I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello, hello.

How are you doing?

I'm sitting in my studio. It is dark outside. I've been sipping ill-grade tea and I'm ready to talk. So what am I talking about today?

Have you ever had a freak out and known you're freaking out and heard yourself and you're like, oh my God, what are you doing?

And sometimes you've almost felt like you're like, oh my God, like what are you doing?

And sometimes you've almost felt like you're

almost powerless to stop yourself.

Oh, yeah?

Sometimes you have seen yourself freaking out

and then range yourself back in. Well that happened to me last week and it got me

thinking about how as grown-ups we freak out about not just decisions but how we think we're messing

our whole life up and that we have to we have to be able to see all the way into the future

with every decision that we make. Now how I came to be freaking out is with this I'll

give you a bit of a backstory. My eldest daughter is now 12. And well when I was 12 I hadn't started

secondary school yet because I grew up in Dublin Ireland and so I started a secondary school at 13. You start there

about sort of late 12-ish 13. Whereas here you start at age 11. And in my daughter's

school, they do something called options in year 8, so the second year of secondary school as opposed to year 9, the third, like other schools too.

Now, these options are where you choose your subjects

that you're going to focus on for the next three years

for your big exam the GCSE. So this is the exams that you do at

age 15, 16, and then however you do in those exams you then opt to do, instance A levels which is like the equivalent of

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