumed it was.
I got obsessed. Not with success — with the questions themselves. Who am I? What is all this? Why am I here? How can I be useful? What is a human being actually capable of becoming?
I can see now that I was searching for meaning — the big thing, the calling, the reason I was here. I thought there was something "out there" with my name on it, some giant cosmic job description waiting to be discovered. Life had other plans. Or maybe no plans at all.
That's one of the things nobody tells you when you're twenty-five and searching for your calling. You imagine there'll be a moment — a revelation, a sign, some undeniable certainty that arrives and points you in the right direction. What actually happened was far less dramatic. I kept living my life. The questions stayed. The longing stayed. The feeling that there might be something more stayed. But life itself carried on in a remarkably ordinary fashion, which is perhaps the most frustrating part of personal growth: you have a profound realisation on Sunday and still have to answer emails on Monday.
A lot of these stories get rewritten in hindsight as dramatic prison escapes from corporate life. Mine has too, from time to time — mostly because "young woman escapes soul-destroying corporate existence in pursuit of freedom" is objectively a better story than "young woman is reasonably successful at her job but suspects there might be something else going on." But honestly, it wasn't like that. I didn't hate my job — that's important. I was actually good at it. I enjoyed parts of it. I cared deeply about the people I worked with. I just couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't the whole story. Something didn't fit, and I couldn't have told you what — only that every time I imagined living the same life for another thirty years, something inside me quietly recoiled.
So I kept searching. Read the books, listened to the podcasts, went to the courses, journaled, reflected, asked bigger questions — and then did what most people do. I carried on. Kept working, kept getting promoted, kept drinking more than I should, kept dating people for reasons I didn't fully understand, kept waiting for clarity to arrive. Years passed. The questions remained.
Then one day my relationship ended and I found myself sitting on a park bench. I was sick of myself. Sick of the patterns, the excuses, the drinking, another relationship ending — and for the first time in my life I was starting to see my own role in why it had ended. That's an uncomfortable experience. It's much easier when all your problems are somebody else's fault.
The park bench wasn't really about the relationship. The relationship had just ripped the lid off everything underneath it. And sitting there, feeling sorry for myself, a thought arrived that would quietly alter the course of my life: if I keep waiting until I know what I want to do with my life, I'll wake up old and realise I never actually lived it.
At the time it felt less like inspiration and more like being punched in the face. I wish I could tell you I immediately quit my job and ran off into the sunset. I didn't. I went back to work on Monday, which is both less inspirational and considerably more accurate. But something had shifted. Once you've seen something, it's difficult to unsee it — and the creeping feeling that I was heading for a life of regret wasn't finished with me yet.