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I can send emails on little sleep. I can be grounded and challenge clients in coaching sessions. I can be inspiring and host a podcast episode. I can be me while running on empty.

And here is the deal — I can do anything, and that was the problem. “I can do anything for a season” was my mantra. Hard things come in waves; startups are tough, which is why most fail. I had been here before, but this was a new level. It was after one meeting with my co-founder that I realized we were now driving a car with no brakes. There was no end in sight with us driving at this velocity, and something cracked. It wasn’t major, it wasn’t loud, but my inner voice whispered “oh shit” in a way that I couldn’t ignore anymore. I pressed on for 6 more months after that meeting because from the outside, everything was going well. By all external metrics, I genuinely had nothing to complain about, and I felt guilty for being a little bitch about it.

Then two things happened.

I had an insanely deep healing session with a hypnotherapist that helped me heal a deep level of shame that I didn’t know I was carrying around. And I saw this quote: “You already know what you want to do; now you are just negotiating with fear.”

Once I was able to see clearly without the “I am not worthy, I am the worst ever for not being better at this,” it made space for the quote to land. Then it was instant go time.

If you are reading this, wondering how I crawled inside your brain and stole your thoughts, you don’t have to figure this out anymore. The road forward is going to be bumpy either way, but you get to choose what kind of ride you want to have. If you keep going on this path, we know where it leads. More of what you are already battling, and likely even worse, is to come. The other path, the one where you don’t have all the answers (or any), has wide open white space for you to create what you want. To get a fresh start. To have the big, bold, audacious life that you deeply crave. It will still be a challenge, but it will be a challenge that you are made for. Which one do you want?

Here is your first step towards the rest of your life…you have to tell someone. You have to make these inside thoughts outside thoughts. Hit reply to this email and let me know which path you WANT. Not which one makes sense or is most practical. What is it that you want? I would love to know.

xo

Shelby

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P.S. If you want to learn how to intentionally burn your life down, keep what works, and ditch the rest, read my 4-part series “The Controlled Burn” and start here

Do you actually know why I want more of you in the room? Grounded, rooted in what you actually want, unfuckwithable. Turns out that’s contagious, and not just as a vibe. Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler spent years mining the Framingham Heart Study, decades of health data on the same sprawling social network, and found what they call three degrees of influence: your habits, your mood, even your health ripple out to your friends, your friends’ friends, and their friends too, before the effect fades. When someone in that network became obese, their close friends were 57% more likely to become obese as well. The same pattern showed up with quitting smoking and with happiness itself, published in the New England Journal of Medicine- not a hunch, an actual documented ripple. So stack some good humans in your corner. I have MANY. And if you’re a good egg, I want you too.

Here’s what that’s actually doing for the people already in it.

It started with me

Every one of these started as a thought I had alone first. In an ICU bed. At my own kitchen island, doing the math on what my actual life needed to cost. Sitting with a business partner I loved, admitting something was off. I wrote it down and put it out into the world with no idea if anyone else was thinking the same thing, or if it was just me.

Spoiler, it wasn’t.

Now it’s brewing with you

First, someone recognizes themselves in it, before they’re ready to say so out loud.

A reader, on Motherhood Made Me Allergic to Hustle: “How is it we seem to be mirroring the same thoughts right now?! I’m shedding the old ways that no longer serve me. I have goals but noticing I can’t (and won’t) approach them the way the old me would have. There’s no more hustle in me. I’ve hustled for the last 35 years, often sacrificing my relationships and sanity in the process.”

A reader, on 5 Hour vs 50 Hour Work Week: “That hit the nail on the head. I have so many ideas but haven’t landed on one. So much of the industry feels forced, and I just can’t land until I land, ya know?”

A reader, on How Much Money Is Enough?: “What interesting timing that I would see this post today, because I’ve been thinking about this. It’s hard for me to actually put a number to it, because when I get one, I’m like, yep, that’ll do it, then I think about other things I also want to do that are meaningful to me and would be beneficial to others, and then the number gets bigger.”

Then some of them actually do something about it. Not all at once. Not cleanly. But they are moving.

A paid subscriber, on Motherhood Made Me Allergic to Hustle: “There’s a part of me that resists doing this exercise, though I know it will benefit. There’s a truth my heart seems to know that I don’t feel quite ready to face yet. My mind is trying to unravel what that might be, and ego is fearful of what’s behind the curtain.”

A paid subscriber, on The People Who Held Me While I Fell Apart: “I did the exercise... I have to say this was eye-opening. At a certain retreat I participated in last fall, I wrote down in a notebook that I wanted to live life more intentionally, more purposefully, more fully. It’s all coming back to me again, and I am realizing that despite it almost being a year, I am still not living that statement.”

A reader, on How Much Money Is Enough?: “I’ve been asked this before. The struggle to identify a number is a challenge that brings some serious insight, if willing. I’ve written a number down before and was told it wasn’t large enough. I’m in a totally different space now. I’ll have to give it a try again and see how I handle it differently. Thank you for being willing to go first.”

A reader, on How Much Money Is Enough?: “Money. This could not be a more perfect timing post for me. Thank you!! I love seeing you completely change directions, and it cannot wait to see where it’s going! Thank you for allowing us to watch the journey!!”

And then something moves.

A longtime reader, on 5 Hour vs 50 Hour Work Week: “I’ve quietly sat back to reevaluate how I want to tackle this new chapter. It’s been these 90 days of yours (mine, May 15th), I left my job for what I thought was something completely different, ended up helping my sick father and spending quality time. Now here I am with a new part-time gig on my terms, allowing me to do things my way. Have trust and faith that it all works out the way it’s supposed to.”

A reader, on How Much Money Is Enough?: “A great read! Some solid points that took me too many decades to learn. The part I wrote down was that there is a difference between money with room to breathe versus you are allowed to breathe, and that can’t be solved by money.”

A reader, on 5 Hour vs 50 Hour Work Week: “This is powerful, because you are describing the inner restlessness that people with entrepreneurial spirit have. The reality of needing to make a living, while also balancing the time and the ideas. What is true here is your commitment to yourself and your time. I applaud this because so often, it’s easy to fall backward to a place of comfort. A place that is familiar. You are looking outward and defining your future on your terms. That is courage.”

A reader, on What Open Heart Surgery Actually Feels Like: “I came close to tears 3x reading this! My goodness... thank you for sharing.”

Where does it go next?

These thoughts started with me. Now they’re brewing with you. It makes me all tingly to even think about the ripple that’s happening. This is the impact I always wanted to create in the world, not just to inspire, but to help you GO DO IT BY GOLLY, and I’m so stoked to keep tip-tapping on my keyboard, just for you.

(Also yes, I hear y’all on the podcast. One major project at a time, I’m a one-woman show these days! It’ll be hosted here too, so make sure you’re subscribed to catch it when it goes live.)

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I don’t know where they go from here. But I trust that it’s all going somewhere important. I promise to keep showing up with the right questions at the right time and a way to synthesize it into your own life if you choose to participate. I can’t do the work for you or even make you put your pen to paper; that part is up to you and is honestly why most people get to their deathbed with a list of regrets. If any of this is calling you out, good, you know where to go next.

If you want to be one of the people that “gets the bug” in the best way, subscribe to the paid newsletter today. Not only more essays, but the actual exercises, the audits, the things you sit down and do instead of just reading. Paid subscribers also get first dibs on shaping the podcast, what we cover, who's on it, before it even launches. It’s $10 a month right now; that goes up to $15 on September 1st. Lock in the annual rate before then instead: $100 a year, and you’ll save $80 compared to what you’d pay monthly once the price jumps. Come test it out; cancel anytime; it’ll stick if it’s supposed to.

XO Shelby

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P.S. September 1st isn’t far off. If any of what you just read sounds like you, don’t wait for the right moment; there isn’t one, there’s just the one you make.

I’d sit there thinking I'd just witnessed a first. Some new sound, some new way he moved his hands, that lightning bolt thing you’re supposed to feel watching your baby do something for the very first time. He is my third baby, but there is something purely magical about watching their firsts, experiencing life through their eyes. It’s one of the things I love most about motherhood.

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Then the audacity of my husband to say it so casually; I don’t think he even noticed what he was doing to me, and it surely wasn’t on purpose. He’d been doing that for weeks. I just hadn’t been there.

This happened over and over last year. Enough times that I started to brace for it before he even said the words. I was there for every bedtime. I gave him every bath. That was nothing, but it wasn’t the point, you know? It was five minutes stitched onto the end of a ten-hour day, and somewhere in the space between the bath and the bedtime and the next morning, he seemed to be growing without me.

Here’s the part I actually have to sit with. I only got 14 days with him where nothing else had my attention. And even those weren’t good ones.

He was born after a high-risk pregnancy, and I almost died having him. Severe preeclampsia, the kind where your own blood pressure becomes the thing that might kill you. So for those first two weeks I was in bed checking my BP every 60 minutes, slamming PRN meds like I was at a rave (tbh, I have never been to a rave, but this is what rave Shelby might do), and when the numbers climbed, genuinely afraid I might stroke out holding my own newborn. I want to tell you those 14 days were sacred, that I clocked every minute with him because I knew how close I’d come to not getting any. That’s the story that would make this easier to read.

The truth is I wasn’t present for those either. I was surviving them. There’s a difference between being with your baby and being terrified next to your baby, and any mother who has been through a traumatic birth gets what I am saying. You are doing a big exhale and bracing for impact at the same time for whatever could come next.

Then, at two weeks postpartum, something in me decided I was fine, and I went back to work. (spoiler; I was not fine.)

I told myself it was temporary. I can do anything for a season; that was the mantra, and it had gotten me through worse before, so why not this? The business had caught on fire the same month he was born, and there was no one else but me to jump back in. My partner had been holding down the fort, and I felt like I needed to jump back in the trench with her. From the bed. From the bathroom floor with him screaming from reflux on one arm and my laptop balanced on the other. I bypassed every value I had about what a season of my life was supposed to look like, and I told myself it would end. Soon. Any month now.

It didn’t end. It just kept being my life.

I remember exactly where I was when that broke open, in a therapy session, of all places, talking through something that had nothing to do with my baby at all. And somewhere in that conversation it hit me that this wasn’t a season anymore. This was just what my year was going to keep being, indefinitely, no end date, nothing to hold onto and wait out. I’d been telling myself I was surviving something temporary. I was actually just... living there now.

Here’s the thing I didn’t see until I said all of this out loud to someone else this week. Those first 14 days and the year that came after weren’t actually two different things. They were the same move, twice. Checking my blood pressure every hour and checking Slack every hour were the same reflex wearing two different outfits. My body had learned how to survive something real, and it did exactly what it was built to do. Then the real threat passed, and nobody told my nervous system that. It just kept running the program. Vigilance instead of presence, monitoring instead of feeling anything, because monitoring was the thing that had kept me alive once.

Except that’s where it gets complicated, and I don’t want to let myself off easy here, and I promise this isn’t me jumping into the “woe is me” mindset. The first 14 days, I didn’t have a choice. My body was actually trying to take me out. The second one was made up. There was no cofounder or client or launch date that was going to end my life if I stepped away from it for an afternoon. I could have stopped anytime. I got confused somewhere along the way about which threat was real.

This is a real, predictable part of human behavior when you get flipped into fight-or-flight mode, when your nervous system shifts gears for the sake of survival. If you had told me this in the moment, I would have agreed with you and then said: “but there is no other way; the work has to get done, and I am going to do it.” I have so much empathy for me last year because she wasn’t wrong in her mindset here…just like present-day me isn’t wrong here as I reflect on it.

I’m not writing this to tell you I’ve forgiven myself, because I haven’t, and I’m not sure I want to yet. I want it to sting a little when I think about that year, actually. Not so I can sit in it forever, but because the sting is doing a job. My kids are my best teachers. They’re my best medicine, honestly, in a way nothing and no one else has managed to be, because they don’t let me lie to myself about what I’m actually choosing when I disappear into something else. I will always have time to make more money. There will always be another season, another business, another fire that needs putting out. There is only one year my son is going to be one. I already spent it somewhere else, checking something, telling myself it was temporary.

Maybe you’ve got your own blood pressure cuff. Wearing a different outfit. Something you’re checking too, telling yourself it’s temporary.

I don’t get his first year back. I get to not miss the next one.

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Want more stories about this? Try reading some other related articles by me:

1. How To Build A Life You Actually Want

2. The Day I Almost Died

If your answer was nobody, or someone who ended up telling you what they thought you should do instead of actually sitting in it with you, that’s the gap this is for.

Your inner circle isn't just whoever's closest to you. It's the specific handful of people you trust enough to be the real you with. The people you can call at midnight with tears in your eyes, or meet for coffee in your sweatpants, and tell them how you really feel without being afraid of judgment. People who love you for you, who encourage you to dream a little bigger, who remind you that you're worth all the desires of your heart, and who you're not afraid to ugly laugh or cry in front of.

I already had deep, meaningful friendships. Basically, if we are friends IRL, I never let go, and I have had the same core group of friends for more than 20 years. I feel deeply known and deeply loved; it is a true gift. While my friends have always fanned my flame, encouraged me, and believed in me…what took my life from “oh wouldn’t it be nice if…” to “okay, here is my to-do list to shift gears and bring my dream life to reality” was the moment I started paying for professional support. Being asked the right questions at the right time, being challenged and encouraged not just to dream bigger but to put my feet on the ground and start walking toward my goals, being in the right room, surrounded by people who are doing the damn thing changed my life. It’s contagious.

I didn’t have to burn my whole life down and leave the friendships I’ve had since I was fourteen to do it. The healthiest thing I ever did was stop placing expectations on my people who had different values than me to all of a sudden start acting different when I was the one who wanted change.

I remember pouring my heart out to a stranger, a coach I’d found on the internet, about the most audacious, bold, different version of my life I could possibly imagine. I braced for the list of reasons it wouldn’t work. Instead, she said, “I can feel how much you want this. So what’s the plan to make it real?” Twenty years of people who love me, and nobody had ever asked me that question. Not because they didn’t care. Because loving someone for decades doesn’t automatically teach you how to ask it.

My reality shifted almost instantly. There are wild people out there just like me? Fantastic, let me bring them close.

This is the kind of space I want to create for you.

Right now, this lives in one place: the No Small Life newsletter. I’m not launching a live program yet (this is in the works!); I don’t have the bandwidth to build one well right now, and I’d rather tell you that straight than throw open doors I can’t actually hold. If you want someone live with you sooner than that, that’s what my coaching waitlist is for: [click here], one-on-one, not a group room, but real and available today.

If this is our first time meeting: I'm a board-certified nurse coach and a certified deep coach and transformation expert. I co-founded, built, and sold a coaching certification for nurses. I've coached women from 20 to 80 at this point, hundreds of them. Women who've put their hopes, dreams, and wishes on the back burner for years. Women who know they want something different but don't know what it is yet and don't want to grind themselves into the ground to have it. Thousands and thousands of hours of coaching, through exactly this kind of work. Not only do I know what I'm doing, I love this kind of work. I live and breathe it, all day, every day.

The receipts

If you want to see what the paid side of this actually looks like before you decide anything, start with [The 6-Question Audit to Avoid Regret]. It's the six real questions I used to decide whether to walk away from a business I'd spent years building, the same audit format every paid post here follows: not another essay, but something you actually sit down and do. It's normally paid, unlocked here so you can see exactly what you'd be getting.

What’s actually available right now

Here’s what’s open today: the No Small Life paid newsletter. No calls, no waitlist, no someday.

Free posts are the story, the surgeries, the company, the decade of moving and starting over, all the stuff that earns your trust. Paid posts are different on purpose. They’re not more essays telling you life is short, you already know that part. They’re audits and actual homework. Things like naming the real dollar number that would make you feel like you have enough, and why almost nobody does that math on purpose. Or the six questions I actually used to decide whether to walk away from something I’d spent years building, instead of just telling you the story and leaving you to figure out your own version alone. You get something to sit down and do, not just something to feel moved by for twenty minutes before you close the tab.

Twenty women are already in there.

You can subscribe monthly or annually right through Substack, no separate page, no extra steps. It’s $10 a month right now, or $100 a year if you’d rather commit upfront. The monthly price goes up to $15 on September 1st, so now’s the cheaper time to start if you’re going monthly.

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Who this is actually for

Not everyone. I’d rather tell you that straight than have you sign up and feel misled a month in.

This is for you if:

• You’ve read the free stuff and you want more. More to chew on and more time with me. You want to actually do something with it, not just feel moved by it.

• You’ve caught the word “someday” coming out of your own mouth and hated the sound of it.

• You have a real picture of the life you want and no actual plan for how you get there.

• You want something to actually do, not just something else to read and feel moved by for an afternoon.

This is not for you if:

• You’re chasing hustle energy, a countdown clock, urgency as the fuel. That’s not what’s running this, and it’s not what you’ll find here.

• You want someone to hand you the answer. I don’t have yours. What I have is a way to help you find your own compass.

What to do next

Subscribe to the paid newsletter, $10 a month (going to $15 on September 1st) or $100 a year, right through Substack. That’s the whole ask today.

If you want someone to live with you sooner than that, join my coaching waitlist, [COACHING WAITLIST LINK], one-on-one, real, available now.

Either way, I’m glad you’re here asking “what now” instead of not asking at all.

Ready? Let’s go

xo

Shelby

P.S. The $10 a month rate closes September 1st, then it's $15. Locking it in early costs you nothing you weren't already going to spend (saving you $80), and you already know what happens to the things you tell yourself you'll get to later.

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I told you I’d write about the exact exercises that got me from crying at the island to telling my cofounder three days later. This is that.

I remember scouring the internet for someone who could understand what I was going through, to help me, to guide me…and I didn’t find much. To my own credit, I did actually look; I didn’t sit in my pity party and wish for someone to come save me. I reached out to people I knew, reached for books, hired coaches, but alas, this map was one I had to create on my own.

This isn’t only for people leaving a business per se; it’s for anyone standing in the “should I stay or should I go” fog, whatever “it” is for you. A job. A relationship. A city. A version of your life that looks good on paper and still doesn’t sit right in your chest.

And listen, if you are here…I know it is so hard. I know you aren’t sleeping; I know this is consuming every inch of your brain space, and that if you could have a crystal ball with the “right answer,” with no regret, you would do it in a heartbeat. I see you, friend, and I promise this doesn’t last forever, just for now.

Sometimes you don’t get to avoid all regret; you just have to decide which regret you can live with, and these questions will help you sift through the clues that are likely already there and find the courage it takes to live an audaciously bold life.

Step 1: The Regret Test

Ask it straight, no softening. Which one would I regret more, staying or going?

Then ask the question underneath it: which one gives me the most potential to have a lifestyle I actually believe in, with the most autonomy? Not the safest option. Not the one that disappoints the fewest people. The one that’s actually yours.

You may already know in your gut what you need to do. Some of you will need to sleep on it. Others will need to talk it out loud. You each know your own process, and if you don’t yet, now is a good time to start practicing.

Here’s what I notice: when people know in their gut that it’s time, or that something that used to be a yes is now a no, their brain tends to come online with “logic”. Logic isn’t wrong; it may even have a good argument, but it’s often laced with risk management, worst-case planning, and what-if-ing yourself to death. Make space for both. Just acknowledge that they’re different wisdoms: your gut and your logic. Your gut is your compass.

This won’t make the decision easy. Mine sure as hell wasn’t. But if you already know your values, it makes the decision clear, and clear is what you’re actually after, not easy.

Step 2: The financial gut-check

I knew the island moment was coming for a while before it actually arrived. What would have helped me more, and earlier, was a hard look at our actual finances. I was the primary breadwinner. We’d sunk eighteen months into that business with basically no safety net under us. If I’d forced myself to look at that two years before I did, I could have been making the decision based on real factors instead of fear dressed up as practicality.

Four for you to sit with:

1. What is your real financial runway? Not the vague sense of it. The actual number.

2. Do you want to keep white-knuckling this for the next ten years, even if the payoff at the end is genuinely awesome?

3. Fast-forward a few decades: how could you make eighty-year-old you proud, right now, today?

4. If you stopped negotiating with fear, what is the outcome you actually want?

Step 3: Name the lie

There’s a lie that shows up right around here, and it sounds reasonable, which is what makes it dangerous. It sounds like: this is good enough, you have so much to be grateful for, you’ve already put all this time and energy in, so you should just stay.

Here’s the truth underneath it. You have built all of these skills. You have so much to actually be proud of. Now go build the version of your life that has your values as the priority, not the sunk cost.

Gratitude for what you built and permission to leave it are not opposites. You’re allowed to hold both.

Step 4: What you have to stop believing

Underneath my decision was a belief I didn’t even know I was carrying: that I was unworthy. Unworthy of my current business, my current partnership, my current success. I had to actually heal that; I did it through hypnotherapy, and after one particularly potent session, every decision that came after got a hundred times easier.

You don’t need my method. But you do need to ask yourself what you’d have to stop believing about yourself to actually make this move. Most of what feels like a logistics problem is a worthiness problem wearing a logistics costume.

Step 5: Get it out of your head

Talk to someone. Your best friend, your husband, whoever it is, tell them how much you’re actually struggling, not the polished version. I mean it, let your people care about you and love on you in this way. Get the problem out of your head and into the air around you or onto paper. That alone changes its shape.

Then get your finances on paper for real, not a guess. Knowing your actual boundaries is what lets you build a real runway, or lets you move fast and clean if that’s what the moment calls for. Either way, the goal is the same: let the move come from your actual life, not from the version of it you’ve been carrying around in your head.

Step 6: If the answer is stay

I’m not going to pretend this audit only points one direction. Sometimes you run it, and the honest answer is stay. That’s a real outcome too, not a failure of the exercise.

If that’s where you land: what has to shift for this to actually be where you spend your years? What conversation have you been avoiding? What support do you actually need that you haven’t asked for? There is real work on either side of this decision. So what’s the work that’s surfacing for you right now, to actually squeeze the juice out of this life instead of just enduring it?

Run this on paper, with a real pen, not just in your head where it’s easy to talk yourself out of the honest answer.

Sometimes the bestie you used to hit the bars with just doesn't quite get it, and that's okay. Same goes for husbands, they tend to like problems with a clear solution, and this one can get murky. That's part of why the paid newsletter exists: more of this, from someone who's actually run the audit herself and made big life pivots from it.

It's not just me in there. Twenty women are already inside doing this exact kind of work, sitting with their own versions of this same fog. You wouldn't be starting alone; we got you.

I’m rooting for you, boo; you can do this.

XO,
Shelby

P.S. If this felt like a taste of what deeper work with me looks like, that's exactly what the paid newsletter is for: more of this, the actual exercises, not just the essays. It's $10 a month right now, going to $15 on September 1st, or $100 a year.

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I have had this “Okay, what now?” thought more times than most people get to, especially at 35. Like the universe gave me a real good, shoulder-shake-with-both-hands, “You survived, what now, babe?” moment.

Every single time, once the danger passed, I’d sit in the gratitude for a few weeks or months, but my brain was always running logistics: What now? What do I do with the fact that I’m still here?

That question is the whole reason No Small Life exists. It’s also the real answer to something people have started asking me since leaving my company: “What now? What’s next?” And I did sit on that for a good four months. Chewed through and spit out a couple of ideas, circled back to my values at least a hundred times, tried to negotiate with my good ol’ friends hustle and grit to find a new Everest, and instead intentionally landed here. Which is why I’m charging for part of this Substack publication. (Do I get to call it a publication? Newsletter? I guess we’re rolling with it.)

Before I pushed all my chips in, I wanted proof. Proof that I have a story worth telling, proof that I have something to offer beyond “wow, rough few years, huh.” Charging money is a blunt, uncomfortable way of finding out if something is real or if you’ve just been telling yourself it is. I didn’t want to keep guessing.

But that’s not actually deep enough to build a business on, so I sat with it longer, and what I landed on is this: free and paid aren’t about better and worse writing. They’re about two different jobs.

The free stuff is the story. It’s the surgeries, the birth, the company I co-founded and grew to seven figures and eventually sold, the decade I spent moving every two or three years in my twenties, starting over in a new city with no friends and no idea if the new plan would work. That’s what earns your trust. That’s what proves I’m not writing about mortality and reinvention from a book I read or from a yoga mat in Bali; I have lived it… by choice and by luck, I am all in.

But if I’m honest, the surgeries and the company aren’t actually the strongest thing I’ve got. Those just happened to me, or were the result of choices I made in crisis mode. The thing that’s actually rare is that I’ve been obsessed with living a good life since long before any of it happened. I have a Pinterest board from 2012 titled “so the problem is, you think you have time.” 2012. No hospital bed in sight yet. My dad has been asking me bigger questions than “how was your day” since I was a kid, and somewhere in there it became my own question too: what is this all actually for?

I could have settled. Nursing is a perfectly good career, and I could have kept it and been fine, genuinely fine, and nobody would have blamed me. I could have found a way to fit into the multi-7-figure business I help build for the next few years too. But I think I was just born with a natural discomfort around planning for someday. Not the healthy kind of planning, the other kind, the kind where you keep pushing the actual living part off to later because you’re assuming later is guaranteed. It never sat right with me, even as a kid, long before I had a reason as good as almost dying twice to back it up. So instead I’ve spent my whole adult life actively chasing something different, authenticity, alignment, whatever you want to call it, more than anyone I’ve personally ever met. People tell me I’m brave. Courageous. That I’ve got this “it’s going to work out” thing that’s apparently contagious and, in their words, worth sticking around for.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one wired that way; I just maybe made peace with it earlier. I’ve coached thousands of nurses through burnout and grief and the exact moment they realized “someday” had quietly become the whole plan. I’ve heard the same regret in a hundred different voices. Almost nobody regrets the thing they did. They regret the thing they kept meaning to.

The paid tier of No Small Life is the list. Remember that ICU bed, and the only thing that made “still alive, now what” bearable was something concrete to do about it? That’s what’s behind the paywall. Not more inspiration, because inspiration was never the problem; you can find inspiration anywhere on any other app. But you, my friend, you already know the plane could go down tomorrow. You already know “someday” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your day-to-day living. Knowing that has never once been what gets a person to actually change anything.

What changes things is having a grounding point you come back to on purpose, something that makes you sit down once a month and ask, in writing (or in our chat) are you actually living like your time is finite, or are you just talking like it. Deeper assignments. Real calibration. Your own list, for your own “what now.”

I want to be straight about something else too. In those same four months, in my latest layer of significant healing, I have almost lost all sense of urgency. Which, to be honest, kind of sucks. These last four months I’ve really had to learn how to be different in my own life, and I know that learning is still just the tip of the iceberg. Urgency isn’t a clean fuel source for me anymore; I literally can’t access it like I used to. I’m not an ER nurse, no one’s life is on the line, and I’m not in a startup anymore, where urgency is one of your best assets.

Even in writing this piece, I got to bed late 2 nights in a row (that’s on motherhood), and I slept through my writing time. I woke up feeling like a failure, and it wasn’t until I looked at my calendar that I realized I had a buffer day built in, and I was really only one article “behind”. I am constantly reminded that I built the next chapter of my life differently, and unless I simply stop writing, it will be really hard to ever be behind again.

The new fuel source is intention. It's values-based action. I think it's always been, but it got cloaked in urgency somewhere along the way. If something's a problem, I fix it, usually quickly, because that's just how I'm built. I don't like to suffer unnecessarily when there's something I can do about it. You'll see me move quickly, adjust often, and take the path with more risk. I used to feel weird about that. Now I'd rather just embrace all of it, out loud, and you're welcome to do the same. I've coached enough people to know that's not everyone's clock, and it doesn't need to be. Some of you will read this today and feel nothing shift. Some of you will read it a year from now, and it'll click on a random Tuesday for no reason you can name. Both are fine. Neither is late.

Here’s the other thing I bring to this, besides the intention and the lived and professional experience.... I know how to take an idea and make it real. Not eventually. Not “getting around to it.” Real, on a timeline, with something to show for it at the end. I’ve done it for myself more than once. A nursing career. A company I built out of nothing and sold. A body I had to rebuild a few times after it tried to quit on me. And I’ve done it with other people, hundreds of them at this point, watching an idea stop being a nice thought they had in the shower and turn into an actual thing sitting in front of them.

This Substack is for the people who ask the big questions. The what’s-this-all-for questions. The am-I-actually-spending-my-one-life-right questions. But asking was never going to be enough for what I’m building here. This is for the people who ask, and then do something about it. The ones who are done using “someday” as the plan.

So here’s the actual answer to “why are you charging?” It’s not because I think my writing is worth more than free writing. It’s because the free version of this can only ever hand you the mirror; it can’t make you look in it every month. The paid version is me building the thing that does that, because I’ve had “okay, what now” answered for me by an operating table twice, and I would rather help you build your list than keep writing you postcards about mine.

I’m not selling certainty, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what you want anyways. I’m selling the space that makes you actually do something with the time you already know is limited, instead of just feeling moved by an essay and closing the tab.

If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you, genuinely, for being the proof I needed. If you're not yet, no pressure, no countdown. I'll tell you exactly what's behind it in the next one.

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Doesn’t matter which one you are; I have done them all, and they each are their own ride. The question underneath all of it is the same: what’s your number?

Ask people what they want, and they’ll say “to be happy.” Ask them what they want money-wise and they get cagey. “Enough to be comfortable.” “I don’t need much.” “I’m not really about the money.”

Even worse, sometimes you ask this question, and people are too afraid to open their bank account. I used to be one of those people, and I have coached HUNDREDS of people just like me.

Honestly, in my early days as a nurse, I never asked myself the question at all. I didn’t grow up thinking about what it would actually cost to live my version of a good life, I just lived it and hoped the math worked itself out. Then I started a company, and the number stopped being optional. When you’re the one directly responsible, a low number is on you. So is a high one, and suddenly a high one felt achievable in a way it never had before.

I co-built that company to seven figures, with a business partner who was every bit as much in it as I was. And somewhere in there I learned something I didn’t expect: I didn’t actually want to keep chasing that size. I’m genuinely okay with less. I also learned I still want a part-time, boujee kind of life, not a “gone for ninety hours a week” life. Those two things aren’t a contradiction; they’re just both true, and it took building the big number to find that out.

Here’s the one your CPA or financial advisor is never going to tell you: how much money is enough isn’t a feeling. It’s a number. And if you never actually pick one, you don’t get peace; you get a treadmill. There’s always more to make, which means there’s always a reason to keep grinding, which means you never get to the part where you stop and check if you’re actually building the life you wanted or just running from the fear of not having enough.

So today I want to do something a little uncomfortable. I want to walk you through naming your number. And then I’m going to tell you mine.

Money isn’t the problem. Where you put it is.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first, because I know it’s sitting there. Wanting money isn’t shallow. Wanting nice things doesn’t make you materialistic. I like nice things. I don’t like things because they’re expensive. I just like things, and they happen to be expensive.

Here’s where a lot of my coaching clients get stuck, and it’s rarely actually about the money. It’s a Bible verse. “Money is the root of all evil.” Say it in a room of people trying to build something and watch the guilt land, and almost none of them have actually cracked open the text and read it themselves. They just trusted their pastor and moved on, or even better, they have never gone to church, but this is a phrase we throw around as law, and the collective absorbs it as truth.

Except that’s not what it says. 1 Timothy 6:10 says the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Not money. The love of money. And not the root, a root, one among many, not the single cause of everything bad that’s ever happened. Read the rest of the verse and it’s about people who wandered from their faith chasing it, not people who simply had some. That’s not a small difference. It’s the whole point.

I’m not trying to give you a sermon. I just think it’s worth knowing the verse you’ve been quoting at yourself was never actually about the number. It was about where you put your trust. Which brings us right back to where we started.

The problem was never money. The problem is when you hand your peace over to it. When “enough” keeps moving every time you get close, because the number was never really the number, it was a stand-in for something else you were trying to prove. Safety. Worth. That you’re not the same person who almost lost everything, or never had much, or spent a decade building someone else’s dream instead of your own.

Money can buy you room to breathe. It can’t buy you the belief that you’re allowed to breathe. Those are two different jobs, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re actually asking it to do. (Let me know if you want to learn about creating safety around money; that’s a different topic that deserves its own space. This is going to be more logistics-focused.)

The exercise: figure out your actual number

Most people have never done this. Not “what do I make now,” but “what does my actual life cost, and what would make it feel like enough.”

Here’s the rough shape of it:

1. Fixed costs. Mortgage or rent, insurance, debt payments, the stuff that happens whether you feel like it or not.

2. The real cost of living, not the bare-bones version. Groceries you don’t stress about. Gas without doing math at the pump. The version of your life you’re actually living, not the austerity version you tell yourself you’d be fine with.

3. Buffer. A number that exists so a flat tire or a surprise bill doesn’t take your whole month down with it.

4. The wants that aren’t emergencies but are still real. Vacations. Nice dinners. The stuff you’d cut first if you were being “responsible,” and the stuff that’s actually a huge part of why you’re doing any of this in the first place.

5. Margin for whatever it is you actually want to build. Savings, investing, the next chapter, whatever “more” means to you specifically.

Add it up. That’s your number. Not a vibe. An actual figure you could say out loud without flinching.

(I’m working on a piece walking through how to actually build this out with Claude, line by line, so you’re not doing it on a napkin. That’s coming. For now, just get a rough number down somewhere you’ll see it again and make sure you subscribe so you can be plugged in when that goes live.)

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Panic has a way of showing up dressed as excitement, with a deep seed of fear underneath it. If you’ve read any of my writing up to this point, you know I don’t build off adrenaline anymore. I build off intention. So before anything gets a real yes, I ask it the harder question. Does this still sound exciting once I imagine actually doing it, not just announcing it? Is this something I want to show up for, and do I actually have the time to do it well?

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Every time, some part of me, quiet but immovable, said no. Not maybe. Not “run the numbers and see.” No.

Here are some of the ideas that didn’t survive that question:

I thought about buying an existing “boring business” that already has cash flow. I have a bit of a girl crush on a woman named Codie Sanchez, whose whole platform is about buying back Main Street, and she fuels my idea of buying an old laundromat and making it cute. Maybe we put a mini bar in it and have family laundry nights: you come and wash your clothes with your friends, your kids run around a bouncy castle, there’s a food truck in the parking lot.

I have also thought about buying a decaying house in Italy, moving my family overseas, swapping my current American problems for problems that at least have handmade pasta once a day. But I can’t decide how to monetize it. A retreat center? A BnB?

The appropriately delusional part of me knows I could do any of these things. It’s not rocket science; it’s laundry and pasta. I am a smart lady; I can figure it out.

However, I am in this precious stage of motherhood where big new swings would likely be the hardest thing I could choose. Taking my 20-month-old to the store is hard enough; he pulls everything off the shelf from the cart, so renovating a laundromat or an old Italian villa is off the table, at least for the next 12 months.

I also thought about going back to 1:1 coaching, something I deeply love and am good at. But again, the time piece is my current biggest constraint, and I am in the middle of trying my best to honor my own capacity, not violate my own knowing. The most I could do would be 1 or 2 clients at a time, which is doable, but not financially life-sustaining.

So this brought me back to the drawing board, and got me crystal clear on the base question: if you could actually have anything you want, what is it? If every option is on the table, what do you want?

I want a community of seekers. People who ask the big questions, who desire more from life, and are willing to do more than just think about it or complain about it. I don’t want to be your business coach. I want to help you clear the fear out of the way of your own dream that is currently talking to you, so you can actually hear it.

Which is exactly the thing I couldn’t do for myself back at that drawing board. I had the wanting. I just couldn’t tell whether the no’s in front of it were fear or truth. I used to think that “no” voice was fear, full stop. Honestly, for a long time, it probably was, dressed up as wisdom so I’d listen to it. But I’ve been paying closer attention lately, and I don’t think all “no” is the same “no.” Some of it is fear talking. “You’ll fail. You’ll embarrass yourself. Who do you think you are.” That’s conditioning. That’s static. But underneath the static there’s a second voice, quieter, that isn’t scared of anything. It’s just clear. I can tell the difference now, mostly by what happens in my body when I imagine actually doing the thing. Fear tightens. Clarity doesn’t.

Ninety days of no, and then one idea got through. Not loud. Not a lightning bolt. Just... a yes, the kind I hadn’t felt in a while. And the first thing I did with it wasn’t write a business plan. It was open my calendar.

Here’s why that matters. I already know what happens when the calendar wins and the values lose, because I’ve lived it. Fifty-plus-hour weeks. Nursing my son in an office chair between meetings. I didn’t miss that year because I didn’t love the work. I missed it because nobody, including me, had decided that my presence with my kids got a vote in how the week got built. The company grew. I disappeared more. That’s the trade nobody warns you about when they hand you the “you can have it all” version of ambition.

So when this new yes showed up, I ran it through a filter the old me didn’t have: could I build this and still be a present mom? Not “could I make it work.” Could I actually be here? If the honest answer was no, it didn’t matter how good the idea was. It was a no by default, because freedom and presence aren’t negotiable line items for me anymore.

I’m not going to pretend the trade is free. The version of me building a bigger, louder thing, unbothered by school pickup, could probably build it faster. There is a real cost to a calendar this protected, and if you’re doing this math in your own life, I’d rather you go in with eyes open than have me sell you a fantasy where flexibility is free. What I’ve decided is that money is a tool, not an identity, and I already know what happens when I let a calendar tell a different story than that. I’m not doing it again.

As for what the yes actually was: I still don’t have a tidy plan for the whole thing. What I know is this. Most of us are walking around with an inner voice that’s gotten quieter and quieter, buried under years of “that’s not practical” and “who do you think you are,” until we can’t tell if what we’re hearing is fear or truth anymore. I want to help translate the difference. Not with a framework, not with ten steps, just with the same thing I had to do for myself. Turn the static down until the actual voice underneath it is loud enough to trust again.

The one piece of it that already has a name is the call itself. Twice a month, ninety minutes, I’m hosting something I’m calling Inner Circle, where all of this stops being theoretical and gets real time. More on that soon.

That’s what’s living inside this calendar. Not a launch. Not a hustle. A room, still being built, for anyone else standing at ninety days of no, waiting to find out if there’s a yes underneath it somewhere.

Here’s the shape of the week that passed the test.

Monday: early AM writing block if it’s one of the mornings, school drop-off and pickup untouched, afternoon is kids, nothing scheduled on purpose

Tuesday: Inner Circle call, writing block if it’s one of the mornings

Wednesday: buffer day, catch-up, rest, the same idea as a cleaning buffer day, writing block if it’s one of the mornings

Thursday: Inner Circle call, writing block if it’s one of the mornings

Friday: lighter afternoon, planning, or fully off

Weekend: one burst session, however long the week actually allows, shooting for about 3 hours

Two or three mornings a week, one hour before anyone else is awake, plus one weekend burst, about three hours. Five to six hours a week. Not a day. A week.

If you knew me from my previous life, you may be reading this with your head sideways thinking “really?!” because this amount of work used to simply be my Monday morning. And hell yeah, this has taken some weeks to adjust to... doing less has been hard for me, but I can’t actually do it another way. My body says no, and it is no longer a discussion, but instruction.

If something doesn’t fit inside those hours, it waits for next week, or it doesn’t happen at all. That’s not a productivity hack. That’s the actual ceiling I built on purpose, because I already know what it costs to not have one.

There was a yes underneath ninety days of no. I just had to clear enough space to hear it.

P.S. If you want first access when Inner Circle opens, message me; I will save you a seat!

It’s been a lot, but I love my life when it is full, so no complaints here. None of it a surprise, except that my kid got pneumonia and hand, foot, and mouth all in one week, and I have been slinging Motrin and Tylenol as I work in a pediatric unit…

And then my mentor died. Or, I found out that he died 2 months after he actually passed.

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I’d texted him about this new Substack. He didn’t respond. I figured he was on a retreat. I texted again, told him I was worried…again, silence.

I knew he was likely gone, even though I’ve spent years in therapy calming the exact fear of “if they don’t respond, they must be dead.”

It’s weird when your anxiety turns out to be right.

Except this time it wasn’t anxiety. It was a knowing.

It still took me two more weeks to search his obituary; I was still hoping he would text me back and I would get to chastise him for leaving me on read. I found it at the dinner table, my family eating dinner. A weird time to get the courage, yes. I let out a small whimper. My husband peeked over my shoulder and echoed it.

Does anyone else need to know the cause of death to have any sort of peace? Maybe that’s the nurse in me. I saw his daughter posting updates about how he passed. Hard to read, but it sounds like he had a tough go in the ICU.

My nurse heart hopes he did not suffer, but my nurse brain knows otherwise.

He was never an expert. Just a witness. A guide. Imperfect. He never gave me the answers, only encouraged me to turn within.

“I know that face. Get out of your head and into your body.”

We talked about religious deconstruction. The meaning of life. How to be a leader. How to heal people-pleasing. He walked alongside me for about four years. He probably witnessed some of my most insane growth and transformation.

“Do you remember what we used to talk about? Look at how far you have come! Your problems are so much bigger now, so much cooler.”

He knew how to gas me up for the hard conversations. Back in December of 2025, I panic-texted him. My life wasn’t adding up again, and I needed an ear.

“Listen, you know the answer and what you need to do next. Whatever you choose to do next is neither right nor wrong, but your choice is yours to live with. Do you want to panic text me in December again for the 3rd year in a row?”

Neither of us knew he wouldn’t make it to the next December.

I’m happy to report I followed through. I spoke my truth. I honored my knowing. And he got to celebrate with me.

I’m sure I’d still panic-text him this December, out of habit. Truth is, I know he isn’t far, and if he wanted to connect, we could.

He spent four years teaching me how to be my own witness, how to feel my truth, to trust my own knowing, not to need his or anyone else’s.

I knew he passed before I ever found his obituary; I used my knowing last December and altered the entire course of my professional life. I don't love that he won't be here to hold space for me along the way anymore. But he taught me well enough that I don't need him to be.

His last post on Facebook, from May 15:

He didn't know it would be his last one. I don't think that's the point. It's just the kind of thing he'd say on a random Tuesday, because he believed it, not because he knew anyone would remember it.

Rest in peace and see you (eventually), dear friend.

A to-do list 400 miles long, half the ideas needing to go from square one to real in 30 days flat. For almost a decade, I thrived here. The speed was fun. When I am in a flow state, creative output pours out of me like the hours fly by on the clock: fast. Slowly, though, over years, my days filled up with too many shoulds, too many asks, until the hours started coming up short and there was no white space left to eat into...and I was already tired for tomorrow before the sun even set on today.

I used to love this feeling; it was like a hard workout for my soul, tired in the good way. I could hang my hat on a “job well done” 97% of the time, and it felt good. Now, after 3 kids, it’s different. Hustle and motherhood are fighting for the same body, and motherhood is going to win every time.

I’ve coached working moms enough, across every stage of motherhood, to know the pattern: not one has ever regretted the time she spent with her kids when they were little. not. a. single. one. Most (not all) carry real anger about going back to work, whether it came from expectation or choice, and I have spent hundreds of hours holding space for these women to process their grief, taking personal notes on the side, hopefully learning from their wisdom. If there is a way for me to not learn the hard way, I am going to take it.

Maybe it was hearing that same sentiment enough times that it made me hypersensitive. Maybe it was all those heartfelt reflections slowly digging up my own truth until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Either way, earlier this year, this truth that I wanted to be more mom just showed up and wouldn’t leave. Work all of a sudden felt heavy in a way that I couldn’t ignore. This was going to get my attention one way or another, and instead of running from it or shoving it away, I turned around and looked it in the face. It almost felt like an allergy in my body; my breath was shallower, I was always a little bit uncomfortable, yet still functional. I was going to make myself sick if I kept going. Something I used to handle just fine and now I “suddenly” can’t. Like a gluten allergy. Again, absolutely infuriating…because I love bread.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about how I finally saw the light and hustle was bad all along. That’s not this. I built my “boss babe mom boss” identity on purpose, with my eyes open. I wrote it out on paper and manifested this identity back in 2018, then I breathed life into her. It gave me somewhere to put all the drive I’ve always had, and for a long time it fit. I liked being her; I really loved it. She got things done. She co-built a company from nothing and grew it to seven figures. This isn’t a “we were all so naive back then” essay. It’s not a costume I didn’t know I was wearing. It worked, well, until it didn’t.

What changed wasn’t my ambition, because I’m still full of it... It was motherhood.

Nobody handed me a new title when I had kids. Motherhood didn’t replace “boss babe” the way “boss babe” replaced “nurse.” What it did was quieter and weirder than that. It recalibrated what my body could actually tolerate. Hustle takes capacity, and I’ve got an insane amount of it, for change, for building things out of nothing, for chaos I chose on purpose. I just didn’t know how much of that same capacity my kids were going to need until it was already happening and the train was moving. I couldn’t keep pace the same way anymore.

I didn’t consciously decide hustle is over. I noticed, one Thursday, that my body wasn’t going to do it anymore. Not won’t. Can’t.

It was a Thursday, and I was on a call with a mentor of mine, and we were deep in the mud about healing some lingering shame that I could not seem to shake off, despite trying for 7 years straight.

I have carried a specific “I am not enough” wound, seems like all of my limiting beliefs landed there, despite me intellectually knowing better. I had mostly resigned to being aware of it and carrying it forever, but this day, it was time to put some band-aids on it.

Now, if you have ever done healing work, you know it is tough to put words around, but I came out of that session LEVITATING. It was some inner child work mixed with some deep hypnotherapy, and when I tell you it has been 5 months since I have ever asked the question “am I enough?”…it hasn’t happened. Not once.

Days after this, the knowing in my bones that something had to change hit a breaking point, and I needed to move. My work output was no longer tied to this "am I enough" question, and I could finally move. I could decide. I didn't need to think any longer. I simply knew. I had no idea how it was all going to shift, but I knew I couldn't keep asking my body to do both at full volume anymore.

Hustle was never free. It was always going to cost me something: time with my kids, time for my marriage, time with my friends, time with myself. For years I let it cost me those things anyway, because giving everything to the business felt right, and for a long stretch, it was.

At some point that stopped being true. I didn’t want hustle to be the only place my energy went anymore. I wanted some of it back, for my kids, my marriage, my friends, myself. And in the role I’d built for myself inside that company, that wasn’t really an option. Not because the business was wrong; it just didn’t fit the season I was actually living.

I still believe there’s a business out there, a way to build something that matters and helps people, that actually fits me (and fits you), in your season. Leaving wasn’t me walking away from ambition. It was me doubling down on that belief and putting my money where my values are.

I don’t want my life to be balanced like a P&L; I don’t just want to coexist with purpose and motherhood; I want them to fuel each other, and I’ve had stretches where the work made me a better mother and being a mother made me sharper at the work, and it was, genuinely, some of the best living I’ve ever done.

So here’s where that leaves me. Nurse: grieved, gone (in the traditional sense). Boss babe mom boss: grieving it now, letting it go too. Mom: the one identity that never got shed, the one still standing after the other two came and went, the one I am most excited to keep close. And this time, nobody’s handing me a new title to replace what I’m letting go of. There isn’t a next box to check. What I’m building instead doesn’t have a name yet, and for me…it’s extremely exciting.

I’m not allergic to ambition. I still want big things. I’m allergic to a fixed model, to a life poured into one shape and expected to stay there forever whether it still fits or not. What I want is fluid, that’s why I got into coaching in the first place. Something that can hold ambition and motherhood without either one having to shrink to make room for the other, and that can change shape again when it needs to, without me grieving a whole identity every single time.

It’s not wrong. It’s just new. And I happen to be pretty good at being new.

I can tell you what mine looks like, and you are watching me build it in real time (more articles coming soon about my calendar and how I built it this time)…but I can’t do this work for YOU! The only way I’ve ever actually found the shape of a system that fits, versus one I was just gritting my teeth through, is by looking at the actual evidence instead of trying to feel my way to an answer.

Not what I wish it was, not the potential of what it could be, but to look at my life on paper, in the black and white, and be honest with it.

So that’s the fieldwork this week. Not “reflect on your relationship with hustle” in a think-about-it way, but in a practical way. Just look at two weeks, side by side, and let them tell you something you can’t argue your way out of.

This is for you if you already suspect something in your setup (or your life, your career, relationships, etc) doesn’t fit anymore, but you don’t have a single moment you can point to, no blow-up, no bad boss, nothing you could defend out loud yet, just a feeling that won’t leave you alone. It’s for you if you’re done with prompts that just ask you to feel your way to an answer, and you actually want proof.

Here’s what’s waiting on the other side: the exact two-week exercise I use on myself and with my own clients, plus the AI prompt that catches the pattern you can’t see from inside your own week. Twenty minutes, tops.

By the end, you won’t have another journal entry. You’ll have real evidence for which parts of your life are actually working and which ones are quietly costing you more than they’re giving back.

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It frequently brings me back to the question…Did they actually fix it?

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That 5-word question has been running in the background of my life since January of 2021 and has greatly shaped my entire life up until this moment.

I want to be honest with you: this essay is purely for selfish reasons, and now that the dust has mostly settled on this wild aneurysm-based journey, I feel like I can put it all on paper in a way that may be helpful for you and is healing for me.

I want to tell you what open heart surgery actually feels like...not the sanitized version, not the “she’s such a warrior” version. The real one. The one with a GAD diagnosis (generalized anxiety disorder, for those who haven’t had the pleasure), a voice that sounded suspiciously like God, and a question about my own heart that I still haven’t fully answered.

Part one: the mental f*ckery

I found out about the aneurysm in my aortic root two weeks after I turned 29. Right on the other side of my tricuspid valve, measuring 5.3 cm. You qualify for surgery at 5 cm, so this was definitely “oh shit” territory. I had just become the sole income earner for my family less than 4 weeks ago; my husband had just left the military. My daughter had just turned one. Not to mention a global pandemic had just kicked off, and now, apparently, I could die at any second.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

If any of my nursing homies have seen an aneurysm dissection IRL, your buttcheeks just clenched. For those of you with relaxed cheeks, this is like…the actual worst case scenario. Die within minutes worst case scenario if things go south.

I waited eight months for that surgery. Eight months of scans and cardiologist appointments and a slow, creeping realization that the aneurysm wasn’t the only thing trying to kill me...my own nervous system was doing a pretty good job too.

”Let’s just get you through the Holidays, then we will get you fixed.”

Get me through the Holidays?! It felt like my death certificate was being signed while I was not only still warm, but with a lot of life still on the table.

I would lie awake all hours of the night, doing the math on my daughter’s age at every future milestone, wondering if I would get to be there for them or even allow myself to dream of more children.

I started meeting with a therapist for the first time, and she diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder within 60 minutes. At first, I found this offensive; this woman doesn’t even KNOW me…and it turns out she didn’t really need to. My anxiety was rolling off me into every area of my life, and while we waited for surgery, we were going to start tackling this too (cool).

The day of my surgery finally came after a few reschedules; it was 5 in the morning, I was on my knees in the dark of my childhood bedroom, sobbing, because I was about to say goodbye to my daughter and I did not know if I would come home to her. I thought about the story her dad would have to tell her if I didn’t make it. This may be morbid, but I knew my husband was going to be sad if I died…but nothing compared to the idea of leaving my kid behind. The idea of leaving her without a mother took the breath out of my lungs. Hugging her that morning was the most brutal moment of my life, and I hadn’t even left the house yet.

Part two: the voice

After I signed consent papers, you know the ones where they talk about your stroke risk, that you could die, etc., I talked to my anesthesia team and BEGGED them to extubate me before I got to the ICU. The anesthesiologist wrinkled his nose, and this is when my anxiety boiled over. It was the one thing I could advocate for and attempt to control: the idea of waking up and feeling the tube in my throat was something I couldn’t handle. Even if they couldn’t promise me, I wanted him to lie to me and tell me he would try. He reluctantly agreed as I began to sob, unable to control any emotion anymore. He offered me some liquid valium, and I slugged it back like a bad tequila shot, hoping it would knock me out on the spot.

While the valium quickly kicked in, I naively (and hopefully) thought that I would be waiting for hours for the surgery to start. In all my years as a nurse, nothing was ever on time. Turns out I was the main show that day and the whole room was ready for me before I even pulled into my parking spot.

They wheeled me into an OR full of about 50 people in scrubs, bright lights everywhere, everyone looking at me. I was still coherent enough to move myself from the gurney to the table, which is a detail nobody warns you about. You don’t get carried in like a Disney princess. You scoot yourself over while sobbing and high on valium.

They told me the valium probably meant I wouldn’t remember any of this part. They were wrong, because I remember every second.

I remember the anesthesia mask going on my face and being told to breathe deep, and I started to panic more when I didn’t immediately knock out. I remember the poke of the IV in my left arm. I remember my anesthesiologist grabbing my hand and saying, “You’re doing great, Shelby, just keep breathing.”

Why on earth was I still awake? Please just knock me out.

Then someone else said, “I just gave her two of Versed,” and I was about to pop out of the bed and do their jobs for them. I had pushed Versed as a nurse hundreds of times, and patients went night night almost instantly, so what the hell was going on here?

And then, right before I went full Hulk mode, somewhere in there, I heard a voice say, “You did it.”

I don’t know whose voice that was. It wasn’t the anesthesiologist. It wasn’t a nurse. It felt like it came from somewhere else entirely, and it landed in my body like a held breath finally letting go. A wave of peace rolled over me, and underneath it, this deep, certain knowing: I would wake up.

Not because someone promised me. Because I just...knew.

I had spent eight months fighting to get to that table alive, and in that one second, all of it felt like it counted. Whatever happened next, it hadn’t been for nothing.

Then I let go…and woke up 8 hours later in the ICU.

Part three: did they really fix it?

Here’s the part nobody can tell you unless they have lived this particular moment themselves: the surgery doesn’t end when you wake up. It just changes shape.

In a total of 8 hours, they sawed open my chest, repaired the aneurysm with my pericardium (cool?!), sewed me back together, and everyone around me acted like that was the finish line. Cue the confetti, roll credits, go live your grateful, transformed life.

Except I still had a body that had almost died. My body had betrayed me. And a body that almost dies does not just go back to trusting itself, no matter how many people tell you the surgery went perfectly.

When I woke up in the ICU (extubated! hallelujah!), my throat was a level of dry I didn’t know was possible. I asked Rob to itch my nose and then hunt down that nurse for ice chips, to seduce her if he had to. She said I could have 3 ice chips as long as a I promised not to throw up. I coerced my rule-abiding husband to feed me the whole cup.

I fell back asleep for a short time and then the pain ramped up, and it was crushing. It felt like I was being squeezed between two giant hands, one on my chest and another on my back, and I couldn’t breathe. It came in waves, and the fentanyl did nothing but knock me out; then I would be woken up to more crushing pain. To top it off, I'd had my surgery at a pediatric hospital, and the staff seemed scared to give an adult a grown-up dose of pain meds. I genuinely suffered for the first 24 hours.

The level of helplessness you feel as a patient in a bed is holistically humbling. I couldn’t advocate for myself; I was completely incapacitated for about 36 hours, I didn’t know which way was up, delirium had taken over. My NP would stand at the end of the bed and bark at me to get out of bed, but my arms were useless; no one was helping me move; the pain was overwhelming me, and I really honestly felt like I could die at any moment.

I was on my second night when a travel nurse came and got on her knees next to my bed and said, “I am an adult ICU nurse; this is outrageous. I will burn this place down to get you what you need,” and boy did she. I wish I could remember her face or her name, but I was so out of it from the pain and anesthesia that it all remains a blur. I held onto her words like a lifeline, and she delivered.

The next day, the team got my pain management straightened out, and I was able to get out of bed and take a lap around the pediatric ICU. I fought tears, not from pain, but from watching the nurses’ and the doctors’ faces as they sat outside these tiny babies’ rooms. The worry they carried, ready to jump in. In that moment, I was so glad it was me and not my daughter here. I would come back a million times if it could somehow keep her out of here.

I was discharged after 4 days in the ICU and sent home. Seems kinda fast if you ask me, but as soon as I could get out of bed, I wanted out as soon as possible and because it was COVID times, the team wanted me out too.

This was only the beginning of the pain for me; it did fully take 6 months to heal completely, and for the first 12 weeks I couldn’t wash my hair, put on my own clothes, or even walk around the block without triggering a migraine.

For the first year, every skipped beat sent me spiraling. I could literally hear it. Every twinge in my chest was the aneurysm reforming, or something worse, or proof the surgeons had missed something. I would lie in bed at night with two fingers on my wrist, counting, like if I just paid close enough attention, I could catch my own heart in the act of failing me. I played out how much time I would have if my repair ruptured to get my husband’s attention…I likely wouldn’t last for the ambulance.

Did they actually fix it?

I have asked my cardiologist this question in some form at every single follow-up appointment for 5.5 years. He shows me the imaging. He shows me the numbers. He tells me it looks great. I have had 2 more babies as proof that everything is okay, and most of the time, I believe him.

Then I hear my own heartbeat in a quiet room, or I feel my pulse jump after a flight of stairs, or I hug my daughter tight enough to feel her heartbeat against mine, and the question comes right back, uninvited. Did they actually fix it? Not as a thought I choose to have. As a reflex, the same way your leg kicks when the doctor taps your knee with that little hammer.

I also wonder if my kids got the faulty heart too, but that is a worry for future Shelby to figure out if and when it happens.

This is the part of the story that doesn’t fit in my chart or in a research paper. Survival isn’t a single moment you clear and move past. It’s a relationship you keep having with your own body, probably forever. Some days that relationship is tender. Some days it’s exhausting. Most days it’s just...there, quietly, like static under the signal.

I am not writing this because I’ve resolved it, but I have learned how to work with it. I am actually so grateful that I can’t ignore the heartbeat in my ears. It doesn’t mean I automatically have everything figured out, but it keeps the impermanence of life real close, just like I like it.

But I also still hear the other voice. The one that said “you did it” before I even knew if it was true.

Last week I hugged my daughter goodnight and felt her heartbeat against my chest, right next to mine. Two hearts, both still going. Hers new. Mine repaired. Neither one of us has any idea how long we get.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

So far, so good.

Last time, I told you the decision got made for me at the kitchen island, standing three feet from my husband, crying for three hours straight. I told you I found my values, finally, after doing the work I walked you through. Let’s talk about what happened after that, because knowing what you value is not the finish line. I wish it were. I sat there with a list in my hands, real clarity for the first time in months, and I still remember thinking, yes, yes to all of this, and now what?

The gap nobody warns you about

Here’s the part nobody tells you. The gap between knowing and doing has its own weather. It is not a clean handoff where insight walks you straight into action. For a while, you feel like a car that’s shifted into a lower gear while your foot is still pressing the gas, revving, disoriented, going nowhere fast, even though you did the work.

I can tell you now, having done this twice, that this part is normal. But I want to be honest about something else too. Telling you the road gets bumpy won’t actually prepare you for it. You’ll nod along, think okay, got it, bumpy road, and then you’ll be in the middle of your own version of it, and none of it will feel like what you read about here. That’s not a flaw in you, and it’s not a flaw in anything I’ve told you either. It just means you’re actually living it instead of reading about it, and those are two different things in your body, not just on paper. Reading about a bumpy road and driving over one are not the same experience, no matter how well the reading prepared you. So if you’re in it right now and it feels bigger, longer, or harder than anything I described, that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s just what depth feels like from the inside.

What “personal power” actually means

Before I go further, I want to name something, because I think it gets thrown around without anyone actually explaining it. Personal power, the way I mean it here, isn’t power over other people, and it isn’t confidence exactly either. It’s how steady you feel standing inside your own decisions when nobody is there to validate them for you. It’s the difference between needing your title, your paycheck, or someone else’s approval to feel like you matter, like you need that to orient yourself in the universe, versus feeling solid in yourself even when none of that is propping you up anymore.

There’s a woman named Janet Hagberg whom I owe a real debt to here. She spent decades studying how people actually hold power, and she mapped out something I think about constantly. In the early stages, she found, power comes from outside you: your title, who you’re associated with, what you’ve achieved and can point to. But there’s a real shift later, where power stops being about proof and starts coming from inside instead, from reflection, from purpose, something closer to wisdom than achievement. Between those two worlds, she names something she calls the Wall — the place where the old way of feeling powerful stops working, and the new way hasn’t solidified yet.

That’s The Rebuild. You’re not powerless here. You already did the hardest thing, you already said it out loud, you already lit the match. But you also don’t yet have the new architecture in place to feel steady inside your own decision, because the old sources of I matter — the title, the paycheck, the identity everyone already understood — are gone, and the new ones haven’t finished forming yet. You’re between two ways of holding yourself. It’s uncomfortable specifically because it’s a real transition, not a fake one.

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If this is the first post of mine you’ve found, welcome, but you’ll want to start with Part One, then Part Two, before this one. This series builds on itself, and this post won’t land the same way without the rest of the story behind it.

Last time, I told you about the smoke and the heat. The bad feeling I couldn’t prove, the deadline that quietly expire…

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What I didn’t tell you is what happened in the months before any of that. The part where nothing had happened yet. Where I couldn’t have pointed to a single bad meeting or a single cruel thing anyone said to me. Where, if you’d asked me directly, “Is something wrong?” I would have said no. Genuinely no. And I would have believed it.

That’s where I want to start, because I think that’s actually where most people get stuck. Not in the big dramatic exit. In the part before it, where you don’t even have the language yet for what’s happening to you.

[Here's what's on the other side of this: the actual story of what those months looked like from the inside, including the parts I haven't told anyone publicly before. Plus three exercises I still use myself, the kind you can do in ten minutes with a pen and paper, to help you figure out if you're standing in this exact spot right now.]

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“Shelby, why does everything always happen all at once for you?”

My dad always asks me this same question, and I think that I operate in big bursts. So when we go, WE GO all in.

But let me back up a little, because you know most of this but not all of it.

I was a nurse for about 5 years. Then I co-founded a company from scratch, one that ended up helping nurses nationwide, and I co-ran it for almost 7 years before I walked away from that too. So when I tell you what I know now about building a life you actually want to live, I’m not telling you from a hypothetical daydream I lived out in my head. I’m telling you from having “burned” my own life down twice and taken notes both times to hopefully get it right the 3rd time.

The first time was traditional healthcare in traditional nursing. It wasn’t one bad shift that did it. It was more of a slow burn. A few peak moments where I knew, underneath it, that this wasn’t going to be my long-term path, but it was working for now. I had zero desire to get my master’s, become a PMHNP, or climb the ladder they hand you, so I made a lot of later moves. Travel nursing, switching specialties, and that got me to the 5-year mark before I started sinking into some pretty significant secondary trauma (google it) and moral injury (also, google that too).

The traditional pathway to further my education did not light me up. at. all. It lit me up less when everyone was telling me I should anyway. It was just going to be more of the same. Higher-end work, more pay, the same schedule, the same lack of freedom I was craving. Knowing the deeper desires of the life I wanted to live, it was so obvious to me that I was going to have to change paths, likely in a non-traditional way.

But here’s the part I want you to notice so you don’t make the same mistake: I blamed my lack of freedom and job satisfaction on the system. The hospital. The culture of nursing itself. I put the problem entirely outside of me.

Listen, traditional healthcare is so flawed. Most of this blame was accurately placed, but there was a good chunk of it that was on me. Saying yes to extra shifts, to a night shift job I knew would suck the life out of me…there was a lot in my control that I refused to take the reins of and simply blamed it on healthcare.

So, I left. My travel contract ended, and I decided I was going to give this coaching business thing a real shot. In the same four weeks, I found out I was pregnant with my first daughter and started my business anyway. Leave the job, find out you’re pregnant, start a company…I didn’t pause long enough to ask if I was running toward something or just running.

I told myself I was building freedom. A slower, more luxurious life. Room to actually be there for my kids, my husband, and myself. And for many years, I did! It was amazing. It will forever be marked as one of the best seasons of my life.

I was working 20-30 hours a week and making mult 6 figures. Truly, the most fun I had ever had making any kind of money. I didn’t know how good I had it.

Then the business hit its first real winter. The variables changed, and we got caught behind the eight ball. Not an impossible problem to solve, but the learning curve was steep. I knew I was going to have to shift modes right around the time I was pregnant with my third (surprise!) baby. Two weeks after he was born, I didn’t have the capacity for the more holistic coping mechanisms I’d built the business on. So I went back to hustle and grind instead.

I was on 24/7 during my postpartum recovery. I worked as many hours as I could muster with a reflux baby, which meant I was working all the time. From my bathroom floor. From the bed. At the kitchen table. I bypassed myself so that I could show up and keep going; the idea of letting my partner down was not an option (even though she never asked me to).

What I know now is that in times of stress, you revert to old coping mechanisms. You can build your own box, and the box can be pretty. The box can make sense. It can be deeply rooted in purpose, in doing good in the world — all of that can be true, and it can still not be the correct box for you.

The business just took on a life of its own. Fifty-hour work weeks. Hustle we swore I’d never do. And this time, there was no hospital system to blame. I built it. With my own hands, on purpose, out of my own values. Crisis or no crisis. That’s what made the second time hit so much harder than the first.

There’s one night I keep coming back to. A Tuesday, after a coaching call I’d just wrapped up. The call was great; there was nothing that knocked the domino over and sent the cascade of change through my life. I just walked downstairs where he was doing the dishes and told my husband I was worried I didn’t have a lot of time left in the business, that something was off.

I hadn’t said that out loud to him on purpose. I was scared of what it would mean, scared he’d be stressed or upset. So I just carried it for months. Eroding from the inside the whole time.

We stood at the island, him on one side, me on the other, and I held my head in my hands and cried for three hours straight. Because I loved the work. I deeply, genuinely loved it. And I knew I was missing the point anyway. Missing my kids. Missing dinner. Missing my husband. Missing my family and my friends. Knowing the schedule was never going to change on its own, and we were in so deep that I didn’t know how to change it now. It wasn’t just me anymore; there was a team and structure…it was so much in the best of ways and so much in the hardest of ways.

I was going to trade making real money, building something of real importance, helping nurses across the country, for my family. It felt like I had to choose. I’m sure there’s a version of this where I could have made it all work, and I want to assure my fellow dreamers that I did try. I tried to find a way where it all made sense, that this was a lesson to learn, that there was a way through…

But something deeper than logic was trying to get my attention: this isn’t what you signed up for. This is not what you started. I signed up for a slower life. I wanted dinner with my family, girls’ trips, Christmas morning without a looming to-do list following me around, waiting for me to get back to my computer.

I did not sign up to build an enterprise. Admitting this hurts every single one of my feelings. I hate confessing it, because there is a part of me that wanted to find out what that was like, to see what was possible, to actualize the full potential.

That Friday, three days after the island, I told my cofounder I needed to leave. This conversation was worse than any breakup I’ve ever been through, because the love was so real…for her, for our company. But we both know the price of authenticity, and she encouraged me to do what was best for me.

Here’s what I actually know now, both burn-downs later: you have to be so dialed into your own values, so willing to say no to the shiny objects that cross your path, that you don’t accidentally build something powered by old coping strategies. For me, that’s hustle and grind. It’s quiet. It’s enticing. The money is good, so your excuses are easier to disregard. It’s almost guaranteed to entice you into skirting your values.

You can build something awesome. Something deeply good. Something that genuinely helps people. And it can still be incorrect for you.

Here’s what that year of not saying it out loud actually cost me. Sleep. My hormones. My cardiac health (thank you, Oura ring, for the daily reminder that I was deteriorating in real time). But the part that disappointed me most wasn’t physical. It was my integrity. I was negotiating with fear. Using logic and reason to justify staying, when underneath it, I already knew it would be better for the business too if I stepped out, because I am not good at gritting my teeth and bearing it once I have fully admitted to myself that something has got to change.

Coming up, I’m going to write about the exact exercises I did to get clear enough to move — the ones that got me from the island conversation to the Friday conversation with my cofounder. So if you’re standing on the edge of your own big change right now, you’ll have them to use.

If this is you, or you know someone who is negotiating with their intuition already, share this. Please post it to your Facebook, your own Substack, or wherever the people who need it are going to see it.

I believe that we all can build a life we LOVE living, and likely you don’t have to burn your life down to do it like I did. You know what they say…third time is the charm! Steal my homework so you don’t have to do it the hard way.

See you soon.

He listened to my heart for a few seconds, heard the murmur, and looked at my mother and said, “I don’t know how she is not dead.”

They wouldn’t let her go home. We went straight to the hospital, someone called my dad, and I was put on a medical flight to San Antonio to fix the hole in my heart before it killed me. There was a team waiting on the ground with stretchers and oxygen tanks, ready for whatever they’d find. What they found was a baby who walked off that plane on her own two feet.

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I had my first open-heart surgery before I was old enough to remember it. I grew up with the scar, with the story, with being the miracle baby my mother almost lost in a country far from home. Years later, in nursing school, I got to meet the surgeon who saved me and thank him, face to face.

Then, decades after that, I heard almost the same sentence again. Different hospital, different doctor, I'm now old enough to understand every word of it. I was in the ICU after my second open-heart surgery, and someone told me the wall of my aorta had been paper-thin. It could have ruptured any moment. I was, once again, lucky to be having this conversation instead of not having it at all.

Twice. Two different decades, two surgeons, the same sentence: you shouldn’t be here right now.

Here’s a detail that made it stranger. The aneurysm I had happens in about 0.9% of cases, and it’s almost exclusively found in men. My maternal grandfather died from the same one.

So there’s a version of this story where I tell you I’m special. Where some higher hand looked at a baby on a foreign military base, and then looked at that same person again thirty years later, and decided this one gets to survive twice, because she’s meant for something. That story is seductive and deeply comforting to both you and to me. It turns “I don’t know how she is not dead” into “you were saved for a reason” instead of “you got extremely lucky, again.” It turns a 0.9% statistic running through my family like a bad inheritance into a cosmic plan with my name already on it.

Here’s the problem that I have wrestled with for 6 years. It doesn’t hold up. If I were chosen, why does this happen almost exclusively to men? Why did it kill my grandfather instead of transforming him into anything? Why would a plan built specifically for me route itself through my mother’s fear, a stranger’s blunt disbelief, and a paper-thin wall in my chest that any number of small things could have ruptured before anyone found it? Special implies a reason. What I actually got was genetics. A coin that had already landed wrong once in my bloodline, and landed wrong in me too.

I got the shitty end of some genetics. Twice, apparently. That’s it.

I used “everything happens for a reason” for years because it let me survive something brutal, twice over. It let me make peace with a body that tried to kill me before I could talk, and tried again as an adult. It let me believe I was put here to have this extreme story, so I could sit with other people in their worst moments and actually mean it. And I still think most of that is true. What I survived did make me more capable of holding other people’s pain without flinching. I just no longer believe a higher power engineered a paper-thin aortic wall to get me there.

So what do I believe now?

I think you, on a soul level, sign up for lessons. I don’t know who assigns them or where the signing happens, and I’ve stopped needing to know. But I don’t think you’re forced to learn them. You get a choice about whether to actually participate in yours.

I also think you get to choose which lessons you stay for. I know there were probably a hundred more lessons waiting for me if I’d stayed in my business. Bigger numbers, harder problems, the version of me that gets built by surviving that particular gauntlet. But there were another hundred lessons waiting on the other side of leaving, the ones that only show up when you honor your own capacity instead of your own ambition. I didn’t opt out of growth. I opted out of one mountain range and walked toward a different one. That’s still a choice, even though from the outside it might have looked like giving up.

I also think the meaning isn’t always sitting there waiting to be discovered. Sometimes you make it. The day I decided the aneurysm could mean something instead of just being a genetic misfire, it started meaning something. Not because the universe revealed it to me, but because I built it, on purpose, out of the wreckage. I don’t fully know if my soul signed up for two open-heart surgeries, a near-fatal birth, and becoming a family’s sole income during a pandemic, or if I’m the one who decided afterward that all of it had to add up to something. Both feel true depending on the day, and I’ve stopped needing to pick.

I want to be honest about where this belief gets hard for me. There are things happening in the world right now that are horrific and entirely outside anyone’s control. I don’t have a framework that lets me put a heart surgery next to a genocide and call them both lessons with a straight face. I don’t think I’m supposed to. Some suffering teaches the person living through it something. Some suffering doesn’t teach anyone anything; it just happens, and calling it a lesson would be an insult to the people living it. I hold both of those at once, without a clean answer, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they’ve resolved that tension neatly.

What I know for certain, at least for my own life, is this: it’s smaller than being chosen, and it’s harder to swallow. There’s no cosmic reason my grandfather and I share the same failure point in the same organ. There’s no reason a baby in Spain and a grown woman in a Texas ICU thirty years apart got told almost the same sentence by two strangers who never met each other. There’s just what you do once you’re standing at the bottom of the mountain, whether you asked to climb it or not, and whether anyone assigned it to you or you assigned it to yourself.

You climb many mountains in a lifetime. Or you don’t, and you spend your life at the bottom, complaining about the view you never bothered to earn.

I’ve climbed two heart surgeries, a birth that nearly took me too, and a business I built and then left. Every time I was at the top of one mountain, I looked around and found another one waiting for me in the distance. That used to feel unfair. Now I think it’s just what being here is for. Not punishment. Not a prize. Just the deal, whoever made it. You climb, your legs get stronger, your heart gets stronger, literally and otherwise, and you get a view from up there that you can’t get any other way.

So no, I don’t think everything happens for a reason. I think things happen, and you get to decide what you build out of them, and then you get to decide whether you’re someone who climbs or someone who stays at the bottom telling everyone the mountain wasn’t worth it anyway.

I’m still the same nurse who once had a surgeon save her life and got to look him in the eye years later and say thank you. I don’t know if that was written somewhere before I was born. I just know I showed up for it. And I’m still climbing.

People think surviving open-heart surgery changes your life.

It doesn’t. Well, not immediately, at least.

I had just turned thirty. My daughter had celebrated her second birthday only a few weeks earlier when someone first used the phrase urgent open-heart surgery in a sentence about me. It’s a strange combination of words, isn’t it? Urgent makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and your brain go “oh shit”.

At first, survival doesn’t change your perspective. It changes your calendar. Cardiologists become recurring appointments. CT scans, echocardiograms, MRIs, and blood work slowly replace vacations and long-term plans. Your life becomes measured in follow-up appointments and countdowns as doctors say things like, “Let’s get you through the holidays, and then we’ll do the surgery in the new year.”

You stop making too many plans six months in advance because, if you’re honest, you aren’t entirely sure what six months from now looks like.

It changes your medication list, too. As a nurse, I had handed out beta blockers thousands of times without thinking twice. I’d explained the risks, reviewed the side effects, reassured nervous patients that they would be okay. But when it came time to swallow my own tiny white pill, I froze.

I had to call a nurse friend for the same pep talk I’d given so many other people.

“This may not be forever,” she said. “But it is for now.”

Then, on top of all of this, people get weird. Your family and your friends. Not because they all the sudden they don’t love you, but now they know they could lose you, and words often fail and fall short.

They don’t know how to ask how you’re doing without reminding themselves that terrible things happen to healthy thirty-year-olds. They tilt their heads, lower their voices, and say things like, “I can’t imagine how scared you must be,” or “You’re so strong,” or, “I don’t know how you’re doing this, especially with a little girl.”

And every time I wanted to laugh.

Or scream.

Or both.

Because, fuck me, Susan. As if I had stumbled into some hidden reserve of courage. As if bravery was something I’d chosen instead of something life had demanded. As if there had been another option besides waking up every morning and walking toward the operating room because the alternative was much worse.

Then something else happens that nobody really prepares you for.

Everyone assumes survival is the happy ending.

They assume looking death in the eye permanently rearranges your priorities. That gratitude settles into your bones. That every sunrise feels sacred and every inconvenience becomes insignificant. They expect you to emerge from the experience transformed, carrying some profound wisdom about what really matters.

and I did, for awhile.

But surviving doesn’t automatically teach you how to live.

That lesson comes later.

Sometimes years later.

Sometimes after you’ve gone right back to overworking, over giving, people pleasing, chasing achievement, saying yes when you mean no, and forgetting that your heart has already been cut open once (actually, I have had 2 open heart surgeries, but more on that later).

That’s the part no one talks about.

The surgery repaired my aorta. It did not repair the parts of me that believed my worth depended on being useful. It didn’t heal my tendency to outrun my own exhaustion. It didn’t magically make more time in my calendar to be more present with my family or grateful for ordinary Tuesdays.

I still had to learn those things.

In many ways, I’m still learning them.

That’s why I’m writing here.

Not because I have answers, but because I keep returning to the same question the surgery itself could never answer: How do you become the person you promised yourself you’d be when you thought you might die?

Because I made promises to myself in those months leading up to surgery. I told myself I would work with ease. That I would stop worrying about things that wouldn’t matter on my deathbed. That I would be more patient, more present, less concerned with achievement and more concerned with being alive.

Then, almost without noticing, life resumed.

The appointments ended and the inbox filled back up. The business demanded my attention. The bills kept coming. Three children replaced one. Ambition and fear returned. The ordinary rhythms of life quietly swallowed the extraordinary promises I’d made to myself.

It turns out surviving was the easy part.

Learning how to live in the aftermath has been much harder.

This isn’t really a newsletter about medicine, even though nursing will find its way into these pages from time to time. It’s about mortality, identity, marriage, motherhood, work, fear, money, and the strange things life unknowingly teaches us if we are willing to pay attention. It’s about the stories we inherit, the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones we eventually have to rewrite if we want to become who we actually are.

Mostly, though, it’s an exploration. A place to wrestle honestly with the question I’ve been asking myself for the last five years.

How do you build a life that would still make sense if you knew it you could die tomorrow?

If you’ve ever survived something, or loved someone who did, or simply found yourself wondering why being alive doesn’t always feel like living, I hope you’ll stay and wonder with me.

I think you’ll feel at home here.