My therapist started our session by asking, “What are we covering today?”

Honestly, I didn’t know.

“I feel like I’m shedding something,” I told her. “Or I’m in some kind of transition. I can feel it, but I can’t really explain it.”

Then I proceeded to try to explain it.

I talked about my business, my children, the kind of leader I want to be, the kind of mother I want to be, and all the things I feel like I should be doing differently.

This is something I’m very good at. I can turn almost any feeling into a research project.

But two words kept coming up: clarity and lightness.

I want more clarity about what I’m building and what deserves my attention in this season of my life.

And I want more lightness. More laughing. More playfulness. Less treating every part of my life like something that needs to be analyzed, fixed or made useful.

At some point, it became very obvious that I probably won’t find either while maintaining the current stream of information coming into my brain.

My children figured this out before I did.

They have a name for the version of me who has recently consumed parenting content online.

They call her “Instagram Mom.”

One morning, Instagram Mom decided that all three children would begin every day with exercise.

I marched into the room like a sergeant, clapped my hands and announced, “Okay, guys. We have a new structure happening now.”

Fifteen push-ups. Fifteen jumping jacks. Fifteen squats. Fifteen of whatever else I had added to my exciting new family program.

They looked at me.

Then they looked at each other.

“Oh my God. Here she goes again being Instagram Mom.”

The system lasted four days.

The annoying part is that morning exercise was a good idea. I still think it’s a good idea.

That’s actually the problem.

Most of the ideas I find online aren’t terrible. Better screen habits are good. More reading is good. Consistent chores are good. Teaching children independence is good. Exercising in the morning is good.

But our family cannot introduce a new system every week and stay consistent with any of them.

My children weren’t rolling their eyes because they didn’t want to exercise. Well, maybe partially. But mostly, they knew another good idea would eventually replace this one before it had time to become part of our lives.

The internet has given us access to more good ideas than one life can hold.

And I am apparently trying to hold all of them.

This doesn’t stop with parenting.

Because I work in the creator economy, I feel a real responsibility to pay attention. The industry changes constantly. Technology changes. Platforms change. Consumer behavior changes. As a leader, I can’t decide that I know everything and close myself off to new information.

I’m afraid of missing something important.

I’m afraid someone else will see the shift before I do. That I’ll become irrelevant because I wasn’t paying attention. That I’ll make the wrong decision because I failed to listen to the person who saw the future more clearly.

So I listen to everyone.

Someone posts a confident prediction about what creators need to do next. I save it. I send it to my team. I send it to Gary. I start reconsidering plans we made when I was in a much more grounded state.

Before I’ve even decided whether I agree with the person, their prediction has entered my company.

My children call her Instagram Mom. I don’t know what my team calls her, and I’m not sure I want to know.

I’ve always thought that keeping my mind open made me a better leader.

But I’m starting to wonder: At what point does keeping an open mind become abandoning your own?

Recently, I watched coverage from a women’s business event. It was polished, successful and clearly meaningful to the women involved.

But I had an immediate reaction: I don’t want this.

Not because there was anything wrong with it. It just showed me a version of success that wasn’t mine.

For once, seeing success didn’t make me want to chase harder. It snapped me out of the chase.

It made me wonder how many goals I had unconsciously collected by listening to other people explain what successful women should want.

How many of these decisions were actually mine? And how many did I make because someone online made them feel urgent?

I don’t want to operate from a place of fire all the time. I don’t want my business or my life to run on spiked cortisol. I don’t want to constantly feel like something has been left behind.

But the internet is very good at making everything feel urgent.

A new business model. A better morning routine. A parenting method. A wellness protocol. Another emotional pattern I should investigate.

I can wake up feeling relatively fine about my life and acquire seven new problems before breakfast.

I’m not blaming the people sharing these ideas. My entire career has been built online. I share my life and thoughts too.

But I’ve always resisted presenting myself as the person with the answer. I can tell you what I’m trying, what I’m learning and what I currently believe. I may contradict myself later because I learned something new—or because I was wrong.

I don’t want anyone to take my process and turn it into a fact.

And yet, I sometimes do exactly that with other people.

I mistake confidence for certainty. I assume the person saying something knows more than I do.

Maybe they do. Sometimes.

But sometimes they’re just saying it more confidently.

The uncomfortable truth is that consuming more information allows me to delay trusting myself while still feeling productive.

I can research. Save. Listen. Send a bajillion videos to everyone around me. Keep every possibility open.

But eventually, I still have to choose.

And choosing means accepting that there may be other good options-and I’m still not going to do them.

That’s the part I struggle with.

A good idea is not automatically my next assignment.

Maybe the discernment I need now isn’t only knowing what is helpful. It’s knowing what is helpful for me, in this season, with the capacity I actually have.

Because I would rather do a few things well than do everything badly in the name of becoming better.

Toward the end of the therapy session, my therapist asked me what story I was telling myself about everything I was feeling.

And suddenly I was just done.

“I don’t want another story,” I told her. “I think the clarity I need requires fewer stories, not more of them.”

She smiled.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “That’s very wise. Sometimes we need to hear our own stories and get tired of hearing them in order to break through.”

I think I’m tired.

Not of learning. Not of being curious. Not of the internet.

I’m tired of the urgency.

And I’m tired of assuming that everyone else knows more than I do.

So I’m trying something very unremarkable.

No scrolling before work. Creating before consuming. Not immediately sending every video to my team and Gary with some version of, “Should we rethink everything?”

I’m going to let ideas sit before I turn them into strategies, systems or new family policies.

I don’t know exactly what will happen when I close the stream. Part of me is still afraid I’ll miss something important.

But I also wonder what I’ve been missing while paying attention to everyone else.

I was fine before I opened my phone.

I want to find out what I think before I open it again.

I kept seeing this trend online where people shared the five things they think are actually worth spending money on.

I thought it’d be an easy list to make.

It wasn’t.

The first thing I wrote down was bloodwork.

Then a financial advisor.

Then a house manager.

Then meal prep.

Then a cleaner.

I looked at the list and actually laughed.

When did I become this person?

Fifteen years ago, I dreamed about buying my first designer bag.

Thirty-five-year-old me gets excited about ferritin levels.

Five years ago, this list would’ve looked completely different.

A beautiful handbag.

Diamonds, maybe.

Travel, for sure.

Probably some skincare treatment I was convinced I couldn’t live without.

And before anyone misunderstands me…

I still love every one of those things.

I still think travel is one of the best ways to spend money.

I still save handbags I’ll probably never buy.

Nothing about that changed.

But something quietly did.

Looking at those two lists, I realized my Girl Math had grown up.

Five years ago, it was mostly trying to answer one question:

How do I justify this purchase?

Wear it enough times…

It’s basically free.

Convince yourself it’s an investment.

We’ve all played that game.

Now my Girl Math asks a different question.

What is this actually going to give me?

Not what does it cost.

What does it give me?

Sometimes it’s clarity.

Sometimes it’s confidence.

Sometimes it’s simply making an ordinary Tuesday feel a little lighter.

That realization surprised me more than the list itself.

I wasn’t proud because bloodwork made my top five.

I was proud because I’d stopped trying to justify my purchases.

I was making decisions based on what I genuinely wanted more of in my life.

Looking back, I don’t think my choices became more practical.

I think they became more honest.

Take bloodwork.

A few years ago, I probably would’ve spent the same amount of money chasing whatever wellness trend everyone was talking about.

Another supplement.

Another protocol.

Another promise.

Eventually I realized I wasn’t buying health.

I was buying hope.

Bloodwork felt different.

I wasn’t buying bloodwork.

I was buying the ability to stop wondering.

Now, when another miracle supplement shows up on my feed, I don’t immediately wonder if I’m missing something.

I already know what my body needs.

To me, that’s clarity.

One thing that made my list was a financial advisor.

Not because I think it’s something you do once you’ve accumulated wealth.

I actually think it’s the opposite.

If there’s one thing I’d encourage more women to invest in, it’s understanding their financial life and planning for their future.

Whether you’re investing your first thousand dollars or your first million, confidence is one of the highest-return investments you’ll ever make.

There was a time I’d sit in those meetings mostly listening.

Now I leave with my own questions.

To me, that’s confidence.

The purchase I wrestled with the longest was hiring a house manager.

For months I couldn’t make the math work.

Shouldn’t I be able to remember the birthdays?

The school emails?

The groceries?

The schedules?

Looking back, I wasn’t questioning the cost.

I was questioning whether I should need the help.

Those are two completely different questions.

Eventually I realized I wasn’t paying someone to run errands.

I was paying to stop carrying my household around in my head.

One afternoon it hit me that I hadn’t thought about what the kids were eating all day.

A few years ago, that would’ve been impossible.

To me, that’s luxury.

The cleaner and meal prep don’t make for very glamorous recommendations.

But every time I walk into a clean house after a busy week…

Or open the fridge and don’t have to figure out dinner…

The biggest gift isn’t dinner.

It’s one less decision.

That’s when I realized something else.

The old version of my Girl Math wasn’t wrong.

It was just solving for something different.

Looking at that list, I realized it wasn’t just my spending that had changed.

It was the question behind it.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking,

“How do I justify this?”

And started asking,

“What is this going to give me?”

Luxury used to feel like owning beautiful things.

Now it sometimes feels like not thinking about something at all.

When I looked at that list, I didn’t just recognize my spending habits.

I recognized myself.

My Girl Math had grown up with me.

-

Valeria

Years ago, there was a viral video where applicants interviewed for what they thought was a Director of Operations role.

The interviewer described impossible hours. Expertise in everything from healthcare to logistics. No vacations. No salary.

People laughed.

Some thought it had to be illegal.

Then came the reveal.

The job already existed.

It was Mom.

Most people walked away thinking motherhood was the hardest job in the world.

I walked away wondering if we were calling it the wrong thing.

If you stripped away the word mother and only described the responsibilities, nobody would call it instinct.

They’d call it executive leadership.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something I call personal infrastructure.

Because I don’t think the problem is productivity.

Or optimization.

I think it’s infrastructure.

Because somewhere along the way, motherhood quietly became one of the most sophisticated management roles in modern life.

The job evolved.

The description didn’t.

And maybe that’s why so many women feel like they’re failing at a job nobody ever properly defined.

I don’t mean previous generations had it easier. Every generation has carried burdens the next couldn’t possibly understand.

What changed is the scope of the role.

Many of us aren’t simply raising children.

We’re trying to raise emotionally secure children while healing parts of ourselves.

We’re learning about attachment theory while packing lunches.

Building careers while trying to preserve marriages.

Trying to be present while managing an endless stream of invisible decisions.

We don’t just want to survive anymore.

We want to enjoy the life we’re working so hard to build.

Ironically, I didn’t arrive at this realization through motherhood.

I arrived at it through business.

As our company grew, everything bottlenecked through me. Every approval, every decision, every question somehow found its way back to my desk.

Gary recognized the pattern long before I did.

He’d say:

“There is no novelty in doing it all yourself. What kind of medal are you trying to get?”

I remember getting so frustrated every time he said it.

At work, delegation made perfect sense.

At home, it felt like caring less.

If someone else bought the birthday gift or packed the lunches, somehow I felt like I had failed.

Looking back, he wasn’t asking me to do less.

He was asking me to build systems.

For years, my life felt like one long game of trying not to forget.

The teacher email.

The Spirit Day outfit.

The birthday gift.

The groceries for the recipe I promised we’d make together.

The one-on-one afternoon I’d been meaning to schedule with one of my boys.

And if I forgot?

I’d wake up at three in the morning replaying everything I’d missed.

I blamed myself.

Never the system.

I spent years trying to become a better woman… when what I really needed was a better system.

Looking back, I think this is part of why my relationship with ambition became so complicated.

I wasn’t questioning my ambition.

I was questioning my capacity.

Because I couldn’t explain why everything felt impossible, I assumed something was wrong with me.

Now I see it differently.

I wasn’t trying to run a simple household.

I was trying to run an executive-level operation with almost no infrastructure.

The question stopped being:

Why can’t I keep up?

It became:

What system is missing?

That question has quietly changed the way I build my life.

Today, I think about my home the same way I think about a growing company.

Not because my family is a business.

Because both deserve systems that allow the important things to flourish.

Shared calendars.

Recurring grocery deliveries.

A house manager whose role has evolved alongside our family’s needs.

Clear ownership.

Technology.

Support.

Not because I’m trying to optimize every minute.

Because I’m trying to protect the moments that actually matter.

It’s one of the reasons I invested in ChefPost, a service that’s essentially Uber for chefs.

Think meal prep.

Packed school lunches.

Someone cooking in your kitchen using the groceries you already bought.

When people hear private chef, they hear luxury.

I hear infrastructure.

I hear fewer decisions.

More presence.

I think we’ll eventually look at AI the same way.

Most people talk about AI in terms of what it might replace.

I’m much more interested in what it can relieve.

It can organize calendars.

Draft school emails.

Help create routines.

Plan meals.

Build packing lists.

Turn mental clutter into repeatable systems.

It doesn’t replace motherhood.

It reduces cognitive load.

For the first time, many families have access to tools that can help build the operating systems our lives have been missing.

That’s not something I fear.

It’s something I want to learn.

The mother I want to be isn’t the one who never forgets a permission slip.

She’s the one who’s fully present at the park.

The one who’s listening to a story instead of mentally writing a grocery list.

The one who shows her children that ambition and presence don’t have to be enemies.

That you can build a big life without making your own exhaustion the price of admission.

I don’t want there to be martyrdom in my motherhood.

—

Valeria

For the past couple of months, I’ve been having a quiet, uncomfortably honest conversation with myself about ambition. About how much of it I want and what I’d have to give up to find out.

I haven’t said most of it out loud. It mostly just runs in the background.

So at dinner over the weekend, when a friend mentioned what it’s been like to watch her partner’s world up close, I asked her:

Has seeing it firsthand changed what you want for yourself?

She said absolutely. No hesitation.

Seeing that world from the inside made her realize she doesn’t want it. Not a softer version of it. Not someday, under the right circumstances. She just doesn’t want it.

She likes being an employee at a big company. She’s good at her work, she’s proud of it, and she likes the stability and predictability. She just doesn’t want the stress and the size of the life her partner is living.

What stayed with me was how clean her answer was.

She looked at the whole thing and said, “No thanks. That’s not what I want.”

And she meant it.

Most of us never get that clarity. Most of us are chasing the bigger version of our lives without ever seeing it up close. We just assume that once we get there, it’ll finally give us the feeling we’ve been after.

She got to look right at the life she might have spent years climbing toward, and she found out she didn’t want it.

That clarity is very appealing to me.

But I can’t say what she said.

I’ve tried it on and it doesn’t fit.

Because I do want it.

The Forty Percent

There’s a number I keep running in my head, and I’m a little embarrassed by how specific it is but it’s important to say out loud.

I think I’m giving about sixty percent. Maybe sixty-five on a good month.

Which means there’s about forty percent of me I’ve never put into my work.

Not because I don’t have it. I can feel where it lives. I just keep choosing not to spend it.

In practice, it’s quiet. Easy to miss.

It’s saying no to the bigger stage because I’ll do it next time. Waiting to ask for the opportunity until I feel more qualified. Launching later than I could. Playing smaller with my creativity. Making enough safe decisions that eventually they stop feeling safe and just start feeling reasonable. I’m being responsible, you know.

For a while I told myself it was about balance.

Then I adopted the idea that life isn’t balanced at all. It moves in seasons. Some seasons ask more from your work. Others ask more from your family.

I still believe that but lately it hasn’t felt true.

Because if I’m being honest, this isn’t a season.

It’s a ceiling I keep putting on myself.

What It Might Cost

I am scared of what the other forty percent would cost. Not in money or hours, but in the things that don’t show up on a calendar.

My marriage.

The version of me who is home enough to notice my kids and not just manage them.

What scares me isn’t being gone.

It’s being here and not really here. In the room but three emails away, until that’s just the mother they got used to.

The other day, my 11-year-old said to me, almost in passing, “You’re like the modern version of a mother from the ’50s because you’re home a lot, but you also have a business.”

I can’t tell you how happy that made me.

It also made me realize that this is something I’ve been building carefully toward.

Maybe too carefully.

At the same time there’s also a clock in it. I think that’s why it’s hitting me now.

I don’t want to be working this hard in my fifties. I think this stretch is the one where the bigger version of this gets built or it quietly doesn’t.

So the forty percent isn’t a someday question. It’s a now question.

And right now, my boys are still young enough to want me in the room.

I started my career already holding two babies. By the time it took off, we had three.

I’ve never known what it feels like to build something with nothing else pulling at me. I’ve never been ambitious and free in the same breath.

I catch myself looking at women who are my professional peers but are in their twenties or thirties, with no marriage or children, and it isn’t jealousy.

It’s closer to curiosity, like I’m looking at an experiment I never got to run.

The Story I Bought

Somewhere in here I started wondering where I even got the idea that the price has to be this high.

Because I didn’t invent it. Think about almost every story we get handed about people who become great at one thing. The genius ends up alone. Wrecked somehow, always paying for the “success”. We made the tortured one the hero.

We almost never tell stories about the woman who became very, very good at her work, stayed married, and raised people she likes-and who like her back.

Apparently she isn’t interesting enough to put on screen. Which makes me think the price tag might be partly a story I bought.

At some point I started believing I could go all the way in my work or keep my life together, but not both at full volume.

I don’t remember ever agreeing to that.

I keep saying I can’t go all in because of the cost.

Maybe the forty percent is me protecting the things I would never trade. That’s the kind version, and some days it’s clearly true.

Or maybe “can’t” is just a nicer word than “won’t,” and I’m using the people I love as the reason so I don’t have to look directly at the fear.

I go back and forth between those two all day. I haven’t landed on either.

I said earlier that nobody makes the movie about the woman who carries both.

Maybe the reason I can’t find her is because she’s the one I’m supposed to become.

My friend’s no was clean because she doesn’t want it. That’s the whole difference between us. It took me until this weekend to see it.

I do want it.

I look at the bigger version, and I want it and I’m afraid of it at the same time.

I’ve realized we’re not answering the same question. Hers is whether to want it at all. Mine is what to do with the fact that I already do.

It stops being “all in or stay here.”

The question becomes whether I know myself well enough to feel the moment ambition starts asking for more than I want to give. To know when to push and when to pull back in real time, instead of deciding the whole thing right now out of fear of getting it wrong.

I don’t know if I do.

That’s the honest answer.

On my best days I think I might be.

And some days I think the fear is protecting me.

Other days I think it’s just fear.

So I’ll leave it unfinished, because that’s where it really is.

The question I keep coming back to is whether what’s protecting my life and what’s holding me back from it are actually the same thing-

and whether I trust myself enough to tell them apart when it counts.

x,

Valeria

When I moved to Canada I thought I had landed in the nicest place on earth. And I mean that literally. The warmth was immediate. Constant. Everyone was so... on. Enthusiastic. Happy to see you. High energy in that way where you leave a conversation feeling like you just made a new friend and then you’re standing outside going... wait, did I? Did we just become friends or is that just how she talks to everyone?

That was the thing. I couldn’t calibrate.

Because how I grew up, in a Russian culture , warmth meant something specific. It wasn’t the default setting, it was information. People didn’t smile at strangers on the street just to be polite. A flat face wasn’t rude, it was just a face. And when someone was genuinely warm with you, you knew it. You felt the difference. The temperature actually told you something.

So I land in Canada and suddenly everyone is at a 9 out of 10 all the time, regardless of how they actually feel about you. And I spent probably two years genuinely confused by this, I couldn’t locate myself in relation to people. I couldn’t read what was real. Was this person excited to know me or is this just her face?

It took a while but eventually I figured it out. The niceness wasn’t fake. It was just... the default. Like it didn’t mean anything specific, it was just how everyone operated. Once I understood that I relaxed. I stopped trying to decode it. I learned to just exist inside it .

Fast forward a few years. I’m on a brand trip (one of those group things where you spend a few days with women you’d never naturally end up with otherwise). Nice enough trip, nice enough people, just not really my people. And at the end, during the whole goodbye rounds, this one girl comes over to say bye.

And I did the thing. The full Canadian/North American..call it whatever you want. I smiled, I hugged her, and I said something like... when I’m next in New York we should totally hang out, i’ll dm you.

She looked at me and said: You won’t.

Not mean. Just... accurate.

I awkwardly laughed in the moment. What else do you do? But I could not stop thinking about it. Because she was right. I had zero intention of calling her. We hadn’t connected on the trip in any real way and I knew that. And I said it anyway. Completely on autopilot. The words just came out.

That was the moment I went... wait. When did I become one of those people?

Here’s the thing that actually bothered me. It wasn’t shame about the interaction. It was more like... how long had I been doing this without noticing? Because that’s the sneaky thing about absorbing a culture. It doesn’t happen in one big moment. It seeps in. Slowly. And because it’s warmth, because it feels like friendliness and social ease, you’re not guarding against it. You just start speaking the language.

I started doing this little inventory in my head. How many times had I said let’s catch up soon to someone I had no real intention of calling? How many we should do dinners that were never going to be dinners? Isn’t that’s what you say? It’s the social glue. The thing that makes the goodbye feel gentle instead of final.

And then somewhere in that inventory I noticed something that bothered me even more. It wasn’t just that I’d been giving other people the wrong information, it’s that I’d been giving myself the wrong information too. When you not attuned to your actual response often enough you start to lose track of what your actual response even is. Like, do I genuinely want to see this person or am I just being nice? I couldn’t always tell anymore.

But that girl (she didn’t let me have the gentle exit). She handed it back to me. That was more useful than anything warm I could have walked away with.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between niceness and kindness ever since. And I don’t think they’re the same thing at all, even though we treat them like they are.

Niceness is what you do on autopilot to keep the temperature comfortable. It’s not really about the other person. It’s about you not being the one who made it weird.

Kindness is different. Kindness requires you to actually stop and see the person in front of you and make a choice about what she actually needs. And sometimes that’s the less comfortable thing. A clean goodbye. A real one. “It was so great to meet you, safe travels”. No open loop, just an honest ending to something that was what it was.

And I think women especially have a hard time with this, like, a genuinely hard time, because somewhere along the way we learned that being liked and being good were basically the same thing. That softening every exit is just... what you do. Because being too direct feels aggressive, right? So we just leave everything slightly open.

What I handed that girl was a map to a place I was never going to take her. And I think we do this more than we realize, leaving little false doors open everywhere because closing them feels rude. But there’s something almost more disorienting about a door that looks open and isn’t. You don’t get rejected. You just stay confused.

I keep thinking about the women in my life who feel the most like themselves. And they’re almost never the nicest ones in the room. They’re the clearest. You know where you stand with them. They’re not cold, they’re not harsh, they’re just not performing warmth they don’t feel. And there’s something weirdly relaxing about being around that. You don’t have to decode anything. You don’t leave wondering what was real.

I think about this sometimes when I notice how much cultural fascination there is right now around Eastern European women. The unsmiling photos. The flat affect. The directness that reads as almost jarring to people who grew up in cultures where performed warmth is the name of the game. I grew up inside that and I spent years softening the edges, learning to perform the warmth too. And now I watch people from the outside find it... refreshing? Aspirational even? I don’t think it’s about coldness. I think it’s about being easy to read. You know where you stand. There’s nothing to decode.

I want to be that for other people and for myself.

That interaction was so small. That girl has no particular weight in my life (I’ll probably never see her again). But it stuck because it cracked something open. Not just about that goodbye but about how much of this was me, and how much was just... something I picked up along the way.

I don’t know. Worth asking, I think.

Curious- have you ever caught yourself doing this? Or been on the receiving end of it?

My mother navigated marriage the only way she knew how. She moved money quietly. Spent without mentioning it. Found ways to have things without having to explain them. Not because she was dishonest. Because she didn’t feel like she had another option. That was the pattern I grew up inside.

And I swore I would never be that woman.

So I left home at sixteen. Built a career. Made my own money. By the time I got married at twenty-one, I had already proven to myself that I could take care of myself. I didn’t need to depend on anyone if I didn’t want to. I thought that was the whole answer.

It wasn’t.

We need to talk about something that nobody is talking about. At least not honestly.

Every conversation about financial independence for women happens inside the same story: she was controlled, she was trapped, she didn’t see it coming, she had to start over. The advice is always framed around the wrong relationship, the bad marriage, the exit plan.

What about the rest of us?

What about the women who are in good marriages? Loving ones. Ones where nobody is hiding anything, nobody is controlling anyone, nobody is leaving? Why are we only allowed to talk about financial clarity as a survival tool and never as a basic requirement of real partnership?

Because here’s what I’ve realized: you can be in a genuinely good marriage and still not fully know your own financial life. And we’ve made that so normal that most women don’t even notice it’s happening.

I didn’t.

Last month I read Belle Burden’s memoir, Strangers. If you haven’t read it, it’s about a woman who had everything. Wealth, a seemingly solid marriage, a life that looked completely intact from the outside. And then it wasn’t. And what shook me wasn’t the betrayal or the affair or the divorce (that’s a cliche at this point). It was the moment she had to ask herself basic questions about her own financial standing and didn’t know the answers.

I put the book down and tried to answer those same questions about my own life.

And I couldn’t. Not all of them.

That hit me like a wall. Because I make money. I have my name on our accounts. Gary and I have one bank account, both our names on everything. When I read that Belle didn’t even have her name on their properties I genuinely had to reread the page which also alarmed me and made me text all my girlfriends to make sure it’s not common. That felt almost unimaginable to me.

And yet.

There I was, unable to answer questions about a financial life that is equally mine. Not because anyone kept it from me. Because I never asked. I just checked out of that part of our life and told myself that making money meant I was covered. It doesn’t. Those are two completely different things.

Here’s what I need you to understand about my marriage before I go further. Gary is not the problem. Gary is the opposite of the problem. He is a man who at different points in our marriage has sat me down, unprompted, and walked me through exactly what to do if something happened to him. What documents to reach for. Who to call. What accounts exist. He’s been trying to bring me into this picture for years.

That was love. That was him doing the work I wasn’t doing for myself.

But I want you to sit with that for a second. Even in a marriage like mine, where the man is actively, lovingly trying to keep his wife informed, I still wasn’t fully present. I was nodding and moving on. I was trusting instead of knowing. And I was calling that partnership.

It wasn’t. Not fully.

After I put that book down, I did what any woman would do after a quiet panic sets in. I went straight to Gary and led with all of it. The urgency, the emotion, the charged energy of someone who had just realized something uncomfortable about herself. I came in hot. Of course I did.

And of course he got defensive. Because I didn’t come in saying I’ve been absent and I want to fix that. I came in like something was wrong. Like I was signaling doubt. Which wasn’t true, but that’s what he felt. And honestly, that’s on me.

What I should have said from the start was something closer to the truth: I haven’t been asking questions I should have been asking. I want to change that. I want to go through everything, the prenup, our estate, the assets we have, not because anything is broken, but because I’m thirty-five and I’m done opting out of my own life.

Because the prenup we signed at twenty-one was fair. It was thoughtful. I had my own lawyer. I knew what I was agreeing to. It protected me. None of that is the issue.

But I was twenty-one. I had no idea what the next fourteen years would look like. I didn’t know we’d build businesses together, that my personal brand, constructed side by side with him for over a decade, would become what it is. A document you sign at the beginning doesn’t automatically update as you change. Asking to revisit it isn’t distrust. It isn’t a warning sign. It’s two people acknowledging they’ve grown and that the agreement between them should reflect that. Fairly, for both of us, for who we actually are now.

We’ve made “revisiting a prenup” sound like something you only do when you’re already halfway out the door. That’s wrong. It might actually be one of the most honest things a couple can do together.

My mother’s pattern was secrecy. Mine was absence. Different shapes, same result: not fully knowing her own life.

The fear that pushed me into this wasn’t “what if he leaves.” It wasn’t catastrophizing. It was quieter than that, and more embarrassing, honestly. At thirty-five, with every resource available to me, I was choosing not to know. Not consciously. But choosing nonetheless. And I kept dressing that up as trust.

Trust and knowledge are not the same thing. You can have complete faith in your partner and still owe it to yourself to know where you stand. One doesn’t cancel the other out. Real trust, the kind that actually holds up, requires both people to be fully present. Not one person managing while the other opts out because it feels safer to let someone else hold it.

You cannot call something a partnership and then excuse yourself from half of it.

I’m still in this process. These conversations are still happening. I don’t have a clean resolution for you because there isn’t one yet.

But here’s where I’ve landed. We’ve been talking about financial clarity like it’s something you reach for when the house is on fire. When he leaves. When it falls apart. When you finally need to protect yourself. And because we’ve framed it that way, women in good marriages, happy ones, traditional ones, loving ones, have quietly decided it doesn’t apply to them.

It applies to all of us.

You don’t have to blow up your marriage to know your life. You don’t have to suspect your partner to ask questions. You can have divided roles, a traditional setup, a man who handles the finances and does it well, and still own the full picture. Those things are not in conflict. In fact, the most traditional thing you could do is be a fully informed partner. That’s not paranoia. That’s presence.

Both of you knowing. Both of you informed. Both of you here. Not someday, when something breaks, but now, while everything is still good.

So thank you, Belle. For writing about the hardest season of your life so that women like me, in perfectly good marriages, would finally wake up and ask the questions we'd been avoiding.

There’s a kind of tired that doesn’t look like anything.

You’re answering emails. You’re scheduling things. Nobody knows. But there’s a calculation running the whole time - not in money. In nervous system.

I realized this on a flight from London yesterday.

My seat wasn’t working properly. The flight attendant came over, apologetic, told me they wanted to compensate me. He explained that if I became a member of their loyalty program, I’d receive a credit. Around $400.

I stopped him.

“It’s fine. I don’t need it.”

He did this thing where he stopped talking mid-sentence and just looked at me. “What do you mean it’s fine? It’s 400 pounds. Why wouldn’t you take 400 pounds?”

“Unless you have a way for me to do absolutely zero,” I told him, “I’d prefer to skip it. If I need to chase it down, fill out forms, create an account -I’m not doing it. My nervous system isn’t up for it.”

He was baffled. I was calm. Honestly it was the clearest I’d been all week.

Nobody’s writing thinkpieces about the woman who said no to the airline form. But maybe they should.

Because that’s what quiet rebellion actually looks like right now. Not moving to Bali and going offline. Not a dramatic gesture. Just a woman on a plane, turning down money she’s entitled to, because she’s done.

And here’s the thing -that credit wasn’t really a gift. It was a job. Sign up. Create a login. Remember the password. Check the account. Chase the expiry date. The whole architecture of modern perks, loyalty programs, credits, rewards - it’s designed to feel like they’re giving you something. What they’re actually doing is offloading the admin onto you and calling it a benefit. We’ve just been too conditioned to see free money to notice the invoice attached to it.

Most of us are one Google Calendar/ task notification away from the woods and we all know it.

Not because we’re weak. Because we’ve become the administrators of our entire lives (and if you’re a mother, add 2/3 more people to this equation).

Every task has a task behind it. Every “quick thing” has three steps you didn’t account for. And then one day your body is already saying no before you’ve thought it through - is this worth it? What does this actually cost me?

Everyone has a fix for this feeling.

You need better systems. You need a boundary-setting framework. You need the right supplements. You need to learn how to get AI to do all of that for you - don’t even get me started.

Sure. And also - what if the tiredness is right?

The fatigue is information. The body flagging that you are carrying more than was ever designed for one person. When I turned down that $400, I wasn’t being careless with money. I was doing a different kind of math. The kind that accounts for what something actually costs - not just in dollars but in attention, in follow-up, in the low-grade hum of one more open loop in your brain. We’ve been taught that money is always the most valuable thing on the table. Nobody taught us to put nervous system health on the same line.

I spent a long time trying to be the woman who captures every opportunity within the context of work, motherhood, friendships. Who fills out the form. Who is disciplined enough to do the thing that looks smart from the outside even when she’s already at the limit.

I don’t want to be her anymore.

The woman I’m more interested in knows the difference between what’s actually worth her energy and what just looksworth it. She’s stopped performing optimization. She does the math that accounts for the full cost - including the invisible one.

The admin is not neutral. It’s relentless, and it’s been rebranded so many times - as productivity, as optimization, as self-improvement -that we’ve stopped noticing it’s still just unpaid labor with better marketing . So when your body says no more -when you’re one notification away from the woods - that’s not weakness. That’s the most honest accounting you’ve done all day.

The rebellion isn’t loud. It’s a woman on a plane handing back a form and saying: I know what this costs me. And it’s not worth it.

I left $400 on a plane and I slept better that night than I had in weeks.

To make this win even sweeter, he issued the credit anyway. No form. No account. He just did it. I want to believe he respected the boundary work i’ve demonstrated but most likely he just didn’t want me to talk shit about the airline, either way- WIN.

Maybe the math we’ve been taught to do isn’t the right math.

-V

I was sitting in the nail salon (my most dreaded appointment of the month) waiting, because you’re always waiting, and I had this moment where I just stopped and looked around and thought: why am I here? Like genuinely. Why am I here right now?

Not in a dramatic, existential way. Just... I don’t love this. I never loved this. I came because I always come. Because at some point this became a thing I do, and I never actually decided to keep doing it- I just never stopped.

And then I looked at the price menu. And I thought- I am paying for this. Consistently. Every few weeks. For something I don’t even look forward to.

So I stopped. And then I made a little video about it, kind of offhand, not expecting much. And it exploded. Which told me a lot.

(Some people in the comments called it a recession indicator. Which, fair. But also I don’t think that’s actually why it hit.)

Because I don’t think it was about nails.

I think it was about that feeling. That moment of sitting somewhere, doing something and spending real money and time on it -and suddenly going: wait, am I choosing this? Or did I just... end up here?

We do this constantly. With routines, with subscriptions, with how we spend our Saturdays. Things that started as something we wanted slowly become things we just maintain. And the bill keeps coming- monetary and energetically- and we keep paying it and we never stop to ask if we’d sign up for this today if it weren’t already a habit.

It’s not that the thing is bad. It’s that you forgot to keep choosing it. And there’s a difference.

I’ve been doing this thing lately where I look at different parts of my life and ask one question: am I choosing this, or am I on autopilot? It sounds simple. It’s actually kind of destabilizing, in the best way. Because once you start asking, you can’t stop.

Here’s what I noticed when I stopped going: I got time back. Time I didn’t use for anything impressive - I just... had it. And I realized I am not great at just having time. I’m very good at spending it, filling it, justifying it. Actually sitting with unscheduled space and not immediately finding a way to earn it or explain it? That’s a different skill.

Which made me wonder how much of what we do is less about the thing itself and more about the comfort of the routine. Maintenance keeps us busy. The recurring appointment keeps the calendar full. And a full calendar can feel like a full life even when you’re not really present for any of it.

And look - maybe you love your nails. Maybe that two hours in the salon is genuinely yours. Maybe it’s the one place nobody asks you for anything, you sit there and breathe, and that is sacred to you. And maybe the $120 or whatever it costs feels completely worth it for that. Then keep going. Please keep going.

But if you’re sitting there counting down and mentally running through your to-do list - that’s worth noticing.

I’m not making a case for doing less or opting out of beauty or any of that. I genuinely don’t care what you do with your nails.

What I care about is the question underneath the nails that obviously resurfaced to a lot of women that watched my video. The one I want to keep asking myself about every corner of my life right now: is this a choice, or is this just something you stopped deciding and just kept doing?

Because when you start asking that, really asking , you find out what actually matters to you. Some things you thought were obligations are actually things you love. And some things you thought you loved are things you’ve been funding on autopilot for years that’s robbing you of your time and capacity.

The point isn’t to quit everything. The point is to choose it. On purpose. Eyes open.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing I’ve been thinking about.

by the way, I landed on a nail cleaning every 2 months with an at home natural polish I re-apply at my own convenience. IM FREE.

- V

Emma Grede is being dragged online right now. Not by men - by women. For saying out loud what she believes it takes to succeed in business. Whether you agree with her or not isn’t really the point. What’s interesting is the reaction. The disappointment. The sense of betrayal. The pile-on. Because if you zoom out for a second, you start to notice something: the harshest critics of a woman who speaks her truth are almost always other women.

I’ve been thinking about this since a friend told me her teenage daughter has been pushing back hard against her lately - cold, judgmental, combative, full of an anger she can’t quite explain. My friend thought something was wrong. But I think something is actually right. I think her daughter is doing exactly what women have always done with each other, whether they know it or not.

She’s practicing.

What if it’s not a flaw? What if it’s a stage?

We’ve been told the story of women as each other’s enemies for so long that we’ve stopped questioning it. The jealousy, the competition, the judgment - we treat it like a character flaw. Something to be ashamed of, fixed, or explained away.

But the more I think abut it the more I believe we’ve had it wrong the whole time.

I have my own proof.

I was 9 years old at my father’s birthday party when another girl walked into the room and changed everything. She was my age, but she sang, performed, danced like she’d been born knowing exactly how much space she was allowed to take up. I was the gray mouse in the corner -invisible by choice, shrinking by habit.

I ran to the bathroom and cried. I was mean to my mom for the rest of the night.

I didn’t have the words for it then. But I know now: her confidence threatened my existence. And I had no idea what to do with that except throwing a tantrum.

That feeling followed me. Through modeling, where I watched girls carry themselves with an ease I couldn’t understand and couldn’t touch. Into my twenties, into social media, where strangers began commenting on my choices, my opinions, my life - and where I started to notice a pattern. The bitterness in the comments tracked something. The women who pushed back the hardest were almost never the ones who had found themselves yet.

I recognized them, because I had been them.

The playground gets bigger. The dynamic stays the same.

I moved between countries - Russia, Israel, Canada - always arriving somewhere new, always the outsider, always reading the room from scratch. New hierarchies, new rules, a new version of the confident girl I was supposed to measure myself against. I never belonged long enough to compete the way girls do when they grow up in one place. But I saw the pattern everywhere, in every language: women learning power on each other first.

This doesn’t disappear when we grow up. It just changes shape. The girl crying in the bathroom becomes the woman leaving a pointed comment under a stranger’s post. The daughter pushing against her mother becomes the audience dragging a businesswoman for being too honest, too ambitious, too much.

But here’s what I’ve also lived: the shift.

The moment when you know yourself well enough that another woman’s confidence stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like a gift. I know exactly what season I’m in now because of the women around me. They are my compass. I don’t look at them and feel smaller. I look at them and get curious. How do they move through the world like that? What do they know that I’m still learning? Where do I need to practice more, and where do I have something to give?

Their confidence has become a map.

So when I watch women come for Emma Grede (or any woman for that matter), I don’t see enemies.

I see women at different stages of the same journey. Some are still practicing power the only way they know how. Some are threatened by a woman who stopped apologizing for wanting things and feeling comfortable saying them out loud. Some are genuinely hurt by words that didn’t account for their reality. All of it is real. None of it makes anyone a villain.

Women are the first place other women practice power. That's not an accusation. It's the origin story. And if we're each other's first teachers- in comparison, in competition, in cruelty, in confidence- then we're also each other's greatest resource. The practicing never stops. It just gets to mean something different with every season.

The longer I’m a parent, the less interested I am in the fantasy of doing it perfectly.

There was a phase when I consumed so much parenting content that I genuinely believed every decision carried permanent psychological consequences. Miss a school function? Trauma. Lose your patience? Trauma. Forget the handmade snack for spirit week? Future therapy.

Somewhere in that spiral, I came across a TikTok from a woman describing what sounded like the perfect mother.

Her mom cooked every meal from scratch.
She showed up to every school event.
She created beautiful traditions, magical birthdays, the kind of childhood that looks incredible in retrospect.

And yet, the daughter said she was now in therapy because that perfection left her with a fear of never measuring up. wow.

That stayed with me.

Because it confirmed something I’ve been slowly realizing:
there is no version of parenting that doesn’t leave a mark.

We are all shaping our children in ways that will someday become the material for their self-discovery.

Some of it will be beautiful.
Some of it will become friction.
Some of it will become the exact thing they spend their twenties trying to understand.

And maybe… that’s not failure.

For a long time, I had a hard time with this idea that everything goes back to our wounds. Maybe it’s my Soviet upbringing, maybe it’s growing up around people whose focus was survival not self- analysis, but I never fully connected to the idea that every hardship should become an identity.

Lately, though, I’ve started seeing my own childhood differently.

Not as damage. As direction.

Yes, some limiting beliefs cost me time. There were rooms I didn’t walk into, versions of myself I didn’t allow, opportunities I couldn’t yet see because of the stories I inherited.

But those same stories also pushed me into the most important journey of my life: finding out what could be changed.

What could be rewired.
What was learned, not fixed.
What pain could become power.

Some of the very things I once labeled as “trauma” became the reason I developed resilience, hunger, adaptability, and a deep curiosity about my own mind and how it works.

That’s the part I think we miss now.

We spend so much time obsessing over how we might mess our kids up that we forget the mess is often where identity begins.

I’m not the mother who’s at every function.
I don’t love cooking.
Until recently, I donated most birthday gifts to shelters until my kids started loudly protesting- which, honestly, fair.

We don’t do giant celebrations.
We don’t have a long list of sacred family traditions.
Our home is loving, but it is not curated.

And maybe what that gives them is something equally valuable:

The ability to notice what they want to build one day.

What they want more of.
What they want less of.
What felt missing.
What felt meaningful.

It gives them contrast.

It teaches them to become articulate about their needs instead of inheriting mine by default.

Maybe the point isn’t to give them a flawless blueprint.

Maybe the point is to give them enough love and enough room that they eventually learn how to build their own.

I was sitting with friends recently, and one of them told a story about a girl who came from what everyone described as a happy, stable household and still ended up struggling deeply- with drugs, with self-destruction, with all the things people assume “good parenting” protects against.

The question she asked her psychologist was:
How does this happen if I came from such a happy home?

But the real question that came up for me was:

What even is a happy home?
What is a stable one?

A house without conflict?
A childhood without pain?
Parents who did everything “right”?

I don’t know if that exists.

I think being human means friction. It means unmet needs, misunderstandings, projections, blind spots, and eventually the slow work of deciding what stays and what gets rewritten.

Maybe our children don’t need us to save them from every shadow.

Maybe they need enough safety to meet their shadows without disappearing into them.

We’ve become so paralyzed by the fear of trauma, shadow work, and psychological mistakes that we risk missing the point of being human in the first place:

to figure it out for yourself.

And maybe the best we can hope for as parents is not that we won’t mess them up.

It’s that we’ll love them enough that whatever we pass down becomes material for growth, not a life sentence.

So yes.

I hope we mess up my kids.

I just hope we do it in ways that teach them who they are.

A few weeks ago a reel stopped me mid-scroll.

A woman looked straight into the camera and said: “In your thirties you’re going to get the urge to burn your whole life to the ground and start over. And it’s very important that you listen to this urge.”

The comments were flooded. Thousands of women saying yes, this, exactly this. And I understood why. Because the urge is real. I’ve felt it. Most women I know have felt it.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about what was missing from that advice.

Because listening to the urge is step one. Knowing what it’s actually telling you - that’s the whole game.

That urge isn’t a verdict. It’s not your life telling you to light a match and walk away. It’s a signal. A quiet, persistent, impossible-to-ignore signal that something has shifted - in you, around you, or both - and it’s time to look honestly at what’s there.

I call it the invisible audit. And I’ve been through enough of them to know: the women who navigate it well aren’t the ones who act on every impulse to burn it down. They’re the ones who get still enough to actually read what the audit is showing them.

Nobody warns you when life starts auditing you. There’s no notification. No calendar invite. It just starts happening - quietly, in the background, while you’re making lunches and taking meetings and showing up for everyone else.

And then one day something feels off. Not wrong. Just off. That’s not a crisis. That’s the audit beginning.

The audit doesn’t announce itself. It arrives as restlessness, as friction, as a quiet sense that something no longer fits - even if you can’t name what it is yet.

The audit at work

I’ve built a lot. And somewhere along the way, I had to look honestly at how I was showing up - not just what I was producing, but who I was being in the process. The way I led. The way I communicated. The standards I held and the ones I let slide because I was too busy to address them.

The audit at work isn’t about whether you’re successful. It’s about whether the way you’re working still fits the person you’re becoming. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes you realize you’ve been operating on a system that made sense three years ago and urgently needs an upgrade.

That’s not failure. That’s just growth catching up to you.

The audit in friendship

This one is the quietest and the most complicated. Because nobody leaves a friendship with a formal goodbye. It just gets slower. The texts take longer to answer. The dinners stop being planned. And then one day you realize a person who used to be essential to your life has become peripheral. And you’re not sure if that’s okay or devastating.

I’ve had friendships I thought were forever that quietly dissolved. Not because of a fight or a betrayal - just because we were growing in different directions and neither of us wanted to say it out loud. The audit looked at those friendships and asked: are you holding onto this because it still serves you both, or because you’re afraid of the space it will leave?

That’s a hard question to sit with. But it’s the right one.

The audit in marriage

I’m going to say something that might make some of you uncomfortable: I am not the same woman Gary married. And he is not the same man I said yes to.

I was twenty-one. I had no idea who I was going to become. And neither did he. We’ve been growing in parallel for over a decade, which is beautiful and also requires constant, honest recalibration. Because the woman I am now has different needs, different edges, different non-negotiables than the girl who walked down that aisle.

The audit in marriage isn’t about whether you love each other. It’s about whether you’re still choosing each other consciously - not out of habit, not out of fear, not because it’s easier to stay still than to evolve together.

This is the audit most people are too scared to run. And I understand why. But I’ve found that the relationships that survive growth are the ones where both people are willing to look at the numbers honestly -even when it’s uncomfortable.

The audit isn’t a crisis. It’s a signal. But only if you’re willing to look at what it’s actually showing you.

Signal, not verdict

That woman in the reel wasn’t wrong. The urge to start over is real. And it deserves to be taken seriously.

But there’s a difference between listening to a signal and acting on a verdict. A signal asks you to pay attention. A verdict tells you it’s already over. Make sure to know the difference.

The invisible audit doesn’t want you to burn it down (yet). It wants your honesty. About what’s working. About what you’ve outgrown. About what you’ve been tolerating that you shouldn’t be. About what you’ve been neglecting that deserves more of you.

I don’t think the audit ever fully ends. I think we just get better at recognizing it when it starts and braver about what we do with what it shows us.

So I want to ask you:

Where is life auditing you right now?

Yesterday was International Women’s Day and if I’m being honest, I almost forgot.

Not because I don’t care about women.
Not because I’m unaware of the history behind the day.
And certainly not because I take the freedoms women have today for granted (I don’t know about you but I think about all the women that paved the way for us to be here doing the most on our own terms.)

But something about it felt… quiet.

I noticed that most of the women in my life weren’t really talking about it either. No big reflections. No long captions. No group chats lighting up with celebration.

It almost passed like any other Saturday.

And that made me pause and wonder something I hadn’t really considered before:

Have we reached a moment where we don’t actually need International Women’s Day anymore?

Now before anyone panics- I’m not dismissing the reason the day exists.

International Women’s Day began as a movement. It was created to demand rights, visibility, and dignity for women at a time when those things were not guaranteed. It was a rallying point. A reminder that women deserved space, voice, and opportunity in a world that often denied them.

For many women around the world, that fight is still very real.

But here’s the thought that kept coming back to me yesterday.

Maybe the ultimate goal of International Women’s Day was always to reach a moment where we wouldn’t need it anymore.

Not because women stopped supporting each other.
But because women stopped needing permission to take up space.

Because when I look around today at the women in my life, in my community, in business, in media, in families -I see something different than what this holiday was originally built for.

I see women who are not waiting for March 8th to celebrate themselves.

Women who are building companies.
Raising families in new ways.
Creating their own platforms.
Redefining what success looks like.
Making money. Making art. Making decisions.

Women who have moved beyond asking for a seat at the table and are now building entirely new tables.

And when that becomes the everyday reality, a single celebratory day can start to feel… strangely small.

There’s also another layer that’s hard to ignore.

Somewhere along the way, International Women’s Day started to feel a little performative.

The purple graphics.
The brand campaigns.
The panels that say the same things every year.
The captions about “empowered women empowering women” that quietly disappear the next morning.

What started as activism sometimes now feels like marketing.

And maybe that’s why the energy around it feels different.

Because the women I know aren’t waiting for a hashtag to remind them who they are.

They’re living it.

They’re negotiating salaries on a Tuesday.
Launching companies on a Thursday.
Raising sons and daughters who see women as leaders, not exceptions.

The pride of being a woman doesn’t suddenly activate on March 8th.

It’s just… part of life now.

But there’s another side to this conversation that matters too.

The truth is that the world is not one place.

For many women globally, the rights we sometimes take for granted are still being fought for. Safety, education, freedom of choice - these things are not universal yet.

So maybe International Women’s Day still serves an important role.

But maybe the conversation around it needs to evolve.

Maybe instead of framing women primarily through struggle and exhaustion, we can start telling more stories about women through capability, creativity, leadership, and joy.

Maybe the narrative doesn’t always have to center around how hard everything is.

Maybe it can also celebrate how much has changed.

Because when I look at the women around me today, I don’t see fragility.

I see momentum.

And maybe the real sign of progress isn’t how loudly we celebrate women one day a year.

Maybe it’s the fact that for so many of us, being a woman no longer needs a designated day to feel powerful.

It’s just how we move through the world.

So now I’m curious.

Do we still need International Women’s Day?

Or is the fact that many of us barely noticed it this year… actually a sign that something worked?

I don’t trust certainty the way I used to. That’s the sentence that’s been sitting with me lately.

There was a time in my life when certainty felt empowering.
Decisiveness felt like maturity. Clear answers felt like stability.

You were supposed to know what you wanted.
Who you were. Where you were going. And if you didn’t, you figured it out quickly.

But the older I get, the more I’ve noticed something subtle: The things I’ve been most certain about in my life are often the things that later evolved.

Careers shifted.
Priorities changed.
Versions of myself that once felt permanent quietly dissolved.

So when Gary recently asked me a question that required a definitive answer, I felt resistance rise in me.

Not because I didn’t care. Not because I was confused.

But because I no longer believe clarity is always honest.

When you’re young, you think you know everything.

Or at least you think you’re supposed to.

You speak in absolutes.
You make bold declarations about who you are.
You choose careers, partners, identities like they’re permanent fixtures instead of evolving chapters.

At 20, certainty feels powerful.

You think growing up means arriving somewhere.
Figuring it out. Locking it in. Becoming someone stable and defined.

And then you get older and instead of feeling more certain,
you start realizing how much you don’t actually know.

Not in a destabilizing way- In a humbling way.
In a way that makes life feel bigger instead of smaller.

I’ve built a career I once dreamed about.
I’ve built a family.
I’ve built businesses.
I’ve sat on stages and spoken with confidence about things I’ve learned.

And still at 35, there are so many things I haven’t figured out.

And for the first time, that doesn’t feel like a problem. It feels like maturity.

Because i’ve realized that growing up isn’t about having answers, It’s about becoming someone who can live well inside the questions.

I Haven’t Figured Out What I Want to Be “When I Grow Up”

I’ve been a model.
A content creator.
A founder.
A podcast host.
A mentor.
A mother.

And still, I feel like I’m becoming.

There’s a version of me that used to believe I would eventually arrive somewhere, that one day I’d land on a clear identity.
A version of myself that doesn’t shift anymore.

But every time I get close to that feeling, something changes.

What once felt like “this is it” becomes just a chapter.
What once defined me becomes something I’ve moved through and I stopped thinking that it means I’m lost.

I think it means I’m alive.

At 20, I thought the goal was to choose something and commit to it now I understand that the real skill is staying open long enough to become who you didn’t know you could be.

I Haven’t Figured Out How to Fully Rest

Even when I wake up at 5 a.m. to sit in silence.
Even when I intentionally create space before the day begins.

There’s still a quiet hum of you could be doing more.

For most of my life, momentum felt like safety.
Progress felt like control so slowing down doesn’t come naturally.
It feels unfamiliar.

And I’m still learning how to rest without needing to earn it first.

I Haven’t Figured Out The “Balance”

Between being ambitious and being present.
Between building and enjoying.
Between being a mother and being a woman outside of motherhood.

Some days I’m lit up by work and feel slightly pulled in another direction.

Other days I’m fully immersed at home and feel my mind drifting toward what’s waiting for me professionally.

Rarely does everything feel evenly nourished and I’ve stopped expecting it to.

Balance, for me, has become less about symmetry and more about awareness.

I Haven’t Figured Out How To Not Take Responsibility For Everyone’s Emotions

I can feel a shift in a room before a word is said.

Tone changes. Energy shifts. The unspoken becomes obvious.

For a long time, I thought that meant it was mine to fix.

Especially in my relationship.
Especially in business.
Especially at home.

Working with my husband has brought this into focus in a way I couldn’t ignore.

Where does support end and over-functioning begin?
Where does empathy turn into control?

Just because I can carry it doesn’t mean I should.

And I’m still practicing putting it down.

I Haven’t Figured Out If I’m Doing Enough OR Doing Too Much

There is always another level.

Another idea.
Another opportunity.
Another version of what this life could become.

And there is also a quieter pull toward simplicity.
Toward fewer moving parts. Toward depth over scale.

Holding both at once isn’t always clean because ambition pushes and peace pulls.

And I’m learning to listen to both without assuming one has to cancel the other out.

I Haven’t Figured Out What “Having It All” Means

Because the definition keeps changing.

At one point, it meant momentum.
Visibility. Growth.

Now it looks more like peace.
Strong friendships. Children who feel safe.
A relationship that evolves instead of quietly eroding.

The metrics have shifted and I expect they will again.

I Haven’t Figured Out How To Be Soft Without Feeling Like I’m Falling Behind

Strength came easily to me (the disassociation game is strong).

Structure. Discipline. Resilience. Being capable. Being dependable.

Softness asks something different.

It asks me to slow down, to feel more, to measure less.

It’s less visible, but more honest.

And I’m still learning to trust that choosing it doesn’t mean I’m losing ground.

I Haven’t Figured Out How To Fully Disconnect

My work lives in my phone.

My ideas live there. My community lives there. My business lives there.

So disconnecting isn’t as simple as stepping away.

It’s about creating boundaries that actually hold and if I’m honest, that’s still a work in progress.

I Haven’t Figured Out Why I Need Alone Time From The People I Love Most

But I’ve stopped apologizing for it.

For a long time, I felt guilty about needing space. How do you explain that you want to step away from the people you love not because something is wrong, but because something inside you needs quiet?

Without that space, I feel it in my patience, in my tone, in my capacity.

So I stopped over-explaining it. I stopped softening it.
I stopped treating it like something that needed permission.

I Haven’t Figured Out What The “Right” Next Step Is

And that question doesn’t carry the same weight it used to.

Clarity isn’t constant.

Some seasons are defined others are transitional.

I’ve experienced both and I’ve stopped rushing to turn every moment into a decision.

Growing Up Isn’t About Knowing

There’s a version of maturity I used to believe in.

One where you arrive and things just make sense.
Where your life becomes clear and stable.

That’s not what this feels like.

At 35, I don’t feel finished- I feel aware.

Aware of how much changes. Aware of how many versions of a life can exist within one lifetime. Aware that clarity comes and goes.

I guess what changed isn’t how much I know but It’s how I relate to not knowing.

There’s less urgency to define everything.
Less pressure to finalize who I am.
Less need to turn every transition into a conclusion.

I trust evolution more than I trust certainty.

I trust that things unfold, even when they’re unclear.

And for the first time, that feels steady.

Not because everything is figured out but because I’m no longer waiting for it to be.

I started therapy (finally) thinking I was going in to fine-tune things. Life looked good on the outside. I was functioning, producing, handling. But somewhere in those therapy conversations, a pattern started to surface not about what I was struggling with, but about what I had never allowed myself to struggle with. I realized how much of my identity had been built around being capable. Not just as an adult, but as a little girl. There wasn’t much room for my emotional needs back then, so I learned something else instead: figure it out, don’t be a burden, be strong, don’t ask for much. And it worked. It built a life. But therapy has a quiet way of showing you when the thing that once protected you… has slowly become the thing that’s exhausting you.

Capability as a Survival Skill

For many of us, capability didn’t begin as empowerment.
It began as a survival skill.

You read the room early.
You learned what was needed.
You understood that being emotional might complicate things (especially when it’s modeled that emotions= chaos) but being competent would always be rewarded.

So you became self-sufficient. Low maintenance. Reliable.

Those skills built independence. Stability. A sense of control. They made life smoother.

But survival skills don’t disappear when the environment changes. They just evolve into personality.

At some point, being capable stops being something you do and becomes who you are. And when that happens, it gets very hard to separate your worth from your usefulness.

The Modern Trap: We Can Do Everything… So We Do

Women today have more access, choice, and freedom than ever before. We’re educated, self-aware, financially involved, emotionally literate, growth-oriented.

But here’s the quiet shift:

We didn’t just gain possibility. We absorbed responsibility.

We became good at everything - and then everything slowly became ours.

Emotional regulation.
The mental load.
The invisible coordination.
The anticipating.

Not because someone handed it to us - but because we could handle it.

And humans naturally lean where things are strong.

So without meaning to, you stop being someone in the system… and start being the system holding it together.

But for me, this isn’t about being surrounded by incapable people. It’s not about carrying what others refuse to. I’m actually deeply supported. My husband is a solver, a carrier of responsibility, someone who has helped build real systems around me so I don’t have to hold everything alone.

The truth is harder to admit.

Even inside support, I still default to holding.
I don’t easily let myself be the one who doesn’t know.
The one who needs.
The one who is confused or emotional without a solution.

The pattern isn’t only external. It’s internal.

What Capability Costs the Body

This is the part I didn’t fully understand until therapy slowed me down.

When you’re the one who is always thinking ahead-
What needs to be done.
What could go wrong.
Who needs what.
What you might be forgetting.

Your nervous system rarely gets the signal that it’s safe to fully power down.

Research on emotional and cognitive labor shows that women disproportionately carry the invisible mental load - the planning, organizing, anticipating, and managing that keeps life running - and that this ongoing demand is linked to higher stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion . The body doesn’t look at this as “being capable.” It reads it as constant responsibility.

So what you experience as “being on top of things” can translate physiologically into chronic activation.

This is where:
exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix
irritability
feeling emotionally flat (hey me)
resentment you feel guilty for

start to show up.

Not because you’re failing but because you’ve trained your system to never really stand down.

The Quiet Emotional Disconnection

This is the part I’m still learning to face.

It’s not only that capable women become relied on.
It’s that we often disconnect from our own emotional world in order to keep functioning.

I’ve said for the past 2 years that I’m an “aspiring type B personality.” I thought it meant wanting to be more relaxed, less structured, less intense.

But now I see something deeper.

My longing to be “more type B” is really a longing to not always operate from responsibility. To not always override my feelings in the name of getting things done. To not feel like I have to translate every emotion into action.

I’m good with boundaries. I don’t see myself as a people pleaser. This isn’t about being a victim of expectations.

It’s about a quieter pattern: I don’t always give my own emotional needs room to exist. I don’t naturally communicate them. I often disconnect from them so I can keep the system running.

Even with support.
Even in a safe relationship.
Even when I’m not actually required to carry everything.

Capability can look like strength on the outside -while inside, you slowly lose access to what you feel.

Not because you don’t have emotions.
But because feeling them doesn’t fit into the infrastructure you’ve built.

Reintegration

Lately, therapy hasn’t been teaching me how to do more healing or correction. It’s been teaching me how to notice. Notice when I override a feeling because it’s inconvenient. Notice when I jump into problem-solving instead of sitting with what’s actually happening inside me. Notice when I gaslight myself into competence.

I used to think becoming a more relaxed, “type B” person meant changing my personality. Now I see it’s something gentler than that. It’s learning to let myself be a person before being a function.

Capability built my life. I’m grateful for it. But I’m slowly learning that I don’t have to earn my place in my own life through usefulness alone.

Maybe reintegration isn’t about becoming less capable.
Maybe it’s about becoming whole enough that capability is something I use - not something I hide inside.

And maybe the real relief comes not from dropping everything…
but from finally letting myself be someone who gets to be held, too.

I wrote this note to myself and almost deleted it.

I stay in motion, but I’m not in a rush.

It sounded… too good. Too clean. Like something that belongs on a neutral background with a serif font and no context.

But the truth underneath it isn’t aesthetic at all.

It’s actually about something I’ve been quietly wrestling with for a long time, trying to figure out whether something is off with me — or if it’s culture.

Progress has become loud.
Growth has gone underground.

We live in a culture that only recognizes movement if it’s announced (and preferably has a visual hook).
Timelines. Metrics. Screenshots. Before-and-after photos.
If it can’t be measured, shared, or turned into a caption, it almost doesn’t count.

And I’ve never really found my place in it. I sure did try.

About a month ago, I was on a podcast and the host asked me why my bio says “quietly reaching 150 million people a month.”

I felt like the word quietly threw her off.

She wasn’t being critical — just curious.
And what surprised me is that I didn’t really have a clean answer.

I said something about culture. About how loudness feels very North American. About how visibility here often equals volume — how much you can project, claim, announce.

All of that is true.

But it wasn’t the full truth.

The fuller truth is this:
I genuinely enjoy building without narrating every step. Without having eyes on me at all times. (I see the irony of my career — don’t worry.)

And for a long time, I didn’t know if that meant I was playing small.

We’re told that confidence looks like broadcasting. Stand loud and proud.
That growth should be obvious.
That success should be unmistakable.

So when you choose quiet, it’s easy to start questioning yourself.

Is this humility or fear?
Is this intention or avoidance?
Am I being thoughtful… or am I hiding?

I’ve asked myself those questions more times than I can count.

But lately, something has been clicking for me.

There’s a difference between loud progress and intentional growth.

Loud progress needs witnesses to validate it.
It thrives on urgency.
It wants to be seen becoming — and preferably applauded.

Intentional growth is slower.
It’s often boring from the outside.
It’s boundaries you don’t announce.
Decisions you don’t explain.
Momentum that doesn’t translate well into content.

Intentional growth often looks like stagnation if you’re not inside it.

And maybe that’s the point.

This season of my life wouldn’t photograph well.

There’s no dramatic pivot.
No aesthetic reinvention.
No clear “before” to contrast with an “after.”

What there is:

More awareness than excitement
Fewer declarations, more follow-through
Less pressure to prove that something is happening

I’m still in motion.
I’m just not rushing to turn it into a performance.

I think we’ve confused visibility with validity.

We’ve made progress something you show, instead of something you feel.
Something that needs applause instead of inner alignment.

Not everything needs an audience while it’s becoming.

So no, to answer my own question — “quietly” isn’t a lack of ambition.

It’s a preference.

This season isn’t about arriving faster.
It’s about moving without betraying myself for strangers’ applause.

And I’m finally okay with the fact that not everyone will be able to see that movement.

That’s how I know it’s real.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how easy it’s become to summarize ourselves.

Not in a poetic way.
In a data way.

Somewhere in the last few years, we all became very eager to put ourselves into categories. Clean. Minimal. Mob wife. Soft life. Pick a lane, stick to it, optimize it.

At first, it felt harmless. Kind of fun. Like trying on outfits for your personality.

But then we didn’t just try them on. We moved in.

We started shaping our habits, our taste, even our moods around these versions of ourselves. And once you say who you are out loud (or online), there’s this quiet pressure to keep being her.

Which is exhausting.
And also… not how humans work.

I don’t wake up as one person every day (that would have made life so much easier though.. ).

Some days I want structure, routines, minimal everything.
Other days I want chaos, curiosity, and to dive into something completely unhinged at 11 p.m.

And yet there’s this low-grade frustration when you don’t show up as the version you’ve decided you are. Like you’re breaking a contract you don’t remember signing.

What’s funny is that this isn’t how taste used to form at all.

Before algorithms, you didn’t optimize your identity. You stumbled into it.

You wandered. You paused. You followed things that didn’t make sense yet. Half the time you didn’t know why something interested you- you just knew it did. And somehow, over time, that added up to taste.

You discovered music because a friend burned you a CD.
You read a book because it was lying around someone’s house.
You fell in love with art because you stood in front of something and felt something before you knew what it meant.

Even further back, art wasn’t created to perform. It was created to process. To question. To make sense of being alive.

Taste was shaped slowly. Accidentally. Through proximity and curiosity. Not reinforcement loops.

There was no feed constantly whispering “If you liked this, you’ll love that!”

You just wandered.

Now the algorithm knows what I’ll click on before I do.
It knows what will make me pause.
It knows which version of me I’m flirting with.

Which is… slightly terrifying. and annoying.

Because when everything you consume mirrors you back to yourself, curiosity starts to shrink.

You stop exploring.
You stay inside the lines.

And I think that’s why so many of us feel creatively stuck. Or just generally off.

We’ve been cornering ourselves into being legible instead of letting ourselves be human.

We’ve been living like brands instead of people.

And brands need clarity.
People need room.

So my quiet mission for 2026 is this: I want to confuse the algorithm.

Not in a dramatic way. I’m not deleting all my apps or moving to a cabin.

Just in small, human ways.

Liking things that don’t match my aesthetic.
Being interested in something with no plan to explain it.
Starting something I might not finish.
Changing my mind without announcing it.

Letting myself be random again.

Because the more predictable my life becomes, the less alive it feels.

And I don’t think we talk enough about how the pressure to be consistent, cohesive, and easily understood quietly messes with our mental health.

When everything has to make sense, nothing gets to breathe.

So no, I don’t want my life to be perfectly curated this year.

I want it to surprise me.
I want it to contradict itself.
I want it to be harder to summarize.

Here’s to 2026.

The year we stop being so easy to read
and start confusing the algorithm instead.

And I couldn’t agree more.

Not because I felt triggered but because I felt… uninterested.
(Is that what maturing feels like? Wild.)

I didn’t feel the urge to post my own year-in-review.
Not out of resistance or judgment.
It just didn’t align with how I was ending this year.

And that distinction matters.

There was a time when I would’ve interpreted that feeling differently.
I might’ve framed it as criticism-
as everyone being performative, focused on the wrong things, playing a game I didn’t want to play.
That quiet “am I above this?” energy.

But I don’t see it that way anymore.

After 35 years of observing (myself included)-
I’ve realized that everyone is the author of their own story.

What we share is, in many ways, a living diary.
However curated. However intentional.
It reflects how we want to remember ourselves in a certain season.

For me, this year wasn’t about the highlights.
It was about the moments in between.

The quiet recalibrations.
(And there were many.)
The internal shifts.
The days that didn’t need documentation.

I don’t really have photos of those moments and honestly, I’m happy about that.

Means i’ve done it right.

Was there a flicker of FOMO?
If I’m being honest- yes.

A small voice that wondered if I was skipping something I was supposed to do.
Highlighting the wins.
Getting validated by the crowd.
Especially given what I do for a living.

But if there’s one thing this journey of self-awareness keeps teaching me,
it’s that alignment shows up in the smallest decisions.

The ones no one talks about.
The ones you make when no one’s watching.

Every day, you’re met with a choice:
your truth or what you think is expected of you.

And every time you choose your truth,
even in ways that feel subtle or quiet,
you move a little closer to peace.

This is one of those choices.

And this space - Notes I Didn’t Post -
is where those choices land.

Unfinished thoughts.
Unpolished reflections.
Nothing to perform.
Nothing to optimize.

Just notes.
The ones I didn’t post and belong nowhere- until now.

A few quiet rules for this space:

• This is not a highlight reel.
• Nothing here has to perform, persuade, or prove anything.
• Some thoughts will be unfinished — that’s intentional.
• This is a space for reflection, not reaction.
• I’m not here to teach, fix, or convince — only to notice.
• What’s shared here may never make it anywhere else.
• If something resonates, take it. If it doesn’t, let it pass.

This is simply a place to think out loud,
without the pressure to be loud.