The First Day Reborn: How Loss Led Me to Truly Start Living
- LucyT Decades Reloaded Founder
- Apr 27
- 2 min read
She doesn’t know it yet.
Her dad is at home, desperately trying to save her mum’s life — but it’s too late.
She doesn’t know this is the start of the end for the life she thought she was building — safe, stable, simple as an IT project manager.
She doesn’t know she will walk away from the career she spent years building.
She doesn’t know she will pour her heart into dance fitness, that it will become the place she saves not just herself — but helps others heal, too.
She doesn’t know that this day will spark the only dance fitness brand in the world that trains instructors in transforming mental health in their communities.
She doesn't know it yet... but everything is about to change.
It's scary how you can wake up and have no idea your entire world has caved in on you.
This time in 2016, I woke up in a beautiful setting in the Lake District.
I didn’t even want to go there.
I didn’t want to leave my first-born overnight for the first time.
I didn’t want to travel hundreds of miles away from him.
I was petrified something bad would happen — and I wouldn’t make it back.
What I didn’t realise then was that my nervous system knew.
It was trying to warn me.
I just misunderstood the signals.
Mum was fine, or so we thought. She’d been unwell — told to rest and sleep off the flu.
Nothing to worry about, surely.
Except it wasn’t the flu.
It was pneumonia.
And she never woke up.
That moment — that heartbreak — became the catalyst for everything that’s followed.
I don’t know if I would ever have found the courage to walk away from the life I had built.
A safe job. A steady career.
But life-changing events have a way of shaking you awake.
I nearly lost myself trying to find the new path.
Grief, guilt, fear — they could have swallowed me whole.
But somehow, somewhere inside me, there was a light.
A warm, bright, inviting light — like the orange-yellow glow of the sun.
And I followed it.
That light led me here.
To Decades Reloaded.
To a community built from pain, healing, connection, and hope.
To a family of mental-health-aware instructors around the world,
championing movement as medicine,
building supportive communities,
and transforming lives — starting with our own.
I didn’t know then what I know now.
I didn’t know that heartbreak would become rebirth.
I didn’t know that losing one world would open the door to another — brighter, warmer, more alive.
But now I do.
And now I’m here to help others find that light, too.
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