For me, it was more a soft landing than a hard one; a surface I crept into rather than jolted head first. It was the making of years, not minutes; of experiences, not moments. The episodes were long seasons, oscillating between high highs and lower lows.

Rock bottom has a stereotype for the material addicts of the world: alcohol, narcotics, substances. We often forget about those with more cellular, behavioral diseases: the depressed, the anxious, the chronically starved.

For most of my teenage years and early twenties, I felt unstoppable. Like I could take on anything and do anything anyone asked of me; I could learn new things and stretch myself like elastic into any room or audience. My body, my brain, and my spirit were on autopilot.

I was slipping away from the girl I was and becoming someone unrecognizable to myself.

How do you know when you’ve hit rock bottom?

You… don’t.

Rock bottom is hindsight. Hindsight is 20/20.

In my personal experience, hitting rock bottom felt like a runaway train — so much momentum I mistook it for control. For 10 years, I felt this massive, expansive, endless sense of growth. In every corner of my life, I was picking up prizes, trophies, accolades. I was running so fast and catching so much steam, that I could never see a world in which I ran low.

I was molding experiences that didn’t belong to me. Squeezing into clothes that weren’t my size, aligning furniture in a room that wasn’t mine, despite how much I wanted it to be.

I was running uphill. Which made the descent feel that much steeper.

I truly think that — in our darkest moments — the only person who can pull you out is yourself. While the helping hands are nice-to-haves and certainly provide a warm blanket to wrap yourself in, the only person who’s going to wake you up from your bad dream is your own conscience.

No matter how many people told me to chill out, to take a breath, to just go with the flow, there was always an alarm going off in the back of my head: “No, they’re wrong, you gotta keep going. You’re not doing enough.”

The maddening part is that from the outside, it looked like I was doing the work. I journaled and did all of the “self help” but never once let the pen near the thing that actually scared me. It was all surface level. I said yes to everything and finished nothing, because commitment meant deciding — and deciding meant I might choose wrong, or worse, choose right and still fail. In college, that scattered, sprinting-in-every-direction energy read as ambition. It looked good on a resume. Post-grad, nobody was grading the resume anymore.

I was just a person who couldn’t sit still long enough to ask herself what she actually wanted.

The one thing that woke me up from my lucid dream? Myself. The realization that I was going to burn the f*** out (more than I already had) if I didn’t get a grip on my life.

I guess I just got tired of not seeing real progress. That meant I needed to start aligning every corner of my life to one I actually want to live.

With a lot of real journaling, tough conversations, and new firsts that took me out of my comfort zone, I sluggishly woke up.

I moved to a new city, changed my surroundings, tried to make new friends. Nothing.

So I tried again. Moved home, got out of New York, changed jobs.

Nope. Try again.

Now, I’m on my third city and third job in three years, but that’s not what did it.

I always thought that my external surroundings were responsible for my peace.

And now that I’ve taken the time to pour myself into something I really love — writing, serving, connecting with others — I’ve realized that the power has always lain with me.

What’s more — the more I looked inward, the more I realized that the impact and the connection I want to make matters so much more than I do. It was time I start really contributing to something greater than myself, of thinking about others first

A quote from my favorite movie that is quite fitting:

“You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself” - Glinda The Good, The Wizard of Oz

Hitting Rock Bottom Turned Out to Be the Best Thing for Me

A year and a half ago, I would sit in my room, curled up in a ball, with a box of chocolate next to me and stress eat. I would eat until I felt whole again: that wholeness came from me filling a deep void in my stomach that would, literally, be full.

No other antidote did it for me. Something about the loneliness and being with just myself and my thoughts, and a box of chocolate that would never talk back to me nor give me its opinion, felt right. It felt safe. And safety was something I deeply struggled with.

Unfortunately, I was feeding more than just my stomach: I was feeding the beast. I disassociated myself so much that a lack of connection felt normal. And that new normalcy set in after a while.

I began to mistake loneliness for liking to be alone, something I still do today.

For so much of my childhood, I felt like a burden, a nuisance, a mistake — I felt I had to replicate that in my adult life. That I could be present everywhere except where it mattered most: with myself.

I rarely looked inside myself and asked myself what really mattered to me.

To show the world every side of me felt outlandish — the loud parts, the lost parts, the parts still deciding who they were.

Hitting “rock bottom” allowed me to start doing that. Putting pen to paper, communicating, creating meaning through art — all things my dad saw in me long before I did. He said as much in his last letter, the one I still return to when I forget.

Once I finally started writing, I started feeling like myself again. Gaining hope and perspective and clarity. I still don’t know if I’d recognize the girl from three cities ago, or if I’d even want to — but for the first time, I recognize the one writing this.

When you’re in the darkness, the light feels impossible. I’ve felt the suffocation and tunnel vision, but the only way out is through.

Do the work, look inside, feel whatever it is you’re feeling, but be honest about it.

On a brighter note: the moving is done and now the fun part of organizing and decorating is here. Hope you have a nice last week of “summer.”

Win Today.

Real feedback I received this past weekend. Me, a crazy 25-year-old, staying out until the next morning. Something that, while was routine in my teenage and college days, has long been decommissioned.

For some, I go to bed “early,” between 9 and 9:30pm when I can on weekdays, and by 10pm on weeknights (with the exception, exhibit A above). But I also get up by 4:30am on weekdays and like to start my Saturday and Sundays by 6:30am. I’m most productive then (I’ve done my own research on my body clock and circadian rhythm)

I do my best work in the morning and like to make enough time for myself (writing, journaling, working on my book(!), reading, etc.) both when I wake up and before I go to bed.

I’m witnessed firsthand that life moves too fast. I was both a child and a parent at once, I learned to file taxes before I could drive, and then I swam a little too close to the deep end for a little too long. Through it all, I’ve adapted, adjusted and acclimated, and I’m finally finding the space and time to tune into myself.

If there’s one thing I’ve really picked up on, it’s that we have no time for anything yet time for everything. Something always has to go, so what’s it going to be?

You want to do it all. You want to be superwoman.

I was recently reminded (and humbled) that I can’t be everything for everyone. There will be times where I’m not going to have the answer, I’m not going to be the first call or the friend that is needed. But that’s ok, because we all have our time and our place. We all play a different role in each other’s lives, and you’re only responsible for showing up as that friend — as YOU.

I’ve written a lot about my childhood and how I was lucky enough to have not just one saving grace, but a village to help me rise from the trenches. And, I’m even luckier that the same girls who jumped in the snow in bathing suits at my dad’s shiva are the same girls I call my best friends today.

The thing is, we grew up together. The 8 women we are today look a little different than the 8 women we were 10 years ago. But we love each other all the same, unconditionally, flaws and all.

We were sitting around a table, eating breakfast together, already annoyed that it took my friend 20 minutes to make 7 eggs because she insisted they be strained for texture purposes (spoiler: the eggs were really good, but arguably not worth the wait. As one friend put it, the beauty of eggs lie in their hastiness). We were debriefing the night before, and my friends poking fun that, while I stayed out late for my standards, I was still the first one home.

And I did the thing… where I take offense. I put on my armor and was rightfully called out for it. But here’s the thing: I did what I have always done. I felt my body priming for flight mode (my heart rate spiked to 118bpm, no joke), hollowed out, capsized by my choices and rattled that I was different.

In that moment, I let the fear of being different blind me from making a core memory with my friends. More than anything, I forgot what means the most: my friends love me regardless of what time I leave the club. They love me for me.

My choices, actions, and thoughts might look different. But they only need to serve one person: me.

The Subtle Art of Growing Up

It’s innate that we grow, evolve, and adapt as beings. I know in my heart that my habits have changed “for the better” — I make decisions that benefit my wellbeing, I choose food that makes me feel good, I partake in what I enjoy and, less and less, am not wasting time on things I don’t.

But it’s still so hard to be confident in the life I’m building, because, at any moment, the floor could drop out from under me and, boom, fail.

So I’ve felt this burdening weight of needing to be more for others while being less of myself.

And I think I’ve had it backwards.

While stacking wins are great for the ego, what we really need to grow are the losses. The losses that build stamina, persistence, and grit.

That’s why I’m glad I added a tally to the “loss” bucket this week.

Losses remind us that we are not immortal. Our limits are defined by our ability, our lanes bound by time. Losses matter just as much, if not more, than the wins — not because we need to be humbled or toned down.

Because of the outcome. Wins signal that we did something good. Losses teach us there is more to be done: how we react, our ability to process complex emotions, how and where we choose resilience and persistence.

This week, I took a step back and reframed: what could I have done differently at the table? How could I have adjusted my approach and reaction, instead of taking offense and letting myself get overwhelmed? What can I learn from this and where and how can I make a positive change?

Most importantly, can I take this loss and turn it into a win?

I’ve viewed much of my life as needing to be a continuous win, applying the definition of a “win” as a binary outcome: you can only win if you don’t lose.

But that’s not true,

I talk a lot about bouncing back, about building a life from adversity and overcoming childhood grief, trauma and devastation. But I don’t think we talk enough about how that carries us through adulthood and how it lives in everyday interactions and reactions.

If we don’t talk about it, nothing will change.

The moment you make the first change is the moment you win. Not when you cross the finish line after a big race, but the moment you decide to put the shoes on and start training.

Not when I have some extraterrestrial, mind-blowing reaction, but when I make the first switch and adopt a positive mindset, deciding to do better.

“The presence is for the optimist.”

You have nothing to prove to anyone but yourself. For me, confidence is what I lack most. The gap between who I am and who I want to be is my greatest fear. But I will get there with time, effort, and discipline. By continuing to put one step in front of the other, course-correcting frequently and deliberating, and taking losses in stride.

Whatever it is you need, you will find the same power.

Win Today.

This was and is for you, dad.

1. 12 birthdays

2. 4 Phillies playoff series (he would have been right there on the baseline)

3. 3 Elon Dad’s Weekends, where he would have bonded with my friends’ dads and shot terribly in golf

4. 2 Eagles Super Bowl wins, though I know he still celebrated proudly

5. 1 global pandemic that cut my freshman year of college short and encouraged my brother and I to get creative building workouts in the driveway. He would’ve loved the creativity and all of the time we were forced outside. I imagine he would’ve spent most of it throwing a baseball, though his business would have been hard as the restaurant scene was forced to quickly adapt

6. My high school graduation, Annette handing me my diploma and me, sitting front row as a class officer.

7. College graduation, four years later, marked by his same empty seat. He would have been proud to see my opening remarks as part of my Business Fellows graduation.

8. Bill from driving school teaching me to parallel park in a Target parking lot, since he never got the chance.

9. Touring colleges and grilling the admissions center on academics, honor societies, and extracurriculars. He was a huge advocate of community involvement.

10. Crying in his arms after getting my heart broken for the first time.

11. Then, more gossip sessions over high school boys and how much they sucked, and him telling me that I just haven’t found “the one” yet.

12. Meeting Connor (the one) for the first time, and the many conversations, laughs, and baseball games they would share together.

13. The fight we would have had over my prom dresses; he would have insisted I cover up entirely, neck to toes.

14. The agony of his strategic planning that would have been a multiple-day ordeal as part of moving into my first dorm room, then my first apartment in NYC, then, finally, to Boston.

15. Listening to the life lesson he would have taught me after picking me up from a concert after I got too drunk at the ripe age of 16. I’ll tell myself he would have been the “cool” parent in this situation.

16. The very serious feedback session we would have had after my first shift as a waitress. He’d make me walk him through the whole shift, analyze it myself, and then tell me what he would have done differently. Constructive, if anything.

17. Sending him pictures from the Glasshouse in NYC, where I was asked to speak in his honor at an Elon LEADS Campaign in front of 200+ attendees.

18. The call I would have made to him after class at Elon, telling him how I learned how to value companies using this crazy method called the DCF, and he would proceed to pitch me a penny stock and force me to value it just to try to justify his investment.

19. The same daily phone call on the way home from class, this time in tears over how I epically failed my first macro exam and would never make it in the big leagues because I could never remember how to draw surpluses and deficits.

20. My first internship, and showing him how I lit up in the corporate world, analyzing financials and modeling interest rate payments, realizing this was as a career I wanted to pursue.

21. Calling him after my first day at my “big girl” job at Goldman. Our call would have lasted for hours as he asked me questions I couldn’t answer. Turns out, I didn’t need Econ.

22. Finally learning the recipe to his secret pasta sauce.

23. Asking him if he had it figured out in his 20’s, and what he wished he knew when he was my age. A dad’s advice is so critical in such a confusing and perplexing time in a daughter’s life.

24. One last hug, kiss on the cheek, or “you got this” — especially when I needed it these last two years. I would give anything to hear his voice again.

25. The back and forth pros and cons list we would have drafted, edited and deciphered in launching this platform. He would have kept insisting I follow my dreams and passions, and here I am, doing just that. I made my own list, dad.

25 things is really just an undercount — the real list runs longer than any note could hold, tucked into every mundane Tuesday he’ll never get to complain about with me. I used to think grief was about counting what’s gone. Now I think it’s about counting what keeps happening anyway — birthdays, box scores, butterflies — proof that life insists on continuing whether or not the people we want most are here to witness it.

Question for you: Whose list are you keeping, and what’s one thing they’ve missed?

Leave your answer in the comments.

Remember them. Keep going. Win Today.

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No co-signer, no loan, no parent walking me through a dealership (thankfully, Poppop had her dropped off — no dealership theatrics required). At the time, I knew no different. Now, I’d have serious respect for any teenager who saved every dollar she made to buy her own way out. Because for me, money has always been a contested topic. It did a lot of the taking in my childhood. It’s also what paved my way out.

You already know I had a comfortable childhood. Not rich, but I never once questioned whether we’d eat that day. I grew up in a townhome — no yard, no single-family house. I had what I needed, most of what I wanted, and the yearly family vacation. All up until I was thirteen.

I want to tell you it started with the house. But it started before that, in the space between my dad’s diagnosis and his death, where the bills arrived faster than anyone could explain them to two kids who still thought the biggest threat to our family was cancer, full stop — not the invoice it left behind.

Medical debt doesn’t knock. It shares a very thin wall with survival. And I learned fast that hard work and survival are not, contrary to what we’re told, the same transaction.

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We lost the house within months of losing him. I’ve written that sentence before, and it still reads the same way every time: flat, factual, like I’m reading someone else’s bank statement. “Foreclosure” wasn’t a word in my vocabulary until that day, and I still couldn’t process the size of it. The bank was taking our house, and we had to go — anywhere but there. I thank my angels (my dad, specifically) every day that my grandmother was in a position to move us down the street, so we didn’t have to uproot our whole lives twice. So down the street we went. That’s just what happened, the way water finds the low point in a yard.

The funny thing: I don’t actually remember being scared during any of that. I remember being useful. I remember learning, at thirteen, that if I could help myself, if I could make my own money and keep it, I stopped being one more thing someone had to carry. That felt like the safest job available to me, so I took it.

So, in keeping with my overachieving, obsessive nature, I poured myself into learning about money, too. My life, as I understood it, had changed because of two factors: my dad dying, which I couldn’t control, and money, which I could.

What I Thought Money Meant

Money quickly became synonymous with the root of all evil. Too little and you can’t survive. Too much and you inevitably become greedy, selfish, all-consuming. But — money was also the only path to freedom I could see. How do you build a healthy relationship with something you’ve decided is simultaneously your enemy and your only way out? Short answer: you don’t, not until you actually understand the thing.

Early Innings

Annette drove me to the bank to open my first CD. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen. I didn’t understand then what an act of faith that was. I understood it as a transaction: she showed up, I signed, we left. It took me a decade to realize that was the first time anyone had treated my money like it mattered — like it was worth protecting, like it was mine, like it would take me somewhere.

That’s when it clicked: no one was going to make the money for me. I was going to earn it. I was going to spend it only where it counted, where it functioned as a tool instead of just an exchange. I was also going to hoard it, and get quietly terrified to spend any of it unless I could justify the ROI.

Being the girl on the free-lunch program and state-funded healthcare, you spend a lot of energy worrying what people think, and with that comes the need to mask it. I learned that things could build the mask. I just hadn’t worked out how to afford both the mask and the savings account.

Knock-offs. Random splurges. Always chasing the next thing, while telling myself the story that the money was better saved than spent — because college was coming, and I was my own greatest resource.

Approaching College

Touring schools made the price tag real fast. Every tour came with homework: financial aid packages, scholarship terms, loan math done at night on my own time. I remember thinking the worst thing I could do to myself was graduate in student debt. I equated it, dead serious, with my dad’s medical debt. Not happening.

So I worked my ass off. All the awards, all the overachieving — I can see now the pressure I put myself under, but it was in service of one goal: earn the education, earn the diploma, earn the job. Everything, for the future version of me.

Annette put scholarship opportunities in front of me and made it clear it was never a question — I was going to a great university and building an even greater career. She got me in front of the school district, local shops, the Rotary Club, and from there, Comcast, Dunkin’, regional banks. All of it, money toward a future I hadn’t earned yet on paper.

The deciding factor in choosing Elon was, aside from the academic rigor, the money — their Odyssey Scholarship and Business Fellows programs, stacked on top of everything I’d already built in high school, funded my own full ride. I don’t think it gets much better than that. Maybe being the scholarship girl had its perks after all.

Money, at that point, was my greatest superpower.

Post-Grad

New York dismantled that illusion fast. The thing that had been my superpower for four years now meant something else entirely — half my income went to survival and upkeep, despite technically earning a living wage. Another 25% went to taxes and healthcare. Granted, I didn’t need to live the fast-lane lifestyle. I just wanted, badly, to fit in.

Ordering food I couldn’t pronounce. Carrying bags that cost more than rent. Paying rent I couldn’t justify on paper. Life got expensive, fast, and that old switch flipped again — money was taking from me, and I needed more of it just to keep up.

I signed a lease in a doorman building because a doorman building felt like proof I’d made it. I said yes to every party, every dinner, every $26 cocktail. I’ve always been excellent at building a narrative around a decision I’d already made. Then I’d open my banking app and feel the floor tilt: thinner than it looked from the outside, and thin was the one thing I’d promised myself I’d never be again.

I lasted two years before admitting the math wasn’t actually the problem. Well before that, I knew I was drowning in the overwhelm, thisss close to rock bottom. Trying to spend my way out of a scarcity I’d never priced correctly to begin with. No lifestyle upgrade was going to cover that invoice, and the imposter syndrome (crystallized by a multitude of factors, money being one of them) crept up. I moved back home to Philly to figure out what was next — and to save a shitload of money.

Where I’m at Today with Money

Life is still, and always will be, expensive — a joke that never stops being exactly as funny as a bad joke should. But that’s not actually what keeps me up. What keeps me up is that money has become one of the loudest voices in my life, especially in terms of my future, my relationship, and my goals. In fact, life is never going to get cheaper: friends getting married, getting married, kids… it only goes up from here.

The uncertainty surrounding my financial livelihood as a child has scarred me in more ways than one, so I find myself budgeting every dollar I spend on every item I buy, categorizing it and then analyzing where I tend to over- or under extend myself, and how that relates to actually building a “better” life: one full of experiences and memories, not things.

I’ve also, predictably, built myself a side-hustle — this one, actually, the one you’re reading right now. But I’m building this not need to make money, but rather a place to say the thing out loud. To let others know that they are not alone, in whatever it is they are going through. Which might be the first time in this entire story that money and I agreed not to be in the room together. (As always, all subscribers are welcome).

My Takeaways & How I Can Help You

I used to think all of this — the car, the CD, the refusal to ask anyone for anything — was a story about resilience. I’ve grown to think it’s actually a story about proof. Every dollar I earned as a kid wasn’t about the dollar. It was evidence. Evidence that I could survive without the house, without him, without a floor that other families seemed to come with standard. I built my own floor out of babysitting cash and a car I paid for outright — the same floor I wrote about building shift by shift in the last post, except I don’t think I mentioned it was made of money before it was made of anything else.

I still stand on it. White-knuckled, mostly.

In my corporate job, I spend my days fluent in other people’s capital — liquidity, risk, return — and I go home and check my own accounts the way you check a smoke detector at 2 a.m., not because you heard anything, but because you used to. But I watched a bridge collapse from the inside, so forgive me if I still test my weight before I walk across.

I don’t think this is a scarcity mindset in the self-help-book sense — the kind you fix with a budgeting app and an affirmation taped to a mirror. I think it’s closer to what my dad’s counter-sweeping was: something that held a structure up long after the structure needed holding. Except his ritual was devotion. Mine, if I’m honest, is closer to bracing.

I’m not telling you I’ve made peace with money. Grief doesn’t leave when the danger does. It just finds a new bill to attach itself to, and keeps paying rent, monthly, indefinitely, whether I’ve forgiven it or not.

It’s about using money to invest in yourself, not to paint a version of yourself you don’t recognize. Money is a means to the end, but only if you first define and refine what you want those ends to look like — it is, by no means, the end.

Win Today.

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I grew up thinking family dinner was just what families did. I understand now that my circumstance built the space for it to feel that ordinary. My mom could be home when the bell rang. We could sit down and trade the rose, bud, and thorn of our day like it was owed to us. Sundays were non-negotiable, spent chasing my parents' best friends into some new adventure. I didn't know yet that ordinary was a privilege.

Family dinner looked different by high school. Most nights I lived off whatever survived in the fridge of the house I was babysitting for, or a last-minute text to a friend — *have you eaten yet* — so I wouldn't have to sit alone with a bowl. Some nights it was whatever I could whip together. Losing the house, the structure, the backbone of it — I'm not sure we ever fully recovered. We just started laying brick on a new foundation, one Tuesday at a time.

Taco Tuesday was one thing we tried to make a religion. Hard shells that cracked down the middle the second you bit in, spilling meat everywhere, my friends howling with laughter every single week like it hadn't happened the week before. Paper towels doing the job napkins couldn't. It was chaotic and it wasn’t anything extraordinary, often times the only toppings for your tacos was cheese, lettuce and sour cream — because who could be more creative than that. But it was, for a few hours on a Tuesday, enough.

Family dinner never came to be what it once was. But somewhere between a cracked taco shell and opening my broken home to my friends, I stopped waiting for the table to look the way it used to and started noticing who kept pulling up a chair to whatever version of it I had left.

I've grieved my dad. I don't think I've grieved the girl who sat at that first table, the one who thought dinner was guaranteed. I've blacked most of those years out — remembering them means remembering a life I don't get to have anymore, and for a long time that felt like too high a price for a memory. What's left is mostly texture, not scene: the smell of the Bath & Body Works plugs in that typified my house, the sound of the unhinged barn door of the pantry, the view from my loft bedroom where I hid away. I'm writing this to try to earn some of the scenes back.

One I have in full: riding shotgun to my dad's restaurant before it opened, before a single customer walked through the door. He ran the kitchen and the floor, and he was damn good at both. But those afternoons, empty tables and all, were when I got to watch him do the thing he loved third-most in the world. In that room, before anyone else arrived, my dad came fully, unmistakably alive.

He had three loves, in this order: my mom and his kids, baseball, and the restaurant. I found out recently, catching up with one of his old friends, that he'd have been insufferably jealous of my job now — he always wanted to be near the markets, wanted to be an investor, despite the fact that every stock he ever picked himself now trades for pennies. But nobody watching him work a floor would've guessed he had a second passion. He moved through that restaurant like it was choreographed — precise, unhurried, grace built into the smallest gesture — like the talent wasn't taught so much as inherited, something already living in his hands.

Mornings meant checking every oven, every walk-in, every drawer of cutlery, doing laps until the back of house was armed for the night ahead. Then the front: sweeping the bar with his eyes, turning every label so the brand faced the room, running two fingers along the counters and booth-backs hunting for dust like a drill sergeant with unexpectedly good taste — funny, considering the restaurant was the only square footage on earth he kept spotless. Then his rounds: check-ins, questions answered, presence logged, so every person on his floor knew he'd actually seen them that day. An hour of invoices before the doors opened. Then: showtime.

That ritual is the answer to a question I used to think required an entire essay. For years I told myself circumstance was something done *to* you — a verdict, already signed. But watching him sweep a counter that was already clean, nudge a label two degrees so it caught the light, I understood something closer to the truth: circumstance isn't the sentence. It's the raw material. He didn't inherit an easy life. He built a good one out of restaurant hours and a family that couldn't always make dinner and a body that would eventually turn on him — and he did it by deciding, every single night, that the counter needed sweeping and sweeping it anyway.

That's the part that took me a decade to understand. I thought my circumstance — the scrambling, the losses, the instability — was the whole book, ending already printed. So I stayed in the worst chapters on purpose. I picked fights I didn't need to win. I disappeared into rooms and people that asked nothing of me and gave less. Not because any of it helped, but because staying furious felt like the only thing I still had control of. I wasn't fighting my circumstance. I was just building a house inside it and calling the house permanent.

My dad didn't have it easier. Oldest of three boys from Northeast Philly, raised by parents who split when he was young; his father remarried a man who'd later walk my dad down the aisle. He fell for baseball wanting to go pro, and when that door closed, he found the next room that made him come alive and gave it everything he had left over. He wanted his kids to have the whole world, and for years after he was gone, I carried the guilt that his sickness — and everything it cost us and bought me — was the ending he'd chosen for our family. He didn't choose it. And I don't have to keep choosing it for myself, on his behalf, a decade late.

Healing doesn't arrive like a switch flipping — it arrives like restocking a kitchen mid-shift, one shelf at a time, while customers are already seated. The anger had me so occupied I forgot to notice a sunset for years — genuinely forgot they were still happening without me. My dad never lost that sight, even at his sickest. He never once complained. He just kept sweeping the counter, service after service, until he couldn't anymore.

Some nights I think about the kids I hope to have, and what I want them to inherit: a house that feels steady, parents who are in love, a mother who didn't take her bad days too seriously, and a family that met hard things without falling apart.

I spent a decade convinced the cure was somewhere outside me — in a fight I hadn't picked yet, a version of myself I hadn't tried on yet, a room I hadn't left yet. It wasn't. The only thing that's actually worked is sitting still long enough to look directly at what I've been avoiding, which is, infuriatingly, the least cinematic prescription available.

So, for now: that first dinner table and my dad's restaurant floor were never two separate stories. They were the same one, told twice — someone deciding, night after night, to show up for whoever was still sitting there, regardless of what the day had already taken. I lost the table. I'm still learning to build my own floor, one shift at a time, and some nights I still crack the shell down the middle and lose the meat everywhere.

I'm setting my own table. Some nights it's just me at it, and I'm finding out that's allowed to be enough, too. I hope you can, too.

Win Today.

But I've always been that person scanning the studio like I'm auditing myself against everyone else in it. The woman in front of me. The true yogi folding into crow pose. The pace of the breath next to me. I'm usually off-rhythm, looking around more than I'm breathing — usually forgetting to breathe — tallying up all the ways I'm not measuring up.

I also tend to enjoy workout classes with a friend, because they seem ironically less lonely. If I'm struggling, chances are my friend is too, and we can make faces at each other and laugh in unison. There's safety in shared mediocrity.

But Monday night, I decided to test something: what if I showed up for an audience of one? Okay, challenge.

—

Comparison is exhausting. It's the reflexive reaching for proof that you're enough; proof that lives externally, in the eyes of everyone but you. I've preached this before, and Monday I finally put it into practice. I walked into that studio alone, without the buffer of a friend or the permission of another person's struggle to make mine feel acceptable.

I was totally off-pace. There were shavasanas I completely botched. I swapped movements around. I actually *listened* to my breath instead of chasing someone else's rhythm. And somehow, miraculously, I didn't look at another person the entire class.

It was the best yoga class I've taken.

—

Our twenties are more and more so metastasizing into our thirties. We're told to have it figured out in our twenties: the titles, the money, the correct city, the postcard-ready life. But there's something unprecedented happening. For the first time, we're actually being afforded the space to be truly alone with ourselves. Not lonely. Alone. To discover, to question, to sit with the discomfort of not knowing.

I'll be 25 this month. The threshold between my early twenties and whatever comes next. If you'd asked ten-year-old me where I'd land, the answer was inevitable: newly engaged homeowner, climbing the bulge bracket ranks, half-a-million on the horizon. The full fantasy.

Well. I'm not a homeowner (kudos to those who can own in this rate and affordability environment). I'm not engaged (I am in a deeply committed relationship). I'm not making half-a-million dollars… yet. Hopefully that one still tracks.

What that vision never accounted for? The texture of being alive. Who I'd actually become. Where my energy would want to go. Because my eye was always on the glittering trophy — a band-aid for a wound that needed naming, not covering. My vision was never an antidote. It was a trap.

—

"The treasure you seek is in the cave you fear to enter." — Joseph Campbell

I came across this quote this past week and felt that unmistakable *ah-hah* — the kind that feels like recognition from someone I've lost. I keep a butterfly in my room and my office as a reminder. When something lands this hard, I take it as a sign.

Monday night's yoga class might not feel like a big deal to anyone else. But I walked into that cave alone and found the treasure waiting there: my breath. My presence. Myself, unauditioned.

For the first time in a long time, I was relaxed. I wasn't thinking about work, my phone, or anyone else. I was just there. Present.

—

Exiting my early twenties, I'm learning the difference between control and agency. I'm outlining my life deliberately now, but resisting the urge to color it in completely— because certainty, I've learned, is the enemy of presence. Grief still occupies a seat at every table, but it no longer crowds out everything else. It coexists. It shares space.

For the first time, I feel free of the pressure, the performance, the people. For the first time, I'm playing my hand for myself. Deliberately, intentionally, boldly.

And that? That's a win.

Win Today. And have a happy fourth. I’ll be here on the beach with an ice cold one in my hand, something I haven’t done in a while. Also a win.

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I’m writing this on some unremarkable June day in 2026, which feels almost insulting given how much weight (pun intended) this topic still carries. But that’s exactly why I’m writing it now and not waiting for a better day, because I don’t think a better day is coming. This one will have to do.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve given you a peek into my grief, small windows and glimmers. Today I’m opening another. This one dives deeper into that hunger for more — the insatiable kind that taught me to mistake small for superior, starvation for strength.

If you’re in the same corner of the internet I am, you’ve likely felt it: “skinny” is trending again. Feeds overflow with “what I eat in a day” rituals, protein powder flying off shelves like the new currency (don’t get me wrong, my friends know I love a good protein powder), an entire generation absorbing — scroll by scroll — the quiet thesis that smaller is both the goal and inherently achievable if you simply want it enough. I wanted it enough once. I want to tell you what that actually cost me.

I know what you’re probably thinking: wow, this girl has a lot to unpack. But grief has a way of colonizing every corner of your life. For me, it arrived dressed as ambition: an unshakeable need to be more, to do more, to become the version of myself that wouldn’t disappoint anyone. I was consistently unsettled, hunting for purpose and place, convincing myself I was never enough.

Today’s post is difficult for me because it is something I hold so dear and private, something I have yet to say out loud. It’s also a topic that’s very real, raw, and triggering. To those who can relate today: I see you, I hear you, you are not alone.

I developed disordered eating habits 6 years ago and have struggled ever since. The habits first took form in anorexia and eventually developed into bulimia.

The sorority house wasn’t the origin. It was just the first platform that gave me a new audience.

You know by now I’d spent years already auditioning for identities — trying on personas the way others try on clothes, hoping one would finally fit. The girl who was effortlessly fine, exceling . The girl who didn’t require checking on. The girl whose grief came with an expiration date everyone else seemed to have set without consulting me. By the time I arrived on campus, I had practice. I knew how to become whoever a room needed.

Before my dad died, and through most of my adolescence, my body wasn’t something I managed. It simply existed. I ate without calculation, moved constantly — cheerleader, gymnast, later the failed athlete turned relentless overachiever — and rarely thought twice. My body wasn’t a problem because I hadn’t yet learned it could be one.

College arrived with a calculus I didn’t have the inputs for. The girls who moved through my new world effortlessly were built differently, animated in ways the grief had already quietly dampened in me. They possessed something I couldn’t manufacture: ease, inherited economic comfort, the kind of background that doesn’t announce itself because it doesn’t have to. I couldn’t fake that.

But I could manufacture what I looked like.

In the balance between scholarship girl and aspiring-somewhere-girl, I took what I could into my own hands. For the first time, I audited my body against others: Was I thin enough? Petite enough? And as recruitment season materialized, I became acutely aware of what entered and exited my body, and what it might cost me. Would I appear bloated before going out? Would dessert tonight show on my face tomorrow? Had I done enough to earn this meal?

No one staged an intervention. No one pulled me aside. Because I was fitting in. I learned the quiet version of restriction: how to skip a meal and blame it on a busy day, how to order a salad and call it preference, how to watch my jeans loosen and call it discipline.

Like most things I committed to, once I started, I couldn’t stop. That’s the trap of ambition — that voice in the back of your head always reaching for more.

I filled hours with movement that served no purpose except to delay the next meal. Everyone else was doing it, so I had to as well. It helped that I was genuinely overcommitted — extracurriculars, studying, the perpetual scramble to stay ahead. Certain weekdays became rules: liquid only, paired with movement that had nothing to do with joy. Other days required just enough fuel to get through the depletion of the previous night.

Then March 2020 arrived, and the world shuttered. College disbanded. I went home.

And for the first time since my father’s diagnosis, I found something I’d been starving for without knowing it: total control.

Control became a currency I could actually mint. I built an architecture of discipline and rigidity — a routine without exception, food decisions that answered only to myself because there was no one around to answer to. I declared certain foods unpalatable, arbitrarily but absolutely. I became obsessed with a number on the scale that moved the instant I reached it, never satisfied because satisfaction was never actually the goal. The goal was the chase itself.

I didn’t clock this as dangerous. I clocked it as relief.

By the time lockdown ended and I returned to school, I’d transformed in a way that earned immediate commentary. “You look amazing.” “What are you doing?” “Can we work out together?” The relief had calcified into a system, one I could operate on autopilot during daylight. But nights were different — parties had returned, and alcohol had calories, so I learned to drink on an empty stomach because that’s what everyone did and I needed, badly, to be the kind of girl who did what everyone did.

Around 2 a.m. most weekends, the system fractured under its own pressure. I know now how much of that pressure I’d constructed myself — ambition layered with a nervous system running on fumes. The only outlet I’d engineered for that pressure was a cycle I didn’t have language for yet: the binge. It had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with a pressure that had nowhere else to go, and so it went into my body like water finding a crack.

My body was starving. My mind was drained. I was hollowed out in a way that had nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with how little remained of me. My body needed more. But I wanted more, more, more — and somewhere in the static between those two needs, I found the wrong answer.

Bingeing became the counterweight to restriction. I lived for the hours after midnight, when I could finally let the gate down and consume whatever I’d barred myself from — and I mean consume, as in let it consume me. It was the only comfort I’d engineered, and also the only punishment I could administer. Somehow, both at once.

My skin fractured like I was back in middle school. My body held onto fluid in places that made me feel foreign to myself. I was exhausted in a way that sleep couldn’t touch. But some part of me believed I deserved it — a penalty for whatever I thought I’d done wrong that day, a punishment that paradoxically felt like the only solace available.

I wish I could say the bingeing stayed contained to college. It didn’t. As I sank deeper into a depression I didn’t have language for, the pattern followed me into adulthood — quieter, but relentless.

It took years to understand what I’d actually been doing: confusing two entirely different concepts.

Skinny is an achievement. It’s a number, a state, a temporary address — and one that, for me, was perpetually unsatisfied. You can always be skinnier. The goalpost has an infinite runway.

Healthy is what’s actually happening underneath — and the two have almost nothing to do with each other. This is the exact trick the internet has been running on women forever: that your body is a problem, and the solution is always something you can buy. The specific shape being sold changes every few years — Kardashian curves, pre-Kardashian thinness, whatever’s next — but the underlying message never shifts. Be different. Be less. Be more. Be anything except what you are.

What finally cracked this open wasn’t a better diet or a wellness rebranding. It was learning to ask a completely different question: Not what will this do to how I look, but what does this actually do for me?

What does it do for my energy? My clarity? The way I show up in a workout? How I sleep? I stopped tallying and started listening — which foods left me foggy versus clear, ashamed versus grounded. When I lost my period and realized what that meant for my future, I stopped sorting food into moral categories and started asking, more simply, what it was actually doing to my body.

Movement shifted the same way. I stopped exercising to erase myself and started moving because I liked how strength felt — training toward a tangible finish line instead of a number with none at all. The competitive instinct never left me, and honestly, I wouldn’t want it to. But there’s a chasm between chasing a personal best and punishing yourself for the size of your body on any given day. It took years to feel that difference, not just understand it intellectually.

I’ve learned to differentiate control from agency. Control is what I built during quarantine and the lonely years that followed — a rigid system designed to eliminate variables, to make myself smaller and more predictable. Agency is what I’m building now: the ability to make choices that expand rather than contract. To eat a sandwich full of ingredients I like and how it makes me feel, not because I’ve earned the right through punishment. These look superficially similar but operate on opposite principles. One is about domination. One is about consent — first with yourself.

I’ve also redefined the finish line. For years, the goal was disappearance. Smaller. Better. Enough. All while trying to be more to earn a seat at I didn’t want to eat at, Goals without finish lines are infinite treadmills, and I was running myself hollow chasing a number that never held still. Once I started training toward something tangible — a race time, a strength milestone, a body that could do things instead of look a certain way — the entire relationship shifted. Your body becomes a tool instead of a project.

A phrase I think sums up my experiences, that transcends boys, pressure, and food: the cost of living as an external measure of success. I spent so much energy becoming what people needed, what circumstance demanded, what culture whispered back through screens. That cost isn’t measured in calories. It’s measured in the parts of yourself you lose because they weren’t useful for fitting in. The cost is real and permanent and the only way through is accepting that you can’t be everything to everyone — which means you have to stop trying, and that feels like failure until it doesn’t.

I still get comments sometimes. “Ava won’t eat that.” “She doesn’t eat bread,” people say, half-joking, like it’s a personality trait instead of an old wound they’re describing without knowing it. I don’t always correct them. But I notice the comment lands differently now. It used to feel like proof I was doing something right. Now it mostly just feels like a window into how long these patterns sit in a room after you’ve left it.

(For the record: I do eat bread. I prefer sourdough and rye based on how they make me feel afterward, which turns out to be almost entirely different from how they make me look.)

This blog isn’t a wellness narrative or a recovery guide. I’m not here to offer you a blueprint and I’m suspicious of anyone selling certainty on something this personal anyway. This is just what I learned by staying in the mess long enough to understand it. I’m just here to share my story.

A reminder: Healing isn’t linear. It’s not complete. There will be parts of you — habits, fears, the faint reach for old comforts — that coexist with growth. That’s not failure; that’s honesty. I still hear the food noise, the voice that reaches for the binge on hard days. But I’ve learned to talk back. I’ve learned to choose differently. And I choose myself now — in food, in movement, in the daily decision to build up instead of disappear.

Every day I choose fuel over punishment is a day I win. Every time I silence that faint, familiar voice and eat the bread anyway is a day I’m still winning. The victories are small and quiet, which is exactly how they should be.

Win Today.

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“You can never get enough of what you don’t need.” — Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

I first came across this line in Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead, tucked inside a chapter on what she calls Leading from Hurt — a pattern she observed in leaders who use power and performance to fill a self-worth gap that, no matter how many accolades get poured into it, refuses to close. She’s talking about the boardroom. She’s talking about bosses who micromanage and colleagues who sharpen elbows over nothing.

But the moment I read it, I wasn’t thinking about any of that.

I was thinking about a fifteen-year-old girl doing her homework until midnight because an A-minus felt like a personal failure. I was thinking about the version of me who couldn’t walk into a room without scanning it for evidence that she was enough. I was thinking about the newly-decorated Elon graduate who landed a job at the world’s leading investment bank and walked into her first day completely drowning in imposter syndrome, smiling like she’d rehearsed it.

I was thinking about the appetite. The one that started small and quiet, and eventually became the loudest thing in the room.

In Waving the Red Flags, I started pulling at the thread — the patterns, the people, the moments I kept selecting on a loop without fully understanding why. But threads don’t explain themselves. They lead somewhere. And this one leads back further than any relationship, further than any decision I’ve written about so far. It leads back to a house where silence was louder than the fights, and a girl who learned early that love was something you earned, a girl who convinced herself that her life was the way it was because that’s what she deserved.

Somewhere along the way, I promoted myself. Chief of Operations. Emotional Regulator. The one who held it together so nobody else had to. When boys weren’t occupying my mind, I made sure I was at least stimulating myself intellectually — reading, writing, getting ahead by any margin available to me.

What that teaches you, when you grow up holding everything, is that your value is entirely conditional. That you are useful, or you are invisible. I was, for a long time, both at once. And the moment you stop performing — the floor drops out. I didn’t know that was what I learned. I just knew I couldn’t stop.

Brown describes this with uncomfortable precision: Leading from Hurt emerges when someone uses a relentless drive to perform to fill the self-worth gap that’s been sitting open since childhood. The most common source? Our first families. The approval and acceptance we never quite received from the people who were supposed to give it unconditionally — and how we spend the next two decades chasing it from everyone else.

An insatiable appetite for recognition, unproductive competition, zero tolerance for risk. She calls it armored leadership. I call it my entire adolescence. Sound familiar to you?

The early years after my dad’s passing were characterized, as I’ve written before, by denial and anger. But his loss wasn’t just personal — it was structural. My socioeconomic status was downgraded. My family transformed. My support system looked entirely different. When your life changes that drastically, that fast, you look for survival where you can. For me, that meant my second family for love, boys for distraction, and school for success.

Education became my most important privilege; not coincidentally, but because it was my most reliable currency. If you’re hardwired to believe that enough is never enough, being a good student means nothing. Being the best student? That means recognition. Acceptance. Belonging. The three things I was most starving and searching for.

So I got to work. Class office, DECA, FBLA. School board representative, community volunteer, president of various clubs. At fourteen, I held two jobs — babysitter to my kids, and assistant to a local accountant, where I taught myself debits and credits because I had already decided I was going to be a Business major.

With Annette’s guidance, I was building a resume before I had a life to put on it. I remember her sitting me down with a resume template and telling me to start now soI was prepared for college. I was probably the only fourteen year old in my school with a resume. I don’t know how the kids are doing it these days.

Then there was mini-THON. Two of my friends came to me with a vision modeled after Penn State THON — a 24-hour fundraising marathon raising money for children with cancer. They came to me because, apparently, I was the person you called when you needed something built from scratch and run without dropping a single ball. I just want to give a huge applause to all my friends and peers involved in pioneering our school’s first event, because there is something quite remarkable about fifteen and sixteen year olds raising over $20,000 in the matter of months, and then scaling to over $26,000 the next year. We did that. Go team.

I was also, briefly, a basketball player, in the most generous interpretation of that term — third-leading scorer, six points for the entire season. I also gave soccer a shot until eventually accepting that my athletic coordination was not keeping pace with my academic ambitions, but I had the bullets for the resume, so.

I was the student who was invited to leadership camps over the summer and genuinely enjoyed them. Camp Neidig will always hold a special place in my heart.

By Senior Awards Night, they had to shrink the font on my trophy because I had won too many awards to fit the standard size. I’m not telling you that to brag. I’m telling you because it is the most precise illustration I have of what was actually happening underneath all of it: the accolades were real, the learning was real — but what was driving it had nothing to do with the subjects.

It was the hunger. The is this enough yet? that operated just below the surface of everything.

The answer was always no. And I kept asking anyway.

—

Before going further, I want to pause, because it matters deeply to be precise about the emotion at the center of this story. Not just for academic clarity, but because naming our feelings is one of the most underrated acts of self-compassion we have access to. In Dare to Lead, Brown distinguishes four emotions we routinely collapse into each other, and the conflation costs us more than we realize.

Guilt says: I did something bad. It’s tethered to behavior, not identity, and it can actually motivate change — it points at an action, not a person.

Embarrassment is fleeting: the cringe you feel when you trip in public. It passes and can even become funny in hindsight.

Humiliation cuts deeper and lingers longer than embarrassment precisely because it carries a sense of injustice: I didn’t deserve this. Where embarrassment is a private blush, humiliation is a wound inflicted publicly, from the outside. It stings in a way that can calcify into resentment — but it still locates the problem in the event, not in you.

Shame is something else entirely. Shame says: I am bad. It’s not about what you did. It’s about who and what you are. And unlike guilt, which can mobilize you to change, shame corrodes the very part of us that believes change is possible. It doesn’t say do better. It says you are the problem, and doing better won’t fix that.

Brown also makes clear that shame is not a solo experience — it is, at its core, a social construct. It thrives in silence, in secrecy, in the company of judgment. Which means it also requires a social mend: empathy. Not sympathy, not solutions, not silver linings — empathy. The act of being witnessed without being assessed.

Shame cannot survive being spoken. This is precisely why naming it matters: the act of bringing it into language is itself a disruption of its grip. This is a story about grief and shame, and how empathy has emerged as the antidote, and can be yours, too. I sat in shame all these years because I was too scared to start at step one.

What I carried for years wasn’t guilt over specific choices. It wasn’t embarrassment, fleeting and forgettable. It was a quiet, persistent conviction that at my core, I was somehow not enough — that the gap between who I was and who I needed to be was structural rather than circumstantial. That no grade, no award, no trophy could close it. Because why would the world take away my dad if I didn’t deserve it?

I was right, in the most painful possible way. Not because the gap was real — but because you cannot close a shame wound with performance. You can only paper over it temporarily, and then you have to perform again.

Name the feeling. Sit with it. That’s where the healing starts.

—

If high school was the training ground, college was where I took the habit to a genuinely impressive extreme.

At Elon, I graduated with a 4.0, summa cum laude, and a senior year that culminated in two distinctions I’m genuinely proud of: leading the CFA Institute Research Team to a first-place finish in the state of North Carolina, and earning a spot on Poets & Quants Best & Brightest — one of 100 students selected from top-50 business schools nationally.

Beyond the academics: Treasurer of my sorority for two and a half years, then Vice President, then Social Chair my senior year — when by every reasonable measure I should have been doing absolutely nothing except enjoying the last few months with my friends, but why take the easy route? Undergraduate representative on the Love School of Business Board of Directors. Two simultaneous jobs as an Economics and Finance tutor and a Reed Finance Center student worker, while volunteering as a math tutor for fifth graders in Alamance County. Business fraternity. Multiple leadership circles. President of Women in Finance.

And I applied to, participated in, and networked across virtually every Early Insight and Leadership program at every major bank — JPMorgan, Citi, Goldman, Wells, BofA — because if there was a door, I wanted to be standing on the other side before it opened. I probably could have uploaded my resume in lieu of writing this, but that’s no fun.

The summers were no less disciplined. Freshman year, internship at an insurance agency plus Wall Street Prep coursework. Sophomore summer, same internship plus a 10-week virtual rotational experience at Goldman — thanks, COVID. Junior summer, back to Goldman as a Summer Analyst (which was equal parts work hard, play hard with a side of that boyfriend I wrote about last week). Because of course.

Looking back, what I understand now is that I engineered my schedule to have zero margin — not because I had to, but because I was deeply afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. Downtime meant sitting with my thoughts. Sitting with my thoughts meant encountering a version of myself I hadn’t fully met yet and wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. Productivity was armor. Social settings were my outlet. A packed calendar was the only reliable way to stay one step ahead of the quiet.

I looked impossibly capable on the outside. Inside, I was running on fumes and calling it discipline. But I craved more — I always craved more, more, more.

When you can’t outrun the quiet forward, you go sideways.

I became fluent in being physically present and emotionally elsewhere. I built whole interior worlds and retreated into them — books, projects, anything that wasn’t the actual texture of my own life. What I understand now is that this isn’t a personality quirk I was born with. It is, in part, a wound response. When I was in high school — when I wasn’t with my kids, at an extracurricular, or escaping to a friend’s house — I was in my room, filling every available hour so that none remained for simply feeling. The introversion I carry today deepened in the crucible of that avoidance.

I used to be the girl who lit up in the center of a room. Who made people laugh without trying. Who wanted to be seen.

Somewhere along the way, I started feeling awkward and self-conscious in every room I entered. That isn’t a natural evolution, that’s what happens when you spend years performing connection while remaining fundamentally disconnected from yourself.

Laying out my life on paper has made this pattern almost embarrassingly legible: when I do something, I cannot half-ass it. I can’t even three-quarters-ass it. I am a product of having to go above and beyond in everything — school, work, boys, hobbies — because the feeling of never being enough cast its shadow across every corner of my world. Shame has no manners. It shoves itself into every crevice and makes itself at home.

The problem with escapism isn’t that it doesn’t work. If you’ve ever tried to escape, you know it’s brief and incomplete. The problem is that you have to come back. And when you come back, nothing has moved. The pressure is exactly where you left it, the gap is just as wide. And now you’ve also lost the hours, which only adds more weight to the pile.

When I graduated in May 2023, every box was checked and every medal had been adorned, and I had the privilege to walk directly into a full-time role as a Credit Analyst at Goldman Sachs. By any external measure, the plan had executed perfectly. Luckily, I had landed somewhere that rewards running on adrenaline, minimal sleep, and obsessive precision. If you’re going to have a shame-driven productivity problem, I highly recommend leaning the finance / banking route (just kidding, please do what you love).

I said yes to everything, because “no” felt like the first step toward becoming invisible — and invisibility was the thing I had spent my entire life engineering against. In every staffing, deal and project, I delivered — constantly, compulsively, with the kind of precision that gets you promoted fast.

But here’s where the story takes a turn I didn’t expect.

The pressure that had followed me my entire life — the insatiable hunger, the relentless need to do more — did something strange at Goldman: it outpaced the work itself. I wasn’t miserable because the job was too hard or the hours were too much. I felt empty because for the first time, I didn’t feel the genuine connection to what I was doing. My resume thus far was consistently service- and people-driven. For fifteen years I had been preparing myself for something that demanded everything I had — intellectually rigorous, high-stakes, genuinely complex — and I found myself needing even more. So I asked for it. And then more. And more after that, until I had quietly outgrown the container.

What my particular brand of driven, shame-fueled overachievement had actually built — beneath the resume and the performance reviews — was a sharp, creative mind that needed real problems to solve, and a genuine capacity for human connection that was being left almost entirely unused. I had ideas. I wanted them heard. I wanted to be in rooms where people were building something, not just processing it.

When people started introducing me primarily by my title — this is Ava, she’s an analyst at Goldman — something in me resisted quietly and then, eventually, loudly. I was more than where I worked. The label felt like being handed a trophy for the wrong thing.

After two and a half years, I left.

The pivot into my current role in Investor Relations was the first career decision I made that felt genuinely, completely mine — not optimized for prestige, not scaffolded by external validation, but chosen because it matched something real in me. IR sits at the intersection of everything I had quietly become skilled at across a lifetime of needing to connect in order to survive: translating complexity into clarity, building trust in rooms where it doesn’t exist yet, listening with intent, making people feel genuinely understood.

The irony that lands hardest is this: the skills I developed out of pure necessity as a child — reading a room, earning belonging, making someone feel seen when everything else felt uncertain — turned out to be my most transferable professional asset. What started as a survival mechanism became a competitive edge. The network is the net worth, in more ways than one.

Here’s something from Dare to Lead that stopped me mid-page: so much of our adult dysfunction traces back not only to what we experienced in our first families, but to what we didn’t receive there — specifically, empathy. Brown outlines six ways that well-intentioned people miss the mark entirely when someone comes to them in pain. She calls them the six empathy misses, and reading through them felt less like an academic exercise and more like an inventory of my adolescence.

Miss #1: Sympathy vs. Empathy. The friend who responds with I feel so sorry for you rather than I get it, I feel it with you. Sympathy looks down into the well. Empathy climbs in.

Miss #2: The Gasp and Awe. The friend who hears your vulnerability and responds with horror: widened eyes, a sharp inhale, judgment dressed up as concern. You came to them with a mistake you were processing, and suddenly you’re a spectacle. Ouch.

Miss #3: The Mighty Fall. “I just never expected this from you.” This one is the one that I felt closest to. The person who has placed you so high on a pedestal — capable, composed, the one who has it together — that your humanness reads as a betrayal. The Mighty Fall doesn’t have malicious intent. It’s the byproduct of an image so carefully curated that when it cracks, the people around you don’t know how to hold it. I built that image deliberately. And then I paid for it quietly, for years, whenever I needed someone to simply sit with me but felt I couldn’t ask.

Miss #4: The Block and Tackle. The person so uncomfortable with your vulnerability that they redirect immediately — turning the conversation into an attack on whoever hurt you, or an argument, or a problem-solving session that sidesteps your actual feelings entirely. This sounds like “oh, screw him, I’ll fight him.”

Miss #5: The Boots and Shovel. “It’s not that bad — you know you’re amazing.” The well-meaning friend who refuses to let you acknowledge that you made a real mistake or are genuinely struggling. False reassurance dressed up as loyalty.

Miss #6: If You Think That’s Bad. The one-upper. “That’s nothing — let me tell you about my...” Your pain becomes their segue. As humans, I believe we are most susceptible to this, quick to compare thinking we are doing the person a service. We are not.

I want to invite you to sit with this list for a moment. Which of these do you receive most often? Which do you give? I ask not to assign blame — most of these misses come from exactly the place you’d expect: the profound human discomfort of watching someone suffer when you don’t know how to help. But naming them matters. Because the first step to asking for what we actually need is recognizing what we’ve been getting instead.

Brown says the only real fix is to go back to the source. You cannot fill a self-worth gap by performing harder, leading louder, or stacking credentials until the pile feels tall enough to be safe. The search never ends. It leaves only a wake of disconnection.

If you’ve ever spent time with my friend depression, you know she doesn’t arrive with a score and a slow-motion montage. She prefers a longer entrance and takes a while to make herself at home, until one day she’s snuggled up right next to you on the couch. I’d spent years stacking — work, identity, the performance of a person who had it together — and the whole structure came apart at once.

Something unexpected happened when I put my life into sentences: I started to see the circles. The loops. The same story wearing different costumes. The thirteen-year-old who felt she failed her dad and couldn’t get enough approval had become the college student who couldn’t tolerate a gap in her schedule, who had become the analyst who couldn’t say no, who had become the adult who couldn’t identify what she actually wanted because she’d spent her entire life performing what other people needed from her.

I saw the source. And I understood that I had been filling the wrong tank my entire life.

My collapse wasn’t a collapse at all. It was the arch in my plot line. The moment the story stopped being something that was happening to me, and started being something I was finally, deliberately, writing.

In Losing Myself, I wrote about moving through the phases of grief — including the long, unglamorous work of moving from depression toward acceptance. That journey didn’t feel linear or graceful; honestly, it felt like a very long argument with myself until I finally ran out of defenses and just sat down.

Unlearning shame doesn’t happen the way you’d hope. There’s no single revelation. No moment the voice goes quiet and you emerge, blinking in the light. It’s more like learning to hear the voice and — slowly, imperfectly — choosing not to let it steer.

Vulnerability is not the opposite of strength. It is its prerequisite. Sitting with the discomfort of your own interior life — actually naming what’s there, without immediately reaching for something to paper over it — is the only way through. And here is what I’ve come to believe about that: vulnerability leads to clarity. And clarity leads to kindness — for yourself first, and then, almost inevitably, in how you show up for everyone around you.

What I’m also learning — with considerably more resistance than I’d like to admit — is that “no” is not a withdrawal. It is not passivity or failure or making yourself smaller. “No” is a complete sentence. It is what creates the space to actually be present for the things you do say yes to. When every task is urgent, nothing is. When every commitment is mandatory, none are chosen. Saying no isn’t closing a door — it’s finally figuring out which doors you actually want to walk through, rather than sprinting through all of them just to prove you can. That’s more of what you need and less of what you don’t.

I am still learning that one.

The pressure hasn’t disappeared, and honestly, I don’t want it to entirely. Some of it is genuinely mine — the kind that comes from caring deeply about the work, from wanting to build something that matters, from wanting to be a better friend, colleague, daughter, sister, and partner than I was yesterday. That pressure, I’ll keep.

That pressure turned into ambition that turned into opportunity. The opportunities I had in high school to earn awards and scholarships and find my passion in bettering my community (figures 3 and 4), to distinguish myself and inspire others at Elon through sharing my story (figures 5 and 6), and to realize that my career is in no one’s hands but mine, and I didn’t need to follow a playbook to score a touchdown.

When the source of pressure correlates to your “why,” you realize you are capable of accomplishing much more than you think. That intrinsic motivation leads you to who you want to be and what and how you can make an impact. It’s the other kind I’m learning to set down: the external motivation, the needing to prove your worth, the filling your tank from others praise, applause, and approval. Because your life is yours to win.

I would be lying to you and myself if I told you I have arrived. I am still, on more days than I’d like to admit, acutely aware of what other people think of me. I still make choices shaped more by fear of judgment than by what’s actually best for me. I still scan rooms. I still feel the pull of the performance. The self-worth gap has narrowed — meaningfully, measurably — but it has not closed. And I think it’s important to say that out loud, because too many of these stories get told in the past tense, as if the work is finished and the narrator is standing, whole and healed, on the other side of it. I’m not on the other side. I’m in the middle, journaling through it, writing about it here, digging into the kind of self-work that is unglamorous and slow and occasionally deeply uncomfortable.

What has shifted is the direction I’m facing. My why for winning is no longer pointed outward — at the approval of a parent who wasn’t there, at a room full of people I need to impress, at a title that proves I matter. It’s turning, slowly and deliberately, inward. Not in a navel-gazing way — in a this is the only foundation that will actually hold way. Because if I can narrow my own self-worth gap through this work, through writing it down and sitting with it and sharing it with you, then maybe I can help someone else do the same. That’s the win I’m actually after.

If not for my past, I don’t know that I would have become this. I probably wouldn’t have graduated with that trophy, wouldn’t have gone to college on a full scholarship, wouldn’t have started my career at one of the best firms in the world, and wouldn’t have had the clarity — or the courage — to leave when I outgrew it. The grief, the pressure, the shame: they built something real in me. I am not willing to disown that. I am also not willing to keep running on it.

That high school trophy was heavy and I was proud of it, but I also didn’t let myself feel that pride for more than forty-five seconds before calculating what came next.

That’s what I’m working on — staying in the moment long enough to actually feel it. To let enough be enough: not as a slogan, but as a daily, imperfect practice. To win today, so I can win the long life I’m slowly, deliberately, learning to build for myself.

Win Today.

Grief is a process. It ebbs and flows, in an imperfectly non-linear technique that looks different for each and every one of us. It is beautiful, it is sad, but it is healing. I believe that writing this is allowing me to turn the dark corner from a lonely depression onto the road of acceptance.

Grief is not a competition. It is not a comparison. It is not a zero sum game. In loss, we all can win — hence the name.

My grief will not look like yours. My grief does not negate, invalidate, discredit, or blame yours. There is no wrong form of grief. It is yours to own, yours to win.

This is my truth, and I am here to win.

—

Let’s talk about something the internet never seems to tire of: boys.

To understand the relationship I developed with boys, you first have to understand the relationship I grew up watching.

My home was loud. Not in the chaotic way of a full house, but in the way that makes a child learn to read a room before she learns to read a book. Early on, I became fluent in the language of tension: the particular silence before an argument, the way certain words landed like dropped plates, the emotional temperature that shifted the moment a door opened. I absorbed it all without knowing I was taking notes.

Since I can remember, I experienced love as needing to be seen — fully, loudly, demonstrably. Love, in the architecture of our home, was measured in grand gestures and material things. In the right gift, the right vacation, the right version of abundance.

The quiet acts — showing up on a Tuesday, choosing presence over performance — didn’t count in the same currency. And so the ledger was always unbalanced. There was always something more to want, something just out of reach that would finally make it enough. I watched for years. I didn’t yet know I had inherited the habit.

And then cancer arrived and rewrote everything.

My dad didn’t leave all at once. That’s the part they don’t warn you about: that illness takes someone in installments, slowly and without ceremony, until the person sitting across from you at dinner is both entirely present and somewhere else entirely.

Treatment is its own kind of violence. It hollowed him out quietly, steadily — the energy first, then the lightness, then the version of him that had the bandwidth to be anything other than a man trying to survive. I know, with everything in me, that he showed up in every way he still could. As did my mom. That they fought to be present the way they fought everything — with everything they had left.

But cancer has a way of becoming the loudest thing in the room. And slowly, without fault or intention, my dad became a derivative of his disease.

I was losing him in real time, in increments so gradual I couldn’t name them — and so I did what children do when they can’t name the loss. I looked for somewhere else to put it.

One of those places, as it turned out, was boys.

Losing my dad and the experience that came with it created a polarizing relationship between myself and the opposite sex. It’s difficult to point a finger at one cause; grief rarely offers us that kind of neat. So let me distill it down to a few factors.

Some might call these daddy issues. I’d call them that too, actually. Because owning the term is the first step to reframing it, and reframing it is exactly what I intend to do.

From the time my dad got sick until he passed, I was looking for ways to stay busy, oblivious, avoidant. As an 11, 12, and 13-year-old, boys were the very obvious answer. Having a boyfriend was fun and thrilling — I’m sure you remember the butterflies when that cute boy slipped a note across the desk. The joy!

My first “serious” boyfriend came along until somewhere between 7th and 8th grade, overlapping with my dad undergoing his first treatment, entering and coming out of remission, and facing the last leg of his battle. Said boyfriend was as unserious as serious could be at 12 years old, but I could already feel the tendencies calcifying.

Always wanting to start a fight, terrified that stillness meant he’d leave. Always needing to feel remembered, because silence felt indistinguishable from loss.

And such began a pattern learned not from a textbook, but from living. Toxic traits that pushed themselves to the front of my mind for the next decade, all desperately setting off the same alarm in the back of my mind: neglect. Safe to say that first boyfriend was booted shortly after my dad had gone, as I was forced to face my fears head-on, and I ducked.

Lesson: Fear of abandonment doesn’t announce itself. It disguises itself as neediness, as picking fights, as testing people before they have the chance to fail you on their own terms.

We can briefly gloss over the boyfriend who came the summer after my dad’s passing. The slightly older, cooler guy, known for his basement parties and probably a bit too well-versed in things a grieving teenager didn’t need. The epitome of the boy your parents wouldn’t want you bringing home. He didn’t last long, but he was proof of something: I had swum straight into the deep end, arms outstretched, desperately seeking attention and the sensation of being chosen. Mirroring the same frustrations I faced at home, I reached outward for belonging. And, like many of my other choices in that first phase of anger, I reached in the wrong places.

Lesson: Grief will find a vehicle. If you don’t name it, it names itself - usually in the form of someone entirely wrong for you.

Luckily, the boyfriend to follow was his antidote. Sweet, kind, but still older, because apparently that was a pattern in the making. I was a freshman in high school, and what better way to announce your arrival than dating a grade up. It further fortified my gravitational pull toward older men, though I hadn’t yet connected the dots on why. But it wasn’t long until I got bored. The relationship was anything but toxic — too good to be true, too easy to be real. There were no red flags, no push and pull, no adrenaline. Life had never handed me anything that uncomplicated, and I didn’t trust it. So I cut it loose.

Lesson: When chaos is your baseline, calm feels like a warning sign. I confused safety for stagnation, and walked away from good things because they didn’t feel familiar enough to be real.

The summer after freshman year was the first time I actually fell for someone. A camp boy. Every young Jewish girl’s dream. He was just about perfect in every way, and we were inseparable that summer. He was the first boy I introduced to Annette, the first one the kids met and fell in love with too, the first boy I quietly wished my dad could have the chance to meet.

But as summer faded, so did my ease. Different schools meant distance, distance meant uncertainty, and uncertainty in my world was indistinguishable from impending loss. Would he forget about me? What if he met someone else? I was in too deep.

All I knew was that the good things always got stripped out from under me eventually, so I might as well do it first. I reacted the only way I knew how: fear and toxicity. Endless fights, relentless questioning. We fought like hell for over a year, me quietly testing how far he would stretch. In hind sight, and as you might expect for 15-year-olds, the fights were never as deep as the root cause that fueled a fire within me.

But still, I pushed him away.

My first real heartbreak landed like a second layer of grief — not the same, but familiar in its weight. And in true form, I didn’t want to sit in it. Within weeks, I had found a replacement. Because stillness, it turns out, was still my greatest fear.

Lesson: I didn’t just push people away, I preemptively grieved them. Loss had taught me that love had an expiration date, so I kept one hand on the exit at all times.

I was stuck in a pattern of corrosiveness, cycling through relationships without ever pausing to examine the engine running underneath. Unable to name or acknowledge the root of my affliction, I kept looking outward.

Despite the second family I had found in those years, there was still an inner yearning — hollow and insatiable — for validation that no boyfriend could have ever filled.

It’s worth remembering, too, that my parents never had a perfect marriage (as most don’t, and that’s normal). It’s not entirely my story to tell, but it shaped my experience.

I catalogued every fight, every concession, every moment a partner made themselves smaller to keep the peace, and somewhere along the way, I started doing the same math.

I inherited a blueprint for love before I ever had the chance to draft my own. I learned its vocabulary through slammed doors and silence, and absorbed, without knowing it, the lesson that love was something you endured — not something you were simply worthy of. That gap between endurance and worthiness? It would take me years to find it, let alone cross it.

And so, at sixteen — peak anger-stage-of-grief, running on empty and fumes of false confidence — what better choice than another shot at a boy my mother would never want me to bring home?

Enter: the prep school boy.

He had everything I had quietly classified as the life I wished I had: a two-parent household, siblings with an unbreakable bond, the nice house with more cars than common sense, the SAT tutor, the beach house, the whole curated American dream. He lived my fantasy so completely that I think I mistook proximity to it for possession of it. I wasn’t falling for him so much as I was falling for the life he represented — a life that felt, to me, untouched by the kind of loss that had rearranged mine.

So I stayed. Longer than I should have, through more than I should have excused.

The relationship was a cycle as vicious as it was familiar: breaking up, getting back together, dramatic in all the ways that felt, at the time, like passion. And as toxic as it was, something about it invigorated me. The chase made me feel worthy. The volatility felt like proof that I mattered enough to fight over. I had grown up in a home where love was loud and complicated, and this felt fluent. I was practically native.

We dated for nearly two years until I found out he had cheated. And hidden it. But, still, I stayed.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because it still stings to admit. I knew. And I stayed. I believed every lie and every apology. Not because I didn’t know my worth, exactly, but because, somewhere underneath all of it, I had already decided that this was mine to fix. That if he had gone looking elsewhere, the variable that needed examining was me. My not being interesting enough, exciting enough, present enough — not having enough, in the way that he had everything. How could I compete, when I still felt, at my core, like the girl whose dad left — even if leaving wasn’t a choice he made?

We both went on to our respective colleges, promising to stay in touch and try it out in whatever form or shape it would take. It seemed more bearable than letting him go.

It wasn’t a single revelation that finally ended it. It was an accumulation: the lonely nights freshman year of college, the new friends who looked at me like why are you still doing this to yourself, the quiet but pointed conversations with Annette, who had a particular talent for delivering hard truths wrapped in enough warmth that you couldn’t argue with them.

Slowly, the strings loosened. And eventually, I let them go.

Lesson: Staying after the betrayal wasn’t weakness — it was the logical conclusion of every lesson I’d absorbed about what I deserved. Leaving wasn’t just about him. It was the first time I chose myself over the familiar shape of pain.

Despite being fully moved into college at this point, I had approximately zero awareness of how much unpacking I still had left to do. I thought distance from home meant distance from the pattern. I thought a new city, new people, new version of me meant the old math no longer applied.

I was wrong, of course. The pattern doesn’t care about your zip code.

The next three and a half years were more a masterclass in self-distraction than they were in self-discovery. I conquered the art of switching identities to match my audience, in search of acceptance while quietly battling the shame of my scholarship status.

Without the structure of a relationship to pour myself into, I found a new currency: image. If I couldn’t control what I felt on the inside, I could curate relentlessly what people saw on the outside. The right parties, the right people, the right guys — not boyfriends, never boyfriends, because boyfriends required vulnerability and vulnerability was still my least favorite language.

This offered the hit of validation without the exposure of actually being known. I could be wanted without being seen. And for a girl who had spent years convinced she wasn’t enough, being wanted — even temporarily, even shallowly — was a reasonable counterfeit for the real thing.

I became very good at it. The performance of effortlessness. The studied nonchalance of a girl who didn’t need anything from anyone, thank you very much.

What nobody saw, and what I barely let myself see, was that underneath the social choreography was the same girl from the loud house, still running the same arithmetic. Still measuring her worth in whether or not she was chosen.

Avoidance is just another word for control. I told myself I didn’t want a relationship; the truth was I didn’t trust myself inside one. Keeping things shallow kept me safe. It also kept me stuck.

The irony, of course, is that chasing image is its own kind of invisibility. The more carefully I curated what people saw, the less of me was actually in the room. I was present everywhere and known nowhere — which, if I’m being honest, felt familiar. I had learned early that being fully seen was a risk. My dad had seen me, wholly and without condition, and then he was gone. The math was simple and devastating: being known meant being losable.

And so I floated. Through freshman, sophomore, and junior year — a rotating cast of meaningless entanglements that I dressed up as independence. I convinced myself I was living freely. I was, in fact, hiding in plain sight.

But before I found stillness, I found one more storm.

The summer before senior year arrived with the particular recklessness that only a college summer can manufacture (you know, your intern summer). When I wasn’t on the clock, I wanted to be sun-soaked and full of life. I, ever the overachiever, made sure my New York summer did not disappoint.

So along came another prep boy. I seemed to have a recurring, ping-ponging type, which is its own data point. Polished on the surface, curated to precision, the kind of person who knew exactly what to say and exactly when to say it, which should have been the first warning sign and was instead, embarrassingly, the first thing that drew me in.

He wrapped me around his finger with the casual ease of someone who had done it before and expected to do it again. He offered the glossy vision of what I thought I wanted in my soon to be post-grad era: the life, the energy, the promise of something substantial, and delivered, underneath it all, a carefully constructed fiction.

Something always felt off. That low, persistent hum of wrongness that lives just below the surface of a thing you want to be right. I felt it and I filed it away, the way we do when the alternative — admitting we are being deceived — is more costly than the deception itself.

My friends knew immediately. So did Annette. She had a radar for this particular species of boy that I had not yet developed, a finely tuned instinct for performance masquerading as substance. She didn’t mince words — she rarely did when it mattered — and I didn’t listen. Which is its own kind of lesson, the kind you can only absorb by living it.

The summer ended. The lies surfaced, as lies reliably do. And what I was left with was not heartbreak exactly, but something closer to embarrassment. The particular sting of having known, somewhere in your gut, and having chosen the comfortable fiction anyway.

Lesson: Intuition is not paranoia. That quiet, persistent wrongness you feel in the pit of your stomach is not anxiety inventing problems, rather it is your most honest self trying to protect you from what your hopeful self refuses to see. The people who love you most will sometimes see it before you do. Listen to them. And when you can’t listen to them, at least listen to yourself.

When you’ve confused being wanted with being worthy, you’ll keep collecting evidence of the former to avoid confronting your deficit of the latter. Quantity of attention is not a substitute for quality of connection, no matter how convincingly you do the math.

Senior year of college crept up and I was finally set on having fun with my girls. No distractions, no meaningless games. Then, when I wasn’t looking, I was letting someone in. Not fully, completely or gracefully. Just partially, just enough to put the first crack in my windshield of perception.

He was not what I would have picked for myself on paper. No flash, no performance, no carefully constructed image to mirror back at mine. His interests were intuitive, quiet and reflective. The early mornings and the kind of quiet that I had spent nearly four years running from. He was, in the truest sense of the word, simple. So different from my previous distractions, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment, which itself tells you something about how much I had grown.

For the first time, I was in a relationship that asked me to actually show up. Not the curated version, not the effortlessly cool girl from the party — just me. We did things together. Real things. We sat in silence that didn’t feel like a threat. There was no volatility to mistake for passion, no chaos to confuse with chemistry. It was just two people, present with each other, in the most uncomplicated sense.

And it terrified me.

What I didn’t fully understand then, though I feel it clearly now, was why he felt so disarmingly familiar. He wasn’t flashy or loud. He didn’t count love in grand gestures or measure his worth in what he could provide. He showed up quietly, consistently, in all the small ways that had never been enough, but that I recognized, somewhere deeper than memory, from my dad. The love for activity, the simplicity, the groundedness — it echoed something I had been reaching for without knowing I had lost it.

This was the first time I consciously understood what I was looking for in a man. Not the cool guy, not the status, the beach house — but my dad. The feeling of him. The safety of someone who didn’t need the world to know how much they had, because they already knew who they were.

But here is where it gets complicated. Because recognizing my dad in someone is not the same thing as being ready to hold that recognition. Every time I caught a glimpse of it, in the way he moved through the world without urgency, in the quiet steadiness of him, something in me recoiled. Not from him, exactly. From what he represented. From the terrifying possibility that I had found something real, and that real things, in my experience, had a way of disappearing.

So I did what I knew how to do. I created distance where there was closeness. I manufactured friction where there was ease. I created problems where they didn’t exist and built walls. I made sure it never got too serious, distancing myself where possible.

I told myself that something was missing, that the fit wasn’t quite right, when the truth, the one I could barely admit even to myself, was that loving someone who reminded me of my dad meant reopening the precise wound I had spent years learning to work around. It meant grieving him again, differently, in the context of something new and fragile and entirely too hopeful.

The further I pushed the resemblance away, the further I pushed him away. We eventually parted ways when I moved to New York.

Lesson: Finding echoes of the people we’ve lost in the people we love is both a gift and a grief of its own. I was not yet equipped to hold both at once: to let someone in who felt like home, knowing what home had cost me. Healing is not linear, and neither is love. Sometimes a relationship still ends because you are not yet whole enough to receive it.

But something was shifting — almost imperceptibly at first, the way light changes before you notice the season has turned.

Somewhere in the next two years, I started to ask myself, at what point does “not enough” start cracking?

And then came the wilderness.

Those first post-grad years were a particular kind of lost — not the dramatic, cinematic kind, but the slow, gray, directionless kind. The kind where you wake up in a city that was supposed to feel like freedom and instead feels like a costume you’re not sure you earned. I have written about this depression and you have read it earlier (if you have not yet, I urge you to read my second chapter here). But the short version is this: I went inward. Deeply, uncomfortably inward.

The occasional NYC Hinge date materialized and flopped. Nothing stuck, because I wasn’t really there.

I was present in body and somewhere else entirely in spirit, still doing the quiet, unglamorous work of figuring out who I was when no one was watching and nothing was performing.

It was not a pretty season. But it was a necessary one.

There is no shortcut through the wilderness. You can date through it, dance through it, distract through it — but it will wait for you. The only way out is the long way.

—

Flash forward to Father’s Day 2024, I was at a Phillies game. Which, if you knew my dad, this story will make perfect sense.

Father’s Day weekend. My family’s quiet, annual act of devotion — my mom, my brother, and I, in the stands, honoring him the way we knew how. Baseball was his language. It was one of the few things grief hadn’t managed to translate into something unrecognizable. And so, a few years back, we decided the game would be the thing that didn’t need to be said out loud, the form of rekindling that we profoundly worked so hard to form.

It was there, in that particular pocket of tenderness, that my best friend texted me. She had a friend who was into me. I already knew who he was — we’d met, followed each other on Instagram, existed in that comfortable periphery of almost-strangers. He wanted to take me on a date. Only problem: he lived in Boston.

She had a solution, naturally. Come visit. We’d all go out together. Worst case, the date was a disaster and the two of us could debrief over a girls’ night. I told myself that was the only reason I booked the flight. I was lying, obviously — but I let myself have the fiction long enough to use my credit card points and get on the plane.

The date was extraordinary. Not in a grand, orchestrated way — in the way that actually matters. We laughed until it was embarrassing. We traded childhood stories like they were currency, each one raising the stakes of the conversation. The chemistry wasn’t something I manufactured or talked myself into. It was simply, undeniably there: the kind that makes you feel simultaneously at ease and entirely undone. Even more, he shared my love for movement and self-improvement — offering to go on a run and jump in the ocean with me the next morning.

This is him, I thought. With a certainty that frightened me more than its absence ever had.

And so, with the precision of someone who has spent years perfecting the art of self-sabotage, I fell apart.

The following night, out with his friends, the walls closed in. Not gradually, all at once, the way anxiety operates when it has something real to protect you from. The fear of what this could become, of how much it already mattered in so little time, of how catastrophically I could lose it — it overwhelmed me so completely that I ran out of the bar mid-evening and called my best friend at home, mascara somewhere south of where it started, questioning what exactly I thought I was doing flying to Boston for a boy I knew from his Instagram handle.

She knew, before I finished the sentence, what I needed to hear. She always does.

Let him in, she said. Not all the way. Not all at once. But one wall. Pick one and let it down.

I thought about why he had already gotten further than most without trying. The simplicity of him — unhurried, unperformed. The way he loved baseball and tennis with the same quiet reverence my dad had. The way he lit up a room without demanding it, welcomed people without effort, made everyone around him feel like they had been expected. Extroverted in a crowd and deeply, perceptively inward when it mattered. He was, in the ways that counted most, a frequency I recognized.

I wiped my face. I walked back into the bar. I put one brick down.

Two months later, we made it official. And what followed was, in the most honest terms I have, the relationship that began to answer the question I had been asking for eleven years.

He learned me. Not the curated version, not the performance — the actual architecture of me, the parts I had kept in storage.

He learned how I needed to be loved: not in things, but in experiences. In hugs and little somethings. In handwritten hellos and “have a good day” post-its left somewhere I’d find them. In unexpected flowers and long walks and the particular grace of a hand to squeeze when the world felt like too much.

He provided a space that felt, for the first time in as long as I could remember, genuinely safe. His love did not come with a ledger. It did not require performance or contingency or the constant, exhausting work of earning it.

He treated my mom with the utmost respect and care. He showed my family what it looked like to be loved well. Annette saw our future in him before I let myself look that far. The kids claimed him as their own — not just mine, theirs — which is, in the taxonomy of my chosen family, the highest possible endorsement.

He was, and is, my person.

And still, because healing is not a destination you arrive at and unpack your bags, I am not finished. The fear of abandonment does not evaporate because you find someone worthy of your trust. The instinct to go silent when I should speak, to retreat when I should reach, to brace for the loss of something before it has any intention of leaving — these are not habits that love alone dissolves. They are the work. The ongoing, unglamorous, worth-it work.

But here is what is different now: I am naming it. I am sitting with it instead of running from it. I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, that being fully known is not the same as being fully losable — and that the man who has earned the right to see all of me is not going anywhere just because I finally let him look.

The right person will not complete you — that was never their job. But they will hold space for you to complete yourself. They will love the version of you that is still mid-becoming, not because they don’t see the cracks, but because they understand, better than you do in your worst moments, what is being built inside them.

So why did I tell you all of this? Why lay it out — the boyfriends, the patterns, the shame, the self-sabotage — in this particular order, for anyone willing to read it?

Because I spent a very long time believing that my story was something to survive quietly. That the grief, the dysfunction, the carousel of wrong relationships were evidence of a deficiency in me — proof of the “not enough” I had carried since childhood like a stone in my coat pocket, heavy and constant and so familiar I forgot it wasn’t supposed to be there.

Naming it, it turns out, is the beginning of putting it down.

This is what moving into acceptance actually looks like. Not a single revelatory moment, not a clean before and after. It looks like writing this. It looks like tracing the thread backwards through every relationship and finding, not a series of mistakes, but a girl doing the only things she knew how to do with the tools she had been given.

It looks like extending her some grace for that. It looks like understanding that the patterns were never personal failures — rather, they were inherited blueprints, absorbed in a loud house, reinforced by loss, and carried faithfully into every room I walked into until I finally learned to set them at the door.

I’ll write more about this soon, but I want to say now: I am evicting shame from my vocabulary. Not all at once — it is a stubborn tenant, slow to pack its things. But I am done letting it narrate my story. Done letting it convince me that I was the reason, that I was the variable, that love was something I had to earn rather than something I was simply owed by virtue of being here.

My relationship is not perfect. I want to say that plainly, because this is not a story about arriving. I still go quiet, scared to hear my own voice. I still flinch, sometimes, at the nearness of something good. The fear of abandonment does not dissolve because you find someone who has never given you a reason to feel it — it simply becomes something you name out loud instead of acting out in silence.

I am learning a new language of love. One that does not require volatility as proof of passion, or distance as a form of self-protection. One that is fluent in the small, steady, unglamorous acts of showing up — for him, yes, but first and most importantly, for myself.

Because that is the thing no one tells you about loving someone well: you cannot do it with an empty tank. Every relationship I moved through — the chaos, the deception, the ones that felt like my dad and the ones that felt like punishment — was, in some circuitous and painful way, moving me toward the understanding that I had to learn to love myself first.

Not perfectly. Not completely. But enough. Enough to believe I deserve the post-its and the long walks and the hand to squeeze. Enough to stop manufacturing reasons to leave before I could be left. Enough to walk back into a bar in Boston with mascara on my cheeks and put one wall down.

I am not finished. I suspect I won’t be for a long time. But I am no longer standing still, and I am no longer standing alone. And after twelve years of carrying this particular weight, that feels, today, like winning.

This is my truth. And I am here to win.

You’ve likely heard of the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. And if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve lived inside at least one of them. That’s the thing about grief: it isn’t selective. Grief is inevitability the one appointment none of us can cancel. So rather than brace against it, I want to encourage something harder: sit with it. Be vulnerable in it. Be brave inside of it. I’ll be right here with you - going through the motions, the emotions, the unravelings. My hope is that we can eventually dig into the research around grief, and how we can foster it to fuel motivation, ambition, and what it truly means to win. But it would be disingenuous to arrive there before we’ve had the chance to know and trust each other first.

For me, grief became a companion before I could fill out an A-cup bra. Now well into my early twenties, I’d like to think I’m finally bottoming out of stage four and inching, however reluctantly, toward stage five. If the math adds up, that’s nearly twelve years to move through four stages of a process. I share this not for your pity - I am a firm believer that pity sits at the very bottom of the emotional totem pole, useful to no one - but to underscore that grief is not a quick process. It doesn’t shape-shift overnight. It isn’t linear, and it certainly doesn’t respect your schedule.

Ages 13–14: Denial

Early on, I was covered in denial. While I recognize there is no right age to lose a parent, thirteen is plenty young to be handed a loss you don’t yet have the language for. At first, I didn’t fully process that my dad was, like, gone. The fact that he wouldn’t be at graduations, wouldn’t walk me down the aisle, wouldn’t get the chance to be a father-in-law, a Pop-pop, an old man. I blacked out those early years and painted over them with suppression, leaving denial to do its quiet, merciful work. I was lucky, in the way that mattered most: I had a group of friends who became family, who did everything in their power to make me feel like a normal teenager. So tone-deaf and gloriously alive as we were, we threw a fashion show and snow-plunged in our bikinis at my dad’s shiva. A real sight - for a girl who had absolutely no idea what was coming for her.

Ages 14–17: Anger

As I mentioned in my first post, the loss of my mom was simultaneous with the loss of my dad, just in different ways. In the year that followed his death, my mom was consumed by the logistics of survival: how to pay the bills, where we would live, how we would get by.

In that vacuum, I quietly learned how to do the things a thirteen-year-old shouldn’t have to: file taxes, grocery shop, make dinner. The goal was to survive while making myself as invisible as possible. The last thing I wanted to be was another item on mom’s list.

If we stepped out of line, asked a question in the wrong tone, let slip an innocent “Dad would’ve known how to fix that” — all hell broke loose. Her grief came first, and she hadn’t signed up to be a single parent.

I remember too well the nights that ended in rug burn, the days I’d come home to a locked front door, the fights that concluded with my clothes thrown from a window and an invitation to go find a better life if I thought I deserved one. When she did show up, it was to pull us into therapy sessions and family grief centers, until she decided she no longer wanted “Widow” trailing her name like a shadow.

So I retaliated the only way a teenager knows how: I got loud. I drank until I blacked out, tried things I shouldn’t have, dated the wrong boys, blocked Life360, and disappeared into friends’ houses for days at a time. I wanted her to worry. I wanted her to notice. I was swimming toward the deep end.

And then, rather improbably, someone reached in and pulled me back.

In middle school, my friends and I had worked as mother’s helpers for the daughter of one of our teachers. I connected instantly with the family, and over time stepped into the sole babysitter role. By some stroke of grace, they saw something in me worth seeing. That teacher, Annette, became something far greater than her title: my mentor, my anchor, my rock. Through her, I inherited a Pop-pop, two “disters” (daughter-sisters, a term we coined given the age gap between me and her daughters), and younger siblings I now have the extraordinary privilege of helping to raise (the other week, one referred to me as her “soul sister”). They gave me something to live for. Something to show up for.

Annette saw my potential before I could locate it myself. I genuinely believe I’d be on the wrong side of grief without her. Ours is a bond so singular that when we try to explain it to people, we’re met with a polite nod and the very gracious decision not to ask follow-up questions. We’ve found it easier, and preferred, to sum my title up as Annette’s “eldest, adopted grand-daughter".”

Together, we navigated the rage and the recklessness. She helped me weigh my options, not dramatically but deliberately: was I going to let this eat me alive, or was I going to rise above it? She pointed me toward scholarship programs, took time from her own full life to drive me on tours, and placed my high school diploma in my hands herself.

I left that chapter a little straighter, a little steadier. A young woman who finally knew what she wanted and was beginning to believe she deserved to go after it.

Ages 17–21: Bargaining

One of my greatest accomplishments in twenty-four years is that I graduated college. For many, this is a given: a four-year interlude where the biggest stressor is what next dress to buy for the next date party, all of which financed from the same lender that foots tuition. For me, it was never guaranteed.

I attended Elon University on a full scholarship through the Odyssey Scholars and Business Fellows programs, and while it remains one of the best decisions of my life, it came with conditions - the kind you don’t see on the acceptance letter.

My college years were defined by an identity crisis of my own quiet construction. If you don’t know Elon, allow me: a predominantly white, female campus, with roughly 40% of undergraduates hailing from the Northeast, 16% from New England alone (nothing against New England (but go birds), but its worth noting this particular client was of the privileged upper-middle and upper classes).

I never saw myself as a sorority girl, but the girls I knew were affiliated, the parties seemed fun, and I wanted, more than anything, to fit in. I thought it might diversify my social world, given that I’d already carved out my niche in Business Fellows and found genuine community in Odyssey.

What my various groups and roles actually created was a fracture - a dichotomy of self I spent four years trying to paper over.

I bargained constantly. Trading this for that. Scholarship girl for cool girl, because the idea of both coexisting felt laughably impossible. I chased being the best at everything, which is a reliable path to burning out completely. More status, more involvement, more accolades — more, more, more.

When people spoke of me, they spoke of accomplishments. When others asked how I was doing, my mom cited my internship at Goldman Sachs, university board seats, and leadership titles as proof that I was just fine.

Meanwhile, I was chipping away at myself from the inside out. For several years, I starved - both physically and mentally - falling victim to eating disorders and an insatiable need to feel like enough.

By the time I left the Elon bubble and entered the real world, I had no idea who I was. And that numbness, it turns out, was the most dangerous stage of all.

Ages 21–24: Depression

Post-grad has been the most grueling stretch of this journey, and also the most honest.

Shortly after graduating, I moved to New York City and started my career at Goldman Sachs. By most measures, I was living the dream… I’ll let you sit with the irony of that phrase. What we don’t talk about enough, and what I’m committed to excavating here, is that things, titles, and accomplishments are a very convincing costume.

For nearly a decade, I had been manufacturing a version of myself I barely recognized. Relentless effort, total immersion, one hundred percent functionality at all times, no matter the cost. Everything had to be perfect, or at least the version of perfect I’d constructed in my own imagination, built entirely on a foundation of fear.

So when I finally got room to breathe - a new city, a living wage, the first real taste of freedom I’d ever had - I started slipping. My mind began taking me to places I’d spent years avoiding. It was necessary. It was also brutal.

What I haven’t told many people is just how deep the depression got. For the better part of two years, I quietly unraveled. I withdrew from social spaces that once felt effortless. I lost control around alcohol and eventually quit entirely — telling people it was for health reasons, which wasn’t a lie, just an incomplete truth.

My anxiety reached a register I hadn’t known it was capable of. I lost friends. For a stretch, I genuinely lost myself.

I told almost no one. And the few I did tell? I only came clean once they noticed I wasn’t myself anymore. I remember telling Annette only after I broke down in her kitchen after having a panic attack that my dister pulled me out of. If my mom is reading, well, hi mom - here’s the truth.

That’s the particular loneliness of high-functioning depression: you become so practiced at the performance that the people closest to you don’t know to worry until something slips.

But then slowly, stubbornly, imperfectly, things began to shift.

Over the last six months, I’ve made some of the most significant changes of my life. I started listening to myself - really listening - instead of performing for an audience I’d invented in my head. I identified what I actually enjoy, what genuinely drains me, and whose energy in my life deserves a seat at the table.

I started, for perhaps the first time, caring less about what other people think. I won’t pretend I’ve mastered it. It’s a work in progress. Most worthwhile things are.

What I know, with a certainty that feels innate, is this: winning in life has far less to do with what’s on your resume than with what’s happening in your interior. I’ve had the accolades, the title, the city, the narrative. And none of it touched the parts of me that needed the most tending.

Success that isn’t built from the inside out is just a very well-decorated façade.

That is what this platform is for.

I’ve been someone who struggled with paralyzing self-doubt while appearing - to almost everyone around her - to have it all figured out. I know what it is to smile in a boardroom and fall apart in a bathroom.

I know what it is to grieve loudly, quietly, violently, and imperceptibly. I know what it is to rebuild. And I’m still learning.

So if you’re somewhere in the middle of your own unraveling - grieving a person, a version of yourself, a life that didn’t go the way you planned - I hope you’ll let me be in it with you. Not as someone who has arrived, but as someone who is genuinely, stubbornly, still in the process.

Win today.

“Win today so that you can play tomorrow.” — Howard T. Rosen

A quintessential dad-ism from a man whose first love was baseball and whose second - after the obligatory hierarchy of wife, children, and work - was helping other people live more fully. If I had to distill my father’s purpose into a single idea, it would be this: he wanted the people around him to experience a life expansive enough to become entirely their own.

His time, however, was cut short. My father lost his battle with cancer at the conspicuously unfair age of 47.

Somewhere in the wreckage of grief, anger, and fear that followed his passing, I came to believe that my responsibility was to continue what he started. In the last letter he wrote to me, my father reminded me of my ability to bring words to life on a page. So after years of internal negotiations, avoidance, and self-interrogation, I’ve decided to honor that encouragement by finally beginning.

This is not a platform meant to remind you that life is fleeting. The world already does that incessantly, with headlines, tragedies, and timelines that refresh faster than we can emotionally process them. My hope instead is to remind you that your life is yours to win. Winning, after all, is deeply personal. It looks different for everyone, and contrary to what we’re often taught, it does not require someone else’s defeat.

You have to play today as though you deserve the life you want tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow is never guaranteed, but if it does arrive, it becomes infinitely sweeter when you know you showed up fully for the game in front of you. Play hard enough that, even if the lights go out early, you can say you left nothing sitting on the bench.

A little about me.

For the first 11 years of my life, things were wonderfully ordinary. I was raised in an unremarkable suburb outside Philadelphia in a quintessential middle-class household: dad worked constantly, mom held everything together (your typical SAHM), my older brother cycled through every sport imaginable in which he beautifully failed in one after another, and I existed as a glitter-covered cheerleader-gymnast hybrid with unwavering commitment to being painfully girly.

Like many Philly kids, my summers revolved around camp. Dad would drop us off in the mornings before rushing to the restaurant, where he spent nearly every waking hour building a career at Outback Steakhouse, the only company I ever knew him to work for.

Then one July afternoon, he was home when the camp van dropped us off. That was strange. Afternoons belonged to mom.

After bribing us with Tastykakes (back when they still tasted like childhood) Dad explained that he was no longer working at Outback. According to him, he simply wanted to be a more “involved” father. That explanation would have been touching had it been true.

The reality was far less polished: he had been let go because he was no longer healthy enough to work. In simpler terms, he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and corporate compassion, unsurprisingly, had its limits. But at 11 years old, I didn’t care about the fine print. My dad was suddenly going to be around more. He would see more, do more, experience more. Lucky me.

In the weeks that followed, my parents became perpetually elusive. They were constantly in and out of Philly visiting “friends,” attending “appointments,” and generally behaving in the suspiciously vague manner adults do when trying to conceal catastrophe from children.

Eventually, at Hahnemann Hospital (which has since closed its doors), Dad learned that what he initially believed to be manageable symptoms amounted to the destination every mind instinctively avoids: stage four bladder cancer.

My parents sat with the diagnosis for weeks. They weren’t ready to explain to two tweens that life had abruptly become organized around a self-destructive monster. My brother and I remained concerned with far more pressing matters: were we were still going to Aruba? Was Dad going to coach Little League? Cancer existed as an abstract concept reserved for movies and charity walks. Surely not us. Surely not him.

What I failed to understand then was that my father was quietly navigating the most psychologically brutal years of his life. More than the physical deterioration, it was the uncertainty - the months before, during, and after diagnosis - that demanded impossible reserves of optimism, composure, and endurance. And somewhere inside that impossible stretch, my father made the most consequential choice a person can make: how to perceive his circumstances.

Fight or flight. Sink or swim. Despair or perspective. Perception became everything.

I’ve described my brother and me as having a “typical” tween reaction to my father’s illness, but I’ve grown to dislike that characterization because it softens what I now recognize as my greatest regret. To this day, my response to my father’s diagnosis remains the singular thing I would undo if given the chance. It revealed a level of naïveté and self-centeredness that still unsettles me. I wanted my life uninterrupted. I wanted normalcy preserved. I wanted inconvenience more than I wanted understanding.

You spend years hearing people say, “I wish I could go back and do it differently,” never realizing how hauntingly literal that feeling can become.

Of course, I can’t go back. None of us can. The only available option is forward: hopefully wiser, gentler, and more aware than before. But I would be lying if I said those years did not leave behind anxiety, shame, loneliness, and a fear of loss so profound it occasionally feels cellular.

Over the two years of my father’s illness, our home transformed. Doctors rotated through our front door. Appointments multiplied. Estranged friends resurfaced with casseroles and condolences. But strangely, life did not truly unravel until after he died. That’s the cruel irony of grief: you rarely understand the architecture of your life until something foundational disappears.

When my father passed away in January 2015, the collapse was swift. Within months, our home was foreclosed on. We survived largely through the generosity of my grandmother. And while my mother remained physically present, grief hollowed her out in ways I was too young to comprehend. She, too, vanished.

At school, I perfected the art of duality. I wanted desperately to appear normal, to be funny, social, likable, unaffected, while privately learning how to exist as both child and caretaker.

Then came the person who would become my North Star: a teacher who quietly stepped into the wreckage and helped raise me as though I were her own. Nearly twelve years later, she is still guiding me through every version of myself - the polished ones, the broken ones, and the deeply stubborn ones. I’ll share more of that story in time. But for now, this is the foundation beneath “Win Today.”

After losing my father, winning became less of an aspiration and more of a daily act of survival. For years, there were no cheerleaders, no roadmap, no real stability. So I found refuge wherever I could: in writing, in friendship, in mentorship, and in creating spaces where I felt visible, heard, and safe.

Losing nearly everything taught me something I continue to relearn every day: the effort and presence you bring to today matters more than almost anything else.

Because ultimately, the life you want is built there.

Win today.