Then, instead of accepting the socially approved response and moving along, they stay. “No, really. How are you?”

That’s the second question. And I’m beginning to think it might be one of the most generous things we can offer another person.

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We live in a time when we know an extraordinary amount about one another. We know where someone went on vacation, what they ordered for dinner, who got promoted, who got engaged, whose kid started kindergarten, and whose flight has been sitting on the tarmac for three hours.

I can know what you had for brunch and still have absolutely no idea how you are.

That’s a strange kind of closeness when you think about it.

We’re updated. But I’m not sure we’re always known. There’s a difference. An update tells you what happened. Knowing someone means being curious about what it meant to them. I’ve been thinking about that distinction a lot lately.

After sharing something difficult, people understandably ask what happened. They want the outcome. The news. The answer to the question they knew you were waiting on.

There is kindness in that. But every once in a while, someone asks something different.

“How are you feeling about it now?” Not what happened. Not what are you going to do. Not even are you okay. How are you feeling about it now?

The first question asks for information. The second asks for you. I’ve started noticing these people everywhere. The friend who remembers the appointment was Tuesday and checks in on Wednesday. The person who notices your voice sounds different even though you’ve insisted everything is fine. The colleague who doesn’t immediately offer a solution. The partner who knows when the answer you gave isn’t quite the whole answer.

They aren’t interrogating. They’re paying attention. There’s something incredibly intimate about being remembered in the middle of someone else’s busy life.

Not your birthday. Our phones have outsourced that particular miracle. I mean the small things. The meeting you were nervous about. The conversation with your mom. The test result you were waiting for. The decision you hadn’t made yet. The thing you mentioned once, almost in passing, that someone somehow understood wasn’t actually small. Those moments have changed my understanding of what it means to care for people.

For years, I thought being supportive meant knowing what to say. Twenty years of leadership reinforced that instinct. Listen to the problem. Understand it. Help find a path forward. Useful? Absolutely. Human? Yes. Because not every conversation needs somewhere to go. Some need somewhere to stay. That has been a harder lesson for me.

I’m a fixer by nature. Give me a problem and some decent snacks, and I’m prepared to form a task force. But life keeps reminding me that people don’t always need solutions. Sometimes they need someone willing to remain curious after the obvious question has been answered.

I think the best leaders understand this too. They don’t only ask, “How’s the project?” They ask, “How are you doing with the project?” They notice the difference between someone delivering and someone drowning while delivering. They listen for what isn’t in the status update. The same is true in friendship. And marriage. And families. And probably every relationship worth keeping.

The people who know us best aren’t necessarily the people who know the most facts about us. They’re the ones who remain interested after they already know the news. That distinction feels especially important now. We share so much of our lives publicly that it’s easy to mistake access for intimacy.

Someone can know your news without knowing your heart. They can read the announcement, see the photograph, send the hearts emoji, and genuinely care.

But being known asks for something slower. Attention. Memory. Curiosity.

The willingness to ask one more question. And then actually wait for the answer.  I’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of care lately, and it has made me wonder how often I offer it in return. Do I remember to ask again? Do I leave enough silence for someone to give me the answer underneath the first one? Do I listen without immediately searching for the encouraging thing to say? Do I make people feel heard, or simply responded to? I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I move too quickly. Sometimes my instinct to help arrives before my instinct to sit beside.

Sometimes I hear “I’m fine” and let the conversation move on because life is busy and dinner needs making and apparently the laundry has once again declined to handle itself.

But I’m paying more attention now. To the pause after someone says they’re okay. To the story they mention twice. To the thing that gets dismissed with “It’s probably nothing.” To the subtle invitation hidden inside, “Anyway, enough about me.” Maybe care isn't always knowing exactly what someone needs. Maybe it's being curious enough to notice when there's more.

Because the second question doesn't say, I can fix this. It says something quieter.

I remember.

I'm still here.

You don't have to give me the easy answer.

There are people in my life who have done that for me. They haven't made difficult things disappear. They haven't found the perfect words. They've simply made sure I didn't disappear inside them. And lately, I'm finding that far more impressive.

Turns out, some of the people who know us best aren't the ones who always know what to say. They're the ones who care enough to ask again. And stay for the real answer.

♥️ Rosanne

Continue the Conversation

Who is someone in your life who asks the second question? Maybe today is a good day to tell them you've noticed.

Before You Go...

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New - a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

I’ve learned that some of life’s greatest transformations happen far beyond our job titles. Today, I write about leadership, identity, health, reinvention, and what it means to navigate life’s unexpected chapters with courage, curiosity, and grace.

If today’s article resonated please share this with a friend and if you’re looking for a thoughtful partner as you navigate what’s next, I’d be honored to walk alongside you simply visit wellthisisnew.com to learn more.

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If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought, “Well... this is new,” you’re in the right place. I’d love for you to subscribe.

Rosanne

Creator of Well, This Is New

A community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

wellthisisnew.com

Meanwhile, something inside you is standing perfectly still.

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I noticed this in the days after our journey to parenthood ended. After months and months of appointments, bloodwork, medications, injections, ultrasounds, hope, fear, and an egg retrieval that left us with no eggs to retrieve, there was suddenly nothing left to do.

That may have been one of the strangest parts. For all of those months, there had always been a next thing. Take this medication. Come back Tuesday. Increase this dose. Watch these numbers. Wait for this call. Prepare for retrieval.

Then suddenly, there wasn’t a next appointment. No next possibility to carefully hold.

Just space. And grief.

I thought I would want to fill that space immediately. Figure out what came next. Ask more questions. Make another plan. Find something productive to do with the pain.

I am, after all, a woman who has spent much of her adult life believing a good plan can solve almost anything.

Grief, it turns out, has very little respect for project management.

So I stopped. Not intentionally or gracefully. I simply didn’t have anything left to push forward.

For a while, even ordinary things felt strangely difficult. Answering a text. Deciding what to eat. Having a normal conversation with someone who had no idea that the future I’d been imagining had just disappeared.

And then something unexpected happened.

I laughed.

I don’t even remember what was funny. I just remember hearing myself laugh and feeling a little startled by the sound.

For a split second, I felt guilty. How could I be devastated and laughing?

Apparently, somewhere along the way, my brain had developed rules for grief. If you’re heartbroken, act heartbroken. If you’re grieving, remain appropriately solemn. Please refrain from enjoying anything until further notice.

Except emotions have never been particularly interested in following instructions.

You can cry in the morning and laugh at dinner. You can feel hollow and still notice that the sky looks beautiful. You can have your heart broken and genuinely enjoy someone’s ridiculous story.

One feeling doesn’t cancel the other. I’m beginning to understand that this is the difference between moving on and moving forward.

Moving on has always sounded like leaving something behind. Closing the chapter. Finding closure. Getting over it. I don’t know that I want to do any of those things.

There are experiences I don’t want to “get over.” Not because I want to remain inside the pain, but because what happened mattered.

The hope mattered. The version of myself who believed she might become a mother mattered. The dream Johnny and I shared mattered. Our heartbreak mattered. I don’t need to erase any of that to continue living.

Maybe moving forward asks something entirely different. Maybe it means allowing life to grow around what happened. I’ve started thinking about grief less like a road I need to finish walking and more like something that changes shape as I carry it. Some days it is enormous. It takes up the whole room. Other days it sits quietly in the corner while I do something completely ordinary. And sometimes I forget it’s there for a little while.

Those moments used to make me feel guilty. Now I’m beginning to understand them differently. Grief can exist without owning every inch of my life. That’s new for me.

I’ve always liked clean categories. Good day. Bad day. Hopeful. Heartbroken. Moving forward. Falling apart. Life seems increasingly uninterested in cooperating with that system.

These days, the answer is often both.

I can grieve the life I imagined and love the life I have. I can be heartbroken about what my body could not do and grateful for the life still unfolding around me.

I can mourn one future while slowly becoming curious about another. I can cry with the person I love and laugh with him later that same day. Apparently, adulthood has considerably fewer either - or questions than advertised. There is something freeing about that.

I don’t have to wait until I’m “better” to participate in my own life again. I don’t have to prove I’ve healed before something is allowed to make me happy. And happiness isn’t evidence that the loss mattered less. That’s perhaps the part I’m learning most slowly.

Joy isn’t betrayal.

Laughter isn’t forgetting.

Looking forward isn’t leaving behind.

There are still moments when grief catches me without warning. A thought. A conversation. Someone else’s announcement. A future tense I no longer use quite the same way.

The ache can return with remarkable efficiency. But it doesn’t hurt everywhere anymore. That is the difference I’m beginning to notice.

I used to think healing meant eventually reaching a place where something stopped hurting. Now I wonder if healing is discovering that something can still hurt without hurting everywhere. There can be grief here. Love here. Anticipation. Disappointment. And dinner plans over there.

All inside the same life.

Maybe that’s what moving forward actually looks like.

Not a triumphant march toward whatever comes next. Not closure. Not turning pain into a lesson before it’s finished being pain. Just slowly allowing yourself to belong to your life again.

There are things ahead of me I’m genuinely excited about. People I love deeply. Work that still matters to me. Conversations I haven’t had yet, places I haven’t seen, ridiculous things I haven’t laughed at, ordinary mornings I haven’t lived.

None of those things replace what we lost.

They’re not supposed to.

A new future doesn’t have to compete with the one that didn’t happen.

There is room to grieve one and still become curious about the other.

So no, I don’t think I’m moving on.

I’m not particularly interested in leaving this part of my story somewhere behind me as proof that I’ve healed correctly.

I’m learning to carry it differently.

Some days better than others.

Some days with grace.

Some days with snacks and considerably less grace.

But forward.

For right now, forward is enough.

Turns out, moving forward isn’t about leaving what happened behind. It’s learning to carry what happened without asking it to decide what happens next.

If you’re carrying something of your own right now, maybe you don’t need to be over it either. Maybe forward is enough.

Until something else becomes new…

♥️ Rosanne

Before You Go...

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New - a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

I’ve learned that some of life’s greatest transformations happen far beyond our job titles. Today, I write about leadership, identity, health, reinvention, and what it means to navigate life’s unexpected chapters with courage, curiosity, and grace.

If today’s article resonated please share this with a friend and if you’re looking for a thoughtful partner as you navigate what’s next, I’d be honored to walk alongside you simply visit wellthisisnew.com to learn more.

Subscribe now

If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought, “Well... this is new,” you’re in the right place. I’d love for you to subscribe.

Rosanne

Creator of Well, This Is New

A community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

wellthisisnew.com

Humor has always been one of the ways I find my footing when life gets heavy.

There was hope underneath all of it. Fragile, complicated, sometimes terrifying hope. But hope nonetheless.

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Every appointment carried the possibility that we might hear something good. Every medication came with the quiet understanding that we were asking my body to do something extraordinary. Every injection felt like one more small act of faith in a future I had spent years wondering whether I would ever get to have. A child. Our child.

For the better part of a year, I paid attention to my body in a way I never had before. What it was doing. What it wasn’t doing. What it might still be capable of doing.

I learned numbers I never wanted to know. I watched screens I barely understood. I learned to search the faces of nurses and doctors before they even spoke. I became fluent in a language I never wanted to learn.

Still, I hoped.

The morning of my egg retrieval, that hope came with me like a silent shadow. I knew the odds. I knew things hadn’t gone exactly as planned. I knew there were questions. But I was there. We had made it to retrieval. An emotional point in this journey. Surely that meant this retrieval would move us to the next step and next chapter of our lives we both could feel around the corner.

When I woke up, I remember the faces. Before I remembered their words, I remember their faces.

The nurses looked to me with sadness in their eyes. My doctor mirrored that sadness and gave me a big hug. There is a particular kind of fear that arrives when the people trained to remain composed can’t quite hide what they’re feeling.

Then came the news. There were no eggs.

What we had hoped were growing follicles were in fact cysts. The retrieval I had spent several months preparing my body for had produced nothing to retrieve.

No eggs.

No embryo to hope for.

No next step waiting on the other side of that room.

Just an ending I wasn’t prepared to hear.

The nurses gave me extra time. No one rushed me. No one tried to make the moment smaller than it was. They let me sit there with the news.

And I sobbed.

Not the quiet kind of crying where tears politely collect at the corners of your eyes. The kind where grief takes over your entire body. Tears crashed down my face faster than I could wipe them away. For months, I had been asking my body to produce something. That morning, all it could produce were tears.

I felt hollow.

That’s the word I keep returning to.

Hollow.

As though someone had reached inside me and removed not just the hope of this IVF cycle, but an entire future I had quietly allowed myself to imagine. I had let myself picture it. A baby shower with the people we love. The ridiculous little clothes. A nursery. The first time Johnny held our baby. The ordinary chaos of becoming someone’s mother.

The life I had spent years wondering if I would ever get to live had briefly felt close enough to touch. Until it wasn’t.

There is a strange kind of grief in mourning what never existed. There are no photographs. No memories. Or stories everyone else remembers. Just the life you imagined. And somehow, the heart grieves it anyway.

If my heart could have done this for my body, we would never have been in that room. My heart was ready. It had been ready. My body simply couldn’t follow it there. The unimaginable feeling that my body was not capable of what I yearned for.

I wish I could tell you my first thought after hearing the news was about myself. It wasn’t. It was about Johnny.

He didn’t know yet. He was waiting. He had been the amazing partner on this ride with me through every appointment, every possibility, every shift between hope and fear. He had carried this dream beside me with every single injection.

And suddenly I was the only person who knew it had ended. There is something unbearably lonely about holding news you know is about to break the heart of someone you love. My own grief was still happening, but my mind immediately turned toward his. Showing up for him in the million ways he has shown up for me over the years.

How was I going to tell him? How do you take something that has just shattered you and place it into the hands of the person you love most? For a few minutes, I wasn’t thinking about what I had lost. I was thinking about what he was about to lose. Maybe that’s love. Or maybe it’s simply what happens after you’ve shared enough of a life with someone that their pain lives dangerously close to your own.

Eventually, I had to leave that room. The physical pain from the procedure had moved to the backseat. I barely noticed it anymore.There are apparently some kinds of pain the body knows how to quiet when the heart becomes louder.

My nurse wheeled me down a long hallway. Past many doors and windows with light shining through illuminating the path ahead. I focused on that light. To stop the tears. To know there is a future path forward. We emerged out front. He had pulled the car around. I found his eyes. He helped me into the car. He saw my swollen eyes. My red nose. We sat quietly for a moment in the parking lot. I grabbed his hand. And somehow, I said the words that he was feeling before they were said.

“We couldn’t…”

I told him. There were no eggs for IVF.

And the world went silent. I don’t remember what happened around us after that. I remember his face. I remember our hands. I remember tears. His. Mine. Ours. Two people sitting inside the same broken dream. There was nothing to fix. Nothing I needed to dive in and research alternative methods. No question left to ask in that moment.

There was only grief. So we let it be grief.

We cried for the child we had imagined. For the possibility we had carried. For the months of appointments and medications and needles and hope. For the version of our future we had allowed ourselves, carefully, to believe might still be possible. And somewhere underneath all of that heartbreak was love.

Not the kind that makes loss easier. I don’t think love always does that. Sometimes love simply makes sure you don’t have to experience the unbearable parts alone. Johnny and I have shared nearly every version of adulthood together. The beautiful ones. The complicated ones. The ones we never would have chosen.

I know we will find our way through this one too. But I don’t want to rush there yet. I don’t want to wrap this experience in a bow and tell you everything happens for a reason. I don’t know the reason. Right now, I don’t particularly need one. I need room to grieve. To be angry. To sit in the numb. To miss someone I never got to meet. To mourn a version of myself I had quietly imagined becoming. And to acknowledge what my body has been through without immediately asking it for something else.

For months, I watched my body like it was holding the answer to my future. Today, I am trying to look at it differently. Not as the body that failed to give me what I desperately wanted. Just as mine. A body that endured. A body that tried. A body that carried me out of that room when my heart wasn’t quite ready to leave.

I don’t know exactly what comes next.

For once, I’m not trying to. There will be time for that. Today, there is simply this. A hand I can still reach for. A love that is still here. And two broken hearts learning, very slowly, how to hold each other while they grieve what could have been.

♥️

Rosanne | Well This Is New ♥️

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New - a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

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I don’t think this happened all at once. It happened one tiny moment at a time. A quick glance while waiting for the elevator. An email answered in the parking lot. A podcast during the walk. The news while the kettle boils. Five minutes here. Three minutes there. Until eventually, silence started feeling less familiar than stimulation.

The funny thing is, I don’t actually miss being bored. I miss what boredom used to make possible.

It gave my mind somewhere to wander. It let questions finish forming. It left enough room for memories, ideas, and the occasional wonderfully random thought to show up uninvited. Some of my clearest thinking has never happened while I was trying to think. It’s happened while driving home with the radio off. Watching rain collect on the window. Walking without a destination. Looking out an airport window instead of down at my lap.

Nothing remarkable was happening.

Which, I’ve started to suspect, was exactly the point. Somewhere along the way, we’ve become incredibly efficient at filling every empty space. Not because we’re shallow. Because we’re capable. Technology makes it easy. We’ve quietly absorbed the idea that every spare moment should be useful.

It’s such a subtle shift that most of us never question it. We don’t just experience life anymore.

We narrate it. Capture it. Share it. Research it. Improve and optimize it. Sometimes before we’ve even finished living it.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

I’ve spent years helping teams build better systems. I love a good process. I appreciate efficiency. But every good system has one thing built into it.

Margin.

Without space, nothing new has room to emerge. The same is true for people.

I’ve noticed that my best ideas rarely arrive when I’m actively looking for them. They show up while I’m making tea. Walking to the mailbox. Sitting in the car for an extra minute after an appointment.

The moments I used to dismiss as unproductive have quietly become some of the most meaningful parts of my day. Not because they’re exciting. Because I’m finally present enough to notice them.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been missing. Not boredom.

Attention.

Attention to the life that’s unfolding while I’m busy reaching for something else.

Attention to the ordinary moments that never ask to be photographed, improved, or shared.

Attention to my own thoughts before someone else’s arrive.

Lately, I’ve been trying a small experiment. When life hands me a few unclaimed minutes, I leave them alone. No grand philosophy. No digital detox. I simply resist the urge to immediately fill the space.

Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes I remember to call someone I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes an idea I’ve been chasing for days quietly finds me instead.

Last week I sat in my car after an appointment. Out of habit, I reached for my phone. Then I stopped. A little girl pointed excitedly at a bird in the parking lot as if she’d discovered something no one else had ever seen. Her dad stopped what he was doing and looked up, too.

For a few seconds, neither of them was trying to capture the moment. They were simply inside it. I smiled, put my phone back down, and watched them disappear around the corner.

Nothing about that afternoon changed my life. But it opened my heart.

But it reminded me that not every beautiful moment is grand. Some simply wait to be noticed.

Turns out, I don’t miss boredom nearly as much as I miss the version of myself who wasn’t so afraid of leaving a little space. The ordinary moments we often dismiss may be the very places where our attention and perhaps where parts of ourselves have been waiting.

♥️

Continue the Conversation

What’s one ordinary moment you’ve started paying attention to again? I’d love to hear what you’ve noticed lately.

Until something else becomes new…

Rosanne | Well This Is New ♥️

Before You Go...

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New - a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

I’ve learned that some of life’s greatest transformations happen far beyond our job titles. Today, I write about leadership, identity, health, reinvention, and what it means to navigate life’s unexpected chapters with courage, curiosity, and grace.

If today’s article resonated and you’re looking for a thoughtful partner as you navigate what’s next, I’d be honored to walk alongside you. Through discovery, candid connection, intentional mentorship, and meaningful conversations, I help people find clarity when life feels anything but. Visit wellthisisnew.com to learn more.

Subscribe now

If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought, “Well... this is new,” you’re in the right place. I’d love for you to subscribe.

Rosanne

Creator of Well, This Is New

A community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

wellthisisnew.com

Apparently, my nervous system believed the decision needed legal representation. I laughed, highlighted the whole thing, hit delete, and sent one sentence instead.

"I won't be able to make it, but thank you for thinking of me."

Then I waited. Not for a reply. For the feeling. The guilt. The urge to send a second text with just a little more context. It never came. The conversation simply continued, and by the next morning, everyone had moved on.

I hadn't.

I kept thinking about how naturally I'd started building a case for a decision that had already been made. When did that become my default?

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I've realized I don't just do it with dinner invitations. I've done it with jobs. With slowing down. With protecting my time. With choosing to explore IVF. With changing my mind.

For years, I told myself I was simply being thoughtful. Offering context. Helping people understand where I was coming from.

Lately, I've started wondering if I was doing something else entirely. Maybe I wasn't trying to help people understand me. Maybe I was trying to make it impossible for them to disagree.

There's a difference.

Twenty years in leadership probably reinforced the habit. My job was to anticipate questions, build alignment, and bring people along before resistance had a chance to settle in.

Those instincts served me well at work. They quietly followed me home. Without realizing it, I turned ordinary life into a series of stakeholder meetings.

Every boundary came with supporting documentation. Every change of heart included an executive summary. Every "no" arrived with an explanation I hoped would make it easier for someone else to accept.

The funny thing is, the people who love me rarely asked for any of it. Most of the courtroom existed entirely inside my own head. I've started paying attention to when that invisible trial begins. It usually sounds something like this.

• What if they think I'm selfish?

• What if they don't understand?

• What if they think I've changed?

The answer, I've discovered, is wonderfully inconvenient. They might. Yet life keeps moving anyway.

That doesn't mean I've become guarded. I still believe in sharing my heart. I still think context can deepen connection. Some conversations deserve the whole story. But I've stopped believing that every personal decision requires a defense.

There's a difference between inviting someone into your life and asking for permission to live it. I hadn't realized how often I was doing the second.

Midlife has a way of revealing habits that once looked like strengths. I've spent years communicating clearly, anticipating needs, and making things easier for everyone around me. Those are gifts. But somewhere along the way, I confused clarity with justification. I forgot that a decision can be thoughtful without being negotiated.

These days, I still catch myself writing the second paragraph. The explanation. The evidence. The part where I try to make my choice easier for someone else to approve.

Most days, I delete it. Not because I've become mysterious. Not because I no longer care what people think. But because I'm learning that trust in myself sometimes sounds remarkably ordinary.

"I won't be able to make it."

Period.

That tiny period at the end of the sentence has become one of the quietest acts of self-respect I've learned. Not because it guarantees I'll be understood.

But because it reminds me that understanding was never the requirement for making a life that fits.

♥️

Continue the Conversation

Have you ever caught yourself explaining a decision no one actually questioned? I'd love to hear your story in the comments.

Until something else becomes new…

Rosanne | Well This Is New ♥️

Before You Go...

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New - a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

I’ve learned that some of life’s greatest transformations happen far beyond our job titles. Today, I write about leadership, identity, health, reinvention, and what it means to navigate life’s unexpected chapters with courage, curiosity, and grace.

If today’s article resonated and you’re looking for a thoughtful partner as you navigate what’s next, I’d be honored to walk alongside you. Through discovery sessions, intentional mentorship, and meaningful conversations, I help people find clarity when life feels anything but. Visit wellthisisnew.com to learn more.

Subscribe now

If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought, “Well... this is new,” you’re in the right place. I’d love for you to subscribe.

Until something else becomes new… ♥️

Rosanne

Creator of Well, This Is New

A community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

wellthisisnew.com

I wore those words like a favorite sweater. They fit. They kept me warm. Without realizing it, they became part of how I introduced myself to the world, even when I never actually said them out loud.

Looking back, I don’t think I was trying to become indispensable. I think I was quietly building a life around being needed. It happened the way most identities do. Gradually.

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One solved problem became another. One promotion led to the next. One person asking for help slowly turned into everyone assuming I’d know what to do.

At some point, I stopped noticing the difference between what I did and who I was.

Competence stopped being a skill. It became part of my identity.

That’s the sneaky thing about competence. No one tells you that the better you become at carrying things, the more people hand you to carry.

The extra project. The difficult conversation. The emotional labor.

The responsibility that somehow lands in your lap because you’re “just so good at this.”

And because you are capable, you pick it up. Not once. Again and again.

Until one day you look around and realize you’ve become the designated carrier of everyone else’s backpack. The surprising part is that I didn’t resent it. At least not at first.

Being needed feels good. It feels important. It even feels safe. If people depend on me, then I matter. If I keep showing up, no one will be disappointed.

If I’m useful enough, maybe there will always be a place for me. I never would have said those words out loud. But I lived as though they were true.

Then midlife arrived with all the subtlety of someone opening the curtains after you’ve been asleep for years.

My body stopped negotiating. The energy that used to appear on command started asking questions first.

The certainty I’d built my career around became less interesting than peace. The woman who could push through almost anything quietly packed up her office and left.

Honestly, she earned the going away party.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve realized that life has a remarkable way of exposing the identities we’ve mistaken for character.

Being kind is character.

Being generous is character.

Being trustworthy is character.

Being the person who carries everything is a role. And roles can be rewritten.

Leadership taught me how to build strong teams. Midlife taught me that strong teams don’t need one person to rescue them.

Friendship taught me that people who love you aren’t keeping score.

My body taught me that there are seasons when carrying less isn’t giving up. It’s wisdom.

I still can catch myself reaching for things that don’t belong to me. The awkward silence someone else could answer. The problem someone else could solve. The guilt that somehow wandered into my purse even though it belongs to someone entirely different.

Old habits are persistent. But they’re no longer in charge. These days, I’m learning the difference between being dependable and believing my worth depends on being depended on.

One creates connection. The other creates exhaustion.

For years, I thought becoming stronger meant learning how to carry more. Now I wonder if strength looks more like knowing what to gently set down.

Maybe that’s what this season has been trying to teach me all along.

Not how to become less capable. How to become someone who no longer mistakes capability for identity.

Because underneath every role I’ve played, every title I’ve held, and every problem I’ve solved has always been a woman who deserved to be loved long before she proved herself useful.

I’m finally getting to know her. And she is far more interesting than the version of me who thought she had to earn her place by carrying everything.

Turns out, she wasn’t asking me to do more. She was inviting me to put something down.

Maybe even come home to myself.

♥️

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I’d love to know: What have you quietly stopped carrying this year?

Not because you gave up. Because you finally realized it wasn’t yours.

I’d love to meet you in the comments.

Until something else becomes new…

Rosanne | Well This is New

Before You Go...

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New—a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

I’ve learned that some of life’s greatest transformations happen far beyond our job titles. Today, I write about leadership, identity, health, reinvention, and what it means to navigate life’s unexpected chapters with courage, curiosity, and grace.

If today’s article resonated and you’re looking for a thoughtful partner as you navigate what’s next, I’d be honored to walk alongside you. Through discovery sessions, intentional mentorship, and meaningful conversations, I help people find clarity when life feels anything but.

Visit wellthisisnew.com to learn more and explore whether a mentorship is the right next step for you.

If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought, “Well... this is new,” you’re in the right place. I’d love for you to subscribe.

Subscribe now

Until something else becomes new… ♥️

Rosanne
Creator of Well, This Is New

A community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

wellthisisnew.com

Instead, it did something far more interesting.

It taught me how to live alongside it.

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For more than twenty years, my work centered on helping people find clarity. I led teams through change, coached leaders through difficult conversations, and built systems that brought order to complicated problems. If something wasn’t working, my instinct was simple: understand it, improve it, and move forward. I still love that part of myself. There is deep satisfaction in helping people untangle complexity and move confidently toward what comes next.

Somewhere along the way, though, I quietly began believing that every part of life could be approached the same way. If something felt uncertain, I assumed I needed a better plan. If something hurt, I believed I could work my way through it. If the future looked unclear, I thought more preparation would eventually reveal the answer.

Then life introduced me to experiences that weren’t asking to be solved.

They were asking to be lived.

Receiving my diagnosis of endometriosis and adenomyosis changed my life in ways that extended far beyond medicine. It wasn’t simply a collection of unfamiliar words written in a medical chart. It reshaped conversations I had been having with myself for years. It asked me to reconsider assumptions about time, motherhood, ambition, and the quiet agreement I had made with myself that life would unfold in a particular order if I simply worked hard enough and made enough good decisions.

Grief has a peculiar way of rearranging certainty. It rarely arrives with dramatic declarations. More often, it quietly changes the questions we ask ourselves.

Looking back now, I don’t think the biggest shifts in my life began with decisions. They began with noticing.

I began noticing how often I volunteered simply because I was capable. I noticed how quickly I apologized for needing rest, even when no apology was necessary. I noticed how easily I accepted responsibilities that no one had actually asked me to carry. Most of all, I noticed that somewhere along the way, usefulness had quietly become one of the ways I measured my worth.

None of those habits appeared overnight. In fact, many of them were rewarded. Being dependable earns trust. Being prepared opens doors. Being the person everyone counts on can become a wonderful reputation to have—until one day you realize you’ve become responsible for holding together a version of your life that no longer fits.

That realization wasn’t dramatic. It arrived in small moments that would have looked entirely ordinary to anyone else. Protecting an afternoon instead of filling it. Letting an email wait until tomorrow. Saying, “Let me think about that,” instead of answering immediately. Recognizing that just because I could carry something didn’t automatically mean I should.

Years of leadership taught me that healthy organizations periodically examine the systems they’ve outgrown. We review old assumptions, question familiar processes, and make thoughtful adjustments, not because the old way failed, but because we’ve changed. Somewhere this past year, it occurred to me that people deserve that same kind of thoughtful leadership.

I had spent years refining the way I worked.

I had spent very little time questioning the invisible rules I lived by.

Rules like always be available. Always be capable. Always finish what you start. Always make it easier for everyone else.

None of those beliefs are inherently wrong. They simply stopped being universally true.

One of the unexpected gifts of midlife is discovering that wisdom often arrives disguised as permission. Permission to reconsider. Permission to disappoint expectations that no longer belong to you. Permission to move at the pace of your life not what someone else’s timeline requires. Permission to acknowledge that the version of success you admired at thirty may not be the one you need at forty-two.

That isn’t inconsistency.

It’s growth.

These days, certainty matters less to me than curiosity.

Curiosity has become a quieter companion. It asks what deserves my attention instead of how much I can accomplish. It asks what feels true instead of what looks impressive. It reminds me that my body isn’t an obstacle to overcome but a relationship to nurture. It has gently taught me that becoming isn’t a finish line waiting somewhere in the distance. It’s an ongoing conversation with the person I’m becoming.

I still love a fresh notebook. I still appreciate a thoughtful plan. And I still experience an unreasonable amount of satisfaction from crossing something off a list. Some habits are simply too charming to give up.

What has changed is my expectation that a perfectly organized life will somehow answer questions that belong to the heart.

Those answers arrive differently.

Usually more quietly.

Almost never on my timeline.

Over the past year, I found myself returning to the same questions again and again. Not because I expected immediate answers, but because they helped me notice where change had already begun. Long before I could explain it. Long before the outside of my life reflected what was happening within it.

I’ve gathered those questions into a new Well, This is New Companion - Questions that Changed Me. Please comment below if you would like to receive this resource. Not as a checklist. Not as a formula. And certainly not because I believe I have life figured out. I share them because they helped me pause long enough to hear my own life again. They reminded me that growth rarely arrives as one sweeping reinvention. More often, it unfolds through quiet realizations that slowly change the way we move through the world.

Life, I’ve discovered, rarely changes all at once. It changes one conversation at a time.

One boundary at a time. One expectation we gently set down. One afternoon we choose rest instead of proving something.

One better question.

And sometimes, that’s enough to change us long before our lives catch up.

Rosanne | Well, This is New ♥️

Before You Go...

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New—a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

After two decades leading teams and building a career, I’ve learned that some of life’s greatest transformations happen far beyond our job titles. Today, I write about leadership, identity, health, reinvention, and what it means to navigate life’s unexpected chapters with courage, curiosity, and grace.

If today’s article resonated and you’re looking for a thoughtful partner as you navigate what’s next, I’d be honored to walk alongside you. Through discovery sessions, intentional mentorship, and meaningful conversations, I help people find clarity when life feels anything but.

Visit wellthisisnew.com to learn more and explore whether a discovery session or mentorship is the right next step for you.

Continue the Conversation

If something in today’s article stayed with you, I’d love to hear about it.

Leave a comment and tell me what resonated, what challenged you, or what chapter you’re navigating right now. Some of the most meaningful conversations in this community begin with someone saying, “I thought I was the only one.”

And if you know someone who could use these words today, I hope you’ll share this essay with them. Sometimes the greatest gift isn’t advice, it’s helping someone feel seen.

Share

I’m writing through it in real time, and I’m so grateful you’re here.

If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought, “Well... this is new,” you’re in the right place. I’d love for you to subscribe.

Until something else becomes new… ♥️

Rosanne

Creator of Well, This Is New

A community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

wellthisisnew.com

It wasn’t fear that drove me. It was responsibility. I genuinely cared about doing good work and helping the people around me succeed. But if I’m honest, there was another layer to it.

I spent much of my career leading in a male-dominated industry, often as one of the only women in the room. You learn quickly that credibility isn’t something you’re simply handed. Whether real or perceived, it can feel like something you’re expected to earn over and over again.

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So I prepared. Then I prepared some more. I knew the presentation inside and out. I had the backup plan for the backup plan. I could anticipate the objections before they were spoken. Somewhere along the way, I confused being exceptionally prepared with believing I needed to carry the weight of every outcome.The funny thing is, no one ever put that expectation on me.

I did.

And because I could carry it, I assumed I should. For a long time, that looked like leadership. Today, I think it looked a lot more like over-functioning.

One of the biggest surprises of midlife is realizing that the strengths you’ve been praised for your entire life can quietly become the things that exhaust you. Being dependable is a gift. Being resourceful is a gift. Being capable is a gift. Until those gifts become your identity.

When that happens, people stop seeing what you contribute. They simply begin expecting that you’ll always be the one who steps in. The meeting stalls? Rosanne will figure it out. Someone avoids a difficult conversation? She’ll have it. A project starts drifting? She’ll pull it back on course. Need someone to stay late? Need someone to smooth things over? Need someone to quietly carry the emotional weight that no one else wants to hold? She’ll do it.

At first, that feels like trust. Eventually, it feels like gravity.

I’ve coached leaders for years, and one pattern appeared so consistently that I can’t ignore it anymore.

The highest performers often become the most indispensable people on the team.

Most organizations celebrate that. I’m no longer convinced they should. Indispensable people are often admired because they make everything work. What no one notices is what they’re quietly making impossible. When one person becomes the answer to every problem, everyone else loses the opportunity to become one. That’s not sustainable leadership. It’s dependence dressed up as excellence. I know because I lived it.

These days, I find myself asking a different question.

Not, How can I solve this? But, Who else is ready to solve this?

It’s a subtle shift, but it changes everything. Leadership isn’t about collecting more responsibility. It’s about creating more capacity. It isn’t about proving how much you can carry. It’s about making sure other people discover that they can carry more than they thought possible. The best leaders I’ve known don’t create followers. They create confidence.

Midlife has changed more than my leadership style. It’s changed my relationship with silence. Years ago, if a room grew quiet after I asked a question, I would have rushed to fill the space.

Now I wait.

Silence isn’t always uncertainty. Sometimes it’s courage gathering itself. I’ve learned that some of the most thoughtful ideas arrive five seconds after everyone else has become uncomfortable. If I rescue the conversation too quickly, I don’t create momentum.

I interrupt it.

That lesson has followed me well beyond conference rooms. Into friendships. Into family conversations. Into moments with people I love who don’t actually need my advice. They simply need someone willing to stay present long enough for them to find their own words. Who knew leadership would teach me how to become a better listener? Or perhaps more accurately, who knew midlife would?

One of the greatest gifts of getting older is that my scorecard has changed. Early in my career, success often looked like being the person with the answer. Today, success looks very different. Did someone leave this conversation believing more in themselves than when they walked in? Did I create space instead of taking it? Did I ask better questions than I gave answers? Did I make someone else’s confidence a little stronger? Those questions matter far more to me now than whether I was the smartest person in the room. Because the truth is, I’ve been in enough rooms to know that intelligence is rarely what people remember.

They remember how you made them feel.

They remember whether you listened.

They remember whether they felt seen.

They remember whether they walked away standing a little taller.

That’s influence.

And influence has very little to do with having all the answers.

I’ve also stopped believing that leadership begins when someone gives you a title. Some of the strongest leaders I know have never managed a team. They’re the women who quietly steady a family during uncertain seasons. The friend everyone calls because they know how to sit with hard things without trying to fix them. The woman rebuilding her life after a diagnosis she never expected. The one learning to trust her body again. The one deciding that peace is a better measure of success than constant productivity.

Leadership has always been about influence. Midlife simply widens our definition of where influence lives.

If twenty years in leadership taught me anything, it’s that people don’t need perfect leaders. They need present ones. Leaders who are steady enough to say, “I don’t know.” Confident enough to ask for another perspective. Wise enough to stop rescuing. Secure enough to let someone else shine. Ironically, I spent years believing leadership meant becoming indispensable. Now I think the very best leaders do the opposite. They leave behind stronger people, not greater dependence.

Maybe that’s what growing older has given me. Not fewer ambitions. Just better ones. These days, I’m less interested in being remembered as the woman who held everything together. I’d rather be remembered as the woman who helped other people discover they could.

Well, this is new ♥️

Before You Go...

I’m Rosanne, creator of Well, This Is New—a community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

After two decades leading teams and building a career, I’ve learned that some of life’s greatest transformations happen far beyond our job titles. Today, I write about leadership, identity, health, reinvention, and what it means to navigate life’s unexpected chapters with courage, curiosity, and grace.

If today’s article resonated and you’re looking for a thoughtful partner as you navigate what’s next, I’d be honored to walk alongside you. Through discovery sessions, intentional mentorship, and meaningful conversations, I help people find clarity when life feels anything but.

Visit wellthisisnew.com to learn more and explore whether a discovery session or mentorship is the right next step for you.

Continue the Conversation

If something in today’s essay stayed with you, I’d love to hear about it.

Leave a comment and tell me what resonated, what challenged you, or what chapter you’re navigating right now. Some of the most meaningful conversations in this community begin with someone saying, “I thought I was the only one.”

And if you know someone who could use these words today, I hope you’ll share this essay with them. Sometimes the greatest gift isn’t advice, it’s helping someone feel seen.

Share

I’m writing through it in real time, and I’m so grateful you’re here.

If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought, “Well... this is new,” you’re in the right place. I’d love for you to subscribe.

Subscribe now

Until something else becomes new… ♥️

Rosanne
Creator of Well, This Is New

A community navigating midlife with heart, wit, and the quiet confidence that we’re allowed to become someone new.

wellthisisnew.com

Life kept going.

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Which, honestly, felt a little rude. Because after the tears, the appointments, the difficult conversations and the medical terminology I suddenly knew far more than I ever wanted to... there were still groceries to buy. Meetings. Laundry to fold.

And there was this body. The same one. Except it wasn’t.

No one really prepares you for what comes after a diagnosis. Not the emotional part.

The management.

The everyday negotiations. The way you quietly begin asking yourself questions you never thought about before. “Do I button these jeans... or do I enjoy breathing today?” “Is this bloating... or am I suddenly five months pregnant after eating a sandwich?” ‘Endo belly’ is one of those phrases that sounds almost...cute.

Like something you’d laugh off. Until you experience it. Then you realize there’s nothing particularly adorable about looking in the mirror at 7:00 p.m. wondering how your body managed to change shape between breakfast and dinner.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s unpredictable. It’s frustrating. And maybe hardest of all... it’s invisible.

Someone can tell you that you “look great” on the very day your pelvis feels like it’s negotiating against you. That’s one of the strangest parts of living with something people can’t see. Your outside and your inside become very different conversations.

I’ve spent most of my life trusting my body to quietly keep up with me. Long workdays. Travel. Big presentations. Busy weekends. I asked a lot of it. It rarely complained. Now it has a voice. And it’s surprisingly opinionated.

Some mornings it’s fatigue. Some days it’s pain. Some days it’s a body that simply says, “We’re not doing this at your pace today.” I’m learning that listening isn’t weakness. It’s partnership.

That’s probably been the biggest shift.

I used to think resilience meant overriding discomfort. Now I think resilience sometimes looks like canceling the plan. Taking the nap. Changing the schedule. Ordering the stretchy waistband. (Which, for the record, deserves far more respect than fashion magazines have ever given it.)

I’m also learning something I never expected.

There is a grief in realizing your body has changed. But there’s also an invitation. To know it. To work with it. To stop treating it like an employee who should simply perform without ever a complaint.

I’ve spent years asking my body to cooperate with my life. Maybe this season is asking me to cooperate with my body instead. That’s new.

Some days I still resist it. Some days I mourn the simplicity I used to take for granted. Some days I celebrate the small victories, an afternoon without pain, enough energy for a long walk, laughing so hard with friends that for a little while I forget about all of it.

I’ve learned those moments matter more than I used to think. Not because they’re extraordinary. Because they’re ordinary.

And ordinary starts to feel extraordinary when your body reminds you it never owed you certainty in the first place.

I’m still figuring this out. Probably one comfortable pair of pants at a time. But maybe that’s what this season is really teaching me. Not how to fight my body. How to become friends with it.

Rosanne | Well, This is New. ♥️

If this resonated, there’s a good chance someone else in your life is quietly holding a version of this story too. Feel free to share this with them.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t advice, it’s having language for something they haven’t been able to name yet.

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And if you’re here because someone shared this with you—welcome. You can subscribe to follow along. I write about the shifts of life as it’s actually experienced; layered, evolving, and often unspoken.

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But somewhere along the way, Father’s Day stopped feeling like a holiday and started feeling like a mirror. Because the older I get, the more I understand what my Dad actually gave me. Not financially. Not materially. Not through speeches or life lessons delivered at exactly the right moment.

He gave me himself.

And I don’t think I understood the magnitude of that until recently.

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When we’re young, we tend to believe we’re building ourselves. We think we’re becoming who we are through our own choices, our own experiences, our own determination. Then one day you’re forty-something years old and realize half your personality was downloaded before you even knew what personality was. Suddenly you catch yourself saying something exactly the way your father would have said it. Approaching a challenge the way he would have approached it. Laughing at something nobody else finds funny. And there he is again. Still shaping you. Still showing up. Still teaching you.

My Dad never raised me to believe I was limited. That may sound simple, but it is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received.

My Dad was one of nine siblings who began his childhood in Mexico, unexpectedly lost his father at the young age of ten when he passed. He then shifted to take care of his mother and siblings. My Dad moved to this country when he was only thirteen. He brought his younger, seven year old brother with him. My Dad became a father figure in that moment. He raised him, and built a life. A life to be proud of.

I knew he did the seemingly impossible at such a young age. This was unknowingly engrained in my belief system. I grew up believing I could figure things out. That hard work mattered. That my word mattered. That showing up mattered. That when things got difficult, you didn’t immediately look for the exit. You looked for the next step. I have carried those lessons into every room I’ve ever entered. Every promotion. Every leadership role. Every setback. Every version of myself.

The truth is, so much of what people compliment me on today was planted by my Dad years ago.

My resilience. My independence. My determination. Even my sense of humor. Although if we’re being honest, I like to think I improved upon the original model. Even if just slightly.

The thing about getting older is that your perspective changes. As a child, you see your parents through the lens of what they do for you. As an adult, you begin seeing them through the lens of who they are. Their sacrifices become visible. Their worries become understandable. Their imperfections become human. Their efforts become extraordinary. And suddenly you realize how much was happening behind the scenes while you were simply being loved.

There have been many moments in my life when I felt strong. Standing on stages. Leading teams. Navigating challenges I never saw coming. Starting over when I wasn’t expecting to. Building a life that looks very different than the one I imagined. Honestly, every single one of those moments traces back to a little girl who had a father teaching her she could. Not because he said it every day. Because he lived it. He showed every day was hard work, with sacrifice, and choice.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that kind of leadership. The quiet kind. The kind that doesn’t need recognition. The kind that shows up consistently. The kind that creates confidence in someone else simply by believing in them first.

This year, Father’s Day feels different. Not because my Dad has changed. But because I have.

I’ve reached the age where I can finally see the full picture. The sacrifices. The example. The steady presence. The countless ways he shaped my life without ever asking for credit. And maybe that’s what gratitude really is. Not simply appreciating what someone did for you. But recognizing how much of who you are exists because they did. Everything I am isn’t because my dad raised me perfectly. It’s because he raised me faithfully. With love. With character. With consistency.

With the quiet belief that I could become whoever I wanted to be. Because he showed me the way he did each and every day.

Turns out, he was right.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Everything good in me has your fingerprints on it. Even the stubborn parts. 😊

Rosanne | Well, this is New ♥️

If this resonated, there’s a good chance someone else in your life is quietly holding a version of this story too. Feel free to share this with them.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t advice, it’s having language for something they haven’t been able to name yet.

Share

And if you’re here because someone shared this with you—welcome. You can subscribe to follow along. I write about the shifts of life as it’s actually experienced; layered, evolving, and often unspoken.

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For most of my life, I didn’t think much about the futures I imagined. I wasn’t someone who had every detail mapped out. There was no vision board tucked into a closet somewhere. No ten-year plan laminated for safekeeping. But if I’m honest, I carried expectations. I think most of us do. Not because someone explicitly tells us what our lives should look like, but because we absorb stories. We watch other people. We make assumptions. We aspire. We quietly build an image of what life will become if we work hard, make good choices, and stay the course.

At twenty-five, forty-two felt impossibly far away. If you’d asked me then what my life would look like now, I suspect I would have painted a very specific picture. Some parts would have been right. Many wouldn’t. Because that’s the thing about imagined futures. They’re built with incomplete information. We create them before we’ve experienced loss. Before we’ve had our hearts broken. Before we’ve sat in doctor’s offices receiving news we never expected. Before we’ve learned what truly matters to us. Before we’ve become who we actually are. We build them with the wisdom available to us at the time. And then life hands us more wisdom.

Lately, I’ve been sitting and thinking about this because I’ve found myself standing in front of one of those invisible losses. The kind that doesn’t come with a funeral or a formal goodbye. The kind that doesn’t always make sense to people around you because, technically, nothing has happened. And yet everything feels different. Sometimes grief arrives through an event. Sometimes it arrives through information. A conversation. A realization. A diagnosis. A sentence spoken out loud that quietly rearranges the future you thought you were walking toward. You leave with the same face, the same body, the same car parked outside. Nothing appears different. Yet something inside you understands that the road ahead may no longer look the way you imagined. That kind of grief can feel surprisingly lonely because it lacks the visible markers we often associate with loss.

What I’ve learned is that grief doesn’t care whether something physically existed. It cares whether it mattered.

• We can grieve a future.

• We can grieve a possibility.

• We can grieve a version of our lives that lived only in our imagination.

And that grief is every bit as real.

For a while, I resisted that idea. It felt indulgent somehow. How could I mourn something that was never guaranteed? Something that had never actually happened? But grief isn’t a courtroom. It doesn’t require evidence. It simply asks us to acknowledge what was meaningful.

The future I imagined mattered to me. The hopes attached to it mattered. The dreams attached to it mattered. The woman carrying those dreams mattered. So rather than arguing with my grief, I’ve been learning to sit beside it. And in doing so, I’ve realized something unexpected.

This isn’t only about one future. It’s about all of them.

The older I get, the more I see how many invisible futures we carry throughout our lives. The career we thought would fulfill us. The relationship we assumed would last forever. The family we expected to have. The version of success we spent years chasing. The person we thought we’d become by now. Some of those futures arrive. Some don’t. Some arrive looking nothing like we imagined. And sometimes the life that unfolds turns out to be richer, stranger, harder, and more beautiful than the one we planned.

I look back now at younger versions of myself with enormous tenderness. She meant well. She really thought certainty was possible. She believed enough preparation could protect her from disappointment.She assumed confidence was something you eventually achieved and then permanently possessed. She thought adulthood would feel significantly more organized. Bless her.

What she couldn’t know then was that life isn’t something we master. It’s something we participate in. And participation requires flexibility. It requires releasing our grip on the exact shape of things. It requires allowing reality to become more interesting than expectation. That’s easier to write than it is to live. There are still moments when I find myself mourning what might have been. Moments when I catch a glimpse of the life I once imagined and feel a familiar ache. But increasingly, those moments are accompanied by something else.

Gratitude.

• Gratitude for the woman who dared to dream those dreams.

• Gratitude for the hope she carried.

• Gratitude for the fact that she believed beautiful things were possible.

Because she wasn’t wrong. The details may have changed. The timeline may have changed. The story may have changed. But beautiful things are still possible.

Perhaps that’s what I’m learning in this season.

The goal isn’t to stop imagining futures. The goal is to stop believing there’s only one version worth wanting. There is wisdom in honoring the lives we thought we’d have. There is wisdom in grieving them when necessary. But there is also wisdom in turning toward the life that’s here instead of endlessly comparing it to the one that isn’t.

The future I lost never existed. But neither did many of the fears I’ve carried over the years. Neither did the worst-case scenarios I spent energy rehearsing. Neither did countless stories I told myself about what would happen next.

The truth is, none of us know how the story ends. Which can feel terrifying. Or freeing. Depending on the day. Today, it feels freeing. Because the life in front of me may not be the one I imagined years ago. But it is real. It is unfolding. It still contains possibility, connection, surprise, heartbreak, joy, and chapters I cannot yet see. And after everything life has taught me so far, I’m beginning to trust that what comes next doesn’t need to match the blueprint I once created to be meaningful. It only needs to be lived.

Rosanne | Well, This is New. ♥️

If this resonated, there’s a good chance someone else in your life is quietly holding a version of this story too. Feel free to share this with them.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t advice, it’s having language for something they haven’t been able to name yet.

Share

And if you’re here because someone shared this with you—welcome. You can subscribe to follow along. I write about the shifts of life as it’s actually experienced; layered, evolving, and often unspoken.

Leave a comment

And to be fair, competence served me well.

It helped build a career I’m proud of. It opened doors, created opportunities, and helped me navigate rooms where I was often one of the only women at the table. It gave me confidence when I needed it and credibility when I hadn’t yet earned the benefit of the doubt. If something needed to get done, I could do it. If a problem appeared, I could solve it. If things got messy, I could usually find a path forward. For years, I viewed those traits as evidence of ambition.

Lately, I’ve started wondering if they were also evidence of something else. What if competence wasn’t just a skill? What if it was protection? Looking back, I can see how early many of us learn that being capable earns approval. The daughter who doesn’t cause problems. The student who gets good grades. The employee who always delivers. The friend who is easygoing. The woman who doesn’t ask for much. The message is rarely spoken out loud, but somehow it settles into us anyway: If you’re useful, you’ll be valued. If you’re capable, you’ll be safe. If you can handle it yourself, you won’t be disappointed. Those beliefs don’t arrive all at once. They build slowly over years, becoming so familiar that they stop feeling like beliefs at all. They simply become the way you move through the world.

And at some point, without realizing it, I stopped being a woman who was competent and became a woman whose sense of security depended on competence.

That’s a very different thing. Because when competence becomes emotional armor, you stop trusting that who you are is enough. Instead, you trust what you can do. You trust your productivity, your reliability, your ability to anticipate needs before they arise, your capacity to carry things. You trust your usefulness. And usefulness can feel incredibly safe. People appreciate useful people. They need them. They praise them. They depend on them. The problem is that usefulness is not the same thing as worth.

One can disappear overnight. The other never should. I think that’s part of what this season of life has been teaching me. Not through one dramatic moment. Through a series of smaller ones.

The kind that arrive unexpectedly and then refuse to leave. A difficult conversation. A diagnosis. A shift in plans. A grief you didn’t see coming.

The realization that a future you quietly loved may not unfold exactly the way you imagined. The kind of moments that stop you long enough to notice what you’ve been relying on all these years. Because for most of my life, competence solved things.

Work challenge? Competence.

Leadership opportunity? Competence.

Difficult room? Competence.

Unexpected obstacle? Competence.

Hard season? More competence.

The formula worked remarkably well. Until it didn’t. Because lately I’ve found myself in situations where competence wasn’t the answer. I couldn’t spreadsheet my way through grief. I couldn’t professionally develop my way through uncertainty. I couldn’t over-perform my way around a diagnosis. I couldn’t leadership-skill my way back to a future I thought I was going to have. I couldn’t solve my way out of sadness.

And for the first time in a very long time, the tool I’d trusted most wasn’t working. That realization was both heartbreaking and strangely freeing. Because when competence stops being the answer, you’re forced to ask different questions. Questions that have nothing to do with productivity.

Questions like:

Can I sit with uncertainty without immediately trying to fix it?

Can I receive support without “earning it”first?

Can I be loved when I’m not useful?

Can I still trust myself when I don’t know what comes next?

Those questions feel much harder than anything I ever encountered in a conference room. And yet, I suspect they’re the questions that matter most. Especially in midlife. Especially when life begins asking us to evolve. I don’t think the goal is to reject competence. I love being capable. I love meaningful work. I love contributing. I love showing up fully for the people and things that matter to me. But I’m becoming less interested in building my identity around how much I can carry. Because the truth is, the version of me who built her life around competence worked incredibly hard. She protected me. She got me through difficult seasons. She taught me how to persevere. She showed up when life demanded more than felt fair. I’m grateful for her. But I’m not sure she gets to lead anymore. The tools that carried me through one chapter may not be the tools I need for the next.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a different set of skills.

Boundaries.

Honesty.

Rest.

Receiving help without immediately trying to reciprocate. Saying, “I don’t have the capacity for that.” Trusting that my worth survives even when my productivity takes the day off. Trusting that being loved and being useful are not the same thing. Trusting that I don’t have to earn belonging through performance. None of those skills come naturally yet. Some days they feel wildly uncomfortable. But discomfort is often what growth feels like when it first arrives.

As I write this, I’m sitting on a plane headed to a girls’ weekend that was planned months ago. And somewhere between the airport security line and the overpriced bottle of water it occurred to me that this trip feels less like a vacation and more like medicine.

A few days away. In the middle of the week. No work mode. No fixing. No solving. No carrying.

No anticipating everyone else’s needs before they have them. Just a group of women showing up exactly as we are. Full hearts. No apologies. No performances. No carefully managed versions of ourselves. Just laughter. Stories. Connection. The kind that reminds you who you are underneath all the roles you’ve spent years carrying. The kind that asks nothing from you except your presence. And maybe that’s the lesson I’m taking with me into this next chapter. Maybe safety was never supposed to come from being useful. Maybe safety comes from being known.

Not for what you do. Not for what you carry. Not for how much you can handle. But for who you are when you finally put some of it down.

Well, This Is New.

If this resonated, there’s a good chance someone else in your life is quietly holding a version of this story too. Feel free to share this with them.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t advice, it’s having language for something they haven’t been able to name yet.

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Instead, burnout, or whatever this season is, has arrived much quieter than that.

It feels less like: “I can’t function.” And more like: “I can no longer pretend certain things feel okay.” Which honestly feels deeply inconvenient considering how long I spent becoming exceptionally good at pretending.

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I think that’s what surprises me most about midlife. Not necessarily the physical changes. Not even the emotional ones. It’s the honesty. The way your body and nervous system slowly stop cooperating with things your younger self tolerated automatically. Things like overcommitting. Emotionally one-sided relationships. Constant availability. Performative busyness. Forced small talk. Being everything for everyone. Pretending exhaustion is normal.

At some point, your internal system just quietly says: “Actually… no.” And suddenly your tolerance changes. Not because you became bitter. Because you became aware. There’s a distinct difference. I notice it in small moments now. How quickly my body identifies emotionally expensive situations. How certain conversations drain me instantly. How little patience I have left for environments where everyone is performing instead of actually connecting. I used to override discomfort like it was a personality trait. Now my nervous system responds more like: “Absolutely not. We are not doing this today.”

Growth.

I also think women eventually reach a point where we stop wanting to perform ease all the time. We get tired of translating ourselves into “pleasant.” Tired of cushioning truth to make it more digestible. Tired of acting endlessly flexible while quietly unraveling underneath. And maybe what looks like burnout externally… is actually honesty internally. Maybe we’re not failing. Maybe we’re finally acknowledging what hurts. What drains us. What no longer fits. What costs too much emotionally. Because I don’t think women magically become “too sensitive” in midlife. I think many of us simply become less willing to betray ourselves for approval. That changes everything.

You start noticing how much energy goes into maintaining appearances, protecting other people’s comfort, minimizing your own needs, and performing emotional steadiness even when you’re exhausted underneath it all. No wonder women are tired! We’ve been managing entire emotional ecosystems for decades while somehow still apologizing for needing rest let alone self-care.

Honestly, if women were compensated financially for emotional labor alone, half of us could retire early and buy vacation homes with excellent lighting. But beneath the humor, I think something very real is happening for many women in this season of life.

A recalibration. A shedding. A slow honesty.

You begin realizing peace feels better than proving yourself. Depth feels better than performance. Rest feels better than being endlessly impressive. And suddenly the life you once maintained so beautifully starts feeling emotionally unsustainable.

Not because you failed. Because you evolved.

I don’t think this season is asking women to become smaller. I think it’s asking us to become more truthful. More honest about capacity. More honest about grief. More honest about exhaustion. More honest about desire. More honest about what kind of life actually feels nourishing now. And maybe the goal isn’t becoming a woman who can name everything without breaking. Maybe the goal is becoming a woman who no longer believes she has to on repeat.

Sitting in this. Honest and evolved. Well, this is new!

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it with someone you know is in a similar shift of life right now.

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For a long time, I thought resilience meant never letting things interrupt me. Not emotions. Not heartbreak. Not my body. Certainly not something as inconvenient as needing rest in the middle of a busy season of life. Especially as a woman in leadership, you learn very quickly that competence becomes currency. The calmer you appear, the more trustworthy you seem. The more you handle, the more valuable you become. The less emotional space you take up, the more “professional” everyone decides you are.

So you adapt.

You become the woman who can hold everything. And eventually, you become so good at carrying things that nobody notices how heavy they are anymore. Sometimes not even you.

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This week, health stopped me in my tracks in a way I wasn’t prepared for. The kind of stop where tears show up before thoughts do. Where your body says, “Actually, we’re going to feel this now,” and apparently there is no unsubscribe button.

In full professional woman leader fashion, I scheduled my doctor’s follow up via Zoom after I arrived and settled into my hotel where I would be setting up for a 3-day conference. A quick appointment added to the agenda. But what I had been quieting in the midst of all the professional things - leading, mentoring, and building strategy; I have been living with pain for the last 5 years. It was intermittent, sometimes mild, gone for a month or two, and sometimes back with a vengeance and an excruciating pain like barbed wire somehow made its way into your favorite pair of slack’s zipper and waistband. I had pushed the need to ‘take care of this’ down low beyond any recognizable priority level because I was adapting with it.

My doctor was so kind and genuine, delivering news that could lead to life-altering treatment and paths forward. The tears rolled down my face without stopping. I listened with a hollow hum ringing in my ears. Time stood in parallel with me. An almost out of body experience stopped and all I could hear were the care pathways my sweet and thorough doctor was sharing. Options. That is good. Yet all I felt was a grief of something never known. I share more about that here.

But today, this appointment was new. Adenomyosis, a word I have never heard before. Endometriomas, four to be exact, this is one of those more is not better situations. Lastly, a more recognizable term, endometriosis. But although I recognized it, I did not. If that makes sense. What does all of this mean? A new lifestyle change. No biggie there, I can adapt and move it forward with discipline and perseverance. The other two paths meant partial and/or full surgery. Down for 3-6 weeks. As a woman, this space means the end of the era. If you know what I mean, a beautiful privilege bestowed to all women. Gone. Not chosen, but left me with the empty feeling. So many emotions flooded my brain that my thoughts and nervous system could not keep up.

And then, because life enjoys irony, less than 12 hours later, I was standing center stage in front of a room full of leaders, storytelling and sharing insights like I hadn’t emotionally dissolved in private the night before. Honestly, it felt very midlife woman coded. One moment: crying hard enough to qualify for electrolyte replacement. The next: “Good morning everyone, thrilled to be here.”

And maybe that’s the strange thing nobody fully explains about this season of life. Women become experts at carrying contradictory realities at the exact same time. We hold heartbreak and professionalism. Grief and calendars. Fear and performance reviews. Disappointment and dinner reservations. Emotional exhaustion and perfectly applied concealer.

We keep showing up because somewhere along the way we learned: capability is safety. The woman who handles things gets respected. Rewarded. But I’m starting to wonder if some of us became so identified with “handling it” that we stopped asking whether we were okay.

Because there’s a difference between resilience and chronic self-abandonment. And I think women get praised for confusing the two all the time. I don’t say this dramatically. I say it lovingly. As someone currently unpacking the realization over again myself. I felt I was moving past this.

The truth is, my body has probably been trying to get my attention for a while now. Bodies are fascinating that way. They will whisper politely for years. Then one day they kick the front door open like a tiny emotionally unstable coach yelling: “WE’RE DEALING WITH THIS NOW.” Very rude behavior honestly.

But also… maybe necessary. Yes, very necessary for me in this moment.

Because I think there comes a point where high-functioning stops being a superpower and starts becoming camouflage. You look successful. Reliable. Calm. Strong.

Meanwhile your nervous system is filing incident reports behind the scenes. And what I’m learning, slowly, imperfectly; is that strength may not actually look the way I thought it did. Maybe strength is not powering through every emotion before it has time to breathe. Maybe strength is not constantly proving your capacity. Maybe strength is not becoming emotionally indestructible. Maybe strength is allowing yourself to be human before your body forces the issue.

This season of life feels different for me. Not because I suddenly became weak. But because I no longer want to confuse depletion for achievement. I still care deeply. Still lead deeply. Still show up fully. But I think I want to do it from a softer place now. A more honest place than before. One where I can admit: sometimes things hurt. Sometimes life changes you unexpectedly. Sometimes your body interrupts the plans your ambition made years ago. And sometimes resilience looks less like powering through…and more like letting yourself fall apart for a minute without believing you failed.

This, well… this is new!

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If this resonated, there’s a good chance someone else in your life is quietly holding a version of this story too. Feel free to share this with them.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t advice, it’s having language for something they haven’t been able to name yet.

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And if you’re here because someone shared this with you—welcome. You can subscribe to follow along. I write about the shifts of life as it’s actually experienced; layered, evolving, and often unspoken.

Familial and friendships. There are people you don’t talk to as often anymore… and still think about all the time. Not in a heavy way. Not in a way that interrupts your day. Just quietly. A passing thought. A memory. A moment where something reminds you of them, and for a second, they’re right there with you again. And then life keeps moving. No one really prepares you for that part of friendship.

Not the kind where something happens and you can point to it. The quieter shift. The kind where nothing is wrong—but something has changed. Conversations become less frequent. Schedules don’t quite line up the same way. The things you used to share easily… take a little more effort now. And because there’s no clear reason, it’s harder to explain, even to yourself.

I think that’s what’s been sitting with me lately: nothing is wrong, but something has shifted. And I can feel it.

Friendship in this season doesn’t come with a clear storyline. There’s no moment that explains it, just a gradual awareness that life has started moving in different directions. Some people are raising kids. Some are navigating relationships. Some are building careers. Some are quietly rethinking everything they thought they wanted aka me!

And even when the connection is still there, the day-to-day experience of life isn’t always shared in the same way. That changes things.

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Not in a way that breaks the friendship, but in a way that reshapes it. And I think that’s the part no one really talks about. Friendships don’t just end. Sometimes they evolve. Sometimes they stretch. Sometimes they become something different than they were, without anyone agreeing to it. And that can feel disorienting.

Because you can miss someone, even when nothing bad happened. You can feel distance, even when there’s still care. You can love someone, and still not feel as close as you once did. That’s a strange thing to hold, especially when you’re used to being aligned. You mourn it, what once was.

There was a time when friendships felt more effortless. Proximity did a lot of the work. Shared routines, shared stages, shared priorities. You didn’t have to think about maintaining connection, it was just built into your life.

Now it’s different.

It requires intention, timing, energy, and sometimes, even with all of that, it still feels like you’re slightly out of sync. I’ve had moments where I’ve caught myself wondering if I should be doing more, reaching out more, trying harder to recreate what used to feel natural. And then I pause. Because not everything that changes needs to be fixed.

That’s been the shift for me, seeing these moments not as something breaking, but as something becoming more honest. Growth doesn’t always happen in the same direction, and expecting it to can quietly create pressure that doesn’t need to be there. Pressure that turns into anxiety and the stories big and small you tell yourself.

Some friendships stay close. Some shift into something lighter. Some come back around later and pick up where they left off. And some take up less space than they once did, not because they matter less, but because life looks different now. Life at its core evolves us. Why would friendships in midlife be any different.

And within that, I’ve started noticing something else. Not just what’s changing, but what’s staying. The friendships I’m choosing to keep close. Not out of habit. Not out of history alone. But because of how they feel now. The ones where the conversation still lands, even if it’s less frequent. The ones where there’s room to be brutally honest, even when life looks different. The ones that don’t require constant tending to still feel real.

They’re not always the loudest or the most visible, but they’re steady. There’s an ease to them that doesn’t depend on proximity or perfectly aligned schedules, just a mutual understanding of trust and authenticity.

And maybe that’s the shift within the shift. Not holding on to everything the same way, but becoming more intentional about what still fits. There’s a maturity in allowing both things to be true, letting some friendships evolve into something lighter or inevitably end as a result. While also recognizing which ones still feel like home, without over-explaining it or forcing it.

Because the truth is, we’re all navigating different versions of life at the same time. And sometimes, that means we don’t walk as closely together for a while. That doesn’t erase what was. It just acknowledges what is. And that is ok. Keeping the history as sacred memories.

And if I’m honest, there’s something quietly relieving about that. Less pressure to maintain a version of connection that no longer fits. More space to appreciate what still does. Less “are we okay?” energy. More “this is what it looks like right now.”

Still care. Still history. Just… different. And at the same time, something else has become clearer. Just because a friendship looks different doesn’t mean the love has changed. It just moves differently now, quieter, less visible, but still there.

There are people I don’t talk to as often as I used to, people who aren’t part of my life or everyday rhythm anymore, and still, I think of them. In the middle of a random day. In a passing moment. For no reason I can fully explain. Just a quiet, “I hope they’re okay.” A connection that hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just not as loud.

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Midlife friendship is just that, different. Less calls, more “thinking of you” moments. Sending a text. Less constant connection, more trust that it’s still there. And I think that’s what surprised me most. That real friendships just grow in softer, deeper ways. Less frequent, maybe. But more meaningful. More chosen. More understood.

And those moments, the ones that are fewer, but fuller. Those are the ones I’ve started to cherish the most with each passing day. Belly laughs for days and days. Secret code language to refer to memories of the distant and not so distant past. Forever engrained in my heart.

I’m still learning how to hold all of this without overthinking it, without assigning meaning too quickly, without assuming distance equals something negative. Because sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes it just means life is full, and people are doing the best they can within it. Holding space and taking a pause.

If you’ve felt this shift too, where friendships don’t feel the same, but also aren’t broken, you’re not the only one. You’re just in a season where things are evolving like me. It’s ok. Not any simpler but perhaps clearer.

And maybe the work isn’t to fix it. Maybe it’s to understand it, to give it a little more room to be what it is now, and to notice, quietly, who is still there, why they are there, just in a different way.

I’m curious, is there someone you don’t talk to as often anymore, but still think about? Maybe this is the perfect timing for a quick nudge, a ‘thinking of you or remember when moment’.

For some, it’s joy. The cards, the brunch reservations, the posts that say exactly what you’re supposed to feel. For others, it’s complicated. And for many of us, it’s both. I’ve been thinking about that this year. Not just what Mother’s Day celebrates, but what it reveals. The version of you who is someone’s daughter. The version of you who may be trying to become a mother. The version of you who is still figuring out what that even means in this season of life. And how all of those versions can exist at the same time.

There’s something about this stage of life that makes that more visible. More layered. You start to see your parents differently, not just as parents, but as people. People who had their own pressures, their own hopes, their own ways of trying to get it right. Doing their best even if trauma accompanied it. And somewhere in that, you begin to understand yourself differently too. I grew up with a quiet understanding. Culturally, it wasn’t harsh. The too common saying ‘it was a different time’. It wasn’t even constant. But it was there, just enough to shape how I moved through the world. How I spoke. How I valued myself. How I showed up after trauma. How I learned to read a room before I fully entered it. It became instinct. And for a long time, I didn’t question it. Because it looked like maturity. Like awareness. Like doing things “right.”

But Mother’s Day has a way of pulling on a different thread too. One that doesn’t always have a clear story.

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I remember sitting in a doctor’s office in my mid-twenties, watching an ultrasound screen as my OB-GYN pointed out what she called “complex cysts” on my ovaries. She spoke calmly, professionally—sharing statistics, possibilities, outcomes at my young age. But all I really remember is the feeling hearing the big word - Infertility. A quiet chill that ran down my back. The sound of her voice became distant, almost like something out of a Peanuts cartoon. I could hear it, but I couldn’t fully process the words. Was it shock? Intensity? Surprise? Yes. All of it. And then - nothing. The car ride home was pure silence, processing and realizing a moment that could create a future for me.

Not outwardly. Not visibly. I didn’t face it. I didn’t process it. I didn’t stay with it long enough to understand what it meant. I moved on. Or more accurately, I moved forward, quickly. Into my career. Into growth. Into something that felt exciting, distracting, and rewarding. I built, I led, I progressed. I helped others grow. And in many ways, that part of my life expanded exactly as I had hoped. Picture perfect on paper.

But that quiet moment never really left, it was engrained. It just… shifted. It became something I didn’t look at directly. Something I could set aside most days, but not entirely. It showed up in quieter ways. In baby shower invitations. Gender reveals. Family announcements. Not loudly. Not in a way anyone else could see. But enough. Enough to feel it.

And still, I kept moving. I celebrated the moments I could step into. Being an auntie. Playing with littles. Laughing, spinning, holding joy where it naturally existed. And for a long time, that was enough. Or at least—it was what I allowed to be enough. Because as long as my health was “fine,” as long as nothing was urgent, I didn’t have to revisit the question. Time moved. Life filled in. Until it didn’t.

Now, in this season, with new awareness, new information, and facing new health realities and diagnosis; endometriosis, adenomyosis, and a few endometriomas. What was once quiet has become physically and emotionally painful. Impossible to ignore. That question I had set aside is no longer sitting quietly in the background. It’s asking to be answered. And the answer, as simple as it sounds, hasn’t been easy to say out loud: Yes.

• Yes, I want to explore this understanding the risks.

• Yes, I want to understand what’s possible with beams of hope in my heart.

• Yes, I’m willing and ready to step into the complexity of it.

And that decision, clear as it is. It hasn’t made everything feel resolved. It has broken me open. The weight and heaviness, opened something deeper the unknown uncertainty, from many years ago. From bright flashes of a future life, a what-if highlight real, to the swing of the very low outcomes and statistics swirling their way through my mind. The quiet ache I carried for years never disappeared. It’s changed. More present. Less avoidable. It sits in a place I spent a long time protecting. And now, I’m learning how to be with it. Research and learning day by day. Test by test. Question by question. Daydream by daydream. Not with certainty, but with honesty and the deepest of hope.

And that, for me, is what Mother’s Day holds this year. Not a single story. Not a clear label. An uncertain future. But a layered, evolving experience of what it means to hold this question in real time. To be both grounded in where I am and open to what could still be possible. Not yet ready to face that opposite reality. Mother’s Day isn’t one feeling. It’s not one path. It’s not one version of a life well lived. It’s layered. And maybe that’s what makes it meaningful.

The ability to hold gratitude, reflection, hope, and uncertainty, all at the same time. If today feels simple for you, I’m so glad. If it feels layered, you’re not alone. And if you’re in a season where something is unfolding in a way you didn’t expect, I see you in that too, grace and courage ♥️.

Rosanne | Well, This is New.

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If this resonated, there’s a good chance someone else in your life is quietly holding a version of this story too. Feel free to share this with them.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t advice, it’s having language for something they haven’t been able to name yet.

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And if you’re here because someone shared this with you—welcome. You can subscribe to follow along. I write about the shifts of life as it’s actually experienced; layered, evolving, and often unspoken.

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Where it started

If I’m honest, this didn’t begin in adulthood. It started much earlier. I grew up with a phrase that was never loud—but always present: Don’t embarrass me. It wasn’t said in a harsh way. It was said in a way that felt like guidance. Expectation. Care. But those words stayed with me. It was a sense of pride to make my family proud. They showed up, and those words showed up in moments where I wanted to take risks. An anti-call. When I wanted to speak differently. When something in me pushed against the way things were supposed to be.

Even as a kid, walking onto the playground, heading toward the jungle gym, there was already a quiet voice in my head: Be good. Not too loud. Not too much. Not disruptive. Just… good. That followed me. Into middle school, choosing where to show up based on what made sense, what fit, what kept things smooth. Into high school, aligning with achievement, structure, the “right” path of college applications, scholarships, forward motion. The drive was real. The ambition was real. But looking back now, talking with friends who lived it alongside me, we’ve said the same thing; we can see the boundaries now. Clear as day. At the time, we didn’t even know they were there. They weren’t rules we were told. They were rules we absorbed.

Where I sharpened

Then I entered the workforce. A male-dominated industry. Rooms where I was often the only woman. And there’s a kind of smallness that shows up. Like being the only person without noise cancelling headphone on a flight. People see you and know that you are doing or saying something, but they don’t hear what it is. Not because you aren’t capable, but because of how you’re received. I’ve been talked over. Belittled. Most frustratingly diminished. And without even realizing it, those early childhood standards came right back in those moments…

• Don’t embarrass yourself.

• Prove you belong.

• Don’t disrupt too much.

So I responded the only way I knew how: Do more. Be sharper. Be more prepared. As a leader, this is easily done. Be the one who proves without saying a word, that you belong. Because that’s what a “good girl” does. She adapts. She delivers. She doesn’t question the standard. And that standard followed me everywhere until I gave them a reason to take off their noise cancelling headphones.

You can review more of this unlearning in my previous article below.

The question that changed it

There wasn’t a dramatic turning point. Just a quieter realization. I wasn’t just responding to what was required. I was responding to who I believed I needed to be. And once I saw that, I didn’t need a full system. I just needed one question I could come back to. Does this feel like a version my future self will thank me for? Not the version of me that wants to keep things smooth. A regret. Not the version of me that knows how to handle everything. The version of me that is actually building a life that fits. That question pulls me out of habit and into alignment. Alignment was the pull forward. It was not easy. Still isn’t. But it was much-needed.

The part I think about now

Sometimes I think about my younger self. The one on the playground. The one choosing carefully. The one learning how to fit without realizing she was doing it. If she had asked that question; would this version of me thank me for this? What could have been different? Not the ambition. Not the drive. But maybe the way I used it. Maybe it would have looked less like proving and more like expressing. Less about fitting into the structure and more about shaping it. Less about being “good” and more about being fully myself.

What’s changed

I didn’t lose my ability to drive results and lead. I just stopped letting that be the default. Now, I pause. And more often than I used to, I choose differently. Not perfectly. But intentionally. And that’s created something I didn’t have before: space. The kind that lets you feel what actually fits instead of what you’ve been taught to carry.

Where I am now

Those old standards still show up. Quietly. Quickly. “It’s easier if I do it.” But I don’t want to make this harder. I see them. And once you see something like that, you have a choice. You don’t have to follow it just because it feels familiar.

What I know now

I know my value. Not in a way that needs to be proven, but in a way that’s steady. I know the impact I have in rooms, in relationships, in the way I move through my life. And I don’t want to play small anymore. Not in the subtle, socially acceptable ways that once felt like strength. I want to play in ways that feel honest. Expansive. Fully aligned with who I actually am.

If this feels familiar

If you’ve ever felt like you’re more than anyone asked you to be, there’s a good chance it didn’t start recently. It just followed you. You don’t have to unlearn it all at once. Just start with the question. Does this feel like a version my future self will thank me for? And maybe, this is the part that feels new.

You get to decide what game of standards you’re playing now. I’m choosing one rooted in truth and intentionality. You’re invited to play the game truest to you and I sure hope you do the same.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you. What’s one standard you’re starting to question?

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Rosanne | Well, This is New.

If this resonated, there’s a good chance someone else in your life may be quietly noticing a shift and trying to move differently.

Feel free to share this with them.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t advice. It’s language for something they haven’t been able to name yet.

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Because there were days where I wasn’t that busy, and I still felt… off. Not exhausted. Just slightly drained. Less clear. Less present. A little disconnected from myself. Easily distracted. And for a long time, I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Until I stopped looking at what I was doing and started looking at what I was holding on to regularly. That’s where the difference is. Because energy doesn’t just go to action. It goes into everything around me.

The anticipating. The tracking. The remembering. The quiet mental checklist running in the background at all hours of the day or night that no one else sees.

The part where you’re already thinking about what could happen next—before anything has actually happened. That’s where most of my energy was going. Not the work itself. The constant awareness of it. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. It’s like the old adage, “It’s like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere”. So no matter how much rest or self-care methods I attempted, I was never able to get back that energy lost or reset. Because as soon as I restored my energy and felt I would be recharged, I was holding on to so much I lost it by getting back into that rocking chair each day.

What depletion actually looks like

It’s not huge or elaborate. It looks like: checking something one more time and replaying a conversation after it’s over at 3 am. Thinking about what needs to happen next before you’ve even finished what you’re doing or planning. I was constantly holding space for things that were future driven not a looming deadline. But my body felt no difference in either case.

None of it feels like a big deal. But it adds up. And over time, it creates a baseline of: always slightly “on.” Even when nothing is actually required of you.

The shift

I stopped asking: “Do I have time for this?” And started asking: “What kind of energy does this require?” Because not everything costs the same of the energy reserve. Some things: move you forward and feel aligned better yet, they give you clarity. This is priceless. Others though may linger, slowly but consistently drain quietly and take more than they can give back. And I had been treating them the same.

The tool I use now. I keep it simple. I started noticing everything I engage with through three categories:

1. Expanding - These give energy. They create clarity. They move something forward. They feel aligned, even if they require my focused effort.

2. Neutral - These just exist. Logistics. Admin. Prep. Things that need to be done, but don’t take much from you. Almost in an auto-pilot mode.

3. Depleting - These take more than they give. They linger. They create friction. Stress impacts. They stay in your head longer than they should.

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What changed

I didn’t try to optimize everything. I just started reducing what was unnecessarily depleting. That alone changed more than I expected. The clarity and mental shelf space began to clear. Not because I had more time. But because I wasn’t constantly carrying things that didn’t need to be carried. I officially got out of the ‘rocking chair’.

What surprised me

Some of the things I thought were productive, were just… draining. Perhaps once thought to be proactive. And some of the things I wasn’t prioritizing—were the ones that actually mattered. The things that light me up. That’s when I realized: Energy is a better measure than time.

Where I am now

I still feel the pull. To stay slightly “on.” To think ahead. To keep everything moving. But now I notice it, this is new. And when I do, I don’t want to get back into that space. I come back to something simple: Not everything deserves my energy just because I’m capable of giving it.

If this feels familiar

If you’ve been feeling slightly drained in a way you can’t fully explain—look at what you’re holding, not just what you’re doing. That’s usually where the answer is.

And if you want to keep exploring this with me—the patterns, the shifts, the things we’re learning to put down— please come along by subscribing. I’m writing through it in real time.