A recurring, reflective space, separate from our institutional news, on the pressures and practice of judicial wellness.
No one talks about the grief of getting everything you once prayed for.
The quiet ache of becoming a version of yourself the world rewards …but your soul no longer recognises.
Because the bars aren’t metal.
They’re made of performance.
Praise.
And parts of you that you’ve silenced to survive.
They look like:
Delivering brilliance while your spirit fractures
Smiling for the room, while screaming inside
Filling every hour to avoid the parts of you you’ve forgotten how to feel
We were told: be someone.
But no one warned us what happens when the “someone” we became .. becomes a sentence we serve, not a self we chose.
So we overwork.
We overprove.
We overstay in rooms that stopped seeing us long ago.
And we call it ambition.
But often, it’s quiet abandonment.
I’ve lived this.
I’ve worn the title so tightly, it erased my reflection.
Delivered in court while breaking in silence.
Smiled through fatigue, afraid the truth would cost me everything I’d built.
But this isn’t just burnout.
This is soul-loss.
The slow forgetting of who you were before the role arrived.
And I see it everywhere:
The intern or pupil starving for validation
The associate too afraid to pause, in case they disappear
The leader who built a throne, only to find it’s a cell.
We become fluent in excellence.
But illiterate in rest.
Experts in visibility.
But exiles from our own inner lives.
The strongest people I know aren’t the ones who climbed the furthest.
They’re the ones who remember the bottom …and never forget who they were before the title came.
Here’s what they do:
Because if your value only lives inside your profession, then when it ends, you disappear with it.
In many cultures, we’re taught to become something.
But rarely are we taught how to return to ourselves.
So pause.
Not next quarter.
Not when the holiday comes.
Now.
Ask yourself:
If I took off the title, the applause, the mask… would I still recognise the sound of my own name?
Or have I lived so long in performance… that I forgot who I was before they were watching?
Because one day, the emails will stop.
The rooms will fall silent.
And the version they knew of you… will no longer be needed.
And when that day comes
May you not mourn the end of a role.
But celebrate the return of yourself.
Because the truest freedom isn’t walking away from the job
It’s remembering that the key was always in your hand.
And the door… was never locked.
Before the meetings. Before the metrics.
The morning is mine.
It’s where I return to who I am
before the world tries to decide for me.
Not all successful people rise with the sun.
But all of them rise with intention.
Some begin before the world stirs.
Others wake quietly, gently, slowly.
Our methods differ.
But our meaning is shared:
It’s not the hour we rise that shapes our life
It’s the energy we rise with.
Clarity.
Conviction.
A conscious refusal to drift into the day unnamed.
There were seasons where I woke up already behind.
Phone in hand.
Mind racing.
Soul unanchored.
It wasn’t chaotic.
But it was unclaimed.
And unclaimed mornings became unanchored months.
Until one quiet shift changed everything:
I wasn’t losing time.
I was forfeiting alignment.
The transformation didn’t come from a new system.
It came from this question:
“What would shift if I greeted the day before the world greeted me?”
The way we meet the morning
is the way we teach life how to meet us.
And if we enter the day unconsciously,
we become available to everything except ourselves.
We don’t need perfect routines.
We don’t need to join the next trend.
But we do need a moment.
A threshold.
A space where we remember:
We are not here to react to life.
We are here to shape it.
(For every season and schedule)
The day doesn’t start when your alarm rings. It starts when you remember who you are.
Mornings aren’t routines they’re returnings.
Every day begins with a question:
“Am I aligning or abandoning myself?”
Let your morning be a mirror.
Not of pressure.
Not of perfection.
But of presence.
You don’t need to master the morning.
You just need to meet it on purpose.
And when you rise
don’t just start moving.
Start meaning it.
We don’t need more time.
We need more truth in how we begin.
And that begins before the world even knows we’re awake.
Today we celebrate the second International Day of Judicial Wellbeing. Judicial wellbeing has become a prominent feature of discussions in judiciaries across the world. It is recognised that in the pursuit of justice and the rule of law, the wellbeing of judicial officers and court personnel is important to maintaining trust and confidence in the administration of justice.
We must get to a place where we acknowledge the importance of judicial wellness. Judicial officers and those who support them in the workplace must care for their health, but equally important is that institutions must provide the institutional support to facilitate and support judicial wellbeing.
I therefore urge and encourage each of you to take some time for you, to reflect on where you are and make the decision to take better care of yourself. Let’s move. Just a few minutes of your time.
Today, let’s start the conversation and encourage changes, both personally and at the institutional level, which can better support our judicial wellbeing.
Happy International Day of Judicial Wellness, family. Let’s support and encourage each other in our quest to become better stewards of our judicial wellbeing.
The President of ECAWJ collaborated with the President of CAWJ on this video for CAJO’s observance of the first International Day of Judicial Wellness on 25 July 2025. Wellness was also a key theme at the CAWJ and TTAWJ 10th anniversary conference.
