Stepping into ourselves

the awkward transition: former to current self

It’s been awhile since I have put out anything here, and for good reason. I’ve had my head down figuring out my next trajectory in life and working really hard on all the details. (More on that later.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way life feels, post-tectonic-shifts. Like, once all the dust has settled from something cataclysmic and you are no longer fighting in survival mode and you realize, oh, I made it through that. It’s over.

For the longest time, I have been identifying pretty hard as a divorced woman. As struggling. Everything in my life orbited around the thing I had survived and how I was struggling to move on from it. I identified as a survivor, not from my ex-husband but from my former life and the toll it took on me to get through such a change.

In my experience with divorce (and maybe just grief in general) it’s easy to create an identity around this for awhile, like sometimes years, because everything in your life does orbit around your divorce (or grief). There are so many new logistics, so many pain points to navigate, so many reminders and moments where whether you like it or not, you’re experiencing what it means in your life and relationships and finances to be divorced. It’s exhausting.

In November of 2021, everything came to a head and my marriage fell apart. Three years later, in 2024, I am fully rounding the curve of letting go of the woman I was, the one that got me through all of it. She was so good. She did the best she could with what she had. I love her so much. And - I’m ready to let that person rest now.

So that is what I have been doing. I’ve been deciding new things about who I am and where I’m going. I’ve decided new things about the kind of woman I am now, on the other side of it all. The kind of mother I am now. I’ve been present with my children (now age 11 and 8! What the HELL!) and having the bandwidth to take them in for all of who they are without always secretly having my internal hard drive loudly humming as it runs through all the pains and dangers I’m facing.

I’ve continued showing up every day, working on making my body, life, and home a place full of warmth, texture, ease, embodiment, self-trust, good smells, great sounds, dancing, and deep-seated peace. I’ve been marinating on the life I want.

Letting go of the survivor in me has been really uncomfortable. Everything about it has felt weird and foreign, like I’m in a different country where I only know how to say, “Where is the bathroom” and “Thanks.” The process has affirmed everything I’ve been learning about our minds, neural pathways, and our subconscious, which is that once we’ve settled into a certain set of habituations (in our mind or in our physical lives) those habituations start to be strongly associated with safety.

So a big part of stumbling toward a different version of myself (a thriving one, a deeply self-assured one, a successful one) has been repeating to myself daily that it’s safe for me to feel uncomfortable, uncertain, and a little shaky as I let go of an older version of me. As I let go of a version of myself that could only comprehend survival. As I embrace someone more powerful than I was before.

I’m safe in this life I am making. It’s safe for me to feel unsure and keep going forward anyway. I’m safe to take up space. I’m safe in this life I am making.

This shift over the last several months has been tangible. It has led me from being absolutely clueless about how to restructure my professional life in a way that can support me and my kids to doing job interviews with ease, to welcoming new opportunities that fall into my lap, to new dynamics in my relationships, and, to deciding that what I’d really like to be doing for a living is to be coaching women. So that’s what I’ve been working on.

In the next few weeks I’ll be launching my coaching business where I will be offering 1:1 mentorship to women within a three month container, and I couldn’t be more excited. It feels like the next right thing.

What does this mean for my audience or content? Honestly, not much is going to change. Mostly, I’ll be taking what I put out into the world more seriously, and offering more opportunities to connect with me. My posts here will remain the same (largely free with the option to pay $5/month for occasional private content). But I did just want to put it out there in the world, and let you know how thrilled I am to be making this shift.

Thanks for being along for the ride. See you on the Internet :)