I keep coming back to this question lately, what is the goal?

You get a good job and work hard. You decide to work hard and you stay healthy. You pay all the bills on time and you spend a good portion of your life working so you can afford the life you return to when the workday is over.

And somewhere in between all of that, you are constantly being reminded of everything you don’t have yet. The nicer kitchen, the better body; the vacation and the clothes. The organized pantry. The newer car. The version of yourself who apparently drinks enough water, wakes up at 5 a.m., has a skincare routine, makes six figures, never loses her patience with her children, and somehow has matching containers for every dry good she has ever purchased.

There is always something else waiting to be wanted.

And sometimes I find myself wondering: If I do everything I am “supposed” to do, what exactly am I supposed to arrive at?

But I am realizing, I don’t think there is an arrival.

A good job can give you security and exercise can give you more years and make those years feel better. Money can remove enormous amounts of suffering and a comfortable home can make everyday life easier. None of those things are meaningless. But I’m starting to think they are mostly infrastructure for a life. They aren’t necessarily the meaning of life.

And I think we confuse those two things constantly. We need money to live, we need a roof over our heads, we need to be clothed, have means to get places and all of this items are measured in a constant state of- yeah you need it, but it needs to be better. Heck we need health, so suddenly we aren’t just supposed to be healthy, we are supposed to optimize every inch of our bodies.

And there is always another level and another upgrade. Another thing that promises that perhaps this will be the thing that makes everything click into place.

You can spend your entire life improving the conditions in which you’re going to live your life and accidentally never get around to living it. That’s the part that gets me.

Because I don’t think fulfillment is a permanent destination. I don’t think one day you finally get the right combination of money, health, love, accomplishments and square footage and unlock some secret level where you wake up every morning completely content. I do not think we as a society really work that way.

We adapt. The thing we desperately wanted becomes the thing sitting unnoticed in the corner of the room or the thing we swore would finally make us happy becomes normal, and our eyes inevitably wander toward whatever is next.

Happiness comes and goes. There are boring Tuesdays inside beautiful lives. There is laundry inside beautiful lives. There are arguments and overdue bills and exhaustion and grief inside beautiful lives. Maybe fulfillment is much quieter than we have been taught to expect.

Maybe it is your kid saying something absolutely ridiculous at dinner and everyone losing it. Maybe it is making something simply because you wanted to see whether you could. Maybe it is realizing somebody feels safer because you exist. It is having someone who knows the whole complicated version of you and chooses to sit beside you anyway. It’s laughing so hard that for a few seconds you forget everything you were worried about. It’s helping someone. It’s learning something that changes the way you see the world.

Maybe that’s one of the closest things we get to arriving: I don’t need this moment to become anything else.

My children are obviously an enormous source of meaning in my life. But I don’t want them to have the responsibility of being the entire meaning of my life. Because they are going to grow. They’re supposed to. They’re going to build lives that belong to them.

And when they do, I hope there is still a me underneath motherhood. Someone curious. Someone creative. Someone who loves people. Someone who wants to learn things and make things and laugh at stupid things. Someone whose existence isn’t only measured by how well she took care of everyone else.

I want my children to see that, too. I don’t want to teach them that adulthood is simply forty or fifty years of responsibilities occasionally interrupted by a vacation. I want them to know that they are allowed to enjoy being alive.

And maybe that’s why I have also started thinking about the difference between a happy life and a meaningful life. Because they aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Raising children can be deeply meaningful while being unbelievably exhausting. Creating something can be meaningful while making you want to throw it across the room. Loving someone deeply is meaningful, but loving anything means accepting that someday you could lose it. Standing up for something important can make your life harder rather than easier.

Some of the things that have given my life the most meaning have not necessarily given me the most comfort.

So maybe asking “Will this make me happy?” isn’t always the right compass. Sometimes I think the better question is: “When I eventually look back at my life, will I be glad that this is what I spent it on?”

Because time is the currency underneath all the others. Money can be earned again. Things can be replaced. Homes can be renovated. Careers can change. But a Tuesday afternoon when your children are seven years old happens exactly once.

And that’s difficult to remember when you’re actually inside the Tuesday afternoon. Because there are dishes in the sink. Someone needs something. You’re behind on something. Your phone is buzzing. And somewhere on that phone is an entire economy designed around convincing you that the life you’re currently living isn’t quite enough.

That’s the battle I don’t think any of us completely escape.

We are living through a human experience in which we are constantly advertised a version of who we should be. Not just what we should buy. Who we should become. What our homes should look like. What our bodies should look like. What success should look like. What motherhood should look like. What happiness should look like.

And the cruelest part is that the finish line keeps moving. The moment we get close, someone can make money by convincing us we’re still missing something.

So I don’t think I’m ever going to become completely immune to wanting. I’m human. I will see someone’s beautiful house and wish mine looked like that. I will see someone’s success and wonder whether I’m behind. I will want things. I will compare. I will occasionally forget everything I just wrote here but maybe that’s part of the human experience too.

But I hope I’m gaining the tools to recognize it. To notice when a desire actually belongs to me and when it was quietly handed to me. To ask myself: Do I actually want this, or have I just been taught to want it? Will this improve my life, or will it simply give me another thing to maintain? Am I building a life I love, or am I building a life that photographs well?

And most importantly: What am I spending my life on?

Because I don’t think the goal is to stop wanting things. I don’t think the answer is to reject ambition, money, nice houses, careers, vacations or beautiful things. I like beautiful things. I want to improve my home. I want security. I want experiences. I want to accomplish things.

The difference I’m trying to learn is that those things can be part of my life without becoming the measurement of my life.

Maybe a good life isn’t one where you successfully accumulated everything you were told to want. Maybe it’s one where, little by little, you figured out what was actually worth spending your finite number of days on. Where you learned to recognize enough while the moment was still happening. Where you loved people while they were here. Where you made things. Where you noticed things.

Where you occasionally stood in the middle of your imperfect, unfinished, ordinary life and realized:

Oh. This is it.

Not the life I’m working toward. Not the life I’ll finally deserve once I fix everything. Not the life waiting on the other side of the next purchase, accomplishment, renovation or version of myself. This one.

And I know I will spend the rest of my life fighting against a world that is very good at making me forget that. Maybe we all will.

But I hope I’m getting better at recognizing the voice telling me I need more. I hope I’m gaining the tools to question it. And I hope that every time I get pulled back into the endless wanting, I learn how to find my way back.

Back to the people I love. Back to the things that make me feel alive. Back to the ordinary moments I will someday desperately wish I could visit again. Back to my own definition of enough.

Because I don’t want to spend my whole life preparing to live.

I want to notice that I’m already here.

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So I ran. I outran old houses, old versions of myself, old dreams, old fears. Or so I thought. But every time I stopped to catch my breath, there it was.

Quiet. Patient. Waiting beside me. Not because it had chased me but because it had never left.

You cannot outrun your own shadow. It doesn’t grow tired. It doesn’t lose your trail. It simply follows, asking for nothing except to be noticed.

For a long time, I hated that. I wanted healing to be faster. Cleaner. Farther away. I wanted one final sprint that would leave every painful memory standing alone in the distance.

Instead, healing asked me to do something far more frightening. It asked me to stop and to turn around. To look directly at the thing I’d spent years trying not to see. And when I did, I discovered my shadow wasn’t reaching for my throat.

It was reaching for my hand.

It wasn’t trying to pull me backward. It was carrying every version of me that had survived without ever being comforted. The frightened child. The overwhelmed mother. The anxious woman waiting for the next storm. The dreamer who learned it felt safer not to dream at all.

They had never wanted to haunt me, they only wanted to be found and maybe that is healing. Not learning how to run faster, but becoming the kind of person who can finally stop.

I’ve spent so many years trying to leave you behind. All this time, I thought I was running from my shadow. I never stopped to wonder...

what if my shadow was the one waiting for me?

Waiting for me to become gentle enough to stop calling it my enemy. Waiting for me to become brave enough to see that it had been carrying every frightened version of me until I was finally ready to carry them myself. Maybe healing was never about outrunning the dark.

Maybe it was always about becoming the light that knew how to turn around.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the phrase “just do it.” It’s one of those pieces of advice that gets handed out constantly. If you want to lose weight, just do it. If you want to clean your house, just do it. If you want to start a business, write the book, send the email, make the phone call, or change your life, just do it. And the thing is, I don’t entirely disagree. At some point, action does matter. At some point, we do have to take the step. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that “just do it” leaves out a huge part of the story.

I’ve been on this challenge for over sixty days now, and despite everything I’ve accomplished, I still have days where I feel lazy. Not because I’ve spent the day sitting around doing nothing, but because the thing I accomplished doesn’t feel big enough. Maybe I cleaned out a drawer instead of an entire room. Maybe I answered one important email instead of tackling my whole to-do list. Maybe I worked on a project for thirty minutes instead of three hours. Somewhere in my brain, there’s still this voice that measures the value of my effort by how dramatic the result looks at the end of the day.

The strange part is that if I look backward instead of forward, the evidence tells a completely different story. My house looks different. My routines look different. My mental health looks different. The way I talk to myself is different than it used to be. There are things I do today without thinking that would have felt overwhelming not that long ago. If someone else were looking at my life from the outside, I think they’d see progress immediately. Yet somehow, when you’re the one living inside the process, it’s much harder to see.

I think part of the problem is that we tend to focus on the visible action while ignoring everything that had to happen before it. People see someone start exercising consistently, but they don’t see the years spent learning how to stop tying self-worth to a number on a scale. They see someone finally clean their home, but they don’t see the grief, depression, overwhelm, executive dysfunction, or mindset shifts that came before it. They see the person who started the business, but not the years of self-doubt, failed attempts, learning, and rebuilding confidence. The action becomes the headline, but the internal work is often the entire story.

That’s why I’ve started to realize that “just do it” is both true and incomplete. Yes, eventually you have to do the thing. But getting to the point where you’re able to do the thing often requires a hundred smaller changes that nobody sees. Sometimes it requires support. Sometimes it requires knowledge. Sometimes it requires therapy, medication, encouragement, stability, rest, or simply enough time to believe you’re capable of trying again. Those pieces matter too.

What I’ve been noticing lately is that my brain has a habit of moving the goalpost. The things that once felt impossible become normal so quickly that I stop giving myself credit for them. I adapt to my own growth faster than I recognize it. What felt like a huge victory a month ago now feels like the bare minimum. Instead of appreciating how far I’ve come, I focus on how far I still have to go.

And I think that’s why progress can feel so invisible when you’re the one experiencing it. You’re measuring today’s effort while everyone else is seeing the distance you’ve already traveled. You’re looking at the one drawer you cleaned today while someone else is noticing that the entire house looks different than it did two months ago. You’re looking at the one email you still haven’t sent while someone else sees the dozens of things you’ve already accomplished. You’re standing so close to your own growth that sometimes you lose the ability to see its shape.

I don’t think I’ve fully figured this out yet. In fact, I think I’m writing about it because I’m still in the middle of learning it. But maybe that’s the realization I’ve been bumping into lately. Progress isn’t always found in the big, dramatic moments we imagine. Sometimes it’s found in the quiet accumulation of small choices. Sometimes it’s found in becoming the kind of person who keeps showing up, even when the effort feels insignificant. And sometimes the growth isn’t in the task itself. Sometimes the growth is in realizing that the person doing the task today is already different from the person who couldn’t do it yesterday.

I’m making money. I’m making things happen. My husband will be home more this summer. I am transforming our house little by little, and I think this might be the first summer in a long time where I’m not carrying constant panic in my chest. And honestly, that feels scary to admit out loud.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much of my life has been shaped by fear. Not fear of trying, because I’ve always been willing to try. I built a business from the ground up. I pushed myself constantly. I kept showing up.

But I also turned down opportunities. I played small when I shouldn’t have. I hesitated. I convinced myself not to go further sometimes because deep down, I was terrified of failing publicly. Terrified of messing up, forgetting something, disappointing people, or proving every bad thing I secretly believed about myself.

And that’s such a painful way to live because it means every opportunity comes attached to shame before it even begins.

Looking back now, I don’t think I understood myself very well yet. I was still learning my own weaknesses. Still learning how my brain worked. Still learning that burnout, overwhelm, procrastination, and shutting down did not make me broken.

But at the time, every mistake felt enormous to me. If I forgot something, it felt catastrophic…and honestly I still feel this. If I wait until the last minute, I see it as proof I am failing. If I get overwhelmed, I feel it means I am incapable.

I am realizing I was failing, but not in the way I think. I was failing to believe in myself. Failing in the fact that I am so overwhelming with everyone else’s life and problems and not my own.

The thing is, I did not grow up in stability. So much of my adulthood has been shaped by wanting to create stability for my children. I wanted them to grow up feeling safe. Supported. Loved. I wanted them to have soft places to land. I wanted them to experience a kind of consistency I didn’t always have.

But recently, I realized something that honestly made me emotional. I deserve that life too.

Even if I didn’t get it as a child, that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve it now. I think growing up in instability has quietly made me believe love is something I provide, not something I fully get to experience myself.

But I don’t want to live like that anymore.

I cannot say yes to everything. I cannot run myself into the ground trying to fix my whole life overnight. I have to listen to my body. I have to rest before burnout forces me to. I have to stop treating myself like a machine that only deserves love when it is productive. Life is full of bumps and setbacks and messy middles. Boy I know that first hand. I’m living it right now.

But for the first time in a long time, I also feel hopeful. Not because life suddenly became perfect or because nothing hard is happening. But because I finally believe I am allowed to have a good life too. Maybe healing is finally looking at the younger version of myself, the one who spent so much of her life bracing for disappointment, and telling her:

This life is for you too.

The peace and the stability. The laughter in a clean home. The slow mornings on my front porch with a cup of coffee. The safety. The love. Letting her know she did not miss her chance to be cared for just because nobody taught her how sooner.

It is not too late, she deserves this life, and I plan on giving it to her.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people usually only see the “peek” of what someone is carrying. They see the missed laundry, the messy room, the exhaustion, the emotional reaction, the overwhelm. But they do not see all the invisible weight stuffed underneath it. And I think a lot of us are walking around trying to force entire storms into tiny spaces inside ourselves just to keep functioning. Pressing down on it all, trying not to let anything spill out because once it does, people are quicker to judge the mess than ask what made it so heavy in the first place.

This poem came from that feeling. The feeling of carrying too much for too long and realizing maybe healing is not learning how to carry it better. Maybe it is finally letting yourself unpack some of it without shame.

Some of us are carrying storms
in suitcases of the mind,
pressing down with all our weight
just to keep the zippers lined.

Knees against the bursting seams,
praying nothing slips,
holding back the flood of things
we hide behind our lips.

And people call us messy
from the outside looking in,
never seeing all the battles
we have fought beneath our skin.

They see the piles of laundry,
the dishes in the sink,
but not the thousand heavy thoughts
that barely let us think.

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This weekend felt really emotional for me in a way I honestly was not expecting.

We finally started the garage and got all the trash out, and while I know to some people that probably just sounds like cleaning, for me it felt so much bigger than that. Only a few weeks ago, I would stand there looking at that space and feel completely crushed by it. Not just overwhelmed, but ashamed. It felt like physical proof of every hard thing we have been through these past few years. Every financial stress, every burnout moment, every season where survival took priority over keeping life looking neat and manageable. I told myself it was laziness. I was an awful person. An awful mother.

I genuinely believed that pile said something terrible about me as a whole.

Before I posted the video, I debated cutting the pile in half first. I thought maybe if I cleaned up enough of it beforehand, people would understand it better or judge me less harshly. I wanted to soften it. Make it easier to look at. Easier to explain. But I kept thinking, “That is not the truth though.” This is what it looked like. This is what struggling looked like for us. And while this was my horror and my nightmare, I had this feeling deep down that maybe someone else out there needed to see another person admit they do not have it all together either.

Honestly, I was convinced I was about to lose a massive amount of followers. I prepared myself for videos mocking me, for people calling me lazy or disgusting, for strangers online using one glimpse of my life to decide who I was. But I kept coming back to this thought that if even a small handful of people felt less alone because I posted it, then maybe it would be worth it.

What I did not expect was the response I actually got.

Instead of judgment, thousands of people started sharing their own stories with me. Their own messy rooms, garages, laundry piles, depression nests, grief, exhaustion, burnout, survival mode. So many people quietly carrying shame that looked different on the outside but felt exactly the same on the inside. And I think that is what hit me the hardest. Realizing how common struggle actually is and how many people are silently drowning while trying to pretend they are perfectly fine.

I think the reason that shame felt so unbearably heavy for me was because I was carrying it completely alone. I had isolated myself inside of it for so long that I convinced myself nobody could ever understand. But the second I opened the door and let people see it, the weight started shifting. Not because my life suddenly became easier. We are still paycheck to paycheck. Things are still breaking around us. Life is still hard and stressful and uncertain sometimes.

But I do not feel alone anymore.

And I honestly think that was the thing I needed most this entire time.

Not perfection. Not some magical moment where everything suddenly becomes organized and healed and easy. I just needed to know that struggling does not make me lazy. That drowning under life for a season does not make me a failure as a human being. Sometimes life just keeps kicking people while they are already down in the trenches, and people carry more invisible weight than we ever realize.

But maybe there is something powerful about looking at each other and saying, “Me too. I understand. Let me help you carry some of this.”

Maybe that is how people finally start climbing out.

One trash pile at a time.

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Not waking up transformed
with sunlight in my chest,
but standing in the chaos
and trying my very best.

Because life can become heavy
in quiet, unseen ways,
a thousand tiny burdens
stacked through exhausting days.

The dishes turn to failure.
The laundry starts to shout.
The clutter whispers softly,
“You’ll never figure this out.”

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Even in moments where I should feel proud, my brain rushes ahead trying to prepare for what could go wrong next. It feels safer somehow. Like if I expect disappointment first, it won’t hurt as badly when life inevitably throws something hard my way.

The oven stopped working on Mother’s Day and immediately my mind said,
“See? Something always happens.” That thought probably comes from years of surviving. Years of feeling like every time I could finally exhale, something else broke. Another bill. Another setback. Another thing needing fixed. Another reminder that life doesn’t stop moving just because you’re tired.

But I caught myself this time.

The oven breaking is not some grand sign that everything is falling apart. A lot of the things we own were bought around the same time, which means eventually they will wear out around the same time too. I suppose I am realizing that’s not failure. That’s life.

I think anxiety has convinced me that problems erase progress. That hardship cancels out happiness. That if something hard happens, I should immediately stop feeling proud of myself. But I don’t want to live like that anymore.

I don’t want every beautiful moment overshadowed by fear before I even get to hold it fully in my hands. Because there are good things happening right now and there are moments I am proud of. Moments I worked hard for. Moments I wished for during seasons where I felt completely stuck. And I deserve to feel those moments.

Not forever.
Not perfectly.
But honestly.

Part of this journey is learning that happiness does not mean life suddenly becomes easy. It means allowing myself to experience joy without immediately searching for the catch. Because life will always have interruptions and things will break.

But maybe healing is not learning how to never expect hardship. Maybe it’s learning that hardship and happiness can exist in the same room and neither one erases the other.

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But lately, I’ve started realizing that maybe the most human parts of us are the parts we try the hardest to hide.

The exhaustion. The shame. The hope. The dreaming. The moments where you stand in your kitchen surrounded by dishes and laundry and somehow still ache for something soft and beautiful anyway.

That’s what this space is for.

This is where I’m going to share the pieces of myself that usually stay tucked away in late night journal entries and half written poems in my phone notes. The thoughts I have while folding laundry. The feelings that show up while cleaning the house. The strange grief of becoming someone new while still carrying every version of yourself that came before her.

Some of these pieces will be poetry. Some will just be me unraveling thoughts I can’t seem to keep inside anymore. I don’t think I’m writing because I have life figured out. I think I’m writing because I’m still trying to understand it while I’m living it.

And maybe you are too.

Maybe you’ve also felt like life became one long cycle of surviving and responsibility. Maybe you’ve looked around at the mess and wondered if everyone else is handling things better than you are. Maybe you’ve carried shame for things nobody else can even see.

I want this space to feel like sitting across from a friend at midnight finally admitting the thoughts you usually swallow during the day.

Not perfect.
Not polished.
Just honest.

And if these words make you feel a little less alone in your own becoming, then maybe sharing them was worth it after all.

So if you are here, truly, thank you. It means more to me than I probably know how to explain yet, and while I do not expect many people to be reading these thoughts, maybe…just maybe the people who need this most will get exactly what they need from this.