I’m not an expert, I’m not a writer and I'm not a guru with years of experience in online business. I’m a mom exploring who I am in this season. And to be honest with you, that looks different for me everyday.

As much as I want an online income, I’m not willing to lose my authenticity for the sake of vanity metrics and maybe even a little cash.

I can’t be put in a box.

The more I tried the more generic I sound. It’s the tax for listening to everyone else except myself.

On top of that my creativity shriveled up faster than a slug sprinkled with salt.

I was realllyyyy struggling to produce a single piece of content that felt like me. The moment I opened a blank page all I could hear was “provide value, show authority, be quotable” - all coming from voices outside of myself.

The good thing is that I am learning who I am by learning who I’m not.

Not a box (surprise!)

I’m a highly creative person but in a visual way. Expressing myself through words is like playing the piano with oven mitts on. It just doesn’t land. And out of all platforms I chose Substack to express myself. Ha! I accept the challenge but I won’t lie when I say that everyday I am riddled with imposter syndrome.

This is also sucking my creativity dry!!

Subscribe

To be clear, I’m not complaining. I love it here on Substack. I’m genuinely surprised that 80 people have trusted me with their inbox. What I love is that I get to make a real connection with the person behind the email. And THAT is what I need to focus on.

Connection ✨

Something I’m genuinely good at is connecting with people. Making people feel seen. I’m the kind of person that will walk away knowing your life’s story after just meeting you for the first time. Honestly, some people have told me things they probably shouldn’t have and that’s okay. I hold space for them anyway.

This is the essence of me and the essence I want to bring to my brand. Warmth, compassion, connection.

Changing the lenses from “what I have to do” to “this is who I am” made all the difference. It sparks a little something in me.

So for now I am taking myself out of the box and back into my skin. Is that #cringe to say? Probably, but I am cringe and that’s okay! (At least that’s what I tell myself)

This essay is all over the place but the point is that niching down is not working for me at this time so I’m rebelling against it. Today I could write about online business and tomorrow I could write about the time I had the world’s best avocado toast. Hopefully some of you will resonate either way.

I’m following whatever decides to flow through me and on to this blank page. And that’s what my message has been all along. That is the action behind finding your purpose.

“Whatever lights you up inside, do it!”

“Follow whatever is calling you!”

It may not make sense now but I trust that the bigger picture will reveal itself.

-Alina 🌼

Ps. Let me know how you feel about “Niching down”.

Comment

The Chase Is the Problem

Burnout was my trophy. My badge of honor. It used to feel like proof I was on the right track. Ten-hour days. A toddler I only saw asleep. A laptop that came with me everywhere (literally everywhere). I figured if I just pushed harder, stayed later, proved myself a little more, freedom would eventually show up. With all the entitlement in my body, telling the universe “hey I worked hard, you can give me the thing now”.

It never showed up. It kept moving. And I kept burning out…

Then I had a theory.

The chase pushes the thing you’re chasing further away. I hope that makes sense lol. Stick with me.

There’s a quiet system underneath everything, running your habits, your gut reactions, and about 90% of your daily behaviors. It’s like a whole other you inside of yourself that’s processing the rest of what your conscious mind filters out. Maybe that sounds a little dramatic but what I’m talking about is the subconscious mind.

Subscribe

The disadvantage of the subconscious is that it finds sneaky little ways to self-sabotage, all for the sake of protecting your internal belief system.

When you want something as bad as I did. The time freedom, the financial freedom. Heck, the freedom from my soul sucking job. It stirred up all of this desperate energy within myself.

Somewhere in the fog of no sleep, a thought landed:

What if wanting it this hard is exactly why I can’t have it?

Desperation has a texture to it. You can feel it in your chest without realizing what it is. Gripping something white-knuckled like a job offer, a business idea, a version of motherhood where you actually enforce routines and schedules. This sends one message on loop: I don’t have this. I lack this. Nothing works until this arrives. Your subconscious hears that loop and does its job perfectly. It protects the story. Even when the story doesn’t serve you.

The desperation itself becomes the evidence. If you’re this white-knuckled, this hungry, some part of you has already concluded you’re not safe yet, not proven yet, not enough yet and your subconscious takes that conclusion literally. It doesn’t ask whether the belief is accurate. It just registers a threat to the story it’s been running your whole life and responds the way it responds to every threat: pull back, stay small, stay safe, protect what’s known. The chase isn’t literally pushing away the goal. It just manufactures the exact proof your subconscious needs to justify blocking you from it.

You can want something with your entire being and still be working against it from somewhere underneath, quietly, without meaning to. Nobody sets an alarm for self-sabotage. It shows up smaller and usually unnoticed.

Who am I to want this much freedom, when I was raised to clock in and be grateful for it?

If this doesn’t work, it proves I was foolish for walking away from a steady paycheck.

Good moms don’t chase dreams. Good moms just show up.

Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. It shows up sometimes when conscious goals collide with a subconscious identity. In the battle of conscious vs subconscious, the latter tends to win. The reason being because it got there first, years before your goals did.

So the newsletter sits unfinished. The pitch gets “forgotten.” Your stomach turns the morning you’re supposed to go live. Burnout shows back up, and behind all of it is a little subconscious you that’s looking for evidence of failure and in subtle ways it keeps you playing small.

So what replaces the chase? You don’t force the outside world to bend. You go quieter than that. You rearrange what’s running underneath.

Start with detachment. Not giving up, just untangling your worth from the outcome. There’s a gap between “I need this to happen or I’m not okay” and “I’m building toward this, and I’m whole while I do it.” One lives in your stomach as a knot. The other frees your brain up to actually think instead of gripping the wheel.

Then look at the old programming. It feels like tightness. A flinch when you reach for something bigger than what you were handed growing up. Forced positivity won’t fix it. Telling yourself you’re a millionaire by Friday isn’t landing with anyone, least of all your own nervous system (while you’re still figuring out childcare for Tuesday.) Something truer works better: I’m building the skills for this, one unremarkable day at a time. Unglamorous. Your subconscious trusts unglamorous and It’s allergic to hype.

Then, slowly, you start becoming her. The version who already carries herself like it’s coming. How does she talk to her kids during the chaos of 5pm and bedtime? How does she feel when she thinks about her goals? Start acting like her in small, boring ways, long before any evidence shows up. Your subconscious can’t tell rehearsal from reality. Either the most comforting sentence I’ve read all year, or the most unsettling one. Possibly both. The point is, this helps your subconscious mind adapt to new internal beliefs about yourself.

I still don’t have all of this figured out. Anyone who claims they do is usually selling a course. But I noticed something small a few weeks back. I stopped pressing and for the first time I was okay with the “becoming”. I was okay with uncertainty and I felt a shift in my belief system that says the destination is inevitable.

I used to think I needed the universe to hand me proof before I could stop striving for it. Turns out it works backwards. You stop bargaining, and the proof shows up in the ordinary moments you weren’t even trying to collect.

The dream was never sprinting away from me. I was the one sprinting, holding my breath, waiting for the universe to notice how hard I was working. It already noticed. I just had to stop long enough to feel it land.

-Alina 🤎

If you only know me through this newsletter, you probably picture someone who has her stuff together (maybe). Responding to messages, checking things off a very “achievable” to-do list, sounding like a normal functioning business owner.

What you don’t see is that I’m typing most of this with a baby glued to my boob.

I actually laughed out loud today realizing that none of you reading this have any idea that’s what’s happening on my end while I’m writing it (well now you do). And of course, the timing is impeccable. Right when I finally felt ready to start weaning, she decided to be more attached to me than ever. She probably has a haunch that mama is ready to be done.

It’s almost predictable how unpredictable my days will be so my new challenge to myself is learning to work through the chaos. So instead of letting the whirlwind take over, I’ve started managing my work load in a way that makes sense to me. Interruption is inevitable so I set my deadlines a day ahead of schedule. I overestimate the time I need for projects. I prioritize daily actions that actually move the needle. Most important thing I’ve adopted is that if I feel pressure it’s a signal for me to pause and come back to it later.

This concept of “working with it instead of around it” shows up everywhere lately, not just with the baby.

It has taken me about a year of researching, thinking, and planning before I actually let myself start anything in the digital space. A full year of feeling like I needed one more course, one more plan, one more “right” moment before I could call myself ready. The reality is that I’m still in the messy phase right now, where everything feels half formed and nothing feels official yet, but everyday that I keep going I pick up another piece of the puzzle. You don’t get clarity first and then start. You get clarity by starting. Every single week something clicks that wasn’t clicking the week before. The plan gets sharper because you’re actually moving, not because you finally finished planning it.

My one year old is teaching me the same lesson in a much smaller, much louder way. I genuinely thought her clinginess was going to be the thing that got in the way of my work. Instead I’m learning how to fold my work around her instead of treating her as an obstacle to push through. Some days that means typing one handed. Some days it means my “focused work block” is twelve minutes long and happens during a feeding. It is not the workflow I planned for, but it is the one that’s actually working, and that’s the part that matters.

Subscribe now

Today was a good example of what that looks like in real time. Nursing while answering messages. Refereeing a sassy almost five year old who is very much in her “learning to watch her tone with mommy and daddy” era. Trying to teach her how to share with her little sister in between strategy sessions, which is its own kind of negotiation. I genuinely thought I had a few more years before sibling fights started. Apparently they come out the womb ready to declare every toy as theirs and grab a handful of hair any chance they get.

One real bright spot in the middle of all this is my husband is annoyingly tech savvy, and he helped me clean up my workflow this week. My brain doesn’t feel like scrambled eggs anymore, and honestly, that alone made today more than survivable.

Now for the business part of “boobs and business.”

A lot of people ask me what my business actually is, and that’s a fair question because I haven’t been shouting it from the rooftops. Right now I’m heads down on growth, connection, and building this email list, which is exactly where you’re reading this from. I’m not interested in throwing something out there just to sell it. I want this business built on a foundation of real connection and actual authenticity, not a rushed offer because I feel like I “should” have something to sell by now.

So if you’re here, reading this, you’re part of that foundation. The clarity is coming. It’s coming the same way it always does, one messy, milk stained, twelve minute work block at a time.

More soon, probably while someone is attached to me.

- Alina 🤎

Imagine it’s 1:00 AM. You’re anticipating your alarm clock ringing in two hours so you can be at work by 5:00 AM. You’re finally accepting that your toddler isn’t going to sleep after the twentieth sip of water and fourth snack request of the night. Your mind alternates between subtracting every hour of sleep you’ve missed and replaying the follow-up conversation you just had with your boss about your performance. Or lack thereof? Honestly, you probably wouldn’t rest even if your kid spontaneously learned to self-soothe.

This was my experience as a working mom. And I’m not going to sugarcoat things…

My boss was an asshole.

She had her own agenda to get promoted, and she didn't care who she climbed over to get there.

Now, I’m not the type of person to blame everyone else and play the victim. I actually tend to believe that negative people and experiences are a gift. Very challenging gifts that help us learn deeper truths about ourselves.

Before you think to yourself that maybe I should take some accountability, I agree with you, and I do. I’ll get to that in a moment.

When 5:05 AM came, I was just pulling up outside of my building. I was technically on time, right within our five-minute grace period. I was the one with the keys, and I knew the janitor was waiting on me.

However, there was no janitor in sight, so I waited for the next employee to arrive. When we finally got inside, I called the janitor. What they said next completely escalated the trajectory of my termination: “I left because you weren’t there.”

Just picture for a moment the dumb look on my face, followed by a few choice curse words that only I could hear.

Long story short, the bathrooms weren’t cleaned, customer service plummeted, and it led to a very uncomfortable conversation with my boss. Apparently, the five-minute grace period applied to everyone else, but not to me. I wasn’t fired, but maybe I would have been if I weren’t loved and highly favored by some sort of higher power. Later that month, she “sadly” broke the news to us that she would be transferring to another location. I’m sure the look of relief was evident on my face, along with a slight smirk I just couldn’t fight back.

Subscribe now

I worked tirelessly to prove myself at that job. But when I came home, my family got my leftover energy. I was failing at both work and parenting.

Soon, the words of my ex-boss became my internal dialogue.

I wasn’t exhausted; I was incapable. It wasn’t burnout; it was "zero mental capacity." It wasn't survival mode; it was just straight-up failing.

It took a while before I realized that maybe “working” and “mom” should be an oxymoron. At least for me.

Remember when I said that negative experiences allow us to learn deeper truths about ourselves?

The gift of it all was learning what I really wanted in life. I wanted a life that actually felt like mine. One that allowed me to be present while my babies were still little. One that said: Don’t wait until retirement to finally live. I wanted the exact opposite of the life I was living. A life that says: Live now. Be a mom now. Find purpose, not just employment.

Now for the accountability piece I promised you.

My boss was annoying. Truly. But she was also really good at her job. She held people accountable in a way that I didn’t agree with at all. The delivery was rough and the energy was off. But the standard? She wasn’t wrong.

So as annoyed as I was at her, it wasn’t her fault that I was exhausted and burned out.

Every single decision I ever made led me to that job, that building, that 5:00 AM alarm, and that conversation. Every single one. I chose that job. I stayed in that job. I showed up, sometimes barely, but I showed up. That’s on me.

When I really started paying attention, not just to what wasn’t working but to what the situation was trying to tell me, that’s when things started to shift.

There’s something to be said for your internal compass. The way certain things feel right in your body, while other things feel like you’re slowly being hollowed out. When I was dragging myself into that building at 5:00 AM running on two hours of sleep, giving my best hours to a place that didn’t feel like mine, that contrast was loud.

But the loudest moments were actually the quiet ones. The daydreams.

In the cracks of time, between the chaos and the exhaustion, I would imagine what it felt like to be free. I dreamt beyond just being financially stable. I imagined work that aligned with who I was. Work that served my family instead of taking from it. A life built around the people who actually mattered, filled with purpose instead of just a paycheck.

Then I’d wake up from the daydream and feel the massive gap between where I was and where I wanted to be. That gap was information. I just had to be honest enough to listen to it.

So I made a decision. It wasn’t a perfect plan, just another decision that finally served me this time. I stepped away. I became a stay-at-home mom and started building something on my own terms. Part-time, in whatever open spaces this season of life leaves me.

Now, I don’t want to end this essay without saying this: kudos. Genuinely. To the moms who can do it all and thrive in it. Some moms go back to work for their mental health, and that is so valid and so cool. I love that we are all different. I love that our internal compasses don’t lead us all to the same place. Because they shouldn’t.

Mine led me here. To purpose over employment. To presence over performance reviews. To a life that finally feels like something I actually chose.

And that, I think, was the gift hiding inside all of it.

— Alina

Leave a comment

I think one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves as moms is that our dreams have to wait.

Not forever, of course. Just until the kids are older. Just until life settles down. Just until things get a little less chaotic.

The problem is, there is always another season waiting around the corner.

A new baby. A sleep regression. A school transition. A busy spo…

Read more

I want to talk about something that took me a long time to put into words, because for the longest time it didn't feel like a "thing." It just felt like background noise in my life. A low hum of unease I couldn't quite explain.

But I think I finally have language for it now, and I have a feeling some of you are going to read this and feel a little less alone.

The research rabbit hole we've all been in

Let's start here, because I think this is where a lot of us actually begin.

You've probably been down the rabbit hole. You know the one. Late at night, baby finally asleep, and suddenly you're three videos deep into "how to start a faceless Instagram page" or "how I made $10k a month selling digital products" or "how to publish low content books on Amazon and earn passive income." Maybe you've looked into dropshipping. Maybe you've saved seventeen different posts about Etsy printables. Maybe you have a notes app full of half-formed business ideas that you've never told anyone about.

I've been there. All of it. The faceless pages, the KDP books, the "this one Etsy shop makes six figures" posts that somehow always feature someone in a perfectly lit kitchen.

For a long time I thought what I was looking for was the idea. Like if I just found the right one, the right niche, the right strategy, something would click and I'd finally start.

But that wasn't actually it. And this is the part that took me a while to see clearly.

The feeling underneath the searching

Here's what I think was actually happening during all those late night research sessions.

It wasn't really about the business idea. It was about a feeling I didn't have a name for. A quiet, persistent feeling of not having anything that was fully mine. Not my time, which belongs to everyone in the house before it belongs to me. Not my money, which exists but always feels like it's attached to someone else's effort. Not even my identity some days, which had quietly become "mom" and not much else.

The searching wasn't really "what business should I start." It was "I need something that's mine, and I don't know how to get that, so I'm going to keep looking at other people's kitchens until I figure it out."

I didn't realize that's what I was doing until I sat with it for a while. And once I saw it, I couldn't stop seeing it.

Two paths, two different kinds of missing

Here's the other thing I've come to understand, and I think this is the part that might be the actual ah-ha moment for some of you.

We talk about the choice between staying home and going back to work like it's a choice between "hard" and "easy," or "sacrifice" and "security." But I don't think that's quite right. I think it's actually a choice between two different kinds of missing something.

When I was working, I was missing time. Ten hour days. So tired by the time I got home that I didn't have much left to give. I missed firsts. I missed the in-between moments, the ordinary Thursday afternoon stuff that you don't realize matters until you weren't there for it.

I remember a coworker, someone who'd been at that job for twenty years, talking about planning her daughter's eighteenth birthday. Eighteen. And she said, almost like it was just a fact of life at this point, that she felt like she'd missed her daughter's whole childhood.

That sentence rearranged something in me. I thought about it often as I would clock in, wondering what my daughter was doing or if I was missing anything important.

But now, as a stay at home mom, I'm missing something else. Not time with my kids. I have that, and it's everything I hoped it would be. What I'm missing is something with my own name on it. A sense of "mine." Financial security that doesn't depend on someone else's job continuing to exist. The quiet confidence of knowing that if I needed money tomorrow, I'd have a way to get it that's actually mine.

Both of these are real losses. Both of these are things worth grieving a little, even while loving the life you're in. And I think the reason this topic feels so heavy sometimes is because we're often only allowed to acknowledge one side of it.

Working moms are told to be grateful for the income. Stay at home moms are told to be grateful for the time with their kids. Wanting more than that isn't failure. It's just honest.

The setup that sets us up to fail

Here's something else I've been chewing on, and I think it's worth saying out loud because I don't hear it talked about much.

Both paths, the working mom path and the stay at home mom path, seem almost designed to leave you starting over later. Just at different points.

If you're working, you're often too exhausted to bring your full self to anything. Not just work, everything. You're surviving the job so you can come home and survive the evening so you can sleep and do it again. There's not much room left over for figuring out who you are or what you actually want beyond getting through the week.

And if you stay home, something different but equally heavy happens. You give your best years, your most present, most available years, entirely to your kids. Which is beautiful. But it also means you. Your interests, your goals, your sense of self outside of "mom." Those get quietly set aside. Not forgotten exactly, just paused. And the assumption seems to be that you'll pick all of that back up later. After they've grown. After they've left.

I think about the empty nesters who talk about "starting over" once their kids move out. Building a new identity, new routines, sometimes a new career, in their fifties or sixties. And I don't say this to be dismissive of that, starting over at any age takes courage. But I can't help noticing the pattern. Both paths seem to lead to the same place eventually. A version of you that's been paused, waiting for permission to begin again, later.

Subscribe

The middle option

This is where quiet income feels different to me. Not because it's some perfect solution, but because it doesn't ask you to pause yourself and pick it back up later.

It lets you want the income and the ambition while also being present while your kids grow. Not instead of. Alongside. You get to start figuring out who you are and what you want now, in small quiet ways, instead of filing it away for "someday" and hoping someday actually arrives.

It means you don't have to wait until you're exhausted from work to think about yourself, and you don't have to wait until your kids are grown to start something that's yours. You get to do both, slowly, at the same time, starting today.

And I think that's why more moms are reaching for this option right now. Not because it's trendy, but because we're starting to realize we don't have to choose between the two things we've always been told to choose between. We can have a version of success that's ours, defined on our own terms, starting now, without giving up presence to get it.

That feels like something worth being excited about. And honestly, I love that more of us are taking that option while it's available, instead of waiting for permission that might never come.

Where quiet income comes in

So here's where I've landed, and here's why "quiet income" specifically has become the thing I keep coming back to.

It's not about the faceless Instagram page or the KDP books or the next "make $10k a month" strategy, even though those are the things that show up when you start searching. Those are just vehicles. What they're actually offering, underneath all the strategy talk, is the thing I described above. Something that's yours. Built quietly. Without requiring you to become a personality online, without requiring you to give up your presence at home, without requiring you to choose between the two kinds of missing.

It's not flashy. Nobody's filming a video about it with dramatic music. It's mostly just... showing up, a little bit, consistently, building something small that grows slowly in the background while your actual life continues to happen in the foreground.

And here's the part I didn't expect. The day to day doesn't change that much. I'm still home with my kids. I'm still doing bedtime and snacks and all of it. What changes is something underneath all of that. A sense of alignment. Of purpose that isn't just "mom," sitting alongside the part of me that is mom, not competing with it.

That's the thing I think a lot of us are actually searching for at midnight when we tell ourselves we're "doing market research." We're not looking for a business idea. We're looking for a way to feel like ourselves again, on our own terms, without giving up what we already have.

This is slow. And that's okay.

I want to be real about something before I wrap this up.

This isn't a fast process. Quiet income, by definition, is quiet. It doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't come with a dramatic before and after. Some days it's one paragraph written between snack requests. Some days it's nothing at all, and that's okay too.

But if you've felt that hum I described, that low background feeling of not having anything that's fully yours, I want you to know it has a name now. And building something, even slowly, even quietly, even imperfectly, is how that feeling starts to soften.

You don't have to choose between your presence and your future. You can build both, at the same time, at whatever pace your life actually allows. A purpose alongside motherhood.

It is 5pm.

I have accomplished nothing on my list. Not one thing. The list that I wrote with such intention this morning, in the ten minutes of quiet before everyone woke up, with my coffee while I felt for a brief moment like a person who had her life together. That list is sitting exactly where I left it, untouched, judging me silently from my notes app.

Let me show you what today was supposed to look like versus what it actually looked like. Because I think you need to see it laid out side by side to fully appreciate the comedy of it.

What I planned to do today

The business list was ambitious but reasonable. Batch content for the week. Post on Threads. Respond to messages and emails. Write and publish an article on Substack. Normal stuff. Manageable stuff. The kind of stuff that takes maybe three focused hours if you are a person who gets three focused hours.

The mom list was equally ambitious. Homeschool the four year old. Brush everyone's teeth twice. Morning and night, we are not animals. Work on establishing a better bedtime routine because whatever we are currently doing is not it. Schedule the baby's first dentist appointment. Keep attempting to sleep train the baby (keyword attempting). Clean the kitchen. Do a load of laundry. Vacuum.

And then there was the self care section of the list. Which I will now read to you directly: drink water. Maybe take a shower. Question mark.

I wrote "maybe take a shower" with a question mark on my own to-do list. That is where we are. That is the current state of things. Moving on…

Subscribe

What actually happened today

My one year old is teething.

If you have been through the teething phase you already know everything you need to know about how this day went and you can skip ahead. If you haven't, let me paint you a picture.

A teething baby is a baby who is in genuine pain and has absolutely no way to communicate that except by being attached to your body at all times and screaming whenever you attempt to put her down. Not crying. Screaming. The kind of screaming that makes you do a quick mental calculation of how many neighbors can hear you and whether any of them are going to call someone.

She would not be put down. Not in the bouncer. Not on the play mat. Not in the crib for thirty seconds while I used the bathroom. Nowhere. The only acceptable location for my one year old today was directly on me, preferably in a position that made it impossible to type or think or exist as a functioning adult.

So she and I both cried. I am not ashamed of this. It was that kind of day.

The number of times I picked up my phone to work on something; a caption, a sentence, an email, literally anything only to immediately have to put it back down is a number I stopped counting somewhere around noon. Each time it happened there was this specific thing that happens in my brain that I genuinely cannot describe. It is not quite frustration and it is not quite grief and it is somewhere in between the two. Like watching a door close on you over and over in slow motion and being unable to stop it.

The kitchen is not clean. The laundry is not done. The dentist appointment is not scheduled. The bedtime routine remains chaotic and unestablished. The Substack article you are currently reading is the only thing on either list that got done and I wrote most of it one handed at 9pm while the baby finally fell asleep on my chest.

The voice in my head that needs to be evicted

Here's the part that is harder to talk about than the chaos itself.

When the day falls apart like this. When 5pm arrives and the list is untouched and the baby is still crying and the four year old has had too much screen time because that was the only way anyone was surviving today, there is a voice that shows up.

Maybe you’re familiar with it too.

“Just wait until they're older. Then you can do it. Then you'll have time. Then it will make sense.”

“What exactly do you think you're trying to build here? Don't you have children who need your full undivided attention?”

“Who do you think you are?”

That last one is the worst one. It doesn't say it that directly but it implies it constantly. In the gap between every interrupted work session, in the silence after every task that didn't get done, in the comparison to every person online who seems to be building something with ease and peace and a clean kitchen in the background.

To have to actively combat that voice with affirmations just so I don't throw my phone at the wall — and I have thought about throwing my phone at the wall more times than I would like to admit. One that nobody put on the list and one that doesn't show up in anyone's productivity system.

I am exhausted from it. Not from the baby and not from the to-do list and not even from the crying. From fighting that voice every single day while also trying to build something and also keep two small humans alive and also remember to drink water. Maybe.

The thing I keep coming back to

I want to be honest with you about something.

I hate complaining. It does not come naturally to me and it does not feel good and I am aware that I have a beautiful life and two healthy kids and a husband who supports what I'm trying to build. I know how it sounds to sit here and document a hard day when other people have genuinely hard things happening.

But I keep writing these posts anyway because of one specific possibility. That somewhere out there is a mom who is sitting in her version of today. Baby on her chest. List untouched. 5pm arrived faster than it had any right to. And she is doing the same math I did, the one where you add up everything that didn't happen and subtract it from the version of yourself you thought you'd be by now, and the number that comes out makes her feel like a failure.

And I need her to know she's not.

Because here's the thing about today that I didn't see until I started writing it down. Today I kept showing up. Every single time I picked up my phone to try — and there were a lot of times I tried. Every interrupted session, every abandoned sentence, every task that got pushed to tomorrow, I was still attempting. Still in it. Still choosing to come back to it even when coming back to it meant picking it up and putting it down seventeen times before anything happened.

That is not failure. That is the exact muscle that running a business requires. The ability to keep coming back after it doesn't work, after the timing is wrong, after the day falls apart in ways you couldn't have predicted. The ability to try again after the baby cries again after the list goes untouched again.

I genuinely believe that if anyone has the grit to build something it is a mother. Not because we are superhuman (we are very clearly not, see above ) but because we have been doing the impossible on no sleep with constant interruptions and zero external validation for years before we ever tried to build a business. We have been doing the hard thing without recognition for so long that doing hard things without recognition is basically our native language.

The business is just a new form of the same thing we've already been doing.

Subscribe

So what did I actually get done today

Let's do the real accounting.

I kept a teething baby as comfortable as I possibly could on the worst day she's had in weeks. I homeschooled a four year old in between crying sessions. I kept two people fed and relatively clean and safe for another full day. I fought the voice in my head every time it told me to give up and I did not give up. I wrote this post at 9pm with a sleeping baby on my chest because even on the days where nothing gets done something gets done.

The kitchen is a disaster. The laundry is in a pile. I am not sure if I drank enough water. The shower remains aspirational.

But I came back. I showed up. I wrote the thing.

Tomorrow the list resets and we try again and the baby will probably still be teething and the voice will probably show up right on schedule and I will probably pick up my phone and put it down more times than I can count.

And I will try anyway.

If you are in your own version of today — the untouched list, the baby who won't be put down, the 5pm that arrived before you were ready, this is your sign that you are not behind. You are not failing. You are building grit in real time whether you meant to or not.

The mess is the process. The interrupted work sessions are the training. The days that fall apart completely and somehow you still show up at the end of them. Those are the days that are quietly making you exactly who you need to be.

I’ll leave off with a message that motivates me to keep going: Small consistent actions will compound.

Part 2 coming next week. Assuming the baby cooperates.

I came, I posted, I cringed, I deleted. In that order. Within 48 hours. A full character arc.

My first post lasted less than two days before I killed it. It was stiff, it was safe, and it read like I was introducing myself at a corporate meeting I didn't ask to be at. So I deleted it, put my phone face down, and stared at the ceiling for a few minutes like a person who has absolutely no business writing a newsletter about showing up imperfectly.

The irony is not lost on me.

Because this is exactly what I've been telling myself and what I'm about to tell you about starting messy. Trying to be okay with cringe and just doing the thing before you feel ready. And then here's what I actually did when faced with my own cringe: deleted it at 11pm without a second thought and slept like a baby.

I am a work in progress. This newsletter is a work in progress. And apparently the lesson I need to learn the most is the exact one I'm sitting here writing about.

So let's talk about it.

The planning spiral

Being a perfectionist has kept me stuck for most of my adult life. Not in a cute, detail-oriented, color-coded planner kind of way but in a "three weeks passed and I have nothing to show for it" kind of way. I plan, I strategize, I think through every possible outcome, I consume every piece of content that exists on a topic before I dare attempt the topic itself. And then I wonder why nothing is moving.

Here's what I clocked — and yes I'm aware that might not be what the kids are saying anymore but we're going with it. Planning feels like progress. It genuinely does. Your brain cannot always tell the difference between doing the work and preparing to do the work. Both feel productive. Both feel responsible. One of them actually moves you forward and one of them is just really comfortable procrastination wearing a very convincing disguise.

I've spent years in that disguise. Years I wasted. And the worst part is I was very good at it.

My husband is the human embodiment of "just start"

Let me introduce you to the other side of this coin because it lives in my house and it is simultaneously the most inspiring and most unhinged thing I have ever witnessed up close.

My husband does not research before he starts things. He does not plan. He does not think through opportunity costs or watch three YouTube tutorials or make a pros and cons list. He simply decides a thing is happening and then it happens. The research, if it occurs at all, happens somewhere in the middle and usually when something goes slightly wrong and he needs to figure out why.

I have watched this man start a project with zero experience, figure it out as he went, make several avoidable mistakes that a quick Google search would have prevented, and still finish the thing and feel great about it. Meanwhile I am on my fourth research rabbit hole of the evening and haven't started yet.

Is his way better? Not always. Are there moments where a little more planning upfront would have saved time? Absolutely yes. But here is the uncomfortable reality I have had to sit with: he has finished things. Real things. Tangible, completed things that exist in the world. And for a long time I had a very organized folder of things I was planning to start.

There is something to be said for the person who ships the imperfect thing over the person who is still perfecting something that doesn't exist yet.

I deleted my first post. He would have left it up, shrugged, and written the next one. I'm still deciding which of us has it more figured out.

The thing nobody says out loud

There's something else going on underneath all the planning and the perfectionism and the deleting posts at 11pm that took me a while to admit.

If you don't start, you can't fail.

Planning keeps you in a state of permanent potential. You're always almost ready, always almost there, always one more step away from beginning. And that space — that almost — is actually really safe. Nothing can go wrong if nothing has started yet. No one can judge what doesn't exist yet. You can't disappoint yourself with results you haven't attempted yet.

It's fear wearing perfectionism's clothes.

And the cringe? The cringe is the same thing. Deleting the post wasn't about quality control. It was about not wanting to be seen in something imperfect. It was about managing how I look before the work has had any time to breathe. It was fear again — same fear, different outfit.

I'm learning to sit with it. Slowly. Badly. With a lot of 11pm second guessing. But I'm learning.

Subscribe

Nobody is ever ready. And I mean nobody.

Here's the thing that rearranged my entire perspective on this and I'm going to go somewhere unexpected for a second so stay with me.

Nobody is ready to have a baby.

I don't care how many books you read, how many classes you took, how many baby registries you obsessed over or nurseries you decorated before your due date. Nothing, and I mean nothing actually prepares you for the moment that baby is in your arms and you realize this tiny human is entirely your responsibility and they did not come with instructions.

I say this gently because I know for some people the path to parenthood is deeply complicated and painful and this isn't meant to be flippant about that at all. But for those of us who spent time waiting to feel ready. Waiting for the right job, the right house, the right financial situation, the perfect moment. Most of us eventually realized that the perfect moment was a story we told ourselves. And if we had waited for it we might have waited ourselves right out of the experience altogether.

The baby doesn't care that you weren't ready. The baby arrives anyway. And then you figure it out imperfectly, messily, one day at a time and somehow it works.

Building something is exactly the same. The business doesn't care that you don't feel ready. The audience doesn't care that your first post was a little rough. The only thing that matters is that you showed up and started. Everything else gets figured out on the other side of the beginning.

You don't get better at something before you do it. You get better at something by doing it.

And sometimes you delete the evidence and pretend it never happened and that is also fine. The point is you come back.

The mindset shifts that actually keep me going

I'm not going to stand here and pretend I have this figured out. I am very much in the messy middle alongside you. But these are the things I come back to when the spiral tries to pull me back in:

Done is better than perfect and perfect doesn't exist anyway. I used to think this was a lazy person's excuse. I now understand it is the only way anything gets made. The version of the thing in your head will always be better than the version that exists in the world. That is not a reason to keep it in your head forever.

The first version of everything is bad. Every writer's first draft. Every entrepreneur's first product. Every creator's first post. Mine included — I deleted the evidence but trust me, it was bad. The first version being bad is not a sign that you're bad at it. It's a sign that you started. Starting is the whole point.

Cringe is not a stop sign. This one is the one I'm actively working on because clearly I have not mastered it. Cringe means you're growing. It means you're doing something new and unfamiliar and your brain is uncomfortable with the exposure. The people you admire online? They had a cringe era. Most of them still do. They just stopped letting it be a reason to quit.

Progress requires evidence and evidence requires action. You cannot build confidence from a plan. Confidence comes from doing the thing and surviving it, even if you did it badly, even if it was cringy, even if you deleted it at 11pm like a person with absolutely no self control. Every time you show up anyway you make a small deposit in the "I can do hard things" account. Those deposits compound.

Waiting to feel ready is just waiting. Ready is not a feeling that arrives before you start. It is a feeling that occasionally shows up after you've been doing something long enough that it starts to feel familiar. You don't feel ready and then start. You start and eventually somewhere along the way you start to feel ready. The order matters.

The timeline is already running. Time is passing whether you're building or not. Six months from now you will either have six months of messy imperfect progress behind you — or six more months of really well-researched plans that don't exist yet. Both options take the same amount of time. Only one of them gets you somewhere.

Here's where I land

I deleted my first post. I cringed at my own work before anyone else had the chance to. I let the fear win that round and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But I came back. I wrote this one. And somewhere in writing it I realized that the deleted post wasn't a failure. It was a rep. It was me doing the thing I was scared to do, hitting publish, surviving it, and coming back to do it again. The fact that I panicked and deleted it in between is just a detail. A very human, very relatable, very me detail.

So do as I say and not as I do, but also know that even when you do what I did, even when you post the thing and cringe and delete it and question all of your choices — you still did it. That still counts. The doing of it is what matters, not whether it lives on the internet forever.

If you are a lurker right now watching other people do the thing you want to do, bookmarking the posts, saving the reels, adding the courses to your cart and never checking out. This is your sign. Not a gentle nudge. A full sign with flashing lights.

Stop lurking. Stop planning. Stop waiting to feel ready.

Go be a little delusional. Go be a little cringe. Do it before you feel qualified, before the timing feels right, before you've consumed enough content to feel like an expert. Do it now, in the middle of the chaos, in between the nap times and the school runs and the moments you can steal back for yourself.

Say it with me: planning without action will keep you stuck.

I deleted my first post and I'm still here writing the second one. That's the whole lesson right there. Show up anyway. Messy, unpolished, a little unhinged, and completely unprepared for how much you'll want to delete everything you make.

Do it anyway. I'll be right here doing the exact same thing.