To shake the sleeping self - as the author Jedidiah Jenkins titled his book that I’m reading now (it’s a good one if you like travel non-fiction).

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been getting to know a new me. One that’s made choices that honestly surprised even me.

She left a high-paying job of almost a decade to honor her values. She let old friendships come back and new ones take root, after a decade that had quietly isolated her. She closed down her business as she knew it, let go of thousands of contacts. She stopped using social media to share every inner thought - and honestly, to seek validation. She sold the house she raised her girls in for eight years.

And with every layer I peeled away, I kept meeting parts of myself that felt foreign. Unknown. Some of them, at first, unwelcome.

This version of me is different. And as I got to know her, I didn’t know if I liked her at first.

She’s more cynical - she’s gotten to know the shadow side of people, of things, of herself. She’s more discerning about where she invests her energy and who she invests in. Better at boundaries. Better at no. She protects her peace and listens to her body and her nervous system above all else. She stopped performing and achieving for approval.

She doesn’t seem as ‘energizer bunny’ happy. She’s quieter. Sometimes at a complete loss for words. She’s mid-detox from personal development, and she no longer puts anyone else’s wisdom above her own.

In Mongolia, I got to fully meet her - in an environment that showed me who she really is.

In the past, in a group dynamic like this one, I’d have been the one making everyone feel welcome, smoothing the rough edges of every social interaction, making sure everyone had a great experience and “got along.” This version of me showed up with her best friend, met that friend’s great friend and five strangers, and felt no need to make anyone comfortable. She let people misunderstand her without explaining herself. She basically didn’t give a F how she was perceived.

When things promised for the trip didn’t arrive and basic expectations weren’t met, she had the tough conversation with the organizer. The old me would have avoided conflict at all costs, or only seen the good in the situation while bypassing what actually needed to be addressed. This me - sick with a head cold and chest cold since the day I landed, energy low, capacity for shit even lower - valued her time with her two friends over anyone else’s expectations or ways of viewing her.

This new me, I’m realizing, is the me I’ve always been. Without the mask. Without the people-pleasing. Without needing to care for everyone above myself.

She’s raw. She’s strong. And maybe not as likable.

Or so - that was my first thought.

But the place I really met her was with the shaman.

Our hot springs day got cancelled - a foot-and-mouth outbreak in the region - so our guide arranged something else: a meeting with a shaman of seventy years, from a village near where we’d be camping that night. I spent the whole day with my two travel companions figuring out what we’d ask him, keeping it simple, knowing everything would be translated.

As night came, we arrived at a small house in the village. Gathered in a room. Sat on the floor. Incense burning. The shaman and his translator came in - traditional garb, a headband covering his eyes, long braided hair as part of his headdress. He carried a large drum and drummed for several minutes, moving around the room, and then immediately took on a different voice and demeanor.

I’ve been around channeling. I recognized it right away - he’d shifted into the spirit or guide he works with.

But his energy turned into what I saw as aggressive. The language he was speaking - yelling - wasn’t Mongolian. Our guide explained she couldn’t understand it either. That’s why a shaman has his own local translator, for the ancient language or energy coming through.

And I sat there, and for the first time in my life, instead of putting this man’s experience above my own, I really listened to my body and my own intuition.

I asked questions as the discomfort in the room grew. Is this just a cultural difference? Is this a being of light I’d want to interact with?

I got a no.

His demeanor grew more aggressive. He called people up to sit with him, smacked their hands harshly. No one understood the words - not his translator, not ours. For a while I stayed connected to the earth, to my seat, able to just observe, stay in the question, stay curious. My heart rate started increasing, as did my breathing - and I’ve learned to listen to those cues. After several more minutes of that intensity, I looked at my friend and said, “Hey. I’m getting a no on this. For me.”

He said, “I am too.”

So we said, with all respect, this just isn’t for me - and we left the room.

At that dinner at the Shangri-La, I shared that experience as the thing I learned most about myself. In theory, I’d known - after everything the last decade unraveled - that I would never again make someone else’s wisdom or awareness greater than my own. But this gave me the chance to actually put it into practice.

I left that room without any sense that I was missing out. Without questioning or doubting my own knowing. I didn’t wonder if, because he’d been a shaman for seventy years, I must be missing something. I trusted myself, and I walked out in full confidence.

That’s the her that I am. That I’m remembering. That I’m reclaiming.

And as I get to know me, I realize these are parts of myself I’d shoved down, put in my shadow, refused to welcome - because I thought they wouldn’t be liked or accepted.

Now what I realize is most important is that I like her.

For most of my life, I lived in what I now know as the fawn response - tending and befriending everyone around me for safety, for belonging. It’s an automatic, wise nervous system response designed to keep us safe. And many of those automatic responses shaped my identity. What I thought was my personality.

Some of it is genuinely me - holding a room of people in community, seeking out and staying curious about new people, new friends, new experiences. That’s mine. But there was a layer on top that was more protective than true: always the one adding energy, always likable. And rather than seeing that as a flaw, I notice now that it’s just... not there anymore. Some say that falls away as estrogen drops in perimenopause - which I am fully in. Other layers fell away with the job, the lifestyle, the life that shaped her.

Either way, what matters most now is that this version of me is more complete. More whole.

And here’s what I didn’t expect: I’m actually embodying her. It’s not mental. These aren’t things I’m trying to be, or hoping to do, or patterns I’m working to change. I just embody the whole me now (or at least much more of the time ;)) - including what some would call the shadow, the darker sides, the not-as-likable sides, the messy sides. All of it has made me richer and deeper. A woman I am proud to know and to be.

And it turns out my friends, new and old, actually like this version too. That’s been surprising. Recalibrating. And reassuring, for that older version of me - hey, it’s okay to keep finding this authentic self in a new way, without performing it for the world.

As my work changes and I start off in a new direction, I know part of this experience is also here to help others - to witness and be part of other women experiencing all of their parts. Their wholeness. Their complexity. The both/and. I can be joyful and have grief. I can hold these polarities within me and love every moment of it.

I’m here for that in myself. And I’m here to witness it in other women - and to create containers where they can experience it too.

More to come on that as it unfolds…

What experiences have shaped you? Has anything recently surprised you about yourself and your evolution? I’d love to hear in the comments or a DM. I read every one.

I smiled when I read it. Because the honest answer was: I’m better than okay. I’ve just been living my life instead of narrating it.

And it turns out, that’s been one of the most healing things I’ve done in a long time.

There’s a guy behind the meat counter at Whole Foods who always asks what I’m up to. Earlier this week, he looked at me and said, it feels like you’re in your renaissance era.

Yes. That. Exactly that.

I’ve been thinking about what makes this feel so different from other seasons of growth I’ve moved through. And I keep coming back to this: the blooming has been quiet. For me. Not for an audience.

Growth for the sake of it. Beauty for the sake of it. Not to prove anything, not to build toward anything, not to determine my worth by how many people witness it.

I’ve been watching sunsets from my new deck without reaching for my phone. Traveling with good friends and not posting a single thing. Noticing the specific quality of morning light through these particular trees. Talking to a stranger at the coffee shop.

These are the moments I feel most like myself. And for a long time, I didn’t fully realize how much the constant sharing - the look at this, check this out - was quietly diluting something I needed to protect.

There’s something that happens when joy goes unwitnessed. It becomes yours. Fully, completely yours. And I think I’d forgotten what that felt like.

In April, my girls and I moved out of the house we’d lived in for eight years.

It was the final end to a chapter - the house I’d co-owned with my ex-partner, the place that held a full decade of a life I’d since outgrown. And the people who bought it let me know they were going to tear it down.

So before we handed over the keys, I went back one last time. Just me. I brought one of those little single-serving bottles of champagne and a fancy glass, and I walked through every empty room.

I poured a glass and I took my time. I stood in the kitchen and let the memories come - dinners with friends, girls doing homework at the dining room table, the ordinary magic of years. I walked through each bedroom, the backyard, the front yard, under the trees. And I thanked it. Out loud, quietly, to no one and everyone at once.

It felt like a ritual I didn’t know I needed until I was in the middle of it.

Several days later, I drove by with my daughters. It was already a pile of rubble.

I asked them, how does that make you feel?

They were quiet for a second. And then: actually, good. That chapter is finished.

Me too.

What I didn’t expect was the feeling of freedom. Not grief, not loss - freedom. Because watching something that solid, something that literal - walls, a roof, the thing that held our life - reduced to rubble in days...it’s a visceral lesson in impermanence that no meditation retreat could have taught me.

What made that house a home wasn’t the structure. It was us. Me and my girls. And we took that with us.

We moved into a rental surrounded by trees. Every morning I take my mushroom coffee out to the deck and look at the mountain and listen to the birds. Everything is new - the light, the sounds, the way the shadows move across the floor in the afternoon.

My brain is completely off autopilot. And I think that’s part of what’s feeding this renaissance era. When everything is familiar, we stop seeing it. When everything is new, we can’t help but pay attention.

I got rid of a lot when we moved. And what we brought feels like us in a way nothing has before. This space is more me and my daughters than anywhere we’ve ever lived - and they’re at these ages, thirteen and sixteen, that I know are fleeting in a way I couldn’t have understood when they were small.

My oldest might be going to college or leaving the house in two years. I don’t know what comes after that. And rather than that uncertainty making me anxious, it’s making me present.

I want to be here for this. Fully, undistractedly here.

Which brings me to something I’ve been doing this summer that I want to share - because everyone I’ve mentioned it to has immediately said, I’m using this too.

School’s out. I’m in a transition between what my work was and what it’s becoming. I leave for Mongolia next month - a twenty-year dream, finally happening. And I have this window of time that feels genuinely precious.

But here’s what I’ve learned about unstructured time: it doesn’t automatically become magic just because it’s open. Appointments fill in. Small tasks multiply. You look up and it’s Thursday and nothing you actually wanted has happened.

So I made myself a simple framework. Not a schedule - just three buckets I want to hit each week.

Bucket One: Body in Nature

Chattanooga is surrounded by swimming holes, waterfalls, the Tennessee River, mountain trails. I’ve lived here for almost a decade, and for most of those years I was traveling every other week for work, too exhausted when I was home to actually be here. So I did some research - pulled together a list of everything in the area I’ve never done, the places I’ve heard about but never got to.

Next week it’s Foster Falls, a waterfall hike I’ve been meaning to do forever. This week I’m renting a paddleboard and floating that stretch of the river that goes past the island and the arts district. Your version of this bucket might look completely different - but the idea is simple: your body, outside, doing something that makes you feel alive in it.

Bucket Two: Anything New

This is the one that’s easiest to skip and makes the biggest difference. Novelty is what pulls us out of autopilot. It’s why I’ve always loved travel - but you don’t have to leave the country to access a sense of wonder and that curious sense of oh, what’s this?

Walking in a new neighborhood. Wandering into a store you’ve never noticed. A cooking class, a coffee shop you’ve driven past a hundred times, a trail that goes left instead of right. The newness itself is the point. It tells your brain: pay attention, something interesting is happening.

Bucket Three: Something Just for Beauty

No purpose. No outcome. Nothing to learn or improve or accomplish. Just whatever feeds your senses.

For me this week, it’s a pottery class at a studio I just found out about - they do an evening once a month where you make three or four pieces and take them home. I haven’t touched a pottery wheel since college, and I loved it then. Working with my hands in a studio space, making something for no reason other than the making of it - that’s beauty.

Other weeks it might be wandering through one of the art galleries I keep meaning to visit, or driving up to one of the sunset lookouts on the mountain with a cup of tea, or spending an afternoon at the u-pick flower fields.

What I love about these buckets is that none of them are extravagant. A new neighborhood walk takes an hour. A sunset doesn’t require a reservation. The pottery class is a Saturday evening.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: if I don’t plan them, they don’t happen. I looked at the pottery studio’s schedule and realized that one specific Saturday was the only evening that worked with my whole summer calendar. If I hadn’t gone looking, I would have missed it entirely.

The joy doesn’t find you. You have to choose it, make space for it, put it on the calendar and protect it like it matters - because it does.

I made a version of this for my girls too.

I put together a list of about fifteen to twenty things we could do together this summer - just one a week, nothing elaborate, nothing that requires packing or planning ahead. Adventures, mostly. And then I let them choose. Which one looks good this week?

Because they’re teenagers. They have their own lives, their own friends, their own ideas about what’s cool. But given an actual list of options, they pick something. And we get a week with a thing in it that’s ours.

Not consuming. Not shopping. Just doing something together that’s a little bit alive.

I don’t know exactly when you’ll hear from me again. It might be after Mongolia. It might be before, if something wants to be said.

What I know is that this is what I’m doing right now - savoring this particular stretch of time, this particular season of life that I won’t get back. The girls at these ages. The new house with its trees. The mountain in the morning. All of it so ordinary and so extraordinary at the same time.

The joy is here. And we get to keep choosing it.

Every woman in that room felt it. Five of us, all registering the same low hum of discomfort. And not one of us said a word.

The mom did what many of us might do. Smiled, smoothed it over - oh, she’s just watching her iPad. A soft redirect. Polite enough to make the moment pass.

He then came and sat directly across from me and my girls. And here’s the thing - he actually turned out to be kind of interesting. A Vietnam veteran, exposed to Agent Orange, navigating serious health problems. Lonely, clearly. Wanting to be heard. We made eye contact, listened, talked a little. He wasn’t dangerous. He wasn’t malicious. He just... didn’t think twice about any of it.

And the whole time, I was doing that thing many women do. Running the quiet background calculation: Is he okay? Is this safe? Are my girls okay? Should I say something? No, we’re in a doctor’s office, it’s fine, he’s just lonely. Managing my own discomfort while simultaneously scanning for his intentions and keeping the conversation easy.

The little girl across the room never got to decide how she felt about any of it. The adults absorbed her discomfort before she could even name it.

We’ve been doing that to girls - and to ourselves - for a very long time.

My younger daughter told me something recently that gave me a similar feeling to that experience in the doctor’s office. She was at a hair appointment, and the dryer was running hot - actually burning her head. She didn’t say anything.

When I asked her about it, she said: I know I could have. It just felt weird.

This is a kind woman doing her hair in a safe place. And still - the discomfort in her body lost out to the social awkwardness of naming it.

I told her: how your body feels is always first. Always. You get to say something.

But even as I said it, I thought about how many years it took me to learn that myself. Getting a massage that was too hard and saying nothing. Sitting in conversations that felt wrong and finding reasons to stay. Spending decades in spaces - including a lot of personal development and spiritual work - where emotions were quietly treated as the problem. Where the move was always to see the bigger picture or clear the energy or rise above the feeling, not move through it.

It took me until I was deep into somatic work to realize I’d been running on a very narrow emotional bandwidth. I had the big ones - joy and grief. But the occasional burst of something I’d immediately try to bypass, those subtler signals, the ones that arrive before your mind has time to construct a story around them…

I’d been overriding those for decades. And calling it growth.

Just the other day, I was sitting with a feeling I really didn’t want to feel. Limbo. The low-grade anxiety of a new home not yet found, applications out in the world with no word back, life in that uncomfortable in-between where nothing is settled.

And I noticed my hand moving toward my laptop. The pull to open a new tab, start working on my website, do something useful and creative and forward-moving.

I’ve done that for ten years. Work was always the most virtuous bypass available - you’re contributing, you’re building something, this is good. Beautiful story. Extremely effective way to never actually feel anything uncomfortable.

This time, I caught it.

I didn’t get on the computer. I just sat there. Felt the limbo. Asked myself: what do I actually need right now?

That’s the whole practice, really. Not a framework. Just a pause and an honest question. Because underneath the urge to eat, or scroll, or work, or binge something until the feeling goes away - there’s usually a simpler need. Rest. Connection. Reassurance. Something your body is actually asking for, if you’ll stay long enough to hear it.

Mama Gena posted something this week that was so powerful. She was writing about what she’d teach a young girl now - in this moment, in this particular cultural reckoning - and the heart of it was this:

Discomfort is your nervous system sensing something. Teach her to trust it. She doesn’t have to explain it. She doesn’t have to justify it. She just has to notice it.

And then she talked about our bodies: You can’t protect what you can’t name.

I’ve been really letting that sink in. This isn’t about fear. It’s not about teaching ourselves or our daughters to see danger everywhere, to stay small, to be suspicious of the world.

It’s the opposite, actually.

Safety - real safety - is an expanded state. It’s the capacity to stay present with what’s arising in your body instead of rushing to make it stop or explain it away. To notice the signal. To trust that your nervous system is communicating something worth listening to, even when you can’t immediately explain why.

A woman who has that? Who can feel the full range of what moves through her and trust it without apology?

She is very difficult to control or manipulate.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this - the full inhabitation of our own feeling bodies - is exactly what many cultures have worked so hard to train out of us.

The path back to ourselves isn’t armor. It isn’t hypervigilance or suspicion or keeping ourselves small and braced. It’s pausing and listening to your body. Getting curious about the sensations arising and asking:

Where do I feel this in my body? How does it feel?

Not what do you think about it - where do you feel it. Is it a tightening? A buzz? Something that goes quiet in your gut? Does it have a temperature, a color, a texture?

Those questions - asked with genuine curiosity, without judgment - are some of the most quietly radical things I know.

What’s going on in our world right now isn’t just about individual bad actors. It never was.

Systems - governments, institutions, cultural norms - have always had a vested interest in women who doubt themselves. Women who explain away their discomfort instead of acting on it. Women who manage other people’s feelings before their own. Women who were trained, starting in waiting rooms at age two, to be polite before they were true.

And right now, I think we’re watching what happens when enough women decide they’re done managing the discomfort on everyone else’s behalf. When they stop running the quiet background calculation and start asking, out loud: what is my body actually telling me? What do I actually need?

That’s not rage. That’s not chaos.

That’s what it sounds like when women come home to themselves.

And it starts somewhere embarrassingly small. A question you ask yourself before you reach for the phone. A word to your hairdresser when the dryer’s too hot. A moment in a waiting room where you let yourself feel what you feel, and decide that counts for something.

Start there. Not with a framework. Not with a plan.

Just: how does your body feel right now?

Notice. Stay. Get curious.

That’s the whole thing.

And a small thing, if you want it -

This Sunday, March 22, my friend Amy Shine and I are hosting a half-day virtual retreat called Root to Rise. Three hours, live on Zoom, designed to do exactly what this essay is pointing at - not teach you about your body, but actually bring you back into it.

We move through the whole arc together: grounding and orienting first, so your nervous system knows it’s safe. Then energizing breathwork and somatic movement to shake loose what’s been stuck. And then all the way down into genuine restoration - not just relaxing, but the kind of stillness that actually replenishes you.

If you’ve been carrying a lot lately - and I think a lot of us have - come put it down for a few hours. → [Register here]

We’d just had dinner outside - warm April air, good wine, the kind of night that loosens something in you. Now we were in the back of a taxi, the city skyline sliding past the windows, and I was talking. Really talking.

I told her I’d left my job. Lost my financial security. Lost most of my friends and the community I’d built my identity around for a decade. Lost a relationship. Lost a lot of the travel that made me feel most alive. All of it, within the same stretch of time. And I was a few months into pretending I felt fine - building my business, moving forward, being the capable one.

She didn’t say anything while I talked. She just listened.

And when I finished, she turned to me and said:

“That’s a lot, Emily. That’s a lot for one person to carry. Have you let yourself acknowledge that?”

No advice. No reframe. No here’s-what-you-should-do.

Just: I see the weight of this. I see you.

Something released in my chest that I didn’t know I’d been holding for a very long time. Not because she fixed anything. Not because she had an answer. Simply because another human being turned toward me and said: you are not crazy for feeling this. This is actually a lot.

I wasn’t broken. I was carrying a lot.

Those are completely different things. And somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that I was allowed to put it down.

I think about that moment often now, because I keep seeing women doing what I was doing.

Moving fast. Staying capable. Quietly accumulating weight they won’t put down because there’s no safe place to set it - and because somewhere, somehow, they absorbed the belief that needing to set it down means something is wrong with them.

When it gets to be too much, we go looking for the answer. The right hormone protocol. The right nervous system tool. The right modality, the right coach, the right framework that finally explains everything. And sometimes we find good things. Real things. Things that genuinely help.

But we’re still doing it alone. Shopping the marketplace of solutions by ourselves, in the middle of the night, while everyone else is asleep.

What I know now - from my own body, from years of sitting with other women in the hardest moments of their lives - is that this aloneness isn’t a personal failing. It’s a structural one. We have been systematically separated from something ancient that we actually need.

And we’ve been sold replacements that don’t reach the thing we’re actually hungry for.

I knew this in my bones the night my oldest daughter was born.

I’d hired a doula, and more than one person asked me why. Your husband will be there. What do you need someone else for?

What I understood, even then, was this: when the person who loves you most watches you go through something intense, they need holding too. To expect one person to be both inside the experience and holding the container for it is too much to ask of anyone. We need someone whose only job is to tend the room.

The hospital ran out of hot water that night. My doula warmed cups of water in the microwave and poured them down my back in the shower, one after another, for hours. When the baby wasn’t coming, she knew - from deep knowing - to wrap a sheet around my hips and shift my body, coaxing the baby into position. Ancient wisdom, alive in a dimly-lit birthing center at 11:48 at night.

My midwife was seven months pregnant herself when she caught my daughter. She needed holding too. And she had it. Everyone in that room was held, which meant I could be fully inside the experience without managing anyone else’s fear.

That’s what made it feel like magic. Not the absence of difficulty - it was hard, it was intense, it was the middle of the night - but the presence of a web. Everyone supported. No one alone.

I have since aimed to create that feeling in every room I’m in.

I felt its absence most sharply the year I lived in Japan.

I couldn’t speak the language yet, and what surprised me wasn’t the loneliness of not having close friends - it was the loneliness of not being able to talk to the person at the dry cleaner. The woman at the coffee counter. The man on the train platform.

Those small exchanges, the ones I’d never thought twice about at home, turned out to be load-bearing. They were the connective tissue of daily life, the tiny reminders that you exist to other people, that you are seen in the most ordinary and therefore most essential way.

Without them, I felt myself begin to disappear.

That disappearing had a particular texture to it - not dramatic, just a slow dimming, like a room where someone keeps turning down the light. I felt the opposite of that years later on a weekday afternoon in Tuscany.

A small village, summer, and people were simply out. Not going somewhere. Not optimizing anything. Just standing in the narrow streets, leaning in doorways, gathered in front of cafes with a glass of wine and nowhere urgent to be. Talking. Laughing. Present to each other in the most unhurried way.

I stood there watching and felt something ache.

This is what we’ve traded. Not consciously, not all at once, but steadily - for efficiency, for productivity, for the particular American religion of self-sufficiency. We drive everywhere alone. We work from home. We order what we need delivered to our doors. We have optimized almost all friction out of daily life, including the friction of running into people, of being seen unexpectedly, of having to slow down and acknowledge that another human being is standing right in front of us.

And then we wonder why we feel so alone.

Just last week I sat outside with a friend I’ve known for years but haven’t seen enough.

We talked for hours. About hormones and exhaustion and getting curious about what life feels like now. About feeling the fire dim and not knowing how to find it again. About doing all the right things - the supplements, the therapy, the trainings - and still not feeling quite like ourselves.

She lives thirty minutes away. We’ve both been struggling. Neither of us knew.

At some point she said: I’ve been at home a lot, not seeing people nor doing anything fun and feeling really shit. And I said: me too. And we just sat there for a moment in the relief of it. The simple, radical relief of not being the only one.

That conversation didn’t fix anything. Neither of us left with a protocol or a plan. But I drove home feeling lighter than I had in months.

Because we each held space for the human experience of the other.

When each person has support, something magical happens. The whole system relaxes. No one is going it alone. And in that relaxation, something becomes possible that force never could create.

I believe this is true of every threshold we cross. Not just birth like the story I told before. But, the ones that come later - when our bodies begin to change in ways we weren’t warned about, when our children need us differently, when the identity we built our whole life around starts to loosen its grip, when we stand at the edge of what we thought we knew about ourselves and realize we have no map for what comes next.

These are initiations. Profound reorganizations of everything we thought we were.

And we are being asked to move through them alone, armed with experts and solutions for each individual symptom.

This is not because we are weak. It is because we have been separated from something we actually need.

Here’s what I’ve noticed, though: the marketplace of solutions isn’t neutral. There’s a current running through it, and the current says: if you pause, you’ll fall behind. If you slow down, you’ll never make it. There’s always a better version of yourself just one more course, one more protocol, one more framework away.

I know that current well. I’ve swum against it for years. And swimming against a rip current is exhausting - not because you’re weak, but because that’s not how you survive it. You survive by stopping the fight. By slipping sideways, out of the pull. By letting the current carry what it’s going to carry and finding your footing somewhere new.

What I’ve needed - what I’ve watched other women need - isn’t someone to help me swim harder. It’s someone willing to be in the water with me. Someone who isn’t trying to clear the current or fix the current or sell me a better stroke. Someone who can just say: I’m here. I see you. You’re not crazy. This moment is hard.

That’s where the actual movement happens. Not in the striving. In the being held.

Women have always known how to hold each other through thresholds. This knowing is not lost.

It is waiting.

I’m not interested in being another person with an answer.

I’m interested in rebuilding the room.

Not to fix anything, not to follow anyone’s framework or optimize the next chapter, but to move through it together.

If something in this landed in your body - not just your head - I want you to know: whatever you’re carrying, you don’t have to keep carrying it alone. Hit reply or leave a comment. Just tell me what’s true for you right now. I’m here, and I’m listening.

That’s where I am right now. Almost 50. A completely different chapter opening in front of me. And what I keep noticing is that this kind of moment - this wide open, anything-is-possible, slightly terrifying and incredibly exciting blank slate energy - asks something of you that ordinary life doesn’t.

It asks you to actually look at what you believe. And why.

Not just spiritually. Not just personally. But all of it. The political lens you inherited. The community you organized your life around. The voices you’ve let narrate your experience of the world. Because when you’re not rebuilding on top of old structures - when you have the rare and disorienting gift of genuine space - you get to ask: what do I actually want to carry forward? What’s mine? And what have I just been holding because it was handed to me?

I think a lot of us are at this threshold right now. Maybe not in our personal lives - though many of you are - but collectively. The world feels like it’s in its own kind of reset. Old structures cracking. Old certainties dissolving. And in that space, we’re being asked to either grab harder onto what we believe, or get curious about what we actually know.

This piece is about the second option.

The thing I am noticing most at the moment when I go online is not just division and separation - but also a certainty, a doubling down on one’s beliefs - whatever those may be.

When we are bombarded with news and headlines that are disturbing, one of the many things that can happen is that we get knocked out of the present moment and how we feel in our hearts, and we get sent right up into our mind and into reaction.

And it’s hard not to react to what’s in the media right now. It’s designed to be that way - shocking, disturbing, and to make you more sure that what you believe is right and that ‘they’ are wrong.

It takes an ‘us’ vs ‘them’ to maintain this level of hate. But one of the things I keep thinking is - if you scream at the other side about how wrong they are - how could we expect that person to not just question their beliefs, but to feel like they are safe to change their mind?

Think about it. If you start to doubt what you once held certain - and what you held certain probably determined a lot of who you socialize with, the conversations you have, the rooms you feel comfortable in, maybe even your partner, your spouse, your best friends - then is it any wonder people don’t?

We build our lives and find our community around our beliefs now more than ever. We no longer live in a small village of 100 or so people where we all have the same need to survive as a group that unites us - where we would all have had unique roles, different and unique, not one better than the other. All necessary to live and survive and thrive together.

What I keep coming back to is love. Love is the only thing more powerful than hate. And in order to love unconditionally, we have to drop our judgments, our name-calling of someone else and ask questions. We have to be curious enough to ask questions. Our environment plays a big role in what we believe. So being curious about someone else’s environment and history - why might they think the way they do?

And even more importantly we need to be able to question ourselves. To wonder - why do I feel a certain way about something? Where did that opinion or point of view come from? Did I hear someone else say it? Was it from the news? Did I just grow up believing it and never questioned it?

This is what I like to call healthy doubt.

Before I go into any more detail, let’s first look at doubt itself, and why it’s so important right now in times like this of great division.

Doubt is the state of uncertainty or lack of conviction about something - a questioning of whether a belief, claim, or assumption is true or valid. It’s that feeling of “I’m not sure about this” or “Maybe this isn’t right.”

Doubt can be incredibly healthy when examining belief systems, especially those that might be harmful or limiting. Here’s why:

It creates space for inquiry. When you doubt something, you’re essentially saying “let me examine this more closely” rather than accepting it blindly.

Doubt protects you from manipulation. Unhealthy belief systems often rely on absolute certainty and discourage critical thinking. When you allow yourself to doubt, you’re less vulnerable to gaslighting, groupthink, or coercive control. You maintain your own mental autonomy.

It opens the door to growth. Sometimes we outgrow beliefs that once served us, or we realize beliefs we inherited don’t actually align with our values or lived experience. Doubt is often the first step toward finding something more authentic and nourishing.

It reveals inconsistencies. When you question a belief system, you might notice contradictions - times when the stated values don’t match the actual practices, or when the beliefs cause harm rather than healing. Doubt helps you see these gaps clearly.

The key is distinguishing between healthy doubt (curiosity, critical thinking, trusting your gut when something feels off) and paralyzing doubt (anxiety-driven rumination). Healthy doubt moves you toward clarity and truth, even when that’s uncomfortable.

So let’s look more at healthy doubt and being able to sit with that clarity when it is extremely uncomfortable.

From my own personal experience of leaning into healthy doubt, I went on a journey of educating myself about the way our minds work, how we can be influenced by others and by groups that organize around particular beliefs and points of view (be them political, religious, corporate, spiritual, educational), and how to tell whether or not those groups may be healthy or harmful, expansive or controlling, healing or wounding, supportive or exploitative, empowering or diminishing.

One of the key things to note is that many groups are often a mixture of all of these things. Which is what makes this so difficult. When you start to explore this, one of the things you have to be open to is that duality. To be able to hold black and white all at once, and be okay with shades of gray. Our mind does not want to be in what is called cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable mental tension we feel when we hold two conflicting beliefs, values, or pieces of information at the same time - or when our actions contradict our beliefs. It’s that unsettled, anxious feeling of “this doesn’t add up” or “how can both of these things be true?”

Our brains hate this feeling. We’re wired to seek consistency and coherence, so when we experience cognitive dissonance, our minds will do almost anything to resolve it quickly. Often, we do this by dismissing or minimizing one piece of conflicting information, rationalizing or making excuses, doubling down on the belief that feels safer or more familiar, or avoiding situations, people, or information that create the conflict.

But here’s what I think is underneath all of this - the part I haven’t said yet.

The reason doubting an ideology, a religion, a political party, or a spiritual organization feels so threatening isn’t just cognitive. It’s identity.

When we wrap our sense of self around a group or a belief system - when it stops being something we belong to and becomes something we are - the fog rolls in. We can no longer see clearly, because we’re looking through it.

You’ll know this has happened when someone says something critical about that group and you feel it as a personal attack. Not just disagreement. Not just a different perspective. A threat. An attack against you. That’s the signal. That’s where the identity has merged.

And we all do this. I’ve done this. It’s human.

Think about how we say it in our language: I am a Democrat. I am a Republican. I am a yogi. I am a Christian. I am a spiritual seeker. Not I practice yoga or I vote Democrat. But I am. That little word does so much quiet work.

Because when you are the thing, you cannot question the thing without questioning yourself. And questioning yourself - your worth, your belonging, your entire community - feels existential, and well, feels scary. It can feel like you’re about to lose everything. Your friendships. Your family. The rooms you feel safe in. The whole world you’ve built around that identity.

So of course people dig in harder when challenged. Of course they reach for the narrative that makes the dissonance go away. Of course they feel attacked when someone questions what they believe - because to them, it is an attack.

This isn’t stupidity. This is a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do: protecting what feels like survival.

And this is where we have to find compassion. Not agreement. Not tolerance of harm. But compassion for the very human experience of having built your sense of self around something - and then being asked, implicitly or explicitly, to question it.

The people we’re frustrated with? They’re not dug in because they’re broken or brainwashed or beyond reach. They’re dug in because leaving or even questioning feels like a kind of death. And nobody walks toward death easily.

I saw this play out this week when I saw someone post online that a political figure couldn’t possibly be racist because of a kind thing he did for a Black family back in 2008. Despite recent evidence that contradicts that. And it’s so easy to look at that and think - how can they not see it?

But that’s our brain doing what it always does. Reaching for the piece of information that keeps the story intact. That keeps the identity safe.

They aren’t stupid. And this is where we have to have compassion for others - who have been influenced, just like us, by the power of persuasion, propaganda, and techniques designed to control opinion.

This is where the danger lies - not just in organized groups, but in any system of belief we’ve built our identity around. When you start noticing things that don’t align - a leader’s behavior contradicting their stated values, a political party’s actions contradicting their platform, a spiritual teacher’s private life contradicting their public teachings, a movement that claims to protect people causing harm to others - your mind experiences dissonance. But questioning feels even more threatening than staying, so instead you might rationalize it away: “Of course the media would spin it that way.” “This is just my ego resisting.” “Nobody’s perfect.” You may not even have those as conscious thoughts. They may just be running quietly beneath the surface - which makes them even trickier to spot.

Here’s the key shift: learning to tolerate cognitive dissonance - to sit in that uncomfortable “both/and” space - is actually essential for clear thinking and for healing. It allows you to hold nuance.

You can recognize: “This political movement stood for things I genuinely believed in AND it became something I can no longer defend.” “This leader said things that resonated with me AND their actions have caused real harm.” “I had real moments of connection and belonging in that community AND I was also being manipulated.” “Some of what I learned there was valuable AND the system around it was exploitative.”

Black-and-white thinking is actually a trauma response and a control mechanism. When groups insist - we’re right, they’re wrong; we have the answer, they don’t; we’re the enlightened ones and they’re ignorant - they’re preventing you from tolerating the dissonance that would let you see reality clearly.

Coming out of these ways of thinking requires building your capacity to hold complexity. To say “yes, there was good, AND there was harm” without needing to collapse it into one simple story. That discomfort you feel when holding both? That’s not a sign you’re wrong. That’s your mind expanding to hold what is true.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: when we get stuck between two things that both feel completely true, we often think we have to choose. Pick a side. Decide which reality wins.

But there’s another option. A third door.

In nervous system work, this is sometimes called the sacred third - that space that opens up when we stop trying to collapse the tension and instead just... let both things be true at the same time. Not forever. Not as a final answer. Just long enough to breathe.

Try it with something smaller first. Something closer to home.

Maybe you think of yourself as a hard worker, a high achiever - and also, there are days you want nothing more than to lie on the couch and do absolutely nothing. Both of those things are true. Neither one cancels the other out. You are not a lazy person. You are not a high achiever. You are you - a whole, complex human being who contains multitudes.

Now try it with something bigger.

Is this belief - the one you’ve held as certain - is it 100% true, all of the time, in every situation? Probably not. Nothing is. And can you also acknowledge that the contradicting thing, the one that’s been creating that uncomfortable hum of dissonance - can that also be true? Even a little? Even just right now, in this moment?

That’s the crack where the light gets in.

Not to abandon what matters to you. Not to become someone without conviction or values or community. But to loosen the grip just enough to ask: is this belief actually mine? Did I choose it, examine it, test it against my own lived experience - or did I inherit it, absorb it, let it be handed to me by someone who needed me to believe it?

And underneath all of it - beneath the political identity, the spiritual community, the group you’ve built your life around - what’s actually true about you? What do you actually value, when you strip everything else away?

For me, when I come back to that question, the answer is almost embarrassingly simple. Loving my girls. Really loving people - seeing them, hearing them, not performing it but actually doing it. Deep conversations. Feeling seen. Giving that back. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

And none of that requires me to be certain about anything else.

I wrote this piece because I keep seeing people in pain - not just the people we disagree with, but ourselves. The exhaustion of the certainty. The effort it takes to keep the fog in place. The loneliness of being so dug in that you can’t reach across to someone you love.

Love and compassion don’t require agreement. They don’t require you to abandon what you believe or pretend harm isn’t harm. But they do require us to remember that the person on the other side of the divide is also just a human being who built their identity around something that made them feel safe. Just like we did.

Healthy doubt isn’t weakness. It’s not disloyalty. It’s not losing yourself.

It might actually be how we find our way back.

What’s one belief you’ve been holding with white knuckles lately? And what would it feel like - just for a moment - to loosen your grip?

I came across a line this week from Jamie Clements over at Beyond the Breath that I was so glad to see expressed in the world. He was writing about content consumption and he said: stop outsourcing your thinking. And then: engage with ideas rather than just consuming summaries of ideas. Form your own interpretations. Disagree. Wonder. Sit with questions that don’t have clear answers.

I read that and thought - yes. That’s exactly it.

Healthy doubt isn’t just about questioning a group or a political party or a belief system you’ve outgrown. It’s about building the muscle to think for yourself. To have a direct line to your own knowing - your own values, your own sense of what’s true - that doesn’t run through anyone else’s system. Not a religion. Not a tradition. Not a leader. Not an algorithm.

This is the work I’m doing right now. Learning to trust that direct connection. To stop needing something outside myself to hand me the answers. To ask - is this thing I’m holding onto big enough to hold the fullest expression of who I actually am? And if not, to hold it more lightly. To pick up what serves me from many different places, many different traditions and teachers and experiences. To build something that is genuinely, specifically, unmistakably mine.

That’s what blank slate energy makes possible.

And I think that’s what this moment - personally and collectively - is asking of all of us.

Not certainty. Not another system to outsource yourself to.

Just the willingness to wonder.

I met her at the restaurant where I waitressed in my mid-twenties - a place in downtown Chicago where I’d work for a few months, save up a stack of cash, and then disappear to whatever corner of the world was calling me next. It was the kind of job that made that kind of life possible. And the kind of place where you made friendships that last for decades - the kind who became your people - because when you’re working a social job like that, talking with strangers all night and then commiserating with your crew after close, you just get close in a way that’s hard to replicate.

I had just gotten back from Thailand - a little jaunt through Asia - when Linda showed up. She’d just returned from Mongolia. And she told me about sleeping in yurts, riding horses through mountain steppe landscapes, the vast, uninterrupted silence of it all.

I was transfixed.

It was not a place that was on the backpacker circuit. Not a place most people were talking about. And that - of course - was one reason that drew me to go.

A few months later, Linda died in a car accident. She went away for a weekend with some people from the restaurant and didn’t come home.

I have carried Mongolia in my heart ever since.

Twenty-some years is a long time to carry a dream.

But here’s what I’ve learned about the ones that stay with you that long: they’re not waiting to be forgotten. They’re waiting for the right moment to finally become real.

Last summer, I made a little vision board on my phone - just a screensaver, a collage of images that held the feeling of what I wanted to invite into this next chapter of my life. And I added a photo of Mongolia. A full rainbow arching over a yurt in the middle of an open field that seemed to go on forever.

One week later, I was visiting a friend in London. She took me to a luncheon - champagne, a phenomenal mix of women, the woman who runs Elton John’s AIDS foundation as the speaker. After she finished, my friend and I almost didn’t bother introducing ourselves to anyone. But we did.

A woman came up to us. Asked what we were talking about.

Travel, we said.

Oh, she said. I lead expeditions. I actually just got back from Mongolia - it’s one of my favorite places on earth. I can’t wait to go back.

I stared at her.

You know those moments where the universe is so unsubtle that you almost laugh?

I got her number. I said: I just put Mongolia on my vision board a week ago. She didn’t even blink. Just nodded, like that kind of thing happens to her all the time. (It probably does.)

I reached out to her this January.

And now, this summer, I’m going.

Four friends. A guide who has led people through some of the most remote terrain on earth. Horses. Yurts. Two weeks in Mongolia during Naadam - their national festival, basically their Olympics, with archery and horse racing and sumo wrestling and an opening ceremony that I cannot believe I get to witness.

Oh - and a natural hot spring spa in the middle of nowhere. In my guide’s words: In honor of your birthday.

There are no showers on the main stretch of the trip. She suggested wet wipes. Enthusiastically. I love her.

She told us about the Mongolian diet - meat and noodles, because the land doesn’t support vegetables. Yak cheese and yak yogurt so thick you basically chew it. And she told us something that stopped me: they only kill animals that are aging or didn’t put on enough fat to survive the winter. Nothing is wasted. Everything is used. It is one of the most sustainable cultures on earth.

I keep thinking about that.

Yesterday was the last day of the Chinese Year of the Snake - the year of shedding, releasing, letting go of what isn’t coming with you into the next season. And if I had never read that, I still would have known: that’s exactly what this past year has been. Shedding.

My business model. My website. Old patterns and ways of being. Emotions and memories my body had been carrying.

So much releasing. So much thank you, but you’re not coming with me.

Yesterday, I was in a breathwork session - one of my favorites I’ve ever experienced. The whole container was about shedding the last skin. And then, at the end, an invitation: Get on the horse. The horse knows where to go. You don’t have to force it. You just have to get aligned, get on, and trust.

And as I was visioning that - I could see myself riding through the mountains of Mongolia.

Of course I could.

Today is the first day of the Year of the Fire Horse.

I’ve been talking with my somatic coach recently about something I notice in myself - this lingering question of when will I get my old energy back? That capacity I used to have, the amount I could do, the output.

She asked me: But is that actually what you want? Or are you asking to go back to an unhealthy state?

And I just... sat with that for a minute.

Because she’s right. What I’m nostalgic for wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t even healthy. I was running myself and my nervous system completely into the ground and calling it purpose.

The question isn’t when do I get back to that. The question is: what is my new rhythm?

The last two years have been slow and intentional. Letting things process. Letting myself land. Making sure I’m actually in integrity with the life I’m building rather than just sprinting toward the next thing.

And now, for the first time, I feel it: a different kind of readiness. Not the frantic, adrenaline-fueled version. Something steadier. Something that’s actually mine.

The fire horse doesn’t require force. It requires alignment. You just have to know the direction you’re pointing - and then trust that the horse knows the rest.

I keep thinking about Linda.

About how she put a picture in my mind at twenty-something that I never let go of. About how her death made it sacred somehow - not in a morbid way, but in the way that some things just become yours to carry forward. A kind of inheritance.

I also keep thinking about something my guide said about how Mongolia had transformed her.

She said - space. Mongolia and Namibia are two of the last places on earth with this much space. This kind of quiet. This kind of untouched.

Space.

That’s what I’ve been building toward. That blank slate upon which to create is what I’ve been clearing for.

And it turns out, there’s a place on the other side of the world that’s made of almost nothing but.

There’s something about turning 50 that keeps rearranging how I see things. Not in a scary way - in a preciousness way. Like: we are only here for so much time. We have a finite number of summers. There are places on this earth I haven’t been yet, and a body healthy enough to take me there, and friends willing to ride horses through a river with me and not shower for ten days.

If not now, when?

I’ve always believed that experiences stay with you in a way that things just don’t. I have never once regretted investing my energy and resources into going somewhere that changed me.

And I know, already, that this will be one of those trips.

For Linda, who planted the seed.

For the me who carried it all this way.

For the fire horse year that’s asking: get on. I know where we’re going.

Are you carrying a dream that’s been waiting for the right moment? I’d love to know. Leave a reply below - I read every one.

Of course there’s how that term is used for puberty - and yes, I was definitely a late bloomer in that respect. Just wishing that my boobs would grow already so I didn’t have to continue to get made fun of by all the boys at school. I remember being in middle school, in a crowded cafeteria, and as I made my way to find a seat, a boy yelled to me - “hey Emily - you’re a pirate’s treasure - nice sunken chest”. Oh, the joys of being thirteen.

As I grew up, it seemed like so many people around me knew what they wanted to do with their lives. One of my best friends had always wanted to be a veterinarian, and I remember staying at her house one night in our early twenties, and going with her in the middle of the night to help save a horse’s life by sticking her entire gloved arm up its bum to untwist its intestines. She was amazing. She still is. She knew what she wanted to do, and was there for it fully. She’s still a successful practicing vet today.

I was always so envious of people like that - who just knew what they were here to do - that one thing. When I read a story about Jane Goodall hiding in a chicken coop, staying still for hours at the age of 4 to discover how an egg is laid, I was in awe of that level of clarity of purpose.

I kept wondering, when was that clarity going to come for me?

In my early thirties, I had a reading with a Vedic astrologer. This was not something I did regularly, or had ever done before, but with one daughter already born and a plan to bring another child into the world, I wanted to check in with a grander blueprint and design to see if I could get any empowering advice or awareness on bringing in the next family member with as much harmony and ease as possible.

During our conversation, he mentioned that I was designed to be a late bloomer - to find my purpose later in life, and that everything I had done before would come into a sort of perfect culmination that would all make sense. He also mentioned that one of my lessons to embody here was learning how to balance family and work - so I noted that as well.

I remember thinking, well, great. I’m 34, a stay-at-home mom, and I must be coming into my full stride soon. At that point, I’d been a waitress and bartender to fund my love of travel and experiences, a graduate student, an assistant in a conservation department, and a high school biology teacher. Nothing that felt like “this is my calling in life” (at least not yet).

I loved being a mom, and thanks to my husband at the time, I got the privilege of getting to stay home with them while they were young. After a few years, however, I started to get that pull for more. To find more impact outside of our home too.

Someone told me after I had kids that I would never make really close female friends again - that instead I would just have friends of convenience who were moms I met on playdates or at the park. I promptly made a choice that this would not apply to me.

So when I found myself being offered a job that I could do from home when both of my daughters were young, it seemed like everything I had asked for was coming together. It gave me everything I’d always loved: travel, interesting people, work/family balance since I could work on flexible hours. And because it was for a personal development company, it also came with a purpose and mission wrapped right into it.

So I threw myself into it completely. For almost a decade, my life was this weaving of experiences and relationships. My work friends became my travel companions became my closest circle. I manifested exactly what I’d asked for - female friendships, global adventures, purpose, creativity, even my next relationship.

It all felt so interwoven. So satisfying. So lit up.

Until it didn’t.

I had 100% thought that was it - I had found my stride - I had bloomed in my 40’s - hallelujah. I may not have done things on the typical timeline, but I had found something I loved to do.

But as they say, hindsight is 20/20. I may have found work that felt fulfilling, but that came at the expense of so many other things in my life - especially relationships.

During that time, I got divorced, lost touch with friends, missed out on a lot of time with my daughters, and ran my body and nervous system into the ground.

It’s been two years since I left that job and lifestyle, and I have had a lot of healing to do. After years of being on a plane and in another country a couple times a month, waking up to literally hundreds of messages on my phone, and not ever having a day fully off, I was exhausted.

You know that saying “when you love your job, you don’t work a day in your life”? What I’ve learned is: when you love your job, you end up working 24/7 and having a really good justification to do it.

And I did. I was surrounded by everybody who did that. The community culture, the work culture - it all reinforced it.

I spent way too much time on my phone. I didn’t prioritize the people and things and friendships and time in the sunshine. Somehow my work consumed everything, and I had a lot of rational excuses for it.

Especially as a woman, I got acknowledged for being able to do it all. “Wow, you can be a single mom AND have a lucrative job AND travel the world?” Yep. I could juggle all the balls.

What seemed like a great phase of late blooming was actually full of many things that needed to be pruned away. Branches growing too far in one direction that weren’t sustainable or healthy. I had gotten my priorities mixed up and mistaken where my value came from.

When I left that job two years ago, it was destabilizing. Who am I? What do I want to do with my life (and the thought in my head, am I seriously asking this question in my late 40’s)? Where did all of those friends go - were those just friendships of convenience too?

I could see - humbly and painfully see - that I had let work become such a priority that other things that were important to me fell out of my life. Things like my friendships with people in the actual city where I lived. Time with my daughters where I wasn’t frantic. Being able to go on a walk without feeling like I needed to rush back to get on a Zoom call.

Letting that job and identity go was freeing in every way imaginable. And also really scary.

So now here I am, 49 years old, and getting to start over with a blank canvas.

I have a new side job, am creating some other new avenues for work and purpose, dating again, and finding a new house for my girls and me to flourish in.

I’m in the process of reclaiming what’s mine. My energy. My time. My sense of wonder. The fire in my belly.

And from that place? I get to bloom.

Not in some distant future when I’ve finally “arrived.” Not when I’ve perfected myself or transformed into some better version.

Right now. In this messy middle. At 49. As a late bloomer.

This is blooming in a way I never have before - with all the embodied wisdom of the experiences and years lived and a radical coming home to myself.

It feels like I’m just getting started. Like maybe, I’ve spent almost five decades gaining wisdom, to now finally get to funnel that all into what comes next.

I’m not certain what it’s going to look like. But I can tell you what I’d like it to feel like - resourced, rooted, alive, playful, connected, and fulfilled.

If you’re here reading this, thank you. I’ve always deeply valued the connection that comes from sharing words with others.

I learned this phrase recently: When a woman says something and you’re like, “Oh yes, me too!” - instead of saying “me too,” you can say: Sister speaks for me.

And if anything, that’s the conversation I want to have here.

I hope there’s just even one line in this where you think: Sister speaks for me.

Because this is not a clean transformation story. Mine is not a perfect arc, nor will it ever be.

Let’s not be scared to talk about the seeds we planted that didn’t grow. The branches we thought were growing but didn’t, or the ones we had to prune. The days we thought we’d never bloom again.

We get to witness each other in the mess and the certainty - both at the same time.

And for that, I feel fortunate all the way down to the tips of my toes.

If you’re new here, you can read more about who I am and what this space is on my About page. And if any of this resonates - if you’re also in the messy middle of rebuilding, or figuring out what community means at this stage of life, or just trying to trust that it’s not too late - I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Leave a reply below. I read every response.

This isn’t a broadcast. It’s a conversation.

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