I think a lot of people have written a similar list, and a lot of us have been trained to feel guilty about the length of it instead of proud of it. “You want too much.” “You can’t have it all.” “You’re too ambitious.” “You’re too focused on success.”

Wanting everything is not the same as needing everything right now. Most of the anxiety in this feeling comes from collapsing a life meant to unfold over decades into a checklist due by thirty. Nobody builds a full life on a two-year timeline. The women I admire most didn’t get the career and the marriage and the kids and the business all in the same season. They built toward all of it across a life, picking up different threads at different times, some overlapping, some waiting their turn.

Some of what’s on that list I can build entirely on my own, on my own timeline, at my own pace. The career. The business. The languages. The body. Nobody else’s schedule is required for any of that. But the marriage and the kids need another whole person moving at a pace I don’t get to set. That’s a different kind of building, and I think a lot of the pressure I put on myself is really just discomfort with not controlling that half of the list the way I control the other half.

I’ve written before about not centering a life around waiting for someone else to arrive, and I think this is the same principle from a different angle. I get to build the buildable parts now, without waiting. The part that requires someone else gets built when it gets built, and my job in the meantime isn’t to rush it or perform readiness for it. It’s just to keep becoming someone worth building any of it with, and let that be enough for now.

Which is really the whole thesis of this project, I think.

Wanting a full life across every domain, career and love and family and ambition, all of it, at once, is not scattered. It’s not naive. It’s not a girl who can’t focus or a girl with ADHD. I think it’s actually the more formidable position, not the less disciplined one, because it refuses to shrink down to whatever size makes other people comfortable with how much I want. A woman who wants only one thing is easy to categorize. A woman who wants all of it, and is honest about wanting all of it, is a lot harder to put in a box. And that’s okay. Because I want to leave a legacy.

If this is you too, if your list has been called too long by people who never dared to write one of their own, let it stay long. A life is not measured by how quickly its wants are satisfied, but by how faithfully they are pursued across the whole of it. That’s a life well lived.

The creed

I cultivate my character before my reputation, my mind before my opinions, my presence before my platform, and my wisdom before my influence.

I pursue excellence with humility, elegance with restraint, and knowledge with discernment.

I choose substance over performance.

I become quietly formidable.

A mental escape is an interesting way to describe the state I’m in considering I started a job that I think of as a “dream job” this week. It’s weird, having something so great happen in your life, but simultaneously something so hard.

You would never know I’m going through something difficult based on my socials, it looks like I have my life together right now. On paper, I do.

But what you wouldn’t know is that I’ve cried every day this week. You wouldn’t know that I haven’t had much of an appetite or that the only thing that brings me so much joy right now is my job. You wouldn’t know that I’ve spent every free hour before bed writing out every thought because it’s the only thing keeping me sane. You wouldn’t know that some part of me wishes we could’ve worked it out. And not just sweep it under the rug and move on like nothing happened. The real kind of working it out. The kind where you actually sit down and fix what’s broken instead of just letting it end. You wouldn’t know that I’m crushed.

There’s a specific kind of grief in going through something hard that doesn’t resolve cleanly. Just the weight of it sitting there while the rest of life keeps moving around you like nothing happened. The stoics would say I’m only responsible for my own effort, my own honesty, my own intentions, not for how things actually turn out, not for whether the outcome ever matches what I hoped for. I believe that most days. It still doesn’t make the weight any lighter on the nights it doesn’t feel true.

I've thought more than once this week about walking into a Catholic church and sitting down in the confession booth, even though I'm not Catholic, just to say everything out loud to a stranger who has no stake in any of it. Not because I need absolution or want to convert to Catholicism. Just because I haven’t been able to pour my heart out to anyone, and I’m at that stage of hurt where I just keep wondering how to fix my own hurt.

Because that’s the thing about social media, we use it to show the highlight reels of our lives.

But this week has reminded me that I have a terrible habit of trying to suppress negative emotions. I try to focus on the positive things happening in my life like the dream job, having good friends (even though they live thousands of miles away), having good health, parents that are still alive and well.

Sometimes I feel like if I just focus so much on the good, the bad will just go away. The soul crushed feeling will dissipate.

But the truth is, no amount of writing in my gratitude journal, long workouts, or phone calls with friends will remove the negative feelings I need to feel.

It’d be hypocritical of me to keep pretending like everything’s fine and this journey of becoming quietly formidable is happening in a linear fashion. It’s not. But if I ever want to become formidable, I have to mature and recognize that I am not Wonder Woman and I cannot just suppress these feelings. I just have to feel them. No matter how bad it hurts.

I think that’s the actual dirty work of becoming quietly formidable, more than any of the disciplines I usually write about here. It’s not just the disciplined mornings, the reading, the heart posture. It’s being honest with yourself before you’re honest with anyone else. It’s letting the crying happen instead of scheduling phone calls to avoid it. It’s admitting the appetite is gone instead of pretending you just weren’t hungry. Formidable means having the nerve to actually look at what’s true, even when what’s true is that you’re not okay right now.

So if you’re in a season like this too, consider this your sign, your reminder. You don’t have to have it figured out to keep going. You just have to stop pretending you do.

The creed

I cultivate my character before my reputation, my mind before my opinions, my presence before my platform, and my wisdom before my influence.

I pursue excellence with humility, elegance with restraint, and knowledge with discernment.

I choose substance over performance.

I become quietly formidable.

It’s Chuck and Blair, she’s already engaged to Louis at this point, and he shows up and just starts apologizing. And not like a scheme or like he’s trying to win her back, he’s very clearly not trying to win anything. He starts apologizing by going down an actual list. He’s sorry for losing his temper the night she told him someone else had proposed. Sorry for not waiting long enough for her once, years before, at the top of the Empire State Building, the one time he almost said the biggest thing there is to say and choked instead. Sorry for treating her like something he owned instead of someone he loved. Sorry for not saying I love you out loud when he already knew it was true. And then the one that makes most girls cry when watching this scene: he’s sorry he gave up on them when she never did.

The confusing part, he wanted to marry her. Even back then, even knowing everything that was wrong with him, even fully aware of every single thing on that list. He didn’t wait until he’d fixed himself to ask her for a future. He asked anyway. Because waiting until he felt worthy enough probably meant never asking at all, and some part of him knew that. That’s not the same as thinking he was finished becoming who he should’ve been, he knew exactly how far he had left to go. But it didn’t matter because he wanted the future with her regardless, and he was going to keep doing the work either way, whether she said yes or not.

And she believes him, which if you know Blair you know she doesn’t believe him often. In this moment, she doesn’t roll her eyes, doesn’t brace for the twist, the thing he always used to do. She just looks at him like something finally clicked into place that she’d known was true this whole time and everyone told her she was crazy for insisting on it.

But there’s another lesson to be learned from this episode: Blair wasn’t happy with who she’d become in that relationship either, and she was already with Louis at this point, already “moved on.” She still had her own list of things she needed to change- the scheming, the way she used people as chess pieces when she felt threatened, the way she confused control with being loved. She wanted to be different too. And no, not because Chuck asked her to be, he didn’t. She wanted to change because she could see it in herself, the same way he’d finally seen it in himself.

It’s not just that he became who she needed, too late. It’s that she was already becoming someone new too, on her own, completely separate from him. Neither of them was waiting on the other one to move first.

which. okay. this is the part I really don’t want to write but I’m going to anyway, because what’s the point of this whole substack if I only ever point the mirror at fictional people.

I am not the woman I want to be right now. Not fully.

And if the actual lesson here is that you have to become the person you want before you can demand it from anyone else, I have some things to sit with.

I struggle to forgive. Like actually struggle. I can say the words, I can move on in the conversation, but I hold onto things longer than I should. I get frustrated fast when I don’t feel heard, and it doesn’t always come out as hurt, it comes out sharper than that, and I know it does. I hold people to a standard I don’t always hold myself to, which is such an ugly thing to type out but it’s true. I keep score sometimes, even when I’ve told myself and everyone else that I let it go. And I use being busy, being independent, being the one who doesn’t need anything from anyone, as a way to avoid actually needing people. Sometimes it feels like strength, half the time it’s just avoidance.

That’s the weight of what becoming quietly formidable means, more than any of the mornings or the reading or the discipline. it’s not just watching someone else do the work and feeling something about their timing. It’s doing my own work, on my own timeline, whether or not I’m even in a relationship where it matters to another person right now. Blair didn’t wait for Chuck’s growth to want her own.

I don’t think the lesson is to stop believing people can change, clearly they can, they both did, in their own ways, on their own time. I think the lesson is that becoming someone worth being with was never supposed to be a reaction to someone else’s growth. It’s supposed to just be the work. mine, regardless of anyone.

There's a line at the end of that episode, some narrator voice saying every road comes to an end but sometimes the end feels exactly like a beginning. And spoiler alert, they do get back together eventually- married, actually. But I don't think that's the whole reason the line is so deep. I think it’s deep because it's not really about the two of them getting their ending. It's about whoever's left standing there afterward, deciding what to actually build, starting with themselves.

And that's the harsh truth I've had to sit with: I am not the woman I want to be right now. not fully. And maybe wherever I am right now, whatever this season actually is, I need to sprint towards becoming the person I want to be.

The creed

I cultivate my character before my reputation, my mind before my opinions, my presence before my platform, and my wisdom before my influence.

I pursue excellence with humility, elegance with restraint, and knowledge with discernment.

I choose substance over performance.

I become quietly formidable.

I have another friend who nags and nags and nags for her husband to “understand her” and change, but spoiler, he doesn’t care. Another friend who thinks her life is “over” because she’s 27 and single.

I see this pattern everywhere. With women I respect, women with loads of ambition, women who are so incredible, constantly rearranging their whole lives around a man.

Checking if he read the message.

Seeing if he’s lusting over other women.

Waiting for the husband to change and be more present.

Shrinking their standards a little more each day because their desire to be chosen by someone mediocre is more comforting that staying single and whole.

This is called vacancy.

You see, a woman who is de-centered from men and centered on herself is often magnetic without trying to be. A woman who’s centered on a man, waiting on his every move, is doing the opposite of what she thinks she’s doing. She’s making herself smaller and less desirable.

Now, I say all this because it ties into what I’m trying to build into. A woman of honor. A legacy. A character that could hold up a family, a fortified business, a name.

And what I’ve learned over the years is becoming quietly formidable means the center of your life cannot be a man who hasn’t earned that position. It has to be your character, your work, your faith, your discipline, the people who are loyal to you.

If a man is going to be a part of that (and I do want to get married one day so this isn’t supposed to be an anti-relationship post), he should be entering a life that is already full, already whole. He should not be the reason the life exists.

Again, I’m not saying this to become cold or emotionally unavailable. It’s also not about being so independent that you refuse to accept anything from anyone. It’s about where the center of gravity sits.

A de-centered woman can still want love, she just isn’t going to place her whole identity around getting it, and this is the mistake I see a plethora of women making.

As women, we have to get honest and blunt about the difference between hope and delusion. Hope is trusting someone who’s consistently shown you who they are. Delusion is trusting someone despite it.

Now…why does all this matter for the legacy?

A woman who is chasing cannot build anything. Chasing takes the energy that building requires and burns it on someone (or something) who isn’t reciprocating. Every minute spent decoding and focusing on a man’s behavior is a minute not spent on your mind, your money, your character, your actual future.

Looking back on women who built lasting legacies, you’ll notice they did not chase. They were building, they were whole, and the right men recognized that wholeness and valued it. They wanted to be a part of it. No good man is going to marry a woman who needs to be rescued from her own loneliness. Good men look for the women they know would be find without them, and chose them anyway.

That’s the standard we need to hold. We cannot keep lowering the bar because the desire to be chosen by someone unremarkable feels better than the discomfort of waiting.

If you only take one thing away from this post, let it be this: build a life so complete that a man has to rise to meet it, not the other way around.

The creed

I cultivate my character before my reputation, my mind before my opinions, my presence before my platform, and my wisdom before my influence.

I pursue excellence with humility, elegance with restraint, and knowledge with discernment.

I choose substance over performance.

I become quietly formidable.

That stuck with me. I think most people go through at least one season where the old scaffolding falls away: a friendship, a city, a version of yourself that stops fitting the life you’re trying to build. The middle of that, after the old thing ends and before the new thing solidifies, is quiet in a way that can feel like being left behind, even when you’re the one doing the leaving. Nobody talks about that middle stretch. We talk about the before, and we talk about the after, once there’s a clean arc to tell. The middle just gets skipped.

Here’s the trap I almost fell into: waiting for the loneliness to lift before I kept going. Waiting to feel surrounded again, secure again, before I let myself actually build myself into the person I want to become for my legacy. I think that’s the instinct most of us default to. Pause the becoming until the conditions feel better. Wait for the new friend group, the new season, the new sense of belonging, and then start doing the disciplined work of becoming someone.

Peter doesn’t do that. He doesn’t wait for a replacement support system to appear before he starts moving forward. He does the work in front of him, imperfectly, without waiting for the loneliness to end first. And watching that clarified something for me: the middle isn’t a delay before the becoming starts. The middle is where the becoming happens. Character doesn’t get built once things feel resolved again…it gets built in exactly this kind of stretch. Unwatched, unglamorous, mostly just you and the discipline.

Practically, here’s what that’s looked like for me the past few weeks.

I’ve been protecting my mornings even when there’s no one to report that to. I’ve been showing up to my small group even on the weeks I’d rather stay home. I’ve been finishing books I started instead of letting them go half-read once the initial excitement wore off. None of it is glamorous. None of it would make a highlight reel. But I think that’s the point, because a dynasty is built in the unremarkable Tuesday mornings nobody else sees.

I keep coming back to this idea of a throne. Not a literal one, but the idea that you don’t get handed authority, respect, or a legacy worth passing down. You become worthy of it first, in private, long before anyone offers you the crown. I think that’s true for men and women both, but I care most about what it means for me. I’m not interested in waiting around for someone or something to hand me a seat at a table I haven’t built the character to sit at yet. I want to be worthy of whatever I end up stewarding, whether that’s a company, a family, a name, all three, or just a life well spent. That’s not built in the moments people are watching. It’s built in the ones they’re not.

I’m still in the middle of my own version of this. Some days it feels purposeful, some days it just feels like being alone with my thoughts and a stack of books. But I think the version of me on the other side of this stretch is going to be more solid than the one who walked into it.

I don’t regret how lonely it’s been. I think the loneliness has been doing work I couldn’t have done any other way. It stripped out the noise and left me with what I actually believe, what I actually value, and who I actually want to become when nobody’s watching to confirm it for me. I wouldn’t have gotten there the easy way. I’d rather earn the throne slowly than be handed one I’m not ready to hold.

The creed

I cultivate my character before my reputation, my mind before my opinions, my presence before my platform, and my wisdom before my influence.

I pursue excellence with humility, elegance with restraint, and knowledge with discernment.

I choose substance over performance.

I become quietly formidable

.

I want to sharpen my discipline, my patience, my taste, how I carry myself after a long week. I want to become the best person and wife I can possibly be one day. The document I wrote was a mirror. And a mirror is only useful if you’re willing to look.

So I’m going to do this here, in the open, because I think many are going through this process of becoming “more”.

A little about me

I’m 24, I work in capital markets for a publicly traded bitcoin company, where I built the investor relations function. I ghostwrite for a CEO, I do paid media for financial firms, I write and publish across more platforms than I should probably admit to, and I would consider myself a “micro bitcoin influencer” on X. I study markets, macro, and monetary history for a living, and because I’m obsessed with learning how money and the world operate.

I grew up in SoCal, raised by a single mother. Watching her hold everything together through grit and force of will did more for me than any degree ever could. She’s the reason I believe so deeply that financial independence is survival. And every woman should build it for herself before she builds anything else.

I’m a Christian and that runs through everything in my life: how I think about money, character, ambition, what it means to take care of a life well. My faith my foundation.

I studied business economics and marketing in college, and eventually became very passionate about bitcoin through Lyn Alden’s Broken Money, which rearranged how I understood the entire financial system.

I tell you all of this because becoming quietly formidable starts with knowing where you came from and being straight about where you are.

The manifesto

So a few weeks ago I sat down and wrote this personal manifesto. The opening line was:

“Become a cultivated woman of gravitas: intellectually formidable, classically elegant, morally grounded, and quietly influential.”

I built it around five pillars that have been of high interest to me as of late: character, intellect, presence, taste, and influence. I wrote daily practices, weekly rhythms, and “guiding principles” if you will that sit on a digital sticky note on my macbook. It’s a personal creed.

And then I looked at my own life, how much I was doing, how fast I was moving, and I realized I was building a career at full speed but not building myself with the same care. The doing is there. The becoming needs more attention.

That’s what this publication is about.

What you’ll find here

Every few weeks, I’ll write about what I’m doing to get closer to the woman I described in that document. What I’m reading and what it’s doing to me. What I’m practicing: prayer, reading, movement, language learning, writing by hand, and what that looks like for me in my real life, not in theory. Where I’m growing in character, in presence, in taste.

And I want to be upfront, this is not a self-improvement newsletter. I don’t trust that whole world. Most of it is people benefitting off large people groups who don’t know common sense. I’m writing from the middle and I think the middle is where the interesting stuff lives. I’m writing from the young, audacious girl in me who always knew she wanted more.

Why I’m starting this now

I’m watching two versions of womanhood fall apart at the same time.

I see women my age sleepwalking. They settle for comfort, hand their financial lives to men, and live small because nobody expected more of them. They’re addicted to ridiculous reality tv and social media. They’re superficial and ignorant. And then on the other end I see the “career women” who trade everything for a pompous title and a reputation that nobody admires. They hate men and families. And they end up being miserable (most of the time).

I don’t want either of those lives.

The women I look up to have always carried both: strength and warmth, ambition and refinement. The women behind the great families. The ones who were well-read, managed estates, raised sharp children, and left behind something that outlived them. They weren’t decorative, cold, or ignorant. They were formidable.

I think women should want far more than most of us do. But wanting more without becoming more is how you end up powerful and hollow, cold too. I want the ambition and I want to be worthy of it. I want a name that means something because I earned it over years. I want to make my mother proud. I want to make every person who has ever poured into me proud. I want to leave a legacy.

Where my head is right now

I want every edition of this Substack to carry something specific and meaningful, insight into where I am that week. So here’s what’s been sitting with me lately.

Deborah. I’ve been deep in her story in Judges 4 and 5. What I love is that nobody questioned whether she should lead. There’s no verse where she had to prove herself or earn the room’s respect. She just carried it. The people came to her. Barak wouldn’t go to war without her. She didn’t lobby for a seat at the table, she was the table. What does it take to build that kind of gravity in your own life? The kind where people seek you out because they trust how you think. That’s what I’ve been thinking about nonstop.

Legacy. I’ve been studying how families build things that survive them, not just wealth. How values travel alongside money. ’s has been sitting heavy with me. It’s stretching the timeline I measure myself against. I used to think about what I could build in a year, now I’m thinking about what I want standing in a hundred.

Community. This one’s been harder than I expected. We live in a time where ai can do everything for you. And the more I lean on those tools, and I do, I work in this world, the more I feel the gap where the human stuff used to be. I’ve been more deliberate about showing up for people and prioritizing my spiritual community.

Football. (or soccer for my American readers) This one caught me off guard because as an American, football isn’t a big part of our culture. However, the World Cup pulled me in, and now I’m watching old Arsenal matches and learning the players and the formations and just...loving it. I bring it up because the manifesto talks about reaching into things that serve no purpose other than making your life richer. Sometimes you fall for a sport because it’s fierce and beautiful and it fills you with joy, and that’s reason enough.

Who I let in. I used to say yes to everyone. Every coffee chat, every collaboration, every DM, every brand deal. I’m learning that access to me is worth guarding. The people around you mold who you become. If I’m serious about this, I have to be serious about who I keep close.

This is the first one. I'll be back in a few weeks with whatever's true and on my heart then. If you're someone who wants to build something greater than yourself, or honestly if you're anyone who's tired of living below what you're capable of, I think you'll find something here. I’ll close every edition with the creed I wrote for myself that lives on my macbook screensaver. It’s the compass, here it is.

The creed

I cultivate my character before my reputation, my mind before my opinions, my presence before my platform, and my wisdom before my influence.

I pursue excellence with humility, elegance with restraint, and knowledge with discernment.

I choose substance over performance.

I become quietly formidable.