Meet Rhian Budd

If you’ve found your way here, there’s a good chance something in you is shifting.

Perhaps motherhood changed you in ways you weren’t prepared for. Perhaps the life you built no longer fits the woman you’ve become. Perhaps you’re doing everything you’re meant to be doing and still feel quietly disconnected from yourself.

This journal exists for that in-between space — where identity is loosening, old narratives are falling away and you’re beginning to ask different questions about how you want to live.

Not louder ones. Truer ones.

This space was born from a quiet reckoning rather than a single dramatic moment.

The kind that arrives through the accumulation of days — the laundry, the responsibility, the emotional labour, the constant giving. The weight settles so gradually you barely notice it at first, until one day you look around and realise you can’t remember the last time you felt fully like yourself.

I know that moment well.

I’m Rhian — a writer, solo mother to my daughter Emilia, a homebody and a lifelong student of what it means to live from the inside out. I write for women who are remembering themselves again, not by striving or reinventing, but by softening. By slowing down enough to listen. By allowing the woman and the mother to coexist, rather than compete.

I grew up in the Waikato, New Zealand — a sensitive child in environments that prized resilience, silence and fitting in. I learned early how to read a room, how to adapt, how to belong by becoming smaller. By my twenties, I was fluent in other people’s expectations and largely disconnected from my own inner voice.

In a long-term relationship that led to an engagement, I slowly edited and erased my sense of self until I became someone I barely recognised. I became easier to place, quieter, more contained — even my joy felt unfamiliar.

Leaving that life was the first time I chose myself.

What followed was travel — Cambodia, China, Italy, Portugal, the USA, Canada. Not as an escape, but as a retrieval of what I’d lost sight of. Travel didn’t heal me, but it reminded me that I existed beyond the roles I had learned to perform.

In 2018, I came home and discovered I was pregnant. Motherhood arrived suddenly and completely — fierce, tender and disorienting — it cracked me open in every direction.

Postpartum stripped me bare. In my naivety I thought living alone was the most independent and self-sufficient thing I could do. Living alone with a newborn, overwhelmed and exhausted me in ways I had never known. There was a morning — Emilia was nine months old — when I realised I’d disappeared again and, this time, it wasn’t into a partner but into motherhood itself.

I didn’t want to lose myself to love, I wanted to grow alongside it.

So I began the slow return, not to a “new me”, but to something truer. To the woman underneath obligation, expectation and inherited scripts, to the woman who still wanted, still felt, still dreamed, still knew.

That early season of motherhood became the portal that led me back to my heart.

This journal is an expression of that ongoing return — written from inside the living of it, not from a place of having arrived.

This is a space I share my reflections on authentic living, conscious motherhood and self-discovery.

Here you’ll find personal essays, slow lifestyle storytelling and explorations of healing and becoming — the quiet, often unspoken work of reconnecting to yourself while raising children, navigating identity shifts and learning to live with greater intention.

I don’t write to optimise you, fix you or tell you who to become. I write to offer resonance, language for experiences that are often felt but rarely named. A sense of shared terrain for women who are less interested in performing perfectionism and are more devoted to living with integrity.

Think of this as a companion rather than a roadmap — a place to pause, recognise yourself and remember that you’re not alone in your becoming.

For a long time, I didn’t myself reflected in what I was seeing online. I couldn’t find anything that felt like the truth of what I was navigating and experiencing on my own journey.

So much of what I encountered felt aspirational or aesthetic — polished but hollow, all surface and very little soul. There was little room for contradiction, grief, slowness or change, and even less space for the woman behind the mother or the longing that comes with wanting more — or different — without quite knowing what “more” is yet.

So I Created What I Was Longing For.

A place where women can slow down, breathe deeper and reconnect emotionally — without needing to fix or improve themselves first. A place that honours the bridge between woman and mother. A place where story and connection comes before strategy, and resonance matters more than answers.

If you’re in the quiet unraveling, the messy middle or the first flicker of coming home — you’re in the right place.

This publication is for women who sense there is another way to live, even if they can’t fully articulate it yet. For those who want to live slower, more intentional lives. For women who are ready to stop abandoning themselves and start listening closely instead.

Take your time here. Let the words meet you where you are.

I collaborate with aligned brands, founders, platforms and creatives who share values around slow living, emotional wellbeing, embodied womanhood and meaningful storytelling.

If you’d like to connect, you can reach me at [email protected]

I didn’t create this journal because I had the answers. I created it because I was still becoming — and sensed others were too.

If you’re here, you’re welcome. Stay as long as you need.

Rhian xx