This week I noticed a sense of panic arising. The panic telling me that if I stop publishing, I lose whatever ground I’ve gained. That I haven’t been here — haven’t been anywhere — long enough yet to have earned a break. At least not a break that hasn’t been cushioned by working ahead first, buying myself permission in advance by writing and scheduling extra articles ahead of time. And yet I also haven’t been at it long enough to have built that cushion.

I haven’t published this week. It’s only Monday, so I know this isn’t the end of the world, but I had been writing ahead of time in the previous weeks, knowing what I was going to say, having time to let articles marinate before actually hitting publish. I haven’t posted Notes in a week. I haven’t even read anyone else’s Substack articles in the past week, and contributing to this community is genuinely important to me — it’s not a nice-to-have, it’s part of why I’m here at all. What I have done is quit caffeine. That’s it. That’s the bare minimum I’ve managed: detoxing from caffeine, staying alive, staying present enough for the people who need me, and not much else.

This is me dipping my toe back in. Choosing not to let too much time pass, the way I did with YouTube — a couple of months gone and the longer that passes, the more I overthink my return. The honest truth is, sharing the messy middle is exactly what I intended for this publication. I just didn’t fully understand, when I said that, that it would sometimes mean sharing that showing up is harder than I anticipated. That I’d be standing in the space between just take it easy and keep pushing, trying to find the narrow middle path of doing what I can, in the most honest way I have available to me. No pretty bow. Just messy.

I didn’t write an article last week. I haven’t put anything on YouTube in a couple of months. Not because I don’t want to, and not because it doesn’t matter to me. This matters so much to me. As do many things. Such is the reality for many of us who have the audacity to go for the thing we want, when there are so many other things we’re “supposed” to be doing instead.

Here’s my current juggling act:

I’m doing freelance client work, which I’m tremendously grateful for.

I babysit my grandson two to three days a week, which I’m also grateful for — and which comes with its own particular flavor of overwhelm.

I have a nine-year-old son who isn’t a tiny kid who needs me every second, but isn’t a grown adult either. He still needs me, and I want to be there for that.

And underneath all of it, I’m dealing with chronic health issues that are genuinely perplexing me — systemic inflammation, exhaustion, pain, brain fog — that I’m trying to research and solve in the spare pockets of time I don’t actually have.

Somewhere in there, I’m also supposed to be creative.

I suspect a lot of creators doing this alongside an already full life know exactly this feeling: when something’s got to give, it’s this. When there just aren’t enough hours in the day, and something has to be the thing that doesn’t get done, its the thing we’re creating. The thing that doesn’t have a guaranteed ROI, yet.

We all hope that eventually the thing we’re building will be what creates breathing room in the rest of our lives, instead of competing for the little room we have left. It hasn’t happened yet, and there’s no guarantee of when, or if, it will. I know this because I’ve watched so many Substacks, YouTube channels, and podcasts start strong and excited, only to hit a stretch where the growth isn’t as smooth as hoped — and the creator keeps pushing for a while, and then, eventually, lets it go. I don’t say that to sound depressing or defeatist. I say it because I get it. I’ve been there.

There’s also a smaller, sillier layer of guilt sitting on top of all this: the sense that people will notice I’ve been gone, that they’ll feel like I didn’t show up enough. Which is a little absurd, if I’m honest with myself — I’m new here. It is highly unlikely that anyone has been tracking my one week of silence the way I have. But I guess a little delusion that people might miss me isn’t the worst thing 😝

The Scramble for the One Right Answer

I keep scrambling for the single move that will fix everything — the tide that raises all the ships. Some days it’s: maybe I need an ADHD diagnosis so I can get medication that might allow me to finally focus. Other days it’s: maybe I just need to overhaul my diet to perfection and get the inflammation down. And on the days when I’m not thinking clearly, it’s: maybe I just need to hang on by this thread and keep pushing until the money comes — except the thread is getting dangerously close to breaking, and I’m not sure I’m even capable of that particular route anymore.

I gave up coffee last week. If you’ve ever quit caffeine, you know the malaise that follows — that flat, foggy, low-grade despair that mimics depression closely enough to make you question everything else you’re feeling. So yes, this article is skewing toward the heavy and the hopeless. I know that. I’m tired of my own heaviness too. I want so badly to write something that offers hope, and right now hope is not entirely within reach. The positive spin isn’t available to me today. Maybe giving up coffee is the thing… the tide that will raise all the ships, once I get over this hurdle.

The Part I Keep Coming Back To

But here’s what I keep landing on: the whole point of this publication was never about only sharing about the audacity it takes to create the life I want. It was also to share the truth of what it actually takes to get there. And right now, the truth is the messy middle — the part everyone talks about but when it comes down to actually doing it, we all come face to face with the fear that showing our raw, dirty truth will actually be too much.

I can’t wait to get to the other side of it. But I’m not there. I’m in it, and it’s the hardest it’s ever been, and I’m not giving up.

I also know — even though it doesn’t feel true in this exact moment — that 43 years old is young. I have decades ahead of me, assuming things go the way I intend them to. And I refuse to let this stretch become the beginning of a downslide instead of the messy middle of a climb.

Values Don’t Wait for You to Feel Ready

This is what burnout actually looks like when you have values that require you to keep moving anyway.

My values say: move your body, show up for the people who need you, don’t abandon your health, keep creating.

My body says: lie down, watch another episode, let it all wait. Most days, the easiest thing in the world would be to disappear into my current rewatch of The Walking Dead and call it self-care.

And there’s still something in me — a tiny spark that’s quieter than the burnout, but not gone — that keeps whispering just keep going. Not perfectly. Just the bare minimum, just showing up, just not letting the silence become permanent.

So that’s what this is. This is me showing up when I would genuinely rather take a nap, or let The Walking Dead autoplay indefinitely. This is me committing to finally putting a handful of finished meditations up on YouTube in the next few weeks instead of letting “good enough” sit in a folder collecting dust while I wait to feel ready. This is me refusing to let more time slide by while I stand outside the version of myself I want to be showing up as. And yes… this is me, talking my ideas out and letting Claude do the bulk of the writing, because I am doing the best I can with the tools I have available, and the alternative is just going quiet.

I don’t have a tidy takeaway for you today. I don’t have the tide that raises all the ships — I suspect that as I keep showing up, eventually the answer will become more clear. What I have is this: a nine-year-old, a grandson, client deadlines, a body that’s asking hard questions, a coffee headache, and a stubborn, flickering refusal to let this be the end of the story.

If you’re in your own version of the messy middle right now — juggling the people who need you against the thing you’re still trying to build — I see you. We’re not behind. We’re just in it. Keep going anyway.

“We” were packing up the house to move.

I say “we,” meaning me and whoever was involved, although it’s never fully clear who that is.

The house was enormous. Many hidden rooms — rooms I dreaded looking into, for fear of how long they’d been ignored. For fear of how much had been stored in there. And if you went through a room, there was often a room behind that room, and one behind that, going deeper and deeper, and the further you went, the more stuff was hiding. Everywhere I turned, there was another room I had forgotten.

Part of me just wanted to ignore some of the deeper rooms. Leave them for the landlord to deal with, pay people to deal with, knowing I’d get the bill for whatever it cost him to clean it all up later. We were, after all, leaving without notice anyway.

In the dream, I believe we were moving states. There were points in the dream where I felt the grief of that, sharp and aching — why had I agreed to leave when everyone I loved was here? The reason seemed to boil down to there being no other option. I couldn’t sustain a life here. It no longer fit.

What made this dream different from the many others of its kind that I had been having, was that we had a huge team of people helping us pack the “truck.” I say “truck” because every time I looked at what was already loaded, it looked more like an enormous warehouse than a truck. I found myself wondering if I was imagining how big it actually was. I kept wondering if it would even fit everything, if we really did empty the whole house — every hidden room, years of hidden things. I also wondered how it would be possible to drive with something that big. Would it fit on the roads? The enormity was beyond what I could comprehend.

As I walked through the house, there were people in almost every room, working. In one of them, I found my friend Danielle packing up a lifetime’s worth of Christmas decorations. Decorations that went as far back as my childhood. I started to tell her we didn’t actually need to bring all of it — and then realized she’d already packed most of it. And then it occurred to me that some of what she was packing, I had thought was long gone. Maybe it would be nice to see it all again. Though if I hadn’t seen it, I would have just let it go. I didn’t need it.

I’ve felt a sense of this with many parts of my past. So much pain over many years, easier to discard than to sift through and keep what was good and let the rest go. The burden of carrying it all has taken it’s toll.

There were children’s beds in several of the rooms, and I decided I wanted all of them to come. I’m not sure why. Just in case, I guess.

I saw a small playhouse and started to ask my son if he wanted it — but before he could answer, I’d already decided to bring it anyway. I think I was trying to hold onto his childhood, even though it felt like it was mostly behind us already. The parts I had built were harder to let go of.

I don’t know exactly when each of these dreams happened, or which detail belongs to which night. But I can take a guess at what’s been going on underneath all of them, because it’s the same thing that’s still going on now, in my actual life.

Financial struggle. Watching my kids move into their own lives, one by one. The fear of eviction sitting somewhere in my chest more nights than I’d like to admit. An ex moving back in, temporarily, out of necessity rather than reconciliation. And underneath all of it, a feeling I’m still trying to name: not that my chance has passed, but that I was never handed a map for what comes after the thing I spent my first two decades of adulthood building toward.

From childhood, the goal post seems clear enough. Learn from the people raising you. Grow up. Build a career, build a family, do right by your kids. That’s the story of what life is supposed to be all about. At least it’s the only one I seem to know. The one everyone seems to be living toward. But no one ever told me the next part.

I’ve never once heard a narrative for what it looks like once you’ve done the thing — once the kids are grown into who you’d hoped they’d become. Once the building part of life is, in whatever imperfect way, done. Once the kids are grown, on their way, building their version of this life, while I, the older generation, step back, a side character now, the extended family.

Without a vision for what comes next, it can feel like we’re approaching an ending when perhaps what it actually is is more like uncharted territory. I trust there are countless more experiences out there to be had. But there’s also a finality to reaching this point that I didn’t see coming — because for twenty years, the whole story was about getting here. To this moment.

It makes sense, in that light, that my mind keeps building the same house. A house too big to fully know, with more stored inside it than I can account for, that I have to leave without enough time to properly go through and look at everything that went into building this life.

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But something in this version of the dream was different, and I noticed it even while I was still in it.

In earlier versions of this dream, it was just me. Sometimes my kids. Sometimes my ex. Just us, scrambling, running out of time, trying to carry a house’s worth of a life out the door on our own backs. This time, there was a whole team. Movers. Friends. Family. People in almost every room, already working before I’d even gotten there. I wasn’t scrambling. I was walking through, surveying it all, half in disbelief at how much help had simply shown up.

I don’t know if I’ve ever let that be true while I’m awake — that I don’t have to carry all of it myself.

And still. Even with all that help, even with a truck like a warehouse and a dozen hands packing alongside mine, there was another dream this week, closer to the surface, foreshadowing the next question.

In that one, I was moving into a new house. Not packing to leave — arriving. I’d already put some of my things into what I knew was going to be my room. And I had come to bring more, but as I searched to find my room again, I couldn’t. I went up stairs and down stairs, in and out of room after room, looking for the one that was supposed to already be mine.

I never found it. I woke up before I did.

Maybe that’s the more honest shape of where I actually am. Not still stuck in the old house, and not yet arrived in the new one either — somewhere in the hallway between them, with a room somewhere in the building that’s mine, that I haven’t been able to find yet.

But maybe finding the room was never supposed to be the whole point.

I think there’s something I see now about the twenty years spent building — the career, the family, the life you’re supposed to be constructing. Somewhere along the way, we land on the idea that we’re an island of one. That our family is an island of one.

Individualized.

The nuclear family.

Built on our own.

Sustained on our own.

Busy in our own lives, taking care of our own, trying not to be too much of a burden on anyone else. Us against the world, quietly, without ever deciding it on purpose.

Maybe that’s part of what this stage is actually for. Not just grieving what’s ending, or bracing for what hasn’t arrived, but unlearning the idea that we were ever meant to do any of it alone — even the finding of the room. If there’s a wisdom available in getting older, maybe it’s this: realizing we were never as much of an island as we believed, and that the interconnectedness we spent two decades too busy to reach for can hold us, and even help us find our way, in a way our own capability never could.

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If you’re somewhere in the hallway too — between a life that no longer quite fits and one you can’t fully see yet — I made something for us. Making Peace With Uncertainty is a 5-day meditation journey for learning to be here, in the not-knowing, without needing to rush toward an answer. A practice in loosening our grip on what comes next, returning to what’s true right now, and trusting that we don’t have to find the room before we’re allowed to feel at home in ourselves.

Making Peace with Uncertainty

16 years ago I almost lost the only woman who has been a mother to me throughout most of my life. I met her when I was 16 and pregnant when we worked at Hobby Lobby together. We used to spend our days crumbled on the floor of the seasonal aisles in fits of laughter over “who knows what” day after day. She got into as much trouble at that job as I did.

Her kids were right around my age, and my life at home wasn’t great. When my daughter was born, she was there, and she drove home through a blizzard that night. Not long after, I moved in with her and her family. She became, and has been almost the entire time, my family. Her kids, my siblings. When I go “home” to visit, its to see this friend and the entire family. 26 years now that we’ve been friends.

But I digress…

16 years ago, my friend took me, my first husband, and my two kids in to live with them in their house. I had just been laid off, and we were looking for a fresh start, so we made the move back to Colorado from Utah, into my friend’s home while we got on our feet. My husband and I had a room, and my kids had their own room to share. We were so grateful.

The problem was, I hadn’t been honest to anyone… myself included, about how bad things were with him. His drinking had been out of hand for a while, and I didn’t love the way he treated me, but from what I could tell, it maybe wasn’t that bad. But now that there were witnesses, it started to become pretty clear that things were as bad as they felt, and it wasn’t just me making things bigger than they actually were.

I started to vent to my friend every day about various things my husband would say or do. I was looking for her validation… “this is as bad as I think it is, right?”

She watched it. Day in and day out. She affirmed what I had been thinking. The drinking was problematic. He was controlling. His jealousy colored most of our interactions, and led to his need to control only getting more intense. And then there was the day when she gave him money to run to the store, and he snuck a bottle of whiskey in the house that he had bought with her money but lied about it. I was mortified to say the least.

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For the most part, everyone in the home tried to stay out of the relationship challenges we were having, trying to let me come to my own conclusion. One day I tried to tell him I thought I was done, and he threatened that if I left him, I would never see my son again. I wanted to fight, but I didn’t know how I could with the fear that he could take my son. So I put on a happy face and carried on.

The conversations and the venting with my friend continued, and the tensions in the home escalated. She lovingly shared resources for women’s homes, and places where I could get protection for my kids and I from this man. She pointed out that he was abusive. I agreed that he could be mean, but abusive felt like a stretch. I didn’t want to wrongly accuse him of something that awful. That didn’t feel fair.*

The night it all finally broke was an ordinary one, right up until it wasn’t. I had taken the kids to a friend’s house, my husband had been home on his own, and he was drunk and angry when I got home. Yelling and accusing me of doing something to betray him, I reassured him over and over that I had just been at my friend’s house, while our kids played. Finally, when she couldn’t handle listening to the yelling anymore, my friend came bursting into the room yelling, “ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH!” and she told him he was no longer welcome in her home.

But here, in this moment, watching it actually happen??? I wasn’t strong enough. I felt bad for him. He had nowhere to go, and it was my fault. I had brought him to this state where he had no family, and now he was getting kicked out. I couldn’t leave him there. So I took my kids and left with him, to the great astonishment of my friend.

We went to a hotel that night. Shortly after, we were in an apartment, and starting our new lives in Colorado. Us against the world. It did not get better. The drunken fights continued. His lying, controlling, and jealousy all stayed strong. And this time I was alone. I didn’t have my best friend. The woman who had been a mom to me for over 10 years.

Several years later, circumstances all aligned in a way that allowed me to finally have the courage to leave, and once those 4 words came out of my mouth, of my own accord, I knew I could never take them back. It was my truth, and not honoring that was no longer an option.

My friend and I eventually reconnected, some time after the divorce. It took a few years to rebuild back the trust, but ultimately we both knew what we had done wrong, and we both expressed regret for how we had let that come between our friendship. To this day, it has been many years of weekly multi-hour phone calls because this friendship is one that is worth the investment. I am so grateful that we both had the courage to come back together after what had felt like the greatest hurt of our lives.

Looking back, I realized I desperately wanted someone to tell me that it was acceptable for me to leave that marriage. I even had wished at times that he would have just hit me, because then the decision would have been easier. (I know that that should have been sign enough on its own) And yet, when someone actually did tell me, “Nicole, this is bad. You need to leave this marriage.” I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I needed to come to that decision on my own.

No one could validate my feelings enough to make the decision easy for me. Ultimately, it came down to me learning to trust myself, choose myself, and have the courage to validate my own feelings.

I wish someone could have handed me that trust sixteen years ago. They couldn’t. But I can hand you the practice I built to get there — the same one I still use.

* It wouldn’t be until many years later when I finally found the courage to watch the Netflix series Maid, after seeing so many people post on Facebook about how hard it was to watch the abuse, when I would finally get why my friend said what she said. My first impression of that show, in episode 1, 2, 3… was, when is the abuse? He hasn’t even hit her. Then it finally started to click.

At the bottom of this article, I’m going to share with you a meditation I created to help you hold space for your emotions, lesson content for self-validation, and a worksheet to guide you into learning to be your own source of emotional validation.

For less than the cost of a monthly self-help book that will end up in the pile by your nightstand with all the other well-intentioned books you mean to read, you’ll unlock the Audacity Chronicles experience — a growing library of tools and resources designed to help you heal from your past, put yourself first, and develop an unshakable sense of self trust and deep love for yourself.

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Now let’s dive into the self-validation resources…

NOTE: This isn’t a quick read, this is an involved practice. I encourage you to bookmark this and come back to it as you move through all the pieces. I promise you, practices like what’s included here will have the power to transform your relationship with yourself and the way you show up in your life.

We were never taught to trust our own emotional experience. So we go looking for permission — Was I wrong to feel that? Would anyone else react this way? — and we collect reassurance like evidence, hoping enough of it will finally make us feel secure.

It never does. Because as long as your emotional truth depends on someone else agreeing with it, one disagreement is all it takes to knock you back into doubt.

Self-validation is the shift out of that. It’s recognizing that your feelings are valid and acceptable because they’re true for you. This does not have to mean that you expressed them perfectly, or that you’ve polled all your friends, and the consensus is that you’re “right.”

Feelings aren’t a declaration of who’s right and who’s wrong. They’re signals. Data. Part of being human.

This isn’t either/or thinking — I’m right or they’re right. It’s both/and: both of you can have valid feelings. That’s what makes room for compassion instead of defensiveness.

Self-validation sounds like:

• “I feel hurt — and that matters.”

• “I understand their side, and my feelings still make sense.”

• “I don’t need anyone’s approval to feel what I feel.”

You don’t need a jury. You don’t need someone else to confirm what’s already true for you. You’re allowed to feel it, honor it, and be on your own side — while still holding someone else’s truth in your other hand.

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO LESSON

My Emotions Are Safe With Me: A Self-Validation Meditation

A short, 8-minute meditation to help you settle into the core belief of this module: your feelings don’t need anyone else’s agreement to be real.

Instead of searching outward for permission — was I wrong to feel that? would someone else react this way? — this practice guides you back to your own hand, your own heart, your own breath, as the place your feelings get to land safely.

Use this whenever you need a quick reset — before a hard conversation, in the middle of an emotional moment, or anytime you catch yourself waiting for someone else’s verdict on what you feel.

📝 Exercise: Self-Validation Workbook

In this practice, you’ll move through the Self-Validation Activation Worksheet to gently explore, name, and honor your emotional experience. Instead of looking outward for permission to feel what you feel, this will guide you to understand why your feelings make sense, hold space for both-and truths, and reclaim your inner safety — right here, within yourself.

Each step is designed to help your nervous system learn:
My emotions are valid. My emotions are safe with me.

Self Validation Activation Worksheet

66.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

He pulled off his headset, looking panicked, and quickly apologized, worried. I sat in shock for a brief moment before a giggle escaped as I processed the silliness I’d just witnessed. Relief spread across his face in a delicious little grin as he crumbled into a fit of laughter. He proceeded to mock himself several times over the rest of the evening, reenacting his tumble.

He’s a funny kid. I haven’t been laughing for a while.

It’s not that I usually snap at him when he makes mistakes. But when he wants to show me something, my typical response has become a deep breath, a few seconds of my full, undivided attention while he shows me whatever trick he wants a witness for, and then a polite smile as my eyes go back to my computer. I used to be the mom who’d get down on the floor and lose it laughing at his jokes. Somewhere in the last three years, I became the mom who’s doing her best to survive each day. Telling myself that when things get better, I will be different.

That’s the thing this season has stolen from me that I resent the most. The money of course has been tremendously difficult, my ability to enjoy being with the people I love has been the most heartbreaking cost.

Here’s how I got here…

I’ve been a single mom for 6 years, trying to make it on my own, mostly with freelance work, since I never really “fit” in the corporate world in a way that felt like I could get anywhere stable. Freelance paid more, for the most part, and gave me hope that with enough work, I could make things get better. It also gave me the time freedom to try to build my own business on the side, hoping that would offer more abundance and space over time — and to fit in hours here and there while my son napped or played, so I could still be around him most of the time.

It seemed like a win/win for a while. As my skills grew, my earnings grew, until I was almost comfortable. Not entirely, but mostly.

Then 3 years ago, my main client — the primary source of my income — had to cut my pay by 40% due to revenue decreasing. It was meant to be temporary, just until we could bring the revenue back up. The workload didn’t decrease along with the pay, and thanks to a lifelong tendency toward people-pleasing, a friendship with this client, and a sense that I owed them for how much they’d helped me in the beginning, I didn’t push back. I hoped that together we could bring the business back stronger than ever, and that soon, money would no longer be a worry. That’s when I started asking my landlord for extensions to pay rent a few weeks late.

A year and a half later, and countless trauma dumps from this client about not knowing if we’d make revenue, month after month after month, I finally made the hard choice to leave the dynamic, hoping to find something more stable. Something more stable did not come along. Whether through my unconventional work experience or a genuinely low sense of self-worth, it has been downright impossible to find a job that covers all of what it takes to afford to live.

Rent continued to be late. I told myself repeatedly how lucky I was to have such a gracious, understanding landlord.

Month after month, I found myself scrambling — always somehow making it through some combination of help from family, client packages that came through in the nick of time, and a lifelong skill of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” that my dad taught me throughout a childhood spent in poverty. You get pretty clear on which utilities will keep running when the bill is late, and which ones will shut off immediately.

At one point, I made the heartbreaking decision to let my car get repossessed. I knew there’d be long-term legal and financial consequences, but I needed to cut my losses and bring my “minimum required to live” down as much as possible. I went over 2 years without a car before someone gifted me an old beater that has been the most tremendous gift. There’s a whole next level of financial shame… not being able to drive your kid and their friend to the park, and the countless other things that not having a car takes off the table.

This journey has shrunk my life in countless ways. I stopped going to dance lessons, which had brought me what felt like life-altering joy, because I didn’t have a car to get there, and couldn’t justify the $15 anyway. I started dialing back time with friends as my energy became more and more depleted, needing to prioritize enough rest to keep fighting this battle.

I hate this version of me. Life is passing me by, and despite my constant efforts, I’m not making the situation better. I haven’t raised my income, even with what feels like unending sacrifice — working harder, hustling more, trying to force myself to never stop until things improve. After more than 3 years of this, I’m starting to wonder if they ever will, at least through the methods I’ve been using. Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong.

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As a lifelong student of manifestation, I’m no stranger to the idea that our energy affects our reality. But when you genuinely don’t know if you’re going to get evicted in a few weeks, trying to believe things will get better, visualizing the results you want, acting as if — all of it can start to feel like checking out. So I pulled away from even considering that I could manifest a better experience, and tried to redirect that energy into something that felt more like control: pure hustle. I told myself I’d just need to push — work more hours, take on more client work, look for more clients, write, create meditations, eat better, move my body again.

What actually happened is I landed in a complete nervous system freeze. For 2 weeks straight, I felt incapable of doing anything.

So I slept. I rested. I asked for help getting meals prepped. I asked for help entertaining my son.

And then I found myself laughing when he did something that, just a couple months earlier, would’ve gotten a heavy sigh and a stressed “you need to be more careful.” Maybe the rest led to this. I lost my stranglehold on all the fear and problems I was managing, and I just fucking gave up. Not by choice — by sheer collapse.

To laugh again felt like a gift, and a reminder.

My actual financial circumstances haven’t changed yet. I still need to spend next to nothing, still need to lock in and work as much as possible. But it finally occurred to me: I don’t need to keep letting this season of struggle steal the simple joys that don’t cost anything more than a little attention.

And let’s be honest… even in the hustle, it’s not like I’m actually working all the hours I spend “on it.” A lot of that time goes to stressing, researching, scheming, future-tripping on worst-case scenarios, spiraling on the uncertainty. That’s the part I’m choosing to steal back — not because the money problems are solved, but because the money problems weren’t the only thing stealing my laugh. The spiral was.

If you feel like you can relate — if uncertainty has you checking, overplanning, and running future scenarios that haven’t happened yet instead of being present for the people in front of you — I made something for you, and for me. It’s a free 5-day audio practice called Making Peace With Uncertainty, built from the exact tools that got me laughing on that couch again: naming the open loop your mind is trying to close, coming back to what’s actually true right now, cutting the noise down to what matters, and meeting yourself with grace instead of another sigh.

You don’t have to wait for your circumstances to change to get your laugh back. You just have to steal it back first.

Making Peace with Uncertainty

Can you relate to losing the ability to enjoy life’s simple pleasures during a particularly hard season? You’re not alone.

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Don’t let your life slip by while you disappear into everyone else’s wants, one yes at a time.

I want to tell you about a few women. I’m not going to use their names, because these aren’t really about any one specific woman — this is about all of us. You’ll probably recognize yourself in at least one.

There’s the young woman in her twenties who gets a text from a friend about going out tonight. She’s tired. She doesn’t want to go. But somewhere in her body, the thought of her friend being disappointed, or possibly even upset with her, feels heavier than her desire to do anything else. So she goes. Not because anyone forced her to. Because it was easier than the discomfort of letting someone down. She keeps telling herself that she’s going to take a break, that she wants to start making time for something else, but then weekend after weekend, someone reaches out, wanting to hang out with her. She feels wanted. Valued. And yet tired. But she goes. Is it FOMO? Or perhaps something deeper. A void that’s getting filled by being chosen, and the fear that if she doesn’t keep being there, she may not keep being the one who’s chosen.

There’s the wife whose husband has very clear opinions on what he wants, and how he wants to spend his time. And when it comes to her saying she wants to try something she’s had on her mind for a while — a dance class perhaps, or a long time dream of traveling to Greece — he just doesn’t seem to be receptive. He’s not being intentionally dismissive, and she files what she wants away for another day. “It’s okay,” she tells herself.

Then there’s the mother who has a project or a dream. Something that’s been calling to her for so long. Something creative, something that’s hers. The book she’s wanted to write. The business idea that she’s had on the shelf for years. She keeps telling herself that she’s going to start working on it soon.

Tonight.

This weekend.

Next month, once things calm down.

But the kids need her, her partner has a lot going on at work, her friend is going through something and needs her too, and it’s always, always easier to set her own thing down than to hold it while everyone else is needing her in some way. It would be selfish to not put other’s first. Wouldn’t it?

None of these women are doing anything wrong. And in so many stories like these, nobody’s a villain — not the friend, or the husband, or the kids. Most of the time, nobody’s even asking as much of us as we think they are. Of course there are the scenarios where someone is actually blatantly expecting us to put our needs on the back burner, but more often than not, the insidious truth is that we’re volunteering to put ourselves on the back burner. Whether through modeling, or negative experiences of letting someone down and feeling what that felt like, we learned to choose the happiness and comfort of everyone else over our own.

Maybe you watched your mother do the same thing, and it was simply the unspoken “way things were.” Maybe you learned early — through being praised for being easy, or through the subtler lesson of what happened when you weren’t — that accommodating was how you stayed safe or kept things peaceful, or even just made sure everyone was happy and you were loved.

And so you keep choosing the smaller discomfort — disappointing yourself — over the bigger one: disappointing someone else.

The challenge with these small trades is that over time, they become our way of being. There’s no single moment where you decide to disappear into everyone else’s needs. It happens one yes at a time, one set-aside dream at a time, until one day you look up and twenty years have gone by, or thirty, or forty — and you’re not sure exactly when you left the room of your own life. You were just always the one who could be counted on to put herself last. And it worked, in a way. Everyone got taken care of. Except you.

In Bronnie Ware’s infamous article on The Regrets of the Dying, she notes the top 5 regrets of those who are confronting their own mortality, and 2 of the top 5 seem to be deeply related to the sneaky tendency to self-abandon.

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. She states that this one is the very most common regret. When people look back on their life and realize that they didn’t do the things or honor the dreams that meant most to them. And why does this most often happen? Because we’re doing what others expect of us. Whether that be to meet their needs over our own, follow in a path that they saw fit for us, or simply there was limited space for pursuing what we wanted, so we made the unofficial self-sacrifice to let what we wanted slip away for someday… that never came.

I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. When you spend a lifetime trying to put peace and ease in relationships above all other things, inevitably some things don’t get expressed. Resentments build. And relationships are never afforded the depth that could bring true fulfillment when someone is keeping what they feel to themselves for fear of causing discomfort in the other.

I have seen self-abandonment have many expressions in my life, from the major ones, like the time I met a man from a dating app with the specific intention of exploring sexually, and yet upon meeting, I realized I wasn’t actually into him, but I brought him into my bed because I was afraid of hurting his feelings, to the far less consequential, yet still meaningful, like the times I agreed to go out late with friends on a work night, when I knew I was way too depleted to function at my best for work the next day. The uplifting thing to note about this range is that we can practice on the small things… the ones that require far less courage, and it naturally spills over into the bigger areas.

If any part of this is landing in your chest right now — that specific, quiet ache of recognizing yourself — I made something for you. A short affirmations meditation called “Stop Self-Abandoning: Affirmations for Healing,” for women who are learning to come back home to themselves after years of disappearing. You can listen in the video below. Take the affirmations that resonate most and let them travel with you through your days.

Breaking the cycle of self-abandonment doesn’t mean that you will always get your way, or that you’ll start bulldozing those around you to put your needs first. In fact, sometimes you won’t even necessarily get your way… sometimes after expressing your truth, you’ll find that a conversation leads to a compromise, or that there is a legit reason for someone else’s needs to come first. The difference will be that you’re finally allowing yourself a voice. You’re bringing yourself into each relationship. This is where dynamics can start to shift.

So where do you start? Not with a total life overhaul. Not with quitting your job or ending your marriage or becoming someone unrecognizable overnight. You start small, and you start with practice, because taking up space is a muscle, not a decision you make once.

Practice a small no or ask, on purpose. Not the biggest one you’re avoiding — a small one. Decline the invitation you don’t want. Order what you actually want, even with the 5 modifications that make your kids feel embarrassed. And be so bold as to not apologize for it but say “thank you” instead. Before I say no to someone now, I remind myself: their disappointment is theirs to navigate, the same way mine is when I get a no. And the truth is, I’m always okay — so they will be too. It’s not our job to manage everyone else’s feelings.

Let someone be let down, and don’t fix it. This is the one that takes the most practice. When you disappoint someone, resist the urge to over-explain, over-apologize, or manage their feelings for them. Let their reaction be theirs. You can be kind and still let it be uncomfortable. I found practicing this in text messages gave me the space to navigate my own feelings about it in the privacy of my own space. Rather than facing someone while disappointing them, which put me on the spot to hold my truth and could sometimes be too much, until I was more practiced at it, texts gave me space to sit with my feelings in private, without external pressure staring right at me. I would send a message that said I wasn’t available, and wished someone the best, and then practiced the restraint to not try to offer a full back story, or start trying to offer alternatives, and simply let my answer be the answer

Put your thing on the calendar, not just on your mental list. Whatever it is you keep meaning to get to — the project, the walk, the hour of quiet — give it a time, not just a loose back up plan. Speak about your plan and let the potentially affected people know, before a conflict comes up, so that they are prepared, and you’ve practiced carving out the space before you officially take it.

You are allowed to take up space in your own life. It doesn’t have to wait until it will be convenient for everyone. You don’t have to wait until everyone else is taken care of. You get to do it now — messy, imperfect, sometimes selfishly, still-learning. Now.

That’s where it starts.

What you get when you become a paid subscriber?

Self Love Activation, my program for coming home to yourself — modules, sleep hypnosis, and worksheets on self-advocacy, boundaries, and validation — is part of what your paid subscription unlocks.

I published my first meditation on Insight Timer on July 1, 2025. It was a track I’d created for a one-on-one client. She loved it so much she shared it with a close friend, and told me she had a feeling other people would want it too. She suggested I put it on Insight Timer.

I’d been meditating on the app for 10 years, and loved it, but it had genuinely never occurred to me that I could publish there — I think some part of me assumed the teachers on it had been invited, or vetted, or were simply more qualified than me. I certainly didn’t feel ready to call myself a “meditation teacher” and put my work out into the world. But thankfully, I’d reached a point in my life where I was actively challenging the thought that I wasn’t ready yet, in any area that thought showed up, so I took her advice, set up a teacher profile, and published the meditation. A couple weeks later I published one more sleep meditation, then let it sit for a few months before I thought to publish again.

Join me on Insight Timer

Around the same time, I’d started posting sleep meditations, hypnosis recordings, and videos on YouTube — also since July — and that was slowly growing too. People seemed to genuinely appreciate what I was making. My consistency there finally took off with a sleep hypnosis recording on Abundance that, to this day, has almost 2,100 watch hours. It occurred to me that I could repurpose those same recordings for Insight Timer, so I chose to get a little more consistent — picking the ones I was most proud of and publishing them there too. In total, I published 9 tracks to Insight Timer in 2025.

Turning point — I actually make money

In January, I got my first payment from Insight Timer: $22.80. That covered everything I’d made for all of 2025 — and it was the first time I’d ever made money from something I created without hustling a launch to sell it. I remember just sitting with that. It unlocked something I hadn’t let myself want before: the chance to create without constantly trying to sell, and to let the people who resonate with my work simply enjoy it — without me having to contort myself explaining why it would change their life.

In the months since, I’ve made it a point to publish a free or premium track almost every week, and even got inspired to put together a small 5-day course. My income has grown every month, from a thrilling-but-tiny $20 that proved the concept was real, to three months straight over $100 — which is starting to feel like an actual contribution to my monthly needs.

• February: $25.62

• March: $26.27

• April: $28.39

• May: $125.46

• June: $122.69

• July: $156.73

These aren’t huge numbers. But the growth is exponential, and consistent, with very little effort on my part. My daughter had a baby in April, and I took six weeks completely off from creating or publishing anything, anywhere — and it still grew. And the wildest part, even as I write this: I have 306 followers on the app. 306. After years of trying to crack the code on other platforms and never once seeing modest growth translate into anything tangible in my life — especially on Meta, where growth has always felt like a hamster wheel that demands I perform for likes, constantly questioning whether this is really how I want to contribute to the world.

Why we need to create in spaces that are aligned…

YouTube did work, technically — but I took a similar break there, due to personal circumstances and genuine burnout, and the channel has basically gone quiet. I’m okay with that. I’m not giving it up, I just haven’t figured out what I want it to be yet. Everyone says you have to stay consistent, keep pushing out content, stick to one thing. I agree with that — and I also think it takes real experimentation to find what your “one thing” actually is.

As a single mom of three, navigating a lot of transition right now, still needing to earn an income that supports myself and my youngest (my two oldest are grown and out of the house), the constant hamster wheel of the platforms I’ve tried before — the performance of them — has just never fit who I am. Insight Timer offered something different, and it’s been genuinely validating. Healing, even. I’m noticing Substack offers something similar, which I’ll get into in a second.

Facebook and Instagram (I can’t speak to TikTok — I barely open it, what can I say, I’m old 🤣) have a way of taking someone who is genuinely trying to create and put themselves out there, and making them feel unseen, unimportant, and unsure why they’re even doing this. I know plenty of people build meaningful communities on those platforms. But the vibe never fit me, and my own persistence became a double-edged sword — I felt bad about myself for posting and having it fall flat, and bad about myself for not posting enough, because clearly that was the real reason nothing worked. Trying to condense something that actually means something to me into an eye-catching hook, then fighting to hold someone’s attention on an app LITERALLY DESIGNED to keep them addictively scrolling — that was never a game I wanted to play. I just thought I had to, in order to matter at all.

Substack is healing a lot of that for me. Not because I’m growing dramatically faster, or making a lot of money (although I did get my first paid subscriber a couple weeks ago 🥹🙏) — but because of how people actually engage here. This is a place for people who want depth. Who want to be moved, to sit with something, to actually experience it. Now that I’ve started peeling myself away from the lie that you have to be on social media to be relevant or to grow anything — I’m returning to myself a little. I love long articles. I love something that slowly invites me in, instead of competing to pull my brain in thirty directions the second I open the app.

So back to Insight Timer. I think it’s time we normalize growth that’s slow but meaningful — finding the places where our people are actually hanging out and participating, instead of being treated like a commodity, competing with a million directions for someone’s attention. If I can go from $0 a month, to $20-something, to over $100, in the span of a few months — then I believe it’s not wildly out of the question that if I keep showing up, one of these days I might actually be living a life where what I create fully supports me.

That’s a dream I’m willing to keep putting drops in the bucket for.

As you likely know, Substack recently partnered with an AI-detection tool. The subtext is hard to miss: if you used AI to help you write, you owe your readers a confession, or at least an asterisk.

I’ve felt that sting. I’ve used AI in my writing — a lot, actually — and for a while I made myself wrong for it. I felt ashamed for using AI to help me articulate my ideas long before this tool came around. In fact, it’s part of why I haven’t been consistent in publishing on Substack for the past two years, because I didn’t have the capacity to write the way I thought I was “supposed” to write — without getting help. Because it’s morally superior to grind every idea out of my head myself, one clumsy sentence at a time, than to take the jumbled mess in my brain and let a tool help me shape it into something someone else can actually read. Almost like the deeper sentiment is: if you can’t clean your ideas into a pretty package entirely on your own, you haven’t earned the right to share them.

But then I had a conversation with ChatGPT last week that had nothing to do with writing. It was about ice cream bars.

*Before we go any further… I want to note that even in publishing this article, which is oozing with my own personal thoughts on this topic, crafted with 20ish minutes of voice notes talking out what I wanted to say, paired with pages of personal written thoughts from my own personal experience of binge eating, and then hours of back and forth with Claude, when fully pulled together, I scanned for AI text and it was over 90%, and I felt shame. I read through and made a few edits, and then it was 94% AI. I thought… OMG this is really going to discredit me and my voice. But ultimately, I think this is the whole point. There are humans behind so many of these highly AI written pieces, doing their best to share what’s on their heart. And even when we know all that went into it, we are risking someone making an immediate judgement on the sincerity of the work, based on a faulty AI scanner.

Binge eating is something I used to do in harder seasons of my life. For the most part, I’d left it behind. But these last few months, it’s been creeping back in. Not “lately” like a bad Tuesday — lately like months and months, and I’ve felt genuinely perplexed by my own behavior.

I tried gripping it with control first. Full restriction. Anti-inflammatory everything. Purge the body of what I’ve let in. That turned into a scary kind of self-talk — the demonizing, good-versus-bad way of thinking about food and, underneath it, about myself. I know better intellectually. It didn’t matter. The old pattern was already running the show the way it had done in my 20s.

So I swung the other way. No fighting it this season. If the chips happen, they happen. That didn’t work either — it just meant five trips to the freezer for another ice cream bar, or a family-size bag of chips gone before I noticed I’d started.

Then I tried the third thing we always try: the perfect meal plan. Beautiful groceries, real structure, a fresh start. And I couldn’t sustain it, because I am burnt out and depleted in more areas of my life than I can count right now — you can read the money journey I’ve been writing here if you want the fuller picture of why.

Control. Permission. Structure. None of it touched what was actually happening.

So I finally just talked to ChatGPT the way I’d talk to a therapist, or a coach, or a friend at 11pm. Not the “give me a meal plan” or “give me a tough-love pep talk about the ice cream bars” kind of conversations I’d been having over the past couple months.

Just:

here’s what’s bothering me

here’s what I keep trying

here’s what happens when it fails

here’s what’s sitting underneath all of it that I can’t fully name.

It was a huge, chaotic brain dump — money stress, intermittent fasting videos, perimenopause questions, carnivore-diet Reddit threads, manifestation concepts around how I can just BE the kind of woman who doesn’t struggle with this crap, all of it tangled together into one overloaded system that was already carrying a life crisis. I didn’t need one more expert take. I needed help finding the through-line in my own tangle.

What came back, gently, was something I already half-knew and couldn’t quite see: I’m in survival mode. Concepts like difficulty with executive function were introduced, and suddenly it’s making a lot more sense, and I’m getting a clearer picture of what’s going on for ME. Not what would be going on for another 42 year old, or what autoimmune issue is most likely the cause of not only my inflammation, but also my inability to comply.

Just the truth… the realization that sitting down to plan and prep and feed myself, day after day, has started to feel like more than I have capacity for. Even an easy 15 minute meal felt out of reach. And reaching for the fastest, easiest, most immediately gratifying thing isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system asking for relief in the only thirty seconds it can access.

Somewhere near the end of that conversation, one line landed and hasn’t left me since:

We act like it only counts if we did it the way we’re “supposed to” do it. A protein shake from Costco is somehow morally inferior to a steak we cooked from scratch — as if the nourishment is completely discounted if it didn’t follow a very strict set of standards, and anything that leans too heavily on “the easy way” is simply not good enough.

This segued into what’s been going on inside my head about using AI in general for my writing.

If everyone on their moral high horse keeps telling us we’re wrong for taking the path of least resistance — with food, with writing, with anything — eventually we just stop trying at all. Hence me telling myself that I can revisit Substack when I have more capacity, for 2 years. Capacity didn’t change, but my grace for myself did.

So here’s where I’ve landed: everybody needs to back off, and let us use the tools we actually have to do the best we can from where we actually are.

Since I stopped fighting that, my meals aren’t perfect. But they’re real meals instead of a family bag of chips eaten standing at the counter. I sit down and eat one thing instead of heading back to the pantry 5 times. And with the writing — I’m forming fuller, more articulated ideas with less AI now, not more, because it gave me a place to unpack the chaos long enough to find my own thoughts underneath it.

Using tools to make things a little easier isn’t the opposite of effort. It’s sometimes the only way to finally do the thing you’ve had on the back burner, even though it matters soooo much, when you’re already juggling seven plates and putting out three fires — and still trying, somehow, to get an idea out that actually means something to you, except there’s no room left. Because, well, life.

Tools like this level the playing field. They let us hear from people with wildly different sets of life experience, instead of only from the ones privileged enough to never have to shove their ideas onto the back burner.

Here’s the belief underneath all of it, the one I’m still untangling: somewhere along the way, I internalized that hard work is the cost of admission for a good life. That I only get to claim what I want to create if I can point to the uphill climb it took to get there. That my worth is proven by the visible struggle, not by the outcome, and definitely not by how lightly it came.

Which means the things that come easily — or easier than we were told they were supposed to be — get quietly discounted. Not celebrated. Discounted. As if ease is evidence we didn’t really earn it.

At one point in that same conversation, I said something about a sentence I was trying to write, and it reflected back: “I don’t want to wrestle every sentence into existence.” That line stopped me. Because that’s exactly the fantasy I’d been sold — that the wrestling is the proof of the work’s worth. That a sentence which arrived without a fight is somehow less meaningful.

We’ve been told otherwise, plenty of times, by plenty of people we admire. Thought leaders and writers I respect have said versions of this for years — that support isn’t cheating, that ease is often just good design, that suffering isn’t a prerequisite for meaning. I’ve read it, nodded at it, even taught pieces of it to my own clients. And yet, the belief still runs deep enough that I felt shame reaching for a protein shake and shame running pages of my own thoughts and ideas through AI, in the same week, for the same underlying reason.

That’s how deep this one goes. It doesn’t untangle because you read one good essay about it. It untangles in small permissions, repeated on purpose: accepting the help that’s actually in front of you. Taking the easier road when one is available, instead of manufacturing a harder one to feel like you’ve earned the right to arrive. And letting go of the urge to go on a witch hunt for anyone else who isn’t doing their work the hard, uphill, purist way either — because that policing was never really about them. It was the same belief, aimed outward instead of in.

I don’t use AI, or the protein shake, or the rotisserie chicken, to avoid the hard things. I use them so there’s anything left in me for the hard things that are actually worth it — the parenting, the coaching, the writing that’s true, the showing up for the people in my life who need the real version of me, not the version who spent her last ounce of energy proving she did everything herself.

I refuse to make myself, or anyone else, wrong for reaching for the support that’s in front of them. Not with food. Not with writing. Not with any of it.

There’s another way that AI has helped me in my writing, and it has nothing to do with commas or creating ideas where there were none. It’s when it calls out my tendency to hedge. It’s the sentence I write, delete, and rewrite three times so nobody could possibly misread me or take offense. The extra clause explaining what I meant so no one thinks I’m being dramatic, or difficult, or asking for too much. Even in the way I soften a text to a guy I’ve been seeing when I realize I’m actually not interested anymore but I feel guilty to admit it. That’s not a writing habit. That’s a lifetime of people-pleasing and self-abandonment, dressed up as diplomacy or aiming for perfect communication.

Learning to say the true thing once, without padding it, has been some of the most quietly healing work of my life. And it was the robots who caught me doing it in almost unending spirals around trying to find the right words to say anything that felt scary to just come right out and say. It shows up when I stop over-explaining a boundary to a client. It just showed up a few paragraphs ago, in a line I almost softened before you’d even read it.

Every one of those moments is an example of how getting help, in the form available to us, can help us become more ourselves, more fully expressed in a way that’s true to us. The rotisserie chicken instead of the from-scratch dinner because in this moment, I am a mother, navigating life challenges, and executive function has become out of my reach at the moment . The paragraph I let Claude help me shape instead of wrestling alone, because while I’m putting her heart into sharing myself here, I’m also navigating life with a young child, growing awareness of undiagnosed ADHD paired with perimenopause, and more work than I can seem to keep up with, and the alternative to getting the help from AI is that I would have just put this dream of writing on a shelf for another time when life feels easier and I have more space. The one honest sentence instead of the three padded ones. None of it was ever about taking a shortcut. It was about finally believing I didn't have to earn the right to be understood.

Harder was never holier. It was just the story we were told so we wouldn’t ask for help.

If any of this landed — the food, the writing, the hedging, all of it — here’s the part I want to say straight to you: I don’t think you need to have it fully figured out before you’re allowed to create. I don’t think you need the perfect system, the cleared calendar, or the sentence that arrived without a fight. You’re allowed to use every tool available to you, ask for the kind of help that actually helps, and just do the damn thing anyway.

In my one on one program, Publish Your Damn Work, I guide clients through a 30-day push to stop holding themselves back waiting to have their whole vision mapped out, and just do the damn thing instead. DM me for details, or sign up here.

At first, when I made my reentry to Substack 2 weeks ago, I had just come out of a deeply profound mushroom journey in which I asked the mushrooms to show me what I was missing and where I was stuck, because the actual truth of that moment, 2 weeks ago, was that I was close to eviction. My rent was 1 week late, I needed to ask for another extension, and I had no idea where the money was going to come from, and there was no end in sight. What the mushrooms revealed to me was that it was time to get radically honest about where I actually was. At first that honesty felt like defeat — like I was being asked to lie down and accept the consequences of the situation I had gotten myself into. The shame felt absolutely crushing as I considered that this was where I was at, and I didn’t know how I could fix it. It looked quite certain that I’d lose my home, and it would take my son down with me. That was devastating. But the insight kept working on me for days afterward, and it slowly turned into something else.

I asked the mushrooms explicitly to show me the next right step. I knew that asking for the whole path out was more than what was likely to be revealed, but 1 next step felt reasonable. I had a deeply grounded vision of myself coming clean with myself as I began to share my story. So on Day 1, with the mushrooms still running through me, I got honest, and I published.

By day two, the honesty had lifted just enough weight that I was ready to express my fear and shame to loved ones, and the heartache of feeling the failure poured out of me. That lifted a bit more weight which led to the next shift. I realized that the radical acceptance the mushrooms were inviting me into wasn’t about accepting the consequences as though it was a final decision — it was about accepting what it was actually going to take to get out. Those are two very different postures, and the second one was what finally got me moving.

So I reached out. I found every past client whose contact info I still had, and I told them I was available. The whole time, a voice was running commentary: I haven’t talked to this person in years, they might be offended I’m reaching out. I don’t even know if they got results working with me. Who am I to think I have anything to offer them? I reached out anyway.

One of those clients was thrilled. She told me she’d quietly stepped back from her own business, and it wasn’t until we started working together again over the past couple of weeks that she realized why — it hadn’t been fun without me in her corner. Having me back had brought her creativity, and her excitement, back with it. Another client isn’t able to work with me right now because of her own situation, but she told me she wants to find a way back, simply because of what working together gives her.

That’s when it landed: I have clients who will find work to do with me, even when they don’t actively have a need — not because they need something fixed, but because they want to work with me. That’s not nothing. That’s data.

What “Make Yourself Smaller” Gets Wrong

My initial act of radical honesty with myself brought me to the 12 steps I personally learned in Al-Anon, and the first step being “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” Well as someone who has loved multiple alcoholics in my life, and been on my own journey with Al-Anon, I have found a great deal of relief in the 12 steps, and I’ve seen value in applying the 12 steps in other areas in which we feel powerless. As it turns out, there actually is an Underearner’s Anonymous, so I have begun actually working with step 1 through this context, which then also led me back to the book Overcoming Underearning by Barbara Stanny. Finally, I am finding and prioritizing tools and work that will get to the heart of this particular life lesson I am navigating.

Here’s what I keep bumping into: almost all the standard advice for not having enough money is some version of make yourself smaller. Spend less. Restrict more. Cut the luxuries. And I’ve done that, to the point that it’s shrunk my whole life. I feel guilty buying my kids birthday gifts because I can’t spare the money. I also feel guilty not buying them gifts, because I should be doing better than this by now. I feel guilty spending $20 on Taco Tuesday with friends. I also feel guilty letting money keep me from showing up for the relationships I actually value.

Sometimes that advice just misses the mark. It’s aimed at people who are overspending, not at people who genuinely aren’t earning enough — and there’s so little advice for that second group, because the problem isn’t a budgeting problem, it’s a psychological one. And if all we ever hear is “make yourself smaller,” it doesn’t stay contained to spending. It bleeds into earning too. We take jobs that pay half what we need. We undercharge for our work. We don’t even throw our hat in the ring for opportunities that we could be amazing for, because some part of us has already decided we’re not good enough to be considered.

The More Empowering Truth

I want to be honest about something else, too, because it would be too easy to end this on just my low self-worth. Here’s a real question I’ve had to sit with: why am I so passionate about inner work when it’s been so hard to sell, and when it hasn’t yet gotten me all the way out of the one life challenge I’ve circled for decades?

Because inner work is exactly what gave me the courage to put myself out there at all. It’s what let me create things from my own passion without having every step mapped out first — and I’m proud of what I’ve made. It’s what let me leave relationships that were quietly killing me. It’s what taught me to speak up for myself while still holding unconditional love for the people involved, including the ones who hurt me. This money journey is just the arena my inner work is still working in. That doesn’t mean the work doesn’t work — it means there’s more for me to learn here, and I’m staying committed to that no matter what. My life, as hard as this chapter is, is already richer in ways that would have looked completely unattainable 5, 10, 20 years ago.

I think back to the 25 year old version of me, in a relationship that had quietly become about control, not partnership — while my kids were watching, and I want to go tell her how proud I am of her that she managed to find the courage to find her way out of that. And I think back to my daughter when she was 15, and I was 32, telling me that she felt that she needed to protect me, because I couldn’t protect myself. I hate that that was ever our story. But it’s also proof: a challenge that feels insurmountable right now isn’t a life sentence. It’s taken years of work — hers and mine both — for her to fully rest in knowing I’m okay. But she does now. If that circumstance could change, this one can too.

Where I Land

We live in a world of highlight reels, and highlight reels do something sneaky to us: they make us assume everyone else has their whole life together, in every arena, all at once. So when we’re sitting in our own mess, we hold back the parts of us that are genuinely magnificent — because the dark cloud of what we’re still struggling with feels too heavy to let anything shine through it. We think: who am I to shine, when I’m still living through this ugly, painful part?

But that’s the lie. Your broken pieces and your magnificent pieces were never mutually exclusive. They’re both true, at the same time, in the same body, for basically all of us, basically all the time. The version of you that’s still in the mess is allowed to be the same version of you that’s actually extraordinary. Stop waiting for the mess to clear before you let yourself be seen. It might not clear for a while. Shine anyway.

I spent so much of my life wanting to do a thing that I somehow could not just fucking give myself permission to do.

There were so many completely logical reasons… I had young children, bills to pay and jobs that didn’t pay enough, busy seasons, an aging parent — and the argument to wait until a better time seemed like it made sense on paper. But the thing about life is, it just keeps lifing, and a better time never comes. The more fed up you start to get with yourself around the fact that you wish you had started years ago, doing the thing you always said you wanted to do, the more you start to see the less logical, more internal factors of resistance pop up.

The nagging fears of what people will think, or your garden variety imposter syndrome, or the questions like “can somebody please just tell me what niche to pick to so I can finally start doing the fucking work I want to do” start to point at something deeper. That core fear that you aren’t good enough or special enough to live the life you want, and that if you can just find a way to get that certain thing that that you seem to be missing, then maybe… just maybe, you can prove yourself worthy of the full expression it takes to finally show up and do the thing you’ve longed to do for far more years than you’d like to admit.

I’ve never been one to just accept the way things are and follow the rules in life. I’ve known I’m here to do something beyond just the typical path to the life we’re supposed to live. But… and this is a big BUT… I have let the world’s dialogue of what you can and can’t do limit me because all the while as I’ve beat to the tune of my own drummer as my dad used to say, I’ve also had a near constant voice in the back of my head telling me that the things I want in this life aren’t actually realistic things to want.

Frustratingly, for myself, and for the people who love me, I struggled for far too long to just pick one path or the other. Never fully audacious enough to rebel in the way my soul longed to, but never fully compliant enough to just let the vision of something more go and just follow the typical path to a conventionally happy and resourced life.

We try on these different options, trying to find the one that will stick and make the dream we want feel plausible. From a very young age, I wanted to be a writer. I spent my very early years creating funky little rhyming poems that, in adolescence shifted to sharing the darker parts of me that I needed to explore. But the constant dialogue of well meaning parents had me quite certain that a creative path like that of a writer was a certain path to poverty and plain and simple, it wouldn’t work.

In 2010, I began reading blogs and thinking…. OMG THIS IS IT! It opened my mind to the idea that maybe there was actually a way to pursue my dream of being a writer after all. And then I found myself sitting on the sidelines, unclear what I would even write about. So I set out to find what would make my voice worth sharing, and along the way, I actually lost sight of the dream all together for awhile. Trying on different dreams and paths, hoping one or another would eventually fit. Setting the writer dream on the back burner, for “a better time.” Maybe when my kids were older, when I made enough money to have more free time, when I finally knew myself enough to know what I wanted to say in the world.

That journey took me all over the place… various MLMs, a life coaching and hypnosis certification in 2016, and then spending the next almost decade turning to various marketing and business gurus to tell me what to do to make that path work.

So after what must have been at least the 10th program that walked me through defining “exactly who my ideal audience was, and exactly what she was struggling with” and countless Instagram Reels saved on how to master the perfect hook to grab said audience’s attention, I realized I could no longer sit in circles with other entrepreneurs reciting our elevator pitches to each other and pretend that any of that actually mattered as much as we thought it did. And I finally started doing the thing I should have done all along.

In a pivotal mushroom journey, I found myself asking the mushrooms to just tell me what I should make or talk about, so I could finally move forward. And they explained to me that it was time to just begin. There was no right answer. It was time to stop spending so much time trying to get certainty about the outcome of what I would make that I kept myself on the sidelines.

So I started creating. Just something. ANYTHING.

I started creating sleep meditations for YouTube and Insight Timer, and designing healing journeys based on my own healing journey into finding the courage to create. I began walking myself home to myself, in the most cliche, and yet fully embodied way. And the more I created, the more I found what felt like blockages began to shake loose. More wanted to flow through me. Sleep meditations felt like a safe and easy doorway to finding my voice which got the juices flowing, but then it turned out there was more I wanted to say.

I realized that the act of creation wasn’t the thing you get to do once you figure out who you are and what you have to contribute to the world, it was actually the whole freaking point. And you don’t get to find out what you’re going to create in this life by mapping it out in your head or in your planner before you actually start putting it out into the world and see where it takes you.

That’s what this manifesto is all about. After literal decades spent chasing certifications, and pretty packages, and reasons to give me permission to do the thing I wanted from the start, to write, I’m frustrated by the amount of time I wasted trying to find the perfect blueprint for the unconventional life I was trying to build. I don't actually believe any of it was wasted — the journey always has meaning, even in its detours. But I wish I had given myself permission to be messier, publicly, and show up without having it all figured out, long before I finally did.

Even in the process of writing this manifesto I’ve found parts of myself that I didn’t know were hiding. I’m finally seeing the garden begin to take form. Sure seeds have been sprouting here and there for a while, giving way to beautiful little blooms that are lovely in their own right. But the garden never had what she needed to fully become her wild and beautiful self as long as I was stuck in the drawing room trying to put together the perfect blueprint.

I think back to the 16 year old finding solace in poetry in a world that didn’t make sense to her but being told that was a waste of time, and the young mother trying to find the courage to leave a marriage that was breaking her, while discovering blogs that gave her hope and made her think there could actually be a way that she could still pursue her dream, and I wonder how much heartache I could save her from. Heartache for all the years when she longed for something that she just couldn’t allow herself. For all the years that she tried to search and contort to find the thing that would make her finally feel good enough to do the only thing she ever wanted to do for her. I want to hug her and tell her she’s wonderful and to just put one foot in front of the other. I want her to know that perfection is not the cost of admission for the work she wants to do.

So if I could leave you with one thing… If I could go back and tell my 25 year old self one thing, it would be this…

do it messy

do it inexperienced

do it ugly, fat, and with a sloppy background

push through the discomfort of putting the not fully formed version of it out in the world and let it breathe. See what it becomes when the world works it over and it has the space to be received and evolve.

Please don’t waste one more year waiting to FINALLY do the thing that’s been on your heart for far too long.

You get to do whatever the fuck you want, and it can change as many times as you change. And until you give yourself permission to be seen in all the messiness that is a human evolution, you will keep costing yourself years of the life you think you want more than anything.

This show did not disappoint on that front. I was moved. I was inspired.

I also found myself confronted with a thought I’m not proud to have thought…

The show opens with Jennifer Garner’s character finding out that her husband has died in a car accident, and rather quickly it cuts to 6 months later, drawing the picture that she’s spent the past 6 months - after her husband’s death - in a state of grief and the dysfunction that comes with not knowing how to live in a world that no longer has someone you thought would be in that world with you for many years to come.

And here’s the thought that came to mind for me… What a privilege it must be to have the resources to break when life does its thing and works you over the way life can sometimes do, and not be forced to keep pushing because your lack of money never stops, no matter what life is throwing your way.

Money. Fucking money.

Anyone who says that money isn’t everything has not known a life constantly on the edge of ruin, questioning if there will be a roof over yours and your kids head in the next week… or the prayer that your picky kid will just eat the damn yogurts that he swore were his favorite food just a few days ago, before you found a great sale and bought a bunch, and now he’s saying he doesn’t like them anymore, and you don’t know what to feed him instead.

As Kanye said… “Money isn’t everything. Not having it is.”

And while this isn’t to say that money challenges trump other life challenges, I do want to note — for myself and anyone else who carries the weight of what feels like never ending money struggles — that there is a particular kind of bone deep exhaustion that comes from living a life in which you can never stop pushing, because your survival, and the survival of anyone who counts on you, depends on it. Sure I don’t know the depths of many other ongoing struggles that others have gone through, so this is just me sharing what this particular rupture feels like.

Here’s what I’ve noticed in the past several days in which I’ve been taking ownership of where I’m at and coming clean with those who are impacted…

There’s a moment that can often only be seen after we’ve collapsed, in which we realize that what was once a strong character quality of resilience that kept us going and led us to find gratitude in the tiniest of wins, had actually evolved into something completely unsustainable. The adrenaline of the survival has pulsed through your body to the point where you don’t feel what’s actually happening — kind of like the hiker who’s left their partner, broken and starving on the mountain and has headed to look for help, even though they are quite broken themselves, their body keeps going, fueled by a spirit that is unrelenting in its commitment to survive. You keep going, under a body that is just on the verge of breakdown, because you must.

And when the moment comes where you finally break, that is the moment of surrender. The moment when, if we’re lucky, the unseen forces can usher in to pick up our broken pieces and hold us while we’re in collapse.

And as you start to come out of the fog of the collapse, you begin to realize that you could never actually hold it all alone, and the fact that you kept thinking you could might actually be the reason it didn’t get better for as long as it did.

So here I sit, in the aftermath of my own collapse, bewildered at how fast life can move when I finally let go of the wheel and admit that I don’t know what I’m doing.

This week, I’ve humbly confessed to myself and those around me that I, quite in fact, don’t “got this” and I need help.

I’ve asked for help, for advice, for work. I’ve shared my most broken pieces, which honestly feels as though I’m standing naked for all to see.

And what I’ve received is that forces, unseen and seen, have in fact, ushered in the way they can do when we finally surrender, and my pieces have been gathered and I am being held.

I’ve received exactly what I asked for… help. Advice. Work.

I managed to gather what was needed to cover my rent in full, when just a few days ago it felt like an actual impossible amount of money to find.

And yet the work has just begun. More rent will be due soon. The bills will keep coming.

But I am no longer under the delusion that I am a lone wolf who will find my own way.

I see that this may be a long, and often hard road to recovery, but for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel as though I’m traveling through the dark woods with no light and no map and no one to hold my hand when I’m scared.

And simply that fact has been the ever so slight lifting of the load I’ve been carrying on my own, and I am slightly renewed with just enough energy to put one foot in front of the other. For today. And if tomorrow I find that I can’t, I know how to ask for help in taking one more step.

I’ve spent much of my life thinking I had to carry my struggle alone to prove I could handle it. In this moment, I know that isn’t true. If you’re carrying something similar — money, grief, anything you’ve been white-knuckling through in silence — you don’t have to do it alone either. Tell me what’s true for you. I’ll hold it the way mine has been held.

If any of this moved you, I’d love for you to join me and follow along or to share it with someone else who might need it too.

And if you feel so inspired, you can become a paid subscriber to this publication, or buy me a coffee here.

So much love and gratitude for you being here.

Xoxo, Nicole

This isn’t the way I wanted to present myself to the world.

Honestly, I’ve spent so long trying to build something valuable in the personal development space — desperate to overcome my own issues, hoping I could prove to myself that issues can be overcome, so I could then show others it can be done too. But I realize now that in hyperfocusing only on what’s good and working — thank you, marketing gurus, for the gospel that a successful business means selling a transformation from point A to point B — I inadvertently let the one part of my life that isn’t working just sit there, unaddressed, while I shared the highlight reel of my healing journey and hoped to find a way to make an honest living at the one thing I’m actually good at.

And in doing that, I failed to be fully honest about something: I have not made a livable income in my entire adult life. No job I’ve ever had has covered basic needs. My business has never done more than a trickle here and there — enough to cover some of what it takes to live, never all of it. The available solutions have felt insufficient — jobs that don’t pay enough, the necessity of childcare when kids are young and home from school, expenses that keep growing — so I’ve struggled to take any action that actually moves the needle, because working full time only to make significantly less than it costs to live, with no light at the end of the tunnel, feels impossible to keep pushing through. I kept telling myself this was a season. But the truth is, this “season” has gone on for decades, and it’s started to feel like it might not have an end.

The only thing that’s ever felt within my control was my thoughts. So I told myself it’s going to get better. I’m so close, I just know it. And in doing that, I stayed surface-level in acknowledging that what I’m doing isn’t working — and that I don’t know what to do differently.

So I’m showing up here to share the journey. Because honestly, I wish I could immerse myself in someone else’s journey from the bottom of their deepest despair, to see what it takes to find a way out when life feels completely impossible.

For now, this is going to be the messy, real-time account of finding my way through a struggle so painful I’m not sure how I make it to the other side. My hope is that anyone going through something similar can find some camaraderie here, and that we can find relief in each small step forward, together.

Yesterday’s step was coming clean with myself.

Today, my reckoning is with a real fear: that what I’m going through might make me unworthy. Unlovable.

I’ve sat with the fact that becoming homeless is a real possibility — and this visceral feeling that maybe that makes me actual garbage. We can acknowledge, from a safe distance, that a “homeless situation” is unfortunate. We can feel compassion for people going through it. But that compassion tends to only reach as far as the safe distance allows. To actually be a “normal” person, living a “normal” life, and end up homeless? I can’t think of a greater shame. Do you still get invited to family parties if you have to show up living out of your car? Can you actually get a job to change your situation if you can’t get a good night’s sleep in a bed, or a shower to show up clean?

This is forcing me to dissolve anything I thought I could control about how bad I’d let life get. Like there’s an actual bottom, and once you hit it — what’s left? Are you discarded from the world of everyone who knew better than to end up here?

Alongside watching my ego completely disintegrate, today has also been about facing the music. Having real conversations with people I love. Admitting to myself, and to them, that my life has, in fact, become unmanageable beneath a struggle I don’t know how to navigate. That there are people I love who are being affected by this. And I’m sorry.

It’s humbling to admit that a struggle has bled into every part of your life, leaving its mark on everyone it touches.

And yet something tells me: the only way out is through.

So today, alongside the facing and the admitting, I also reached out to past clients — asking, humbly, if there might be work, or if they know someone who has some. I know any single opportunity that comes from it might not be enough on its own. But I’m no longer willing to wait until I have the whole journey figured out before I move. That waiting — for the full plan, the clear next ten steps, the guarantee it’ll work — is exactly what’s kept me stuck here for so long. So I’m moving anyway, one small, imperfect action at a time, without knowing yet if it adds up to enough.

And here’s my tiny light for today.

I made a call I’d been avoiding — to a loved one I’d kept at arm’s length while I tried to find my way through this on my own with my head down. I told her where I actually am. And she didn’t try to fix it. She just held me in my shame and told me there was nothing moral about being here. She offered understanding instead of a solution, and somehow that was exactly what I needed.

When I shared with her the emails I’m sending out, trying to find work, she wrote back: “Excellent steps you are taking. So proud of you! Acknowledging is the first step and you have and are doing this beautifully. I wish I could scoop you up and hold you close. I believe in you and know you can get over the hump. You are worthy of all good things life has to offer. It was my gift that you came into my life and I am grateful for every day.”

I told her afterward that I was noticing something: it’s one thing to be loved in the moments when you’re clearly contributing to the people around you. It’s an entirely different gift to be loved in your darkest, most painful moment — loved with nothing to offer back yet. Thank you for loving me in all my moments.

Always and forever.

If any of this moved you, I’d love for you to join me and follow along or to share it with someone else who might need it too.

Or buy me a coffee here.

So much love and gratitude for you being here.

Xoxo, Nicole

I’m sitting here trying to find the perfect entry point to share a truth I wish wasn’t true. I’m 42 years old, and month after month, I can’t ever seem to be able to pay all my bills.

I want to name something here, before I go further: this might be the moment when you want to look away. To create a little distance from the shameful cringe of a grown woman admitting she doesn’t have this basic thing figured out.

You’ll want to put distance between yourself and it, because money shame runs deep in many of us. It’s one thing to be young and broke while you’re still figuring life out. It’s quite another to be in your forties, kids grown, and still here. How shameful, right?

What a shameful thing, to be the friend everyone quietly covers dinner for — loved, wanted, and known to be broke.

What a shameful thing, to be the grown woman still asking family for help because she can’t get her life to work.

My hope, instead, is that you feel cracked open — inspired to get honest about what isn’t working in your life, too.

So here’s my truth…

My life has become unmanageable beneath the truth that I haven’t figured out how to make enough money to live.

That’s the admission. The one they teach you to make in twelve-step rooms, at the bottom of the thing that’s been running you. I’ve been pretending there’s something I’m missing — one piece of a puzzle — and that once I find it, I’ll finally get this one struggle under control and be free to fully participate in my own life.

When in fact, I don’t know if I will ever figure it out.

The impact of pretending otherwise is that I have been slowly disappearing.

I’ve been making my life smaller and smaller. Adding restriction on top of restriction, hoping that if I can just contort myself into the shape of a healed, fully-together woman, I’ll finally get the thing I actually want — peace. The chance to set the struggle down for even a moment and just live.

But the struggle keeps me in a constant hypervigilance I don’t know how to set down.

So I cope. I binge eat. I binge-watch shows to leave my own life for a while. I sleep too much. My energy is constantly gone, and I keep telling myself that once I have more energy, I’ll cook real meals, move my body, play, take care of myself. Once I finally fix this struggle, I will expand my world to look at the other things in it. But the energy doesn’t return. The struggle doesn’t lift. And day by day, I drown a little more.

I quit coffee, thinking maybe the caffeine was clouding my thinking. I consume content about optimizing sleep, mastering my inner world, eating to eliminate inflammation — anything to micromanage the symptoms of a life being run by one truth I haven’t wanted to face.

The truth is, I am not currently making money.

I wish it weren’t true. But it is.

I’ve spent over a decade actively participating in my healing journey, hoping that with each “wound” healed, I may find the one that will unlock the door to the world where I don’t struggle anymore.

Desperate to believe that I am one spiritual insight away from a life where I can finally pay all my bills. If I could just heal one more wound.

In the quiet shadows of my mind, I wonder, is there an existence beyond struggling and healing in the hopes to overcome the struggle?

Like what could life look like if we managed to clean up every hurt we ever experienced so that we were free to live, unencumbered by the limitations those hurts may have created?

I’ve overcome a lot, and grown in immense ways. But this struggle? This one that keeps tagging along with every life phase I move through? Somehow I keep her close. I want to pretend that I don’t know her. She’s not with me. But she follows me everywhere I go and I just can’t seem to sneak away, no matter how hard I try.

I make it mean something about me that she keeps tagging along.

… that I am failing at life.

… that I somehow missed the memo on how you’re supposed to live by the time you’re middle aged.

… that I’m a deadweight burden on those I love.

And no matter how many articles I’ve read on how shame doesn’t help anyone stop doing the thing they keep doing, there seems to be an underlying dialogue going on that hopes if I can manage to make myself wrong just enough, then maybe, just maybe, I can fix the wrong thing I’m doing that keeps this problem owning me and my life.

And I keep discounting everything else I’ve done or do… as if the fact that I haven’t figured out money negates anything else I’ve done with my life.

Perhaps we all hold our deepest core struggles closest… hoping that no one will witness us in the ugliest part of our existence. That if we can just clean it up on our own, then maybe we will be worthy enough be show up fully in the world. But until then, we must only show up fully with the parts that aren’t so despicable.

Maybe for you it’s that you just can’t seem to get relationships figured out.

Or that you’ve spent a lifetime warring with your body and no matter what you do, you just can’t seem to lay down your weapons.

Or perhaps you look back on your parenting and realize you did a shit job and you can’t go back in time and change it. (I’ve thought this at times about my own parenting as a young mother)

Our struggles hold so many life lesson opportunities, and I would be selling myself short if I didn’t honor the ways I have healed within my struggle, even if I wasn’t fully admitting the depth of the toll the struggle was taking all along.

I’ve humbled myself to ask for help, and receive that help with gratitude.

I’ve found the courage to keep showing up to share my voice, even when I don’t know if I have anything worthy to share.

And every time I get a sliver of hope that I am on the right path… a comment from someone who was moved by my work, or a gift from a loved one to help me get by just a little longer, I celebrate with the utmost gratitude, AND a dash of shame that I couldn’t figure it out on my own.

I constantly tell myself, “if I can just buy myself a couple more months, I’ll get it figured out.”

But I never actually figure it out. I keep believing the answer is outside of me — please somebody help me, please someone save me, please algorithm gods, put my work in front of the right people. Anything but look at the truth in front of me.

I may never overcome this.

What if my whole life is just not getting by? What if I end up homeless and never find my way out?

I have let this struggle define me so completely that it bleeds into every part of my life, all while I perform that it isn’t happening. That if I can just white knuckle grip to the reality I want to create, then it will become real and I will be saved from the truth of what is actually happening.

It’s not that the people closest to me don’t know. On the surface, they do — no money coming in, constant worry about bills. But the deeper truth, the one I haven’t shared because I hadn’t gotten honest with myself about it yet, is this: I am afraid I will never be more than this struggle.

I can smile. I can focus on everything I’m grateful for. I can tell myself this is just a season. But the truth I’ve been avoiding is that this “season” started the moment I became an adult, and it has gotten worse every year since. Pretending I’m just around the corner from it finally getting better is the thing that’s kept me from ever being fully in the truth that I’m not okay.

This is how a struggle becomes all there is. And when you can’t see past it, this can be where suicidal ideations start to enter. I had them recently — even though I have so much to live for. So much love. I know this. Which is what made it feel so insane that a mind could arrive at the thought of not continuing over a few thousand dollars that it can’t seem to find access to. But it was never really about the number. It was that the struggle had consumed the life force out of every day, because I had spent so much energy resisting the fact that it was true.

What we resist, persists. I’ve heard that phrase for years and never felt it in my body until now. The struggle didn’t loosen its grip when I fought it, hid it, or tried to think my way past it. It loosened when I stopped resisting the fact of it. Somewhere in that surrender, I found something I wasn’t expecting: relief. Not because the rent is paid or the money has appeared, but because I’m no longer spending everything I have holding two realities apart — the one where I’m struggling, and the one where I have to pretend I’m not.

This circumstance is something happening in my life right now. It is not who I am.

The current reality is that my life has become unmanageable because I don’t make money.

I create work I’m proud of. And still, underneath everything I do, there’s this constant, quiet nagging — you don’t make money — and it makes me smaller. It makes me question if there’s anything about me of value at all. Because if you can’t even figure out how to pay your bills, some part of me has been believing, then you must be worthless.

After a decade spent on my own healing journey, and wanting to share that in the truest way possible, my view has been distorted by the marketing gurus preaching that we must share a transformation. That the only growth that counts is the growth that comes when some kind of destination has been reached. Until then, fix it and wait to share until when you’re out of the trenches. But what if we are never completely, and 100% “out of the trenches”?

What then?

Do we not get to give ourselves permission to live and appreciate life until we no longer struggle? Because that may never be the reality.

We may struggle, in some form, throughout our human experience. And perhaps, learning to live alongside our struggle and suffering is exactly what the whole point of it.

I realize in reflecting now on the journey I’ve been on with this particular struggle, that I never once let myself just live inside the limitation itself. I constantly imagined a magical life on the other side of paying every bill on time, where you finally get to set your armor down. Until then: guard up. Rest when the fight is over.

But what if the fight is never over? What if you can’t finish a battle you’re gripping onto so tightly precisely because you keep telling yourself you’re not fighting — that you’re fine, that everything will be fine, just a little further now?

I could bore you with the logistics — jobs that don’t pay enough to cover the bills, summer childcare costs that make working feel impossible, a world that keeps getting harder to survive in while we all just keep our heads down and manage. Focus on surviving. I know I’m not alone in this.

I’ve been walking alongside a deep inner knowing that life was never meant to be this hard.

That it is an injustice to be expected to live to work, to work to pay for living, and to do this until the end. I’ve been unwilling to accept this as the only possible reality, so I resisted it — kept telling myself it would get better one day, while staying locked in survival mode, one moment at a time. Covered this month’s rent? Good. Now start on next month’s. And that’s how a life quietly slips by while you’re busy managing the day in front of you.

So this is my admission.

I am not okay, in the sense that I don’t have this figured out. I am struggling, and I don’t know if this lifelong relationship with money is going to change tomorrow, or next month, or next year, or ever. And I am also, somehow, more free than I’ve been in years — because I’m no longer spending my life force pretending otherwise. Both of these are true at the same time. Pretending they couldn’t coexist is what’s kept me stuck for decades.

I guess this is what surrender looks like. Not giving up. Just finally putting the armor down and letting what’s real be real, alongside everything else that’s also real — the love, the beauty, the kids who are thriving, the friends who show up. The struggle doesn’t cancel any of that out. It never did. I just couldn’t see past it while I was busy hiding from it.

I have incredible kids, and I did the best I could as their mother. They are genuinely thriving. They know they are loved. They are safe to tell me where I’ve gotten it wrong, and I will always honor their truth.

And they’ve had to witness me, and help me, through more than any kid should have to help a parent through.

I’ve overcome so much — childhood abandonment, and more — and I have learned I am deeply loved, by family, by friends, by everyone I’m lucky enough to have in my life.

And I am flawed and messy and may never have the means to contribute financially to this life.

I am rich in friendship, in fun, in love pouring in from every direction.

And I don’t know how I’m going to pay my rent.

My hope in being radically honest — not just carefully honest inside my safest relationships, within my safest pieces of myself that I am willing to share — is that I might finally own this truth of what is, so I can let the chips fall where they may and deal with what’s actually in front of me. Staying guarded with this struggle kept it as compartmentalized as possible, which somehow let it keep owning me, without me ever fully admitting it was there.

Maybe this is what they mean when they say the truth will set you free. Not because the truth is comfortable. Mine isn’t. But because I’m no longer using everything I have to keep it hidden — and that energy is mine again, to actually live with.

If any of this moved you, I’d love for you to share it with someone else who might need it too.

Or buy me a coffee here.

So much love and gratitude for you being here.

Xoxo, Nicole

If you’re navigating your own struggle with suicidal thoughts, please know you don’t have to carry it alone — the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US) is available any time, day or night.

We were all in a coaching certification together, and there was a retreat that was going to be held in Costa Rica, that was not included in the cost of the program, and those of us who wanted so deeply to go on this retreat, but weren’t quite sure how we were going to make it happen, banded together to talk about our desire to go, and to get in the juicy manifestation energy of creating our desires together.

But there was one problem… we had been told that there were only something like 5 spots left, and there were like 8 people on the call. I found myself feeling guilty that I knew my desire was so big that that may lead to me taking a spot from one of these other amazing and deserving women.

I called this out, and I wasn’t alone. Each of us wanted this experience so badly, but when confronted with the fact that receiving our desire might come at the expense of someone else receiving theirs, our tendency to shrink stepped in.

I was given a task to get aquainted with this discomfort of taking up space. I was to practice appreciating each moment in which I was given the gift of taking up space, and to allow it to expand, and simply notice the urge to shrink, without taking action on those urges.

When I see a car in line after me at the gas pump, I was instructed to take the time I needed to put my card back in my wallet and get situated before rushing to move out of the way, and then to smile and wave a thanks for the person who waited for me.

Tiny moments like this show up in infinite, almost imperceptible ways throughout our days, and they show us how much we shrink ourselves to accomodate anyone and everyone.

The Invisible Shrinking

You may know the experience of shrinking all too well. Or perhaps you may not even know you do it, but you have a hunch that this shows up in more ways than you even want to acknowledge.

Here are some of the many ways I’ve seen myself and other women shrink and play small to be more palatable in a world that taught us to fear our bigness…

Being “humble” about what makes us amazing

Downplaying our gifts so we don’t make others uncomfortable.

Brushing off compliments.

Speaking about our accomplishments with disclaimers attached.

Pretending something came easily when we worked incredibly hard for it.

Dimming our brilliance so we aren’t perceived as arrogant, self-centered, “too much,” or threatening.

Many women learned early that being visibly powerful could create tension. So we learned to package ourselves in ways that felt safer to other people.

Wearing the badge of being able to do it all… on your own

Refusing support while quietly drowning.

Overfunctioning.

Becoming hyper-capable because relying on others once felt unsafe or disappointing.

Taking pride in needing nothing from anyone while secretly craving softness, partnership, help, rest, and care.

Sometimes our independence is empowering.

And sometimes it’s armor.

Carefully expressing desires so as not to seem too greedy

Softening what we really want before we even say it out loud.

Saying things like “I’d just be happy with…” while our soul aches for something far bigger.

Talking ourselves out of desires before life even has the chance to respond.

Convincing ourselves we should be grateful for crumbs because wanting more feels selfish, unrealistic, or embarrassing.

Not fully honoring our “yes’s” and “no’s” to avoid making others uncomfortable

Saying yes while our body screams no.

Over-explaining boundaries so others feel comfortable with them.

Abandoning our preferences to avoid disappointing someone.

Letting guilt become more trustworthy than our own inner knowing.

Many women don’t struggle with hearing themselves.

They struggle with believing they’re allowed to honor what they hear.

Consistently taking more than our share of the ownership of challenges that involve more than one person

Automatically assuming relational tension must somehow be our fault.

Becoming the emotional manager of everyone around us

Apologizing preemptively.

Carrying the responsibility for fixing dynamics that were never ours to fix alone.

We become so accustomed to maintaining harmony that we forget relationships are meant to involve mutual responsibility.

Not speaking up when we have feelings that might disappoint someone

Staying silent to preserve connection.

Swallowing discomfort to avoid being perceived as difficult.

Rehearsing conversations endlessly before having them.

Waiting until resentment builds because direct honesty feels terrifying.

Sometimes the fear isn’t actually conflict.

It’s what conflict once cost us.

This self-abandonment may look small when only looking at each isolated incident, however when we look at the way these ways of being interweave our entire existence, it’s staggering to acknowledge the far reaching impact on every area of our lives.

The Rage of Realization

I was speaking with a friend recently, and as she’s navigating dating and actively looking for a partner, she found herself in tears over a string of seemingly simple “no’s” and boundaries she had had to communicate over the course of the week…

…Speaking up when a suitor showed up looking 10+ years older than the photos she had seen when they matched on the dating app.

…Expressing a preference for an actual date rather than going to a man’s house for the first meeting.

…A friend that popped by unnounced, expecting her to be available to hang out, when her only plans had been to have a lazy morning in her home, but she felt bad that she didn’t have an external commitment as an excuse for not being available.

When we’re breaking the cycle of self-abandonment to accommodate others, it can feel like it takes a massive amount of effort, and it can be so depleting. These are moments when we need extra care and grace for ourselves. Because establishing a new way of being in the world, in which we honor our needs, is no small feat.

I remember several years back I told my therapist that it felt like my whole life was a string of uncomfortable conversations and letting people down, and I wished I could catch a freaking break and stop being presented with moments in which I HAD to speak up for myself. Why were people repeatedly pushing up against my edges?! But now, looking back, that was my curriculum that got me to the point of speaking up for myself like it’s natural… and like I have a right to take up space in the world.

Maybe you know someone who says no when asked to do something, and you feel simultaneously put off… (like who just says “no” 🤯🤯🤯 That’s so rude) and awed… (I didn’t know were were allowed to do that 🤔)

I got a comment on my Insight Timer course called “The Audacity to Take Up Space” from someone who said “This all hit me 100%. This actually made me angry, how I’ve changed to fit in, by taking up less space. By just coasting rather than risk conflict by speaking up for my wants, my needs, my discomfort.”

And I can relate… Once you see the many ways you’ve shrunk to make others comfortable, you can’t unsee it. And when you see the resistance that comes up in you (and others) when you start to have the audacity to break that pattern, it will likely bring up big feelings. Including anger.

That can be a good thing. Anger, when channeled with intention, is an activating emotion that can effect change. And you deserve to know that you get to take up all the space you desire in your life.

Audacity as a Threshold

I think many of us imagine that expanding into a bigger life will feel inspiring, empowering, freeing, and exciting.

And sometimes it does.

But often, before it feels expansive, it feels deeply uncomfortable.

Because the moment you stop negotiating with your desires…
the moment you stop shrinking your dreams into more socially acceptable sizes…
the moment you begin honoring your yes’s and your no’s…
you will likely come face to face with every part of you that learned it was safer to stay small.

Audacity sounds sexy in theory.

In practice, it can feel confronting.

Bold action can feel reckless to the nervous system.

Visibility can feel unsafe.

Choosing yourself can feel selfish.

Going all in on a dream can activate grief, fear, guilt, doubt, and the temptation to backtrack into the familiar.

Not because your desire is wrong…
but because expansion asks us to become unfamiliar to ourselves.

And that threshold — the space between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming — can feel incredibly tender.

I think this is why so many people stay circling the edges of the life they want.

Not because they lack desire.
Not because they lack capability.
But because building an extraordinary life often requires tolerating the discomfort of becoming fully visible inside your own life first.

There comes a moment when you realize:
No one is coming to hand you permission.

At some point, you have to decide that your desires matter enough to act on before you feel fully ready.

At some point, you have to stop waiting to become fearless and instead become devoted.

Devoted to the life calling you forward.
Devoted to the woman you know you could become if you stopped abandoning yourself every time expansion felt uncomfortable.

The Antidote

Maybe the audacious thing isn’t accomplishing the thing. Or overcoming the limitation.

Maybe it’s finally allowing yourself to fully be who you already are. Messy, imperfecty perfect, big, bold, loud, quiet, yearning, savoring.

Maybe it’s trusting the desires that continue tugging at your spirit instead of endlessly trying to rationalize them away.

Maybe it’s letting yourself want more.

More joy.
More visibility.
More creativity.
More intimacy.
More honesty.
More aliveness.

Not because you’re ungrateful for your life…
but because there is a version of you that knows you were not built merely to survive and accept your existence.

You were built to create within it.

Fully.

And no, this doesn’t require becoming fearless overnight.

It doesn’t require performing confidence or bulldozing through your nervous system.

It simply asks for willingness.

Willingness to stop shrinking.
Willingness to tell the truth.
Willingness to take one brave step before certainty arrives.

I think many women are standing at the edge of a life filled with authenticity and desire and magic, waiting for permission to fully go for it.

And maybe what changes everything isn’t waiting for the perfect plan…
but deciding you’re finally done abandoning yourself in the name of comfort, perfectionism, or fear.

I believe your life changes the moment you stop asking:
“Am I too much?”
…and start asking:

“What becomes possible if I fully back myself?”

Not because I think anyone cares as much as I do.

Certainly not because I think my poetry has to be perfect.

But because it’s been a longing since I was a child. A longing I have not fulfilled.

I sometimes pull it off the shelf to look at it. Maybe it’s ready… nope not yet. Of course I’m not sure what ready would look like.

My mind tells me “ready” for this part of my life that longs to be expressed, is that I have a wide open space to explore. No obstacles that demand my attention.

Just my mind, my words, and the open road.

But alas… life keeps on lifing, and my words keep sitting on the shelf, waiting for me.

So here I am, with no pretty package…

No promise of whether I only write poetry now…

No clear direction of where I’m going…

Just giving myself permission to show up each day and choose to create something.

Learning to wear my own crown and be seen, in more ways than one.

One foot in front of the other. Day by day.

Pulling the thread and seeing where it leads.

Some days I may write poems… some days I may write something else.

But for now, here is the first official poem I am sharing.

I’ll Leave the Light On for You

I made the trek through the treacherous roads

I’d traveled those roads before

Yet I did so by leaning on an unskilled guide

I didn’t think I could go it alone

So when I found myself at that old familiar fork

I knew it was time

For me to learn to navigate

my own journey

Years of finding myself

Years of messy mistakes

Years of offering myself grace

Years to finally choose me

I’ve made it home from my journey

I’m wiser now

No longer a scared girl

longing to be saved

I’m ready for union of my strength with yours

I’ll leave the light on for you

I trust you’ll find your way

Until then, I’ll be here

building a home…

…living a life

joyfully awaiting your arrival

You come in and you feel like home

Not the “walking on eggshells,”

bracing myself for danger,

kind of home that felt so familiar growing up

The kind of home that says

“Come, my dear, rest”

“I’ve got you”

“You’re safe.”

Over the years I’d learned to be my own source

No longer needing to be saved

Yet relishing in the warmth

of truly being held

You find my verbosity captivating

I hungrily devour your every word

Time ceases

and I’ve lost track of where your breath ends

and mine begins

We’re both wise with life experience

that comes from having loved and lost

Yet not too old, not too jaded

To appreciate the gift of having a new opportunity

to fall in love again

LISTEN TO THE OPEN TO LOVE & GENUINE CONNECTION - Sleep Hypnosis

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From a young age, many of us are conditioned to believe that the “right” answers live outside of us — in the experts, the rules, or the people we believe know better. Over time, this causes us to doubt our instincts and question our inner wisdom. Self-trust is the process of reconnecting with that inner guidance and remembering that you are capable of navigating your own life.

Trusting yourself doesn’t mean every decision will be perfect or easy. It means you believe that whatever unfolds, you can handle it. Your intuition — that quiet knowing inside — is always speaking to you. Even in moments when you didn’t listen, those experiences helped you learn what your truth feels like.

Self-trust is built each time you choose based on what feels right for you, even when fear is loud or others disagree. This is how you reclaim your power, your voice, and your direction. You don’t need certainty. You don’t need permission. You simply need to remember:
You are the one living your life — and you can trust yourself to lead it.

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Confidence isn’t a personality trait reserved for the lucky few — it’s a skill we build. Real confidence comes from trusting yourself… from knowing that you can rely on you. Every area of your life where you already feel capable or strong is proof of that — you’ve built confidence before through courage, practice, and showing up even when things felt uncertain.

Where confidence feels missing, it’s not a sign that you’re incapable — it simply means the skill hasn’t been developed yet. Confidence grows where competence grows, and you get to decide what areas matter enough to improve. You can admire others’ gifts without turning them into expectations for yourself.

Confidence isn’t the destination — it’s the bridge between who you are now and who you’re becoming. Courage comes first. Every small step you take, every moment you choose to try again, becomes the foundation of your confidence. You are building proof that you can rely on yourself — and that is the source of true, lasting confidence.

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LISTEN TO AUDIO LESSON

This module is designed to help you gently uncover the stories, beliefs, and emotional imprints that have shaped your sense of worth. Together, we explore the past moments that taught you to feel unwanted, unworthy, too much, or not enough — not to relive them, but to understand them with compassion and clarity.

You’ll learn how to reframe these experiences through the lens of love, seeing that while difficult things may have happened, they never defined your value. Through guided reflection, journaling, and the accompanying hypnosis session, you’ll begin releasing the old meanings your younger self attached to these moments and reconnect with the truth: your worth has always been inherent, intact, and unearned.

This module supports you in uprooting the beliefs that once held you back so you can move forward unencumbered — open to love, belonging, visibility, and the fullness of who you already are.

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For most of our lives, we’ve been taught that love and belonging come from being good.
From being agreeable.
Pleasant.
Predictable.
Palatable.

We learned to edit ourselves — to hide our edges, our anger, our hunger, our wildness — believing that if we could just stay “nice” enough, “easy” enough, “safe” enough…
we’d be loved.

But what if the version of you that you’ve been hiding is actually the key to your wholeness?
What if the part of you that’s been labeled “too much,” “too emotional,” “too opinionated,” “too powerful” —
isn’t wrong at all… but sacred?

This lesson is about remembering who you were before you learned to perform.
It’s about peeling back the layers of conditioning, and reclaiming the raw, radiant truth of who you are — the woman who exists beyond the mask.

The one who’s not afraid to take up space.
The one who honors her boundaries like holy ground.
The one who knows her “no” is as powerful as her “yes.”
The one who doesn’t apologize for her fire, her feelings, or her freedom.

🖤 The Villianess Journey

In this lesson, you’ll meet your Inner Villainess — not the villain the world warned you about, but the woman who stopped shrinking.

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