What I Learned from Co-Living as a Single Mom: On Control, Awareness, and Inner Shift
July 17, 2026
I did not choose co-living because it was the easy way. I chose it because I knew I could not create the life I wanted alone.
From leaving my country in a caravan, to sharing space and planning life alongside another mom and her daughter: this experiment has stretched me in ways I did not expect. Not just practically. But internally. My capacity. My nervous system. Everything.
What Co-Living Actually Confronts You With
Living closely with another family means you cannot hide your edges. The places where you would naturally close yourself up: you have to stay open. The moments where you doubt yourself and want to compromise, but instead have to trust what you feel intuitively.
I have had to face my need for control. Look at my patterns. Recognise the places where I was bringing assumptions and unconscious frameworks into shared space, and decide, again and again, whether to defend them or question them.
What I Have Actually Learned
It is not the environment that creates the shift. It can help, but it cannot do it alone. It is the awareness I bring into the situation that changes everything.
I can change everything on the outside: the country, the house, the people around me, and still feel hopeless and scared inside. Or I can begin to question my own reality, my own framing of how I see the world, and suddenly, everything moves differently in my internal and external reality.
That is the shift. And it is an inside job.
The Work I Actually Care About
I am not interested in helping women change their surroundings. I am interested in helping them see that something else could be true: a perspective that will support them in manifesting, in seeing things shift, in building a life that feels genuinely theirs.
If you feel like there is more available for you, you are right. The question is not whether it exists. The question is whether you are willing to do the inner work to meet it.
If you want to understand yourself more deeply and start seeing the patterns beneath your decisions, Beyond Your Type: The Enneagram is a good place to begin. It is available as a free PDF download or as a printed version for less than 10 euros on Amazon.
