Yesterday morning, I took a sip of lukewarm coffee at my favorite childhood breakfast place and felt a flash of self-pity. Flapjacks is a pancake house in the White Mountains and as happy a place as exists. A model train circles the entire restaurant on a decorated track. The waiters are fast, the coffee is served piping hot, and the pancakes are legendary -- big, fluffy, and served with warm New Hampshire maple syrup.

I looked down at my coffee, frustrated at the impossibility of it in a place like this. And I felt bad for myself. Logically, I knew I shouldn’t indulge the feeling, but I couldn’t help the thoughts flying through my head.

This isn’t fair! Why can’t we just have a normal family breakfast? Shouldn’t kids be excited to go for pancakes on vacation? What’s wrong with mine? Why on earth didn’t we take my mom up on her offer to leave them with her and go to breakfast alone?

I’ll tell you why we didn’t. Guilt and hope. Guilt that not including the kids in a ritual like a pancake breakfast on our family vacation makes the whole idea of having had kids a little silly. My inner voice screamed: Why have kids if you don’t want to involve them in your life?

And hope, too. Hope that this meal would be a good one. We were at a kid-friendly restaurant with epic pancakes; there was almost no wait, and they had mom, dad, and grandma’s full attention. A recipe for success, right?

But instead, it was rough. It started with my daughter’s tears before we even left the house. Her forgotten stuffed monkey then escalated things. And my son’s dysregulation, perhaps intensified by his sister’s state, international travel, a passing cold, overstimulation, or some combination of all of it, was at a height. He was climbing me, touching me, making constant noise, and for a moment I wallowed in the misery of the unglamorous parts of motherhood.

The thoughts continued:

Why do we even bother? Let’s just leave them with the TV next time. Maybe we put the brakes on restaurants for a while.

All I knew was that I was going through the motions of eating at my favorite childhood restaurant, but from the cold coffee onwards, nothing was quite right. This wasn’t the version of the experience I’d come for.

Toward the beginning of my sabbatical, I scribbled down a note to myself, an idea for a future article. My Q3 KPI? Joy.

The general idea was that I’ve been so goal-oriented and KPI-driven these past years that the sabbatical was, in part, a way to break my addiction to achievement and my constant need for signs of progress. I figured that if anything was worth measuring, it was moments of joy, or even awe, experiences that had become too scarce in my busy life.

It felt irreverent and luxurious, in the optimization culture we live in, to measure not for some tangible output but rather for a subjective feeling, an emotion. How evolved, I thought. I also recognized that it was more a sign of the exit society ideal than the fast-moving, AI-obsessed accounts crowding my feed. And if I’m honest, I even felt a subtle sense of victory for having arrived at a point in life that was post-optimization.

But today I’m two months into this sabbatical, and I’m questioning that idea.

I’m questioning if joy is possible to manufacture at all.

In principle, my equation made sense. In pre-sabbatical life, I had relatively few windows for joy. My hours were already claimed: the morning rush to school, my desk from nine to seven with breaks for food or exercise here and there, homework help and bedtime from seven to nine, then my own dinner, reading, and bed around 10:30. I left most weekends wide open, but they carried their own pressure to be both relaxing and adventurous, productive and lazy. But I figured that if, in that version of life, I still had a handful of joyful moments a week, then increasing the available hours (which is what Mommy Camp was supposed to do) would surely bring a proportional increase in joy, right?

Wrong.

And the fact that I am now objectively less productive and not seeing an increase in joy feels pretty bad.

I feel blocked creatively, frustrated, anxious, and impatient. There are moments when I wonder whether I should give up on the experiment entirely. Should I just send the kids to activities and fill my hours with new goals and projects? Sign up for that MBA? Pull the trigger on a new business? Start consulting? Get a new job?

But the equation doesn’t work that cleanly.

A hundred things to do in a day becoming only twenty doesn’t automatically make those twenty any more profound. The hours I’ve gained with my children don’t automatically translate into meaningful connection, despite my intentions, and three times as much family time doesn’t create three times as much joy. Sometimes it just creates three times as many chances for fighting, boredom, dysregulation, irritation, and exhaustion.

Underneath my impatience is a pattern I know well: I have always needed a mountain. Not scenery for an Instagram feed, but the actual climb, one clear direction to pour myself into, with the small wins along the way, the failures that make me recalibrate, and the pull of not knowing how it ends. That’s when I feel most alive, and I’ve built most of my life around arranging for it.

What I’ve also come to see is that most mountains we climb aren’t especially important. We climb because we were raised to climb. After all, achieving is what a capable person is supposed to do with her days, and the mountain being there is reason enough to start climbing.

The experiment underneath the sabbatical was never really about joy. It was whether I could go a season without a mountain and still feel my hours were meaningful. Two months in, the answer is a fairly clear no, and I don’t know yet whether that’s a limitation to outgrow or just the truth about who I am.

The obvious move is to build the next mountain, and the relief would be immediate. I was one click away from signing up for a master’s program starting at the end of August. One click. I held back.

The more evolved move is to choose a mountain that actually matters instead of grabbing the nearest one for its momentum. And when I picture that better mountain, it’s never about me. Someone asked me recently why I’d start anything again, when I’ve already built and sold a company and “don’t need to prove anything to anyone”. I heard myself say it would feel selfish not to point whatever talent and energy I have at something bigger than myself, that whatever comes next has to make the world a little better.

It sounded good. I think it’s even true. But I can also hear the self-manipulation in it. A woman who can’t sit still for a summer would find “I owe the world my ambition” a very convenient thing to believe, because it lets her keep climbing and feel noble about it. I can’t tell, most days, whether the pull toward a meaningful next thing is a real calling or the same old need for a mountain, dressed up so I’ll stop questioning it.

Back to breakfast.

Later that morning, we were meeting my extended family for a short hike at the Lost River Gorge. Given how the day had started, spending the next several hours managing children didn’t sound especially appealing, and I would have been happy to go back to the vacation rental and sit in the hot tub. But everyone was going, the kids wanted to see their cousins, so we went too.

They loved it. The kids squeezed through boulder caves and saw their first waterfalls. Afterward we all went to lunch, by which point my children were tired and starving, a combination that usually has me calculating how fast I can get bread onto the table.

But it was joyful. Time slowed as my kids delighted in trying a baked pretzel (their first). They devoured their steak tips, played with the stuffed animals they’d just picked out at the Lost River’s gift shop, told the kind of funny stories only six-year-olds can tell, and were just completely absorbed and engaged in everything around them. I was sitting across from them at one point and became aware that I was having exactly the kind of moment I’d imagined when I decided to keep them home this summer. And I’d almost skipped it because breakfast had been so bad.

There’s no tidy lesson here about perseverance, or about joy arriving when you least expect it. That’s not what I’m learning, or at least it’s not the part that interests me now.

What fascinates me is how convinced I was that creating more space would give me more control over what happened inside it. I could control whether we brought the kids to breakfast. I could keep the day open for the hike and the lunch. I could choose Mommy Camp, take a sabbatical, travel for the summer, and organize my life so work no longer occupied most of my waking hours. I could set all the conditions. And still, breakfast was miserable and lunch was wonderful, and I got no vote on which was which.

I had confused creating the conditions with causing the result.

For years, a good day answered a simple question: How much did I get done? I thought I’d retired that question. What I’d actually done was replace it. Did I spend enough quality time with my kids? Did I have a meaningful conversation? Did I learn something? Was I present? Did I experience joy?

I’m still grading the day. The new questions just sound nicer. And joy, unfortunately for my Q3 planning, is proving particularly unwilling to be managed. It shows up at the wrong lunch. It skips the morning I built for it.

And when the metric fails, I notice the reach for a bigger one. If joy won’t hold still long enough to tell me the sabbatical is working, then surely the next thing, the meaningful thing, the endeavor that helps somebody besides me, will finally settle the question of whether I’m spending my life correctly. That’s the same scoreboard again.

That challenges Project Recharge, this place I’m building for women to take their own version of a sabbatical, because the premise rests on the value of making space. Space outside my normal routine has changed me before. Travel, education, long walks, conversations, and coaching have all shifted the way I think and, in some cases, what I did next. But I have to be careful about the promise hidden inside that belief. Space gives you the opportunity for something to happen. It doesn’t tell you what will. I can create all the conditions and still not control what arrives. I can’t manufacture joy. I can only keep giving it somewhere to land.

The harder thing is that I may not get to know for a while whether any of this worked. Most of my adult life I’ve been able to point at what my effort made: my first TripAdvisor review when I guided a tour, a new product or destination going live, an exciting graph showing revenue growth. Even the difficult stretches had motion I could clearly see. This period is asking me to tolerate a much looser thread between effort and outcome, to let an entire day produce nothing I can name and feel okay with it anyway.

My note about the Q3 KPI is still there. I won’t delete it, because I like what I was reaching for. I do want a life with more joy in it, more moments when I notice I’m actually inside the life I worked so hard to build instead of racing through it toward the next thing. I’m just beginning to doubt that I can manufacture those moments by simply giving them more room, and even less sure that counting them will tell me whether any of this is working.

Last night, Sofia told me she wished she could build a bridge between Spain and the US so we could always be connected. My heart melted. I couldn’t have planned it. It arrived at the end of a day I’d nearly written off by my second coffee.

I have about four weeks left in Q3, and I’m going on month three of this sabbatical. For once, I’m trying not to decide in advance what a good result would look like.

I’m Lauren, a founder, mother, and writer currently on sabbatical after fourteen years building a travel company.

Through Project Recharge, I’m exploring what a modern sabbatical can look like for women: how we step away, what we discover, and how we design lives that are ambitious, meaningful, and sustainable.

Here I write about leadership, identity, energy, ambition, motherhood, and what comes next.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

The hotel greeted us with smiles and chilled rosé. But I just wanted my room key.

We had spent most of the day driving from hot, dry Madrid, where forest fires raged not far from where we live. The smoke in the air leaving the city was apocalyptic, and it set an anxious tone for the six-hour drive ahead.

It was one of those car trips where nothing seemed to flow. The kids were fighting. No one napped. We’d stop for gas for nearly fifteen minutes, and then five minutes later someone needed a bathroom. I forgot the wristbands and lollipops for carsickness.

As we made our way into the green, winding mountains of rural Asturias, I wanted badly to close my eyes. But my son was nauseous and crying and somehow still fighting with his sister and demanding we change the song again.

By the time we arrived, everyone needed some space.

Instead, we were brought to sit in the reception area while the staff completed our check-in. A strong fragrance filled the room, the sort of scent someone had carefully selected to communicate luxury and wellness. I found it overwhelming. The twins predictably started asking what the smell was. My seventeen-year-old niece, who was staying with us, scrolled her phone.

Then the drinks arrived, a rosé from the hotel’s own vineyards — interesting for Asturias, where wine production is rare. It was actually quite nice, but I was being climbed on by two six-year-olds while calculating their proximity to several serious pieces of art. My son was still complaining about the smell.

The welcome was thoughtful, and the seated check-in was as polished as you would expect at a five-star hotel. I would guess that most guests find it relaxing.

But what I needed most at that moment was my room key.

I wanted to take off my shoes, let the kids explore, and stop being responsible for everyone’s behavior in a room full of breakable objects. I would have happily accepted the same glass of wine twenty minutes later, ideally outside, while looking at the mountains instead of measuring the distance between my son and a vase.

The hotel was delivering the experience it had designed. I was waiting for someone to notice that the most hospitable thing they could do was redesign it.

I kept returning to that idea throughout the weekend.

I had paid for beautiful surroundings and excellent service, and a few days without cooking, cleaning, or laundry. It was luxury by most standards.

But what I had expected to feel was something closer to being seen, to being cared for.

Until that trip, I am not sure I had fully defined the difference. But it was clear: one does not automatically equal the other.

To be fair, I had asked a lot of those three nights before I even packed the car.

Within the previous month, my life had changed multiple times.

I received my Spanish citizenship after nearly two decades calling Spain home. My husband and I marked our fifteenth wedding anniversary. His company entered an exciting phase with new investors, and I left the job and business that had defined most of my adult life to begin a sabbatical and start building something new.

Each event was worthy of celebration, but instead disappeared almost immediately under administrative obligations and the pressure of the next item on the to-do list.

By the end of July, we were exhausted and vaguely aware that we should have celebrated something.

Neither of us has ever been particularly good at stopping to mark an occasion, but even we could see that the moment deserved more than a rushed toast between milestones. When a long weekend opened up, I grabbed it and immediately began trying to cram in more meaning than any short getaway could reasonably hold.

I spent hours comparing rental houses and hotels, clicking between Galicia, Asturias and Valencia while calculating driving times and opening enough tabs to make my computer overheat. Every option looked promising until I found the flaw: a recent lukewarm review, a price point just beyond what I could justify, or no last-minute availability for five of us.

More than anything, I realize that I just wanted to be relieved of responsibility for a few days.

I had chosen to spend the beginning of my sabbatical at home with my six-year-olds, running what I had optimistically named “Mommy Camp.” The reality was closer to Mommy Zoo. So the thought of cooking and cleaning, or stripping sheets at the end of an expensive rental stay, held no appeal.

Eventually, I chose the most luxurious and atmospheric hotel I could find within a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Madrid. It had a spa and a KM 0 restaurant, along with an infinity pool overlooking the mountains. Our rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, and the owner had decorated the property with enough art to make it feel like a private museum.

Each morning, we sat down to a breakfast I had not needed to think about. There wasn’t even a menu. Food simply arrived, plate after plate, and someone else cleared it away.

But even five-star service could not remove the work of traveling with people who depend on me.

Someone still had to calculate mealtimes and find missing shoes, and check whether everyone had brushed their teeth before bed. Someone had to manage the wet swimsuits and make sure everyone had used the bathroom before we got back into the car.

And let’s be realistic, that someone was me.

I have written before about how motherhood changed my relationship with travel. Family trips do not give me access to the same version of my pre-kids self, the one who could spend a day wandering without thinking about who might be hungry again in twenty minutes.

I am still searching for a travel formula that offers enough space to relax without leaving all the domestic work to us. A rental house gives us freedom, but we end up running another household. An all-inclusive resort handles the logistics while often separating us from the place we traveled to experience. A formal hotel removes much of the work, but I become acutely aware of how the kids are occupying the space.

I know every format involves a trade-off. This knowledge has never stopped me from opening another fifteen tabs in search of the one exception.

Still, there was something else underneath my restlessness that weekend.

I had wanted the hotel to notice what I was too tired to explain, to see what needed to happen before I did. I wanted to stop being the person always monitoring the room.

That is probably less a definition of luxury than a fantasy of motherhood temporarily suspended.

I did not only want someone else to cook breakfast or clear the dishes. I wanted to stop anticipating what everyone would need next. To be able to walk into a room without immediately scanning for what could break or where the next problem might come from. I wanted, briefly, to be the person whose needs were being anticipated.

A beautiful hotel can remove many practical responsibilities. It cannot make me stop noticing.

Years ago, before we had children, my husband and I stayed at a small rural lodge run by a lovely couple, Laura and Esmeraldo.

The accommodation itself was fairly basic, a comfortable room in a casa rural rather than a five-star hotel. Yet I still think of it as one of the most luxurious experiences of my life.

Laura and Esmeraldo paid extraordinary attention. Small snacks appeared at exactly the right moments. A drink would reflect something we had mentioned enjoying the previous day. Their suggestions for restaurants and outings suited us better than the plans we might have made ourselves.

At the time, I thought of this as excellent curation. Looking back, I can see that it was their curiosity about us that made the curation possible.

They took the time to get to know us, and the relationship went both ways. We learned about them too. As the days passed, they understood more about how we liked to travel and which places would draw us in. Then they adjusted what they offered.

The experience kept changing because we were there.

We felt so connected to Laura and Esmeraldo, and to the village they introduced us to, that we later bought an old stone house there that we plan to renovate. That’s a whole other story, but probably the clearest evidence I can offer for the impact of true hospitality.

For a long time, I remembered the snacks and recommendations as proof of their excellent taste. I now know that what really made the difference was that none of it came from a generic idea of their ideal guest. They were paying attention to us, and what they noticed changed what they offered.

That kind of attention is difficult to replicate through a preference form or booking profile, however sophisticated it may be. A form can record that you like rosé wine. It cannot easily understand when you would rather skip the welcome drink altogether.

Luxury hospitality often places a high value on discretion. Needs are anticipated discreetly, and the staff remains almost invisible.

For many people, that is exactly the point. They want privacy and consistency. They want the freedom to disappear into the experience without having to build a relationship with the person serving breakfast.

I understand the appeal. There are days when being left entirely alone sounds like the highest form of luxury available.

But discretion also creates distance. It is possible to move through an experience where every standard is met without feeling any connection to the people who made it possible. The staff may know your name and the preferences attached to your reservation while knowing very little about the person standing in front of them.

Being known requires participation. The guest has to reveal something, and the host has to respond. There is risk involved because this kind of attention cannot be scripted. Sometimes the right response is conversation, and other times it’s handing over the room key as quickly as possible and coming back later.

That is much harder to standardize than a welcome drink.

It is also the part of hospitality I value most.

I have spent most of my career designing experiences around this tension.

At Devour, we could choose the route, shape the stories, and train our guides carefully. But a great food tour could never be sealed off from the people taking it. Every tour changed according to the group that showed up.

The best guides noticed what was happening in front of them. They understood when someone wanted another story versus when the group needed to stop talking and eat. They drew in the person hanging back and changed the pace when needed, before the plan became more important than the people following it.

Now that I am building again, my instinct is to design every detail. I can choose a beautiful setting and think carefully about the rhythm of the day. I can obsess over the food and spend a ridiculous amount of time deciding on the exact snack someone should find in her room.

I know myself well enough to assume that I will do those things.

But a snack is only evidence of care when it reflects some understanding of the person receiving it. Otherwise, it is just another fancy snack.

I have devoted most of my working life to arguing that design matters, and it absolutely does. The right structure can remove decisions and help people settle into an experience. But preparation can easily become prescription. I can plan the entire day, including the snack, before I know who will be sleeping in the room.

The danger comes when the design becomes so complete that the people inside it no longer have any effect on what happens next. Taste can begin masquerading as attentiveness. I can create an experience that reflects everything I believe people should want while failing to notice what the actual person in front of me needs.

The hotel in Asturias gave us beautiful rooms, warm service and privacy. Each morning, I woke up to the mountains, walked downstairs and ate breakfast while someone else did the dishes.

The children will remember the game room, the cows crossing the road and the infinity pool. They will, I hope, forget my anxiety about their volume in the restaurant.

I came home tired and unsettled, but not because the hotel had failed.

I had assumed that spending more would make me feel more cared for. The trip forced me to question whether those things were as connected as I had believed.

Comfort can be purchased. So can beauty and excellent service.

But the experiences that have stayed with me over the years offered something less predictable. I remember the food tour guide who changed a stop because one guest wanted to taste Madrid’s famous gambas al ajillo. Before a cooking class in Vietnam, the teacher sent us a book of more than 100 lesser-known dishes and built the class around what each person most wanted to cook. And in the most extreme example, Laura and Esme made us feel so welcome that we bought an old stone house in their village.

I will probably over-research our next family trip and convince myself, temporarily, that the ideal answer is hiding somewhere on a Reddit forum.

But I understand something clearly about the experiences I want to create.

I can design the setting, the food, the rhythm and the welcome. I can choose the exact snack waiting in the room.

But I will still have to notice who arrives. And I’m really looking forward to that.

I’m Lauren, a founder, mother, and writer currently on sabbatical after fourteen years building a travel company.

Through Project Recharge, I’m exploring what a modern sabbatical can look like for women: how we step away, what we discover, and how we design lives that are ambitious, meaningful, and sustainable.

Here I write about leadership, identity, energy, ambition, motherhood, and what comes next.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

Last Christmas, I didn’t make the Christmas cookies.

I gave myself permission to opt out, knowing that no one in my orbit would in any way be harmed by this decision. And no one was. Santa got the packaged star cookies I’d bought the day before and enjoyed every bite. My kids never said a thing. The butter went back in the fridge.

But as the year has gone on, I have a nagging feeling that I actually needed those cookies.

Not the taste of them. Just the small, impractical act of doing something for no reason other than that it’s been done before. The moment in the calendar that says: this is what we do today, the second Saturday in December. There’s a photo every year. Flour is everywhere; somebody is inevitably crying, and there’s the same bad kitchen lighting. But it’s how I could tell where one year ended and the next one started. This year there isn’t one.

In an over-optimized, maxed-out life, ritual is one of the last places the emotional, slightly unreasonable part of me is allowed out. It interrupts efficiency and asks for repetition even when repetition is inconvenient. No spreadsheet would defend it.

Yet without it, things start to feel thin.

Ritual used to arrive, whether you wanted it or not. It came with the season, the calendar, the church, the family, the village. Nobody sat down in October and mapped out the year’s ritual schedule (that’s a thing now). Rituals were simply done, and you were part of them, and your opinion was not requested.

Now everything is up for review.

Ritual today is drag and drop. Morning yoga or meditation? Birthday cake or the new place that does gourmet eclairs? Funeral or celebration of life? Santa Claus, the Three Kings, both, neither?

This freedom is real, and in many ways it is good. I would not go back. Plenty of us inherited rituals tied to beliefs we don’t hold, roles we don’t want, or versions of family life that no longer exist. There is dignity in choosing and relief in opting out.

But more choice hasn’t made anyone I know more fulfilled. Sometimes I wonder whether our need to control everything has cost us something essential. A menu is not the same thing as a meal.

I grew up with a lot of ritual. Nothing exotic — Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and the full Catholic sequence of baptism, first communion, confirmation, each one with a big family party attached. All of it was produced by my mother, with a level of effort I can only begin to understand now that I’m the one with the kitchen and the backyard.

There was always food, mostly homemade. And because her love language is gifts, there were goody bags and small surprises layered into occasions that did not call for them. Every March, she made a full boiled Irish dinner for St. Patrick’s Day, from scratch, for our extremely not-Irish family. There was no Irish anything to honor, and nobody asked. She just thought we should have it, so we had it, year after year, corned beef and cabbage in a house of Poles and Italians.

As a child, I took all of it for granted. It was simply what we did.

Not all of it felt the same way, though. The religious rituals felt performative to me even at the time. I went to Mass, to catechism classes, made my first communion, got confirmed, and did all of it because those were the instructions. My beliefs were still completely unformed, but the knowledge that confirmation came with cash gifts was enough to keep performing. I had the structure without the meaning, and structure without meaning is just choreography.

The Italian-American rituals were different. Those I could feel. Long meals that ran six hours across a hodgepodge of Italian and American courses, more food than anyone could eat, all of it produced somehow out of my grandmother’s minuscule kitchen. I couldn’t have explained it then, but I knew there was history around that table. Something was being carried through the food that nobody could say out loud.

So I learned ritual through the table. That’s where it made sense to me. Gather people, feed them past the point of reason, keep them there for hours.

Which is why it’s a little funny that I then spent fourteen years building a company around shared tables.

I’ve told that story a hundred ways and never once as an inheritance. But that’s what it is. I took the one ritual I loved, the one I believed in, and I turned it into a business. I did the work my mother did, at scale, for hundreds of thousands of strangers, with a calendar and a budget and a team. I got very good at it. I got paid for it.

Which ironically means I never actually refused the job. I just refused to do it for free, at home, at 1 a.m., with no title.

Because I saw what that version cost. The magic ran on a person, and the person was tired. Somewhere in my twenties, I started to understand that as a warning rather than an instruction. I have never wanted her version of it, and I have also never stopped wanting the holidays.

I don’t think that’s only me. Anyone who has been the keeper of something can tell you that at some point it stops being fun. You’re up late assembling a thing that will be looked at for four minutes, and you feel a flash of resentment toward the very people you’re doing it for, and then you feel guilt for feeling it.

Here’s what makes opting out so easy. It costs nothing at first.

Nobody really notices. Santa eats the store-bought cookies. You make the call once, and it feels like relief. You make it four or five years running, and it stops being a decision. It’s just who your family is now.

There’s no bill, not at first. It even looks like an investment. There’s less strain, less resentment. But the cost is deferred, and it gets paid later by someone else, when they go looking for what their childhood smelled like.

I’ve felt that grief in my own way. I grew up with a physical longing for extended family, for Europe, for some real connection to land. I couldn’t have named it at the time. In many ways, it’s what put me on a plane in the first place.

And that’s just it. In my life, there’s another layer, which is that I live between cultures. Born and raised in the US, by a Polish mother and a first-generation Italian-American father, and now seventeen years in Spain. My choices are cultural before they are anything else, and kids bring them out constantly.

The Tooth Fairy or Ratoncito Pérez? Santa Claus or Los Reyes Magos? Do we bother with Thanksgiving or Halloween, both of which are gaining popularity here anyway thanks to the strange, inevitable mix of globalization and Instagram aesthetics? Baptism or first communion, both religious acts for some families and mostly cultural for others? Do we call Abuela on her saint’s day? Do we go to the feria? Do we care about football or Semana Santa or the Christmas lottery?

I was hoping there would be a default setting.

Of course there wasn’t one.

Or maybe there was, and I didn’t want to be the person responsible for turning it on.

For years, I carried an unexpressed thought, with a healthy dose of resentment attached, that the problem was my husband. He isn’t ritual-driven. His analytical brain does not wake up wondering how to mark the passage of time with themed baked goods, and he seems entirely at peace without an Easter basket. That said, I’ve also watched him light up every single time we’ve actually done any of it. But we didn’t celebrate Reyes until we had kids, and I'm the one who started it. And I’ve still never once called my mother-in-law on her saint’s day.

I wanted him to be the one. If the Spanish traditions arrived through him, they’d be his to maintain, which would make them free for me.

The resentment has stopped feeling honest, though. Because the truth underneath it is that I am ritual-driven. I always have been. I can criticize it and intellectualize it and calculate the mental load of it, and yet I still want the long lunch, the birthday cake, the walk we take every year on New Year’s Day because we take it every year on New Year’s Day. I want a life with shape. I just wanted somebody else to build it.

A few weeks ago, after seventeen years here, I became a Spanish citizen. I’d been eligible far earlier. I waited, for reasons I’m still sorting through, until it felt less like paperwork and more like claiming something that was mine.

Shortly after, we went to what was technically a friend’s birthday drink with the kids.

I knew precisely how it would go, because I’ve lived here long enough to know. A drink is never just a drink. It becomes tapas, and then more drinks, and then somebody orders one last round, and children end up running on tortilla and Fanta and the electricity of being out far past every norm I was raised under. It ends near midnight with two kids drunk with exhaustion, falling asleep in the car.

That’s exactly what happened. All of it, on schedule.

There was a time I’d have experienced that as something Spanish going on around me. Charming, chaotic, definitely too late — a thing I was observing.

This time it finally felt like part of my own story.

And then last night we watched football together as a family for the first time.

It helped that it was a World Cup semifinal. My husband and I don’t watch or follow sports, so this was not some long-standing family passion finally brought to life. But I felt a draw to watch it together, and I should be honest about where it came from, because it didn’t come from me. Try avoiding Spain in a World Cup semifinal. It’s in the bar, on the street, in the group chat, coming through the window from the neighbor’s house. The country put it there, and I went along.

And it was wonderful. The kids came alive with excitement, with a six-year-old patriotism that made me laugh out loud. My daughter didn’t make it to the end, so I took her to bed. Later, my husband told me that my son had very earnestly said how much he loved their date.

That word stayed with me. Date.

He wasn’t watching football. He was on the couch with his father, past bedtime, inside something the whole country was inside at the same moment.

Here’s what got me. For seventeen years I’ve been standing at the menu, deliberating. Trying to choose right. Last night I didn’t choose anything. It chose me.

Which is exactly what ritual used to do.

I’ve been trying to work out why last night and the birthday drink got through when the cookies couldn’t, and the honest answer isn’t flattering.

Neither of them cost me anything. Somebody else made the tapas. Somebody else scheduled the semifinal. A whole country did the work of making both of those nights feel inevitable, and I walked in and got to belong. It’s a lovely thing when a country does it for you.

But nobody is going to sweep me into Thanksgiving here. There’s no ambient pressure for the American half, no noise through the window in November, no group chat. That half only exists if I build it, if I choose to spend a random Thursday in November cooking, while everyone else has school and work.

So half of what my children inherit will arrive free, carried by a country that never asked my permission. The other half runs on me, or it doesn’t run at all.

And I can already feel what I do with that. When’s the final? Should we watch that one too? Should there be snacks? Should we invite people? Should I buy face paint? Should this be a thing now? I take one good night and immediately convert it into an obligation. Make it repeatable. Make it special. Make it mine to maintain. But I have watched that movie all the way to the end, and there’s a woman in it still awake at two in the morning, and though I love her, I am not doing that.

Which leaves me holding two things that don’t fit together. I want ritual in my life, badly, more than I let on. And yet I don’t want the job. I haven’t found an arrangement where both of those are true, because the only reason my own childhood felt like magic is that a person I loved was standing in a kitchen paying for it.

The butter is in the fridge. Christmas is still five months out.

I don’t know what I’m doing about the cookies. I do know I want the photo.

I’m Lauren, a founder, mother, and writer currently on sabbatical after fourteen years building a travel company.

Through Project Recharge, I’m exploring what a modern sabbatical can look like for women: how we step away, what we discover, and how we design lives that are ambitious, meaningful, and sustainable.

Here I write about leadership, identity, energy, ambition, motherhood, and what comes next.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

We’re on a video call, the kind where everyone keeps their camera on, and it has the unplanned feel of a Shark Tank episode. Leadership sits on one side of the screen, our faces small squares with blurred backgrounds. On the other is a local manager in presenter mode, equal parts nervous and excited to finally share the slides and product concepts she’s spent weeks, sometimes months, building.

The ask was simple: bring us new product concepts for our travel company.

Then she starts, and before the second slide, I already know. This isn’t what we’re looking for. It rarely is.

In the moment, I keep a warm face and send signals of engagement at the appropriate intervals. Underneath it, the self-doubt starts. Was I unclear about what we needed? Is the vision not sharp enough to build from? Did I fail her somewhere upstream, weeks ago, before a single slide got made? My colleagues have told me more than once that I carry too much of this, that I reach for my own fault first, and they’re right. I reach for it anyway. Conflict with myself is easier than the uncertainty of conflict with someone else.

She walks us through her rollout plan for a tour I am certain will never run. Today it’s too niche. Other times, too cost-prohibitive. And the word that shows up as she talks, growing louder the longer she continues, is waste. The hours spent inside that deck are only a small part of it. Waste is the concept she believed in, the conversations she had, the research she did, the relationships she started to build. All of it is energy spent that will go nowhere. And I am complicit in this.

I chose to scale my business, and scale is a waste machine. The startup years had their own version of it, plenty of failed experiments, but we were small and agile, and each failure taught us something fast enough to pivot on. But as we grew and then got acquired, the waste grew too. More people meant more projects, and more cracks for a thing to fall through. We were a fully virtual company, common enough now, except no one had been taught to do it well, so we misheard each other constantly and then got frustrated at the lack of communication. Yet we rarely paused long enough to get clear before moving again.

Some of this is also the industry, and I want to be fair about that. Travel moves fast, and it has faced one disruption after another since 2020. You learn to stay on call for the next emergency, to run a business where comfort with uncertainty is a hiring principle. I understand why the pausing rarely happens. But understanding it doesn’t make it feel any better. Another meeting that ends with no next step. Another project scrapped after months of someone’s hard work. The waste is frustrating at first. Over time, it accumulates, and people carry it home.

Not everyone carries it well. Burnout is at an all-time high, and it falls hardest on women and on the frontline workers who hold travel together.

It makes sense. People often come to travel as a vocation. The people I’ve worked with over the years, both in my own company and among our partners, are more often than not driven by a real love of travel and of the service industry. That’s my story too. I love the magic of hospitality and tourism, the way a single trip can change a person.

So someone arrives with real excitement, and somewhere along the way, it fades. And I think waste is a big part of why. We measure productivity constantly, on nearly every call. We rarely name the waste. What would it change if we did?

Here is what I mean by waste, and it isn’t a few hours building a slide deck for a tour that doesn’t work. Most full-time roles are eight hours a day, forty hours a week. Even a little misalignment or miscommunication eats into that. Carry the math out to a year, or a few years, the average tenure in a tourism role, and the number gets frightening.

When more and more of someone’s time, energy, and spark go to things that never see the light of day, written off as the cost of doing business, it breeds disengagement and cynicism, two of burnout’s ingredients.

I keep thinking about the manager on that call. Not the deck, but what a year of those calls does to a person. She builds the next concept, and the next, and each one meets a careful, well-reasoned no. Somewhere in there, the excitement she logged on with stops surviving the call. She pitches the safe idea instead of the good one, then stops pitching much at all. Still on the calls, still competent, just no longer bringing the part of herself that made her worth putting in the room. She didn’t leave and build something of her own. She stayed, and dimmed. That’s the more common ending, and the one with no happy version.

And in the leader’s seat, it can lead to the same place. Even when your own ideas move forward on the strength of your role, watching the waste can feel like an offense against your values. It did for me. And let’s be clear that not all waste is created equal. Wasted potential is worse than wasted time. Wasted time irritates. Wasted potential feels like grief, because what got spent wasn’t the hours; it was the part of a person that wanted to make something and was given nowhere to put it. It was someone’s spark and creativity being shut down -- often with good reason -- but I knew that it was a gamble whether it would come back again or not. I watched that kind of waste affect people I admired until it reached their health, more than once ending in time off.

And let’s not forget, I was often the one saying no. I was the one who classified an idea, or a finished deliverable, as waste, and stamped a red “No” on top of it.

And while the more flattering version of the story has me as the witness who noticed and grieved, I was not only that. When someone brought me an idea with real charge in it, and I could see it wasn’t right for the business, I said no, and meant the no, but there was something else I usually left unsaid.

There were times I wanted to say the truer thing: “That won’t work here, or now. But it doesn’t mean it won’t work somewhere. If you want the work that lights you up, you’ll have to fight for it harder, or go find it elsewhere.”

Some version of that did escape, once in a while. Most people stayed regardless.

I understand why they stayed, because I stayed too. The waste was real, sure, but so was the output. On the spreadsheets where these things get measured, the positives won most quarters. We saw the fruits of the productive stretches. We built many genuinely good things together.

There was a brilliant, passionate woman I worked with in the very early startup days. She left after a year, having worked out before I did that the role was a mismatch. My inexperience had me expecting a clairvoyant unicorn in a single hire, someone who could deliver against goals we hadn’t set, through processes we hadn’t built. Startup Lauren, twenty-five and sure it would all come together, had no idea what she was doing. I meant well, of course, which helped no one. The woman went on to build her own company, a competitor to the one I was protecting when I said no to her, and she is thriving at the exact things I couldn’t make room for. I had her creativity and potential in my hands. And I spent a year trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and when it wouldn’t fit, I let it go. That is waste too. It might be the most expensive kind I’ve ever signed off on.

What I’ve learned, after years of bending roles and even the company around particular people and mostly failing, is that the match between what a person needs and what a business needs is hard to get right, and is a constant work in progress. Both sides have a hand in it. But in her case, the hand that mattered was mine.

Most of the mismatches came down to values more than skill, and I don’t mean values as in ethics. When what someone most wanted out of a day at work wasn’t what the role was built to give back, there was an inconvenient truth that too often went ignored. She needed autonomy, room to build, permission to fail and pivot. Instead, we pressed a growing company’s hunger for structure down on top of her and micromanaged out the very things that made her worth hiring. She became one more smart, hardworking person spending her days far from the work that made her come alive.

I know the other side of waste, which is part of why I can’t leave it alone. I know what it is to create in the light, the stretch of hours that breaks only because your body makes you eat or sleep or move. I had that, building the thing I built. Once you’ve felt it, you want it back, and you want it for the people around you, and you feel a deep discomfort with any decision that keeps someone out of it.

If I learned anything on the road from naive entrepreneur to comfortable VP, it’s that we often measure the wrong kind of success. Fourteen years in, I was successful. Confident, well-paid, respected. I was also on back-to-back video calls, burning my best hours in conversations that went in circles, saying no to creative ideas and the creative people who brought them. I was rarely in flow myself, the state I crave and am eager to get back to now, as I go off on my own again. Instead, I’d spent my days administering waste, mine and other people’s, and calling it the work.

I’ve left to go back to building, back in some ways to those early days of experiments and waste. Careful waste this time, the kind that comes with a lesson attached. At least that’s what I tell myself. Because at some point I’ll make a first hire. I’ll expect something unrealistic, or set off with unclear goals. The test is what I do the second time around. Can I build something where waste is a tool, a byproduct of creativity? Or do I fall back into growth for growth’s sake, the “move fast and break things” world I came up in? I think I’m experienced enough to set the first conditions on purpose. I also know experience is not immunity.

I’m Lauren, a founder, mother, and writer currently on sabbatical after fourteen years building a travel company.

Through Project Recharge, I’m exploring what a modern sabbatical can look like for women: how we step away, what we discover, and how we design lives that are ambitious, meaningful, and sustainable.

Here I write about leadership, identity, energy, ambition, motherhood, and what comes next.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

“I’m so tired, Mama.”

It was 7:23 a.m. I was mid-journal entry, thinking I had at least another 30 minutes to myself before anyone else woke up. But my son climbed onto the couch beside me, stretched, yawned, and announced his exhaustion with conviction.

My words spilled out before I thought them through.

“Buddy, you slept ten hours! You can’t be tired! Come on, what should we do today? Let’s go have some fun!”

Then I glanced down at my journal, at the line I’d written fifteen minutes earlier, before he came downstairs. I began: “Another morning, and I’m just so tired lately.”

I literally wrote the same words on the same couch on the same morning. The only difference was that when I’d written mine, I treated it as something worth thinking about. When he said his, I treated it as something to fix.

I left my job one week ago, and we are one week into this new summer experiment. And already, even my whittled-down expectations are proving unrealistic.

Probably because I began my sabbatical the way I begin most things. Sure, there’s the illusion of space and unstructured time, but in reality, there’s also a color-coded Google Calendar, an early alarm followed by coffee with collagen powder and an intention to start a writing practice before the house wakes up. Later in the day, when I have a few hours of childcare, a plan for solo walks, yoga, strength training at the gym, and working through my self-curated 12-week learning curriculum. Oh, and more cooking, of course, with healthy lunches as a family served out on the patio.

So far, my sabbatical from structured work has meant immediately creating another structure. A nicer structure, yes. One with more books and walks and far fewer meetings.

I am aware of how this sounds.

But this scaffolding gives me the reassurance that no matter what goes wrong, the day will still have been held by something measurable. The boxes will exist, and some of them will even get checked.

But then Monday came, day one, and my back went out. I could feel it coming on, but hoped a visit to the chiropractor would prevent it. Instead, I woke up and reached for my phone on the nightstand (another sign, perhaps?!) and whoosh. It was gone, and I was a hobbling, pain-filled hunchback for at least the next three days.

This was a real wrench in my plans, as at the last minute I’d signed the kids up for a short morning camp, a 15-minute walk down the road to spend three hours with other local kids while I’d go to the gym next door. It was the perfect on-ramp to the full-time Mommy Camp I’d promised. But a 15-minute walk with your back out is eternal.

Add to this a record heatwave that settled over Madrid, making international news. My husband reluctantly stepped in, rearranging his work schedule to drive us when he could. I felt like a failure in all ways, now adding to his stress as well.

And of course, my twins fought from breakfast to bedtime. My daughter cried and screamed at the first day of camp drop-off, “YOU PROMISED MOMMY CAMP!” My explanation that she is awake for 14 hours a day and that Mommy Camp would be the remaining 11 hours didn’t ease her grievances.

All this to say, the first week of my sabbatical did not feel spacious. It felt hot, painful, and weirdly logistical. And like everyone in the house had been swapped for a slightly more feral version of themselves, me included. I might have yelled more last week than in their first six years of life.

And of course, the kids felt it too, though it took me longer than it should have to really wrap my head around that.

Here in Spain, children start structured school at age three. Mine have spent every weekday since September 2022 following somebody else’s clock from, literally, 9 to 5. It runs from September through June, then they’re off to July camp to cover the gap. They wake up, eat breakfast, rush off to school, have lunch, recess, activities, home, homework, dinner, and bed. Baths every other day. A full day, every day, with teachers and classmates and parents deciding what happens next.

In other words, they’ve been working a version of a nine-to-five too.

Until, on the same Monday I’d circled with red pen on my own calendar, suddenly they weren’t.

But I had spent months, years even, preparing for that emptiness.

Theirs wasn’t a choice.

I didn’t really understand the parallel until Friday, at my son’s speech therapy appointment. I was updating Miss Esther on the week, the fighting and the boredom and the tiredness, when she said something eerily familiar.

Totally normal, she told me, almost cheerful about it. Their whole world has changed. They’ve gone from a rigid daily structure and lots of external pressure to something new. The freedom is great, but there will be a serious adjustment period. Expect dysregulation, emotional and physical, for at least a few weeks, while their bodies catch up to the new rhythm and the sudden amount of time at home.

I blinked. And I remember thinking, hang on.

Are you talking about them?

Or me?

Because I had given myself months to prepare for exactly this sort of transition and still felt unsettled by it. My kids had been dropped into theirs overnight, and I was expecting them to wake up cheerful, flexible, grateful for the activity list, and ready to make homemade pizza.

It hit me. I’d been thinking so much about my own sabbatical that somehow I’d forgotten that they were on sabbatical too.

The next morning, I was again sitting on the couch in my office with coffee and my journal, trying to write before the day began. And once again, I felt exhausted. I started to probe:

Was it the heat? Did I sleep badly? Am I getting sick? Am I sad? Am I resisting the day? I treat my own tiredness as information, a thing worth analyzing.

I didn’t say, “Lauren, you just slept seven hours! You can’t be tired. Let’s get some energy. What do you want to do today? What should we be excited about?”

Yet when my son woke up tired the day before, I said exactly that.

I tried to solve him.

Kids are total chaos for someone who likes control.

All week, I could not stop trying to organize their time. Let’s paint. Let’s make smoothies. Let’s read this book. Every suggestion came from a good place. I wanted them to have a summer they’d remember, and I wanted to be the kind of present Mommy Camp was all about.

But under the good intentions was a less generous truth.

I wanted to skip the discomfort.

Watching them flail in the open space was unbearable, and the fastest way to stop it seemed to be to fill the space with a plan.

Which is, more or less, the entire thing I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do this summer.

The other new phrase in the house is “I’m bored.”

Great! I’ve read the books. Boredom is wonderful for kids. It stimulates imagination, creativity, friction and frustration -- the building blocks of a good human in today’s crazy world. We all need to be bored more often!

I believe all of this deeply, until a child stands in front of me saying “I’m bored” for the eighth time while surrounded by books, toys, art supplies, a garden, a pool, and a mother who has literally made herself available.

Then my belief starts to sway.

I want to say, “How dare you be bored?! You have everything!”

That is the honest thought, or one of them.

The more compassionate thoughts come later, and take more effort: of course you’re bored. You don’t know what to do with this much space yet.

And of course, annoyingly, the sentence applies to me too.

Because how many times have I been surrounded by the exact things I once wanted and still felt restless? How many times have I mistaken having options for knowing what I needed? How many times have I treated open space as a problem to solve before it had a chance to become anything else?

I think I expected sabbatical to feel restorative, more or less immediately. Maybe because that’s how we talk about it. You step away from the structure and become, on cue, calmer and more like yourself.

What space actually did, in week one, was lift the lid on a lot of chaos underneath.

For the kids, that came out as fighting and strange sleep and boredom announced every fifteen minutes. For me, it came out as a calendar I’d packed so full that I’d basically engineered the space out of existence before it even had a chance.

Different reactions, but the same protest against sitting in discomfort. Against being bored.

By Friday afternoon, my back was feeling better and I could stand up straight again, which felt like victory. The kids came out of camp hot and starving. We were on foot, as I don’t drive, and getting everyone home before feeding them was not going to happen, so we went to the nearest café.

And I proceeded to feed my kids a cinnamon bun and chocolate cake for lunch.

A week earlier, this would have been irrefutable evidence that the whole thing had gone off the rails. The nutritionally balanced lunches on the patio. The deep connection over arts and crafts. The vision of Mommy Camp as some beautiful blend of summer camp, home education, and relaxed family time.

Instead, there we were, eating cake at lunchtime on a Friday because it was the closest food and we had survived the week.

I took a deep breath. My husband was coming to pick us up so we wouldn’t have to walk home in the heat. The kids were happy, or at least on a sugar high, which is sometimes close enough.

And I smiled.

Not because week one had gone well. It hadn’t, exactly.

Not because I’d learned to surrender either. Still working on that.

But because, for the length of one lunch, I had stopped trying to run anybody’s transition, theirs or mine, and I could finally see the absurdity of what I had expected from all of us. That we would move from structure into space and immediately know how to live there. That my children would swap school schedules for summer freedom without protest. That I would step away from crammed work days and become instantly patient and wise.

I’m not ready to throw routines out the window. I’ll keep my morning ritual and my curriculum. I’ll do my best to give the kids some structure too. Routines matter. They help hold our days, especially when everything else is changing.

But I’m starting to see that a routine imposed too quickly can become another way of refusing to pay attention.

I’m writing this on Sunday morning, on the same couch, before my walk. Then I’ll prep pancakes and pizza dough, and encourage the pool before it gets too hot. We’ll do crafts with yarn and popsicle sticks. There will most certainly be TV time.

I can feel my hand reaching for the relief of my color-coded Google Calendar and a quick glance at my Asana to-do board.

For now, the kids are still asleep. The space is still open.

It’s only week one.

I’m Lauren, a founder, mother, and writer currently on sabbatical after fourteen years building a travel company.

Through Project Recharge, I’m exploring what a modern sabbatical can look like for women: how we step away, what we discover, and how we design lives that are ambitious, meaningful, and sustainable.

Here I write about leadership, identity, energy, ambition, motherhood, and what comes next.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

When my boss offered to fly in from Dublin for my last day, I was touched. To come so far to see me off, in the corporate reality of virtual hirings and firings and everything in between, felt indulgent. But it was her offer, so of course I said yes.

So last Wednesday, I arrived at a busy Madrid tavern expecting exactly that: the two of us, a long Spanish lunch, hours of the kind of conversation you have when things are changing and the hierarchy dissolves. I was looking forward to it. I also felt the grief of knowing it would be the last leg in what had been an intentionally slow walk to the finish line.

I got there on time and gave her name to the hostess. No reservation.

I was texting her when I saw another close colleague walking my way, and it hit me. Lunch wasn’t just with my boss. We walked over to the restaurant’s terrace, where a long table waited with thirteen people smiling around it.

My hands flew to my face, and my eyes welled up with tears. It was one of those rare moments when my brain and my emotions weren’t in sync. The emotions came first, fast, before the thoughts and before any filtering could take place.

I don’t cry often. But I stood at the head of that table, and the tears flowed while I was still working out what was happening.

What followed was two days I’m still processing. We had a beautiful paella lunch followed by drinks, then a late Madrid dinner with conversations that stretched into the early hours. I was gifted a carefully curated photo book filled with heartfelt messages and fourteen years of behind-the-scenes memories. The next day, another gift: a goodbye video that took me back through my own story in my own words.

It was humbling and beautiful and, honestly, a lot.

A surprise party and tears. A classic, I know.

But those of you who struggle to take a compliment will understand. The exposure of feeling appreciated is surprisingly uncomfortable. There’s something about accepting praise, appreciation, and gratitude that always keeps me on guard.

Logically, I knew the company mattered.

We had welcomed almost a million people over fourteen years. I had read thousands of five-star reviews, the first hundred or so naming me as their guide. I had seen the emails from guests saying a food tour had changed the way they saw a city, and helped them connect with a guide, a vendor, a neighborhood, a part of themselves they hadn’t expected to meet over anchovies and vermouth.

It wasn’t brain surgery, no. But some of those tours really did change people, and I knew that.

And I knew, again logically, that I had mattered too. If you had asked me whether I’d had a positive impact on the people I worked with, I would have said yes. I know I am a good leader. Not perfect, obviously, but good. I give people opportunities. I coach. And I care — a lot.

I tried to be better every day. I read the books, built the frameworks, followed my values, made the hard calls, lost sleep over people, and kept going even when it was all really hard.

On paper, the logic was clear.

My impact expressed itself neatly in writing: performance reviews, feedback forms, customer ratings, and messages of gratitude. It is easier to trust things that have been measured and written down.

But that left me with no place to record thirteen people getting on trains last Wednesday. New moms who sorted out childcare for a day to wish me well. Colleagues who woke up at the crack of dawn to catch a five-hour train to Madrid for a two-hour lunch before taking a five-hour train back. Apart from a photo or two, there was nothing to document that day. I just had to allow myself to feel it, and feeling it is the part I don’t usually let myself do.

Why is that?

I realized while writing this that I’m not very good at receiving.

Praise, gifts, appreciation, care. None of it comes naturally to me.

I much prefer being the one giving.

Giving feels active and useful. Giving lets me stay in control of the exchange. Receiving is different. Receiving puts you at the mercy of someone else, and that vulnerability is usually too much for me.

But last week was about receiving. It was a forced celebration, in the best and most alarming sense. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do except sit at that table and celebrate. I felt something deep over those two days, but I wasn’t quite sure where to place it.

As it happened, the topic of the month for Exposure Therapy, an educational community I’m part of, was “Awe, Wonder, and the Sublime.”

I went into the month thinking I knew awe. It was the view from the top of a mountain, a pitch-black sky stuffed with stars, the vivid memory of my 1.7-kilo premature babies. Awe was big, vast, impressive.

So how could a paella lunch qualify?

I suppose because bigness doesn’t always look the same.

Awe, in the simplest terms, is what you feel when something is too big to fit the way you’d understood the world, big enough that you have to rearrange things to make room for it. I’d been picturing natural wonders. I wasn’t picturing a metal table on a terrace.

Later, I learned there’s a name for part of that feeling: collective effervescence. It’s what happens when a group of people gathers around something shared and the energy becomes bigger than any one person in the room.

That was the awe. A stranger version than the one in the textbooks, pointed at the last thing I’d have expected: a celebration of me.

When I’m honest about what felt so big, it was all that impact in one place at one time. It was realizing that while I had been busy doing the work, measuring the work, improving the work, and moving on to the next piece of work, something else had been happening too.

These people had been building their own sense of what I meant to them.

I had been part of a story I did not fully know.

And then, all at once, there it was. I couldn’t scroll past it. It was lunch, tears, sitting around a table in real life. This was love, in the way coworkers can love each other, which is not the same as family or friendship or romance, but is still real. Care is real. Deep care is real. And I think I had underestimated that.

The experience has stayed with me.

I cried in front of people, which I don’t do. I let myself take the praise instead of waving it off. I felt proud and let that sit. The next day, my actual last day, when I had braced for nothing more than signing out of my accounts and a final call with HR, that video played. Normally, I can’t watch myself for ten seconds. This time, I watched all of it and let it reach me.

Something is different now. For years, I think I lived more and more in my head. It makes sense. Leading people is hard. The hardest parts of building a company, at least for me, were almost always about people: decisions, conflict, responsibility, the endless subjectivity of it all. It is very tempting, when the people stuff starts costing you sleep and mental health, to climb into frameworks and models and make things as black and white as possible.

And some of that is healthy. You need frameworks. You need logic. You need company goals and boundaries and decisions that are not made only from feeling. But somewhere in all of that, the awe of the work became less accessible to me.

I remembered it from the early tours: the exhaustion after four hours of being fully on, the nap I needed afterward, the strange high of human connection. I could feel people’s curiosity, excitement, amazement, questions, and fears. It was exhausting, but it was also electric.

At the table, I felt some version of that again. Not the same, but related. The human part came back to the front. The part no framework can fully hold.

I think what I saw over those two days was something I would usually be too guarded to say out loud: goodness, a kind of courage, love.

I also felt something I did not expect to feel so strongly at the end of a job: hope. Not neat hope. Not “everything happens for a reason.” But a real openness. A sense that caring had mattered, even when it was tiring. Especially when it was tiring. A sense that maybe the next thing I build can start from that truth instead of arriving there fourteen years later.

I thought I was leaving a job, an identity. But what actually got me to cry that last day was leaving people who cared about me. For fourteen years, I thought the company was the thing I was building. It turns out it wasn’t the only thing. And even now, writing it down the way I always do, I know these relationships won’t last on writing alone. I’ll have to nurture them from here, and I will.

I’m Lauren, a founder, mother, and writer currently on sabbatical after fourteen years building a travel company—and discovering it wasn’t the only thing I was building.

Through Project Recharge, I’m exploring what a modern sabbatical can look like for women: how we step away, what we discover, and how we design lives that are ambitious, meaningful, and sustainable.

Here I write about leadership, identity, energy, ambition, motherhood, and what comes next.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

Last year, I gave a talk about values, and somehow talked myself into leaving my job.

I didn’t plan it that way. I hadn’t even given a keynote in years. The preparation for public speaking drains me, so I only say yes to the talks I really want to give, and this was one of them. Tourpreneur is an organization for innovative leaders and entrepreneurs in the tour and travel business, and their conferences are exactly what you’d expect from that crowd: unconventional, useful, and full of people who are actually building things. Thrilled to participate, I said yes long before I’d worked out what I’d say.

But instead of covering the ins and outs of building a tour company, or even selling one (both of which I’d done by then), I wanted to go deeper. What I landed on was a thesis I believed to my core. I called the talk “Know Your Values, Change Your Life.”

There was one line near the end:

Your values are always there. But if you don’t know them, you’ll feel stuck. And when you do know them, you can shape your life and your work around them, instead of letting someone else’s idea of success shape you.

Every time I practiced that last part out loud, I tripped over the words.

I knew the lines and felt their truth, and that was exactly why they wouldn’t come out clean. Because I knew, the way you know a thing you’ve been avoiding, that someone else’s idea of success was still running my life.

And who was that someone else? It turned out to be a younger version of me.

I guess I’d always pictured “someone else” as an actual other person. A boss with impossible expectations. Someone I admired, chasing the wrong things. Parents, a partner, the friends who seem to have it all figured out. But it was none of those. It was me. A 25-year-old version of me, who’d decided what success meant back in 2011, and kept measuring by that definition ever since, in spite of over a decade of change.

When I was 25 and newly married, my husband and I moved to Madrid with two suitcases each and a near-empty bank account. We came from Cádiz, eight hours by bus. We hauled everything we owned through the metro, because a taxi was unthinkable. We were living on €7,000, my husband’s unemployment, which was paid out as a single lump sum to start a business. That money was meant to fund his start-up, but it was also all we had to live on. Getting our first apartment as unemployed twenty-somethings meant putting down nine months of rent up front, close to every euro of it.

So when that 25-year-old version of me decided what success meant, she was serious about it. Driven, obsessive even. Failure was not an option. She wanted security, scale, and enough money that she’d never feel that vulnerable again. She also wanted a life with momentum and her own hands gripped firmly on the steering wheel.

And she went and got all of it. By 33, I’d started multiple companies, grown one of them across borders, and sold it. Every target I set, I hit.

Wasn’t that supposed to be the happy ending? I’d drawn a finish line in my twenties and actually crossed it. But nobody warns you about what comes next. I crossed it and just kept running, because it never once occurred to me that the running should stop, or maybe change direction.

You’d think I would have caught this. Spotting this exact blind spot in other people was, by then, close to a professional skill. But your own is the hardest one to see, and I was good at hiding it, especially from myself.

It’s hard to put a definition of success on trial after it’s already handed you everything you asked for. It had long stopped feeling like a choice and instead felt like a fact, and because it had worked so well, I never thought to question it.

What took me the longest to see was that I’d been judging the 25-year-old too harshly. It was easy to remember her as the naive one with a simple scoreboard I was meant to have outgrown.

But the scoreboard was never her true strength or purpose. Look at what she actually did! She took a teaching job in Spain, hated it, and quit, with no Plan B. Then she started trying things, with no idea where they’d lead. She wrote, blogged, bought an embarrassing number of domain names, and cooked dinner for strangers in a kitchen barely big enough to move around in. Eventually, one of those experiments turned into a thriving company. Most of them failed first.

That was the real gift: the nerve to chase something before she could explain why, and the resilience to keep going when it didn’t work. The scale and the security came later, downstream of all that trying. They were proof she’d been onto something, but never the real reason she’d started.

And somewhere across fourteen years of building, I’d kept her scoreboard and let her method go.

I gave my notice about six weeks after that talk. Saying a true thing out loud enough times, even to an empty room, makes it impossible to ignore.

I’m leaving my job now, and everyone wants the plan. I don’t really have one, which is sort of the point. What I’m doing is trying to channel that 25-year-old, the part of her I let fade: her curiosity, her creativity, and the nerve to bet on herself before she knew where it would lead, the way she did with two suitcases, a shrinking bank account, and no idea what came next.

I can’t tell you it’ll work. She didn’t know either. What I can tell you is this. I gave that talk and meant every word, even though the part I believed most was the part I wasn’t quite living. Telling the truth was never the hard part for me. I’m good at telling the truth. I’m still learning how to live it.

Here’s the talk, exactly as I gave it. I meant all of it. I just hadn’t been fully living it yet.

Read or listen to the full talk here.

I’m Lauren, a founder and mother on a mission to spend my energy well and build toward a meaningful life.

Read about my sabbatical to study sabbaticals here.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

In 2019, I was pregnant with twins.

I was so excited. These babies were deeply wished for. And I was ready for the new challenge of motherhood, ready for life to change.

Or so I thought.

At 29 weeks, I walked into my local hospital with stomach pains. They took one look and sent me away — it was early labor, and I’d need a hospital specialized in premature babies.

I hailed a taxi — and with that ride, the rollercoaster began.

I was admitted to the hospital, terrified, put on complete bed rest. Not allowed to get up for anything. Not allowed to open my laptop.

And I felt completely disoriented.

You see, for most of my adult life, work (and the laptop!) was front and center.

Work was and is one of my most important personal values.

This isn’t the same thing as being a workaholic — though at times I certainly was. Work-centrism is the core belief that work should shape your identity, your purpose, your legacy. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt this to be true.

From 2012 to 2019, I put 95% of my energy into this one value. I was building Devour Tours, a food tour company I started in Madrid. I worked long hours, seven days a week. And I loved it. I felt truly alive.

So fast forward again. I’m suddenly confined to a hospital bed — with zero control over my body and my destiny — and it was like slamming on the brakes at full speed — the momentum was still there inside me, but I literally couldn’t move.

My mind raced and raced, but my body managed to stay still for 3 weeks until the medication stopped working and the twins came — 8 weeks premature but, luckily, healthy.

And though I could move again — I stumbled, suddenly clumsy in a life that had changed indefinitely.

One day, it was all about work — and the next, it was all about family.

And swinging from one extreme to the other, I didn’t feel like myself. My identity was shaken to its core.

I suffered from postpartum anxiety. I felt alone. I felt confused. I felt guilty.

I didn’t yet have the self-awareness — or the language of values — to guide me through it.

6 months in, it was time to go back to work.

I pushed past the enormous weight of mom guilt, lined up childcare, and felt a mix of excitement, relief, and angst at my decision.

But I was ready. Ready to take back a part of my core identity: business owner, entrepreneur, boss, colleague.

I walked back into my office on March 10th, 2020.

By March 14th, Spain was in lockdown.

By March 30th, we had let go 20 of our 26 staff members. And there was no work for the tour guides who depended on us.

The pandemic hit Spain hard. It was one of the strictest lockdowns in the world.

I didn’t step outside for 98 days.

And all the while, I was haunted by the fact that the business I had poured my heart into was evaporating before my eyes.

And then… I got a lifeline.

But it was a mixed one.

I had the chance to sell the business. On one hand — wow. It was an incredible opportunity. To partner with a like-minded brand. To secure a future for Devour. To actually get something back for ten years of hard work.

But there was another side to it.

I wasn’t ready to sell. We had big plans. An ambitious five-year growth plan: a PowerPoint with charts, milestones, forecasts! And with this decision, that dream was gone.

I don’t regret selling. I’m still at the business today, and in many ways it’s been one of the best opportunities of my life. But in another world, things might have gone differently. And I grieved that loss for a long time.

That grief, on top of postpartum anxiety, the fear of the ongoing pandemic, the premie appointments, the layoffs — it just felt like everything I thought I knew about myself had dissolved.

I hit rock bottom.

It was the hardest season of my life.

But, it was also the turning point.

Because it forced me to ask: What do I really value?

Not what I valued before kids. Not before COVID. Not before selling the business.

But what does purpose — and success — look like to me now?

And in asking those questions, I began a new journey. A journey of self-awareness, of deep investigation.

A journey to intentionally build a values-centered life.

Have you ever had your own version of this? A moment when the life you built no longer fit? When your values evolved? Changed?

What I want to convince you of today is this:

When you take the time and effort to know your values, you don’t just feel better. You live better. You lead better.

You unlock clarity, purpose, momentum.

And you unlock impact — in your life, in your work, but also in the lives of everyone you touch.

And in our industry — that’s powerful. We touch a lot of lives.

When I first moved to Spain, I was 22 years old.

I didn’t know my values.

I took a job teaching English. And I was miserable.

I felt like a square peg crammed into a round hole. I even developed an eye twitch.

My body was telling me what my brain wouldn’t: something was off. Something was out of alignment with my values.

And I am not a quitter — but somehow I mustered the courage to quit.

And I started experimenting. I wrote. I blogged. I bought dozens of domain names! I hosted cooking classes in my tiny apartment.

And then… I started offering food tours in the center of Madrid.

And that last experiment? That became Devour Tours.

From the very first tours I guided myself — sharing food, history, and the people who make Madrid so special — I felt it in my bones: this is a good thing.

I was in flow 90% of the time.

You know that feeling when time disappears because you’re so fully in it? That’s flow.

And for a long stretch, work was my number-one value. I poured almost everything into it.

And it worked.

Until it didn’t.

None of us can survive on just one value.

And the cost of ignoring the others? It’s high.

In 2017, I got my first big warning.

Devour was growing fast, and suddenly I was dealing with challenges I wasn’t prepared for.

I was working constantly. I kept getting sick. I had this unbearable sciatica — and I couldn’t sleep at night. I developed chronic pain that sent me from neurologist to neurologist, scan to scan — but nothing ever showed up.

If you’d asked me back then if I was stressed, I would’ve said no. But looking back, it’s obvious: that’s exactly what it was.

Because this is what stress does to our bodies.

And I was stressed because I was out of alignment with my values.

One of my most important values is health and well-being. And back then, I wasn’t living it at all.

And the cost was huge. I honestly thought I would live with chronic pain for the rest of my life.

The good news is, I didn’t. With a great chiropractor, exercise, meditation — it took a few years, but I turned up the volume on health and well-being, and I turned it around. And, for the most part, today I’m pain-free.

But I’ll never forget the lesson: when you abandon your values, your body has a way of reminding you.

Now — some of you might be thinking: Lauren, isn’t this all just work–life balance?

Ugh! The idea of work–life balance drives me crazy.

Because life isn’t neatly divided into compartments.

It doesn’t fit into boxes labeled work, family, ambition, self-care.

Life is the whole thing.

And work doesn’t sit in opposition to it. It lives inside it.

For some people, work is a small circle within life.

For others, like me, it’s a big one. And that’s okay. There’s no right size.

What matters isn’t the size of the circle.

What matters is alignment — within the greater map of your unique life.

Alignment isn’t perfection. And it isn’t static. It changes. It evolves.

But you know it when you feel it. It’s when what you do on the outside matches what you believe deep down on the inside.

One of my own deep down beliefs is the importance of agency: independence and control over my time, my energy, my decisions — it’s always been one of my top values.

But back then, I couldn’t have named it. I didn’t have the language or the awareness to recognize it.

Still, it was one of the reasons I disliked teaching, and ended up starting my own business in the first place.

But as Devour grew, suddenly there was an office. HR policies. Vacation days. Working hours. And I started to feel… trapped.

I remember sitting at my desk thinking: I built this. And yet I feel stuck in it.

A show of hands if you’re not built to sit at a desk from 9-5. Me either. I can do it — and sometimes I still do — but the agency I need to thrive means using my time as I see fit.

What I didn’t realize then was that my core value — agency — was under threat. And because I couldn’t name it, I couldn’t defend it.

So instead, I let insecurity take over. I worried: what would my employees think if I worked different hours? Would it look like I was doing less? Or getting special privileges?

Of course, the irony was I gave the business my all. But without the awareness, I stayed stuck in that fear.

Fast forward to today: I’m an employee now, ever since Devour was acquired. But the difference is, I know my values. I can name them. I can defend them. And knowing that agency is non-negotiable gives me the clarity to design a schedule that works for me — in a workplace that supports it.

Your values are always there. But if you don’t know them, you’ll feel stuck.

And when you do know them, you can shape your life and your work around them — instead of letting someone else’s idea of success shape you.

And if you’re running a business, this is critical. Because when your values are clear, the choices you make for your company become clear too. Growth stops being just about more tours or more bookings. It becomes about building something that actually supports the life you want.

Working in tourism, we have the pleasure of meeting many purpose-led, values-aligned individuals. I know there are many of you here in this room.

In my life, one of those people was Juanjo. He’d been selling olives in the market since he was sixteen. His hospitality was never forced. When our groups approached, he’d light up. He’d lean in, ask guests questions, listen — often while I translated — like he had all the time in the world.

One day, he told me his dream was to travel the world once he retired.

Meeting our guests, he said, had only made him more curious, more excited about his own future adventures.

He said to me, “Thank you for bringing the world to me.”

Juanjo knew his values — and he made his tiny corner of one of Madrid’s 67 markets into a melting pot of world cultures.

Juanjo retired in 2020. And apart from the COVID lockdown, he’s been hopping around the globe ever since.

This is the power of values in our industry.

Tourism isn’t just about places. It’s about people. It’s about belonging. It’s about connection.

And no one knows this better than us. We’re the storytellers, the ones who turn a trip into a memory.

When we’re aligned with our values, our stories carry more than facts, our businesses more than bookings — they carry purpose. And people feel it.

This industry, at its best, isn’t transactional. It’s transformational. It’s built on values.

And in a time when this world feels increasingly divided, that matters more now than ever.

So… how do you actually know your values?

Quick reality check: discovering your values isn’t instant. It takes reflection — and sometimes trial and error. For me, it was a mix of therapy, coaching, personality tests, and really getting honest about what energizes me… and what drains me.

To jump-start this work, I want you to consider my 3 C’s:

Commitment. Your values are complicated, tangled, deeply personal. Oftentimes, we even hide them from ourselves. You have to commit to the process and carve out the time to reflect.

Curiosity. Get curious! About yourself. About others. About your reactions and beliefs. Be a scientist of your own life. Observe. Reflect. Hypothesize.

Change. Because what’s the point if it doesn’t shift something? We’re not the same person today that we’ll be ten years from now. So give yourself the permission — and the space — to change.

Commitment, curiosity, change.

Now, I know you’re all itching to get out there, to discover your own values.

So let’s take a moment and start together. I invite you to close your eyes, if comfortable, and take a breath. Listen to my questions, and notice what comes to mind.

What are you doing when time seems to melt away, and you feel in a state of flow?

What drains you — takes your energy and enthusiasm away?

Whose life do you admire, and why?

Marinate on these this week.

Connecting with your values will support the best version of you.

The one that will create the most impact.

In our industry, impact is important. It’s needed.

It has the power to unite people and cultures, and to contribute to a more open and tolerant world.

I stand here today because I believe in the power of values.

Knowing them — and living by them — changed my life.

And I know it can change yours, too.

Thank you for listening.

Two years ago, I was sleeping eight hours a night and still waking up empty.

That was the part I couldn’t explain. The sleepless nights of the newborn years were already a distant memory. Nobody needed a feeding at 3 a.m., and nobody was screaming out in the middle of the night. On paper, I was well rested. Eight-hour nights were the norm. And yet most mornings, I’d wake with a heaviness already sitting firmly on top of me before I’d even opened my eyes. Not sadness, exactly, and not burnout either. I wasn’t collapsing. I was functioning, which was almost worse.

It was then, in the middle of the utter monotony of early motherhood, that I saw clearly: rest and energy are not the same thing.

Because in spite of those eight-hour nights, I woke up utterly depleted, able to predict every moment of the day before it even began.

The hour-long sprint to get two four-year-olds out the door: dress, breakfast, lunchbox, water bottle, swim bag, homework, brush teeth, hair, wash face. The list circled in my head until drop-off was complete.

Then a day at my desk: coffee, meeting, meeting, coffee, meeting, planning, coffee, lunch, etc.

At 7 p.m., the nanny would leave, and I’d emerge from my cave, take a deep breath, and try my best to be a present mom in the ninety minutes left before bedtime. I wanted to want that hour. I knew I was supposed to treasure it. These years are short, everyone says, usually while you are actively drowning in them.

But the truth was more complicated. I couldn’t wait for bedtime to come. And not just for the brief moment of freedom it allowed, but to hit the pillow myself. By 9 p.m., I was done. Not tired in any normal sense, depleted.

Going through the motions was sucking the life out of me. There’s no other way to explain it. I remember my mother visiting and gently suggesting that I do the dishes before bed. I remember telling her I literally could not. In that moment, I wasn’t capable of something as simple as loading the dishwasher after eating. The eating alone took effort.

I’m not there anymore, thank God.

But the strange part is that my life is much the same. My days are still full. I still have children and work and meals and logistics, and I still play Tetris with my calendar. I still sleep about eight hours a night, and my nanny leaves at 7 p.m.

So what changed?

Well, I did. Not all at once, and not through some Instagrammable reinvention.

Some changes were deliberate: meditation, strength training, learning to ask better questions. Others arrived almost by accident, in the middle of a long walk or a good conversation, or in a chapter of a book that happened to land at the right time.

Little by little, some things started giving energy back.

And eventually, I could load the dishwasher again.

And while that might sound small, trust me, it wasn’t. It was the difference between going through the motions to get to the next day and actually being present inside that day.

Now, I’m leaving my job.

That sentence is simple. Familiar, even. Here on Substack, there’s a whole genre of publications about women leaving careers and the corporate ladder behind. But I’m exiting the company I built. I’m closing the door on something I’ve equated with my identity for fourteen years. It is the largest disruption I’ve chosen since having children, and everyone keeps asking the same question:

“What are you going to do?”

My answer is: I’m taking a sabbatical.

My more honest answer is: I don’t fully know what that means yet.

But what’s calling to me right now is the question underneath the question: how do women get their energy back without burning their whole lives down to do it?

I happen to be leaving my job.

But I don’t think you should have to.

The smallest sabbatical that still works

When people hear “sabbatical,” they picture something grand: travel, research, retreat, a clean break from ordinary life.

But I wonder whether we’ve made the idea too large to be useful.

The reframe arrived at the gym, on one of those rare mornings when I decided not to put anything in my ears. No podcast, no music, just hard repetitions and my own thoughts.

Maybe I didn’t need to invent a new language for this thing I’d been calling “recharge moments.”

Maybe they were sabbaticals. Plural.

So I looked up the word, half expecting to discover I had been using it wrong. But the older root is smaller than the modern fantasy. Sabbath: a day set apart from the week. Not an escape, exactly, but an interruption, a piece of protected time carved out of the pattern.

That gave me permission to define sabbatical the only way that makes sense for a life like mine. Mine wouldn’t be one long absence from ordinary life. It would be a series of deliberate returns to my own energy.

A morning, a weekend, a few days, a longer stretch when life allows.

At its simplest, a sabbatical might be any protected break from the pattern of your days that gives you some part of yourself back.

That’s what I want to test.

I’m calling it, for now, the minimum viable sabbatical: the smallest interruption that still restores a person.

I don’t know what that is yet.

So I’m making myself the first research subject, mostly because I’m the one I have full access to.

Here are the experiments. Each one tests a different kind of return: attention, study, connection, surrender.

1: Mommy Camp: Attention

The first stop on my sabbatical tour is called Mommy Camp. I blurted it out to the kids one morning without thinking it through.

“How would you like to skip the school camp this summer, and come to Mommy Camp?”

Their faces lit up, and once said, there was no taking it back. I was trapped by joy.

So we’re doing it.

There will be t-shirts, knock-off Boy Scout badges, themes and activities, and a loose learning path. There will also, I’m hoping, be large stretches of unstructured time in which nobody asks me to glue-gun anything.

I wish I could tell you my motives were pure. But I’m too self-aware to manipulate myself into believing that. I realize my stream-of-consciousness invention of Mommy Camp likely served a few purposes.

There’s the obvious one, that these years are flying by, and I want to be as present as possible. But there’s more underneath. There’s also the guilt, the all too familiar mom-guilt of shipping them off to a camp they’ve never much liked, hot and tired all day, while I sat at home with the capacity to be with them and chose not to. Rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t carry that.

But there’s another motive too, and it’s less flattering, more protective. I was afraid of slowing down. Going straight from a hyper-structured, achievement-oriented life into a wide-open one frightened me. So I built a wall between my old life and the emptiness.

The wall is full-time mothering.

Mommy Camp is love, yes. It is also guilt, and self-protection, and a way of entering freedom without having to face too much of it at once.

That may be exactly why it belongs at the beginning.

Because this sabbatical is not about rest in the simple sense. Mommy Camp will not be restful. My husband still questions my sanity, leaving camp flyers on the kitchen counter from time to time.

My own projects will wait. My thoughts will be interrupted. Someone will demand a snack immediately after refusing lunch. I will probably question every decision by day three.

But maybe the first experiment is not “Can I rest?”

Maybe it is: Can I give my attention to the life I kept saying I was working so hard to build?

2: My Sabbatical Curriculum: Study

I have a tower of unread books beside my desk, another on my nightstand, and a shelf so full the new ones lie flat across the tops of the old ones. I buy them faster than anyone could read them. I’ve written before about what that habit really is: a way of buying the woman I imagine I’ll become once I’ve read them, more informed, more finished. The stack is a promise I keep making and never keep. The books stay closed, the possibility more alluring than the reality.

So the simplest experiment of this sabbatical is also the most exposing. I’m going to read them.

I used AI to pull a thread through a selection from the pile and turned it into my own personalized 12-week course of study, with articles, podcasts, and video clips filling the gaps.

At the moment, I plan to do a deep dive into adult development theory and consciousness studies, and touch on a few other disciplines along the way. I’ll finally read Robert Kegan on the stages we move through as we grow up, Byung-Chul Han on burnout as a condition of the culture rather than a personal failing, and James Hollis on the passage I seem to be standing in the middle of. Nobody’s grading me, and nobody’s my teacher. The only real question is whether I open the covers this time, or whether the course becomes one more elegant way to keep preparing instead of beginning.

3: Creative Conversations: Connection

One of my biggest fears about leaving my job is losing daily connection.

Work gave me people. Human contact, every day.

I don’t want to replace that with the empty shell we call “networking” at random conferences and events, or worse yet, on LinkedIn.

I want the opposite.

Over the past year, I’ve been part of a very special group called Exposure Therapy, run by the brilliant Jasmine Bina and her team. It describes itself as “an educational community for strategic minds,” though what it has felt like to me is something rarer: protected time, mostly virtual and occasionally in person, given over to deep conversation with people I’d never otherwise have met, without a predetermined outcome. That was the point. It challenged how I think and gave me room to grow, and I left almost every session more curious and a little less trapped inside the narrow corridor of my current roles.

That’s what I want more of. Real conversations, what I’ve started calling creative chats, over coffee or over video. The kind with no immediate transaction hiding under the table.

4: The Trip: Surrender

And then there’s the trip.

At the start of the year, I asked myself that old morbid question: if I got a terrible diagnosis tomorrow, what would I regret? The answer came immediately. I’d have one serious regret: I haven’t seen enough of the world.

Not in the checklist sense. I don’t care about collecting places for the passport stamps. I mean something more basic. My innate curiosity about how other people live is close to a physical need in me, and I’ve fed it far too little.

So I booked a solo trip.

This November, I’m going to Kerala, in southern India, with a small group of women I’ve never met.

I’d been admiring Katalina Mayorga’s work at El Camino Travel from a distance for a long time, drawn to a way of thinking about travel that lines up with my own. Her trips are deeply intentional. They go somewhere to understand how people there actually live, which is the only kind of travel I’ve ever really cared about.

On paper, Kerala wasn’t on any list I’d ever made. But the more I read, the more it seemed to call out to me. Kerala is the birthplace of Ayurveda, a place they call God’s Own Country, and the trip isn’t a spa week or a detox retreat. It’s an immersion into a part of the world organized around daily practice and ritual, where wellbeing is woven into ordinary life instead of something you book by the hour.

I’m building an entire project around the idea that small, repeated acts can change the way a person moves through her life. And here was a chance to experience a culture that has believed exactly that for a very long time. The timing was right. I booked it before I could talk myself out of it.

Here’s what I notice about that decision now that I look at it. I handed the whole thing over to someone else. With Mommy Camp and the curriculum, I designed every piece myself. With this one, I gave the design away to someone whose taste I trust completely. I don’t think that’s an accident. I think I needed at least one part of this to be out of my hands.

The Women I Can’t Stop Thinking About

There are other, smaller plans and ideas too. I’ll do some family travel this summer, hopefully to the north of Spain. We’ll spend a stretch of the summer back in the US with my family. I’ll cook more, and possibly revive my Spanish recipe blog, Spanish Sabores.

But underneath the plans, the thing I keep circling is much bigger than my own summer.

For fourteen years, I led teams made almost entirely of women. New mothers. Women caring for aging parents. Women living alone and trying to afford cities that seemed designed to keep them down. Women with ambition. Women exhausted by that same ambition. Women who were grateful for their lives and suffocating inside them at the same time.

Most of them were not in any obvious crisis.

That’s important.

Like me a few years ago, they were functioning, producing, managing, holding the whole invisible architecture of their lives together. From the outside, they looked fine, impressive even.

But again and again, I saw some version of the same question rising in them: is this it?

Not because their lives were bad, but because the life each of them had built for an earlier version of herself had stopped fitting.

I felt it in myself, too. A competent life can become airless long before it becomes intolerable.

Around the same time, I started reading about adult development theory, and I realized that what I was seeing in them, and what I was feeling in myself, wasn’t a personal failing at all. It’s a stage. There’s a fairly predictable point somewhere past thirty where the harder questions start. It’s not a crisis. It’s just development.

What struck me most, from my own experience of it, was that it doesn’t take a six-month escape to get back to yourself. It takes something far smaller: a bit of space that belongs to no one else, some way to get your energy back.

These are the women I keep thinking about: women who do not necessarily need to quit their jobs, leave their marriages, move countries, start over, or blow up the life they spent years building.

But who do need something. A rupture, maybe, or maybe something smaller.

A protected hour, a weekly practice, a trip, a class, a room of one’s own. A morning with no input, a day that belongs to no one else. A return to the body, to curiosity, to wanting things.

Something that interrupts the pattern before the pattern becomes the whole life.

That is what I want to investigate.

What is the smallest sabbatical that still works?

What gives energy back even as it spends energy?

What does this stage of life look like for women in their thirties, forties, and beyond, women who are not falling apart, but who can feel something inside shifting?

And what would happen if more women caught that shift earlier? Before the collapse, before the resentment calcifies into something permanent.

I don’t have the answers yet.

I have a hunch.

My hunch is that energy isn’t just about capacity.

It’s about contact. Contact with yourself, with your values, with other people in ways that aren’t purely transactional, with the world that exists beyond the roles you perform.

When that contact disappears, life can be full and still feel empty. When it returns, even briefly, something begins to move again.

I don’t know what Project Recharge becomes. Maybe a body of writing, maybe a business, maybe a set of conversations. Maybe just a way of living that I needed to learn by experience.

I don’t know if “sabbatical” is the right word; I may abandon it next month for something better. I don’t know what Mommy Camp will teach me, beyond humility and the limits of themed activities. I don’t know what Kerala will open, or whether the books I read will change me at all.

But I do know this much: I was sleeping enough and still waking up empty. And so are a lot of women. And I’m no longer willing to call that normal.

So I’m starting here, before I have the answers, on purpose.

Two invitations.

If you’ve taken a sabbatical, in any form, even if you never called it that, I want to hear about it. It can be any deliberate break from the day-to-day that gave you some energy back and let you move forward with a little more intention: a trip, a course, a ritual... a day, a month, a year. Tell me what inspired it, what you called it, and how it changed you. I’m gathering these stories as I work out my own, and yours would help. Just reply to this email or leave a comment below.

And if you’d like to connect for a creative chat, half an hour over coffee or video with no agenda, let’s do it. Email me and we’ll find a time.

Because I suspect most of us aren’t looking for an escape from our lives. We’re looking for a way back into them.

I’m Lauren, a founder and mother on a mission to spend my energy well and build toward a meaningful life.

You’ll also find me:

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for traditional Spanish food

I’m writing this on a flight to Rome, sitting in my usual seat, 3D. Front of the plane, aisle, and as comfortable as it gets on a budget airline. I’m setting off on my last work trip before I step back from the role and the company that, until now, has defined so much of my adult life.

And what a work trip to go out on. I’m heading to Rome to pilot two of Walks and Devour’s newest tours, from a line we call “Overnights.” We’ve taken itineraries that most operators rush through as day trips and spread them intentionally over two curated days instead.

I’ll be overnighting in Florence and Chianti, then Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast. We’ll be watching the sunset when most day-trippers are already back on the bus to Rome, moving on to the next thing.

It’s not quite slow travel, but it’s certainly more intentional. And this line of trips, still ambitious but more considered, mirrors my own life right now. Intentional ambition, what I’ve started calling energy well spent, is the place I’ve been circling since I began writing here at the start of the year.

I love my job. And I call it a job here only because there isn’t a better single word for it. Part calling, part creation, part lifestyle, and, most importantly, part ME. And that’s the beauty and the trap at the same time, because somewhere between a late-night, coffee-fueled brainstorm in 2011 and now, I became completely enmeshed with this beautiful career.

I founded Devour Tours, then Madrid Food Tour, as an eager 25-year-old. I was new to Madrid, new to marriage, and, quite honestly, still new to the world of adulthood. The venture wasn’t my first. Before guiding people through the markets of Madrid, I’d hosted strangers in my home for a cooking class and traditional Spanish meal (before this was a thing!) and worked as a food and travel writer. I’d applied for full-time work too, but Spain in 2011 was not a kind place to be an unemployed 25-year-old with a tourism degree.

So one day, while researching a new commission, I clicked on an ad for a food tour in Rome (the irony!) and discovered a business model that I fell in love with immediately. Food tours sat at the intersection of everything I had: entrepreneurial energy, a hospitality background, and a deep love of food and of bringing people together around the table.

I led the first tour, terrified of getting lost. I didn’t know Madrid like the back of my hand. I knew the food, the recipes, the history well enough, and I knew how to host, instinctively and from years in restaurants. But I had to push through physical symptoms of imposter syndrome every time I led a tour. I’d end so exhausted I’d need a nap, and at the same time, I was buzzing from the warmth of human connection. I didn’t get lost that first day, but over the years, I was lost and found more times than I can count.

Six months in, there was traction. I had guests, reviews, and even some press. But I knew from the start that I didn’t want the company to wear my face. I wanted to build a brand, not a following. Today, those are often the same thing. But at that time, it felt essential to build a business where I wasn’t the bottleneck.

And honestly, zooming out fourteen years later, it wasn’t only a strategy. It was self-protection. Keeping myself out of the limelight kept me out of the line of fire. A bad review still stung, but “the company” absorbed it, not me.

So I started hiring guides. And in late 2012, I started working with a new guide named James. His enthusiasm matched mine, and without ever meaning to, I stumbled into one of the most important relationships of my adult life: a co-founder. I would have never gone looking for one. The idea of giving up any control over what I saw at the time as MY creation seemed crazy. But that partnership, built on trust and mutual respect, became one of the things I’m proudest of.

It was the first time I understood that partnership could be a richer route than going it alone.

Over time, I moved my way up in my own company. Sure, I was founder and CEO from day one (not that I called myself that for many years). But that looked very different in 2012, as a team of one, than it did six years later as a team of 30. Working with people was both the most fulfilling and most challenging part of the business. I learned patience, humility, how to be direct, and even to enjoy healthy conflict. I now see these as important skills for all humans and essential for leaders. I also notice that many people don’t go through the hard work of developing them.

I made countless mistakes over the years. My impulsiveness led to some expensive rabbit holes (does anyone remember our office-by-day, wine tasting cave by night space?). But I was a voracious student, and every wrong turn became a building block of a slowly improving personal operating system.

But growth isn’t linear. It’s more of a roller coaster, with ups and downs, and a loop or two thrown in. I’ve written about the burnout I experienced while on this path. In 2017, I woke up and went to sleep with chronic pain, constant anxiety, and plenty of other signs that something was deeply wrong. And while I didn’t hit rock bottom until a couple of years later, I did start making small changes in my life. At that time, it was mostly through addition: business coaching, chiropractic care, transcendental meditation, and hiring more team members.

I hadn’t yet realized that the subtraction was just as important. But that would come.

By 2019 we were one of the fastest-growing food tour companies in the world, and our ambition was enormous. True to our name, we really did want to devour the world. We were in talks to acquire a company in China. We’d just hired a Director of US Expansion to take our European brand to the US, something I was especially excited about as an American who knew how little the world knew about the stories and traditions behind the US’s greatest food cities.

But it wasn’t meant to be.

When the pandemic came, we were crushed overnight, like all tour operators. We laid off twenty people in the first weeks and helplessly watched our eighty-some freelance guides scramble for work and government aid. Our expansion funds drained toward zero.

We kept a brave face, ran online seminars and cooking classes, and published two digital cookbooks full of recipes and stories from the guides and vendors we’d worked with for years. I still hold those projects close, because they’re where the heart of our community showed itself. People supported us by buying a cookbook or a t-shirt, attending the seminars and cooking classes, and left the kindest emails. Crisis breeds connection, and the core that held through this time emerged even stronger.

But when we suddenly had the chance to sell the business in 2021, over a year into pandemic life, I jumped at the opportunity.

I’ll be totally honest here. Pre-pandemic, I’d been reading Built to Last, fantasizing about a company that could evolve for a hundred years. What culture would that take? What would it mean to build for the long term over the short?

The pandemic took that fantasy with it. As a new mother to eighteen-month-old premature twins, all I felt when the offer came was a sinking certainty: I can’t go backwards. I didn’t have it in me to rebuild. I couldn’t go back out and guide, couldn’t take on the emergency phone again, the one that lived beside me 24/7.

And there was the money. My husband and I were both entrepreneurs, all our equity locked in our businesses. We’d reinvested everything for years, drawing only modest salaries, both betting that the work would pay off someday. Now it could, for one of us. It wasn’t retirement money, but it was life-changing. Enough for a house, a car, and school for the kids. And perhaps most importantly, enough to feel fairly compensated for the sacrifices that got us to that point.

So I took the sale seriously. Built to Last was exchanged for Built to Sell. I read so much about M&A in two weeks that I doubt a master’s course could compete.

But what should have been an incredible achievement, this finish line of sorts, ended up being my lowest of lows. We signed, we celebrated, the transfer hit the account, and I went home.

For two years, I’d been living in confinement. First bedrest in the hospital, then the postpartum enclosure of new motherhood with premature twins and postpartum anxiety, and finally the COVID lockdowns we all shared. The walls kept moving inward, and I’d told myself I was just enduring it, that the climb was still waiting on the other side.

But now the world was finally opening back up, and somewhere in those first ordinary days post-sale, it landed. I’d sold the mountain. The thing I’d been climbing through all of it, the thing that made the confinement bearable because there was always a summit somewhere above the walls. It was gone, in a few signatures.

The rooms didn’t feel any bigger. If anything they pressed closer, because now there was nothing pulling me up and out of them.

Who was I without a mountain to climb?

Logically, I knew the answer. I was supposed to be content. A mother, a wife, proud of the work I’d done, all of it real and worthy. But ego is a stubborn thing, and I couldn’t make peace with the loss of the pillars I’d spent so long mistaking for self-worth. The unlearning would take years.

And my time at Devour didn’t end in 2021 when we sold. I agreed to stay on for three years. I was totally unsure of what to expect. I wasn’t naive that what was promised during an M&A process might not match reality. Binging those M&A podcasts had exposed me to the ugly truths of post-sale scenarios.

But while there were plenty of ups and downs and variations from the promise, I’m still here almost five years later, writing about leaving.

Post-sale, we integrated with another tour operator. We knew the founder and some of the employees, and believed there would be a good fit between cultures. Though honestly, I wasn’t sure it even mattered that much when both companies had only a few staff members left at the time of the merger.

But good culture persists with even the most skeleton staff, and the culture fit was there. And the process of rebuilding, rehiring and restarting when tourism came back with force in 2023 was so much better as a team. Once again, I saw that my instinct for individualism fell short. Being part of a group gave me support, energy, and camaraderie. It also gave me relief. Because where I was in my life at that point, a new-ish mom in the middle of postpartum depression, my colleagues, remote as they were, became a part of my village. My boss modeled boundaries. My former Devour colleagues who came along with the sale showed me loyalty.

So while I certainly carried the grief of what might have been for a long time, I look back now with gratitude for what was. The team I worked with these past years, the opportunity to lead from within.

When I sold, I didn’t know what to put on LinkedIn. I was no longer CEO. I’d always be a founder. My contract said General Manager. My Slack profile said Iberia Director.

I kept “CEO” up for a long time, telling myself I’d simply forgotten to update it. The truth is, I used LinkedIn constantly and knew exactly what it said. I just couldn’t bring myself to change it. Not without something that felt deserving enough to replace it. I could name the ego clearly. Naming it did nothing for the shame I felt scrolling through the feed.

Then came the org chart.

We held a leadership meeting in Madrid. My colleagues had come to my city, and I’d put real work into the details, the small touches I hoped would make people feel looked after. During a future-planning presentation, my boss put an org chart on the screen. I wasn’t on it. No placeholder, no footnote. Just not there.

I know it wasn’t intentional. My role was genuinely in limbo. But in that moment, in the room I’d arranged, I felt like I’d overstayed my welcome. I figured it was time to go.

By then, I’d listened to the founder podcasts, the ones that say founders never stay, that a true entrepreneur can’t survive inside a corporate structure. Sitting with that org chart, I started applying the mythology to myself. Why was I still here? Maybe I wasn’t so entrepreneurial after all. Maybe Devour had been a fluke. Maybe motherhood and a little financial comfort had dulled the ambition I’d always been so proud of.

But I wasn’t ready to leave. I loved the company and the people. The culture we’d rebuilt after the sale was in many ways stronger and more durable than what came before. So I stayed.

The restlessness didn’t leave, though. One morning, I woke up certain something had to change, now. I’ll do an MBA. I’ll have another baby. I’ll pitch a new role. The tension landed me, eventually, in a coaching certification, an intense eight-month program through Brown University. It was the first time in years I’d put something ahead of work, the kids aside, and it was wonderful while it lasted. When the program ended, I felt recharged, but was standing at the same crossroads I’d started from career-wise.

That’s when I pitched the role.

I did the thing I do when things get too comfortable. I jumped into the deep end and put my hand up for a job I wasn’t fully qualified for. The same familiar-but-new discomfort as those first tours, the imposter feeling back in my body. After some hesitation, rightly placed, my boss named me VP of Marketing for Walks and Devour.

Eighteen months later, here I am. Being in this role brought me back to life. It allowed for autonomy and intrapreneurship. Leading a team of sharp and passionate marketers gave my work energy and meaning. I learned that alongside building, I love leadership, and that it will be a pillar of whatever comes next.

I also learned what it is to not be in charge. To work through influence instead of authority, which I still find hard. That buy-in is worth the time it takes. That change is constant, and a good culture of change management is one of the most valuable things a company can have.

So why am I leaving?

Because at the end of last year I sat down for my annual audit. Every New Year we go to El Puerto de Santa María, and I wake before the house does and walk the beach to think. Then I open my laptop and write feverishly, reflecting on the year behind me and plotting the year ahead. I score the different areas of my life against my values and goals, then zoom out to check the whole picture holds together. Yes, I’m that kind of person.

Colleagues, 10/10. The challenge, 9/10. Schedule, 8/10. Perks, the kind of perk that flies you to Italy, 10/10. Impact, 9/10. Salary, 9/10.

Ownership (literal ownership, in this case). 0/10.

And it turned out that was the only one that mattered right now.

As I come up on forty, I’m ready to build again. The early days, the experimentation, the chaotic schedule, and then a long walk in the middle of the week, no meeting to run back to. I want the full weight of it back on my shoulders, now that I finally know how to manage it. That scares me, too. I know how fast the old habits return, how quickly a phone ends up beside the bed again.

And I miss novelty most of all. The pull to learn things across subjects and platforms and weave them into something that didn’t exist before.

Some people have called me brave. Others look at me like I’m crazy. I’m probably a bit of both. I don’t take for granted what a privilege it is to leave a good job in a volatile economy. But I’m certain this is right. I need to make space for new things. I need a pattern interrupt.

So I’m betting on myself, fear and all.

It’s time.

To my colleagues, past and present, to our guides, our customers, our partners at Walks and Devour: I care about you more than this paragraph can hold. I’m proud to leave at a moment when I believe we’re among the best in the industry — not because we’re better than anyone, but because we bring curiosity, humility, work ethic, and respect to an industry built on caring for people. We’re in the business of awe, of memory, of family. We charge for the experiences, but the aim is always for them to feel priceless. We get it right most of the time.

Thank you for fourteen years, well spent.

I’m Lauren, a founder and mother on a mission to spend my energy well and build toward a meaningful life.

You’ll also find me:

• as founder of Devour Tours, now Walks and Devour, where I spent fourteen years immersed in experiential travel

• at Spanish Sabores, a labor of love and the number one recipe blog for Spanish food

• on LinkedIn, where I write The Energy of Leadership on the many lessons learned leading teams and companies

In third grade, I brought home a report card with perfect scores on every line.

There must have been sixty boxes on it. Reading comprehension, multiplication, classroom behavior, participation, gym. Each box, 10/10. Loads of praise, and no comments pointing toward improvement. Just row after row of perfect scores.

I remember standing at the kitchen counter holding the manila envelope in both hands, feeling proud at first. Giddy, even. I had done school correctly. At nine years old, that felt important. I felt important.

And then another feeling arrived underneath it.

I felt unsettled and confused. 10/10 across the board, what did that even mean? If everything was perfect, what was left to do?

I don’t blame the teacher. She probably thought she was encouraging me. But looking back, I think it was an irresponsible thing to communicate to a child. Not because children need criticism for the sake of it, but because perfection suggests finality. It tells you there is nowhere else to go.

A year later, another teacher handed back an essay with a comment written across the top. This doesn’t have a voice yet. You need to develop your own point of view.

I remember feeling taken aback -- offended even. I had followed her instructions exactly. I had reproduced the structure we were taught, mirrored the writing we were reading, and put in hard work as usual. Why was that not enough?

But underneath my surprise and growing 10-year-old ego, deep down I knew she was right. There was absolutely something missing from the work, and worse, it was something I didn’t know how to study for. I was ten years old. Where could I find this voice I was supposed to have?

I think about what those two teachers told me about myself long before I could make sense of it. One rewarded performance. The other pointed toward growth. And it turns out I much prefer the second one.

Decades later, my cofounder and I flew to Montreal for the Global Food Tourism Conference. We had been building Devour Tours for five years by then and still felt like impostors every day. We came with notebooks and lists of questions, hoping to learn from people who had been doing this longer than we had.

At the awards ceremony, they called our name: “Congratulations to the fastest-growing food tour company in the industry!”

Everyone at our table clapped and the room turned toward us, smiling. We stood for the photo, accepted congratulations, did all the things you are supposed to do in moments like that.

But internally, my reaction was less triumph than disbelief.

This is not true, I remember thinking. We still had so much left to learn.

Because the next morning, we were scheduled to meet with Casey, a business advisor who had already built and scaled companies far beyond ours, and I wanted that meeting far more than I wanted the award. The award felt like a conclusion to a story that was just getting started. Casey represented expansion.

Over the next few years, working with him changed the company completely. Up until then, I had built mostly through grit, instinct, intensity, and self-education. If there was a problem, I worked longer. If there was a skill gap, I read more. That approach worked for a long time. But it always stops working at some point.

What I needed at that point wasn’t praise for working hard. I needed the frameworks I didn’t yet have, and someone who could see what I couldn’t yet see myself.

Casey gave me a phrase I use daily ten years later: “you don’t know what you don’t know.”

In retrospect, the tension I felt at that conference came from the same place as the gap between those two teachers. The third-grade teacher told me I had arrived. The fourth-grade teacher gave me somewhere to go.

Around that same period, my body was failing me in ways I could not make sense of.

The pain began in my sciatic nerve and spread through my back, legs, and arms. But the MRIs came back clean, and multiple X-rays showed nothing. Eventually, a neurologist used the word fibromyalgia, which at the time felt less like a diagnosis than an official admission that nobody had an answer.

I wanted evidence. I wanted a scan that lit up with something obvious and fixable. Instead, I got more uncertainty (they scheduled another MRI in five year’s time!), which I handled the same way I handled everything back then, by pushing harder and harder at work.

I spent much of that year traveling for Devour. I was pulled in all directions: building new destinations, hiring guides, troubleshooting problems in person, running meetings from hotel rooms that smelled like stale cigarettes because even after the company could afford better, some part of me still believed the work only counted if it hurt a little. So I woke up in pain, took ibuprofen, answered emails, and kept moving.

At no point did it occur to me that slowing down might be part of the solution. I didn’t think the body and mind had much to do with one another (“you don’t know what you don’t know”). I thought the body was machinery that occasionally broke down and needed repair, so you could get back to work.

Then I got pregnant with twins. And at twenty-nine weeks, sudden, unexpected pre-term labor put me on complete bed rest at Madrid’s best hospital for premature babies.

And I remember lying in the hospital bed and realizing that my biggest fear, more than my worries about premature babies or an unwanted C-section, was something that felt too ugly to admit out loud:

I was terrified of slowing down, of being left alone with myself without the scaffolding of checklists and the constant reassurance that I was doing enough.

I could physically feel how deeply productivity had fused with my sense of self because the thought of being unable to produce anything filled me with panic. I kept a checklist on my phone to cling to some semblance of control. I checked things like ate breakfast and brushed teeth as visible progress toward the end goal of healthy babies and a body that could stand up again.

The babies came at thirty-two weeks, healthy despite everything, though that period deserves its own essay. What stayed with me most was the realization that even immobile in a hospital bed, I was still trying to earn my right to exist through output.

Despite it all, the company kept growing. I’d done the right things before maternity leave to ensure I wasn’t essential. For many people, this is the dream. For me, it was just proof that I could absorb more.

When COVID came, we rallied again. My penny-pinching over the years meant the company could weather the storm financially. We were able to pay everyone severance and even keep a few of us on part-time. Then, in the middle of all that uncertainty, we sold.

From the outside, this was the happy ending. We had built something valuable enough that someone else wanted to own it. We had survived an industry-wide collapse. We had made it through! It was the perfect report card once again.

But I was too accustomed to organizing my life around difficult things to know what to do when one ended.

I should have felt relief, pride. Instead, I felt grief for the path not taken and shame for not braving the uncertainty and hanging on. Not because I wanted more money or a bigger title, but because I wanted to discover my limits -- to continue to develop the voice I’d finally claimed as my own. I also feared the comfort of employment, of becoming someone who watched life instead of driving it.

Five years later, I am again turning uncertainty into output.

I haven’t yet left one role, and I’ve already drafted a demanding sabbatical curriculum for myself. I started writing essays at the beginning of this year to literally find my voice once again, but then catch myself checking subscriber counts to determine whether the writing “matters.”

There is a small exception to this pattern: I joined a gym because the algorithm told me that women my age are supposed to strength train. And for once, I didn’t need the KPIs. No macros, no transformation photos, no spreadsheets tracking progress.

And even without them I keep going. Not because I expect some dramatic transformation, but because I like the feeling of becoming slightly stronger over time. I can pick up my six-year-olds without worrying about my back. I sleep better and rarely have pain.

I suppose other parts of my life are growing again too. I like reading for no reason beyond a hunger for knowledge and immersion in other worlds. I like long dinners with friends, and I now protect them deliberately because I’ve seen how easily relationships disappear when work consumes all available space.

For years, work provided momentum, identity, structure, self-worth, growth, community, and a way to measure whether I was moving forward or standing still. It did all of those things well enough that I stopped building much else around it.

I understand something now that I didn’t understand when I was nine years old, staring at that report card. The unsettling feeling wasn’t disappointment that the score couldn’t go any higher. It was discomfort with the idea that there was nowhere left to grow.

Back then, I only knew how to look for growth in places I could measure.

I’m trying to build a larger life now. One where work still matters deeply, but where growth also exists in friendships, in writing, in strength, in attention, in the parts of myself no report card can score.

Because the nine-year-old at the kitchen counter didn’t want a higher score. She just wanted room to grow.

A few weeks ago, I enrolled in MIT’s Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness.

I dove into the first lecture headfirst, completing it early in the morning before my kids woke up over the course of a few days. Then I wavered. There were seventeen lectures left. Should I pay for the certificate and get my work graded, or continue with the free option? My delusion in hindsight is jarring. Time to finish a philosophy course, even the free version, was nonexistent. But for those few days that I lived in that fantasy, I felt a false sense of security that I must have needed to get through that week. The security of progress.

I completed one lecture, and haven’t been back. The course ends on Thursday. I keep the tab open anyway.

My life is full of this kind of clutter: unfinished courses, open browser tabs, stacks of unread books, and an inbox full of unopened newsletters.

From the outside, it looks like curiosity. From the inside, it is starting to feel like something else.

A coping mechanism to mask the discomfort of being still.

The discomfort of not doing, of not learning, growing, progressing, achieving.

That discomfort is especially present now. Last week, I announced to my colleagues and friends that I’m leaving the company I co-founded fourteen years ago. I’d been holding that information for six months — much longer if I count the time it lived only in my head. It’s not the moment to unpack that decision. It was made with more care and agony than I can convey in a parenthetical. But the announcement marks the end of an era, and once you’ve come to the end of something so intertwined with who you are, you feel both lost and loss. I’ve felt both over the past few years since selling, and worked through a lot of those feelings with coaches, journaling, and, more recently, hours of back and forth with my preferred LLM of the moment.

But where am I after all of this introspection? In many ways, I’m more lost than when I began.

Because each thread I pull, each tab I open, or book I buy, creates a clone. A near-identical version of myself that takes a slightly different path: the one who quotes philosophers, the one with the MBA, the one who builds more businesses, the one who doesn’t build anything and instead spends a year being fully present with her children. These versions are compounding. I can’t keep track of them all, and part of me doesn’t want to, because as long as they all exist as possibilities, I don’t have to choose. And choosing means closing doors. And closing doors means accepting one’s own mortality, that life is filled with more not-taken paths than taken ones, and somehow making peace with that.

While building my business, I had focus. More than naturally comes to me, thanks in part to a cofounder who held me accountable. I ignored the shiny objects and rarely bought new books. The build was all-consuming, to a fault. I nurtured nothing else. But the focus had its rewards. The business grew, succeeding by all external standards. I might have created a prison in some ways, and I certainly felt trapped at times, but I was wildly productive. I knew who I was because the goal was movement and I didn’t stop moving.

Now, faced with the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next, I’m overwhelmed. Who am I without external measures of success? Without checklists of productivity? Will I even get the chance to find out, or will I fill the space before the question has time to breathe?

Because the day I leave work, I’ve already manufactured productivity.

Welcome to “Mommy Camp,” what I’ve named my decision not to send the kids to their school’s camp this summer, and to stay home with them instead. In some ways, it’s a beautiful decision; the kids are beyond excited. In others, it’s pure self-sabotage. No break, no uncertainty, instead a summer curriculum, personalized learning paths, custom T-shirts, and knock-off Boy Scouts badges.

Fast-forward to fall, when the kids go back to school, and my sabbatical begins. But don’t worry, I have a plan for that too. An extensive reading list, multiple courses of study, new business endeavors, personal travel plans, recipes to try, and more. Fifteen check boxes. All exciting, meaningful, fulfilling in their own ways.

I wrote a Toolkit about this recently, because I know how to give advice on too many open tabs. I teach the audit, the categories, the matrix. I know how to close them, intellectually.

Emotionally? My tabs are my security blanket right now. And two weeks after publishing that piece, I’m still holding it tight.

What I have clear: I want to have impact. I want to serve. I’d like to help women navigate the exact kind of transition I’m in, the reevaluation of priorities and values that comes with age and experience. The whole premise is outward-facing. My next decade will be spent in the service of something larger.

But right now, in this specific window, I’m not serving anyone. Instead, I’m searching, reading, pulling threads. I’m feeding documents about myself into a Claude project in hopes it turns into some sort of oracle. I’m writing essays about my own inner life. I’m taking personality assessments and reading the results like horoscopes, hoping each one will reveal the thing that finally makes it click.

It’s all about me. And it honestly feels selfish.

Last week, out on a walk, my mind wandered. As it often does lately, my hand went to my phone. Claude was out of tokens, so I opened ChatGPT and started asking whether introspection is fundamentally ego-driven.

My whole thesis in recent years has been that introspection is deeply beneficial, that if more people looked inward and did the inner work, the world would be better for it.

I still believe that.

But out on a walk on a beautiful spring day analyzing whether my self-analysis was selfish, I had to stop and look at what I was doing: rejecting the silence, unable to sit with my wandering mind. I had the illusion of conversing with someone, but was very much alone.

The introspection that I’ve made central to my identity in recent years, that I’ve built potential businesses around, that I write about on Sundays since the start of the year — right now, for me, it’s also avoidance. It looks like depth, but it functions like delay. It keeps me from sitting still long enough to feel what’s actually there: loss, the unmooring of an identity I held for fourteen years, grief for something I chose to end, and the fear that what comes next won’t match what came before, or worse, that I won’t be able to build anything meaningful again.

A few days later, an essay landed in my inbox that named the mechanism I’d been circling. The writer argues that wanting, the condition of striving for something you haven’t yet reached, is for a certain type of person the primary medium of feeling alive. And that having or arriving is a kind of ending.

If I’ve already arrived, already built and scaled and sold, what is left? The tabs, the courses, the AI conversations, the personality tests. They keep the wanting alive. They keep me on the verge. And being on the verge, it turns out, is a place I’ve made very comfortable.

So where is the sweet spot? I know that transitions often need space more than structure. That the whole point of a sabbatical is to not have a plan, to follow curiosity, to let things emerge. I’ve read the books about this. I’ve coached other people through it. I can say all the right things about surrendering to the process.

And yet everything in me is fighting against it.

Because surrendering to the process means tolerating the gap between deciding to leave and knowing what comes next. Between the identity I’ve held for fourteen years and the one that hasn’t formed yet. So I open another tab. Chat through another business idea with Claude or ChatGPT. Download a form for an MBA.

Don’t get me wrong, my natural curiosity and love of learning aren’t a bad thing. They’re the things I love most about myself. But right now, they’re also covering up the opportunity to sit with discomfort. And I suspect that’s where I’ll learn the most.

Last week, I didn’t write this essay. The thoughts were there, circling, but they wouldn’t converge. My instinct was to force it — to open a new tab and build scaffolding around the absence. Instead, I closed the laptop.

I didn’t have any revelation in the not doing. No space opened up. No perfect moment arrived that I otherwise would have missed.

I feel most alive when I’m building. Sitting still is uncomfortable.

Last week, I didn’t write.

This week, I did.

I’m not sure which one was movement.

The other day, my laptop started cutting out during a work call. The video blurred, and my colleague’s voice became robotic.

She apologized and blamed her internet connection. But it wasn’t her. My computer had decided it was time to betray my secret: I had over 100 tabs open. Many of them for 30+ days. I knew it wasn’t healthy, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to close any.

I confessed to my colleague mid-call: my computer wasn’t malfunctioning. I was.

But instead of closing tabs in the moment, I simply switched devices.

I’ve been thinking about my open tabs state of mind ever since. Because the 100+ tabs on my browser aren’t random. They are a tangible map of everything occupying my headspace. The things I’m actively working on. The things I need to get to. The things I’m waiting on. The things I’m worrying about. The things another version of me has time to read, study, or try.

But the cost of keeping open tabs is high. Every one of them takes a small amount of processing power, and at a certain point, the laptop slows down, overheats, and starts breaking.

My computer issued a warning with a slow Teams call, and I knew it was a matter of time before the open tabs in my head caught up with my own nervous system. I knew I had to close them.

So here’s how: a practical audit, in three parts.

Part One: Your Literal Tabs

Start with what’s in front of you. Actual browser tabs. Unread emails. Unread messages across Slack, WhatsApp, text. Podcasts queued up. Articles saved for later. Books on the nightstand you’re not reading.

Don’t try to close anything yet. Just look at the volume.

Now sort each open item into one of five categories:

1. Active. You have full agency over it, and it’s useful to you right now. Examples: A document you’re preparing for a meeting this week. A tab for the vacation you’re booking today. The pancake recipe you’ll make your kids for breakfast.

2. Aspirational. You have full agency over these things, but they’re not realistic for you right now. Examples: The philosophy course you’d love to squeeze in. The long-form articles you bookmarked last month. The recipe you’ll try next weekend.

3. Pending. You have partial agency, but are waiting on a reply or more information. Examples: The contractor quotes that need comparing. The school summer camp form that’s due in three weeks’ time. The doctor’s office that you’re waiting on a call from.

4. Worry. Here you have no agency, but it’s occupying mental space. Examples: The news story you can’t do anything about. The friend’s situation you’re not responsible for. Health risks that sound scary, but you have no control over - like air quality scores in your area.

5. Noise. You have no agency, and they are not relevant to your actual life. Examples: Celebrity updates. Old group chats. Social media threads.

Once you’ve sorted, what you close and what you keep open depends on the category:

Active stays open.

These are earning their space. If you’ve been avoiding any of these, stop. Schedule a moment to deal with them. The sooner, the better.

Pending stays open, but batched.

Check them on a schedule, not continuously. I schedule an Asana reminder every few days or weeks, depending on the item, so they’re tracked but not living rent-free in my head.

Noise closes immediately.

No ritual, no deliberation. Just close them all.

Worry closes too.

If you find yourself resistant, ask whether it’s actually a worry or an action you’ve been avoiding. If there’s something you can do, it belongs in active or pending.

Aspirational is the hardest.

And it’s usually where most of the weight is. More on that below.

Part Two: The Aspirational Trap

The aspirational tabs are the ones I want you to look at most carefully.

The open tab for the article you haven’t read yet isn’t really about the article. It’s about the version of yourself who reads it. The wiser version. The one who listened to that podcast, took that course, tried that morning routine.

Closing the tab means closing that version of yourself, at least for now. And that feels like a small loss every time.

So the tabs stay open. And they accumulate. And eventually, there are enough aspirational versions of you floating around that your actual life has less room to breathe.

Ask yourself, honestly: how many of your open tabs are about the person you want to be, rather than the person you are?

Here’s the thing, though. You don’t have to delete aspirational tabs entirely. You just have to get them out of your present moment.

Put them somewhere else. A Pinterest board. A Google Doc called “someday.” A collage on your wall. A note on your phone. The aspiration is worth keeping. The weight of carrying it in your daily operating system is not.

Capture it, close the tab, and free up the processing power for the life you’re actually living right now.

Part Three: The Internal Audit

Once you’ve done the literal pass, widen it. Because the real tabs are internal, and they’re harder to see.

Run the same five categories from above (active/aspirational/pending/worry/noise) across these areas of your life:

Work. What projects, decisions, or worries are you carrying right now?

Family. What’s live? Childcare, parents, partner, in-laws.

Life admin. Passports, taxes, repairs, renewals, appointments.

Learning & growth. Courses, certifications, hobbies, creative pursuits.

Health. Physical, mental, medical.

Social. Plans, commitments, friendships that need tending.

Future planning. Trips, moves, transitions.

For each one, ask: is this active, aspirational, pending, worry, or noise?

You’ll probably notice something uncomfortable. A lot of what’s draining your energy isn’t active. It’s aspirational tabs you resist closing, and worry tabs you’ve never let go of.

Two questions to sit with:

1. Which aspirational tab, if you closed it today, would give you the most room to breathe? And what are you afraid of losing if you close it?

2. What are you carrying mentally that belongs to someone else’s life, not yours?

If this was helpful, you may enjoy these other toolkits:

I’m Lauren: founder, mother, builder. I write about identity, energy, and what happens when we stop running on autopilot and take agency over our lives. These toolkits sit alongside my longer essays on Sundays. Subscribe if you want both in your inbox.

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I was halfway through a Slack message about font choices when the bus slowed, carefully maneuvering toward the top of the steep Basque hills.

We’d just arrived in Getaria for a txakolí winery visit, but most of us hadn’t yet taken in our surroundings. It was a work trip, and working we were, trying to keep up with the realities of Slack and email while also being present on an experience we’d soon describe to our guests with words like unforgettable and once in a lifetime, which, arriving on that hill, felt like an understatement.

I never finished the Slack message. The change in the bus’s motion jarred me out of work mode, and once I looked up, I couldn’t look away. My colleagues were in the same trance.

We stepped off the bus into a fairytale of a place.

The vines climbed vertically up the hillside in tight rows, already leafing out in early spring. Below us, the dramatic coastline of the Cantabrian Sea. And around us, green in every direction, not one shade but dozens of them changing slightly with the wind and the angle of the sun. The air smelled like salt and soil and new life. And the sun, not guaranteed in this part of the world but out in full force today, wrapped my body in a cape of comfort and contentment.

A colleague said, out loud but almost to herself, this is good for my soul.

And I felt it too. Pure joy, which is not a word I use often because real moments are usually more layered. But there it was, bubbling up, hidden somewhere inside me all along.

I felt my own body relaxing, but could also see the same reflected in my colleagues. My breathing slowed, and my shoulders relaxed. Their eyes brightened, and the corners of their mouths rose. My Slack and email threads left my mind, along with any other worries.

I had decided on the bus that I wouldn’t taste the wine. I had a lot of work to get through, and drinking during the day makes me sleepy. That was the plan, and I meant it.

But simply stepping off the bus and into this other world made me reconsider. Of course I’d be tasting. Tasting was an extension of being in this place.

The owner’s son walked us through the vineyard. He spoke of his family’s winery, in operation since 1649, with a pride that wasn’t loud but was confident. It said I may have inherited this, but I am choosing to keep it.

I asked him if he lived up here, at the winery. I’d been imagining it, waking up every morning to this view, the sea below, the vines outside your window. It seemed like a life you’d design if you could.

He said he had, for a few years.

Then he told me why he left.

Winter, mostly. It was too quiet, too grey. There were too many days where the only thing that changed was the weather. He shrugged it off. Of course you’d go back down where there are people, and noise, and the texture of a life shared with others. He still came up the hill almost every day for work. But as evening fell, he went home to something warmer.

Even paradise has a downside, I thought. You can inherit a vineyard and still need to build your own life inside it.

My phone pinged. I put it on silent. It could wait.

I asked another question, and then another, and it felt easy to be interested.

A day later, the trip continued in Burgos, our last stop before heading home to Madrid. I bought my kids two small owl figurines from a shop near the cathedral.

It was a last-minute purchase. I promised them when they were still toddlers that work trips meant presents, not realizing how much work travel I’d actually do. And while we don’t need more tchotchkes, the relief the gift gives me, the guilt it lifts, albeit briefly, is too addictive to stop.

The shop was full of owls, ceramic and painted, on keychains and magnets and tea towels. Clearly, the owl meant something here.

I was curious. I reached for my phone to Google it. And then I stopped, because the man who owned the shop was standing right in front of me. We were practically touching.

He was elderly and not particularly warm. He moved slowly, wrapping the figurines in tissue paper with the careful, unhurried hands of someone who has wrapped thousands of small objects and will wrap thousands more. I was in a rush. The bus was leaving.

The fastest thing would have been to Google it, get the answer in an instant, and move on. I could have had the full history of the Burgos owl before he’d finished taping the bag.

But I knew, standing there, that I had a choice. I should ask him. I should say, what’s the story with the owls? and find out something I didn’t know from a person whose answer might take us somewhere neither of us expected. The way the winemaker’s son had veered into winter loneliness and the limits of paradise, when all I’d asked was whether he lived on the hill.

I didn’t ask.

I decided I didn’t have the time or the energy to risk the unknown. I hurried back to the bus instead, my gift for the kids checked off the list.

But I didn’t Google it either. I put my phone away instead and walked out with the owls and no story to go with them.

The owls now live on a shelf in my kids’ room, next to their gems and magnets and seashells, all pieces in their own growing collections of meaning. I could have come home with a story. Perhaps sparked curiosity for their own visit to Burgos one day. A simple question and a few more minutes, and those owls might mean something different now. Or not. I’ll never know.

I’ve been trying to understand the difference between those two versions of me: curious winery Lauren and hurried tourist shop Lauren.

The simple answer is capacity. The winery was beautiful, I had time, I was present, and so my natural curiosity came out. At the shop I was hurried, the man was unfriendly, and it was easier to continue on autopilot.

But that explanation feels convenient. And troubling. Because today the world shifts more toward the souvenir shop than the winery. I can buy the owl online and have it arrive in a box, cheaper and faster, with the explanation already written, no need to ask for it. I can order the wine instead of visiting the vineyard. The world is full of ways to get the answer without asking the question.

None of this is bad, exactly. It’s just frictionless. And I wonder what we lose when we let friction disappear entirely from our day. The best moments from this trip, and any other, share the fact that they required something from me. Attention, effort, a question, the willingness to stay a little longer than necessary and tolerate a little uncertainty. The winemaker’s son didn’t hand over his story. I had to open a door for it, even if the door was just a few words.

There is a version of my life, and I think a version of most of our lives, that functions perfectly well without ever opening that door. You can move through your days pleasantly, efficiently, consuming what is offered and never asking for more. It doesn’t feel like a loss while it’s happening. It feels like the reasonable way to manage a life with too many demands and not enough hours.

But then you arrive somewhere like Getaria, where raw beauty short circuits the system. You taste the wine and with it, the story of the family who makes it, and you are, briefly, fully inside a moment. Your questions return stories and bits of wisdom and laughter, and you feel connected to people and place in a way that feels natural. Human! It’s so simple: a few words, a few minutes, a choice to stop being a passenger in your own journey and become a participant.

I don’t think the answer is to turn every errand into a meaningful human encounter. That would be its own kind of performance, and I’m suspicious of it. The question I’m sitting with is smaller than that. It’s whether I can learn to notice the moments when the choice is actually in front of me, the way it was in the shop in Burgos, and sometimes choose differently. Not always. Just sometimes. Just enough to come home with a story instead of another souvenir.

When I was a Founder/CEO, I had opinions about everything. Not because I was always right, but because there was no one else to defer to. The decision was mine whether I liked it or not. So I learned to take in information, form a view, and move. Worst case, I was wrong and I learned. Some of my best lessons came from rash decisions and honest mistakes.

Then I sold my company, became an employee, and something shifted.

I started scanning rooms before I spoke. Not for information, but for authority. Was this my call? Had the decision already been made? Would my perspective add something or just create noise? Was it worth the effort of participation?

I didn’t stop having opinions. I stopped offering them. And after enough time, the muscle weakened. I’d research for hours and still feel fuzzy on what I actually thought. The instinct to collect before committing felt responsible and also safe. But it was keeping me stuck.

And not just at work. I noticed the same pattern creeping into the rest of my life — I’d message my husband with an article, asking for his opinion without having fully formed my own. Decisions about my kids where I’d poll three friends before trusting my own judgment. Small things, like where to go on vacation or whether to start this newsletter, got routed through other people’s opinions before I checked my own — opinions from people I didn’t even know, loudly shared through social media platforms.

Seeing this behavior in others was actually what made me address it in myself. I expect a point of view from my employees, and I appreciate one from my friends and family. Here’s how I think about it now: gathering information and forming a point of view are two separate acts. Most of us are very good at the first one. With AI, research takes mere minutes. The second one takes practice.

This is a protocol for the second one. Use it when you notice yourself researching, polling, or “still thinking about” something longer than it deserves.

Step 1: Get specific.

Vague questions stay unanswered. “Figure out a new marketing strategy” can stay in research mode forever. “Do I want to increase our influencer budget next quarter?” has an answer. So does “Am I going to sign up for that course I’ve been researching for three months?” Shrink it down until it’s specific enough to have a yes or a no, a this or a that.

Step 2: Separate what you know from what you’re borrowing.

You’ve probably already collected plenty of inputs — from colleagues, friends, articles, Instagram, AI. Set those aside for a moment. What do you think, based on what you’ve lived, seen, and learned? Not what’s smartest or most trendy or easiest to defend. What’s your actual opinion on this?

Step 3: Say it in one sentence.

“I think we should do X because Y.” Or: “I want X because Y.” That’s it. No preamble, no hedge, no “I could be wrong but...” You can add nuance later. But the sentence comes first.

Step 4: Pressure-test the fear, not the opinion.

If you’re hesitating to say it out loud — to your team, your partner, yourself — ask what you’re actually afraid of. Being wrong? Being judged? Creating conflict? Wanting something that disrupts the current arrangement?

Name the specific fear. Then ask: what’s the most likely outcome if I say this? Not the catastrophic version. The realistic one.

Most of the time, the realistic outcome is manageable. Someone disagrees. A conversation gets more interesting. You learn something you needed to know. The fear almost always overstates the cost.

Step 5: Hold the opinion loosely.

Having a point of view doesn’t mean locking in. The best opinions are formed from the best information available at the time — your research, your experience, your instincts — but they stay open to new input. Say what you think clearly. Then stay curious. If better information shows up, let the opinion evolve. That’s not weakness. That’s how good thinking actually works.

Try this once this week. Pick one thing you've been circling — a question at work, a conversation at home, something sitting in your own head. Run the five steps. See what comes out.

The first time I ever laughed was at the dinner table. I was two months old, packed into a Brooklyn apartment with my entire Italian American family somewhere around the seventh course of Christmas Eve.

My great aunt, Zizi, slapped her hand down on the table and I started to giggle.

Or at least that’s the story. It’s been told enough times that it feels like my own memory. And I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

For most of my childhood, the table was in New Jersey. My grandparents had moved there from Brooklyn when my dad was eight — the American dream in its most literal form, a house in the suburbs, 1960s bliss. My father left for law school in Massachusetts, met my mom, and never came back. So holidays meant a five-hour drive south, my siblings and I crammed into the back seat, the anticipation peaking by the time we stopped for lunch at the New Jersey Diner.

It was always worth it.

Everything was different there. The small homes sat right next to one another, and there were sidewalks and bus stops, novelties to this kid from rural Massachusetts. If I stood at the end of their street, I could just see the Manhattan skyline in the distance and feel its energy from there. Even inside the house felt different — fancier furniture, unfamiliar smells, a bedtime no one seemed to enforce.

And the food, of course. Meals came in waves. No matter the holiday, an Italian course came first. Always. Soppressata and fresh mozzarella from the local Italian deli, platters of olives, cured meats, and breadsticks. And then there was my grandmother’s manicotti, ricotta-filled pasta drowned in her homemade gravy — tomato sauce that had been simmering on her tiny stove since morning. Still my go-to comfort food - or would be, if I could find it.

The meals were endless, a true feat of patience and pacing. The adults talked over each other, voices rising and falling in ways I couldn’t always keep up with, though I tried. I’d get antsy, wanting to leave the table and play, but I’d also hang on to the adults’ words, scanning their conversation for anything that might reveal something meant for adults. Now and then, I’d catch something — a joke, a look, a story that didn’t quite land the way it was supposed to — and I’d lean in. There was always more happening than I understood.

It was uncomfortable and boring and thrilling all at once.

Later, we’d be released. And then there was cousin time. My three siblings and I had our own dynamic, but add my cousin — a month older than me — and the stakes shifted. Alliances formed, power moved, and we played for hours on end. Hide and seek stretched until someone cried or cheated or both. We put on talent shows that no one really watched. We stayed up too late. In my hazy memory, this pre-screens life is the definition of what childhood should be.

I loved even the house itself. Its quirky furniture, its tiny rooms, its marble-floored bathroom that felt impossibly fancy.

That world is gone now.

My grandparents have passed. My great-aunts and uncles, too. My cousin has her own family, her own holidays. My siblings and their kids have built their own traditions that look nothing like what I remember. And I’m in Madrid, which is where I chose to be.

My mother’s family had none of this. She came from Poland in 1962, three years old, speaking a language she was told to stop using before she could even ask why.

There was some family nearby, but the ties were thin and grew thinner. My mother didn’t talk about Poland growing up. She didn’t remember enough to miss it. She clung to my father’s family’s traditions instead and immersed herself fully, and I admire that — the decision to adopt someone else’s rhythms and recipes and make them your own.

But even inside the warmth of my father’s family, something from her own childhood lingered. The loneliness she grew up in was a different category from anything I’ve known — I’m lucky for that. But the ghost of it was passed on anyway. Not as a story or a warning, but as something subtler. A kind of gravitational pull toward solitude that I’ve spent my life both resisting and repeating.

The irony is that her mother forced her to stop speaking Polish so she’d belong, unaware that in doing so she was removing something she’d never be able to give back. She found her way into my father’s family, and like many adoptees traded her heritage for their warmth and never looked back. But I did. I felt an acute longing for my European ancestry. And I went searching for what we’d left behind. Back to Europe, as if connection were something you could find again if you just got close enough to where it started.

Each generation tries to build the thing they didn’t have, and each one, in the building, loses something they can’t get back.

When I got married, I finally hoped to find a bit of what I’d come for. A big Spanish family. Sunday lunches that stretched into the evening. My husband is the youngest of four, and when we were first together I pictured it — the noise, the cousins, the table that never quite clears. I’ve invited his brothers for holidays more times than I can count. The answer is always warm, always sincere, always “next time.” They have their own lives too. I still invite. Maybe one year next time will arrive.

Today is Easter Sunday. This version of it—the eggs, the hunt, the whole elaborate fiction—is American, and therefore, mine. I’m the one who keeps it going here. Last night, close to midnight, I realized I could only find ten plastic eggs. A far cry from the dozens I remembered my grandfather hiding for us in his hedges. It would have to do. This morning, my husband hid them in the yard while I distracted the kids. Somehow, he forgot where one was. We hunted, we laughed, we took pictures.

And then it was just us and the rest of the day.

No cousins fighting in the next room. No kitchen crammed with people and noise. Just my lamb in the oven, and two kids who were hungry before it was anywhere near ready, so I made them burgers and fruit for Easter lunch. They were happy. They don’t know what they’re missing because they’ve never had it.

But grief doesn’t follow logic, and the thing I grieve isn’t even something I can return to. If I moved back to Massachusetts tomorrow, the table in New Jersey would still be gone. My grandmother’s gravy would still be a memory — I don’t have her recipe. The thing I miss isn’t a place. It’s repetition. The same people in the same rooms, over and over, until you know where everyone will sit before they sit down. Arguments that pick up exactly where they left off last time. Recipes no one needs to write down because no one is learning them for the first time.

That kind of density takes generations to build. My great-grandparents built it when they came from Italy and planted themselves in Brooklyn. My grandparents carried it to New Jersey. And then my generation scattered, because that’s what Americans do — we go to college far away, we chase careers in other cities, we follow love or ambition or restlessness to places that feel more like us. I was raised not to settle, so I didn’t. But now I see the reason many do.

What carries over is the table. Standing at a bar at noon eating croquetas. Learning to make tortilla from my mother-in-law. The Sunday ritual of a slow meal that nobody rushes. Food pulls people into a room and gives them a reason to stay. That was true at my grandmother’s table, and it’s true at mine, even when mine is smaller and simpler than the memories I treasure.

I used to think I could somehow build my way back to that Brooklyn apartment. That if I just stayed long enough, loved hard enough, invited enough people enough times, the density would come. That I could reconstruct through sheer will what my ancestors built by staying put.

I’m less sure of that now. Not defeated, but less sure. Some things require time in a way that no amount of intention can substitute. Being in a place for decades, for generations — it counts for something. It builds something that a newcomer, no matter how committed, inherits slowly if at all.

But I’ve also learned that density doesn’t only come through bloodlines and decades. Sometimes it comes through a room full of people carrying the same hunger for it. A table where nobody has to explain why being there matters, because everyone already knows.

So I sit with both. The life I chose and the life that choice made impossible. The table I set and the table I remember. The holiday morning with ten plastic eggs and a lost one somewhere in the bushes, and the echo of a seven-course Christmas Eve in a crowded apartment where I first learned that being surrounded by people who loved you was the whole point.

I’ve always craved it. I’ll never quite have it. And I’m building toward it anyway, one Sunday lunch at a time, in a language my grandmother wouldn’t have understood, in a country she never visited, at a table that is mine even when it feels too small for what I want it to hold.

We woke up to a cold, grey day in Rome. The kind of morning you never picture when you book a vacation. I’d planned for spring sunshine and t-shirts, not cloudy skies and rain jackets.

But in some ways the weather fit, because we weren’t spending the day doing what I’d have chosen either. In my version of Rome, there’s a morning museum visit followed by a long walk bookended by gelato. A leisurely lunch with too much wine leads to an afternoon nap at the boutique hotel, which leaves just the right amount of evening energy for a cramped wine bar and a heaping plate of charcuterie.

In reality, we woke up at a rental apartment with great views but questionable electrical installations and headed to the closest café for breakfast. Not one I’d researched. Just one that was open. Then we set the GPS to the nearest playground.

Yes, playground.

It was our first cultural vacation as a family of four, and two days in it was clear that Rome’s history and monuments didn’t inspire much in my 5-year-olds. Even the gelato and pizza couldn’t quite hold their attention — at dinner the previous night, Sofía had begged to “eat in the hotel.” Another meal out was daunting, not exciting.

Grey skies or not, I’d promised a playground. We set off on a half-hour walk, crossing our fingers there would be no meltdowns on the way.

The playground was anticlimactic. Old and dusty, the equipment looked like it hadn’t been updated in decades. Not that it mattered to the kids — give them something to climb or hang from and they are in their element. Playgrounds bring out this particular expression of who they are, a mix of make-believe and physical challenge, an embodied kind of joy that is genuinely beautiful to watch and tugs at a buried memory of when I, too, was that free.

My husband and I sat on a bench and watched them play, hoping the rain would hold. Tempted by caffeine, we ordered coffees from a kiosk. The black liquid in a plastic cup that we received in exchange for a euro fifty felt like a small betrayal — both to our own standards and to the coffee legacy of a place like Italy. The look on our faces at first sip was identical. We didn’t have to say the words out loud. What would we have gained from acknowledging it? It was shit coffee in Italy, in spite of a Google Maps filled with great places only a short walk away. It was the reality of the moment, part of building whatever our new travel identity was going to be, and we were still figuring it out.

The park had monkey bars — something weirdly hard to find in Madrid — and Alex wanted to try. He went back and forth by himself for the first time, then looked over his shoulder to make sure we’d seen it and beamed. He spent the next twenty minutes mastering them while I held my terrible coffee and watched his face cycle between concentration and pride.

And that was the morning. Not noteworthy, though the irony isn’t lost on me that I’m noting it here. Not meaningless either. But not quite mine in the way travel once was.

—

I’ve been drawn to travel since long before I could act on it.

As a kid, I’d flip through my parents’ Time magazines — written for adults, largely inaccessible to me — but the photographs weren’t. Those were as much mine as anyone’s, and I would stare at them trying to imagine what life must be like in those places, for those people, from my small town in Massachusetts where we had to drive twenty-five minutes to reach the nearest supermarket. My most worldly experience by my teens was driving through New York City to visit family in Brooklyn. We never stopped in Manhattan. We entered through the tunnel and drove straight to Midwood, where my Italian relatives had settled in the 1930s, and I would stare out the car window at the storefronts — the variety of the world expressed on a single city block. Different signs, different languages, different things for sale. I didn’t want to visit any of them specifically. I wanted more of what they represented: the density of difference, the evidence that people can build entire lives around completely different values and still exist side by side.

The first time I traveled on my own — a summer exchange in Sicily at sixteen, paid for with the money my friends used to buy their first cars — I came home permanently altered. Not because seaside Sicily was any better than rural Massachusetts. Because it was different. And once you’ve seen that ordinary life can be organized around entirely different assumptions, you can’t fully return to the innocence of thinking your own is the default. You just know, in a way that never leaves you, that there are other possibilities.

That knowing became the momentum of my adult life. I studied abroad twice because one semester wasn’t nearly enough. Then a year in Spain teaching English, which became seventeen years, a company, a marriage, a life. Travel was never a hobby for me. It was the main way I understood the world and located myself inside it — the only thing that reliably interrupted my assumptions, forced friction, made me more open. Every trip reorganized something. I craved that reorganization. I built a career around it.

That’s what I miss now. Not vacation. Not the logistics of going somewhere. I miss access to that version of me, the one who emerged when the familiar fell away. I could wander a city for hours with nowhere to be — duck into a shop because something caught my eye, eat when I was hungry instead of when the schedule allowed, watch people from a café without checking the time. No obligations. No rush. Completely in the moment in a way that my daily life almost never allowed.

—

Before kids, I would have told you — with the confidence of someone who has not yet been humbled by reality — that children wouldn’t fundamentally change this. They’d adapt. They’d come along. It would be formative for them and beautiful for us, seeing the world through their eyes.

Then they arrived, and there were two of them at once, and even a trip to the zoo could collapse under the weight of naps, snacks, moods, timing, and whatever else small children decide matters in the moment. These particular children have needed routine from the beginning. They thrive on predictability, on knowing what comes next, on the architecture of a regular day. My husband and I, both entrepreneurs, both a little allergic to structure when left to our own devices, were not prepared for that.

For the first few years, we barely went anywhere. Summers in the US to visit my family. Short drives within Spain to see his. That was it. And the whole time I could feel something in me calcifying. I was getting older. I wasn’t living one of my deepest values. I’d already deferred travel for work in my twenties and early thirties — there was always a reason not to go, always a season that was too busy, always a justification for staying put. Now the kids had added another layer of postponement on top of that, and I knew, logically, it wasn’t necessary. I had friends who traveled with children younger than mine to far-off places. I saw the photos. I knew it could be done.

But I felt blocked. Completely, stubbornly blocked. And I couldn’t fully understand why.

—

Part of it is the mental load, which I really don’t think can be overstated. Travel with kids means you’re not managing your own experience anymore — you’re responsible for the entire architecture of four people’s days. Safety, comfort, food, mood, sleep, entertainment, transitions, recovery. And that weight, in our household, falls primarily on me. Not because my husband refuses to share it, but because the urgency around travel is mine. The ache is mine. So the planning, the research, the worry — that all becomes mine too.

Travel was always friction-filled. That was part of what I loved about it — the discomfort was mine, chosen, and it made me feel alive. Now the friction is different. It’s not the productive disorientation of being somewhere unfamiliar. It’s the weight of managing everyone else’s experience on top of my own.

But I know the block isn’t just logistics. I know that because I’ve managed to renegotiate other parts of my identity as a mother — sometimes in a single moment.

I remember the exact day I paused my identity as a food snob.

The kids were three. We were at the mall, and it was lunchtime. Normally I would have packed everyone into the car and driven to a restaurant I’d chosen — somewhere with good food, because I didn’t like wasting a meal on somewhere merely adequate. I would never have wasted my calories or my time on a place that didn’t clear a certain bar.

But there was a VIPs right there. No line. Coloring pages and crayons on the table.

I stood there and felt the calculus shift. Eating, in that moment, wasn’t about the food. It was about sating hunger. Comfort. Ease. Connection. The food itself had dropped several places down the list.

I suggested VIPs.

My husband looked at me like I had two heads. He recognized the change, and I think he welcomed it — not because he likes VIPs any more than I do, but because it meant a less rigid version of his wife was showing up, and that was good for our relationship. For years I had been the one who insisted on the researched option, the refusal to settle. And here I was, suggesting the chain in the mall because it had crayons and no wait.

I’ve made similar shifts with work, with how I structure my days. I’ve let go in places I never imagined I would, and most of that has been a surprising relief — not a loss, but space for something new.

But travel hasn’t shifted. And I think the reason is simple, even if living with it isn’t: the food thing, the work thing, the daily rhythms — those were about what I did. Travel is about who I am. It’s the last piece of my pre-motherhood identity that I haven’t been able to reshape or release, because letting go of it feels like letting go of access to myself.

—

Family travel is often sold as continuity. You loved travel before; now you’ll just do it with children. It will be meaningful in a new way. Formative for them. Beautiful for all of you.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it feels like a counterfeit version of the thing you loved.

When travel becomes convenient, contained, optimized for ease — a resort with a kids’ club, an itinerary shaped around nap schedules and meltdown prevention — it doesn’t just feel different. It doesn’t produce the same feeling of self. The activity still carries the same name, but it’s been thinned. And I think that difference matters more than mothers are usually allowed to say out loud.

Because the approved language around family travel is relentlessly optimistic. Memory-making. Showing them the world. Seeing it through their eyes. And sometimes that’s real. But there are also mornings when you are in one of the most historically layered cities in Europe and the high point of the day is your son crossing the monkey bars while you stand there holding bad coffee for warmth, trying not to think too hard about where you’d rather be.

The love is real. So is the loss. One does not cancel the other.

—

At the start of this year, I was doing one of the reflection exercises I return to — prompts, life audits, the kind of structured check-in that has helped me make sense of stretches of life that would otherwise blur together. I hit a question I’ve seen a dozen times before and usually skip right past.

If you received a terminal diagnosis tomorrow, what would you regret?

This time I didn’t skip it.

Maybe it’s approaching forty. My maternal grandmother died at forty-nine, and I’ve carried that number in the background for years — not as panic, just as math. As a reminder that time is not theoretical.

When I sat with the question honestly, only one answer came. I would regret not having seen more of the world. Not more landmarks or passport stamps — but not having experienced as much of humanity as I possibly could. The different ways people organize their lives, the proof that the world is bigger and stranger than the small, safe, controlled version I’ve been living inside for more of my life than I’d like to admit.

I felt that not as a future loss but as a present one. Something already happening. Something I was already losing by standing still.

So I made a promise to change it. To stop deferring. To figure out what travel could look like now.

But the promise ran immediately into the most obvious reality of my life: I’m a mother. Whatever travel becomes for me now, it has to include my kids. And the version of travel that made me who I am was built on a freedom I didn’t know was temporary.

—

There’s a loneliness in that I’ve never named clearly before.

My husband is a willing traveler. He enjoys it. He’ll go wherever I suggest and have a good time. But travel was never his identity the way it’s mine. He doesn’t carry the same urgency, the same feeling that something essential is being deferred with every year that passes.

The Rome trip was a year ago. This Easter, we tried something different — a five-star hotel in the Canary Islands with a kids’ club, the type of place where a costumed character greets your children at breakfast and the buffet serves anything but the local cuisine. As if throwing money at the discomfort might fix something.

It didn’t. We’re two days in, and the playground — albeit a much more expensive one — is still their favorite part. They both had meltdowns at lunch today. And while my husband and I did get a bit of alone time while they were signed into soft play, it doesn’t feel the way it once did. It has a timer on it. Another kind of pressure — to make the most of that rare hour before the guilt sets in.

But there have been wins too. An hour in the pool with so many giggles I lost count. Rock collecting at the beach, all four of us crouched down examining things I’d normally walk right past. I’m starting to notice what actually works for us — nature and movement over culture and restaurants. The option to eat in the room for some meals instead of forcing another dinner out. Downtime in the afternoons that nobody has to justify.

Slowly, we’re finding a rhythm. It doesn’t look like the one I had before. It may never. But it’s ours, and it’s forming.

—

I used to think identity was something you chose and then expressed. You decided who you were — a traveler, a builder, a person who valued this over that — and your life reflected it back to you.

Now it feels less stable than that. Less chosen, more continuously renegotiated against realities that don’t care much about your self-concept. Not in one brave act of reinvention, but in small decisions that accumulate quietly over years. A VIPs instead of the restaurant you researched. A playground in Rome instead of the slow wander through the museum. A family trip that is good by every reasonable standard and still leaves some private part of you unsatisfied.

I don’t think I’m mourning travel itself. I haven’t lost the curiosity or the desire. What I’m sitting with is something more specific and harder to resolve: one of the few places where I used to find myself most fully no longer functions the same way.

When I travel alone, I feel it immediately — the old quickening, that sense of returning to something intact. And then I miss the kids. And then I worry about them. And then, stranger still, there are moments when I forget they exist entirely, and I am just myself for a few hours — the way I used to be, before. Which is both delicious and horrifying. And then the guilt arrives and reminds me who I am now.

None of that fits neatly into the wholesome script. I assume that’s why so many women avoid saying it plainly.

But plainness feels useful here.

What I miss is not vacation. It’s access to a former self. Not because she was better. Not because this life is wrong. Not because my children are preventing me from doing something more important. But because some experiences do more than entertain us — they organize us. They give us access to parts of our own interior that are harder to reach any other way. And when those experiences change shape, the grief can feel disproportionate from the outside and absolutely exact from within.

The playground in Rome keeps coming back to me. The grey day. The old equipment. Alex going back and forth on those monkey bars, checking over his shoulder to make sure I was watching. The coffee that wasn’t worth finishing but that I held onto anyway because my hands were cold and it felt comforting.

It wasn’t the Italy I carry in my head. It wasn’t the morning I would have planned.

It wasn’t counterfeit. But it wasn’t what I came for.

That’s what makes it difficult.

Right now I’m enjoying watching my kids high-five Olaf at breakfast, but aware that this trip won’t restore me the way a hard hike or a road trip without a plan would.

I used to travel to see how other people lived. Now I’m watching two small people learn how to live — and being reshaped by it whether I like it or not.

It’s not the same thing. But it’s the only way back to myself I have.

The first time I visited the Prado Museum, I left with a heaviness I didn’t expect.

It was a mix of embarrassment, frustration, sadness, and unsated curiosity. I’d absorbed the weight of what’s held in a place like the Prado — a place filled with so much humanity, so much meaning — but so much of it inaccessible for your average visitor.

I was aware of how little of it I could take in, and that made me feel small.

I hadn’t studied art or history. And I was aware that even the most diligent visit could only take in a small fraction of the museum’s stories.

So I did what most of us do. I wandered from room to room, read the signs, and stopped in front of the works that seemed important, or that made me feel something.

But my curiosity wasn’t sated. It grew. And it was overwhelmed.

I’ve been on the other side of this as well — as the curator. I built my career in food tourism, curating routes that immerse people in the tastes, stories, people and soul of a place. And whether it’s food or art, I know that the best guides take a place like the Prado, or the Roman Forum, or the Louvre — places layered in history, culture, architecture, and stories — and they unlock something for the guest.

They curate, filter, hone in. They base their tour on everything human — connection and story are front and center. They connect the dots where others wouldn’t, and pull threads in direct response to our questions and reactions. It’s a two-way dance between guest and guide, in a ballroom of the most incredible material possible — the stories and histories of the centuries.

I’ve spent the last few years confident that guided tours will only become more valuable in the age of AI. Because I know that the depth and connection of that in-person dance is irreplaceable by the current state of LLMs and tech.

But my optimism doesn’t ignore the fact that while good tours and guides will demand a premium, the mediocre ones should start to worry — or better yet, to evolve.

I took a mediocre tour the other day. It doesn’t matter where — it was a city that, like the Prado, was full of history and stories at every corner. The type of place that overwhelms before it makes sense, and where a good guide unlocks something in you.

I should say upfront that I was not the best guest that day. I was tired. My phone was buzzing with work messages. This matters, and I’ll come back to it, because the easy version of this essay is one where the guide is the problem and I’m the objective critic. But it wasn’t that simple.

The guide arrived. And they were no amateur — this person was clearly knowledgeable, you have to be to hold an official guiding license in a place like this. They mentioned their credentials, their years of experience. And then they mentioned that normally this tour would take three hours, but we only had an hour and a half. “What a shame.”

I immediately thought about how ChatGPT would never open that way. It would say — in its slightly grating positive tone — “great, we have ninety minutes, what are you most interested in? Let’s make them count!”

They didn’t ask us that. And they didn’t get to know us. Didn’t ask our names, didn’t ask where we were from or what we already knew about this place or what we were hoping to understand in the ninety minutes we did have. There was no moment of connection — not between the guide and us, not between us and the city. Just credentials and an apology for the time constraint, and then we started walking.

What followed was, in a technical sense, completely fine. The information was accurate. It had clearly been studied, organized, and memorized.

But nothing was building. One stop led to the next, and then the next, but there was no sense of progression or accumulation underneath it. No thread pulling things together. At no point could I have told you what the tour was about, beyond the fact that it contained a lot of information.

And here’s where I have to be honest about my part in it.

A different version of me — better rested and less distracted — might have met that guide halfway. I might have asked a question that opened a door. Or made eye contact in a way that encouraged something less scripted in return. I’ve seen that happen on plenty of tours, tours where the energy of the group draws something out of the guide that the script alone never would.

But I couldn’t offer that energy that day.

About twenty minutes in, my phone buzzed with a message that needed a response, and I pulled it out. And once it was in my hand, I couldn’t put it back. I started replying to emails between stops. Taking photos, half-listening, nodding when it seemed right. I felt guilty about it — genuinely — because I don’t like being that person on a tour. I’ve spent years judging that person on a tour — arguing that people should put their phones away and be present. Anything less is rude.

But I was bored. And I couldn’t shake the thought that kept echoing: ChatGPT would give me a better tour.

Not a different tour. A better one.

It would have adjusted to the time we actually had, treating it as a positive constraint, not a negative one. It would have followed my interests — and given that it knows a lot about me already would have likely started by curating based on my interests and areas of curiosity. It would have checked in frequently, skipping what I already understood and staying longer with what I didn’t. Above all, it would have let me follow my curiosity instead of asking me to follow its structure.

It would have met me where I was, instead of requiring me to show up better.

That realization felt unsettling. It challenged my belief that the human-guided experience is irreplaceable and only becoming more valuable in the age of AI.

I still think that’s true.

But it’s only true when the guide is doing something that isn’t easily replaced. And often, they’re not.

Much of the time, they’re doing what they were trained to do, which is to know things and deliver them clearly.

My guide wasn’t bad. They knew their material. They were professional and prepared. By every traditional measure of what makes a good guide, they were doing the job as it’s been defined for decades. And had I shown up differently — more present, more open, more willing — it might have been a perfectly fine tour.

But I didn’t show up differently. And increasingly, neither will anyone else. Because the technology that adapts to us in real time — that reads our mood, learns our preferences, adjusts its pace and depth and tone — is setting a new standard whether we’ve agreed to it or not.

And human guides, human leaders, human professionals of every kind are now being measured against that standard even when they don’t realize it.

That’s the part that should make all of us uncomfortable.

Over the past month, I’ve taken five walking tours in different cities. Four were great. This one was the outlier. And what separated the four from the one had nothing to do with knowledge. All five guides were qualified, credentialed, and thoroughly prepared. The information gap between them was negligible.

The gap that mattered was everything else.

There’s a guide, Dani, who starts our Madrid tapas tour by asking people, “if you were a spice, which spice would you be?” It’s such a silly question, and yet it has the power to get people to share their history, identity, and personality in the first few minutes of the evening.

Another guide paused in front of a monument and did something risky: he stopped talking. He let the silence hold for maybe ten seconds while the group just looked. And then he told a personal story — one about his own family, his own connection to the place — that reframed the entire site. The facts hadn’t changed. But the way we received them had, because a real person had given us a way in through their own life. It was a deeply human moment.

These weren’t techniques that guide certification exams teach or test for. These were decisions made in the moment by paying attention. A specific human being read a specific group of strangers and offered something no algorithm assembles — a point of view that only existed because they existed. A curation that came from their particular curiosity, their particular life, their particular willingness to show up not as an expert performing expertise but as a person who happened to know a great deal and chose to share it through connection rather than recitation.

And I was different on those tours too. I was more present. More open. Whether that was because they drew it out of me or because I happened to arrive in a better state, I honestly can’t say. Probably both. But the exchange was two-directional in a way that the mediocre tour wasn’t.

So what actually makes a guide irreplaceable right now? Not in theory. In practice, in 2026, when a machine already knows more than any human guide ever will.

At Devour, we interviewed hundreds of guides over the years, and the answer isn’t one thing. It’s a handful of deeply human capacities that happen to be the exact things most training programs, certification exams, and professional cultures have never prioritized.

Curiosity about the people in front of you — not performed curiosity, not the scripted “where are you from?” but the kind that actually listens to the answer and does something with it. The willingness to adapt in real time, to let the tour be different today because the group is different today, even when the script is right there, offering the safety of repetition. Story — not facts arranged chronologically, but a narrative that has a point of view, an arc, a reason for being told in this order to these people at this moment. Vulnerability — the willingness to bring something personal into a professional space, to not have every answer, to be a human being first and an expert second. And presence, which is maybe the hardest one to name because it’s really the sum of all the others: the quality of being fully in the room with the people who showed up, responsive to what’s actually happening rather than executing what was planned.

None of this is what the industry has traditionally hired for. It’s hired for knowledge. Tested for accuracy. Evaluated whether guides hit every stop and got the dates right. An entire professional culture built around the assumption that the person who knows the most wins.

They don’t. Not anymore.

The guides I saw struggle over the years weren’t struggling because they lacked information. They struggled because their identity was fused with being the expert — the person with the right answers, the accreditation, the years of study. That preparation had become armor. And the vulnerability of letting go, of being responsive instead of rehearsed, felt like a demotion. Like losing the thing that made them valuable.

I understand that resistance more than I often admit.

Because I’ve been that guide. Not in the Prado Museum, but in the way I’ve moved through my own professional life over the years.

I’ve written about taking a personality assessment that showed a wide gap between who I was naturally and who I was performing. The natural me: decisive, direct, comfortable taking charge. The performed me: careful, accommodating, softening my edges.

By that point, I’d been performing for so long that it had become impossible to notice. But it wasn’t dishonesty — it was protection. If I stayed behind the competence, the neutrality, then I never had to risk showing up as someone with a point of view that might be wrong, or too much, or unwelcome.

I’ve performed the CEO. I’ve performed the boss. I’ve performed the version of myself who has it together, who doesn’t get rattled, who can answer every question without pausing to think. And each of those performances was built on the same foundation as a scripted tour: knowledge as armor. Preparation as a substitute for presence.

It worked for a long time. The same way my tour guide’s approach has worked for a long time too. You cover the material, you stay professional, you deliver what’s expected, and nobody complains. It’s only when something shifts — when a machine can deliver the same information faster and more precisely, when the people in front of you need something the script doesn’t contain — that the performance gets exposed for what it always was. Functional. Competent. And today, not enough.

In the years I spent performing, I missed things. Moments where a real reaction instead of a polished one might have changed a conversation. Questions I didn’t ask because asking would have meant admitting I didn’t already know. Connections I passed over because making them required dropping the script and being seen in a way that felt dangerous. I’ll never know what those moments could have become, which is its own kind of grief — the grief of having been right there and still somehow absent.

I don’t have a clean conclusion for this. But I have a conviction, and it’s mine — not generated in ChatGPT, not summarized from ten other essays. It’s what I think today, based on what I’ve seen.

The bar has moved. It’s moved because the technology that meets us where we are — tired, distracted, half-present — is getting better at that every single day. AI doesn’t need us to show up generous and open. It adjusts. It reads us. It adapts to who we actually are in that moment, not who we wish we were. And that means the question facing every guide, every leader, every professional whose value has been built on what they know, isn’t whether they’re doing the job well. It’s whether the job, as they’ve defined it, is still the job at all.

This is not an abstract future problem. This is now.

And I think the people who will thrive — on tours, in boardrooms, in classrooms, in any room where a human being is supposed to add something a screen cannot — are the ones willing to do the uncomfortable work of developing the capacities that no machine replicates. Curiosity. Adaptability. Emotional presence. Story. The courage to show up without the armor of expertise and offer something unrehearsed.

These are learnable. That’s the part I want to say clearly, because I think too many people assume you either have them or you don’t. You can learn to ask better questions. You can learn to read a room. You can learn to tell a story that connects instead of a script that informs. You can learn to sit in the discomfort of not having the answer and still be valuable — maybe more valuable than you’ve ever been.

But you have to want to. You have to be willing to let go of the identity that says your worth lives in what you know. That’s the hard part. Not the learning. The unlearning.

I’m still in the middle of it myself. I still reach for the script more often than I’d like. I still feel the pull of preparation over presence, the comfort of the polished answer over the honest one.

But I can see it now — in the guide, in myself, in a world that is reorganizing around what humans are actually for when the machines have the facts covered. And if you have even an undercurrent of curiosity that you’ve been burying under years of performing and preparing and proving you know enough — let it breathe. Cultivate it. It is, I believe, your most valuable asset for what’s coming.

Not what you know.

What you’re willing to feel, and to help other people feel, in a room you didn’t script.

That’s the work now.

Last week I was in Italy for work. Since my very first trip there at sixteen, there’s a feeling I get — butterflies in the stomach kind of excitement, an inner glow of optimism. Traveling to Italy — land of my ancestors, place of history, beauty, food!

But this time the feeling didn’t come.

It was a short trip, only three nights. I had work to catch up on and used every spare moment to do so — in-flight wifi, the taxi ride to my hotel.

The ride from Fiumicino to Trastevere isn’t exactly spectacular, but I normally notice it. This time I missed it entirely.

I usually stay in a quirky B&B, but this time I booked a hotel — a rare place with a gym (that in the end, I never used) and right in front of the business center where our meetings would take place. Convenient. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss walking from point A to point B — that those walks were often what kept my butterflies alive.

After our first full day of sessions, followed by a pasta-making class at our own cooking lab, I arrived back to my room exhausted around midnight. True engagement is tiring. Eight hours of business development, meeting new people, fostering team connection, and thinking about the small details that either make or break these types of events — my nervous system needed rest.

But at the same time, I was wired.

Too spent to think, too activated to sleep.

I’d open my book. Reading has always been meditative for me, a true escape. My brain slows down when I read.

The thing is, the book I’m reading is on my phone’s Kindle app. And while the process seems simple — unlock screen, click Kindle — there are small temptations along the way.

Before I knew it, I was on Instagram instead.

Forty-five minutes later, I surfaced.

That’s the only word for it. Surfaced. I came up from somewhere I hadn’t meant to go, blinking and disoriented.

I couldn’t tell you what I’d seen. I know I followed a few new accounts. Lives that looked curated in ways mine doesn’t. There might have been a quote I screenshotted. I’d have to check my camera roll to know.

What I do remember is the feeling.

My mind wasn’t calm. It was exploding instead — pulled in a dozen directions at once. Recipes led into home décor, which suddenly turned to politics before pivoting to leadership advice.

Forty-five minutes of my life had passed and I had nothing to show for it — not even a memory of where it had gone.

I closed the app quickly, ashamed.

Ashamed of the time lost and that I couldn’t even say what I’d seen. Ashamed of the subtle comparison that creeps in when you watch enough highlight reels of other people’s lives. Even when you know better.

I’d visited hundreds of worlds in those forty-five minutes, but none long enough to matter. There were flashes of inspiration — calls to action, step-by-step guides, links to buy the exact things someone else was selling — but the scroll moved too quickly for any of it to take hold.

Other than a screenshot, I had no evidence that those minutes had existed.

Except for the feeling. Shame.

—

I haven’t read the Epstein files.

Depending on which group chat I’m in, I’m embarrassed to admit that.

In some rooms, not reading them feels like negligence — a rejection of moral responsibility as a woman alive at the time these atrocities were exposed. In others, no one brings them up at all. That silence carries its own weight.

But I’ve been in threads with women who have read them. I’ve seen the messages that follow. The tone is rage, heartbreak, fear.

Not clarity. Not action. Just a kind of gutted helplessness.

I’ve seen the headlines. They made me physically ill without reading further. And every time I hover near the decision to look closer, the same question stops me.

What will it change?

Not in the world. I know what it should change in the world.

I mean in me.

If I read them, will I make different decisions? Will I spend my time differently? Will I show up for my kids, my work, my community in a meaningfully altered way?

Or will I absorb it and then keep making breakfast?

I think that’s what I’m most afraid of. Not the information itself, but the possibility that I take it in and nothing shifts. That I know more and live the same. Because if that’s true — if awareness doesn’t automatically become action — what exactly is all this knowing for?

—

In Italy, a colleague shared Meta’s latest guidance for our ad account. They want six new pieces of creative per brand every week. We run three brands. That’s eighteen new ads feeding into the same system that kept me scrolling in that hotel room.

Even with AI tools, that’s a lot. Quantity is clearly the expectation.

So we’ll generate. And generate. We’ll make it as good as we can — determined to produce quality alongside quantity, even as the systems ask for more.

And what we generate will feed the same machine designed to capture attention, not build it. More content. More things for someone else to scroll past at midnight and barely remember in the morning. These are the rules of the game, and who can afford to opt out?

The loop is clean and circular and hard to look at: a platform demands more content than humans can produce, so we use AI to produce it, so there’s more to consume, so people scroll longer, so the platform demands more content.

Somewhere in that loop is a person in a hotel room who meant to read a book.

I sit in meetings about this and feel the specific emptiness of participating in something I can see clearly and cannot begin to fix. We talk about engagement rates and creative fatigue. We don’t talk about what it means that we’re designing content specifically to capture a resource — attention — that we simultaneously feel is being stolen from us.

—

There is a line I keep returning to from something I listened to recently: more awareness without more agency equals helplessness.

It names what I’ve been feeling but couldn’t articulate.

The exhaustion of being someone who reads widely, sees patterns, attempts to understand the systems we’re inside of — and still ends most days unsure whether any of it matters.

I am aware. Of algorithmic capture, and of what social media does to attention and to my children’s developing brains. I’m aware of geopolitical instability. I’m aware of what the Epstein files reveal about power and impunity. I’m aware of what AI is doing to creative industries.

And most days, I get up at six. I started waking ninety minutes earlier in January in an effort to write — the very practice that led to this newsletter. Some mornings it happens. Many it doesn’t. I’m better at staying out of Instagram these days, my attention landing here on Substack or over on LinkedIn instead. But the platforms changed, and the patterns didn’t. Before I know it, I’m surfacing from Substack notes, wondering why my subscribers aren’t growing like someone else’s. Forgetting, in that moment, that I didn’t join Substack for subscribers.

I’ve tried abstinence too. Opting out entirely. I spent a few years removed from the news loop, my time going almost exclusively into building my business. The rare time away from that was focused squarely on myself.

But even then, sitting on a park bench in the sun with nothing to do didn’t bring the peace it should have.

You’d think that would feel like relief, and for about sixty seconds it does. Then the restlessness kicks in. A to-do item surfaces. An idea I should jot down. I want to switch tabs the way I do on my computer — this thought is boring, let me open a new one. My mind reaches for stimulation the way my hand reaches for my phone, before I’ve ever decided to pick it up.

And underneath the restlessness, if I’m honest, there’s a subtler shame. The shame of opting out. Of choosing personal peace over engagement with reality. Of sitting in the sun while there’s so much to know, to do, to fix.

It sounds luxurious. It feels like giving up.

—

So here is the impossible math of modern attention, as near as I can figure it:

You scroll, and you feel shame. You saw lives you won’t live. You wasted time you can’t recover. You weren’t building or producing or thinking clearly.

You read the news, and you feel shame. You know more now, but you can’t do anything with what you know. You’re informed and impotent.

You opt out, and you feel shame. You’ve chosen comfort. You’ve abandoned the conversation. You’re privileged enough to look away, and you exercised that privilege.

You sit still, and you feel shame. Time is passing. You should be reading or building or at minimum thinking something useful.

There is no move that doesn’t produce it.

I keep thinking that the system isn’t just capturing my attention — it’s capturing how I see myself. Every choice I make about where to look, what to read, what to skip, whether to engage or withdraw, gets run through an internal scoring system that I didn’t design and can’t seem to override. And the score always comes back insufficient.

—

I don’t have a clean ending for this. I haven’t read the Epstein files, and I won’t today. I still scroll when I mean to read. I still sit in meetings about content strategy and feel the loop tightening. I still get antsy on the bench after sixty seconds.

But let’s return to that line: more awareness without more agency equals helplessness.

I believe that. I feel it every time I absorb a headline I can’t act on. Information arrives with nowhere to go and just sits inside you, circulating. Creating anxiety and shame instead of action.

But I’m starting to suspect the shame is the product, not the warning. That it’s what the system runs on — the tax on every choice you make about where to put your attention. Scroll and feel shame. Read the news and feel shame. Opt out and feel shame. It keeps you moving, clicking, consuming, trying to outrun a score that never comes back sufficient.

Yet there’s a difference between knowing what’s happening in the world and knowing what’s happening in yourself. The first kind of awareness can paralyze you. The second is harder to ignore — because once you see your own patterns, you become responsible for them in a way you weren’t before.

I wrote a few weeks ago about noticing I’d been living at 1.3x speed. Before that, about putting down the phone. Bits of awareness, nothing dramatic. But each one was accompanied by a sense of agency that led to small changes.

Not quite transformation, but certainly traction. And right now, traction is enough. I’ll take traction. I refuse to believe it’s a zero-sum game.

At the end of last year, I started to feel a chronic restlessness. At first, it bothered me. My days were chock-full between work, kids, life… so why was I feeling restless?

Upon further introspection, I realized I needed a place to put some of my creative energy — somewhere to hold the thoughts and lessons accumulated over the past six years of chaos and growth.

Thoughts on loss and motherhood. On selling a business and cracking open my identity. On reinventing myself (again). On disappointments, achievements, and the strange mix of clarity and confusion that I wake up with each morning.

I wanted a place to think a little bigger. To process some of it in public, and to see what ideas might take shape if I gave them room.

Project Recharge started taking shape in my head, and in the first week of 2026, I opened Substack and began writing.

But I almost didn’t.

Because the doubts showed up immediately. Not one or two — dozens of them, all talking at once.

Who am I to write about lessons when I’m still learning?
Would people think I had too much free time?
Would people judge my words — hold me to my thoughts and questions that represent a small moment in time?

And of course, the doubts about my value, my worth - the undercurrent of all doubt in my life thus far:

In a world already overflowing with information, is my perspective even unique?
Will I ever be able to say something new?

If you’ve ever tried to start something that matters, you’ve probably met this internal committee in your head.

The brain is extremely good at assembling reasons to wait.

Over the years, I’ve developed an arsenal of mental tricks. When the doubters get loud, I put them in what I call doubter’s jail.

They’re allowed to exist — I’m not pretending the fears are irrational. But they don’t get to drive the car.

Doubts can sit in the backseat. I move forward anyway.

So this time, like many times before, I set them aside and started anyway.

I know this is hard. And also unique.

Because most of the women I encounter — beautiful, brilliant, curious women — somehow don’t have access to doubter’s jail (yet). Instead, they let these thoughts into the driver’s seat of their lives.

And action is postponed.

Not because they lack ability, ideas, or opportunity, but because somewhere along the way an invisible approval process took over.

After this quarter.
When the kids are a little older.
When work settles down.
When I’m a little better at this.

In the moment, it all sounds reasonable. Responsible, even.

But what’s happening underneath is something else: we’re waiting for permission.

And if I’ve learned one thing about adulthood: permission is rarely granted. It’s taken.

When something in my life feels paused, I run a quick mental check. It’s a practical way to surface the invisible rules I’m often following without realizing it.

These are the five questions I use to figure out whether I’m waiting for permission.

1. What are you telling yourself “not yet” about right now?

Be specific.

“Change careers” is too abstract. Break it down. Things like starting to write publicly, saying no to a recurring meeting, asking for help, or stepping back from commitments you resent are much clearer.

The goal isn’t a perfect answer.

It’s to surface the first honest one.

Because the thing we keep postponing with “not yet” is often the thing already asking for our attention.

2. Who do you believe needs to approve it?

Don’t overthink this. In your mind, who holds the authority?

Sometimes it’s obvious — a partner, a boss, a client.

But often the authority is more abstract: professional norms, expectations absorbed from childhood, the pressure to appear competent and responsible, or the imagined judgment of people watching your life for less than a second through a fast-paced social media feed.

Naming the authority matters, even if it turns out to be imaginary.

3. What story are you telling about why now isn’t the right time?

These stories usually sound responsible.

I should be grateful for how things are.
This would be selfish.
It’s impractical right now.
Other people depend on me.

Sometimes those things are true.

But often they’re inherited scripts we never thought to question.

4. What would realistically happen if you did it anyway?

Not the catastrophic version — the more likely one.

In futures thinking there’s something called the futures funnel, which maps possible outcomes from most probable to least likely. It’s a useful way to counter the brain’s habit of presenting worst-case scenarios as if they’re inevitable.

So run through a few possibilities:

What is actually most likely to happen?

Someone might be mildly inconvenienced.
You might feel uncomfortable for a few days.
You may gain attention — and have to decide what to do with it.

Fear tends to shrink when it’s forced into specifics.

5. If no one could see your choices for the next 30 days, what would you do differently?

This question removes the audience. And audiences change behavior.

Without the pressure to appear responsible, impressive, or reasonable, your real preferences tend to show up surprisingly quickly.

You might experiment more. Say no faster. Start things before you feel ready.

Most meaningful changes don’t start with dramatic reinvention.

They start much smaller: canceling a meeting you never needed to attend, starting a project before you feel qualified, or saying no to a commitment that stopped fitting a year ago.

Not because someone granted permission.

Because you realized you didn’t actually need it.

If something came to mind while reading this, that’s usually the place to start. And if someone came to mind while reading this, send it to them.