Something Is Shifting
On voice, becoming, being in the mess
Recently, I've been struggling to write.
Not because I've run out of things to say. I never run out of things to say. But because I've been searching for my voice. The current one. The one that belongs to who I'm becoming, not just who I've been.
I've been thinking about why that is.
Our voices aren't fixed things. They're living, breathing organisms that grow with us, shaped by age and stage, yes, but also by the world we inhabit. And the world I'm inhabiting right now is asking something different of me. Something I haven't quite said out loud yet. Something more honest, more fierce, and in some ways more vulnerable than anything I've written before.
I'm squarely in my second Saturn return (if you missed that essay, start there). The world has, by any honest measure, lost its mind. And I am in the midst of a deliberate, sometimes clumsy, deeply intentional shift into the next version of myself. It feels messy. Becoming rarely feels graceful from the inside, and I've never trusted the kind of growth that doesn't leave a mark.
So let me tell you where I am.
The people I love most are in transition.
My parents are in the final phase of their lives. I want to be careful with how I say this, because the words matter. They are not simply aging. They are completing something. And being truly present for that, not just logistically present but emotionally, spiritually, unflinchingly present, is one of the most profound and painful things I have ever been asked to do. I am learning things about love I didn't know I didn't know. About what it means to witness someone's unfolding and their undoing at the same time. About how grief and gratitude can occupy the exact same moment without canceling each other out.
My children are men now. They have partners and careers and full lives that belong entirely to them. I watch them with enormous, sometimes breathtaking joy. And just beneath that joy, something quieter. A subtle, nostalgic ache I wasn't entirely prepared for, even though I should have been. I miss raising them. I miss the particular intimacy of being needed in the way small children need their mothers. And at the same time, our relationships now are richer, more honest, and more genuinely mutual than anything I could have imagined when they were small. Both of those things are completely true. Neither cancels the other out. I've stopped trying to resolve the contradiction and instead, am working to live inside it.
My work is alive in ways that matter.
I have become, somewhat accidentally, a Chief Growth Officer. This suits me in ways I'm still discovering. I have always tried to look for opportunities to evolve, sometimes in ways that stretched me uncomfortably; and having a role that asks that of me professionally feels less like a job description and more like a calling finally named. My work at InspireCorps is purposeful and alive.
And Unfolding, the business I've built around the work I believe in most, feels more important to me than it ever has. Not because the market is right for it, though it is, but because the women I work with are navigating this particular moment in history with a kind of quiet, determined courage that moves me every single time I witness it.
And then there is everything else.
My own creative expression, still finding its fullest form. My spiritual life, which has never been quieter or more certain. My desire to bring beauty, joy, hope and love into the world, not as a brand strategy or a content pillar, but as a fundamental orientation toward being alive.
My commitment to truth, even when truth is unwelcome. My feminism, deep and unapologetic and no longer interested in softening its edges for comfort. My desire to be part of the movement that is reshaping the world, painfully and beautifully and without any guarantee of outcome.
I want to stand in my values without flinching. I want my anger to be useful. I want it to burn clean and point toward something worth building.
And there is my marriage. My extraordinary husband. My ongoing, daily commitment to showing up as a loving, present, and generous partner. To choose that, not once, but over and over again, in the ordinary moments that turn out to be the ones that shape who we are, together.
I feel all of this. The full weight and the full gift of it. And I am devoted to every single part.
Which is exactly where the tension lives.
Because I don't want to write from only one of these places. I want my writing, and my work in the world, to hold all of them at once.
I want to be fierce and soft. Firm and flexible. Spiritual and strategic. Loud and quiet. An activist and an introvert. I want to resist and I want to restore. I want to speak hard truths and still leave room for hope. I want to be moved and to move others, without performing either.
This is not a branding exercise. This is how I actually committed to live.
I'm idealistic, but I think in systems. I have strong opinions and I genuinely want to be wrong about some of them. I'm an optimist who has looked at the worst of what humans do to each other and chosen, every time, to believe we can do better. I'm clear in my convictions and I remain hungry for the perspective that will complicate them.
I believe in hard conversations, the kind where your voice shakes and you say the thing anyway. I believe that love without backbone isn't love, it's appeasement. I believe that being soft and being strong are not opposites.
I believe that the most sophisticated thing a person can do, in this moment, in this world, is to refuse to be made smaller by it.
My voice is changing. I can feel it getting more courageous. Bolder. More willing to name things directly, to take up space, to say the uncomfortable thing without the cushion of qualifications around it. It will also hold humility, because having strong opinions is not the same as being righteous, and I know the difference. I intend to keep knowing it.
All this to say: I don't know exactly where this is going.
But I have long since stopped waiting until I know.
That's the whole point.
