I was telling someone how the job search was going when I heard myself start listing everything I’d done that week. I mentioned all the applications, a phone call, the channel, the plumbing business and even household chores. By the time I finished, I had accounted for every waking hour like my unemployment had sent an auditor and I had to prove I was trying.

Then I made a joke. I usually make some smart-ass comment about Indeed or LinkedIn because both have earned it, honestly. Once everybody laughs, I start reassuring them. I tell them I’m still working on it. I say something will eventually break my way. I say that I’m lucky to have what I do. I’ll be OK.

I don’t know if any of that is true, but I say it anyway.

Apparently, “I’m scared” is not a complete answer. Wait, let me take that back. I can admit that I’m scared, but then I need to prove that I’m also productive, funny and reasonably positive about all of it. Fear is allowed, but only if accompanied by an upbeat positivity that I just don’t have anymore.

What I find that I’m really doing is making my life easier for somebody else to hear.

I’ve been unemployed for 31 months. Some days I feel hopeful about what I’m doing. Other days I think the whole job market can bite me. The hopeful days have not produced more interviews than the furious, spitey ones.

Here’s what’s weird. If I sound confident and determined, I think people will see me as trying. If I say I don’t know whether any of this will work, I think they’ll start wondering whether I’ve stopped.

I walk into an ordinary conversation already prepared to defend myself against something nobody said. Then I make a joke, offer a reassuring ending and send everyone home with the impression that I remain optimistic about the future.

That is a lot of work for a question that could have been answered with, “Honestly, this sucks and I’m scared.”

Now I can see how often I edit my own fear before I let anybody hear it. I make it productive. I make it funny. I follow it with everything I’ve done and everything I still plan to do.

By the time I’m finished, the truth has been cleaned up enough that nobody has to sit with it, including me.

I don’t know whether I can stop doing this. I don’t even want to lose all the jokes because sarcasm is one of the few benefits my aging brain has left.

I just want to know when I decided that doing the work wasn’t enough unless I could also sound hopeful while I talked about it?

There are two versions of me applying for jobs right now and neither one is getting hired. Apparently, both are unemployable for completely opposite reasons which is rude, but OK.

The first version is on my real résumé. She has thirty years of product strategy, leadership, problem solving and cleaning up messes nobody fully understood when they handed them to her.

I can still do everything on that résumé. I didn’t lose my ability to think when somebody deleted my position from an org chart 2.5 years ago. I swear.

Then, I made a second version of me.

She’s for the other kind of job. The one where I say I can help people find shampoo and toothpaste…oh, and be nice, because I can.

Instead of saying I “oversaw product and platform operations, identified gaps, improved workflows and strengthened systems,” I also say I “helped customers and team members solve problems, improved day-to-day processes and made sure service stayed consistent.”

There. I took thirty years of product leadership and turned it into “nice lady helps people.” Tidy.

The strange part wasn’t changing the language. I mean, everybody changes a résumé to fit the job, right? The strange part was hiding the woman that I took 30 years to build.

I solve problems. I listen to people. I explain things clearly. I stay calm when somebody else has arrived fully loaded and looking for a manager.

Those abilities worked in product strategy and they’d work just as well in a shampoo aisle.

I’m not pretending I can do customer service. I can do it! I’ve done it in a professional capacity with executives having meltdowns over the color of a button used in PowerPoint. I can totally handle somebody who’s mad about the price of roast beef. Heck, I’d commiserate with them! I get it!

But Corporate America looks at my experience and sees somebody who’s been around too long. Retail looks at the same experience and sees somebody who won’t stay long enough.

Both versions of me get rejected. Daily. It’s not fun.

The accomplished version of me is old and expensive. The stripped-down version is overqualified and suspicious. Every time I address one concern, the next employer manufactures another one.

At this rate, my third resume will just say AVAILABLE and include a notarized promise never to develop ambitions or continue aging.

Wait. Do we think that might work?

I’m not the only person doing this. People are deleting dates, removing degrees, changing titles and rewriting entire careers until nobody can tell they ever had one. We’re all trying to look experienced enough to trust but not experienced enough to frighten anybody.

We keep changing the resume because that’s the only part of hiring we have any control over.

Maybe we used the wrong keywords. Maybe we explained ourselves badly. Maybe Arial is no longer an acceptable font and nobody had the decency to tell us.

I can change my resume. I can practice interviewing. I can learn another system. What I can’t do is personally fix ageism, fake jobs, ridiculous hiring requirements or Workday’s belief that every employer lives in a separate universe.

I have two résumés now. One tells more of the story than the other, but they’re both me.

I’m tired of rewriting myself for people who still won’t read the damn thing.

Every week I show up and talk about the midlife stuff nobody warned us about. Work, money, mental health, starting over. If that sounds like your kind of place, hit subscribe. I’d love to have you here.

I closed my laptop after eleven hours of work and immediately began listing everything I hadn’t accomplished.

Nothing I do ends anymore.

I know you know what I mean. Nothing finishes. It seems everything starts, stops, restarts, meanders a bit, and then stays in the messy middle for-EV-er.

When I worked in corporate, there was a person whose job it was to tell me when something was finished. I turned it in, somebody else looked at it, decided it was acceptable, and that was that. Every two weeks money showed up in an account, which was its own kind of answer. I didn’t have to decide whether the work had been good enough, because the deciding was somebody else’s department. I complained about that at the time. I want to go on record as saying I was an idiot.

Now I sit down in the morning and I get up at night and not one thing has closed. The applications are out there being ignored. The projects are half built. There is always another version of something I could be making better. All of it just moves into tomorrow, and tomorrow already has its own pile, and the pile from six months ago is somehow also still there.

So the deciding falls to me and every single night, without fail, I look at the day and tell myself, “Nope. You didn’t do enough today, Sheila. Maybe tomorrow.”

I’ve realized that in my world there’s no amount of hours that produces a verdict of “fine, that was enough, go rest.” I keep waiting for the day that clears the bar and I’m starting to understand that the bar isn’t at a fixed height. It’s juuuuust above wherever I happen to be standing.

Here’s the part that might make me even more of an idiot. I built this. Nobody assigned it. When my structure went away with my layoff 2.5 years ago, I could have let the whole grading system go with it. But, oh no! Instead I kept the worst pieces and got rid of everything useful like the paycheck and the weekends. I kept the judgment and the insane schedule though, so good job?

I keep waiting for something out there to tell me the day counted. To validate me. Until it arrives, everything remains open. Unfinished. Every application, pitch, task, plan, video and possibility follows me into the next morning, where it joins several hundred of its closest friends.

I can see what I’ve been doing now. I haven’t merely been trying to make money. I’ve been withholding completion from myself until money gives me permission to have it.

If money is the only proof I’m willing to accept, how many more days of my life am I going to declare worthless while I wait for it?

I’ve started thinking about small things instead. Not accomplishments. Not steps toward anything. Just some ordinary chore that has an actual end to it, where the ending stays put and doesn’t reopen the next morning. Something nobody will ever look at or pay me for or ask about. A cabinet. A drawer. A walk. Swinging at the park. Something so unimportant that it can’t be turned into progress no matter how hard I try.

I think I need proof that a thing can be over. I’ve apparently lost track of what that feels like and I’d like it back before I forget entirely.

I’m obsessed with looking at my bank account.

I stare at the balance and immediately start listing all the things I didn’t do. I didn’t apply to enough jobs. I didn’t send enough pitches. I didn’t promote hard enough. I didn’t make the right video.

I’m not doing enough.

This insightful realization came to me after I sent off 12 resumes, answered plumbing calls for our little company, created a plumbing ad with an image for NextDoor, Facebook Marketplace and our website, reached out to 2 different brands with a pitch to collaborate, worked on my website, sent out a newsletter, worked on my workshop, answered comments, worked on my next YouTube script and about 50 other things.

But….I’m not doing enough.

Eleven hours of my life disappeared because there weren’t earnings attached to them.

When I worked in my tech career, money showed up every other Friday. Some days I solved real problems. Some days I sat through six meetings and watched adults argue about the wording and color of a button. The paycheck arrived either way and nobody asked me to prove that every hour had personally produced revenue.

I was employed, so the work counted. The judges told me so.

Now I can spend days making something useful and if it earns twelve dollars, I look at those four days like they were an error. A mistake. Like I had wasted time. I’m doing it all wrong. Like…I wasn’t enough.

Apparently, my days are filled with doing nothing. My husband, Doug, asks me what I did today and my solid and standard answer is “Nothing, really. Just the usual.” What I mean is “Nothing that earned me any money. I’m sorry. I’m trying so hard.”

There’s nothing that I can point to that says I’m contributing to our household and it pisses me off.

Then, I get scared so what do I do? I add more work. That’s the part that’s insane. I erase ten hours because they didn’t make money, then give the same system three more hours to prove I’m not lazy. Apparently the punishment for unpaid work is more unpaid work? Management has reviewed the policy and found no problems.

Management is me.

I know the difference between being paid and being productive when I say it out loud. I stop knowing it the second I open my banking app.

I don’t know why the money gets to decide whether the day existed. That’s a hell of a conclusion to reach while my ass is still numb from the chair.

I’m not trying to be dramatic or brag, but I am very good at looking fine. Decades of practice. I should have a certificate! Or at least a trophy shaped like a clenched smile.

But one day I realized something: I’m stuck. There was nothing that I could point to and explain, it was just this feeling that something was off, something didn’t fit, and no matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t figure out what to do.

So I did what I always did. I tried harder. Made lists. Journaled. Listened to the podcasts. Watched the videos. Read the books. Told myself if I just got disciplined enough, the answer would show up. Good things come to those who wait, right?

And every time it didn’t, I did the thing so many of us were trained to do without noticing.

I blamed myself.

I wasn’t trying hard enough. I needed more discipline. I should be grateful. I should have this figured out by now, especially at my age. What I was actually doing was trying to bully myself into clarity. Turns out that doesn’t work. Who knew?

Here’s what finally changed things for me: I wasn’t stuck because I was lazy. I had plenty of motivation. I was stuck because I was still following rules from a life that no longer existed. Rules that made total sense at one time but then stopped fitting and nobody sent me the memo.

That’s what I want to talk about.

I’m running a live workshop, Adult Tech Support: Why You Feel Stuck (And It’s Not What You Think). For 90 minutes, we’re going to look at what’s actually underneath the stuck. Not the surface stuff. The real thing running the show. You’ll start to see the pattern you’ve been living inside for so long you stopped noticing it was there.

I’m not going to hand you a diagnosis or a checklist. I’m going to show you what I found when I finally stopped blaming myself, and we’ll see if it holds up for you too.

Everyone who takes this workshop gets access to a free community. A place to keep talking with the people who were in it with you, and with me. Because this stuff doesn't wrap up neatly in 90 minutes, and you shouldn't have to sit with it alone afterward.

You don’t need to show up knowing what you want. If you already knew, you wouldn’t need this.

Get details and sign up here: https://www.sheilahammond.com/event-details/stuck

I’ll see you there.

The confidence you’ve been walking around with your whole life might not be confidence at all. It might just be somebody else’s permission on loan that felt like the real thing until they stopped renewing it. And then one day the chair’s gone, and the title’s gone, and there’s nobody left to tell you whether your own judgment still counts.

That’s the part I keep flailing around in. Arms goin’ all crazy and shit. I thought I knew how to trust myself because I’d made hard decisions for years. I’d handled corporate money, people, deadlines, and messes that arrived with somebody else’s fingerprints all over them.

So, after the layoff in January 2024, I did what any reasonable woman does and blamed everything else first. Age. Exhaustion. Hormones, obviously, because in this house hormones are always the first ones dragged in for questioning.

But nope. It wasn’t any of that. What was it actually? Oh, you’re gonna love this. I didn’t.

Turns out I’ve had judges my whole life. They didn’t wear robes, but their job was to look at my stuff and tell me whether it counted. They were bosses, managers, teachers, parents, clients and that one lady who spelled my first name wrong on every email.

I never really had to decide whether I was good at anything because somebody else was always happy to make that call. Somebody “upstairs” decided for me, mailed me the results and I just built a whole personality outta that.

Then… all my judges left. All at once, in a meeting titled “Quick Sync” that lasted about as long as it takes to microwave a burrito. And nobody has sent replacements. Rude, but OK.

When the judges disappear, the brain doesn’t go, “Great news, YOU’RE the judge now, here’s a gavel!” Nope. The brain keeps the whole courtroom open - benches, robes, the little wooden hammer - and starts letting randos off the street testify. A stranger leaves one snippy comment and the brain sits up like, “Ooh, this one sounds official! Admit it into evidence!”

Meanwhile, someone else says something warm and gooey, and my brain goes, “Cute, but unverified. Next.”

That’s embarrassing to admit. A million people can say the work is good, and one guy can still overrule them. Let’s call him Chad. You know Chad. His profile picture involves no shirt, one fish, and the absolute certainty that I need his feedback. Chad always wins because praise feels like an opinion, but criticism still feels like a verdict.

The worst part is that this can look responsible from the outside. I can call it checking. I can call it being careful. I can ask for one more opinion and act like I’m gathering useful information when what I really want is somebody else standing near the decision in case it goes badly.

I don’t always want advice. Sometimes I want a witness.

That explains more than I’d like. The extra revisions. The lowered prices. The apology added to a sentence that wasn’t rude. The weird need to make every choice so reasonable that nobody could possibly object to it, which is a very efficient way to never make a choice at all.

I thought losing the job meant losing the structure. I didn’t realize it also meant losing the people who had been certifying me for most of my adult life.

Now there’s no one left to send the results.

So what exactly am I supposed to do with an opinion of myself that didn’t come from somebody else?

I’ve been bailing out a sinking boat with a bucket that has a hole in it.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s just what starting over actually looks like when you’re in the middle of it and everyone on shore is calling you brave.

Nobody tells you the bucket has a hole in it. You find out mid-bail, water pouring out the bottom while you’re still trying to look like you have a plan. And here’s the thing that really gets me… I kept bailing anyway. Not because I believed it was working. Because stopping felt worse than the useless motion of continuing.

That’s not bravery. That’s just what you do when you’ve run out of better options and the boat is already half full.

The part I wasn’t ready for is that I brought the bucket with me. I packed it. I carried it from the old life into the new one because it was mine and I’d used it before and it used to work fine. I didn’t notice the hole until I was already in open water, which tells you something about how long I’d been bailing before I looked down.

The old tools don’t announce themselves as broken. They just stop working and let you exhaust yourself figuring out why the situation isn’t improving.

I spent a long time being very good at the wrong thing. Not incompetent. Competent at exactly the thing that wasn’t solving the actual problem. I was fast and thorough and completely committed to a method that had a hole in the bottom of it, and I cannot tell you how long it took me to look down.

The boat was always going to sink. That part was decided before I got in. What I kept thinking was that if I just worked harder, bailed faster, stayed more focused, I could somehow outpace the water. I could not. The water was faster. The water is always faster.

What I’m still figuring out is when to put the bucket down. Not because the boat is saved. Because the bucket isn’t helping and my arms are tired and at some point the honest move is to stop performing effort and just deal with the water.

I haven’t fully figured out what that looks like yet. I’m still holding the bucket most days. But I’ve started noticing the hole, which is more than I could say a year ago.

When did you figure out the bucket had a hole in it?

I was rewatching an old video of myself on Facebook last week, one from years back, and I caught myself doing something genuinely unhinged.

I was annoyed at her. I was mad. Not nostalgic. Not tender. Pissed.

Pissed, the way you get annoyed at a coworker who keeps making the same mistake after you’ve told her a million times. Except I hadn’t told her anything. She hadn’t made a mistake. She just hadn’t lived the next fifteen years yet and I was sitting there irritated at her for not already knowing what those years were going to teach her.

Nobody tells you that getting older doesn’t actually make you wiser. It just gives you a longer rap sheet on some woman who can’t even defend herself anymore, because she’s off being twenty-eight, or thirty-four, or whatever age she was when she did the thing I’m currently mad about.

I used to call this growth. Ha! No. It’s just me judging someone who didn’t know any better, and calling it wisdom so I don’t have to feel bad about it.

I’m 55 years old and I know how the job turned out. I know how the first marriage turned out. I know exactly which decisions paid off and which ones cost me years I’d like back. And I’m using all of that, every bit of it, against a version of myself who had none of it. There was no manual. No handbook. There was no reading ahead!

Yet, here I am, standing over her with the most recent page furious at her for not knowing any better. That’s not me being honest with myself. That’s not fair. That’s not even close to fair.

I started a business once. A real, brick and mortar art studio. I took the money I had and put it into something I actually loved. No hedging, no backup plan. I went all in, the way you do when you’re certain this is the thing that finally works.

It didn’t work.

Well, not the way I wanted it to, anyway. It cost me 5 years, too much money and time I could have spent “building my career”. I eventually went back to a corporate job and let the business become something I did on the side until it just wasn’t worth doing at all anymore.

Here’s what I do with that now, and it’s not nice. I know exactly how it ended. I know every dollar it cost and every year it took. And I sit here using all of that against a woman who didn’t know any of it yet. She just had a dream and enough small wins to think the next step made sense.

Why am I so damn angry with my younger self? Why does my “today brain” think I could have done it better? Why does “now me” think I screwed it all up and wasted my life?

I think part of it is that blaming her gives me somewhere to put the grief. If I can call her reckless, naive, or ridiculous, then I don’t have to sit with the much uglier truth that she was trying. She was trying with the information she had, the fear she had, the hope she had, and the exact level of confidence a person has before life walks in with a tire iron and a bad attitude.

She wasn’t trying to ruin anything. She wasn’t sitting there thinking, “You know what would be fun? Let’s make future me question her entire existence!” She was trying to build something. She was trying to leave something. She was trying to become someone she could love being.

And now I have the nerve to be mad at her because she didn’t know the ending.

That’s some premium-grade bullshit!

I think there’s a weird comfort in judging the past, even when it hurts. It makes the present version of me feel smarter. It lets me pretend I’ve risen above the whole mess, when really I just got the answers after the damage was already done.

The truth is that I don’t know if I wasted parts of my life. I know I spent parts of it wrong. I know I stayed too long in some places. I know I made a lot of choices from fear and called it “being realistic”.

Ok…so let’s be realistic, shall we?

Back then, I didn’t have the words. I didn’t have the distance. I didn’t have the proof. I didn’t have enough years stacked behind me to see what was happening.

So maybe this whole thing isn’t about forgiving my younger self. Maybe that’s not the right word for it. Maybe it’s just about stopping the cross-examination. Maybe it’s admitting that I keep dragging my younger self back into the room because I need somebody to answer for what it cost me.

Maybe I don’t need to forgive her like she committed some crime against me. Maybe I need to stop acting like she owed me a better ending.

I keep talking about her like she was reckless with my life, when really, she was the one living it. She was the one taking the job. Loving the person. Signing the lease. Opening the business. Trying to make something work with the information she had, the money she had, the fear she had, and whatever scraps of confidence she could scrape together without falling apart.

She didn’t waste my life, she spent it getting me here.

I’m standing here with all this outrage at the cost, and she’s the one who already paid it.

I don’t have to keep handing the blame to the only version of me who was actually there trying, right? Because if she wasn’t the problem, then I have to stop using her as the place where all the anger goes.

If she wasn’t the one who ruined it, then maybe the anger has been pointed at the easiest target, not the right one.

And I hate that.

I found an old corporate headshot of myself the other day while cleaning out my hard drive, which is a nice way of saying I was looking for a tax document and got derailed for forty-five minutes.

Dark blazer. Coiffed ‘do. The kind of smile you practice in a mirror until it looks like it isn't practiced. I sat staring at it for longer than a person should stare at a photo of herself.

I was…well, I was in awe, I guess. She looked good. That's the part that got me. Not good as in pretty, good as in convincing. She looked like someone who had it handled. Someone who would know exactly what to say in a meeting, exactly how to keep a room calm, exactly how to make herself indispensable without ever once seeming desperate about it.

I remember being her.

I used to think competence was the same thing as confidence. I'm starting to think competence was actually a very long, very convincing performance of confidence, and I was good enough at it that I fooled myself along with everyone else.

You know what? This didn’t start with the job. It started before I had words for any of it. Learning to walk was the first assignment, and I got praised for it, and that praise told my whole nervous system this is the deal, this is how it works, you do the thing they want and you get the warmth back.

Then it was learning the rules of the house. Then the rules of the classroom, where someone literally rang a bell to tell you when to move and you moved, and the kids who didn’t move fast enough got a note sent home. Then it was the rules of every room I walked into after that, for thirty straight years, each one handing me a slightly more sophisticated version of the same instruction. Know what’s needed. Provide it before you’re asked twice.

So by the time I got to that headshot, I had been training for that exact photo since I was a toddler. Nobody sat me down and explained the curriculum. It just accumulated, one gold star and one disapproving look at a time, until knowing what other people needed from me became the only kind of knowing I really trusted.

Here’s what I keep coming back to - in that photo, I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing every single day. Not because I had clarity. Because someone always needed something from me, and that need handed me my next move before I had to go looking for one. A deadline. A meeting. A boss who needed reassuring. A team that needed managing. I never had to ask myself what I wanted, because the question never came up. Somebody else’s need was always standing in line ahead of it.

I didn't realize how much I'd built around that until the asking stopped.

It’s not that I don’t have things to do now. I have plenty. The problem is I can’t seem to start the ones that are actually mine unless I can trick myself into believing someone is waiting on the other end, about to be let down if I don’t deliver. I sat down last week to work on something with nothing riding on it but my own want, and I did absolutely nothing for forty minutes. Not lazy. Just no signal. No one to disappoint. No one to relieve. My hands didn’t know how to move without that.

I want to be annoyed at myself for that, and I am, a little. Mostly I’m annoyed at how long it took me to notice. I spent years mistaking “I always know exactly what to do” for confidence, when it was really just compliance. Obedience.

Training.

I wasn’t decisive, I was responsive.

I check on people who are fine. I’ve done it for years and called it thoughtfulness. I think now it’s closer to manufacturing a need so I have something to respond to. If nobody’s drowning, I’ll find someone who looks a little damp and hand them a life vest just to have a reason to be standing there. That’s not kindness. That's a coping mechanism, not kindness, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to tell the difference.

I don’t think I’m broken - not at all! I think I was simply very well trained, and the training worked exactly as designed for about thirty years. My whole system is still sitting there with the engine running, nowhere to go, still wearing that same expression from the photo.

Except now, nobody’s around to take the picture.

So here’s what I actually want to know. If nobody needs anything from me right this second, is that freedom, or is that just the first time in my whole life someone forgot to assign me a job? Because I genuinely cannot tell, and I’m not sure which answer I’m hoping for.

You Tube Video:

I asked myself what I wanted the other day and damn near had another mental breakdown.

That’s an embarrassing amount of emotional activity for a question most children can answer while actively licking syrup off their fingers. A five-year-old knows exactly what she wants. She wants pancakes, a pony, and the complete removal of bedtime as a concept. She may be unreasonable, but she’s not confused.

I had nothing. Nothing but a blank space where the answer was supposed to be.

I sat there waiting for an answer, and my brain immediately started offering substitutions. It could tell me what would be practical. It could tell me what would be responsible. It could tell me what would cost the least, create the fewest problems, and keep everybody else comfortable.

That part of my brain apparently remains fully staffed. The part that knows what I want appears to have left the building sometime around 1997 and didn’t leave a forwarding address.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized the problem was not that I had never made decisions. I had made a million decisions but I had just gotten very good at making them around everybody else. What did they need? What would keep things calm? What would make life easier? What would prevent the next mess? I had spent years answering those questions before I ever got around to asking what I wanted.

I’ve spent most of my life being very good at reading the room. I could tell who was upset before they said anything. I could tell when a conversation was about to go bad. I could tell when somebody needed help, when something needed fixing, and when the safest option was to quietly handle it before anybody else noticed there’d been a problem.

I thought that was maturity. I thought it meant I was capable. I thought it meant I had my shit together.

Those interpretations aren’t holding up particularly well under cross-examination. My therapist and I are working it out.

The more I sit with it, the more I realize I didn’t lose the ability to know what I wanted. I just spent a very long time getting rewarded for asking a completely different question:

What does everybody else need from me?

That question I could answer in my sleep. I knew how to be helpful. I knew how to be calm. I knew how to keep things moving. I knew how to make myself useful before anybody even had to ask. And every time I did it well, somebody told me what a good job I was doing.

So I kept doing more of it.

Nobody sat me down and explained the arrangement. There was no orientation packet. Nobody handed me a badge that said, “Congratulations, You Are Now Responsible for Everything Nobody Else Wants to Deal With.”

It happened one compliment at a time.

“You are so mature.”

“You are so dependable.”

“What would we do without you?”

I believed every word of it. Why wouldn’t I? It sounded like praise. It felt like love. It also happened to keep me doing the things that made everybody else’s life run more smoothly, which was a pretty sweet deal for everyone involved.

Well, for them. Obviously.

The part I can’t stop thinking about is how easily I mistook all of that for a personality.

I thought I was responsible. I thought I was capable. I thought I was just the kind of person who handled things.

Maybe I was.

But I was also the person everybody kept rewarding for handling things, and I never stopped long enough to ask whether I wanted the job.

That is a deeply annoying thing to realize at fifty-five.

How much of the person I became was actually me, and how much of her was just very well rewarded?

I’ve been thinking about the last time someone offered to help me and I actually let them.

I can’t remember it. That’s the thing. I genuinely cannot come up with a specific memory of someone offering and me saying “yes” and meaning it and not feeling weird about it afterward.

I’ve been calling this “consideration” my whole life and I’m learning that is not the right word.

Here’s what I’ve figured out about myself lately. When someone offers to help me, something happens in my brain that I can only describe as a very fast, very automatic, very polite rejection system. They’re busy. I don’t want to owe anyone. I can do it myself. They are looking at me weird. And by the time all of that has processed I’ve already said “no thank you” and moved on and the other person is standing there slightly confused and I’m already three steps into doing the thing alone and feeling weirdly proud of myself.

I once said “I’m fine” to a nurse who was actively doing something to me that was not, in fact, fine. She looked at me. I looked at her. I said it again. “I’m fine.”

I don’t experience this as a problem when it’s happening. It feels considerate. It feels like I’m doing people a favor by not needing them.

What I’ve been slower to understand is what it feels like on the other side of that. To offer to help someone over and over and keep getting thanked and sent away. To watch someone you love struggle with something and have them look at you and say “I’ve got it.” That’s a door being closed. And if it happens enough times, you stop knocking.

Ask me how I know.

I’ve had people stop knocking. And I couldn’t even be mad about it because I trained them not to bother.

The thing I keep coming back to is where this started. Because I didn’t decide one day to be unreachable. Something taught me that needing people was expensive. Maybe the ask got ignored. Maybe it came back with strings. Maybe a lecture, a favor you now owed, a look that made you feel like a problem someone was tolerating. And somewhere in there I just quietly decided that needing people cost more than it was worth. And I never revisited that decision. Not once. I just let it run.

So not-asking became normal. A part of my identity.

I mean hell, it’s right there on my resume under skills. “Self-directed.” “Works independently.” “Thrives without supervision.” What it means is I will absolutely not tell you I’m drowning. Please do not check on me. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Why are you still here?

And the world kept backing me up. “She doesn’t need anything.” “She can handle it.” “She’s so strong!” Nobody said it like a warning. It landed like a compliment every time. So I kept going.

What I didn’t account for is that optimizing for needing nothing also means optimizing against connection. Those two things are harder to separate than I thought.

I’ve been thinking about who I’ve kept at arm’s length without meaning to. The friend who stopped asking if I was okay because I’d said I was fine so many times she believed me. I wasn’t fine. She knew I wasn’t fine. We both just let me lie about it and I went home feeling very proud of how little I’d burdened anyone.

This is the saddest sentence I have ever written about myself and I have written some pretty sad sentences about myself.

By the way, she never asked again. I can’t be mad about that because that’s exactly what I trained her to do.

Here’s what I think is actually underneath all of it. It’s not really about independence. It’s about not believing people will actually show up if I need them. So I don’t give them the chance to find out. I handle it myself and call that strength and quietly make sure nobody ever gets close enough to disappoint me.

The problem is that it also makes sure nobody ever gets close enough to show up.

I’m 55 years old and I’m still doing this. Still saying “I’ve got it” before I’ve thought about whether I do. Still protecting people from needs they didn’t ask to be protected from. Still calling it consideration when really it’s just a very old decision I made about what people are capable of and never bothered to check if it was still true.

It probably isn’t. That’s the part I’m sitting with.

Thirty-eight years of coping with mental health issues is not a chapter - it’s my life. I am never going to be cured. I used to think that was the saddest sentence I could say about myself. Now I think it might be the most honest thing I've ever admitted.

I used to think “better” was the destination. Like if I just found the right combination of meds, therapy and gratitude I’d arrive somewhere. Some version of me that didn’t have to manage this every day. Some morning where I woke up and the inventory just... wasn’t there.

I don’t think that’s coming anymore and I’m surprised by how okay I am with that.

What I think is coming is a better version of this. A version of me that still has the anxiety and the depression and the passive ideations that show up like an uninvited houseguest, but that version handles it better. That version can go somewhere without fear running and ruining the whole show. That version can cope.

That’s a different goal than the one I started with and it’s smaller in some ways. It’s also more honest than anything I’ve let myself want in a long time.

I spent years chasing a version of myself that didn’t need any of this. The one who woke up “normal”. The one who didn’t have to do math on her own nervous system before her feet hit the floor. I was so focused on becoming her that I didn’t notice I was abandoning the one who actually showed up every day and kept going anyway.

This is my normal. It has always been my normal. And there are better versions of this — I genuinely believe that now in a way I haven’t always been able to. But better isn’t the same as gone. And I’m done waiting for gone.

I don’t know what to do with thirty-eight years of reaching for something that was never actually the point. I don’t know if there’s anything to do with it except stop.

What do you do when you finally figure out the destination was wrong the whole time?

I’ve been calling this a personality trait for decades. Homebody. Planner. Someone who just prefers to stay in. It sounded like self-knowledge. It sounded reasonable. It was neither.

It was fear, and it has been making my decisions for a very long time. I just didn’t know that’s what I was letting drive. Which, honestly, is embarrassing to admit, but here we are.

Not the dramatic kind of fear. Not the kind that shows up in a crisis and leaves when things settle. The quiet kind. The kind that has an opinion about whether you go to the grocery store today or reschedule it for the fourth time this week. The kind that sits with you in the parking lot while everyone else just walks in like it’s nothing. The kind that makes you buy enough food for fourteen people because the pandemic happened once and your nervous system has decided that is now a permanent policy.

I have mail sitting in a PO box that has been there for a month. The mail is fine. I am less fine. I keep meaning to go and then my brain starts running the math on everything that could happen between here and there, and suddenly it’s 4pm and I’ve accomplished nothing except a very thorough imaginary disaster sequence. Very productive. Highly efficient system. Would not recommend.

Here’s the part I’m still sitting with - the system made sense once. I grew up in an environment where nothing stayed the same long enough to trust and nothing safe ever lasted long enough to matter. My nervous system learned to stay ready. It learned that calm was temporary and things that felt fine had a way of stopping being fine without any warning at all. So it just stopped trusting calm. It stayed ready instead. All the time. For everything. Including, apparently, the mailbox.

The environment changed and my nervous system didn’t get that memo. It is still running the same protocol on a completely different life, flagging loud noises and weird symptoms and my husband being five minutes late like all of it belongs in the same category as the actual chaos I grew up in. It doesn’t. My brain does not care about that distinction.

I’ve spent a lot of years thinking this was just who I am. Anxious. Careful. A person who needs more preparation than other people. And maybe some of it is who I am. But a lot of it is a nervous system that learned the wrong normal and never got a chance to relearn it. That’s not a personality - that’s old software running on a life it wasn’t designed for.

The cost I didn’t consider is the part that gets me. Not the obvious stuff. The friendships that never got off the ground because showing up felt like too much. The things I watched other people do while I stayed where it felt safer. The versions of my life I’ll never know because fear got there first and made the call before I could.

I’m not writing this from the other side of it. I’m writing this from the middle of it, which is exactly where I am. I’m doing the work. I got to the mailbox last week and it counted as a win, which tells you everything you need to know about where the bar currently sits.

The fear has already had a lot of my life. I’m working on making sure it doesn’t get all of it.

What I still haven’t figured out is how you start trusting calm when calm has never once felt like it was going to stay.

Okay so here’s something I didn’t want to admit out loud, but here we are!

I spent thirty-something years thinking I was a strong, independent woman who trusted her gut — and it turns out what I was actually doing was renting other people’s certainty and calling it conviction. Not the same thing. Not even close.

Every five years there was a new correct version of life and I signed up every single time like a lab rat with a credit card and a deeply embarrassing need to be told I was doing it right. Minimalism. Hustle culture. Quiet quitting. Wake up at five. No wait, protect your sleep like it’s sacred. I did all of it. I bought the notebook. I restructured my mornings. I rewrote my personality based on a podcast I heard in traffic.

And when it didn’t work? I didn’t think maybe the system is stupid. I thought clearly I need to suffer better. More efficiently. With intention. As if the problem was my commitment level and not the fact that I was following directions written by someone who didn’t know me and didn’t care.

I stayed in things way too long. Jobs. Relationships. Versions of myself that had already expired but felt safer than the blank space on the other side of leaving. I told myself good adults don’t quit. Good adults stick it out. Good adults don’t make it weird.

I made it so un-weird. I was the un-weirdest. I endured things that didn’t require endurance and called it strength and honestly that might be the most embarrassing sentence I’ve ever typed.

Here’s the thing nobody warned me about. If you’re someone who reflects and takes responsibility and genuinely wants to get it right — congratulations, you are a systems dream come true. Because you will keep adjusting long past the point of no return. You will write the “maybe it’s me” speech so many times you lose count. You will become a better version of someone who is still in the wrong place and feel noble about it.

The system doesn’t need to trap you. It just needs you to keep assuming it’s you.

I gave that lie my twenties. My thirties. A solid chunk of my forties. I followed instructions that were never written down, for a game that was never set up for me to win, and I did it with discipline and receipts and a color-coded calendar.

So I guess my question is — what exactly were you following that you’re only just now starting to question?

I didn’t realize I had a limit until I hit it. And even then, I didn’t call it a limit. I called it a bad week. Then a bad month. Then I bought magnesium and blamed my sleep schedule and told myself I just needed to get through this one thing, and then I’d feel better.

I didn’t feel better. I did sleep slightly more aggressively though, so that was something.

What I eventually had to admit — and I really didn’t want to admit this — is that I’d been keeping score on behalf of the entire world and nobody asked me to. Every news story I absorbed. Every friend I quietly worried about at midnight. Every family situation I monitored from a distance, tracking it like it was my job because somewhere along the way I’d decided it was. Every headline, every hard conversation, every shift in someone’s tone that I noticed and filed away — all of it was mine now. Apparently.

Nobody sent a memo. There was no orientation. I just showed up one day and somehow I was in charge of everything. No title. No salary. Not even a parking spot. Just the job. I want to speak to whoever approved this because I have questions and also a strongly worded letter I’d like to send.

Nobody handed me any of that. I just picked it up. Because that’s what you do when you’re paying attention. When you’re the kind of person who notices things. When you were raised to believe that caring about people was the same thing as being responsible for them. Which, for the record, is an absolutely unhinged thing to teach a child. But here we are. Functioning adults with excellent manners and a weird eye twitch.

That last part is the one I don’t love looking at directly.

I genuinely cannot tell you when caring turned into carrying. There wasn’t a moment. There wasn’t a decision. It was more like a slow accumulation — one thing at a time, none of it heavy enough on its own to flag as a problem, all of it adding up to something I was never actually equipped to hold. And yet. Here I am. Fully equipped.

And the thing that irritates me most about this is how normal it felt. How completely unremarkable it was to walk around with all of it running in the background. I thought that was just what being a thoughtful person felt like. I thought the weight was the price of giving a damn. Nobody told me giving a damn had a co-pay. I would have budgeted differently.

I didn’t need more sleep. I needed to stop treating my emotional capacity like it was infinite just because nobody had ever told me it wasn’t.

Nobody did tell me that, by the way. Not once. Not my parents, not any job I ever had, not any version of the world that was supposed to be preparing me for adulthood. The message I got, consistently, was that caring made you a good person. Full stop. Nobody added the part about how caring without limits makes you a depleted one.

They left that part out of every after-school special I ever watched. And I watched a LOT of after-school specials. I was prepared for peer pressure and saying no to drugs. Nobody covered this.

So I kept going. I kept picking things up. I kept saying yes before I’d even decided to, my body just agreeing on my behalf while my mouth stayed quiet. And the world kept letting me, because the world is very comfortable with people who carry things quietly and don’t complain about it.

I’m not sure I even knew how much I was holding until I stopped long enough to actually look at it. And when I did, my first reaction wasn’t relief. It was embarrassment. Like I should’ve seen this sooner. Like I’d been walking around with something hanging off me that everyone else could see and nobody thought to mention.

The caring was always real. I’m not questioning that part. But somewhere between genuinely caring about people and deciding I was personally responsible for everything wrong with the world, something went sideways. And I did that. Not because I was forced to. Because I’d been trained to, and I never stopped to ask who decided that was my job.

I don’t know what it looks like to care without carrying everything. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually done it.

Have you?

I saw my dead grandfather in the mirror, which is not how I planned to start my day. He did not age well, so this felt personal. He was also a man, which added a whole other layer.

I stopped, leaned in, and said aloud… “Sir? Why are you here?”

He didn’t answer, which was on brand for him.

It was my hair. Or more accurately, the lack of it.

Now, this wasn’t a surprise. I had been working around my menopausal hair loss for months - mostly with hats and something called “hair fiber powder” which is supposed to stick to what hair you have and make it look thicker. It kinda works…if you have hair for it to stick to, I suppose.

I’m running low on the thing it needs to stick to.

My hair has always been kind of like cotton candy. It looks like it’s there, and then you touch it and it just… disappears. My whole life I’ve had fine, curly hair, and I never really liked it.

Well, I guess I liked it in the ‘80s when I could take that curly hair and tease it within an inch of its life and spray the Aqua Net so thick I’m pretty sure that legally it could be declared a helmet.

I said I was fine with the hair loss. It’s the hand I was dealt. I accepted it. My husband still thinks I’m a sexy beast, so I was going to just embrace it, get a lot of cute hats and move on.

We had a good run.

Then I saw my reflection in the mirror, and it wasn’t me. It was my grandfather the way I remember him. Bald on top, hair on the sides, white hair. And it wasn’t just the hair. It was my face. The whole situation made me look like him. It was bizarre.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I went and got a wig.

I found a small boutique where it would just be me, my husband and the magic maker and I started trying on new versions of myself. My husband came because he is supportive and also because I told him to.

I immediately realized that hair comes with entire personalities attached to it. One made me look like I run meetings that should be an email. One of them made me look like I correct people in public. One made me look like I had many secrets and all of them were sexy.

None of them felt right. The meeting one kept staring at me. I didn’t trust it.

Then I found one that was like my hair was before it started balding. Yes! Look at that! It’s me in the mirror again! Not him. Me. We’re back.

Calm.

I had fixed something that was broken and I felt calm.

No tears. No standing there appreciating the journey. I just looked at it and thought, okay… this is me. Thank you, magic lady. She deserves that title. Possibly a cape.

A few days passed and I made another decision. It turns out confidence is a door. I hadn’t realized mine was closed until I accidentally found the handle.

Ageism is real. We know this. We’ve heard it. Some of us have experienced it. I was laid off two years ago and I’ve been unable to get an interview. I’m not even close to getting a job.

So, about 6 months ago, I decided to go all in on my YouTube channel and stop looking for work. Looking for a job will humble you in ways that feel unnecessary. After all the rejection - I just couldn’t do it anymore and I loved doing YouTube even though it wasn’t really paying me yet.

I stopped looking for a corporate job and became a full-time content creator. I announced it to everyone. Made a video about it. This is who I am now. And I meant it. I still mean it. I’m just also out of money, which has a way of complicating your identity.

Once I got the wig, I realized that a big part of what made me stop job hunting was a ‘What if…?’. What if I got an interview? Would I wear a hat? As soon as they saw me, they’d see how old I was and I know I’d be subconsciously disqualified before I even got started.

You can actually see people’s eyes glaze over as they check out.

You’re not the one. You never will be.

They want the résumé. They don’t want the person who lived it.

The wig made me look younger. It made me feel confident. So, I decided that I would start the job hunt again but I had a whole new outlook.

Over the last two years I’ve healed from Corporate America and all its toxic practices. No more drinking the Kool-Aid. No more “we’re a family” speeches about loyalty.

No. More.

I’m going in with a new attitude and knowing that I’m not trying to build a career anymore. I just want a job and a paycheck. I’ll do a great job, but I’m not giving my soul to a company. They’ve had enough of that already.

Never. Again.

I don’t feel inspired about going back. I feel clear. And that’s new.

I know exactly what they get from me and what they don’t. I know where the line is, and more importantly, I know I’ll actually leave if it gets crossed.

I’ve never done that before. I stayed. I adjusted. I made it work until it didn’t and that’s not happening again.

So no, I’m not going back to build something, I’m going back to get paid.

We’ll see how it goes.

It’s wild that the thing that got me here was seeing my grandfather in the mirror. So, thank you, I guess. You were a weird catalyst, but you showed up when I needed you. Rest easy. Stay out of my mirrors.

I was standing in my bathroom looking at my own face and my first thought was not curiosity or acceptance or any of the graceful nonsense people pretend to have. My first thought was, what do I need to do so this stops feeling… off?

Not worse. Not broken. Just off, like a picture frame that’s hanging a little crooked and now it’s all you can see.

Before I even finished brushing my teeth, I had already started running through solutions I did not care about five years ago. Lighting. Hair. Angles. Do I need to “do something”? Do I need to correct this before someone else notices it and decides I have given up and started living under a bridge with a raccoon named Carol?

That’s what this actually is, and I wish more people would just say it plainly.

It’s not about aging. It’s about managing the audience.

Because I don’t wake up thinking, “I hope I impress myself today”. I wake up already anticipating how I am going to be received, like I am a product that needs to pass inspection before it leaves the house. And the standards are not even mine, which should bother me more than it does.

They are just… there. Absorbed. Reinforced. Delivered casually, like someone offering you gum.

You should do this… You would look better if... Have you tried this?

Nobody ever finishes the sentence, but the ending is always the same.

You would be easier to look at if you did not remind me that time is happening to both of us.

So now I am standing there, in my own bathroom, trying to figure out how much of myself I need to adjust so nobody else feels weird. And that is where it gets ridiculous, because I don’t actually have a problem with how I look, I have a problem with the reaction I have been trained to anticipate.

That’s the scam.

Not the wrinkles. Not the hair. The expectation that I should be managing everyone else’s comfort with something that is happening inside my own body without my permission. And if you don’t play along, if you just show up as you are, people get twitchy. Not always out loud, but you can feel it.

There is a pause. A look. A suggestion that shows up like it is doing you a favor but is really just trying to sand you down into something more familiar.

You start to realize that aging, especially as a woman, is not a private experience. It is a group project you never volunteered for, and suddenly everyone has feedback.

You can fight it and spend your time, money, and sanity trying to outrun a clock that doesn’t care about your budget. Or you can choose not to fight it and immediately get labeled like you’ve stopped trying, like you wandered off into the woods and now you are foraging for berries and yelling at trees.

And here is the part that makes me laugh in a slightly unhinged way: Even when you “fix” something, even when you adjust or optimize or whatever word we are using to make it sound empowering, the goalpost just moves.

It just….moves.

So now the real question is not what do I need to fix, it is how much of my time I am willing to spend negotiating with something that was never broken to begin with, because I can feel the pull to keep adjusting, keep smoothing, keep making this easier for everyone else to look at.

And I can also feel how tired I am of participating in that.

And I am standing in my own bathroom, looking at my own face, trying to figure out when exactly it became my job to make sure everyone else feels okay about what they are seeing.

If you want to see where this started and how I talked through it out loud, it’s here:

It is a survival guide. It is a triage manual for when your job disappears and everyone immediately starts giving advice they have never had to follow themselves.

I took what actually happened to me after getting laid off—the money mistakes, the panic, and the first seventy-two hours where I signed things I should not have signed because someone with a title told me they were standard. I also put in the identity hit nobody warns you about.

This isn’t about staying positive or reinventing yourself. This is a practical guide to do what you need to after layoff - survive without making it worse.

Here’s what’s actually in it.

Module 1: The Signs
How to read the room before the trapdoor opens. The budget freezes, the consultants, the “efficiency” language, the fake job postings, the leadership weirdness — and what each one actually means. This module is about noticing patterns early, while you still have leverage.

You can download this one for free, because I wouldn’t trust me either.

Module 2: The Prep
What to do before the paycheck stops. This is where you stockpile resources, protect insurance access, lock in credit, and convert cash into survival assets so you’re not making fear-based decisions later. This is financial triage for people who don’t want to torch their future out of panic.

Module 3: The Triage
What to do in the first 72 hours after the layoff so you don’t make it worse. What not to sign. What not to say. When to file for unemployment. How to control the narrative. How to shut down shame, gossip, and self-sabotage while your nervous system is on fire.

Module 4: The Reality Check
This is where we deal with the part nobody prepares you for — the identity hit, the grief, the insomnia, the quiet unraveling that happens when your structure disappears. This module is about untangling your worth from your work so you don’t try to fix an emotional injury with productivity.

Module 5: The Identity Detox
Who you were. Who you performed. Who you actually are without the job title propping things up. This is where you dismantle the internalized voice that says you’re only valuable when you’re useful — and start choosing what comes next without panic running the show.

Module 6: This Is Grief
Because that’s what this is, even if no one calls it that. This module deals with the quiet, disorienting grief that follows job loss — the loss of routine, community, identity, and imagined futures. Not to wallow in it, but to stop fighting it long enough to move through without turning it inward.

Module 7: Exploring What’s Next
Choosing what comes next without letting panic lead. This is not about rushing into a reinvention or grabbing the first thing that makes you feel employable again. It’s about evaluating options from a steadier place so you don’t recreate the same conditions under a new title.

Module 8: Rebuilding Structure
How to take your time back when you suddenly have nowhere to be. This module is about rebuilding daily structure, momentum, and agency without turning your life into one long job search or another performance treadmill. Small, sane structure that supports you instead of draining you.

This manual is meant to be used, written in, argued with, and returned to — not skimmed and forgotten. You can read it yourself. You can give it to someone you love who’s pretending they’re fine. You can start with the free first module and decide if the rest earns its place.

I kept the full price low on purpose because I remember what it feels like to calculate purchases when you’re side-eying your money like it’s cotton candy in rainstorm.

Go to www.sheilahammond.com and click <Shop>. You will see the main workbook, and I also broke it into smaller sections so you can take what helps you and ignore what does not.

I just wanted you to know it exists.

—Sheila

I didn’t reinvent myself. I molted. I molted uglily. Is that a word? Well, it is now and that's what I did!

Like a snake in menopause, shedding everything but the bitterness.

I didn’t “pivot.” I came apart. When I was going through it, I said I was pivoting. I said I was reinventing. I even made videos about it. Because “pivot” sounds strategic. “Reinvention” sounds brave.

But I didn’t have a plan, I had a slow-motion unraveling that looked a lot like forward movement, but only if you didn’t look too closely.

Like running on a treadmill that's on fire. I was going nowhere, but really enthusiastically.

I was getting praised for being resilient and feeling nothing but hollow. My résumé made me feel like I was reading a eulogy for someone I never truly liked. I kept looking at my LinkedIn like it was a missing person’s report, except I was the one who disappeared.

Who was that girl?

I was spinning out with just enough polish to make it look intentional. Like, look at her go, losing everything with flair.

There was just me, quietly peeling off all the versions of myself like the peeling skin of a sunburn that had been taped on over the years. I'd been calling it "success."

The achiever. The overfunctioner. The woman who could take care of everyone else without ever needing anything herself. That was me.

And when I let those versions fall away, nothing rose up to replace them. There was no new identity waiting in the wings. Just space. Just quiet. Just me, without the marketing. I was raw.

The longer I stayed in that space, the more I realized I didn’t want to be rebuilt. I didn’t want to be optimized or clarified or made more palatable. I just wanted to be real for the first time in my life. But who was that? How did I find her?

Maybe becoming yourself isn’t about finding a new identity. Maybe it’s about finally letting go of the performance masterpiece that is also called “you.”

I thought that the hard part would be walking away, but it wasn't. It was what showed up after I did. I will talk about that a little later.

I STILL DON’T KNOW WHO I AM, AND I’M NOT IN A HURRY TO DECIDE.

I've had to pivot before, but in the past, every time I tried to build a new version of myself, I kept reaching for old tools. Certainty. Achievement. Strategy.

I'm in my 50s now... the old tools don't work like they once did.

I need to make a living. I'm not ready for retirement both mentally and financially. I don’t even know if I believe in retirement for myself, not because I can’t afford it, though, yeah, that...

But because for the first time in my life, I actually like what I’m doing. And it turns out, the kind of work I want to keep doing isn’t the kind that drains you, it’s the kind that finally feels like mine.

I went all in on so many things when I got laid off and couldn’t get an interview. I did Uber. I tried selling my art on Etsy.

I even monetized my toes and tried selling feet pics.

Yes. Yes I did, and yes I'm admitting it here. It was the most unhinged thing I did to earn money while unemployed.

At one point I was toggling between answering your comments and chatting with people who were watching a livestream of my feet. Normal day in the Hammond household.

I jumped in with gusto trying to find my new place on this earth. Trying to carve out my spot again since my old one was gone.

But it wasn’t really gusto. It was panic. Dressed up as enthusiasm. With toe rings.

And through all of it, my husband Doug stayed steady. He never blinked, not when I sold my art, not when I sold my toes.

Although Doug and I had so much fun doing the photoshoots. He was my little ride or die foot pimp.

At one point during one of our "shoots" I whispered “get it, girl” to my own ankle.

He didn’t need me to land anywhere specific. He just kept showing up like I hadn’t failed, even when I was absolutely convinced I had.

By the way, I only made about $40 dollars doing the feet thing. I spent like $60 on toe rings, cute socks and anklets trying to make my feet look... available. One star. Do not recommend.

I kept thinking there’d be a moment where it all clicked. Like, I'd try something and it would stick. It would work. It would make enough money.

But that moment never came. It still hasn’t. But what has come are smaller things. Deep things. Hard things.

I just stopped selling the version of me that was always slightly dying inside. And what’s left is still loading, but at least she has finally found her voice.

Fifty years of being who I was supposed to be, deleted. No backup.

Smart. Polite. Capable. The kind of woman who could calm down a room, file the paperwork, and swallow the panic all before lunch.

I knew how to keep the peace. I knew how to carry the weight. I knew how to disappear in plain sight, as long as everyone else stayed comfortable.

So... I changed my life into a form of adulthood that doesn't make me dread my life.

And weirdly, for the first time in 18 months of being unemployed and out of the corporate grind, I feel like I might be able to pull it off.

But here’s the thing: Even after you drop that old mask, you still don't feel free. I still feel fake as hell. Like I forgot the script and everyone’s watching me and I don't know my lines.

I make content to help people and make them laugh. I'm trying to build a plumbing business with Doug. And yeah, I still brace when good things show up, like maybe they’ve got the wrong address.

But I’m also not flinching at my own voice anymore. I don’t feel like I need a label to explain why I exist.

And this? This is the only space I’ve ever had where I’m not too much, not too loud, not too weird. Just mine.

And I hate that it took so many years, but I love that it didn't take one more.

The scariest part wasn’t losing who I was. It was realizing no one ever knew her. I didn’t just walk away, I walked right into the part I was most afraid to admit.

I DIDN’T PIVOT, I STRIPPED

The truth is, I didn’t reinvent. I stripped.

I didn’t become something new. I stopped pretending to be what I wasn’t.

The version of me that could rally, charm, achieve, endure? She was a genius at performance but was never at peace.

She was running on deadlines and dread, but somehow people called it high-functioning.

She didn’t need a calendar. She was the calendar. Color-coded, overbooked, and five minutes from crying in the bathroom, but sure, “thriving.” Every color had a purpose. None of them were joy.

And when that version stopped performing… nothing replaced her. I didn’t magically evolve. I just stood there. Unlabeled. Undecorated. Unsure.

Like a thrift store mannequin with one shoe and no head, technically standing but absolutely not okay.

And that’s the part I wasn’t ready for. Being yourself doesn’t feel triumphant. It feels disorienting and a little humiliating, like realizing the costume you’ve been wearing was actually sewn into your skin.

I looked around at the life I built, the roles I nailed, the praise I earned, and thought: how did I not see it? How could I have missed something so obvious for so long? That’s why I felt stupid. Not because I failed, because I succeeded at something that never actually fit me.

But being myself, it's the most honest thing I've ever done.

So yes, I molted. Loudly. Publicly. In front of all of you.

Nothing like shedding your entire identity with closed captions and a comment section.

You have seen my rebirth, and I've been humbled and blessed enough to see some of yours.

I mean it when I say this is the only place I've ever felt I could be myself. I'm finding my tribe and you're finding yours. We can be exactly who we are right here. Every day. Every moment. And that's pretty spectacular.

We’re like emotional raccoons, dragging our truths out of the garbage, blinking in the daylight.

And super cute. So cute.

I am now finally at the point where I can make eye contact with kindness and embrace the power that's been in me all along but I pushed down to fit the mold I thought I was supposed to be.

I didn't become someone new, I stopped performing long enough to finally meet myself. And yeah, she’s weird. And tender. And occasionally feral. But she's no longer edited. Not anymore.

Turns out, meeting yourself is a lot less “Eat Pray Love” and a lot more “What the hell now?”

I’M NOT WHO I WAS. I’M JUST NOT PRETENDING ANYMORE.

I’m not fixed. I’m not healed. I’m not even sure what I’m doing most days.

But I’m not performing anymore. And that’s new.

I know, there’s irony here. I’m saying all this while looking into a camera, shaping it into a story. But this doesn’t feel like a performance. This feels like me.

No polish. No brand. Just me, saying something true, trying not to sneeze mid-sentence, and hoping Posey doesn’t start cleaning herself on camera again.

I’m just trying to stay real, even here. And that might not be a job title or a hefty paycheck, but it finally feels like something I can live with.

I don’t have a five-year plan. I don’t have a label that explains me.

I’m just learning how to show up as someone who doesn’t need to earn her place in the room.

It feels so damn honest. And so damn scary.

I used to sell a version of myself I didn’t even like. Now I just sell plumbing and the occasional trauma monologue, and weirdly, that feels honest.

But for the first time in my life, I’m not trying to get back to anything. I don’t miss who I was. And I’m not trying to define who I’m becoming. I just know I’m finally not disappearing to make everyone else more comfortable. I’m taking up weird, tender space, and staying loud about it.

Full video: https://youtu.be/QK2D8UwtkFw?si=737KjLZz-S3z1usQ

The other day, an acquaintance told me she was proud of me. And I froze. Like, froze. She’s proud of me? What, am I eight years old and just colored inside the lines?

It caught me off guard. That word “proud” felt...weird. But then it hit me: when was the last time I’d actually heard those words? And more importantly, why did it feel so damn odd to hear them? It’s a thing you hear a lot as a kid, right? But as an adult? It’s like it just...disappears.

That’s where we’re going today. Why does “I’m proud of you” hit differently as an adult? Why do we need to hear it—even when we don’t realize we do—and why does it sometimes feel so damn condescending when we say it?

The Friend Story: Why This Hit Me So Hard

So, back to my friend. She was proud of me for all the ways I’ve been hustling and pivoting, trying to claw my way out of unemployment and rebuild my life. And at first, I’ll admit it, I got a little wee bit defensive.

Like, proud of me? For what? For not falling apart? For not throwing my laptop out the window after another rejection email? What are we talking about here?

But then I stopped and actually let it sink in. She wasn’t saying it to be patronizing. She wasn’t talking down to me. She saw me—really saw me—and took the time to say, “Hey, you’re doing something hard, and I notice.” And once I realized that, I swear, I almost started crying.

Almost.

Now, my wonderful husband says “I’m proud of you” all the time. And don’t get me wrong, it’s sweet, it’s genuine, and I love him for it. But it doesn’t hit the same - not because his words aren’t meaningful. But, he’s in my bubble.

When she said it, it was like someone flipped a switch I didn’t even know was off.

Here’s where it gets weird, though. When I think about saying, “I’m proud of you,” it feels...icky. Like I’m suddenly this old sage on a mountaintop bestowing wisdom upon the peasants. “Oh, look at you, doing so well! Aren’t you precious!”

So, as I was working on this idea for this post, I was thinking “maybe this is just a “me” thing. Maybe others don’t feel like this? So I thought: “I’mma test this out! Let’s see what happens!” The outcome was a little surprising, but I’ll tell you about that in a sec.

Why It Sometimes Feels Condescending

Why does it feel condescending to say it? I think it’s because we associate pride with this weird power dynamic. Like, you’re in a position of authority, and the other person is below you, needing your approval. It’s like the verbal equivalent of pinching someone’s cheek and saying, “Good for you, sweetheart.”

I remember once trying to tell a co-worker I was proud of them for leading a project. But instead of just saying it, I blurted out, ‘I’m so … happy for you…Uh, you did...really good.’ I was so worried about sounding condescending that I ended up sounding like a malfunctioning robot.

But here’s the thing: When it’s genuine, it’s not about being superior; it’s about connection. It’s about saying, “I see you. I see what you’re doing, and it matters.”

The condescension is in our heads because we’ve been conditioned to think compliments come with strings attached.

Why It Feels Different Depending on Who Says It

Like I said, when my husband or a family member or something says it, it just hits different, and here’s why I think it is: These people are supposed to think you’re amazing, even when you’re sitting on the couch in your pajamas, not having showered for three days eating cereal straight out of the box while watching Hallmark movies.

But when someone outside your inner circle says it, it feels different. It’s like validation from the universe, not just your bubble. It’s proof that someone who doesn’t have to see your effort still noticed. And let’s be honest, we’re all so hard on ourselves that sometimes we need an outside perspective to remind us we’re not totally screwing this up.

Later, I’ll get into why saying this to someone ELSE can be just as powerful—maybe even more so. But first, let’s talk about why hearing it feels so weird in the first place.

Why “I’m Proud of You” Still Feels Weird

Hearing, “I’m proud of you” can feel weird. I think part of it is because we associate those words with kids—or worse, with that manager who thinks tossing out a “Good job, buddy! I’m proud of the work we’re doing here!” will make you forget they haven’t given you a raise in three years.

It’s also tied to our self-worth. If you don’t feel like you’re doing enough—or that you are enough—hearing someone say they’re proud of you can feel like an insult, even if it’s meant as a compliment. Like, what are you proud of? My barely-holding-it-together routine? Cool, thanks.

Like, I can’t even let myself accept a compliment without finding a way to diminish it.

Why We Need to Hear It Anyway

But here’s the truth: we need to hear it. Life is messy and hard, and we’re all just out here trying to make it through the day. Being told someone’s proud of you? It’s not about trophies or achievements. It’s about being seen. It’s about someone saying, “Hey, I notice you’re fighting battles I don’t even know about, and I respect the hell out of that.”

It’s not about authority or hierarchy—it’s about seeing someone’s effort and saying, “Hey, I notice you, and you’re doing great.”

Because sometimes, we just need someone else to remind us we’re doing better than we think.

So, yeah. I’m gonna say it!

I’m proud of you.

I’m proud of you for the things you think no one notices.

I’m proud of you for going to therapy, even if you had to white-knuckle it through the first session.

I’m proud of you for eating something green today, even if it was just a pickle on your burger.

I’m proud of you for surviving that meeting where someone said, “Let’s circle back,” for the 47th time. That took serious strength.

I’m proud of you for drinking water today, even if it was just because you ran out of Diet Coke.

I’m proud of you for forgiving yourself for whatever you think you failed at.

I’m proud of you for surviving—whatever it is you’ve been through, whatever battles you’ve fought, whatever scars you carry. Period. Full stop.

If this all feels a little too touchy-feely for you, hang tight—because I’m going to share why saying ‘I’m proud of you’ might actually be as much for you as it is for the person hearing it.

Why You Should Say It, Too

Now, let me flip this back to you: when was the last time you told someone else you were proud of them? Not just your kid or your dog, but an adult who’s out here hustling just like you?

I know it can feel awkward, or like you’re putting yourself on some imaginary pedestal. But say it anyway. Text it, shout it, scribble it on a sticky note. You might think they already know, but trust me—they don’t.

So, one day when I was driving my rideshare, the person in back was talking about a struggle that they were going through.

So, I looked in the rearview mirror, made eye contact with them and said “Look at you pushing through! I see you! I’m so freakin’ proud of you!”

In the 5am morning dark in my backseat they said, ‘No one’s said anything like that to me in years.’ I could hear that pain and surprise. Then they said “Yeah. I’m proud of myself too.”

And suddenly, I realized—it’s not about how perfect the words sound; it’s about showing up for someone in a way they didn’t know they needed.