She is in her mid-forties and permanently on the move.

Her car is her second office. The passenger seat carries a laptop bag, tangled chargers, and a large tub of jelly babies. They spill easily when she brakes too hard. She eats them when she is nervous. Which is often.

At home, she is raising teenagers who do not find her particularly impressive. She is also managing ageing parents — appointments, prescriptions, forms. She lives in the narrow corridor between generations: too responsible to collapse, too ordinary to be heroic.

At work, the corridor narrows further.

Clients call her in when things feel unstable. When regulatory scrutiny intensifies. When investors begin asking questions. When government authorities request documentation that is still taking shape. She arrives with structure — timelines, tracked changes, careful wording.

But fear moves quietly through organisations.

A paragraph agreed in one meeting becomes “misunderstood” in the next. A conclusion that felt solid begins to soften. When pressure travels downward from boardrooms or ministries, memory sometimes shifts with it.

“I don’t recall approving that version.”

She stares at her screen. The update is there. Dated. Tracked. Black and white. For a flicker of a moment, she questions herself. Did she imagine the call? The approval? The exchange?

Gaslighting rarely arrives with shouting. It arrives as doubt.

The client is not cruel. He is anxious — about his standing, his reputation, his job. In protecting himself from scrutiny above, he moves the fault line slightly. Just enough for it to run beneath her feet.

And so she absorbs the tremor.

She hovers on the edge of burnout, driving between meetings, carrying multiple truths in her head at once. She knows the standards. She knows what was agreed. She knows what is now being quietly reshaped.

Some evenings she sits in her parked car for a few minutes before going inside. Finishing the jelly babies. Rehearsing the next conversation. Steadying herself to remain measured.

She is sandwiched — between client and regulator, between expectation and reality, between teenagers and parents. Between what is true and what feels safer to say.

Most consultants in this position learn to develop armour. Some leave. Some harden. Some begin to doubt themselves more than they should.

She keeps trying to hold the centre.

Because beneath the shifting narratives are real consequences. Real communities. Real careers.

Perhaps the quiet discipline required in these spaces is not only technical expertise.

Perhaps it is the decision — repeated daily — to remain decent to one another, even when we are afraid.

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