Not once, and not as a sit-down talk. From the time we were eleven or twelve, over and over, to all three of her daughters.

Don't you ever depend on a man.

You depend on yourself, because you never know. A marriage can come apart and you have to be able to walk away from it, not stay because you can't afford to leave. Or he dies, and it's you and the children and whatever you can earn.

My father wanted us educated too. Both of them pushed all of us toward degrees and independence, and I don't want to make him the villain of a sentence he wasn't in.

But my mother's version came from somewhere specific, and I think I understood that even at eleven.

Where we're from, a girl married and was provided for. That was the arrangement, and it wasn't offered as one option among several. So every time she said it, she was telling her daughters to step out of a life she was already standing in the middle of, and to be able to do it without asking anyone's permission first.

She wasn't handing us her fear. She was handing us the exit she didn't have.

And it worked.

I left at seventeen. I put myself through school. I built a company with two partners. I have never in my adult life needed anyone to cover anything for me.

That was the assignment, and I completed it.

What nobody mentioned was the rest of it.

For seven years, I sat in an EO forum with a small group of other founders.

That is what the thing is for. You meet every month. You say what is actually happening in your business and your life. The other people in the room have usually been through some version of it. It is confidential and serious and, for seven years, I took it seriously.

Then my business contracted.

The contraction itself was brutal, but I have written about that part before. The fear. The decisions. What I haven't written much about is what I did with myself while it was happening.

I disappeared.

By then, disappearing had already started to become familiar. There had been a period of cyberstalking before that, which I haven't written about here, and after it started I pulled back from people. I stopped going out as much. Stopped responding to messages. Stopped engaging with friends and colleagues the way I normally did. My world got smaller without my making an explicit decision to make it smaller.

Then the business started contracting, and I went further.

I would get through the workday because there were decisions to make and people depending on me. Then I would go home and sit on my couch.

That was pretty much it.

I didn't want to go out. I didn't want to explain what was happening. Messages would come in from friends and I would leave them unanswered. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes months. People I loved would reach out and I simply wouldn't engage.

It wasn't that I had decided everyone was unwelcome.

I just couldn't see what I would say.

Or maybe more accurately: I couldn't see what saying it would accomplish.

And then I told the forum I was leaving.
They told me they could help me.

This is the part that bothers me now.

I want to be precise about what happened, because the easy explanation would be shame. There was probably some of that. I had built something successful and it was contracting dramatically, and I didn't particularly want to sit in a room and narrate that.

But shame isn't the interesting part.

The interesting part is that seven years of people who had been through hard things, in a room built precisely for this, told me out loud that they could help me, and I could not see how.

Not what they meant. How.

They said it to my face and my mind went straight to: and then what?

They can't bring back what I lost.
They can't make the decisions for me.
They can't tell me which people to let go.
They can't know whether I'm making the right call.
They can't make any of this not be happening.

So what exactly are we going to do in that room?
I couldn't answer that question.
Nobody could help me.

That sentence felt completely factual at the time.
In some ways, it still does.

What I wanted was to run away and handle it myself. Or, more honestly, to disappear from having to explain it at all.

I know what I'm probably supposed to say here. That of course they could have helped. That being witnessed is help. That perspective is help. That somebody sitting beside you while you go through something is different from going through it alone.

Maybe.

I believe those things intellectually.

But if I'm being accurate about how my brain works when something is actually wrong, none of those things register immediately as help.

Help, to me, is something that changes what happens and alters the outcome.

And if it can't change what happens, I honestly don't know what to do with it. I'm not proud of that. I'm also not sure I can argue my way out of it.

Maybe that's the part I actually inherited. More than the independence.

I want to say that I've worked it out since.
I haven't.

The ordinary version of this is somehow worse, because nothing is even at stake.

I'm in YPO now.
There are WhatsApp groups full of people with extraordinary networks and experience, and every day somebody asks for something.

Does anyone know a great personal stylist?
Looking for a headhunter who can find a product lead.
Need a restaurant recommendation.
Does anyone have a contact at this company?
My guy fell through. Anyone know someone?

Some of them are small enough that it would never occur to me to ask them out loud.
And then, almost immediately, six people answer.
Of course I have someone.
Call her.
Here's the number.
Tell him I sent you.

Meanwhile, I have needed a personal stylist.
I have needed a headhunter for a product leader.
I have needed doctors, consultants, introductions, recommendations, places to stay, people who know people.

And my instinct is almost always the same.

I search.
I research.
I ask ChatGPT.
I call recruiters.
I make a spreadsheet.
I figure it out.

I have access to a network specifically designed to collapse six degrees of separation into one WhatsApp message, and somehow I can still spend three hours trying to solve something somebody else could probably solve for me in four minutes.

I have rarely posted in that group asking for help.

Most of the time, it isn't a decision. The group doesn't enter my mind as part of the solution. The need arrives and converts straight into a task before another person is anywhere in the picture.

Find stylist.
Find recruiter.
Find doctor.
Solve problem.

It doesn't arrive as a moment in which someone else might be useful. It arrives as a thing on my list.

This is my life and I'm handling it, the way you handle traffic.

But that isn't the whole of it, and I know it.
Because when it does occur to me, I hesitate.

Not because I think they'd mind. Because posting it means letting a room full of very capable people watch me not know something.

I don't want to be the one who couldn't work it out. I don't want to be the one who isn't smart enough to have found the answer already.

I'd love to tell you those two things are separate. That there's the version where it never crosses my mind and the version where it does and I flinch.

They're probably the same thing, and one of them just got faster.

Once I saw it, I started seeing it everywhere. And it had been everywhere for years.

When doctors kept telling me I was fine, I didn't push back. I went around them and found my own way in.

When my father has been in the hospital, I have gone and stayed and slept in the chair, and I do not remember ever asking anyone to come sit with me.

I have close friends I love, and I almost never call them when I need something.

I've watched other women have the ordinary kind of friendship where you just call, on a Tuesday, about nothing, and I have envied it, and I have not built one.

All of that has looked like competence from the outside and mostly from the inside too.

I jump in. I handle it.

I've been praised for exactly this as far back as I can remember. My grandmother used to say it in Arabic, where it lands better than it does here.
Wherever you throw her, she lands on her own two feet.

I don't think my mother did anything wrong.
I think she gave three girls the only protection she had, and it was a good one, and it worked.

Never depend on a man.
Be able to leave.
Be able to earn.
Never be in a position where someone else's choices decide what happens to you.

What she was teaching us was how to get out.

I got very good at it.

What I'm less good at is knowing when staying connected to someone isn't the same thing as depending on them.

I don't know when independence stopped being a financial principle and became a way of organizing every problem I encounter.

Maybe it happened slowly.

Maybe competence is addictive that way. Every time you solve something yourself, you collect another piece of evidence that you can. Eventually the evidence becomes a worldview.

I can handle this quietly becomes this is mine to handle.

Those are not the same sentence.

I'm only beginning to understand how often I've treated them as if they were.
And I'm wary of replacing one absolute with another.

I don't want the lesson of this essay to be ask for help.

There are things nobody can fix for me. There are decisions that are mine alone. Sometimes the people around me really don't know what to do. Sometimes telling ten people about a problem just means I now have a problem and ten opinions.

I value my independence and everything it has given me, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I still want to know that if everything goes sideways, I can take care of myself.

My mother was right about that.

What I'm less certain about is why I've interpreted being able to carry something alone as evidence that I should.

Maybe there was another sentence that belonged beside hers.
Don't ever be unable to leave.
But don't become so good at not needing anyone that you forget to notice when they're already in the room.

I don't know if she could have taught us that.

She'd have had to have learned it first.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

She was forty.

I didn’t know her well. She was the sister of a dear friend, and over the years we’d spent holidays together.

But that didn’t seem to matter.

Sitting there, listening to people tell stories about her life, I remember having a thought that, given the circumstances, was probably the most obvious thought in the world.

I could go to bed tonight and not wake up tomorrow.

Or I could get a diagnosis that changes everything.
Or a phone call.
Or an accident.

None of us are promised another thirty years.
Or thirty days.
Or tomorrow morning.

I left that celebration convinced something had shifted inside me.

I remember thinking I needed to spend more time with the people I loved. I wanted my family and closest friends to know how much they meant to me—not just because I told them, but because they could feel it in the way I showed up.

Looking back, that realization changed my awareness much more than it changed my behavior.
Life resumed.
Habits and patterns are remarkably good at surviving revelations.

As an adolescent, I had a fairly logical roadmap for life.

Graduate from high school.
Go to university.
Get a job.
Get married.
Have children.

That was simply the sequence I grew up around.

At some point, perhaps after I moved to the U.S., my version of that roadmap changed.

I knew I didn’t want to get married until I had established myself professionally. And I knew I didn’t want children until I was financially secure.

Not just comfortable.
Secure.

I wanted the kind of financial freedom where having children wouldn’t mean losing myself.
Where I could afford help.
Where I could continue building a career I loved.
Where motherhood didn’t require giving up every other part of me.

I have a systematic mind. A logical mind. 1 + 1 = 2.
You take the first step, then you take the next.

So somewhere along the way, without realizing it, my logic became:

I’ll build the life first.
Then I’ll live it.

I never said those words out loud.
I don’t think I even knew I believed them.
But they quietly organized the next twenty-five years of my life.

When I moved to the United States at seventeen, that sequence became even stronger.

I wanted stability. I wanted to be my own person. I wanted to be financially independent so that I could make my own decisions.

I wasn’t trying to build an extraordinary life.
I was trying to build a stable one.

Now, I can look back and say I’ve had an amazing life. And I want the second chapter of it to be extraordinary.
But that wasn’t what seventeen-year-old me was trying to do.

If you’ve read my last few essays, you know I’ve been reflecting a lot on safety.

I grew up in a place where stability wasn’t guaranteed. Then I moved halfway across the world with little more than hope, ambition, and the belief that if I worked hard enough, I could build a different kind of future.

So I did what made sense.

I studied.
I worked.
I achieved.

My younger self solved the problem she was living with.
She was building a life where she could finally exhale.

And honestly, I’m so deeply grateful for the life I’ve had; a life that, as a little girl, I didn’t even have the imagination to dream about.

When I was thirty-six, I froze my eggs.

Why thirty-six?
Because I had finally reached a point where I could afford it.

I’d been reading about egg freezing for years. If I could have done it at thirty without going into debt, I would have.
But I couldn’t.
So I waited until I could.

At the time, I was completely convinced I didn’t want children.
Or at least I thought I was.

Every evening I injected myself with hormones, alone, wondering what exactly I was doing.

Then I’d remind myself.

I’m doing this so I don’t wake up one day regretting that I never gave myself the option.

That was enough.
One cycle.
One possibility.
One attempt at preserving an option.

The fertility specialist showed me the statistics.
I honestly don’t remember the exact numbers anymore.
I remember understanding them intellectually.
I definitely didn’t understand them emotionally.

Now, looking back, I can see that.

I thought one cycle was enough because, after all, I didn’t really think I’d ever need those eggs.
Maybe I’d meet someone.
Maybe I’d have children naturally.
Maybe I truly didn’t want children.
Or maybe it was a defense mechanism.

I still don’t know.

Life would probably sort itself out.
There would be time.

Lately I’ve been thinking about that version of me a lot.

It’s tempting to look back and tell her everything she should have done differently.

Freeze your eggs earlier.
Do more than one cycle.
Work a little less.
Spend more time with your parents.

But that would require her to know what I know now.
She couldn’t.

She made thoughtful decisions with the information, resources, and emotional capacity she had at the time.

She wasn’t careless.
She wasn’t asleep.
She wasn’t choosing the wrong things.

She was solving the problem that felt most urgent.

Safety.

I don’t want to judge her.
I want to thank her.
I’m proud of the decisions she made.

She built the life I’m standing in today.

I’m simply living with a different set of questions than the ones she had.

One of those questions has surprised me.

For years, I told myself I didn’t want children.
Now, I’m not so sure.

And there’s another layer to this that I’m only beginning to understand.

I was sexually molested as a young girl. Choice matters deeply to me. Having agency over my own life and my own body matters deeply to me.

So maybe that’s part of why losing the possibility of choosing feels different from simply losing the outcome.

Do I want children?
Do I not?
Am I saying I want them because I’ve been told I may have waited too long?
Or because I truly do?

I don’t know.

And then another question appears.

Am I grieving the possibility of motherhood?
Or am I grieving the possibility of choosing it?

Those aren’t the same thing.

The older I get, the more I realize that some of the most important questions in my life have refused to be rushed simply because I wanted an answer.

A little over a year ago, I made another decision that surprised some people.

I moved to Puerto Rico.

Part of the reason I moved was because I realized I didn’t want to keep postponing the rest of my life while I was building it.

I wanted mornings that belonged to me.
I wanted to walk by the ocean on a Tuesday.
I wanted my life to feel like something I was participating in instead of something I was constantly preparing for.

That doesn’t mean I stopped being ambitious.
I’m not sure I know how.

I still wake up excited by difficult problems.
I still want to build new things that matter.

None of that changed.
What changed was my understanding of what success could actually give me.

Success gave me opportunities.
Freedom.
Choices.
Experiences I never imagined I’d have when I was seventeen.

What it couldn’t do was create more time.
That was never its job.

I used to think my life would begin after enough things were in place.

After the business was stable.
After I found the right partner.
After I felt financially secure.
After...

The sentence never really ended.

It just found new endings.

I’ve since realized that my obsession with financial security goes much deeper than money. During the Hoffman Process, I started seeing how tangled it was with questions of self-worth and whether I felt like I was enough. That’s probably another essay.

I was not postponing things I didn’t value.
I was postponing the things I assumed would patiently wait for me.

Stillness.
Presence.
Friendships that deserved more than squeezed-in dinners between flights.
Questions about love.
Questions about family.
Questions about who I wanted to become now that survival wasn’t driving every decision anymore.

I kept asking those parts of my life to wait because I genuinely believed there would be another season for them.

I’ve been wondering lately if one of the biggest illusions of adulthood isn’t that life is long.

It’s that we believe our future selves will somehow become people with different priorities.

That she’ll be the one who finally slows down.
Finally chooses differently.

As though she’ll inherit more courage than we have today.

But she’s just us.
Only older.

I spent decades asking one question.

How do I build a life where I finally feel safe?

It was the right question for that season of my life.

I’m grateful I asked it.
I’m grateful for the woman who spent years answering it.

These days, though, I’m asking something different.

Maybe that’s the difference between the woman I was and the woman I’m becoming.

One was trying to build a life that felt safe.
The other is trying to be fully present inside the life she’s already built.

I’ve finally realized my life wasn’t waiting on the other side of all that building.
It was happening while I was doing it.

If I can no longer rely on time to quietly make my choices for me...
What do I choose now?

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

I burst into tears.

Not because of the question. Because of what it meant that he was asking it.

A few weeks earlier I had learned the word perimenopause. Not from a doctor. From a podcast I went looking for myself, after a year of being told everything looked fine while I watched my body do things I couldn’t explain. So I was already holding that word at arm’s length, the way you do when you’re not sure you want it to apply to you.

And then a cardiologist, in a cardiology office, asked about my cycle.

In a split second my mind wasn’t on my heart at all.

I’m aging.
Am I already too late?
Too late to protect my health?
Too late to have children?

None of that was in his question. I understand that now. He was recognizing something I hadn’t accepted yet, which is that my hormones and my heart were part of the same conversation and always had been.

I didn’t know that. I would have told you I understood heart disease.

My dad had his first stroke at forty-nine. Years later, a triple bypass. Heart disease was never abstract in my family. It was something I had watched up close, in hospital corridors, for most of my life.

What I understood was the event.

The stroke.
The surgery.
The blocked artery.

I didn’t understand the twenty or thirty years that came before any of it.

I thought heart disease was something that happened one day. I didn’t realize it was something that had been happening quietly the whole time, and that the day was only the day we finally noticed.

My cholesterol had been sitting a little outside the normal range for years. Every year the recommendation was the same, and every year I agreed with it.

Eat better.
Move more.
Lose some weight.
Let’s keep watching it.

That seemed completely reasonable to me. It seemed reasonable for about a decade.

Then I ordered more testing than my annual physical had ever included, mostly because I was trying to understand why I no longer felt like myself, and cholesterol turned out not to be one number. It was particle counts and inflammatory markers and a picture nobody had ever shown me.

For the first time my family history stopped being background. Not because it decided anything. Because it changed what I wanted to ask.

Here is the part that actually unsettled me, though, and it wasn’t the numbers.

I felt completely fine.

No chest pain. No shortness of breath. Nothing that would have sent me to a cardiologist if I hadn’t gone looking on my own.

Apparently that’s the point. Arteries don’t wait for symptoms before they start changing. Plaque doesn’t appear on the morning of the heart attack.

Disease often arrives in the medical record long after it has arrived in the body.

So I did what I do, which is decide and push.

Over the next year I lost more than twenty pounds. My insulin improved. My blood sugar improved. Most of the numbers I had been working on moved in the direction I wanted them to move.

Then I repeated the cardiovascular testing.

Some things improved. The ones I cared about most barely moved.

Further testing suggested my liver simply produces more cholesterol than average, and that genetics were doing more of the work here than I had wanted to believe.

I’ll be honest. That scared me.

Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet way that has you reading research papers at eleven at night, trying to understand what your own body is telling you, and wondering how much of this was ever yours to fix.

Somewhere in that same year I heard a cardiologist say, at a conference, that women’s health has largely been treated as reproductive health.

It sounds obvious written down. I haven’t been able to put it down since.

Almost everything I was ever taught about estrogen was organized around periods, pregnancy, fertility, hot flashes. Almost nothing was organized around the fact that estrogen had been quietly holding up my blood vessels, my metabolism, my muscles and my brain that entire time.

Which is why the question in his office landed the way it did.

He wasn’t changing the subject. I just didn’t know it was the same subject.

I used to think prevention meant catching something early.

These days I think it might be closer to staying curious while there’s still nothing to find, which is harder, because there’s no result to react to, and I am much better at reacting than I am at paying attention.

I don’t have this resolved.

I’m still working with my physicians. I’m still deciding whether lifestyle will be enough or whether medication becomes part of this. I’m still trying to rebuild muscle I didn’t know I had lost. Still trying to sleep. Still trying to be less impressed by my own ability to override things.

What has changed is smaller than a plan. I used to think of my heart as an organ I was supposed to protect. Some days now I can think of it as a system I’d like to keep for another forty years, and it turns out those are very different jobs.

But what I keep getting stuck on is the earlier part.

I was in the room for all of it. My father’s stroke, the surgery, the recoveries. I watched the whole thing and somehow decided that watching was the same as understanding.

I don’t know what I would have done differently at thirty-five if someone had explained it to me. Maybe nothing. That might be the part I can’t get past.

So the question I’m sitting with isn’t really which test to order next.

It’s whether I’m capable of paying attention to something that isn’t hurting me yet, or whether I’m going to need it to become an event first.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

Not just professionally.
Personally.
Financially.
Emotionally.

Almost overnight, everything that had felt solid suddenly didn’t.

Looking back, that’s the part that surprises me most. The impact was real. The uncertainty was real.

But what happened inside my head was something else entirely.

Within days, as I was thinking through rebound plans and pivots, I was also carrying a completely different conversation inside myself.

I failed.
I’m a fraud.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m back to having nothing.
All those years... all those sacrifices... they were for nothing.

I remember how quickly my mind, my body, my subconscious all went there.

It didn’t stop at the business.
It rewrote my entire life.
It told me I had been wrong.
Wrong to spend years of my life pouring everything into building a company.
Wrong to sacrifice so much of my twenties and thirties.
Wrong to believe that if I just worked hard enough, one day I would finally arrive somewhere that felt secure.

As I've reflected on that period, I don't think I was grieving the business as much as I thought I was. I think I was confronting a fear I thought I had left behind.

The fear of not having enough.
The fear of instability.
The fear that everything could disappear overnight.
The fear that no matter how hard I worked, I could end up right back where I started.

That last sentence is uncomfortable to write.

Because if you met me professionally, you probably wouldn’t describe me as someone motivated by fear.

You’d probably describe me as ambitious. Driven. Resilient. Maybe even fearless.

And all of those things are true. They were true then, and they’re still true today. My life decisions certainly suggest that.

But lately I’ve been wondering if they tell the whole story.

I grew up in Lebanon during a time when stability wasn’t something you expected. It was something you hoped for.

Wars.
An unpredictable economy.
A father whose work—and presence—were inconsistent.
Arguments at home that made you wonder what tomorrow might look like.
Periods where my family depended on my grandparents financially.

I didn’t think of those experiences as trauma. They were simply the backdrop of my childhood.

When I moved to the United States at seventeen, I never consciously thought I was trying to escape instability. I thought I was chasing opportunity.

Part of me was. Another part of me, I can see now, was running away from a future that looked all too familiar.

But looking back now, I wonder if I was chasing something else too.

Safety.

In my last essay, I wrote about always having a next thing to chase.
I don’t think I realized then why I needed there to always be a next thing.
At the time, I thought I was simply ambitious.
Now I wonder whether momentum itself made me feel safe.
As long as I was building, growing, achieving, there wasn’t much room to stop and ask what I was actually running toward—or away from.

Momentum kept me focused on what was ahead. It also kept me from noticing what was still following me.

Every milestone I achieved felt like another brick in a wall I was building between myself and the life I never wanted to return to.

I thought I was building a business.
I was.

I thought I was building financial security.
I was.

What I didn’t realize was that I was also trying to build emotional security.

A life where I would never have to feel that fear again.

Looking back now, I can see that business cycles are part of entrepreneurship. Markets change. Governments change. Priorities shift. Leaders are forced to make painful decisions they never wanted to make.

I understand that today.
I couldn’t see it then.

Almost overnight, I felt like I was seventeen again.
Not because my circumstances were the same.
They weren’t.

Objectively, they couldn’t have been more different.
I wasn’t broke.
I wasn’t starting over.
I wasn’t alone.

But fear doesn’t seem particularly interested in objectivity.
It doesn’t review balance sheets.
It doesn’t care about the evidence you’ve accumulated over twenty-five years.

It reaches for the oldest story it knows.

Mine sounded something like this:

Everything can be taken away.
You’re not safe.
You’re back where you started.

That’s what caught me off guard.
Not the business.
My subconscious’ reaction to it.

For months, I couldn’t understand why the contraction had shaken me so deeply.
I told myself it was because I cared so much about the company.
Because I felt responsible for my employees.
Because I hated letting people down.

All of those things were true and still are.
But they weren’t the whole truth.

It pulled old fears into the present and made them feel current again.

Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.

It also forced me to admit something I hadn’t fully recognized before.

Somewhere along the way, it had become difficult to separate the performance of the business from how I felt about myself.

The business had stopped being something I built. It had quietly become the thing standing between me and every fear I had spent twenty-five years trying to outrun.

Looking back, I don’t think I attached my self-worth to the business overnight.
I think I attached something even more fundamental.
My sense of safety.

That realization didn’t happen immediately.

In fact, I couldn’t see any of this while I was living through it.

It took months of reflection—and an experience that deserves its own essay—for me to recognize just how intertwined those things had become.

Not because I consciously decided that my worth depended on the success of my business.

I never would have said that.

But because somewhere along the way, success quietly became proof that I was safe.

And if success meant safety...
Then struggle must mean danger.

No wonder the business contraction felt like freefall.

The strange thing is that none of this has made me think less of ambition.
Or entrepreneurship.
Or building.

I still love building.
I still love creating.
And I still have new ideas I hope to bring into the world one day.

What has changed is what I expect success to do for me.

For a long time, I think I expected it to quiet that old fear.

One more contract.
One more milestone.
One more achievement.

Eventually I’d arrive at a place where uncertainty no longer had a seat at the table.

Maybe that was never a promise success could keep.
Maybe success creates opportunity.
Freedom.
Choices.
Impact.

Maybe it was never meant to create permanent emotional safety.

I’m still sitting with that.

Some days those old fears still show up. They’re quieter now.

Not because I’ve conquered them. Because I recognize them.

When they tell me I’m back where I started, I know that isn’t actually true.
It’s just an old story trying to convince me that the past is happening again.

Maybe that’s the work now.

Not eliminating fear.
Not pretending it doesn’t exist.

But learning to recognize which fears belong to my present...
...and which ones have simply been waiting for an invitation to return.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

At the beginning of the year, I told myself I was going to write every week. I was excited about it, actually.

Writing had become one of the few things that helps me sort through everything that has happened over the last couple of years. It helps me make sense of my thoughts. It helps me get out of my own head. Every time I write, I feel better afterward.

And then I stopped.

Not completely. I would jot down notes in my phone. Start drafts and never finish them. Think about writing. Plan to write.

But sit down and actually publish something?

I didn’t.
I couldn’t.

What’s strange is that writing wasn’t the only thing.

The same thing was happening with text messages from friends. Ideas I wanted to pursue. Decisions that should have taken ten minutes and somehow took ten days.

A close friend texted me once, just to check in. Nothing complicated. Nothing that should have taken more than a few minutes to answer.

I read it and thought, I want to give her a real response, not some rushed two-line text. I’d reply that night.

Then tomorrow. Then once the week calmed down.

Every time I saw her name I thought, I need to answer her, and then almost immediately, it’s been so long now, I can’t just respond casually.

A text that would have taken five minutes sat there for more than a week.

Eventually she texted again. “Are you okay?”

And there it was. The thing I had been postponing because I cared had communicated the exact opposite.

It happened with more than one of them. Sometimes it went on for months, because answering meant explaining how I was, and I would rather go quiet than do that.

I kept thinking I would snap out of it.
Then I remembered I already wrote an entire post about waiting to snap back.

So maybe that’s not the story.

Maybe the more interesting question is why I’ve been questioning so many things lately that I thought I had already figured out.

One of them is happiness.

I genuinely thought I knew what made me happy.

And I think I was happy.

That’s what makes this so confusing.

When I look at my life, there is so much to be grateful for.

I have a family that loves and supports me.
I’ve had opportunities many people only dream about.
I’ve built a business alongside incredible partners and teammates. I’ve created something I’m genuinely proud of.
I’ve made lifelong friends in different corners of the world. I’ve worked remotely from places I never imagined I’d get to experience. I’ve walked through cities and countries that younger versions of me didn’t even know existed.

When I sit down and really think about my life, there are moments where I still can’t believe it’s mine.

So this isn’t one of those stories where I suddenly realized I was miserable.

I wasn’t.
At least I don’t think I was.

What I’m realizing is that I never spent much time questioning what happiness actually meant to me.

I think I assumed I knew.
Or maybe I assumed it would take care of itself.

I moved to the United States when I was seventeen. I started working almost immediately. Since then, there has almost always been a next thing.

Community college.
University.
Graduate school.
The next job.
The next promotion.
The company.
The growth of the company.
The next challenge.
The next goal.

For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been moving toward something.

I wasn’t drifting.
I was building.

And maybe that’s why I never stopped long enough to ask certain questions.

Not because I was avoiding them. They just didn’t seem necessary.

If you had asked me five years ago what made me happy, I probably would have given you an answer immediately.

Achievement.
Growth.
Impact.
Building something meaningful.
Creating opportunities for others.
Financial security.
Freedom.

And to be clear, I still value all of those things.

This isn’t one of those posts where I pretend success doesn’t matter.

It does.

The business matters.
The work matters.
The impact matters.
The people matter.
The life I’ve built matters.

What has changed is that I’m no longer convinced those things fully answer the question.

The last couple of years forced me to slow down in ways I never would have chosen for myself.

The business changed.
My health changed.
My energy changed.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I found myself asking questions that felt surprisingly basic.

Is this what I actually want?
Is this still what I want?
How do I want to spend my time?
What do I want the next chapter of my life to look like?
What matters to me now?

Not five years ago.
Not twenty years ago.
Now.

The truth is, I didn’t have good answers.

I still don’t.

That’s probably the part that has surprised me the most.

Not that my answers changed.

That I wasn’t sure I had ever really examined them.

That’s uncomfortable to admit. Especially because I don’t regret the life I’ve built.

On the contrary.

I’m deeply proud of it.

I don’t regret my career.
I don’t regret moving across the world at seventeen and taking a chance on a life I couldn’t yet imagine.

But I’ve started noticing things that occupied very little space in my thinking ten years ago.

Connection.
Companionship.
Having people around me that I don’t need to perform for.
Feeling fully seen.
Feeling present in my own life instead of constantly focused on what’s next.

Even writing.

The irony isn’t lost on me that one of the things that makes me feel most connected to myself is also one of the things I’ve struggled to do consistently.

Maybe that’s why this post took so long.

Maybe I wasn’t avoiding writing.

Maybe I was avoiding some of the questions that writing forces me to sit with.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’ve become a lot less certain lately.

And strangely, that doesn’t feel entirely bad.

For most of my life, I thought self-awareness meant having answers.

Knowing who you are.
Knowing what you want.
Knowing where you’re headed.

These days it feels more like paying attention.

Paying attention to what energizes me.

What drains me.
What I miss.
What I crave.
What I keep doing out of habit.
What I keep doing because I genuinely want to.

I thought I knew what made me happy.

Now I’m not so sure.

And maybe that’s not a problem to solve.

Maybe it’s an invitation to ask better questions.

For someone who has spent most of her life chasing answers, that feels unfamiliar.

And if I’m being honest, a little scary.

But it also feels alive in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

I knew about macros.
I knew exercise mattered.

What I didn’t know — not really, not in my bones — was that protein and muscle would be the difference between feeling like myself in perimenopause and feeling like a stranger in my own skin.

My education about my body didn’t start in a doctor’s office.
It started at home.

My older sister is four years ahead of me.
Tall. Long black hair. Naturally thin.
She had the kind of body our culture quietly — and not so quietly — worshipped: slim, elegant, “model material.”

I was different.
Short. Curvy. Compact.

I wasn’t invisible.
I was smart, outspoken, friendly. I took up space in every room I walked into.
But the kind of attention my sister got was different.

My mother dressed her up.
She fussed over her outfits.
She paraded her — not literally, but emotionally — as the pretty one.
Boys noticed her first.

And I learned something I couldn’t yet name:
Slim meant desirable.
Slim meant chosen.

So my relationship with food and my body became about being acceptable. Attractive. Desirable.

Watching what I eat became a strategy.

I’d power through busy days — especially once I started running and scaling a business — barely eating.
Then I’d come home starving and binge.
The cycle was familiar:
Restrict.
Get overwhelmed.
Come home ravenous.
Eat everything in sight.
Feel guilty.

It’s not that I didn’t know what to do.
I did.
I’ve always been educated about nutrition, protein, exercise.

The deeper story was this:
I believed I needed to manage my body to be attractive and desirable.
I believed my worth in the romantic, feminine, “wanted” sense lived in how close I could get to that slim ideal I grew up watching.

I want to be fair to my mother here. She was not cruel about it, and I don’t think she knew she was doing it. She had inherited the same ranking from her own mother and was passing it down the way you pass down a recipe, without ever writing it out.

That belief followed me straight into midlife.

When my body began shifting, I wasn’t uninformed.

I knew strength training mattered.
I understood cardiovascular health.
I wasn’t living on fast food.

And yet things changed.

Sleep became fragile.
My mood felt subtly off.
The scale moved without obvious cause.
My clothes stopped fitting the way they once did.

There was a night that year I was getting dressed to go out dancing. My best friend was DJing. The man I was with was waiting on me.

Nothing fit. Not one thing in the closet.

So we went to a store first, and I asked for the size I thought I had settled at, and that one didn’t fit either, and I stood in a fitting room and asked for the next one up.

I don’t have a graceful way to describe what that did to me.

Then something in me said fuck it. I bought the dress. We went. I danced.

And I felt good. Not the way I used to feel, and I couldn’t argue myself into that, but good.

Which is strange, because the whole premise I grew up inside was that this decided whether you were wanted, and there was a man across the room who wanted me either way.

It didn’t move anything. I remember thinking I had bigger fish to fry.

Then there were the labs.

I was forty-three. My A1c was normal. If you looked only at that, you would have said I was fine, and for years people did.

My fasting insulin was 10.6. That number means nothing to most people and it didn’t mean much to me either, until someone explained that it is what your body is spending to keep the normal number normal. The A1c was the result. The insulin was the effort.

I have spent my whole career reading numbers that tell you where a thing is heading rather than where it is. I had simply never once applied that to myself.

Perimenopause exposed something uncomfortable:

I understood muscle mattered.
I wasn’t eating or training in a way that protected it.

Lifestyle still matters deeply.

It just doesn’t override biology.

For most of my life, muscle was about shape.
Toned arms. A firmer butt.
It was aesthetic. Optional.

But muscle is not decorative tissue.

Muscle is metabolic infrastructure.

Chronic under-eating of protein no longer looked disciplined.

It looked metabolically naïve.

What actually stung wasn’t the biology. It was recognizing the shape of the mistake.

I had been doing the thing I have always done, which is choose the disciplined-looking option and assume discipline is the same as being right. Eating less looked like control. It read as virtue. Nobody tells you that the restraint you are proud of might be the thing quietly costing you.

I have a history of turning health into performance.

There is a version of this where “strong” simply replaces “thin.”
Where protein targets become another control mechanism.
Where lab optimization becomes its own obsession.

I am paying attention to that.

I don’t fully trust myself here, is the honest version. I know what I’m like once I have a metric. I know I can turn “build muscle” into a performance review just as easily as I turned “stay slim” into one, and that the second version would be healthier and still not be free.

So I’m trying to hold it loosely, which is not a thing I have ever been good at.

The goal isn’t domination of my body. It’s long-term cooperation.

The girl who didn’t feel desired growing up is learning:
To eat enough.
To get stronger, not just thinner.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

So when things started changing in my late 30s and early 40s, I did what most high-functioning women do: I rationalized a lot because none of it arrived like a clear breaking point.

I told myself I was tired. Overworked. Burnt out. Stressed. Traveling too much. Running too hard. I didn’t wake up one day with symptoms; they crept in slowly enough to feel like “just life.”

Until they didn’t.

Here’s what actually happened.

I started experiencing vaginal dryness; not mild discomfort, but dryness to the point where I thought something was wrong with me. Sex started to feel uncomfortable, then painful. I began questioning myself in ways that quietly broke me:

Am I not attracted enough to my partner?
Am I not turned on enough?
Is this a relationship issue? A me issue?

At the same time, my urinary patterns changed. I used to be able to hold my pee forever. Suddenly I couldn’t. I had urgency. Frequency. I peed on myself more than once because I couldn’t get to the bathroom fast enough. Right before my period, I started getting symptoms that mimicked UTIs, burning, urgency, even when tests came back “normal.”

My desire didn’t just dip. It disappeared.

And that was the most destabilizing part. I’m not someone who has ever been indifferent to desire — for sex, for life, for pursuit. Losing it felt like losing part of my identity. I felt ashamed. Embarrassed. Quietly depressed. I kept thinking: Is this it? Is this just how it goes now?

Medically, I was told I was fine.
More than once.

At one point, I was told to “focus more on foreplay.”

No one examined my vaginal tissue. No one talked to me about estrogen decline. No one mentioned perimenopause. And most physicians aren’t trained to diagnose or treat it, especially when symptoms show up before cycles fully change.

There is one more thing I learned that year, and it turned out not to be about sex at all.

Someone explained to me that the hormones that were declining don’t only run desire for sex. They run desire for anything. Pursuit. Curiosity. The wanting that makes you pick a thing up and chase it.

I had to sit down when I heard that.

Because I had been telling myself a story where my libido had gone quiet and everything else was fine, and it wasn’t true. That same year I stopped starting things. I stopped answering messages. I had ideas and let them sit. I told myself I was tired, or busy, or past the age where you chase things.

It had not occurred to me that those were the same system.

I don’t know what to do with that yet, honestly. I’m not sure whether knowing the mechanism changes anything. But it moved something, because for a couple of years I had been reading my own flatness as burnout or depression. Something I should have been able to push through, the way I have pushed through everything else.

And it turns out I was asking my body for interest it no longer had the chemistry to produce.

I keep thinking about how long I would have gone on blaming myself for that. Years, probably. I had a whole framework ready for it. Discipline. Effort. The belief that anything I wasn’t doing was something I had chosen not to do.

I want to be careful about how I say this next part, because it took me years to see it.

I went into that appointment with a body that had changed. I came out with a suggestion about foreplay.

And I took it. Of course I took it. I had been raised not to ask questions about any of this, so when someone in a white coat implied the problem was my attention, or my effort, or my partner, that fit a story I already believed about myself.

Nobody looked at the tissue. That’s the part I keep returning to. The answer was physical and it was available and nobody looked.

I think about my mother sometimes, who was handed even less than I was and had nobody to ask either. It would be easy to make that a story about her. It isn’t. She was doing what the women before her did, which is not talk about it, and I did the same thing for forty years without ever deciding to.

I don’t know yet how much of that silence belonged to the doctor and how much of it I brought in with me.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

Not judgmental. But concerned.

They would ask, “Are you okay?” or, “Is everything alright?”

It wasn’t subtle. They could see it. I could see it too. My body looked inflamed. Puffy. Like I was retaining water everywhere. I kept thinking I looked like a balloon, tight and swollen, on the verge of popping.

At first, I told myself it was temporary. Normal, given everything I’d been through.

All my life, I’d gone through periods of weight gain and loss. That wasn’t new. What was new was how fast it was happening and how little control I seemed to have over it. Every week, the scale went up. Every single week.

This was happening while I was doing all the “right” things.

I was eating clean. Prioritizing protein. Tracking macros. Logging everything in MyFitnessPal. I increased my steps. I started Zone 2 training. I was consistent. Disciplined. Careful.

And still, the weight kept coming.

That was the moment I knew something was wrong.

Around the same time, I had done everything I was supposed to do medically. Annual physical. OB-GYN exam. Blood work. Follow-ups. Every doctor told me the same thing:

Everything looks fine.

But I wasn’t fine.

When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize my body. My waist kept expanding. My clothes stopped fitting. My body felt foreign.

Later, I would learn this was inflammation. At the time, all I knew was that my body no longer felt like mine.

I gained over thirty pounds in six to eight months. I had never seen that number on the scale in my life. Not even close.

It shattered my confidence.

I didn’t take a single selfie during that period. Not one. I avoided looking at myself naked. I moved through the world hoping no one would comment, while bracing myself for when they did.

And underneath all of it was a quieter fear I didn’t want to say out loud:

Is this it?
Is this aging?
Is this the beginning of a body I’ll never get back from?
Will I never feel sexy or vibrant again?

What made it worse was the loneliness of it.

I wasn’t “sick enough” to be taken seriously. My labs were “normal.” I was functional. Still doing my life. Still performing competence. So the system had no real place for me.

This didn’t happen all at once.
First came the weight gain.
Then the confusion.
Then the quiet panic of doing everything “right” and watching nothing change.

The testing came later, not as a first instinct, but as a last resort, after I’d been told, repeatedly, that nothing was wrong.

That’s when I stopped relying on typical doctors and typical blood tests.

I took charge.

Out of frustration. Out of desperation. Out of a deep need to understand what was happening inside my own body when no one else seemed willing to help me figure it out.

That’s when I turned to ChatGPT.

Not because I thought it would replace doctors but because I needed a thinking partner. Someone to help me ask better questions. To make sense of test results. To identify which markers mattered and which ones were being ignored. To help me decide what to look at next when the answers kept coming back as “fine.”

I didn’t just do basic blood work and call it a day. I started ordering my own tests, far more of them than anyone had suggested, and when the results came back I kept asking why certain numbers were considered “normal” when they didn’t match what I was actually experiencing.

I wasn’t chasing a diagnosis.
I was trying to understand what was breaking down, area by area, when no one else seemed willing to look.

People suggested GLP-1s early on. I refused because I don’t believe in band-aids when I don’t understand the wound. I’ve dealt with digestive issues most of my life. I knew the side effects. I was scared to make things worse. And I didn’t have a doctor I trusted to guide me properly.

I wanted the root cause. I’m data-driven. I needed to see the full picture before choosing a solution.

The turning point came later, when cardiovascular and liver markers from that deeper blood work flagged something no one else had paid attention to: I was in clear metabolic dysfunction.

When I finally sat across from a cardiologist, after sending him all my results ahead of time, he didn’t start with my weight.

He asked about my cycle.
He asked if my period was regular.
He was the first person to say the word perimenopause out loud.

Perimenopause wasn’t something I’d been educated about by doctors, by family, or by culture. It wasn’t on my radar. And yet, suddenly, it explained why so many symptoms had been treated as isolated or irrelevant.

Around the same time, I was listening, reading, learning, trying to understand what actually happens in women’s bodies during this phase of life that no one prepares us for. I sought out better care. I followed conversations that finally named the intersection between hormones, metabolism, cardiovascular risk, and weight in a way that made sense.

By the time I walked into a women’s wellness summit recently, this journey wasn’t new anymore.

But something shifted being in that room.

Sitting among women who were accomplished, capable, outwardly steady, and privately trying to piece this together too, I realized how much of what I’d learned had stayed locked behind access. Behind money. Behind geography. Behind the ability to keep digging when others simply don’t have the bandwidth.

I’m deeply aware that the access I’ve had to doctors, tests, conversations, rooms like that is a privilege. And I’m grateful for it.

If Between Selves has been about noticing the space between who I was and who I’m becoming, this is part of that same inquiry: where the body stops being a background character and starts asking to be included in the conversation.

I’m not writing this to tell anyone what to do.

I’m writing because I know what it feels like to be told you’re fine when your body is clearly telling a different story. When the data says one thing, the mirror says another, and your intuition is left holding the tension alone.

I’m writing because that space between “fine” and truth is where many women quietly live for far too long.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

Not out loud.
Internally. Constantly.

I kept having these quiet conversations with myself. I’d tell myself why this made sense, why it wasn’t a big deal yet, why I just needed a little time. It felt easier to explain it than to stop and feel how off everything was.

That’s always been a reflex of mine.

Growing up around emotional instability, I learned early how to stay alert. I learned how to read the room, manage myself, anticipate what was coming. I learned that being perceptive was safer than being porous. That understanding things gave me leverage, even when I couldn’t control them.

My mind learned to work overtime.

It learned how to scan, assess, explain. How to stay ahead of emotion by organizing it. How to keep moving by staying cerebral. I didn’t check in with my body. I didn’t ask what my younger self was holding. I didn’t listen for anything quieter or less coherent. I relied almost exclusively on my brain because it had always kept me safe.

That reflex followed me into adulthood. Into leadership. Into responsibility. Into a life where being capable wasn’t just rewarded, it was required.

So when I started to feel off, I did what I’ve always done.

I rationalized.

I told myself this was burnout. Years of pressure catching up. A heavy season doing what heavy seasons do. Of course my energy was low. Of course my edges felt dull. Of course I wasn’t functioning the way I used to.

Burnout fit the story I already believed about my life.
It felt earned.

It also let me stay upright.

As long as I could explain what was happening, I didn’t have to interrupt anything. I didn’t have to stop. I didn’t have to question the systems I relied on — discipline, endurance, competence, will.

I just needed time.
Perspective.
Space.

Except time didn’t change anything.

What I didn’t say out loud — what I barely let myself think — was how embarrassed I felt by my own inability to function. Not in dramatic ways. In small, quiet ones.

I couldn’t do things that had always been easy for me. I couldn’t initiate. I couldn’t follow through. I couldn’t summon the internal momentum I had built my life around.

And instead of asking what was happening inside me, I judged myself for it.

I kept thinking, this shouldn’t be this hard.
I kept wondering what was wrong with my discipline.
I kept assuming I was failing some internal test I’d always passed before.

I started feeling ashamed before I even knew why. Not loud shame. The kind that makes you smaller in your own eyes. The kind that convinces you to hide the evidence and double down on self-control.

So I intellectualized harder.

I told myself I was reacting to professional loss. That losing ground in work would naturally destabilize anyone. That meaning had cracked, and of course my energy followed. That once things stabilized externally, I would recalibrate internally.

That explanation made sense too.

Work had always been an organizing force for me. A compass. When that cracked, everything felt less anchored. I assumed the rest of me would catch up once I found my footing again.

But even as I told myself that, something didn’t line up.

I wasn’t spiraling.
I wasn’t avoiding.
I wasn’t resisting my life.

I was trying — quietly, consistently — to do what I’d always done. And it wasn’t working.

The more I explained myself, the less responsive my body became. The more I reasoned, the further away I felt from the parts of me that actually register truth — my body, my heart, my younger self, my spirit. The brain was running the show alone, unchecked, convinced it could think its way back to capacity.

I understood plenty. I still couldn’t move.

What strikes me now isn’t that I missed the signs.

It’s how completely I trusted my mind with something it couldn’t actually handle on its own.

I didn’t lack awareness.
I lacked listening.

Rationalizing had always protected me. It had gotten me through instability, pressure, responsibility. It had helped me survive by staying sharp and ahead.

I didn’t realize it had also learned how to override everything else.

I kept asking myself why I couldn’t do what I’d always done, instead of asking what part of me was no longer being heard.

And by the time that question started to surface, the strategy I’d relied on for most of my life — letting my head make all the decisions — had already exhausted itself.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

At first, I tried to make sense of it the only way I know how. I told myself I was tired, burnt out, maybe depressed. I told myself this was situational, that anyone would feel this way given everything life had been throwing at me. I wasn’t dismissing it; I was normalizing it. I was intellectualizing what was happening, contextualizing it, convincing myself that this was a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances.

But my body didn’t respond to my reasoning.

I started waking up exhausted, not in a sleepy way or a low-motivation way, but in a depleted, hollowed-out way that didn’t lift as the day went on. Getting out of bed became physically difficult, not emotionally dramatic. My body felt heavy in a way I couldn’t override, and that confused me more than it scared me at first.

Until it didn’t.

I’ve always had strong willpower. It’s been one of my defining traits. When things get hard, I decide, I push, I move. That muscle has carried me through most of my life. And suddenly, it was useless. I would lie in bed fully awake, knowing exactly what needed to be done, and feel completely unable to generate the force to do it. Not resistant. Not avoidant. Just empty of propulsion.

I couldn’t reconcile that with who I understood myself to be.

Then the cognitive changes started. I began losing words I use every day. Not forgetting names or details, but losing entire thoughts mid-sentence.

It started happening often enough in my weekly leadership meetings that my team got used to it.

I’d be talking through something, usually moving quickly from one thought to another, and then suddenly stop.

I completely forgot what I was going to say.
We’ll have to come back to it.

And we’d move on.

A few minutes later, sometimes in the middle of an entirely different topic, the thought would come back. I’d interrupt. Wait. I remember what I was going to say before. And I’d pull everyone back into a conversation we’d already technically finished.

Once or twice, maybe I could have laughed that off. But it kept happening.

That was when I started worrying about meetings with people outside my company.

My leadership team knew me. They knew how I thought. There was nothing particularly risky about telling them my brain had just gone blank and asking them to move on until it came back.

I couldn’t imagine doing that with a potential client or partner.

So I started entering those meetings differently. I became hyperaware of my own cognition while I was trying to have a conversation. I’d write things down as soon as they occurred to me, because I was afraid the thought might disappear before I had a chance to say it. If I felt myself losing the thread, I’d try to improvise my way out of it.

And underneath the actual conversation was another one.

Please don’t happen.
Please don’t happen.

Sometimes it did.

I don’t know if the person across from me always noticed. Maybe what felt enormous to me looked like an ordinary pause to them. Maybe my improvising worked.

But I noticed.

I was used to trusting my brain in rooms like that. Thinking on my feet, connecting things quickly, holding several threads of a conversation at once. Those weren’t things I had ever needed to consciously manage.

Now I was taking notes partly so I wouldn’t lose my own thoughts.

And I think that was when the brain fog stopped feeling merely frustrating and started feeling frightening.

Around the same time, my emotional regulation fell apart. I started crying suddenly, disproportionately, over things that would never have touched me before. It didn’t feel like sensitivity or vulnerability. It felt like something inside me had lost its governor. My mental health was a wreck, and what made it worse was that I didn’t understand why.

That’s when fear entered in a real way; not fear of illness, not fear of dying, but fear of not being able to return to myself. I kept trying to talk to myself the way I always have. Snap out of it, Paola! Come on. You’re strong. You’ve handled worse. But I physically couldn’t. And that was new.

No one around me really understood what was happening, not because they didn’t care, but because they weren’t used to seeing me this way. They were used to me being the one who holds it together, who powers through, who figures things out. I wasn’t that anymore. Or maybe I was, and it no longer mattered.

What frightened me most wasn’t feeling weak; it was realizing that my strength had always been a mechanism, and that mechanism had stopped responding.

I stopped trusting my energy, then my cognition, then my emotional responses. I didn’t know what was a symptom and what was a reaction. I kept waiting for the old formula to work: try harder, sleep more, eat cleaner, reset next week; but nothing moved.

This wasn’t a conversation I could reason my way through. It wasn’t a mindset problem or a discipline problem. It wasn’t something I could outwork.

My body didn’t break.
It refused to keep taking orders.

And I don’t yet know how to live inside that truth.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

From the outside, not much changed. That is most of what I want to say about the last two years.

It held. I held.

Underneath, the thing I had been using to organize my life stopped working, and I didn’t notice for a long while, because I have never been someone who notices that kind of thing quickly.

It wasn’t one event. That’s the part I find hardest to explain when people ask.

My body changed in ways I didn’t recognize and couldn’t explain, including to the doctors I was paying to explain them to me.

The business moved in a direction I hadn’t chosen, and I found out that I had quietly built my sense of safety on top of it.

Questions I had been postponing for twenty years, about children and time and what I actually wanted, stopped agreeing to wait.

Someone spent months making it clear they could watch me, and I found out that the privacy I thought I had was something I had assumed rather than something I held.

Three of those I can write about. I notice I just wrote the shortest sentence about the one that did the most damage.

None of it came with a map.

What it gave me instead was the thing I have spent my whole adult life avoiding, which is a long stretch of not knowing what I was doing.

I keep wanting to tell you I’ve come out the other side of that. I haven’t. I’m somewhere in the middle of it, and the middle is an unpopular place to write from, because there is no lesson in it yet and people are generally reading for the lesson.

I don’t write from resolution. I write from the middle.

What has surprised me is how basic the questions turned out to be. Not what do I do next. Closer to: who was I being for all those years, whether I ever actually chose her, and whether she is something a person can put down.

I don’t have answers to those. What I have is a new suspicion about how quickly I used to produce them.

So this is where I work it out.

I would rather do that here, imperfectly and where people can see it, than do it privately and call that composure. Privately is what I would have done five years ago. It is what I did for about twenty-five years before that, and it is the single thing I am least interested in continuing.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.

Not because it was provocative.
But because it was clarifying.

It made me realize something important about myself:

I don’t need New Year’s resolutions.
They quietly make me feel like a failure.

Resolutions turn desire into pressure.
Vision into obligation.
And progress into perfectionism.

I end up stuck—endlessly refining ideas in my head, waiting for the right moment, the right version, the right confidence.

So instead of resolutions, I’m choosing something else this year—inspired by her words, but grounded in my own lived truth:

Fuck yeses and fuck nos.

Because clarity creates movement.
And progress matters more than perfection ever will.

Fuck Yes

Fuck yes to taking the first step—even when it scares me.
Especially when it scares me.

I’m done waiting until ideas feel fully formed, polished, or bulletproof.
Perfection has been my favorite hiding place.
I’ve called it “preparation,” but it was really fear.

Fear of failing.
Fear of being vulnerable.
Fear of being seen trying—and not succeeding.

This year, if something pulls at me, excites me, or won’t leave me alone, I’m taking the step.

Movement over mastery.
Action over overthinking.

Fuck yes to listening to my body—because it doesn’t lie.
Yoga tells me the truth.

It shows me what nourishes me.
What drains me.
What brings me back into my body, my creativity, my desire, my aliveness.

I’m listening again.

Fuck yes to living on purpose, not by expectation.
I don’t want a life that looks good.
I want one that feels right.

I’m being intentional—and relentless—about protecting my energy, honoring my desires, and building what I actually want, not what’s expected of me.

Fuck yes to trusting myself more than external approval.
My instinct.
My inner authority.
My knowing.

I’m done outsourcing my truth for validation or likability.
I trust myself more than the room.

Fuck yes to regulating my nervous system and prioritizing my health.
Peace over pressure.
Health over hustle.
Presence over performance.

I want my vibrancy back.
My confidence.
My sensuality.
I want to feel alive—and at home in my body again.

That’s not indulgence.
That’s self-respect.

Fuck No

Fuck no to perfectionism.
It’s not discipline.
It’s fear wearing a nicer outfit.

Perfection keeps me stalled, overthinking ideas that never meet the world.
It convinces me I’m not ready—when readiness was never the requirement.

Fuck no to fear of failure running my life.
Especially the fear of being seen failing.

I grew up in an environment where achievement was rewarded — good grades, success, visible wins.
Failure wasn’t encouraged, and often felt shameful.

That conditioning taught me to hesitate.
To wait until I was sure.
To only move when success felt likely.

I’m unlearning that now.

Trying and learning beats hiding and wondering every time.

Fuck no to empathy at my own expense.
I’ve noticed a pattern in myself — being too understanding, too generous with excuses, too willing to justify behavior that doesn’t actually feel okay.

I call it empathy.
Patience.
Seeing the bigger picture.

But when compassion requires me to shrink, over-function, or explain away treatment that diminishes me, it stops being compassion.

It becomes self-betrayal.

I can understand someone’s circumstances without accepting behavior that costs me my dignity.
I can be kind and clear.
I can hold compassion without lowering my standards.

Fuck no to isolating myself when I’m not okay.
I’ve learned to tell myself that being honest about not being okay makes me look weak.
So instead of reaching out — even for a listening ear — I retreat.
I distance myself.
I carry it alone.

I confuse strength with silence.
And positivity with pretending.

But isolating myself doesn’t make me stronger — it just makes things heavier.

I’m learning that I can be honest about not being okay without becoming negative.
That I can ask for support without collapsing.
That connection is not a failure of resilience — it’s part of it.

The author, , invited her readers to reflect on two questions:

She asked her readers two questions. What is a clear fuck yes for you right now? And what would change if you stopped negotiating yourself to keep the peace?

My clearest fuck yes right now is simple—and not easy:

Taking the shot.

For me, that means choosing action over perfection.
Starting before I feel ready.
Letting myself be seen trying, instead of staying safe in my head.

This year, Taking the Shot is my anchor—the theme I’m coming back to whenever I feel myself stalling, overthinking, or waiting for certainty.

If I stop negotiating myself to keep the peace…

I become authentically happier.

Not performatively fine.
Not externally successful but internally exhausted.

Actually happy.
Grounded.
Aligned.

In the spirit of that theme, this is my first Substack article.

Putting my thoughts out here—publicly, imperfectly—takes more vulnerability than I expected. I don’t have a following. I don’t have a strategy. I’m not trying to build an audience.

I just wanted to put my thoughts into the world—and let them exist.

That, for me, is taking the shot.

And this year, I’m choosing courage over comfort.

Paola

Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.