What if the truth is that you never REALLY wanted that thing. Like deep inside of you, it wasn’t ever quite right. But, it was the “conventionally right” thing to want.

It’s so normal to follow the rules you’re handed - how to feel, how to act, what to want - and not even realize you’re doing it. The conditioning runs deep, my girls. But the fact that you keep trying to fix it and you’re still miserable after tells you everything you need to know.

Because…the rules you’re following are fake. Made up. And, rather than actually doing anything differently, you’ve made small tweaks or pivots (possibly some bigger moves), but you have always landed right back in the same f*cking brand of misery. So continuing to use them to try to solve your problems will never get you anywhere other than…where you already are. Maybe just in different clothes.

I know this one because I lived it.

When I moved back to San Diego in 2015, I started applying for jobs in assessment and accreditation at different universities. It, of course, felt like the safe choice. The choice where I was “experienced,” proven. The money, a title, stability…but also boring. I didn’t stop to ask myself, “Hey, you have a chance to start over here…what would you actually REALLY want to do?”

And the job was fine. I was good at it. I met cool people. But eventually, I found myself back on the “proving my excellence” train. Like, “I’m bored, should I get another job?” “I’m better than this. Can people see that?” “If I could only buy the thing, get the promotion, the new title, the [insert any temporary fix here]!!” Same shit, different day.

The thing that holds you back the most…is the (false) sense of safety you get by following those fake rules. Even if you hate them, they are familiar. And if you really go for it and break some f*cking rules…it’s scary. Totally uncharted territory.

So you make excuses to stop yourself juuuuuust short of really f*cking going for it.

And the consequence is staying stuck in the version of yourself who’s NOT happy. You’re avoiding short-term discomfort instead of thinking BIG picture about the life you could really have. A life lived on your own terms, by your own rules.

You think you just need more confidence in your next step. So you overthink it. Crowdsource it. Wait until it feels “normal” enough to say out loud. And somehow…this always lands you back on the safe, conventional choice.

But the answer isn’t in someone else’s rulebook. What you’re really craving is TRUST that YOU can call the shots and your world won’t end. In fact…it’ll get way better because you’ll finally be doing what YOU want.

That trust is a muscle. And the only way to build it is practice.

When I started actually breaking the rules…not just being a “badass but inside the lines,” but actually breaking them…I started small. I started to actually take my time to get ready to leave the house, even if people were waiting for me. I started taking the longer way to drive somewhere in the car (a real no-no in my family 😬). I didn’t respond with haste to every message that landed in my DMs.

And it got easier. I quit my job, left my multi-six figure salary behind and started my own business from scratch. I started writing and speaking in my own unfiltered voice (hey-o!). I started taking naps for literally the first time in my life.

Now I have a new set of filters that are MINE, not anyone else’s. My own rulebook: Do I want to do it? Does it make me happy? Will it impact my mental or physical wellbeing?

And yeah, sometimes it won’t go your way. You speak your truth, make someone uncomfortable or don’t get the job, the promotion, the offer, whatever. So what?? Honestly, sorry, but I have to say it again: So what??

You keep breaking one rule at a time, until you’ve pivoted yourself towards a life that feels WAY better, way truer to who YOU are.

If you trust yourself, listen to YOUR instincts, break some f*cking rules…you’ll stop begging for the conventionally “right” thing to fix your misery and finally start going after what’s YOURS. And, when you’re ready to dive in, I’m here to support you and cheer you on the whole damn way.

When you’re ready…here’s how to start:

The Tiny F*ck It Experiment is a free three-day mini-challenges sent straight to your inbox. Tiny rules, broken on purpose, so you start trusting what you already know.

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You are repeatedly, maybe even persistently, overwhelmed by the amount of work you have to do. It’s literally never-ending. Your to-do list seems to grow by the day, and it’s exhausting because you never even have time to work on what you already have to do. If only you could do ACTUAL work instead of spending all your time in damn meetings that could’ve been emails. But, even if they were emails, you wouldn’t have time to check those either because you’re just so damn overwhelmed.

Cue: hair pulling, midnight wake-ups, and panicked mornings where you feel behind before you’ve even started.

And the thing that’s so frustrating is that you’ve TOLD your boss repeatedly how overwhelmed you are. You said it out loud, even when it was hard. You said you needed help!!

So why don’t things change? Why are you still so damn overwhelmed?

Whelp, I’m going to tell you why, and how to break the cycle…

I’m sitting next to a young woman at the coffee shop, and naturally…I’m ease dropping on her conversation because, duh, I’m a nosy b*tch.

She just got off of a work call and immediately started complaining to her friend about all the extra work that just got dumped on her. Even though she is already so overwhelmed with everything she has to do. And, here’s the kicker that grabbed my attention (and then fired me up).

She said to her friend, “I did start off the call by saying I was drowning, so that’s good.”

No, no, my girl, that is not “good.” Telling leadership or coworkers that you are drowning is not the cure for drowning.

This is how we imagine it:

You’re in a pool. You’re flailing, splashing water, yelling, “help!” And then someone notices and jumps in to save you.

I think this is what so many women imagine will happen in a work scenario. We think we are sending out the right signals that we are flailing, but in reality…it looks like this:

You’re in the pool, but you’re performing the perfect freestyle. Then you switch to backstroke, butterfly, and all the while…as you glide through the pool with apparent ease, you’re politely saying, “Hey everyone, I’m drowning.” But people can barely hear you because they’re too busy swimming away in their own lanes. And by all appearances, you’re killing it. You’re fucking Katie Ledecky out there. So, no. No one actually notices you’re drowning or comes to help you. Because YOUR ACTIONS do not match what you’re saying.

If you are swimming a perfect backstroke, waiting for someone to throw you a lifeline or jump in to help, this will NOT happen.

I know because I’ve tried this technique. I can specifically remember crafting the most beautiful color-coded Lucidchart (my favorite process-mapping software, yes, nerd alert) to show my boss how damn much was on my plate. I think it was even called that, “How Much is On Allison’s Plate,” and I think I even put this gif of the bowl in the china shop:

And you know what my boss said, I mean I could tell he was possibly trying to empathize, something to the effect of, “That’s nice. Like, what do you recommend here?” And, I’m sure I said something like, “Just letting you know!” Exasperated on the inside, but still not asking for what I actually wanted to happen. I was drowning, but I didn’t actually ask for real help. I was waiting for him to give it to me.

In my experience, even when we have awesome bosses who can really empathize (who are likely drowning themselves) the most we are met with is, “I hear you. That’s really hard. This is just how things are right now, hopefully it’ll get better, yada yada…”

But when you’re drowning, you cannot wait for it to get better even a quarter from now, let alone a day from now. If you are really drowning, you need to get yourself REAL help. Now.

Here’s the really hard truth.

The reason you keep swimming instead of stopping to ask for real help is NOT that you aren’t asking loud enough. It’s that part of you doesn’t believe it’s safe to stop swimming and see what happens.

Even simpler: the belief that it’s unsafe to stop performing is the actual thing keeping you stuck. Not the workload, not an unhelpful boss.

But, you would not be saying “I’m drowning” in meetings or complaining to your friends or partner about it, or even feeling it in your body (headaches, spinning thoughts, anxiety) if you didn’t need help.

Let’s talk about how you are REALLY going to start helping yourself. Because if you are drowning, you need to take it seriously. No more whispering for help. No more swimming perfect strokes while hoping someone jumps in. It’s time to actually help yourself out of the water. It’s time to make a change.

The key here is not to yell louder, so that someone comes to rescue you. No, no. It’s taking action without asking or waiting for someone else. It’s proving to yourself, in small moments, that it’s safe to stop performing and do something differently.

Okay, here’s the “HOW” I promised you earlier. How to move from “Katie Ledecky whispering for help” to Woman Helping Herself.

This is what I want you to try. A tiny experiment to help break you out of the way you’ve been moving through your days. Because if you’re really overwhelmed, the only way to fix it is to accept that you literally DON’T HAVE TO keep doing the behaviors that are keeping you overwhelmed.

Read: no one can keep you overwhelmed but you. So, let’s work together to shift you to the right level of -whelm. Not over, not under. Just right. We can fucking Goldie Locks this shit.

(This is a small sample of my free Tiny F*ck It Experiment - one exercise out of a structured process with built-in accountability. Consider this an appetizer. Bon appetit.)

Okay, now, take a few deep breaths and let’s go.

1. Pick a task or behavior that you do every day but resent. It can be something small or something bigger, but see what jumps into your head. (Here are a few ideas to get you started: wait an hour to respond to a message, go 5 mins late to a meeting, delete the bottom of your to-do list)

Hot tip: Try picking one that’s in the sweet spot between “I can do that!” and “Hell no.” Stretching a bit outside your comfort zone will give you the best info!

2. Decide on a predefined amount of time to NOT do the thing you resent. This could be one hour to a day or two depending on your comfort level. If you picked “not checking my email inbox” for example, maybe not doing that for an hour is enough to sound your internal alarm. Whatever it is, again, find that sweet spot. We want discomfort, not total meltdown.

3. Check-in with yourself after you’ve completed step 2 (set a notification in your phone). What you want to focus on here is the following: 1) factually, what happened when you did not do the thing? Nothing but the facts here, ma’am. Do not add your feelings into it. 2) what happened in your body when you did not do the thing? 3) did anything surprise you about how you reacted?

4. Do it again. Pick something else to try or repeat with the one you already tried until it gets easier. This is THE most important step. You cannot stop at one tiny experiment. You need to keep going!

Here’s why…

This whole experiment isn’t about making big, uncomfortable changes. It’s about making enough little changes that you’ve collected proof that it’s safe to move through the world differently. The more often you stretch yourself or “break a rule,” the more comfortable it will become. The idea here (spoiler alert) is that you’ll find that life doesn’t collapse when you start moving differently. In fact, it gets more exciting to do more of it. But, and this is the big BUT, you have to hang in there until it gets more comfortable.

Did you know that our brains are literally hardwired to do the “easy” thing, even if we hate it? This is the brain’s way of trying to keep us safe. So when we do something new, our brains are like “RED ALERT - are you SURE?” So even though you’re overwhelmed, you keep doing everything you’ve always done to keep you there.

Think of it like this. You have hiked the same path over and over again. You are so familiar with this path that you could do it with your eyes closed. You did not make this path, and you don’t want to go down it anymore, but your body just keeps walking because it’s known and easy.

BUT…if you are sick of this path, you need repetition of new behaviors to prove to your brain that there’s more for you. That it’s safe to try something new.

And the more you are able to push yourself to do it, the faster you’ll have a new, well-worn trail that’s all your own. No one handed it to you or told you to do it. No one else jumped in to save you. You created it because you wanted to. Because you HAD to see what was on the other side.

You have to show your brain what you are capable of, that you are DONE with being overwhelmed, and you are ready to act out of agency: taking responsibility for your own damn self. Because, especially at work when you’re performing like a damn diva, no one is going to do it for you.

That’s the whole exercise. Collecting tiny data points that you can survive doing things differently. Do it enough times and things start to shift. This is what the full experiment builds. Not just one data point, but a pile of them, with someone (me!) in your corner making sure you don’t quit at point one. Until you take back enough control to get yourself out of the fucking pool.

If you just read through the steps above and decided you won’t try the experiment, I want to ask you, “Why not? What’s holding you back?” My guess is your brain is spinning with a story of why it’s way too scary to do the thing. But if you listened to your dear overwhelmed body, it just might be telling you that the cost of not trying is way higher.

Speaking directly to your brain for one moment: most of what you’re afraid will happen...won’t. Nobody notices as much as you think. The world keeps spinning.

Drop into the experiment and see what happens.

As I sat next to the young woman at the coffee shop, whispering, “I’m drowning” on her call, I couldn’t help but imagine her ten years from now still whispering the same thing. Wondering why it hasn’t worked out for her. She’s so burnt out, she’s likely job-hopped a few times, repeating the same cycle over and over. Wondering why it keeps happening to her. Because the truth is that it’s NOT the job. It’s the way she’s showing up, still expecting that swimming like a fucking champ and gently saying “It’s too much” will get her a different result. It won’t.

If you want more, more experiments and more accountability, good. Let’s fucking get it.

I created the Tiny F*ck It Experiment – a 3-day mini challenge to give you the support you need to take some risks. To prove to yourself that you can build up the muscles you need to rescue your own damn self. My (validated) hypothesis is that you’ll come out on the other side realizing that you can do things differently, and it truly wasn’t as scary as you made it out to be. You do what you want, help yourself, and the world keeps spinning. I feel pretty passionately about it, actually.

And, if you’re really as overwhelmed as I think you are, the cost of not trying is way higher than the cost of going for it.

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When I was depressed a few years ago, I realized I had stopped singing. I’d stopped listening to music at all, in fact.

I knew this was my very own canary-in-a-coal-mine situation. (In case you aren’t familiar with the metaphor, miners used to send canaries down into mines because the little birds were much more sensitive to the toxic gases that could kill the miners. The little birds would basically stop singing as the gases caused them distress, giving miners time to escape.)

As I grew to understand just how sensitive my own system was to stress (my own “toxic gas”), it became the opportunity to remove myself from the fucking mine. I needed to choose differently to return to the most essential forms of creativity and joy in my life.

If there are things you always LOVED doing, that felt so true to who you were, that you aren’t doing anymore, this is a chance to ask yourself “why,” and “what would need to change for you to get back there?” What’s standing in your way?

My guess is that you’ve exchanged being “successful” at something else less essential to the core of who you are and more “societally” acceptable. And, I’m here to tell you that the two are not substitutable. You will never feel like you’re living in anything other than the toxic mine if you choose what’s conventional over than what feels like YOU. In order to be the most fully expressed version of yourself, it’s imperative that you stop doing the things that are causing you distress and start doing the things that give you life.

Your free, creative expression is a truer signal of your wellbeing than how you’re doing at anything else in your life. And the only way to get it back is to learn how to tap back into your essential creative expression, to learn how to play again. To become less socially acceptable and more YOU.

While that sounds incredibly simple in theory, I understand it can feel pretty fucking challenging. But, I’ve escaped the mine, and I’m here to tell you there’s a way back to your creativity.

It’s way simpler than you think, once you’ve seen the pattern clearly…

Here’s what I see happen over time for so many women. We are wonderful, whimsical, creative little souls, and then we find out early what others, especially authority figures, actually want from us. I even found this to be true with singing, the thing that was just part of who I was. I joined the school choir in 6th grade only to find out it then meant I got a grade for how well I sang. Like, wait one fucking second…is this something I want to be graded for?? I ended up never joining a school choir again, mostly because I was annoyed at how long it took people to learn their parts. If I would’ve stuck with choir, singing could’ve become one more thing I learned to get rewarded and praised for.

As it was, there were lots of other things I learned to do more and more often to get praised and rewarded. Such as completing all my work with excellence and trying to anticipate my bosses’ needs. In order to keep up the reward system, we keep giving more of ourselves, quieting the things that don’t quite fit. And without our awareness, we’ve fallen into the pattern that requires us to exchange our juicy creativity for conventional success.

We keep sacrificing ourselves to keep the pattern going. We’re handed expectations, meet the expectations, get some modicum of a reward, and then repeat for one more dopamine hit. And all the while, as we give up pieces of ourselves, the external performance metrics keep going up: we are getting raises, promotions, everything that signals that we are “fine” in the world around us.

By all external signals, things are going fucking well. Steady income, job title that makes sense to people who ask what you do. But this is the trap. As we increasingly push ourselves to perform, there’s nothing on our performance dashboard that warns us the canary has gone quiet. Wouldn’t that be amazing if there was? Like, “hey lady, yes, you just nailed that presentation, but your cortisol is off the charts and you need a nap.”

The canary is sending the signal, but we are no longer listening. It no longer matters as much to us as it once did. Because no one around us is measuring our internal performance metrics. We feel the loss, but we can’t specifically name it because along the way, our creativity mattered less and less. Are you feeling this?

If in your snazzy job, you’ve worked at all with data…you know about the good old “lagging indicator.” These tell us that something has changed AFTER it happens. We can use it to look backward to say “what the happened there,” but it’s not great when ideally we should’ve stopped the fucking thing from happening in the first place. Whoops, something went wrong and now we have to figure out what caused it.

Your performance or “success” in your job is a lagging indicator. It can stay high LONG after something has gone wrong internally because it’s built to be propped up, willed, gritted through. This is precisely the mismatch between what your life looks like on the outside and how you feel in the inside.

Your unique creative expression, however, cannot be willed in the same way. You can fake a good quarter at work or even at home, but you can’t really fake the desire to sing in the car or paint a painting or go rollerblading.

Your external indicators of wellbeing can 100% be faked. You can game the system. I know because I’ve done it.

I remember when my daughter was about 2 years old, feeling like there were SO many times when I was hanging by a thread on the inside, while composing my voice and speaking neutrally to her. Anyone who’s done toddler bedtime understands this feeling. I was beyond depleted but putting on a good face to keep my life running smoothly. And, sure we can fake it for a while, but the longer it goes on…the more incongruent we feel, trapped in our own lives.

You cannot game your internal indicators of wellbeing.

And the world we live in asks us to keep faking things to keep everyone comfortable: “Show me how good you are! Put on that smile. Say please and thank you. You’re welcome for that 2% raise!” And all the while, you’re crying on the inside. Wishing you had the energy to do anything that even remotely resembled a hobby, much less the creative expression that makes you essentially YOU.

When I finally realized how much of me was getting left behind, I was too damn overwhelmed to do anything about it. Turning on music in the car grated on my already fried nervous system. “How sad,” I would think. “This isn’t me.” Where have I gone?

If we’re lucky, someone in our life might notice our lack of creative expression and nudge us or call it out. For me, nobody was like, “Oh hey, you’ve stopped singing all the time. What’s up with that?” Our unique creative expression is specific to each of us, and the fact that we’ve stopped doing it doesn’t necessarily signal that we are “in a crisis.” It looks like we are busy and will likely get back to the thing at some point.

While the singing was a huge signal to ME, I found that it took my suffering compounding over time for others to really take note of how serious things were getting. I hadn’t left the mine quick enough after the canary stopped singing. The stress, my very own “toxic gas,” was causing me to shutdown.

I can’t help but wonder what would it have meant to treat the absence of creative expression as actual data when I realized it? Rather than just noting how sad it was. Sure, it’s a lagging indicator, but once I saw it, what if I’d actually acted on it? How might I have saved myself from the mine earlier if I would’ve treated it as a real signal of infection, like I would’ve a fever?

What if you could save yourself precious time by responding to your loss of creative expression?

What if you actually use the information to heal yourself? Not to try to force the creativity to return, but to heal the real root problem: that you have traded external measures of success for internal measures of wellbeing. Because sure, those external measures of success have made people “like you,” validate you. (Or at least you’re hoping they will.) But what if you’re actually sick and don’t feel like yourself anymore?

I could not heal myself by turning music on in the car and singing along. If I tried to put myself on a “singing in the car” schedule, join a choir, attend karaoke once a week, I would have been turning my creativity a project, the problem to be solved. But, this was not the root problem, remember. It was a signal, and it would only return on its own if I treated the thing poisoning me.

Not singing or even being able to turn on the music was NOT the real problem. It was a symptom. I had let my creativity go in order to focus solely on performing in ways that were “approved.”

I had now come far enough to know that a promotion or raise would NEVER help me to heal myself. In fact, when looking at my internal wellbeing, I had concrete evidence that getting the promotion or raise would NOT, in fact, make me whole and healthy. I was not whole nor healthy, and I was getting lots of external validation!

The only way to heal was to accept that this truth: no amount of high-performance or external success was going to bring back my song. I had to care WAY more about my internal wellbeing as a signal for how I was actually doing than what it looked like was happening on the outside.

If I had tried to get my creativity back by forcing it, I would’ve been applying the same mechanisms to my internal wellbeing as I’d apply to my external work performance. Instead, I had to begin the process of embracing small ways of breaking the patterns that led to my canary-in-the-coal-mine moment. I had to tackle the “toxic gases” (the fucking stress) that made the canary stop singing in the first place.

What would this look like for you? How would you begin to tackle getting your creativity back if you knew you’d been sacrificing it for something else? If you’d been poisoned and were stuck in as the version of who’s doing “fine” but really isn’t well, isn’t fully YOU.

Here’s how I began to untangle myself over time from the “external signals” of success:

Play, specifically through breaking small “rules” or social norms.

Why, you ask? Well, because the version of myself that cared WAY more about external metrics of performance only did things that were “approved” and safe. The version of me underneath, who wanted to sing and enjoy my life…she didn’t give a fuck about the rules. About fitting in the box.

So, in order to stop being so damned stress all the time, trying to maintain my high external standards, I had to change my actions externally. To stop over-indexing on what others told me was “good” or “right” to do and start doing what I felt like would be good and right for me to do. This was how I knew I could get a different result internally.

I started doing weird little things that I would’ve never done. Like, eating breakfast with a kitchen bowl and spoon while on a walk. Why not? I wanted to both eat breakfast and walk, and I realized I could combine them. And then I realized, why carry around an empty bowl when I could, in fact…hide it in the bushes to pick up on my way back home. My daughter HATES this by the way. She will not let me do it because “the bugs” might get it and will carry it herself if I try to do this weird behavior. So, win-win for me.

I started driving in circuitous routes, not following the “shortest” or most efficient path to get anywhere. I stopped worrying about making people wait for me while I got ready to go somewhere. This one was big for me, and something I never would’ve done in the past.

Play can show up in all different forms in life. Just like your unique creative expression, it’s unique to you. It does NOT have to be conventional. (See bowl in bushes above.) In fact, all the better if it’s not. It’s all about little actions that you would’ve never taken if you were worried about being the “conventionally successful” version of yourself and instead letting yourself go a little bit feral.

The goal here is to start collecting evidence that it’s safe for you to step out of line, that it’s way easier than you would’ve thought, that the world doesn’t fall apart because you wear two different colored shoes to work. (Just an idea. If you try it, let me know how it goes.)

The more I played, the more other forms of creativity started lighting back up in my life. These things compound in the positive direction, building us back up, reminding us what it means to take ourselves less seriously. To enjoy our fucking lives.

When I started coming back to myself, I’d find myself singing in the car again, and my daughter would yell, “MOM!!! Stop singing!” I would playfully respond to her that she “can’t keep a songbird from singing.” This went on for years, in fact. We would listen to her music, she would yell at me to stop singing, and I’d give my standard reply.

One day, though, she became increasingly agitated with me. My husband was in the car, and I told him he needed to be the impartial moderator as to who should win this argument. He came up with a couple compromises that either she or I poo-pooed immediately. But, as we discussed further, I found tears start to leak from my eyes. And, I told her for the first time, why singing was so important to me. That it not only makes me happy but is a key sign that I AM happy, that I’m doing well. That I’m not back to where I was during the really hard season of my life where I had traded essential parts of myself away to be “successful” at something else. Someone less soft, less whimsical, less ME.

And, she actually got it. She understood that this was really important to me. Not by echoing my sentiments or having a discussion about it. She was 7, after all. But she stopped telling me not to sing, and over time…she’s actually invited me to sing along with her. My DREAM! In fact, this morning as we walked to the car for school, she said, “Mom, want to sing with me?” And, all was truly well with my soul.

I created the Tiny F*ck It Experiment – a 3-day mini challenge to give you this exact chance to play in ways you likely haven’t in a long time. My (validated) hypothesis is that you’ll come out on the other side realizing that some “rules” truly weren’t as serious as you made them out to be. You CAN play around, do what you want, and the world keeps spinning. I feel pretty passionately about it, actually.

I Want My Creativity Back

The point here is not to burn things down or to stop being “successful,” but to experiment. To see what it feels like to push yourself a little to do things you wouldn’t normally let yourself do. To stop playing it safe and unleash your creativity.

I want you to gather proof that it’s safe to move through the world differently than what you’ve been doing. Because what you’ve been doing isn’t how you would live if you were fully unleashed, is it?? My guess is you’ll find that life doesn’t collapse when you stop taking everything so damn seriously and let yourself play. It’ll get you excited to do more of it.

If you don’t want to join the challenge, your brain is probably spinning a story as to why it’s way too scary to do the thing. But, hush for a minute. If you listen to your body, it’s likely telling you a different story. That the cost of not trying is way higher than the cost of going for it.

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I call it The Loop. It looks like this:

Get handed a set of expectations, meet or exceed those expectations, receive external validation, repeat…

Following The Loop may have made us successful, but there are also consequences. If we look closely, we are also the same group of women who don’t know what we actually want or how to go about getting it. There is no step in The Loop for us to pause, question the expectations, or decide if we want to meet them. The most important thing is getting to the “pat on the back” phase where we get the validation we need to start the whole thing over again. Phew, I am just as good as I hoped. They like me, they really like me!

The Loop has nothing to do with what we actually want out of life. Nothing to do with what would make us happy or bring us true fulfillment. But it’s so deeply ingrained in us that we follow it willingly, and then wonder why we’ve ended-up unhappy. Why our lives don’t feel like ours. It’s because…they aren’t. They’re lives built on other’s expectations.

And you don’t get your life back by managing The Loop better. You get it back by breaking it.

The really good news is that I’m here to tell you that I’ve tried a different way, as a genuine Top Performer with something to lose. And my world didn’t end.

I was the Queen of nailing other people’s expectations. I got the grades, the jobs, the promotions, the awards. I knew how to not only complete The Loop, but to seamlessly fly through it. In fact, I have joked that I wasn’t really that good at learning the actual content of my classes in school. I got As because I was good at learning how to please, how to manage up, how to navigate what was expected and deliver it. I built my life on this foundation.

But, I’ve always had a rebellious streak. I learned the rules so well that I knew exactly how far I could push them. Expertly towing the line between my ‘gold star’ persona and natural ‘fuck it energy.’

Because of this ‘fuck it energy,’ there were rules I was comfortable breaking and then rules I upheld to make sure I never lost my Top Performer status. I could rail on the company culture, but I would still expertly navigate expectations to get my work done well. I could say I wouldn’t complete certain requests because I knew they weren’t really that important. I was always reading between the lines in order to maintain The Loop.

But The Loop is fragile. Because the last step, the “pat on the back” is ESSENTIAL and requires someone else’s approval to complete it. It outsources validation. And, if the validation stops happening or…stops feeling good enough, the whole thing shatters.

At the pinnacle of my Top Performer life, I got a 20% raise. I was making more money than I’d ever imagined making. Hitting $100,000, once a huge goal of mine, and then quickly doubling it over the next year. But when I got this last raise, my thought was, “I don’t even want it.” (I mean I would keep it, of course.) But part of me wanted to give it back. What I was finally realizing is that the external validation I was getting was NOT enough. It was not worth the amount of effort I was putting in. No amount of money, praise, promotions, or awards was satisfying enough.

The longer I lived in this tension, the more claustrophobic I became. Because even though I felt like I’d been rebellious, the truth was that I was still playing it safe to keep The Loop alive. I was “Safe Rebellious.” I was working SO hard, but The Loop was crumbling under me. It was asking me to work more and faster for validation, but the work was starting to feel meaningless. The cost was becoming too high.

Completing The Loop was consistently leaving me more hollow, more anxious and depressed than I’d ever been.

I can’t help but wonder, Do you ever feel this way too??

I had no choice but to say ‘fuck it’ to The Loop. To let go of it and try something different. I would never get a different result, never actually FEEL different, if I kept going the way I was.

I had no idea how to turn this knowledge into real change. How to find a new way of doing things and MOVE differently. To start making changes in how I was showing up.

I’ve written many times here about when my therapist told me I should “shoot for a B” at work. It was during this breakdown of The Loop that she said it to me. If working so damn hard was making me sick, the obvious answer was for me to stop working so damn hard. But, this truly baffled me. Getting a B sounded like doing bad work, and I had NEVER tried to do a bad job at anything on purpose. I’m pretty sure I said to her, “I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I don’t know how to do that.” But this suggestion from my therapist was one that stuck and that took me years to learn how to untangle and apply in my life.

I had some big questions to answer for myself. If I stopped working so hard, how would I get my reward?! How would I know I was doing a good job, that I was good, if no one told me I was doing good?

If I was going to insist on clinging to The Loop, getting a B was the biggest possible threat.

But, whenever I’m faced with new information that cracks my identity, I take inventory of what I absolutely know to be true. Here’s where I was at:

• The way I was living was NOT working anymore.

• I had no choice but to try a new way or watch things get even worse.

I truly had no choice but to lean in and let my ‘fuck it energy’ take the lead.

So I stopped responding to emails. I quietly let requests for new process documentation go unfinished. And eventually I told my boss I wasn’t doing every single task that came my way anymore.

These were small experiments, small risks, I started taking that began compounding over time. The safer I felt taking each risk, the more emboldened I felt to keep going. The more time went on without anyone confronting me about doing less, the more I was willing to push it further.

In fact, it felt kind of good. Like I’d learned some secret. That I didn’t have to give all of myself to maintain anything. In fact, everyone was so concerned with their own work that…they didn’t notice that I (once the Gold Standard employee) was just getting by.

The system I needed to have in place in order to continue performing well stopped existing. Sure, I was going less at work, and yep, nothing bad happened to me, but then I hit a different kind of wall. Integrity, not fear of unmet expectations. If I wasn’t really going to perform the job anymore, except for showing up to meetings and sounding like I knew what I was talking about, my integrity wouldn’t allow me to keep taking the money. Because of all the things I was excellent at (managing up, nailing other’s expectations), I could make it look like I was doing work. But I could no longer sit in strategy meetings with academic leaders and present the work as if I’d had anything to do with it. I’d worked my way out of the job.

What started as small experiments led to me finally doing the really BIG thing: I quit the job altogether to build the life that was underneath the whole time. The life I never knew it was safe to dream of.

Where I thought The Loop was keeping me safe, and it had for a time, it was NOT the way that would allow me to move forward.

I had built an entire identity - the gold standard employee who shows up first, does it best - around holding up standards that never really needed me that much to hold up. Realizing that was pretty damn amazing and freeing.

What I know now is that getting a B is NOT about trying to maintain The Loop while doing worse work. It’s about recognizing that The Loop was always a broken system, and that I had to trash it altogether to find the true meaning and fulfillment I wanted from my life.

And the only way to build something new is to be brave enough to MOVE differently. To be willing to take action that will lead to different results. Where true satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness have nothing to do with waiting for a pat on the back and everything to do with learning to pause to ask what you actually want and learning how to go after it. Time to dance on the fucking table.

So now I ask you what I eventually had to ask myself: what’re you doing to maintain your Loop? The task, the standard, the role you’re sure would fall apart if you let it go?

If you’ve spent a lifetime completing The Loop and now find yourself in the same place I was, knowing the cost will never be worth the reward, it’s time to stop managing it and start breaking it. To explore what your life could look like if you stepped out of The Loop. To see how it’d feel to start doing things because you wanted to, not because someone else expected you to.

I promise, it’s not as big and scary as you think. Because the biggest secret is: all those expectations you’ve been adhering to, they’re 100% arbitrary and optional. They always have been. You just have to stop. Seriously. Knock it off.

And I know how it feels to not even know where to begin. It’s not your fault. You just haven’t known a different way.

This is why I created the Tiny F*ck It Experiment – a 3-day mini challenge that gives you a chance to dip your toe into taking some low stakes, uncomfortable risks. My (validated) hypothesis is that you’ll come out on the other side realizing that…it likely wasn’t as big a deal as you made it out to be. And no one cared. The world keeps spinning. And I’m giving it to you for FREE.

I'm Ready to Experiment

The point here is not to burn things down (yet), but to experiment. To see what it feels like to push yourself a little to do things you wouldn’t normally let yourself do. To stop playing it safe.

This isn’t about big, uncomfortable changes. It’s about collecting evidence. Proof that it’s safe to move through the world differently than what you’ve always done. Breaking the rules is allowed. Encouraged even. My guess is you’ll find that life doesn’t collapse when you break a small rule. It might just get you excited to do more of it.

If you don’t want to join the challenge, your brain is probably spinning a story as to why it’s way too scary. I encourage you to listen to your body…it just might be telling you a different story. That the cost of not trying is way higher than the cost of going for it.

Ready to join the challenge? Get it straight to your inbox:

Let's F*ckn Go

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Five years ago, I was at lunch with a bunch of friends/colleagues during a conference, and one of them introduced a question for the table: “Do you have a life motto? And if so, what is it?” I always struggle to come up with answers to ice breaker questions, so I immediately thought…uhh, no of course I don’t. As we started going around the table, most people said some version of the golden rule: treat others as you want to be treated. And, I started to feel my familiar panic of not being able to come up with an answer quickly enough. But, then, a lightbulb went off. I DO! I do have a motto!! I don’t know when it first felt true or I said it outloud, but I was very clear that my motto was:

To live authentically as myself, so others feel free to do the same.

As I quit my tech job to pursue a new career for myself, authenticity was at the root. I realized I did not want to use my strengths, skills, or my energy to make money for other people any more. I wanted to do what I wanted, when I wanted, and to have a lot of fucking fun while doing it.

But why is it so important to me, you ask? Because it’s an innate part of who I am. Built into my design and purpose.

I received a big confirmation of this when I started learning about Human Design.

In case you aren’t familiar, Human Design lives at the intersection between ancient traditions (like astrology, kabbalah, chakras) and modern science (genetics, quantum mechanics). This intersection is truly my favorite place to live…right in between the mystical and the practical. So, using your exact birth date, time, and location, a unique human design chart is produced to show your own energetic blueprint, a compass of sorts. It shows how you’re naturally wired to make decisions, interact with others, and navigate life. Fun right!? I think so.

When I opened my Human Design chart for the first time last year, it said: “You are designed to be an influential role model who shows us what it means to live authentically.”

Uhh…this is basically the same sentence I uttered as my “motto” five years before I’d ever even heard of Human Design.

Reading further, my chart said, “You are meant to feel authentically yourself in all that you do and creatively expressed in your work and life.”

Well, damn. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

What I will say here is that capital-P “Purpose” cannot be gleaned from reading one document. It’s discovered, confirmed, and reaffirmed across a lifetime of experience. My chart in this case has served as a powerful reference and confirmation of what I had already intuited and begun living in my own life. But, it gave me even more language and suggestions for practical application. I will continue to live it, experiment with it, and reaffirm it across a lifetime of work. Not just a “target” or something to get right or wrong. But a living, breathing expression of who I am in my life.

Why finding your purpose matters

When I talk about living my purpose, note that it is NOT just about “following my passions.” It’s about a deep knowledge and understanding of what it means I’m here to do and using that as a compass to create my most fulfilling life. Answering the age old question: why am I here? And what am I supposed to do with it?

And, of course, answering these questions is not unique to me. It won’t surprise you that most of us are trying to answer this question for ourselves, just in many different ways.

I’m not sure there are many other questions people have spent millions of dollars and hours trying to answer for themselves. In any bookstore, you’ll see multiple sections stacked with authors trying to answer the question, providing frameworks, lived experiences. There are podcasts and personality tests and assessments. We all want to know what we are here for and to create meaning in our own lives.

None of these are the same book, the same framework, the same religion, the same language even. But they’re all in pursuit of the same thing. People demonstrate, over and over again, the strong desire to have deeper purpose and meaning in their lives.

We all want to know what the hell are we doing on this rock?!

And, here’s the thing. If we don’t take the time to answer the question for ourselves, one of those books or frameworks is always waiting in the wings to give us a predefined answer. See religions, achievements, relationships, titles.

We have so many ways of trying to fill a purpose-void in our lives. We can chase things like religion, money, or even gold stars. But really they are just artificial ways of trying to fill a void in our lives that will never be filled unless we are willing to go deeper. To listen to our intuition, our interests, our skills, and desires. Because (unless you really do want someone to hand you a ready-made purpose to follow, and in that case you can likely close this essay) purpose will not be defined outside of ourselves. We are not one-size-fits-all. We are unique, amazing people who are most fulfilled when we understand our designs and spend our lives in pursuit.

When we angle ourselves towards our own purpose, life becomes less “something to get right” and more of a great experiment. Lower stakes, and more playful. What a gift for those of us with perfectionist tendencies. To shift away from black and white, right or wrong, thinking and to embrace life as a playground. When we anchor in our own purpose, we release the expectations everyone else has handed us and finally write our own. Failure becomes hypothesis testing, a natural part of the process.

How I use it to make decisions and stay on track

What I have come to find is that, the more I lean into my purpose of living authentically the easier and more natural things feel in my life. In some cases, things have been almost too easy. Like I wasn’t sure I was really even doing a job because it seemed too easy. And, if things feel challenging or wrong, it’s a good sign that I need to check myself and ask if I’m really living authentically (or of course where I may be living outside my other core values).

When I first started my coaching business, I got advice to niche down my ideal client. And sure, yes, I understand the logic behind this advice and why it typically makes people money. It makes sense. But, I’ll be honest, what it ended up looking like in practice did not feel quite right. I was advertising my services and working really hard to create content, but nobody outside my immediate network was really buying what I was selling. The people who were buying wanted to work with me because they knew me.

And beyond that, even though I had clients, and they were wonderful, wonderful humans, the coaching program I’d created wasn’t getting me excited. The methodology I’d been trained in felt a lot like conducting therapy to me, and I had never wanted to sign up to be a therapist. Over time, I found myself hoping my clients would cancel. And I thought, “this can’t be what I’m meant to create. It’s not the business I’ve been dreaming of. I haven’t nailed it.”

So I hired a wonderful, amazing business coach who was all about ‘unlocking my unique genius.’ I really wanted to ensure that I was building a business around my strengths, interests, and secret sauce. What I was really looking for was a business that felt true to me, not just following a blueprint I was handed, but a real expression of what I’m here to do. The more work I did with my coach, the more I realized that the answer to my discomfort with my business model was NOT to throw it all out. It was to lean in more fully as myself. To be even bolder, more me, more audacious in what I bring to the table. To live at the intersection of my uniqueness and my interests…my purpose.

Practically speaking for me, this looks like living authentically here on this earth so others feel free to do the same. It means I get to wake up every day creating a business and serving clients in a way that’s uniquely mine. And if I don’t, I won’t feel right or in alignment with the core of who I am.

Before I fully accepted living my purpose, I made being excellent at work the biggest, most important part of my identity. I let others tell me what was important. I let my confidence and self-importance be dictated by how good I was, how good others knew I was. I told myself that it’s just how I was wired. Working that hard and intensely at all times was ME. Except it came at the cost of every other part of me. I could do the work that well, but I could not do it and be balanced and healthy. And I would’ve even said I was living authentically at that time because I told the truth about what it felt like to me at the time. It’s just that I was treating myself so badly and that I wasn’t really making my own choices.

But, once I let go of that public, high-achiever identity, I was able to accept that living authentically meant I had to write my own definition of success. And in this new definition, my worth is NOT defined on how well I hit other’s expectations. It’s about being successful on my own terms, without sacrificing myself or hustling to get there. It looks like working based on my natural cycle and energy levels, giving myself grace to do less. It looks like A LOT of rest. And, it looks like prioritizing my health, my family, and what’s fun for me. Basically, doing what I want, when I want.

How I support clients

So, this is what I do with my clients. We work together to understand who they are, where they’ve been living out of alignment with their purpose, and how to close the gap.

I had a recent client (we will call her Maya) who came to me wanting to establish systems to live a more value aligned life. She wanted so badly to know how to do it, what it felt like in her body and in her emotions. The problem was that she was blocked. She was so caught up in spending time on the “wrong things” or feeling guilty about following her energy. She was convinced that just figuring out the right system would fix the problem.

When we stepped back and looked at her human design chart as a starting point, it said, “You are designed to be a leader, visionary, and guide…You are designed to make decisions in the moment based on your intuition.” Taking it a step further, “When you honor your intuition and trust yourself enough to be spontaneous and make decisions in the moment, you’ll begin to find more flow in your decisions and in your life.”

Uh oh. Did you see what I did? There was no mention of systems. And, in fact, it’s the opposite. Maya saw in her chart a mirror for what she knew about herself but couldn’t yet trust.

Maya, leader. Maya, visionary. Maya, guide. Not Maya, spreadsheet.

When she claims her leadership and trusts her intuition, not only is the tension and heaviness removed, but she feels freaking light and free. She did that. Not any system. Just her.

That’s the client work I get so fired up about. Not handing someone a plan or framework, but watching them realize they were never missing one.

Want to dig into your purpose?

The Audacity Method is a four-month, 1:1 coaching program for high-achieving women ready to stop living by someone else’s blueprint…one handed to you by religion, a job, or anyone other than YOU.

The real question was never whether you wanted more meaning and purpose in your life. It’s whether you’re finally ready to invest in finding it, instead of waiting for someone else to hand it to you.

Together, we dig in to identify who you are, what you want, and how to close the gap to get you there. You build your own plan — not someone else’s system — to live fully, confidently, and audaciously as you.

If you’re ready, DM me and let’s fucking go.

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I wanted one of those awards so damn bad for my first many years at the company. Until I won one, in fact. I felt such a mix of emotions. So fucking proud of myself, a tiny bit embarrassed, and like it had only ever been a matter of time!!

The feeling I did not expect to have though was betrayal. Because I’d done it. Won a big award that clearly and publicly demonstrated my excellence. I’d mastered work! I won. It felt like I’d reached the peak of Everest. But, then what? All I could do was…go back down? Try to maintain the level of excellence that’d gotten me there in the first place?

The kicker was that I would never get the award again. They weren’t going to give it to me every year. I was not an NFL quarterback who won the Super Bowl and could then get back to work to try to win it again the next season. Nope, this was not the NFL. This was…Corporate. And at Corporate, you win just enough to be recognized, but they still need you to get back to work for nothing more than the paycheck and the hope of another promotion or pat on the back. These things dangled like carrots to keep the horse moving around the track. I did it. I made it around the track in first place. That was it.

What I actually got for it was about 5 minutes of public praise from the company President and my boss and $3k in gift cards. And, then…to get back to work producing. Being treated the same as before. As the high achiever who could step in to clean up the messes and solve the hardest problems.

Betrayal here for me felt like reaching the top of the career ladder only to find out it was not so special after all. The underlying competitive behavior that was fueled and encouraged through school and into the workforce was nothing more than a tool in the hands of others more powerful than me. If you get the grades, you’ll get this award, scholarship, into the best schools, the cord around your neck at commencement. You then go into the workforce, and you do it all again. You perform for the raises, the promotions, the title changes, maybe the awards. Your yearly performance review becomes the report card. The indication that you in fact are “such a good girl” and doing what’s expected of you…maybe even more!! But what does it get you?

Many times I had the very special experience of a performance review where my boss told me that they would’ve given me the top rating, but they “weren’t allowed” because of some mysterious HR rule. Like, yes, I know you busted your ass all year long! I saw it! But, alas, there is some power even higher than me. The Human Resources department. The Other, untouchable, holder of “the policies.” You just haven’t been in the position long enough or they aren’t letting anyone have that ranking this year. Hmm. Perplexing, right? The goal is to keep us just flummoxed enough to still want to work harder.

To know what you deserve because you’ve worked so hard. You’ve done everything that was asked of you. You’ve been the best that you knew you could be. You are so tired. You go to bed and wake up thinking about work. But the system was not created to actually reward you or give you a place to show off your skills to truly win or be rewarded by anything. It’s created to keep you productive, making money, and being productive. And everything around you from the support services (here’s some therapy to help you deal with all the stress we’ve caused you!) to the awards is all in service of the end goal: for the company to make more money. Not to watch you win anything or to reward your behavior.

The external validation your company was created to give you is not the kind that you’ve been searching for. It is just that. A company who cares most about its bottom line. No matter how many times the company President chokes back tears telling you about your inherent worth. At the end of the day, no matter how stressed out you become, no matter how hard you work, no matter how diligently you truck through your to-do list, you will not find the satisfaction you are looking for.

And, when you try to question your company and make it all make sense, you will be told that you ask too much. That nothing was ever promised to you. That you are looking in the wrong places. And they’re right. You have been fooled. The way they lure you in and keep you dangling a la aforementioned horse and carrot is working by design.

End rant. Because that’s not really what this is about. I have no more control over corporate policies and practices than anyone else. What I do understand and have control over is what I do with my experience.

What my experience taught me was to stop asking for what I thought I deserved from a corporation and to start asking for it from myself. My frustration makes sense because I was never doing anything wrong. I’d spent my whole life performing a version of myself that was literally built to succeed by someone else’s definition.

Trying to be good enough. To be loved and accepted for who I was.

No corporation would ever give this to me. I had to learn to give it to myself.

If this resonates, here’s what I want to say to you. I didn’t have a self-awareness problem or a boundary problem or a discipline problem.

I had an identity problem. Not until I could let go of being the super high-performer looking for the pats on the back could I step into what I was actually looking for.

So, how to break free from this cycle? I’ll be honest with you. It’s not a quick fix. But, I’d read the books, I’d listened to the podcasts, I’d been to therapy. I was a smart, self-aware woman who needed to stop fighting to win at a system that was never built for me and to start creating the life I wanted for myself. I needed to actually act differently, not just say the right words.

Here’s what it looked like in practice. Stepping back and observing more. Taking note of what felt uncomfortable in my body. Holding lines I’d never held before, not because I couldn’t do what was being asked (I could) but because it wasn’t what was best for me. For me! Not for anyone else who would perhaps not be “pleased” with me. Collecting evidence that the life I was craving was actually possible to live. And, let me tell you what I found out: it is possible.

I didn’t actually need any award to tell me how great I was. Now I just know it because I’ve seen it.

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As a woman who could count the number of Bs (and Cs, le sigh) across my lifetime on one hand, I had no idea what it meant to try for a B. I needed an instruction manual, someone to just tell me what to do.

And I’ve literally had clients say this same thing to me. They know things have to change for them, but they are stuck. They know intellectually what is wrong, but can’t move beyond the knowing into the doing. What I know from doing identity and mindset work with other women is that the hardest part isn’t knowing something needs to change. It’s understanding how to make the change.

When you’ve been performing and excelling inside systems (churches, schools, workplaces) your whole life, you likely have no reference point for what it looks like to do things your own way. To ditch the rules and expectations of others to pave your own path. It sounds great, I’m sure. Okay, fine. It sounds a bit scary, but interesting! But, how and where to begin?

Here’s how I see it. When you live inside someone else’s expectations day-to-day, life feels like a Jenga tower. Like pulling one wrong block will make everything fall apart. So instead of taking risks that might make the tower unstable, you optimize: better morning routine, stronger boundaries, more ruthless prioritization of to-do lists, color-coded schedules. Small moves that feel productive but don’t get to the root.

We talked about this all the time when I was a Product Manager. Ask any person in the field about the Henry Ford story, and they’ll tell you: “If you ask people what they wanted back in the late 19th century, they would’ve said “faster horses,” while Henry Ford was able to bring them the first car.” Now, never mind that Henry Ford never actually told this maxim. The point stands. Innovation comes from going deeper, to the root problems that take more excavation to see.

So, when it comes to real change, it’s not enough to just keep drawing blocks from the Jenga tower or even to build supporting structures that help the tower to stand even better. What I encourage my clients to see instead is that they can actually just throw the whole fucking tower away. Because the tower (all that stress, all those stakes, all those carefully managed expectations) is only relevant as long as you keep playing the game. Once you step outside it, you realize it was built out of someone else’s priorities all along. And, I promise you, life expands when you live by your own.

I spent a 20 year career optimizing. I built my reputation both in and out of work as an incredibly sharp, high-performer. Even talking to one of my closest friends about the challenges I was having and my therapist’s advice to try less, my friend said, “Yeah, but a lot of that is just who you are. You’re an achiever.”

But, here’s the truth, my friends. I couldn’t keep up anymore with my own high standards at work, and it burned me out so hard. I had headaches, rashes, chronic stomach problems, anxiety, and depression. It was bad enough that I finally realized I needed to reevaluate. I threw the Jenga tower away.

It took me many years and over $10k trying to fix what was wrong with me before I finally accepted that it was the performing, the proving, the relentless chasing of gold stars, that was making me sick. The problem was never just the job. Until I confronted that, I was just going to keep recreating the same results with different titles.

So, with nothing left to give, I walked away from the six-figure salary, the title, the version of success I’d spent 20 years chasing. I pursued a coaching certification, started my own business, quit the job, and never looked back.

And that’s why I do the work I do now. I don’t want the women I work with to spend another year (or twenty) optimizing a life that was never theirs to begin with. I’m here to walk them toward full, audacious ownership. To help them stop waiting for permission and claim what’s already theirs.

If you’re honest with yourself, have you been stuck in the ‘optimization trap’ while wondering why things keep feeling shitty? Instead of waking up earlier or taking your lunch break away from your computer, I wonder what it would look like if you took a harder look at the Jenga tower you’re so preciously keeping up.

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Aside from fielding some creepy responses about teenage pregnancy and being an “innocent girl,” I stand by what I said.

Our teenage years are about differentiation from our caretakers…we’ve been taught the boundaries of youth and our hormones, our unformed prefrontal cortexes, and desire to fit in all tell us it’s time to break them.

I’m sure we all did to varying degrees. Made our share of questionable decisions. Threw the egg at the house or drank the Malibu Rum at a party or smoked the joint in the back of some guys van.

If you’re anything like me, you were likely incredibly afraid of getting “caught” and in trouble.

I remember the one time my mom tried to ground me. I was 18 and had gotten a speeding ticket driving home from school on a road the cops notoriously waited for high school students to fly down. I showed my mom the ticket and then told her I was driving to a friend’s house. She acted as if she was going to ground me, and I remember feeling taken aback and, dare I say, miffed? Like, “Lol, you want me to be in trouble now? When I’m about to graduate high school, have never gotten in trouble in my life, have complied (at least to our shared knowledge) with all your rules, have a 4.0 GPA, and am student body president?!? I think we are a bit beyond grounding at this point!”

Similarly, I spent my young adulthood doing everything “right.” I graduated from Christian college, got married so young, and got a job with benefits. I supported my husband in pursuing his career goals. I put myself on the back-burner, living in a city I didn’t really want to live in. Postponing my teaching degree. Doing a job that wasn’t really my dream, all while excelling at it. While my young husband was the rebellious one in our relationship, I became the one who was wound so damn tightly.

But the truth is I’ve always had a bit of a rebellious streak. I always tap-danced on the edge of the “rules.” The problem for me is that my desire to not play it safe, to break the rules, has always come with a really heavy dose of shame.

When guilt says, “oops, I did something bad,” shame says, “shit, I am a bad person.” And, I was afraid of being a bad person. Not just afraid of doing something bad.

When I had my extramarital affair exposed back in 2014, I felt the full power of all the shame I’d held within me come washing over. I was, in fact, drowning in my own shame. Where with the speeding ticket my rebellious self felt defiant, and the affair was total collapse. My rebellious self fully burning my life down. But being in it, the full body shame and true rock-bottom moment of my life, allowed me the reckoning with shame I’d so badly needed. Doing something I never could’ve imagined myself doing and in such a public way, knowing that so many people would be looking at me and talking about me being a bad person. I just felt my tenderness. I felt my humanness more than I ever had. As I clawed my way into figuring out who I really was, I found that I was just a person. A person who made a pretty consequential decision that hurt myself and a lot of other people. But just a person. A deeply feeling, caring, audacious person.

And, I felt that maybe if I felt like I could make mistakes without “being bad” growing up, I wouldn’t have saved them all up for one giant big-bang-of-bad.

It reminds me of the year in San Diego when all the fireworks over the bay accidentally went off at the exact same time. It was loud, bright, pretty disappointing, and a lot of people talked about it after. That was me. I was the fireworks.

So many of the rules we’ve been so afraid of breaking, that I was so afraid of breaking as an adult are made-up. But we’ve learned to apply the same level of intensity, shame, self-correction as we did as children. Trying to please our parents or teachers.

Only in place of them, we now have bosses and maybe partners/spouses we are trying to please. At work, just like we did growing up in school, we are trying to please, to impress, to get gold stars, as a way of publicly saying “See this?? I am GOOD!” And because I’m good, I’m lovable.

The thing about prioritizing all these internalized rules and expectations, though, is that we lose touch with what we actually want. With what feels good and true to us. If I asked you what you wanted today, what would make you exceedingly happy, could you answer? My guess is a lot of you would say that you don’t know.

Having grown up an evangelical Christian, it took me a long time to come to terms with the shame and guilt that guided so much of my thoughts, feelings, and actions. It was the lens I filtered all my decisions through. But, rising from the ashes of my affair to find a healthier way to be myself in relationships, and then eventually leaving Christianity and marrying my awesome and supportive husband…these things were the perfect combination to set my wild spirit free.

I wasn’t like a mustang suddenly loose from captivity. I was more like the possum someone found injured on the side of the road and nurtured back to health in a safe cage. Rehabilitation before being set free. I healed and the door to the cage was opened, but it took me many small tentative journeys out of said pen to fully feel comfortable embracing my inner wildness. Until I realized I didn’t need the cage anymore. I was wild and free…I could go anywhere I wanted!

In reality, this looked like using a lot more profanity than I ever had, living with my boyfriend before getting married (gasp), befriending way more strangers. I feel less constrained, lighter, more free, more open.

I’ve always had an inner rebellious streak. I’ve always liked to drive fast, to wear what I want, say what I want, do what I want. Only now I’m not trying to keep it contained. Only now I know that trying things out and messing up doesn’t make me a bad person. I am a very normal human person. A free person living life on her own terms. (Mom, please don’t ground me for this essay. Just kidding.)

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The only book on the lobby shelves was The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo. And, after whipping through it in 24 hours, I can’t believe I hadn’t read it before. It exactly described what I’ve been contemplating, what I return to over and over again as I journey through my own life. The journey of anyone who’s felt called to follow their dreams in pursuit of what their heart desires.

In The Alchemist, the main character of the story Santiago knows he is meant for something different than what his parents have wanted for him. While they supported his way towards the priesthood, he felt called to travel and see as much of the world as possible. He became a shepherd, leaving his parents’ dreams for him beyond. But, along the way, he’s confronted by a King who tells him that his real treasure awaits somewhere much farther away. As he repeatedly struggles with whether or not to believe this King, whether or not to give up the life he’s created to pursue something more, he can’t help but repeatedly be called back to this treasure.

Along our own life paths, we (and Santiago) must confront obstacles that cause us to question if it’s really worth it. Over and over again, we have to recommit to the path, recommit to the lessons we are meant to learn. The other options, of course, include ignoring the path completely (suffering) or trying to run from the path (suffering).

This is where so many of us find ourselves. We have something inside of us that tells us we want more. We want meaning. We want purpose. We want to pursue our own Personal Legends (a la The Alchemist), but damn can it be so hard to recommit over and over again.

Now at 40, looking back, I can see the arc of my life. See the way I was repeatedly asked to recommit to my journey towards freedom.

I was raised in the Christian church where we are handed a set of values and rules to follow. All in service of being more like Jesus, acknowledging our “sin nature” and seeking repentance. I am bad. I need to be saved. The path to being saved is through Jesus/God. I spent a lot of time learning the lessons, accepting how bad I truly was, and feeling deeply shamed by the dirty desires of my heart. I wasn’t mature enough to question, but I understand now why my story took shape in the way it did. I spent a lot of time performing “goodness” instead of choosing my own values. I spent a lot of time hiding in order to conform with the expectations of those around me, to be safe and fit in.

When it came time to choose a college, I had become so fearful of the ways the “darker” sides of my humanity were peaking through (hello, 18) that I felt like I really needed to go to a Christian college. This is where I would become “recontained” and set back on the right track. The safe track.

Instead, what I found was that I didn’t feel like I quite fit. I felt like I’d landed in the university version of Christian summer camp, and I was drawn to people…like the man who ended up my first husband…who were a little bit rougher around the edges. He understood that there was more to me, more to life, than just performing goodness and fitting in. His way of pushing back was just much louder of a performance than mine.

So we got married at 21 because he felt safe. I felt like he got me in a way others didn’t, and his love was pretty all-encompassing. Only, it still wasn’t quite right. I felt like I was performing as a wife. Performing in a job I didn’t really want, but that helped provide stability and pay the bills for my new little family unit of two. At one point towards the end of our marriage, I remember finding a bunch of old anniversary cards stashed in a drawer. In each one, I had written that the year had been rough but that hopefully the next year would be better. Like, yikes. What a way to live. Where my first husband had found a way to live loudly, I had felt myself grow smaller and smaller. More and more contained.

Until I was pursued by another man, and everything came spilling out. I gave in to the affair. I lost my job. I had to come face-to-face with the state of my marriage. With what I really wanted out of life.

And for the first time, I felt like I was getting to choose what I wanted life to be like. The lesson I was meant to learn arrived loudly and publicly, and I couldn’t ignore what I knew so clearly for the first time that I was meant to learn.

At the time, I called it “deep inner contentedness,” and I wrote about it constantly in my journal. I now know that contentedness is not a word, and I was looking for “contentment,” but this is the beauty of writing with a paper and pen. True creativity and freedom of expression. I know now that this fancy term I fell in love with was really just…freedom.

When I got divorced in my late 20s, it felt like a real chance to choose. This was my invitation to my Personal Legend. Truly, a higher power knock-knocking on the door that was my life, showing me that something else was set out before me. Where I had been living as a full-fledged grown-up with a husband, my “dream” job, rented townhome…I now felt like I had a blank slate. The marriage was over, the job was lost, I was moving out of the townhome. It was a real chance to dream about what my life could look like.

I could continue down the safe path or go wild and choose something that really tugged at my heart.

And here’s the truth. My heart told me to move to Europe and complete a poetry degree. I researched programs, and I imagined myself there. A part of me has always imagined myself living overseas and immersing myself in a new culture. But the other part of me was so ready to move back to San Diego, to be closer to my friends and family. Was this move the “wrong” choice? I don’t think so, but what I do know is that whether I moved to Europe or back to San Diego…my journey is towards learning freedom. Perhaps I would’ve gotten there faster if I threw caution to the wind and moved to Paris. But, instead, I spent years working in higher education, cycling my pattern of performance and approval until I fully accepted that it did not serve me. My heart said something to me. I heard it, and I chose the safer thing anyway.

Underneath, though, I had a true desire to pave my own path and to feel good about it. And, while I feel like I chose this in my personal relationships, it took me longer to learn in my career.

In my last official job, I was working in tech at a very large online university. I thought I had finally found “The Job,” the one that leveraged all my skills and talents, that earned me the money I thought I deserved, that felt just prestigious enough. But, the pattern of performance, of living up to other people’s standards, was the loudest it had ever been. I was shining on the outside, looking so good at my job. While inside I was crumbling, dealing with anxiety and depression, my low-level digestive issues now yelling. I would share with others that I was struggling and wasn’t doing well, but I absolutely could not figure out how to change my behavior.

When I ended up winning the equivalent to “Employee of the Year” at the company, I started questioning the project I’d won the award for…was I really that proud of it? I started questioning the excitement of the award. I had won it, but then…wasn’t it just time to get back to work?

I read once about returning for the part of oneself that got left behind. It was exactly that. I had found a way to be free in relationship, free in my safe marriage where I got to be loud and live the fullest version of myself. But I hadn’t yet landed it in my work. I had to return for her.

I had to stop sidestepping and accept that freedom was possible for me in all aspects of my life. And, this looked like actually changing my behavior at work. Something that had honestly felt impossible for so long. In order to act differently, I had to change my perspective on the work itself. I had to accept that what I had been working so hard for wasn’t as important as I had made it in my life. That if people didn’t think I was “the best,” nothing bad was actually going to happen to me. I became more apathetic towards my work. I stopped volunteering for every project. I stopped saying ‘yes’ when I was asked to take on something new. It became a ‘release,’ though. A necessary time for figuring out what freedom actually meant to me.

But outside work, I was finding more inspiration. I read Martha Beck’s Way of Integrity and felt ideas sparking inside me. A new path forward. I listened to the loud knowing inside me and pursued a coaching certification, pursued establishing my own business, pursued the tricky task of rewriting my own definition of success.

It feels so fucking good. It’s not perfect, but it’s all mine and it can grow and evolve as I grow and evolve. And I’ll tell you this much, I will never play it safe again.

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This essay is for those of us who feel a bit stuck. Like life is happening to you, rather than feeling like you can choose what you actually want. May we all dare to ask ourselves more often.

In my mid-twenties, I lived with my first husband in an apartment in Huntington Beach, California. On my way home from work everyday, I’d drive through the neighboring city and down a hill, where the Pacific Ocean would come into full view. I developed a ritual where I’d take in the view and simultaneously imagine that someone had put $3 million dollars in my mailbox. Every day cresting the hill, feeling the swell of gratitude for the beautiful, blue ocean, and imagining someone has performed an outrageous act of benevolence and sent me $3 million dollars. I wanted it bad, people. I mean, don’t we all?!

The spoiler is that the money never ended up in the mailbox.

A crying shame, I know.

This memory came back to my brain a couple of weeks ago, and my first instinct was to say, “well, that manifestation sure didn’t work.” Which was quickly replaced with, that wasn’t manifestation. That was escapism disguised as wishful thinking.

I definitely didn’t think of it this way in the moment. It was pretty lighthearted, and I didn’t really think the money would end up in my mailbox. But, I had heard of crazier things and thought there was some chance it could magically happen.

Looking back now, it’s quite clear to me that I was loosely fantasizing an escape hatch from my life. I wouldn’t have seen it that way at the time, but it’s one example of many where I imagined circumstances that could theoretically set me free from the life I had found myself living.

I was trying to escape feeling stuck. Feeling poor. Feeling like I’d landed in a life that didn’t quite feel right.

I’d gotten married at 21 to a guy who had one more year left of college. Within a year, I went from being a college student myself to being the breadwinner, making my starter salary of $32k a year plus benefits. Living in Orange County, I honestly don’t even know how we consistently afforded our first apartment. And neither of us were financially proficient.

When we got married, I had the assumption that my husband would finish college and then pursue further education to become a lawyer or a professor. But as his graduation drew nearer, he decided he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He just knew he wanted it to be a profession where he could be his own boss, a desire which would not be satisfied by lawyering or professoring.

He spent time working at an afterschool program, he worked at a kettle corn business, and then finally decided to go to barber school. Which cost more money and did not require the private school four-year degree he’d just paid for.

So, there I was. Working the job that I thought would be temporary. Working while my young husband got to figure his shit out.

I increasingly felt stuck. Stuck in a marriage where money wasn’t understood by either of us. Stuck in a life where I was doing a job I hadn’t necessarily wanted or imagined myself doing. Being in my mid-twenties and not having much fun. Just playing house.

My friends down in San Diego where I’d grown up were having lots of fun, dating, going out, having experiences that come with being in their 20s, and I was hosting dinner parties, fighting about finances, and going to a boring job every day.

Because of my upbringing in the Christian church, my escape fantasies never once included divorce. Divorce wasn’t in my mental vocabulary. But, my escape fantasies always imagined me being set free. More money to be free. Husband gone to be free.

And I also fantasized about myself, usually about getting hurt. I imagined crashing my car into a wall or getting in some other accident. I wanted people to have a real reason to feel sorry for me. If I consistently hid how depressed or unhappy I was (even from myself), surely no one knew how depressed I was or how much I was really suffering. I know I put on a good face. I was young and married and employed and living in the sunshine in Orange County. But, I had a strong craving for people to feel sorry for me without having to articulate what was under the surface. Because I didn’t fully even understand myself.

It honestly wasn’t until after I had my affair six-years into my marriage that I started actually letting myself want directly. Finally bringing what was under the surface out into full view for myself and everyone else to see. Everything before that was about what my husband wanted or about what my boss wanted or about letting things happen to me rather than claiming what I actually wanted. It was about being a good wife, being a super employee.

When I had the affair, I felt want and I felt wanted for the first time in a really long time.

Once the floodgate of my own desire was open, the whole next year became all about choosing who I was and then telling people, including my husband, “this is who I am now, you can take it or leave it.”

I wanted to decide what my life would look like. I wanted to dream for myself. I wanted to choose whether or not to move on from my marriage. (And even that was tricky, with my beloved therapist telling me I needed to wait for God’s release even when I already knew what was in my gut.)

And, I did finally choose. To get divorced. To move back to San Diego, which I’d really wanted to do for so long. Eventually, to leave my religion, to get remarried. And so many other small steps along the way towards setting myself free from what other people or institutions had told me to want.

I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done with the $3 million in my mailbox. I would probably still be in my first marriage, and I would have spent the money trying to make that version of life work instead of learning how to choose and giving myself permission to step into the life I wanted for myself. One where I was able to take up space, be big, be fully me. Dream my own dreams.

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The freedom you left for is on the other side of needing everyone to see that you were right.

I had quit the multi-six figure salaried job in pursuit of starting my own 1:1 coaching business, which felt really right at the time. I totally trusted my instinct and went after the next right thing. The goal was to use everything I’ve been amazing at across my career to create the business of my dreams. I said I wanted to “create something all my own.” Use my skills, gifts, my multi-passionate nature.

Coaching was happening. I had clients. I’d invested the time and even money into myself, hiring a business coach to teach me the marketing and sales skills I felt were lacking, getting my funnel setup, crafting my messaging.

But as I started doing it, I began to realize it wasn’t tapping into everything. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so thankful for it and for the clients I’ve built wonderful partnerships with. I realized, though, that coaching alone wasn’t lighting me up. More and more, I found myself hoping my clients might cancel their sessions with me, which left me feeling so guilty.

What this looked like in real time was continually less time pursuing new clients and more time spent optimizing the systems (like marketing or Instagram reach).

My internal compass was trying to push me towards the pieces of me that were missing in my work, but looking in the wrong places. In retrospect, the constant optimizing and push for process improvement was very clear evidence that I hadn’t yet gotten my dream business quite right.

And here’s the thing that I’ve seen my clients struggle with. They know they want something more, they know the roles they’ve been filling in corporate aren’t 100% it for them either, but they feel SO much pressure to get it right on the first try. Because quitting and “failing” feels like too much pressure. The proverbial Everyone will know they weren’t good enough after all. The many times they said to themselves, “Who do I think I am to go do that thing I want to do?!” feel justified. They were right that trying was just too much, too vulnerable.

The truth, though, is that we don’t always know exactly what the thing is until we try. Until we start doing it.

You might think to yourself, for example, that you want to be a baker. You follow your interest and instinct, learn the trade, and open a bakery only to discover that…you did NOT want to be a business owner. You wanted to bake. The baking part feels right, but everything else that came with it on this journey was not it.

So what do you do? There are two obvious answers (and many others in between, I’m sure). But for simplicity, you either: 1) stick with it because you don’t want people to know that you were wrong, OR 2) you quit and go back to what you did before. Either way, you are not happy because it’s still not quite right. Your gut had told you “baking” and now you are either pushing yourself to do it in a way that feels just plain wrong OR you are giving it up in favor of what feels like the more “stable” choice.

But there’s another way. A way that requires even more bravery than the initial leap you took to pursue “the next right thing.” It’s the path of iteration. If we put pressure on ourselves to get it right the first try, it makes sense why it’s so hard to make the leap. To leave behind the safety of the “known” for a hypothesis. The risk feels too big.

But, if you give yourself permission to iterate: to have an idea, to try it, to learn from it, and then pivot or double-down based on your findings…you’ll get to exactly where you need to go. The key is to allow yourself the journey.

When we go hiking, we don’t just jump and land at the mountain’s summit. That would be a pretty boring hike, actually.

So you did it. You went after baking, you opened the bakery, but it wasn’t quite right. This does not mean it was a waste of time or to throw in the towel. Or to suffer through it because you finally got your family on board with this as your new career journey. That tension is so real. The idea of failure is so hard to hold.

And I get it. I’ve been on my own iteration journey as well. Understanding that 1:1 coaching was the bridge out of my corporate job and not the final destination, I immediately hired my own business coach to start working with me to unlock my own ‘unique genius’ on the path to my dream business.

What I noted so clearly and almost right away was that working with people is only a small part of my natural giftedness.

Before we’d even had one official session, completing my intake process, the truth staring right back at me from the screen. What I believe about myself. What others would say about me. It was right there. I almost felt silly that I hadn’t recognized it right from the start.

All I had to do was answer some simple questions about myself: When am I in my creative flow? The one where time stops and I could go on forever? When am I totally locked in and excited about what’s happening in my work?

It’s not just having a 1:1 conversation. It’s at the intersection of working with fun, like-minded people and complex thinking or problem solving.

This has often looked like process improvement or product or systems design. Taking something complex and making it so obvious. This is when my magic happens.

Often all we need is just for someone to ask us the question, introduce a new perspective to immediately unlock it. I’ve seen this all the time with my own clients. They invest in coaching and they are so ready that all I have to do is nudge, and they fall into what was going to feel right for them all along. Things just click. Time to go BIGGER. To think bigger. To unlock the next phase on my journey.

The Invitation

You don’t have to know the destination to take the first step. You just have to be willing to learn from where you land.

For me, I’m SO thankful for 1:1 coaching. It truly served as the bridge I needed to step out of my almost 20 year career and into something new. And the most beautiful thing is that even this career pivot didn’t require me to start from scratch. And iterating is the same.

You’re not starting over. You’re starting from experience. Every year in corporate or every day at the bakery, every system you built, every hard conversation you navigated, every room you walked into underprepared and held your own anyway…that’s not baggage to overcome. That’s your lived wisdom, and it transfers to whatever you want to do next.

The invitation is to normalize failure and iteration. Is there truly anything more human? Idea, try it, learn from it, try again. Removing the fear of getting it “right” as a prerequisite for trying in the first place or for trying again.

If you’re brave enough, each move is just a stepping stone closer to your North Star. There’s no pressure to nail it on your first try.

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I got my first grown-up job at 21, working as the Housing Coordinator at a small liberal arts college. The reason I was essentially offered the job in the first place was likely because I was so vocal about how shitty I thought the operations were running when I was an RA. (Sorry to Judy, former Housing Coordinator.) When I started in the role, I got right to work shredding everything old and refining what was left. One day, I remember my boss asking me about a change I’d made, “who gave you permission to do that?” And the answer was…myself. I gave myself permission to do it, and he wasn’t upset because I actually made things better.

Perhaps I was born with a general confidence and low-level audacity, but I also at 21 I didn’t know any better. I wasn’t yet jaded by corporate culture, bureaucracy, or the fragile egos of leaders who need to think every good idea was first theirs.

This is how I continued throughout my career. I did mature in understanding company politics and bureaucracy as I went, but I have always thrived on walking the line between doing what I thought was best and…managing up. This is where I’ve operated at my best. The subtle art of understanding people (what they actually wanted, what would make them happy or upset) and doing work that pushed the boundaries ever so slightly. Asking for forgiveness, not permission.

I’ve heard this phenomenon articulated as “greater talent, greater tolerance.” People who consistently perform highly and deliver value to leaders and the organization can get away with more risk or audacity on account of their talent.

The key is that you have to recognize yourself as one of these people and OWN your talent. And maybe you did recognize this when you too started out in your first job, bright-eyed and naive. Ready to bring your unique gifts to the world. Ready to absorb all that was offered to you.

But, over time, something happens. Women stop giving themselves permission to shine, to be unique, to learn. Maybe it’s a comment from a coworker or a boss’s response to a deliverable. A throwaway comment that suddenly has you spiraling, rethinking everything you thought you knew about your role and your contributions.

The shame becomes too much over time, and women who were once optimistic and sincere get socialized right out of their audacity. By politics, by being labeled “difficult,” by learning that playing by the rules is way safer. In this way, women stop giving themselves permission and start performing an identity that someone else approved of. The “high achiever” who is optimized for praise and protection, no longer someone wild and free who trusts her own instincts.

I asked 45 women the following question: do you ever feel successful on paper but still think, “Is this really it?” And the overwhelming majority said, “Yes.”

These women are not burned out because they worked too damn hard. They’re burned out because they stopped trusting themselves along the way and started seeking permission: from bosses, from external validation, from metrics. They stopped doing what felt good to them, what made them light up, and started performing for someone else. Running every decision through a triple validation, rather than trusting their instincts, their body compasses, to tell them the truth.

And, here’s the thing, the path back from this kind of burn out, this kind of deep exhaustion, is not a few days off or even a two-week vacation. The solution lies in rebuilding the self-trust, in throwing caution to the fucking wind, and going for what you actually want. In reclaiming the audacity you had before the world, however young, trained it out of you. Said be safe. Play small. Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t embarrass me.

I get it. It’s really scary. You may be thinking…that’s a nice dream, Allison. I’m not asking you to ignore the feelings you have. I’m not minimizing that the way you were treated over time or what you saw be praised and rewarded weren’t real. Women have described some really unfair, external, and real circumstances that have made them feel heavy and low.

They’ve described bosses who didn’t recognize (or even stole) their work. Salaries that didn’t match their results. Being labeled difficult for the same traits that may have been celebrated in someone else. That’s real. I’m not pretending it isn’t.

And these aren’t the experiences of just 45 women. They’re what so many high-achieving women carry, building up over time until they can’t recognize who they are as the person they used to be. This person, the one you are now, is the one you built to survive all of the above. The identity served a purpose, but maybe it isn’t working anymore. And, only you can choose to set it down.

I know it’s not a small thing. Untangling years of performance to step into the fullness of who you are.

So, what does “asking for forgiveness, not permission” actually look like through this context? How do we move from hollowed out to free and joyful again. To reclaim the version of you (again, no matter how young) who worried less about being impressive and more about being expressive and free.

The first act of asking forgiveness not permission doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

Here’s what I’d urge you to do:

Identify the last time you did something that felt right, at work or at home. Maybe it wasn’t what others would’ve expected or wanted, but you knew it was right. What made it possible for you to do that? What happened after? Perhaps it ended up better than you expected.

As you reflect, notice where you feel it in your body when you think about doing something just for you. What you want.

The women I spoke to were physically carrying the weight of performing for someone else’s approval, but you’ll feel the shift when you start making choices for yourself. Things feel lighter and warmer, from elephant-on-the-chest to a full breath.

The evidence you have that things can, in fact, go well if you get bold, if you get brave, it may be all you need to try it again or in a different context.

In the spirit of 21 year old Allison, give yourself permission. That’s the whole move. Do the thing. See what happens. Your instincts have been right for way longer than you think.

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Somewhere along the way, so many of us are taught not to trust our instincts. Not to hone in on our own decision making process.

My first job was working in Residence Life at a small private Christian college, and I can’t tell you the number of students who came through the office explaining that they couldn’t or weren’t going to do something it seemed like they really wanted to do…because God told them it wasn’t the right timing. Even back then, while still a practicing Christian, I wanted to shake them and say…what are you really afraid of!? It was so clear that they wanted to do the thing (go on the trip, study abroad, take the job, etc.), but something that looked a lot like fear was standing in their way.

Now, I know the idea of looking to others to make decisions for us is not unique to Christianity. Crowd-sourcing decisions or ruminating endlessly on choices is so common, pretty much a rite of passage for teenage girls that persists into womanhood in my experience. It’s more socially acceptable to overthink than to say “I know this is what I want” and then go for it.

When I finally quit my 9-5 job to pursue my own path, so many people said things to me like “I wish I could…” or “I’ve always had this idea…” or “I’d like to find a way but…”

And I understand. It’s fucking scary to choose something different than the comfortable, socially acceptable, well-trodden path.

But, let’s not mistake this feeling of stuckness or impossibility as truth. Let’s not disguise our fear as logic.

Stuckness is a story you tell yourself to avoid making a decision. There, I said it.

Dressing up your fear might sound like:
“I can’t leave yet” = I’m afraid of the unknown
“I need to be loyal” = I’m afraid of disappointing people
“I’m still figuring it out” = I’m afraid of choosing wrong

And even deeper…
“Who am I to do X?” = I’m afraid I’m not enough
“What will everyone think?” = I’m afraid I’ll be deeply judged

For a good while, fear cost me the joy and fullness of my life. While I felt like I was “successful” at work, I started slipping deeper into the buzzing anxiety and depression that came with working so hard and with so much urgency. There wasn’t room for the softness and slowness I needed to be healthy and whole. But, it felt like I had no other choice.

Fear kept me in a box. I showed up every day performing highly inside a system with sharp edges, and I couldn’t see the opportunity or expansiveness outside of those edges.

When I let fear make the call in my life, it may have felt safer or easier in the moment, as it gave me a stable salary, accolades, and titles that signaled my success. But, it got too tight and constricting. If we walk the same path over and over, making incremental progress on that well-worn path, we can’t always see what’s over the hill. I couldn’t see it.

Here’s my challenge: if you’ve want something more for yourself but can’t bring yourself to take the steps towards it, acknowledge that you’re not actually stuck. You’re scared. And that is absolutely fixable.

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Leaving a six-figure job didn’t ruin my career. But staying would’ve ruined me.

The last raise I was given at my 9-5 job was a 20% increase, a surprise to me and my boss if we were honest. It was more than I had expected, and it took me to a salary I hadn’t even dreamed of earning this quickly. Where I went from clawing my way to six-figures over the first 15 years of my career, I had now doubled that within just a couple years.

I had a long and winding career across higher education, almost 20 years in departments from Residence Life all the way to EdTech. I knew SO much about how universities operated, how students learned and navigated their experience, how staff supported them, the policies that made it all click. And I got to use it all to build software that improved those experiences. That solved problems and made life easier, that saved money, that reduced friction. I got to research, write, strategize, communicate complex concepts in ways that people understood. Oh my, for a good while there, I was in love with it all. And it felt fancy. To work in EdTech, not just in higher education. To get the salary that came with working in tech. I’d always felt underpaid and now here I was…freakin’ doing a job with the skills I had, earning money I thought I deserved.

The problem was that the longer I did the job, the more I realized that the job was never just the job. There was the company politics, the constant urgency, the fake sense of importance, the persistent patterns I brought with them…the ones that wore me down. Always trying to prove more, keep up the pace and standards I set for myself. I wore myself down. Like the sad little crayon still left in the box. The favorite color, overused, wrapper peeled off.

This wasn’t just a career crisis or a desire to switch jobs. This was a quiet, undeniable repulsion. I wasn’t falling apart. I was just done. Done with pushing this hard to try to achieve an unattainable goal, to maintain an unsustainable standard of performance and quality. My internal rejection of the raise was the final signal that confirmed to me that I was really ready for something different.

With that, I walked away from the money, from multi-six figures to zero dollars. Walked away from the steady salary (one larger than I’d ever imagined) to my ‘zero dollars per year’ salary. I want to say that it felt easy because I knew it was the right thing to do. I was choosing it for myself.

Internally, I’d made it okay to make zero dollars for maybe six months. I had definitely set a mental threshold for how long my lack of earning was “acceptable,” before I felt like I needed to again claim “success” by earning those dollars.

Externally, I found myself making jokes about how little money I was making, belittling the huge and important decision I had made to let go of my career, my former definition of success and the identity that came with it. The self-deprecating jokes were so obviously a way of managing the vulnerability of my choice. My way of acknowledging the discomfort that came along with letting the salary go. But I caught myself. I saw what I was doing and how I was treating myself.

And the truth is I didn’t really start from zero, from the bottom of a career ladder. I am not the 21 year old excited to be offered my first salary with benefits regardless of the number. I know what I’m worth and what I’m good at. I know my mission and goals, and I’m already on my way towards them. Just with fresh perspective and renewed energy. I’m not starting at the bottom of any career ladder. I’m building a different structure entirely.

I did have to let go of timelines and let myself settle in and be fueled by clarity, by how freakin’ good I feel in my body, rather than the next promotion, pat on the back, or raise. I didn’t need the timeline. All I needed was to keep putting one foot in front of the next, gaining separation from the old way of doing things to realize that the only expectations now placed on me are mine.

And I honestly don’t even regret waiting until almost 40 to make it happen. I know I’m right where I’m supposed to be. I feel clear. Like I’ve come back home to myself in full. My brain is quieting down, and I’m no longer rushing or worrying about someone else’s expectations of me, or buzzing with constant anticipation. The clarity feels like floating on my back in a calm, perfectly heated pool. I drift gently, I’m supported, and I’m free.

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At trivia with my husband, the question was, “How many monthly listeners does DJ Khaled have on Spotify?” My husband thought 2 million, but I said 250,000. (I mean who listens to DJ Khaled?). Sitting in the tension, the clock to submit our answer counting down, I jumped on Spotify, typed in his name, and saw the count said “21.6M monthly listeners.” So, apparently lots of people listen to DJ Khaled. I frantically typed 21,000,000 into the trivia app and hit submit.

Minutes later, the host of the event came over to check if we had cheated. No one had gotten close to our answer by millions…and we were only thousands away from the correct response. Oops. I won’t tell you about the way my face turned red and my stomach tightened at being called out for cheating at trivia as a grown ass woman. But, I will tell you where I think my compulsion comes from.

I love to win. I want it, and I want it bad. I want to think I’m beyond taking extreme measures to do it (see: cheating), but sometimes, apparently…I am not. Le sigh.

The thing is I am actually pretty good at trivia, card games, word games, etc. And with this, I developed an expectation that I should be winning, always. That if I wasn’t winning, I was somehow dumb or blowing it. Inferior or a fraud. Objectively, I know these things are not true, but I kept myself safe with all the winning just in case.

As a kid, this looked like being accused of cheating at games by my brother and trying to play it off like it was not true. As an adult, this looks like ignoring my own needs to be good at things (occasionally cheating at trivia) to try to prove to myself and others that I am, in fact, just as smart and competent as we all think I am.

While I consistently worked hard and fast and with excellence to keep up my “winning” in the workplace, I grew so fatigued and over-worked (due to my own high-expectations and perfectionistic tendencies).

The harder and longer I worked the more of a physical and mental toll my work ethic was taking. I had to question what I was doing to myself. And, if there was another way.

I know now that the answer is…I actually didn’t know any other way. Doing everything I could to keep up with my own standards was how I had been safe over the course of my life.

Even knowing all of this intellectually, there was a question I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

If I stripped away the titles, the promotions, the accolades and awards…who would I actually be?

I was really afraid that the way I was performing was just me. It was who I actually was, and I couldn’t escape it. I was just an “all or nothing” type person when it came to work. I was either an achiever, a winner giving 110% or a lazy failure giving 0%.

But that wasn’t true. When you’re operating within someone else’s system, playing someone else’s game, this binary kind of thinking can feel true. There is just one way to be successful: you must achieve the external targets set out for you, even if it’s detrimental to your own well-being.

And, what if I didn’t know how to work without someone handing me a rulebook, memorizing the rulebook, and then performing at the highest level? I didn’t know the answer because I hadn’t actually proven myself any other way, whether as a child or grownup.

If I knew what was expected of me, I could deliver all the time. I’d never have to find out how people would treat me if I wasn’t at the top or delivering all the time.

I felt most comfortable operating within some kind of guidelines with a clear set of expectations. Even if it meant I was breaking them, at least I knew where the edges were.

The longer I tried to sustain my over-working, achiever persona, the more I knew there had to be a different way of doing things. Because I was actually sick. Not just sick of showing up at work, but sick mentally and physically.

So if I actually began accepting deeply that I was…imperfect, sometimes brilliant, sometimes messy. That was going to have to be okay for me. Because, otherwise, I realized I’d just be torturing myself to achieve some level of perfection that I knew intellectually did not exist.

The pivot for me from high achiever performing for others to…high achiever taking care of herself was at times challenging, emotional, and depressing.

For a while, it meant scaling back and doing way less. Letting others step in to pick up things I normally would. It looked like becoming more apathetic about the work I was being asked to do and really starting to question what it was all for.

Showing up at my job during this period was really challenging. I noticed that when I needed to “turn it on,” I still could. I’d show up and speak to the strategy, the progress. I could get up to speed quickly and attend a meeting and perform. But, mostly, it felt like I wasn’t doing anything of consequence.

Two things about this phase surprised me the most. One was that while I felt like I wasn’t doing anything, no one really noticed. I was still treated and praised just the same. I knew how to do “just enough” to get by, but whether I was exhausting myself doing way too much at once or doing the bare minimum to look involved didn’t seem to matter.

The second thing that surprised me was what it felt like to feel like a third-party observer of the work environment. I had unintentionally created space for myself to look around and make more objective judgements about the system I’d participated in for so long. It was as if the work around me was happening in slow motion. And the slower things went, the sillier they looked. I knew everyone was just doing their best, but for what? I wanted to yell at them all to stop. To stop talking so much. To stop overcomplicating everything. To just stop.

Towards the end of this season, my boss called me to ask if I’d consider changing projects again. This request would’ve previously made me feel important, like they really needed me. They wanted their “best guy” on it. But, this time when she asked, I said “no.” I didn’t care if it was a really important project. I didn’t want to move. I was all done jumping from top priority to top priority.

I felt an edge of tension. Like if I was pushed even a bit harder, I could’ve changed my mind and given in. But I didn’t, and the longer I sat with my “no,” the easier it felt to own it. To soften into just how true it felt.

I was doing it, finally taking care of myself. My whole self. Not just the part of me who was constantly trying to succeed at work. The “no” wasn’t just about turning down a project. It was about saying I was all done putting my well-being behind my performance.

I remember once crying to my boss saying, “I’m just a sensitive woman who wants to do a really good job.” Maybe one of the truest sentiments my core self ever shared at work.

And sure, I love winning. But winning is fleeting. I’ve come to realize it represents a moment in time that is quickly replaced with others. I could get an award or a raise and then still get back to work trying to get another one. What’s better than winning is having fun. I am still sensitive, and I still want to do a really good job.

And, if I ever feel tempted to cheat to make it happen, I know I can always pop on some DJ Khaled and let it ride.

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I’m an Achiever, baby. Just ask my CliftonStrengths results.

For years, this felt like a badge of honor. The one who responds faster, delivers quicker, does the work of three people. I didn’t understand why everyone else couldn’t just...work harder. Be better. Achieve more.

Then one day, a friend said ‘that’s just who you are’ when I told her I didn’t know how to turn it down. My achiever nature had started feeling heavy. I wasn’t having fun anymore.

And I realized: I’d built an entire identity around achieving. And I was exhausted by her.

This is identity fatigue.

Identity fatigue is when you’ve created a version of yourself that doesn’t serve you anymore. In fact, it’s gotten so fucking tiring to be that person that you just can’t do it anymore. I remember hearing a quote from Glennon Doyle where she said something like, “I don’t know how much longer I can keep being myself. She’s exhausting.” Identity fatigue says, even if you are really good at something, even if you think you can physically do it all, you don’t have to. If something doesn’t light you up or bring you joy, you don’t have to do it anymore. Pieces of your identity may feel really true to you, but you’ve likely created most of it to survive or to get the grades, praise, promotions, awards. If you left it behind, it would be scary, sure, but the person underneath would feel far more like you.

From a young age, I cultivated an identity around going above and beyond. In my first job, I remember whipping off email responses so quickly that my boss actually came to my office to teach me the merits of slowing things down a bit. So, I learned that I should still respond quickly, but also more strategically. In every job after, I was the one people came to because I’d get shit done. Fast, perfect, no matter what. I was the human personification of the Ace Ventura typing gif. Coincidentally, I also love animals.

This identity – the ‘go-to’ person, the perfectionist, the winner – was a protection mechanism. I became her to protect myself from not being good enough.

We hear often about burnout, but identity fatigue goes deeper.

Burnout says: “I have too much work, and I don’t know how to manage it.”
Identity fatigue says: “I’m exhausted by who I have to be to do the work.”

Burnout is: Too many tasks, too little time, too much responsibility
Identity fatigue is: The exhaustion of performing a version of yourself that isn’t actually you.

Burnout can be fixed by: Taking time off, delegating, saying no
Identity fatigue can only be fixed by: Shedding the performed identity and reconnecting with who you actually are

The difference here is really important. If you treat identity fatigue like burnout, you’ll take a vacation and come back to the same exhaustion. Because it’s not about the workload. It’s about the identity you’ve built around the work.

You might be experiencing identity fatigue if:

• You’re generally successful but depleted inside

• You don’t know who you are outside of your achievements (titles, promotions, awards)

• Rest feels impossible because your worth is tied to productivity or being needed at work

• You’re performing capability even when you’re falling apart inside

• You feel like you’re playing a role, not living your life (your coworkers or boss might be surprised to learn you’re actually struggling)

• The thought of “slowing down” feels terrifying or even impossible

• You keep achieving or advancing in your career but still feel empty

• You want something more, something “for you” but don’t know what that is

You, like I was a few years ago, might be surprised to find yourself here. You’re likely pretty self-aware, intellectually in tune with who you are and who you want to be. You say all the right things, know the right things to do. You listen to the podcasts. Read the books. You show up to therapy and try to anticipate what your therapist will tell you about yourself before they have a chance to say it. (I can’t be the only one who’s tried to get an A+ from their therapist.)

But identity fatigue is slow and sneaky. It doesn’t just show-up overnight. It chases us across our lifetime, from the time we figure out how to earn grades to please others and feel good about ourselves.

Here is how identity fatigue develops

Stage 1: You learn what gets rewarded (good grades, praise, promotions)

Stage 2: You become the person who gets those rewards (the achiever, the reliable one, the one who does it all)

Stage 3: Your identity becomes TIED to those rewards (you are what you achieve)

Stage 4: You can’t stop performing because your worth depends on it (even when it’s killing you)

Stage 5: You’re exhausted by being that person, but you don’t know who you’d be without her (identity fatigue)

This is especially common in high-performing women because:

• We want to prove we’re “just as capable” as men

• We learn to override our body’s signals from a young age

• We build identities around over-functioning (watch us multi-task, we can do it all!)

• We suppress the “soft” parts to succeed (don’t be “too much”)

I had who talked about persistent feelings throughout her life that she should be a “business woman” like her mom. She perceived her mom as a total super-woman who not only worked a full-time job that gave her family financial security but was a loving, present mom to her children. While this goal wasn’t harmful in itself, my client was suffering, showing up every day to an intense tech company with constant urgency and rigid policies and corporate culture. Under it all, my client discovered that she imagined her truest self as much different than how she’d imagined her adulthood. She was actually most at home in a garden, surrounded by butterflies, and with a proverbial unicorn horn. Her true self was full of whimsy. Was she often very good at her corporate tech job? For sure! Was she stifled and exhausted by the misalignment too? Hell yes.

Here’s what’s possible…

I’ll be honest with you. Shedding an identity that’s no longer working is really hard. Because, yes, the identity doesn’t fit anymore, but it’s what you know. It’s the “comfortable” path your brain, body, and nervous system tread every day. However, I promise you, the payoff for doing the work is so fucking sweet.

I imagine that right now you are likely in a place where success feels empty. (I’ve been there. The last raise I received in my corporate tech job was 20%, and I was so over the work that I kind of wanted to give the money back.) You likely can’t turn off your work brain at the end of the day. Work is always on your mind. You spend all the best of yourself during the workday and have minimal energy left to give to those you love the most. You may look like you are “okay” at work and home, but there’s much more bubbling under the surface. And because you feel guilty about this tension, you don’t believe you can really take the rest you need.

I invite you instead to imagine a world in which you are still successful, but you are calm and in control of your decisions. You make decisions for yourself and not to please anyone else. Your internal compass is clear and strong. You understand what it feels like to create success on your own terms, and you’ve separated your identity from your output. You trust that you can rest, whether or not you’ve “earned” it. Rest is an essential part of your life. You know what YOU want, not what you were told to want. And you’re as whimsical and weird and unique as you want to be without fear that you’re “too much” of any one thing.

This transformation isn’t about becoming less capable or ambitious or invested in your work life.

It’s about shedding who you had to become, so you can choose who you want to be. To choose to come home to the you that’s been in there the whole time.

And, if you are ready to move beyond performing as the person you’ve become and ready to step more fully into the real, true you, where do you begin?

You begin by taking inventory of where you’re at, so you can get the support you need.

So, I must ask you…are you experiencing burnout or identity fatigue?

When you’ve moved beyond the ability to take a vacation to return to work recharged and ready to go, you’re not just exhausted from the workload. You’re exhausted by being the person you had to become to manage the workload. No amount of productivity hacks or boundary scripts, time-blocking or color-coded calendars can fix identity-level fatigue. But, the good news is that with the right support, an even more beautiful life awaits you.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: most people think they’re burnt out from too much work. But burnout is often the symptom. Identity fatigue is the root.

If you’re ready, take my free self-assessment to see if you’re treating the symptom or addressing the root.

I'm Ready for Clarity

Want to go deeper?

🗺️ Take my free assessment: Is it Burnout or Identity Fatigue? — For figuring out if it’s your job...or your own patterns keeping you stuck.

📞 Book a Clarity Call — We’ll identify exactly where you are, what’s keeping you stuck, and what might come next.

💛 Work with me 1:1 — For high-achieving women ready to do the deeper identity work and build a life that actually fits.

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My favorite way to end the day is cuddled up on the couch with my husband, watching our favorite shows. But for months, maybe years, when we’d turn off the TV, my instinct became to grind my elbow into his thigh or pinch him or flick him. My husband is an incredibly gentle person, so my desire to inflict minor physical pain on him felt even more off-key. I became self-conscious enough about it, after so many times of him saying “ow!,” that I made an audible promise to stop. I finally had to ask myself what in the Sam Hell this behavior was all about. What was this subconscious urge to inflict minor pain upon the person I loved, and a very gentle person at that?

But, I (almost) felt like I couldn’t help myself. My insides would buzz, tingle with a need for release. As soon as there was silence in the house, remote clicking off to shift towards bed, I felt the subconscious compulsion to act. To grind my elbow into the nearest thigh.

The closest I could come to defining it was pent-up aggression or unspent stress that I just felt I needed to put somewhere. Sans actual punching bag, my darling, dearest husband was substituting.

The story I told myself, though, was that I didn’t “have time” for spending this pent-up aggression. I was way too busy, work was way too important, for me to possibly take on one extra thing.

A clear pattern had developed over time in which I’d start a job, learn the expectations of the job, and then climb my way to the top of that job. I would respond faster, produce work quicker, do the work better than anyone else. I was professional at setting a totally unrealistic standard for my work and then living up to that standard, wondering why others couldn’t do it. Bragging that I could accomplish the work of three people at once and while maintaining an incredibly high level of quality. And I wouldn’t even work more hours, I’d just work faster.

At work, they would say ‘jump’…I went highest. They’d say dance…and I would perform with flawless rhythm, panache. I didn’t know how to do it any other way. I’d never worked any way, but this frantic and relentless way. Anything other than giving 110% felt strange, impossible, and risky. Plus, I was getting something from it. Oh, the ego boost was so intense and wonderful.

Unfortunately for me, though, I’d gotten to a point where I couldn’t keep it up any longer. I had hit a peak level of performance that was too much for me to sustain. I imagined myself as a cartoon robot speeding up over time until it starts malfunctioning. The robot is smoking, but it keeps trying to perform but the parts aren’t working properly, repeating itself or tasks, running into the wall over and over and not being able to stop as the batteries slowly drain. I was becoming the human embodiment. Clicking away aimlessly at my screen. There surely had to be something else to do. But I could just click, click, click.

Other people could see what was happening to me, but I had a really hard time seeing it myself. I had been in therapy for a good while. My therapist, my doctors, and my husband were all in agreement. In fact, when I finally told my husband that it might be “my job” that was keeping me stuck on the couch while he picked up the slack of our day-to-day lives, he said something like, “Yeah, I thought we were already on the same page about that.”

I was incredibly committed to ignoring what everyone else could see. My work style had been serving me for so damn long: Employee of the Year, verbal praise, a job that finally felt like it fit. I’d always wanted to live up to my potential, and here it was.

I made more money than I’d dreamed of making. I could wield my charm and influence to strategize, data to tell compelling stories. People believed me. They supported me. I could make a difference. I felt important. I loved saying, “I work in EdTech.” How fancy! It felt really good, right? Right?!

But, if people listened closely enough, they’d be able to hear the cracks, the disconnect.

And my own internal voice kept trying to convince me that surely…my body was betraying me, not that I was betraying my body.”

The cost of all my compounding symptoms wasn’t cheap.

In reality, I spent something like over $10k on doctor’s appointments, labs, supplements, medication, therapy. I would cry to my therapist that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I spent so many nights and weekends laying on the couch while my husband took on more and more. By the time my depressive fog started lifting thanks to Lexapro…I had a lot of cleaning and organizing to catch up on.

But there’s way more to it. I wasn’t writing or creating, except in small spurts that I couldn’t maintain. I was fully depleted and spent.

The version I suppressed to make it work was the softer part of myself. I was only honoring the part of myself that knew how to perform and be ‘the shit’ at work. And sure, I let parts of my silly and soft self out to play sometimes. She would peek out, especially in safe spaces with supportive and likeminded friends and coworkers. I remember once crying to my boss saying, “I’m just a sensitive woman who wants to do a really good job.”

I had to learn that I don’t have to give all the best of myself to my job to be successful. For a long time, I thought that’s what success required, every ounce of energy, creativity, and care I had. But I’ve learned something different. I now measure success by how well I take care of myself…because that’s what actually allows me to create anything meaningful in the first place.

I love thinking, writing, and creating. I feel most alive when I’m collaborating with smart people to make cool shit. I hope I get to do that for many years to come, but never again at the cost of me. To get back to this place, I had to finally admit what I’d been avoiding.

The mistake I made was ignoring all the signals my body was sending me. I got so wrapped up in being “successful” I forgot that I am a whole and integrated person. That taking care of my mind and body are just as important (truly more important) than how well I am performing at work.

I thought I could just work my way out of feeling shitty and depressed, and I wouldn’t have to change any of my behavior. I opted for lab work and pills while continuing to perform the same from day-to-day. But, the longer nothing changed, the more apparent it became that I couldn’t keep up anymore. A frightful feeling for someone who’s built their ego on high performance.

I didn’t make big dramatic changes at first. I just really felt like I had no choice but to start listening to myself, to honor what was actually happening, and to try something new.

The need for a pivot was undeniable. But the truth is, I wish I would’ve intervened for myself sooner. I had become so divorced from the person I knew I was and who I wanted to be, but I couldn’t see myself clearly.

I’ve talked to so many women who have similar experiences to mine, but aren’t sure what, if any, steps they should take to change their circumstances. How bad does it really have to get before trying something new? So when is it actually time? When do you seek support or intervention?

If I could do it again, here’s when I would’ve gotten help:

• The signals of pain and discomfort stopped being occasional and became constant (daily)

• I pinched or elbowed my husband instead of acknowledging what I actually needed (stress release!)

• The seemingly unconnected physical symptoms became one of the things I most discussed with my friends

• I bitched to my friends, then told them change was “impossible” when they suggest I try something different

• I spent more energy “acting fine” at work in front of leaders than doing the work to be fine

• I became apathetic and started not to care about the work anymore, but kept showing up anyway

• The moment I realized I was buzzing too much to slow down even long enough to write in a journal

You don’t have to wait for a crisis. You just have to be willing to respect yourself enough to listen.

And what I would’ve actually worked on:

• Tuning into my body and believing it rather than thinking it was betraying me.

• Admitting that the work I was doing wasn’t that serious, sometimes work is really serious (like open heart surgery), but sometimes work is software development…yes, sure, we want to hit a release date, but could that date change without someone dying…yes.

• Holding room for my own complexity: I am strong, I am also weak. And not in a negative way, but in a way that soft is the opposite of hard. We’re all walking contradictions when we are at our most vulnerable and authentic.

• Saying to my boss: ‘I need to step back from this project’ instead of saying, ‘sure, I’ll figure it out’ and then crying behind my computer screen

• Prioritizing movement, making it a regular part of my schedule, not an afterthought

Here’s what I want women to understand about getting support. Yes, it absolutely requires prioritizing yourself. If you’ve ever taken a flight, you know the rule is that you must take care of yourself before you help those around you. If you don’t, what are you left with? The plane will go down, and you will not be saved. And I get that it can be really challenging to put yourself first, and it requires bravery.

One of the bravest things I did was going on Lexapro in order to get the support I needed to actually do the things I knew would help me.

Another of the bravest things I did was actually letting go of day-to-day work for a time. I would help others, show up, speak up, but I stopped doing a decent amount of work. This was probably the hardest thing. (And honestly, it only felt safe because people didn’t really notice.)

During this period, I also took a huge leap and enrolled in Martha Beck’s Wayfinder coaching program. I just decided to go for it. Even though it was long and expensive. It felt like it could really be something, a step towards forging a new and different path for myself. I invested in myself and my choice to try something different.

Often, admitting something “doesn’t fit” feels harder than enduring because it requires us to make at least some of our private suffering more public. I had to admit that while it may have looked like everything was “fine,” or even better than fine, I was not. I’m sure some of my coworkers who’ve read my essays have been shocked that I ever suffered as much as I did. And honestly, it was only bearable because I placed all the blame on my body…the body betraying me, rather than the way I was working undoing me from the inside out. I kept myself in the dark for a long time.

I actually didn’t know this for a long time, but happiness and freedom are possible. All I had to do was learn to choose them for myself.

This is the really good news. There is ALWAYS a choice. Even when you feel stuck or scared or tired or worried what other people will think, there is a choice. You just have to be willing to look at what is in front of you right now.

I had to be willing to look at what was right in front of me. The ways that maintaining my identity were causing me so much harm and fatigue, like choosing job performance over my own well-being and participation at work over my own family life.

And when you finally decide to go for it, you don’t have to wait until you’re 100% depleted to try.

We need more women who are willing to model changing or quitting when things don’t fit anymore, before they’ve totally burnt themselves out. Women who are honest about when jobs or long-held identity patterns or behaviors aren’t working for them.

You don’t have to hit rock bottom to deserve support.

You don’t have to suffer long enough to earn the right to change.

You don’t have to have it “the worst” to ask for help. That’s like saying you have to eat your dinner because children are starving. You treating yourself like shit does not help those children. But, taking care of yourself does fill you back up, so you can do good and feel good in the world.

When women prioritize themselves, really put themselves first, it’s not fucking selfish. It’s power.

So yes, I was the last one in my life to acknowledge that I really needed support. But once I did, I finally stopped pinching my husband.

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And also, this week’s musings on morality. What happened when I became what I would’ve previously considered a “bad person”? Read to find out.

And without further ado, this week’s Five Fun Things:

1. I saw Wuthering Heights this week. I thought Cathy’s insolence was perfectly captured by Margot Robbie. And it was…hot. 🔥 It did send me running to Google to review differences between the book and movie plots. I’ve read the book twice but still couldn’t remember what happened with Heathcliff & Cathy’s relationship! I might have to read Part 1 of the book again. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for the movie to come out on a streaming service, so I can rewatch it. And might rewatch Saltburn again too, just to be safe.

   

2. I finished Laurie Woolever’s memoir Care & Feeding. If you, like me, spent time in your formative years watching the Food Network, I’m sure you’re familiar with the woes of Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Laurie was assistant to both of them during her career, including at the end of Tony’s life. Her story of working in the restaurant industry and her relationships with both men were interesting, but I grew tired of her constant self-destructive behavior (see alcoholism, drug abuse, and infidelity). I wanted to yell at her to knock it off, which is maybe the point. If you’re interested in the subject matter, I think it’s worth a read, but it wasn’t my favorite tbh.

   

3. Have you ever been so overwhelmed or involved in the things around you (maybe work, parenting, other activities, general exhaustion) that you forget to do the things you love? Just me? Well, during my peak anxiety and depression (due to my unhealthy relationship with my job), there were times when I couldn’t make it to the beach three blocks from my house. It felt like years without my laying eyes on the sand. This year, though, I’m back. The confused San Diego weather has it feeling like summer, and I was at the beach twice this past week (once with my former work bestie turned life-long friend and her family). I know aging and blah blah blah, but to me there’s no better feeling than the sun on my face.

   

4. I must dedicate a ‘Fun Thing’ to my husband Eric this week. He had an idea for a book, wrote it, and officially signed a book deal this week. Should be published in December 2026 if all goes according to plan. I mean…writing a book in itself is huge and has required so much commitment from him. If you are interested in “the future of higher education” and love reading scholarly academic work, this will be your cup of tea. Everyone in my family now knows what they’re getting for Christmas from us.

   

5. I got glasses! I have always wanted to be a glasses person, even wearing fake ones back in middle school. But, now that I’m 40…I am officially, ever so slightly, near-sighted. I have to admit that it isn’t as exciting as I imagined. But I do have some cute glasses picked out.

Anything random you’ve been enjoying this week?? Let me know in the comments!

XO,

Allison

It means so much to me that you’re here. If you liked this essay, clicking “like” helps more people discover my work. (Or leave a comment. It truly makes my day.)

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1. This week I wore a new top to Pilates, and everyone two people gave me so many compliments and wanted at the details. If you want to be popular and cute at Pilates, I highly recommend.

   

2. I am also going all-in on trying to break my phone addiction. (Hi, I’m Allison. And I’m a phone-a-holic.) The two things I’m trying are:

   1. The Brick, a device that allows you to tap your phone to lock specific apps. The thing I find most helpful is that you have to actually tap your phone to unlock it. And the cutest thing is that if you try to open an app that’s locked it reminds you to “go back to living.” I’m really liking it so far, and I feel proud when I see the time I’ve “bricked” racking up.

   2. Carrying a physical book in my purse. I don’t mind staring into space in the occasional line or waiting room, but it’s still nice to have something to distract myself. On date night this week, my husband and I popped into Barnes & Noble, and I grabbed I Who Have Never Known Men. I was hooked as soon as I read the first line on the back of the book which had something to do with 39 women trapped in a bunker. Consider me enticed. I’ll report back, but so far so good.

      

3. This week I also placed a long overdue order to Sephora with a gift card I’ve had since Christmas. I’m happy to report that I loved two of the three items. One is the perfect lip pencil. I’m always on the hunt for the perfect nudey-pink…not too pink and not too brown. This is it (in shade Banquette). The other is this serum stick. Now that I’m 40, I find even my tinted SPF to settle into the creases around my eyes. The serum stick is the answer. 10/10 recommend.

4. My daughter had her first solo in a school play this week. I was SO proud of her for standing up there and singing her little heart out into the mic. It reminded me of my first solo in the school Christmas play as a kindergartner. I remember how embarrassed I was that I missed my cue, so they had to start the tape over. I told her to try to alleviate some of the pressure to nail it. But, she did it. Totally nailed it. Here’s live footage of me watching her:

   

5. We hit up our one of our favorite spots for date night this week. In case you live in or near San Diego…or you ever venture here on vacation, let me tell you about the best ramen place ever. It’s literally Michelin-starred ramen straight out of Japan, and it tastes like heaven. If you’re ever near one of their locations, you have to try it. The hot tip is to get on the waiting list on Yelp to monitor your arrival time.

Anything random you’ve been enjoying this week?? Let me know in the comments!

XO,

Allison

It means so much to me that you’re here. If you liked this essay, clicking “like” helps more people discover my work. (Or leave a comment. It truly makes my day.)

Want to stay connected??
✨ Join my mailing list
✨ Follow me on Instagram @itsallisonblackwell

I’m here to make a case for the beauty & freedom that exists when we can accept that we don’t have all the answers. We will never know all the answers.

Recently, my 7 year-old asked if I knew “everything.” I told her that I absolutely do not. She, in turn, told me that she does. She, in her small 7-year-old world, knows all there is to know, apparently. I had to tell her the truth…that the older we get, the more we interact with the world, the less we realize we actually know. There’s just too much. And that the real beauty of life actually lies in its mysteries and complexities. This is the kind of talk young children love btw. Just kidding. She glazed over and pretended like I wasn’t speaking.

When I was in my year of solitude and contemplation back in 2014 (long story, but catch up here), I spent a lot of time reading Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr. He was the first Christian to ever introduce me to the idea of gray thinking. He really opened my mind with his amazing way of writing about faith and the story of Jesus. I’ve read his book Failing Upward so.many.times.

One of the most poignant sections of the book was when Rohr wrote about young people needing structure and constructs in their lives in order to have something to push against as they form their own identity. Religion is perfect for this. It says, “here are the rules all laid out for you…your only job is to follow them or be punished. See: eternal damnation.”

But Rohr’s deeper point was that structure is meant to be a starting point, not an end point. We’re supposed to push against it, question it, and eventually move beyond it into something more complex and whole. The problem is when we get stuck in the “rules phase,” performing, complying, trying to be “good” and never shed the ego self that equates worth with obedience. That’s when the structure becomes a cage.

Growing up in the Christian church gave me a lot of practice following and bumping up against rules, the latter usually in a more private sort of way to maintain the external perfection I was going for. And sure, there was supposed to be room to “doubt” the things we were taught. We were often told it was acceptable, encouraged even, to ask questions, but honestly I never saw this modeled. There were correct stories, correct interpretations of those stories, correct behavior, and rewards for staying in line. The reward of course more abstractly was…heaven. But the reward more concretely was acceptance and belonging within the group. Ambiguity wasn’t dangerous because it was unclear. It was dangerous because it threatened belonging.

Because that’s what churches and organized religion provide best. Belonging…and answers to all life’s most potent existential questions.

Meaning of life? Get saved, go to heaven.
After death? Eternal life with God.
Free will? You can choose, but choose right…or go to hell.
Suffering? Eve ate the apple, but Jesus died for our sins. Just ask for forgiveness.

When I started questioning my faith, I realized how scary that was for people around me. Scary to question all the beliefs we’d built our lives upon, especially when those beliefs offered answers to the big questions. And I got it. It is scary to question the foundations of your life. The fear wasn’t about being wrong; it was about losing the container that had always held everything in place.

Black-and-white thinking gives just that: an illusion of safety. The safety is not real. Imperfection and mystery are literally all around us. And when we are told that things are often only “correct” one way…we limit the beauty that is born from those imperfections.

This type of binary thinking isn’t the clarity one would expect, but rather a cage that keeps us from meeting life in all its fullness.

I kid you not that one of the biggest shockers that challenged my previously held worldview was when I realized that non-Christians are actually good people with values. I didn’t even know that I’d been holding onto this idea subconsciously for so long until I started interacting with really, really good people who weren’t Christians, and felt somehow surprised.

My husband is a perfect example of this — though he was bar mitzvahed and now identifies as ‘atheist’ if he has to pick a label — he’s shown me the beauty, generosity, safety, and openness I’ve always craved in a partner. Living with him through life’s big questions has been an amazing gift. He’s a kindred spirit who, when I spiral over the meaning of life, calmly says, ‘That’s a really normal thing to feel, Allison.’

Whereas in Christianity, I was taught that we were all born with sinful natures and could only be good by trying to be like Jesus, I started to believe that people are good. That our innate desire is to be a part of a community, and that to support each other is instinctual. People could have values not drawn from Biblical texts, and other spiritual practices or religions could guide people in healthy or harmful ways. There wasn’t just one right way to do things, and who knew what right was anyway?

I bumped up against my religious upbringing most heavily when considering divorcing my first husband. One of my coworkers, an older woman who was also a Christian, told me that getting divorced meant I didn’t believe God was big enough to solve my problems. I was stunned. Hurt. She didn’t know anything about me or my marriage, and yet here she was, declaring what I did or didn’t believe about God based on my choices.

But that was the attitude I often encountered in the church. I was shown verses about marriage and warned that remarriage or even (gasp) sex after divorce would be considered adultery.

Only my repression of the darker, more challenging parts of myself led me to crash in a big, public way. It was as if the balloon, finally too full of air, exploded incredibly loudly and with flourish.

With all that noise in my head, I had to listen harder to the quieter voice within. But I didn’t know how. I’d spent my whole life looking for external rules to follow. I didn’t know how to trust my own internal compass. So when my marriage started to fall apart, I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed. I didn’t know how to say ‘this doesn’t fit’ without it meaning ‘I am bad.’ And that’s how I ended up having an extramarital affair.

The pressure to perform at work and a marriage that didn’t fit became too much. I’d explained to my husband that I wasn’t doing well. We were in marriage counseling. I sought comfort from a male friend when all I wanted was a lifeline, someone to see my suffering and say ‘I see you.’

And, it all blew up. I failed at the system and was asked to resign from my job. I should’ve just broken many much simpler rules earlier in my life instead. The ones I was so afraid to break at the time. It would’ve been easier. As would’ve sex out of wedlock. But, what this downfall taught me, the one where I felt like I fell right off my pedestal, the one I’d constructed for myself by ‘behaving’ within systems, was that life was so much more gray than I’d ever even imagined.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then: I thought there were good people and bad people. Good choices and bad choices. Right and wrong. So when I made a ‘wrong’ choice, I didn’t just think I’d done something bad. I thought I was bad. And that’s the cage of binary thinking. It doesn’t leave room for: ‘I made a choice I wouldn’t make again, but I’m still worthy. I hurt people, and I’m still human. I failed, and I’m still whole.”

And from this experience, I learned to ask questions for the first time in my life. About the systems (the combined blur of religion and the university life of my job) in ways I’d never done before. Why, for example, did I feel like I couldn’t ask for the help I really needed? Why would I rather hide and be silent than stand up and say what didn’t feel right? Why would I choose an affair that hurt so many people over saying ‘I don’t want to be married’? I didn’t know how to choose myself in systems that had taught me that there was one right way to do things.

Looking back on my time during the affair, knowing what I know now and how the next year of my life would unravel, it’s striking to realize how the affair turned my world upside down in ways I never saw coming. I’d been living in my own personal version of the ‘Stranger Things’ set. On the surface, everything looked fine: friends, church, game nights. But, beneath the surface, I was hiding my true self, my insecurities, and desires. These parts of me were buried so deep that I didn’t know how to access them, let alone confront them.

After the affair ended, I began seeing a therapist who often spoke to me about living an integrated life—a life where both the light and dark parts of myself could coexist. It meant accepting all aspects of me, not just the ‘perfect’ ones. It meant asking for the help I needed in healthier ways, releasing the perfectionism and fear of failure that had held me back. And what better way to confront that fear than to fail in the most public, spectacular way possible? It was a failure that uprooted everything, costing me my job, forcing me to examine my broken marriage, and demanding that I face myself in ways I never had before. But in the end, I wouldn’t change a thing. I truly believe that to shake me from the path I’d been on, I needed something this big, this ego-shattering, to help me find a new way.

The affair catalyzed a true and public ego death for me.

I spent the next year of my life just picking up the pieces of my life and beginning to dream of what would come next. I sat with what the embarrassment was teaching me, the dismantling of my ego in favor of my essential self. Becoming someone who could shirk the black and white living taught to me through my Christian upbringing, and beginning to ask questions about not just identity but morality for the first time in my life.

I began to see myself clearly, without the facade, as someone who was so many contradictory things all at once. Where I had been wearing my shame as a blanket, I learned to embrace all the parts of me: smart and playful and strong and soft and…young and learning. I was able to say to the world: ‘This is me, and I’m making decisions for myself’ in ways I never had.

Gray thinking didn’t make life simpler. It did make life truer. I could hold multiple truths at once: I hurt people, and I was also hurting. I made choices I regret, but I don’t regret who I became. I failed publicly, and that failure freed me. I wasn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ anymore. I was just…a human. Complicated, contradictory, and whole.

It was so hard and so damn good to be exploring my true, essential self for the first time in my life. To say, ‘I am Allison. I’m complicated and messy. And I like myself this way.’ I entered into the next chapter of my life carrying this energy forward and leaving behind the confines of the religion I’d spent all of my life inside of.

But the more beautiful thing I’ve found is the freedom that comes with recognizing that I can explore my own answers to life’s big questions.

There isn’t just one way. And life is far more gray (or multicolored?) than I ever dreamed.

I started to bask in the freedom as the guilt I’d carried over trying to do the ‘right thing,’ and the shame I felt when I didn’t, melted away. In doing so, I began making strides towards becoming the integrated person I had longed to be after the public humiliation and recovery from my affair. I felt the shift in many small ways, like being more open to conversations with strangers, and in bigger ways, like learning to listen to what my own body and intuition had to say, over external answers.

I was opening up, and it felt so damn good.

Want to go deeper?

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💛 Work with me 1:1 — For high-achieving women ready to do the deeper identity work and build a life that actually fits.

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