We Do the Best We Can With the Information We Have at the Time

There is something I wish I had understood much earlier in my life.

More than one thing can be true at the same time.

You can love someone deeply and still find the relationship difficult.

You can adore your children more than anything in this world and still desperately need five bloody minutes where nobody says, “Muuuum…”

You can be incredibly grateful for your life and still feel completely overwhelmed by it.

You can know better and still not always do better.

You can be educated, self-aware, emotionally intelligent and still occasionally lose your cool.

You can be a good person and get things wrong.

And sometimes, two people can walk away from exactly the same situation with completely different versions of what happened — and neither person necessarily has to be lying.

That last one took me a long time to understand.

How am I actually doing?

I have spent a lot of my adult life trying to get things right.

Trying to be a good mother. A good wife. A good co-parent. A good stepmum. A good student. A good practitioner. A good teacher. A good friend. A good daughter. A good human.

And somewhere amongst all of that goodness I was desperately trying to achieve, I occasionally forgot to ask a fairly important question: how am I actually doing?

Because life behind closed doors is rarely as neat as the version we present to the world.

I am raising children full-time. We homeschool. Additional needs are part of our family’s world, which means motherhood has sometimes required me to learn a completely different language of patience, advocacy, flexibility and acceptance.

There are days filled with learning, laughing and conversations that make me think, God, I love this life.

There are also days when I have answered approximately 7,462 questions before lunch and fantasised about sitting alone in my car with a coffee.

Both are true.

Blended family life

Second marriages. Co-parenting. Step-parenting.

Different households. Different experiences. Different expectations. Different parenting styles. And a whole lot of human beings who all come with their own histories, emotions, needs and perspectives.

I absolutely adore the bonus children life has given me.

And step-parenting can still be hard.

I don’t think we talk about that enough because we’re frightened that admitting something is difficult somehow means we don’t love the people involved.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes the hardest part for me has been working out where all the invisible lines are. When do I step in? When do I step back? What happens when my natural parenting instinct is different? How do I support everybody without trying to keep everybody happy?

And perhaps the biggest lesson: why did I ever think it was my job to keep everybody happy in the first place?

That one has been uncomfortable.

Because for a very long time, peace meant everybody else being okay.

So I became very good at monitoring the emotional temperature of a room. Adjusting. Fixing. Explaining. Helping. Anticipating. Carrying. And trying to control outcomes that were never actually mine to control.

It turns out this is utterly exhausting.

What I can and cannot control

At some point I had to accept something I really didn’t want to accept.

I cannot control other people. I cannot control how somebody interprets me. I cannot control another person’s choices. I cannot make every relationship harmonious. I cannot parent everybody into agreement. I cannot heal somebody who isn’t ready. I cannot explain myself so perfectly that nobody ever misunderstands me.

And I definitely cannot keep every person in my life happy without eventually abandoning myself.

What I can control is what I bring to the situation.

My intentions. My boundaries. My willingness to listen. My willingness to apologise. My willingness to learn. My willingness to say, I didn’t handle that well.

And equally, my willingness to say, I understand that is your experience, but it doesn’t mean I have to abandon my own.

That distinction has changed me.

What my body taught me

Living with fibromyalgia forced me to develop a relationship with my body that I probably wouldn’t have chosen voluntarily. Pain has a funny way of stripping away the illusion that you can simply push through everything forever.

Then a spinal injury changed my relationship with health even further.

Suddenly the body wasn’t an abstract collection of systems I could read about. It was my body. My nervous system. My pain. My mobility. My sleep. My stress. My emotions. My recovery. My life.

And I became fascinated by how interconnected everything was.

Not in the fluffy just think positive thoughts and drink a green juice kind of way. I mean genuinely fascinated. Physiology. Nutrition. Herbal medicine. The nervous system. Stress. Sleep. Pain. Environment. Behaviour. Relationships. Trauma. Movement. Meaning. Connection. The way one piece can influence another.

I wanted to understand all of it.

So I studied. And studied. And then apparently decided I hadn’t studied enough, so I studied some more.

Naturopathic medicine became part of that journey. So did Reiki, EFT, meditation and mindfulness. I kept learning because every answer seemed to reveal another question.

And somewhere along the way, learning stopped being about finding the magical piece of information that would finally make me feel like I had life figured out.

Because spoiler alert: nobody has life figured out.

Not your naturopath. Not your psychologist. Not the woman on Instagram doing Pilates at 5am with an immaculate kitchen. Certainly not me.

We’re human.

Curiosity instead of a courtroom

For years, I thought self-awareness meant being able to identify everything I was doing wrong. Now I think it means something very different.

It means being curious about myself without immediately putting myself on trial.

Why did that trigger me? Why am I trying so hard to fix this? Is this actually mine to carry? What does my body need? What am I afraid will happen if I say no? Am I responding to what is happening now — or something I learned a long time ago? What information did I have when I made that decision?

That final question has given me an enormous amount of compassion for previous versions of myself.

Because I can look backwards now with knowledge I didn’t have then and find a hundred things I would do differently. Of course I can. I know more now. That’s the point.

It would be deeply unfair to judge the woman I was ten years ago using everything the woman I am today has learned since.

“She was doing the best she could with the information, capacity, support and awareness she had at the time.”

Sometimes she got it wrong. Sometimes she stayed too long. Sometimes she pushed too hard. Sometimes she reacted instead of responding. Sometimes she cared far too much about what everybody else thought. Sometimes she forgot herself entirely.

But she kept learning.

And I have a lot more tenderness for her now.

Living in the grey

Mindfulness has probably changed me in one of the least glamorous but most important ways. It created a tiny space between feeling something and becoming it.

I can be angry without deciding I’m an angry person. I can feel hurt without immediately needing somebody else to be the villain. I can disagree with someone without needing to prove that I am right. I can recognise another person’s truth without automatically surrendering mine. I can have compassion for why somebody behaves the way they do and still have boundaries around what I will accept.

That is where I think so much healing lives. In the grey.

Not good person/bad person. Not right/wrong. Not victim/villain.

Just complicated humans carrying experiences that nobody else can completely see.

That doesn’t mean we excuse harmful behaviour. It means we stop requiring hatred in order to have boundaries.

Where Wild Wellness really came from

Not from me waking up one morning thinking, you know what the world needs? Another wellness business.

It grew slowly from my own need to understand.

My body. My mind. My nervous system. My health. My relationships. My patterns. My pain. My purpose.

I didn’t build a wellness philosophy because wellness came easily to me. I became interested in it because, at various points, it really didn’t.

And the more I learned, the less interested I became in telling people what they should be doing. I’m much more interested in asking:

What’s happening for you? What has changed? What are you noticing? What has your body been trying to tell you? What have you already tried? What haven’t we investigated yet? What does the evidence tell us?

And what does wellbeing realistically look like inside your actual life — not an imaginary perfect one?

Evidence, and the human in front of me

Today I have qualifications, clinical knowledge, practitioner resources and access to tools and information that allow me to investigate health with considerably more depth than I once could.

And I value evidence deeply. But I also value the human sitting in front of me.

Because a pathology result is information. A symptom is information. A health history is information. But so are someone’s circumstances, stress, sleep, relationships, environment, capacity, beliefs, routines and lived experience.

The person matters. Mind. Body. And, for those who connect with it, spirit and soul too.

Not because every problem has a mystical explanation. And not because natural medicine means ignoring conventional medicine. Quite the opposite.

I believe in asking better questions. Investigating appropriately. Knowing when something is outside my scope. Using evidence. Collaborating. Referring. And remembering that health doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

I still get things wrong

I still overthink. I still occasionally try to solve problems that aren’t mine.

I still have days where mindfulness is less serene woman meditating in morning sunlight and more Sarah, perhaps don’t send that text yet. Progress.

I still have an ego. I still get defensive sometimes. I still want to be understood. I still care what people think more than I would sometimes like to admit.

I’m human.

The difference now is that I notice it. And I don’t hate myself for it.

I get curious. I reflect. I repair where I need to. I learn. And I keep going.

Because we are here for such a ridiculously short amount of time. I don’t want to spend mine performing perfection. I don’t want ego deciding who I am. I don’t want to miss beautiful moments because I’m mentally rehearsing an argument that may never happen. I don’t want the people I love remembering a woman who was so busy keeping everything together that she was never actually there.

I want to be present. Imperfectly present.

I want my children to know that adults apologise. That changing your mind when you receive new information is not weakness. That boundaries and compassion can exist together. That rest doesn’t have to be earned. That asking for help isn’t failure. That their bodies deserve to be listened to. That nobody needs to have themselves completely figured out before they are worthy of love.

And I want them to know that their mother was a whole person too.

Not just Mum. A woman. Learning. Growing. Getting things spectacularly wrong occasionally. Laughing. Studying. Healing. Building something she believes in. And finally learning that looking after herself isn’t taking something away from everybody else.

If you’re reading this while questioning yourself

If you’re a parent wondering whether you’re getting it right.

If you’re navigating chronic stress, pain, changing relationships, blended families, burnout, health concerns or a body you don’t quite recognise anymore.

If you’ve spent years being the person who holds everybody else together.

If you’re exhausted from trying to be understood.

If you feel embarrassed about decisions you made before you knew what you know now.

Please remember this:

You are allowed to receive new information and become a new version of yourself. You are allowed to say, I understand that differently now. You are allowed to apologise without making yourself a terrible person. You are allowed to have boundaries without making somebody else a terrible person.

You are allowed to investigate your health. You are allowed to ask more questions. You are allowed to slow down. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to put yourself somewhere on your own priority list.

Preferably somewhere considerably higher than dead last.

And you do not need to arrive at Wild Wellness having everything neatly packaged into a perfect explanation. You don’t need the right words. You don’t need to be the perfect patient. You don’t need to worry that I’m going to judge the choices you’ve made.

Because if my own life has taught me anything, it is this:

Human beings are complicated. Health is complicated. Families are complicated. Healing is rarely linear. And there is almost always more to the story.

My job isn’t to judge yours. It’s to listen, ask questions, use the knowledge and resources available to me, investigate what is appropriate, and help you understand your health with a little more clarity and a lot more compassion.

I don’t promise to have every answer. I don’t think any practitioner should. But I will keep asking questions. I will keep learning. And I will meet you as a human being before anything else.

Because after everything I’ve studied, experienced, questioned, unlearned and learned again, one sentence keeps coming back to me:

“We do the best we can with the information we have at the time.”

And when we know more? We get to choose again.

Sarah 🤍
Wild Wellness