I still run a company. I still make the decisions, carry the responsibility, move through days that need clarity from me by eight in the morning.
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.
So raw, the parts about purpose and external validation completely hit home for me, and same goes for dismantling the patterns we inherit , so difficult to do but needed. I LOVE THIS!
Loving this in between 💕