I was sixteen when life told me I was finished. I was pregnant, still in school, and the voices - inside and outside - said that was it, that i was finished, that a girl like me does not get the future she imagined.

I decided they were wrong. I studied through the nights. I became an electrical engineer. I thought I had figured out how to make life work.

Then I walked away from it.

When a job offer came - project manager, salary of my choice, another offer to go and study in France, everything provided - I turned them both down. Because I had found something that mattered more. I went to a monastery, with my daughter, and stayed for five years. Prayer. Silence. Service. The slow, uncomfortable work of finding out what I was made of when nothing external was holding me up.

"I chose purpose over salary. And then I had to rebuild my life — again — from nothing."

I came to Cape Town to start over. I arrived thinking my degree, my faith, and my refusal to stay down would open doors. Cape Town taught me otherwise. Marriage, more children, one born premature with needs that never paused at the time. A career that had gone cold. A salary that was never enough. Years of trying harder in every direction. In all directions everything was crumbling down.

In 2018 the floor gave way. My body started to go numb. I was carrying more than any person should carry invisibly and I had nothing left.

What kept me here was my children. I needed them to know their mother could bounce back once. I cried out to he Heavens and i said "Help". So from that place, not from strength, but from something quieter and more stubborn than strength - faith in the impossible, daring and trusting again when there was no way - I began again. Differently. I stopped pushing harder and started looking honestly.

I spent two years studying myself, undoing all the wrong patterns and beliefs, studying the way I had always studied engineering and applying the same rigour to my own healing and the discipline to learn and recognise patterns whether good or disruptive. I found myself in that research and in that I found every woman I had ever known.

"I was never broken. I was buried and buried things - when they are tended - grow into something no one saw coming."

I became a certified Master Transformational Coach not because I wanted a new career but because I felt compelled and called not to keep what I had learned to myself but help as many as I can to reveal their true destinies through identity.

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This is where The IT² Factor™ - Introspection, Transition, Transformation - comes from. It is not a framework I invented in theory. It is the sequence I lived. In that order. Multiple times.

If you recognise yourself somewhere in this story, I do not think that is an accident.

Sarah Marielle is a certified transformational coach, not a licensed therapist or psychologist. Her programs are personal development and coaching experiences. They do not diagnose, treat, or replace professional mental health care.