Untangling Myself from the System

I can feel it happening.

The further I step away from the rigid edges of institutional midwifery, the more I find myself again.

For a long time, I believed I had to squeeze myself into systems that were never designed for minds like mine. Tick the box. Follow the pathway. Stay inside the lines. Measure, record, justify, defend.

But my mind has never worked like that.

I am dyslexic. I don’t think in neat columns or bullet points. I think in stories. In connections. In emotions. In the spaces between words. I see patterns where others see problems. I hear what isn’t being said. I notice the woman sitting quietly at the back of the room whose shoulders have lifted ever so slightly with fear.

My brain has always wandered beyond the protocol and perhaps that is exactly why I became a midwife, because birth itself refuses to live inside a spreadsheet.

It is physiology. It is chemistry. It is instinct. It is biomechanics and hormones and trust and surrender and ancient memory woven together into something that cannot always be predicted or controlled. Yet somewhere along the way, we have become obsessed with making it fit into a framework.

The institution needs certainty.

The body was never built for certainty.

It was built for flow.

The more I untangle myself from the expectation that every labour should follow a graph and every woman should fit a guideline, the more creative I become. Ideas return. Curiosity returns. My writing softens. My conversations deepen. I stop trying to solve women and instead begin listening to them. I find myself drawn back to the essence of things.

To women sitting together and sharing stories.

To babies finding their own way earthside.

To hormones doing what millions of years of evolution designed them to do when we stop interrupting them.

To birth preparation that is not about memorising stages of labour but understanding yourself.

To debriefing that is not about explaining what happened, but making sense of how it felt.

There is a softness there that our institutions often struggle to hold. And softness is not weakness. Softness creates safety. Safety creates physiology. Physiology creates flow.

As I step away from one chapter, I do not feel like I am leaving midwifery behind. If anything, I feel closer to it than I have in years.

Closer to women.

Closer to birth.

Closer to the messy, imperfect, beautiful reality that life cannot always be measured, timed or standardised. Maybe this is what coming home feels like. Not finding something new. But remembering what was always there.