by Tanya Hicks
Written for the people who kept going.
The ones who learned the skills, did the work, held it together, and still ended up pulling a hamstring at full speed down the straight.
The enduring.
What if the map was never drawn for you?
What if every strategy, every protocol, every try harder, was aimed at you. As if you were the thing that needed fixing.
What if the map was never drawn for you?
And what if you have had enough of not knowing what the rest of it actually is.
Book Tanya to speak →⚠ Content note
The following section describes experiences of exhaustion, burnout, and feeling like something is wrong with you. These descriptions are written with care, but they may resonate deeply. Take your time.
The exhaustion that rest does not fix.
Not everyone starts from the same starting line.
Before you spend more on the next course, the next coach, the next strategy, do you actually have your feet in the starting blocks? Or are you still making your way across the car park?
↑ tap any runner to read their starting line
The advice you were given was built for someone else’s starting position.
Someone else’s nervous system. Someone else’s load. It was not bad faith. It was the wrong map.
Nobody asked where your actual starting line was.
Enough of running someone else’s race.
FREE 2B ME: Less fixing. More living. is a person-facing exploration of hidden effort, skills, support, health, relationships, conditions, practical leverage and authorship. Not so you can finally become easy enough. So more of your life can feel like yours.
What if you could finally measure: where your energy is actually going, how you were actually built, what it actually costs you to show up.
Where it all goes.
And your day hasn’t started yet.
FREE 2B ME
Tanya Hicks
You have worked too hard for life to still be this hard.
You tried the therapy. The routines. The boundaries. The books. You kept doing what you were told would work. And it is still harder than it has any right to be.
FREE 2B ME is not another self-help book that tells you to try differently. It is the book that shows you why the trying kept failing. And what was actually happening the whole time you blamed yourself for the gap.
The exhaustion is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of a mismatch between how you are designed and the conditions you are operating in. The gap between your effort and your outcome is not a character problem. It is a structural one. And structural problems have structural solutions.
It does not let you off the hook. It shows you which hook you are actually on. It separates the weight that was never yours from the patterns that are. It names what has been happening. The invisible taxes, the wrong map, the advice built for someone else’s architecture. And it shows what becomes possible when you stop fighting your own design and start building from it.
Built from clinical practice, lived experience and a way of looking at the whole account when the old map no longer explains enough.
This book is in development. Title, publication and format are subject to publisher and legal clearance. No purchase is available yet - Leave an address and I’ll tell you when it’s ready.
This work was not built as theory first.
It was built on snapped ligaments, sensory overwhelm, a brain that could not understand instruction manuals written in typical language, and a heart that broke over and over again.
And then I had a daughter who was built like me. And I decided: not on my watch.
What came next was forged in clinical practice, neurodivergent-affirming support, community design, leadership, and advocacy, until a framework emerged that actually worked, for people who were never the whole problem.
Matriarch. Viking. Misfit. Clinician. Scholar. Human. Birther of the Enduring. Author of FREE 2B ME.
If capable people keep struggling in your system, the problem is probably not the people.
Good intentions do not prevent harm. When you cannot see the full load someone is carrying, you cannot give them what they actually need, no matter how much you want to help.
First, understand what it costs them to be here. Be the coach the person in front of you actually needs. Not the coach you were trained to be for someone else.
⚠ Content note
This section speaks directly to your experience. It is not clinical. It is personal. If you need a moment, take it. This page will be here when you come back.
You do not have to become someone new.
You may have spent years trying to follow instructions written for a life that was never quite yours. This book helps you look more accurately at what is actually here.
You don’t have to become less of yourself
to have more of a life.
No spam. No funnels. No daily inspiration. Just the book.
FREE 2B ME Practice Library · Its paired companion
Access Before Intervention
The professional companion to this book. It sets out the method, evidence, scope and implementation for practitioners, supervisors and teams - the same territory, from the other side.