HOW I GOT HERE
I know this woman because I am her.
For years, I was the capable one. I was independent and resilient, someone people could lean on - even though it was hard for me to lean on anyone in return. I became an optometrist because it was expected of me, built a successful practice with my husband, and raised three boys while holding it all together. By every external measure, I had made it. Inside, something felt profoundly empty.
SIXTEEN YEARS IN,
We sold the practice. I built an entire second career as a coach and coach trainer and found purpose, meaning, and work I loved. Yet underneath it, I was still relying on many of the same strategies: over-functioning, self-reliance, holding too much alone.
Watching someone I love move through a crisis of identity and mortality showed me a road I recognized under my own feet, and gave me courage I hadn't been able to find on my own.
IN 2018,
I left my marriage and the relationship systems I knew so well. Two years later, I moved with my three boys to Costa Rica - meant to be temporary, and largely for them. I stayed for me.
Away from so many of the roles I'd built my identity around, I began to discover how much of the woman I knew myself to be had been shaped by adaptation.
I was definitely choosing transformation, but I wasn't necessarily choosing the transformation my life was now asking of me. I was reckoning with the fact that the old strategies of success, survival, and resilience - what I thought made me successful, what I thought made me who I was - no longer worked. It was confusing and disorienting. And it opened a door.
That became the beginning of a different kind of learning - moving through recovery, Somatic Experiencing, the study of collective trauma, polyvagal theory, and eventually psychedelic-assisted therapy.
And underneath all of it, a question I'm still living:
Who do we become when survival is no longer organizing our lives?
TODAY,
I'm learning what it means to be in relationship without losing myself or pushing love away. To let work be regenerative instead of another cycle of burnout and collapse. To say yes to what matters and no to what doesn't. To let strength make room for softness, independence for interdependence, self-reliance for the vulnerability of receiving.
I don't teach nervous system reorganization from the outside. I'm living it too. I know what it is to have done years of inner work and still find your body responding to a life you no longer live.
And I know the quiet surprise of discovering who you are when you no longer have to be the person you learned to be.
Book a Conversation
