I used to know exactly who I was.
Eighteen years in corporate banking will do that. You build a career, layer by layer — the roles, the titles, the relationships, the hard-won credibility. You build a network of people who know your name and what you're capable of. You build a version of yourself that walks into any room with quiet confidence, because you have earned the right to be there.
And then, in the space of a single decision — a relocation, a family move to a new country — all of it was gone.
Not gradually. Overnight.
I arrived in a new city, in a new country, with two young children, a husband absorbed in building his own new career, and eighteen years of professional identity that no longer had a place to land. The corporate environment I had built my life inside — the structure, the hierarchy, the colleagues who had become friends, the sense of belonging somewhere — simply ceased to exist.
In my new community, I had no professional context. The eighteen years, the roles, the titles, the credibility I had so carefully built — none of it travelled with me. I had become, without anyone intending it, invisible in a way I hadn't expected. And in the absence of the professional world that had always defined me, I began to question myself.
Who am I, if not my career? Who am I, if not my network? Who am I, if not the woman who walked into any room and knew exactly what she was doing there?
Those questions don't announce themselves loudly. They arrive quietly. In the small hours of the morning, over a cup of tea, in a kitchen that doesn't quite feel like yours yet.
Tea became my ritual in those years. Not because it solved anything — it didn't. But because there was something in the warmth of it, the smallness and the realness of it, that soothed not just my body but my being. It said: sit for a moment. You are allowed to feel this. You are still here.
I rebuilt. From scratch, in a foreign land, with no network and no corporate armour. I reinvented myself — not back into banking, but forward into something I hadn't yet imagined. I trained as a professional coach, earned my MCC credential — the highest level of coach certification in the world — and built a practice helping other professionals navigate exactly what I had lived through.
And in that practice, I kept meeting her.
The woman who had relocated for her partner's career and quietly lost her own. The executive who had been restructured out after two decades and didn't know who she was without the title. The leader who had crossed into a new chapter of life and felt the ground shift beneath her. The professional who was brilliant, capable, accomplished — in meetings, in businesses, in practices, in classrooms — and somehow scattered.
Different stories. The same fracture.
A significant life transition — any significant life transition — has a way of splintering our professional identity. And the world tends to respond with urgency. Be resilient. Bounce back. Move on.
But I knew from my own experience that what these women needed first wasn't a strategy. It was acknowledgement. A quiet moment that said — this is hard. You are not broken. Sit for a moment.
I kept thinking: if only there was a ritual. Something small enough to do anywhere. Something that held space without demanding performance.
And so I built Tumtea.
A ritual space for fragmented professionals to pause, reflect, and restore. To gather their scattered pieces with intention and grace. To step back up and reclaim their seat on the wall.
The Reverse Humpty Dumpty.
Because all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again — but you can put yourself back together. You always could. You just needed a moment, a prompt, and a warm cup of tea.