I looked like someone who had everything sorted. I was 27 and did not know who I was, what I believed, or what my life was for.
Who you are when the framework you were raised in is questioned is a question worth taking seriously. The discomfort of it is the work, not a problem…
A private identity crisis in a context where your identity is held communally is one of the lon…
I thought I was ready to date again at seven months. My first three attempts showed me clearly that I was not.
Give the grief enough time to finish before you ask a new person to navigate the part of you that is still mid-process. They cannot and should not be…
Being ready to date again is not a calendar milestone. It is an internal one. The test is wheth…
I was not eating too much. I was managing too many feelings with the only tool I had been given.
When you find yourself reaching for food outside of hunger, pause long enough to name what you are actually feeling. The pause itself is most of the …
You cannot address emotional eating by addressing the eating. You have to address the emotions …
My closest friend lost her mother while I was at my lowest point. I showed up anyway and it changed both of us.
Presence is often what grief needs most. You do not need to have the right words or the right emotional state. You need to be there. Most of the time…
You do not need to be at your best to show up for someone who needs you. Sometimes showing up d…
I was excellent at the technical work. Leading the people who did it required a completely different set of skills that nobody told me I would need to learn from scratch.
If you move into management, treat it as a new profession requiring new learning - not as a continuation of your technical career at a higher level. …
The skills that make you excellent at a technical craft do not automatically transfer to leadin…
I spent four years trying to fix my brother's substance problem. I finally understood that I could not and that my trying was part of what was keeping both of us stuck.
Loving someone through addiction requires a different framework than loving someone through most other difficulties. Find people who understand the s…
You cannot recover someone else from addiction by loving them hard enough. The recovery is thei…
My grandmother left me more money than I had ever had. I was not prepared for how much it would complicate my sense of who I was.
Money that arrives without effort challenges the self-concept you built through effort. Take time to understand what the money means to you before yo…
An unexpected financial inheritance carries emotional complexity that no one prepares you for. …
I had been doing this work for six years and was objectively good at it. My internal experience of my own competence bore no relation to the evidence.
If you consistently discount your successes and amplify your failures in a way that produces no net growth in self-belief, the problem is not your ca…
Imposter syndrome is not modesty. It is a persistent distortion of self-assessment that prevent…
She celebrated every setback I had. I did not understand what I was seeing until I had a success she could not celebrate and she left.
Pay attention to how your friends respond to your successes. Consistent warmth during your struggles and consistent deflation during your wins is a p…
Some friendships are built on a dynamic of one person's difficulty and the other person's suppo…
I was made redundant from the company I had helped build from forty people to four hundred. The loss was professional and also something deeper that took time to name.
Never let one institution be the primary answer to your identity. Companies restructure. Industries change. The self beneath your job title needs to …
What you use to answer the question of who you are will determine how stable you are when the a…
I checked things repeatedly, planned exhaustively, and kept every environment immaculate. It was praised as diligence. Inside it was exhausting and relentless.
If maintaining your standards costs you hours of private checking and produces anxiety when you cannot complete a ritual, the standards may not be th…
OCD does not always look like what you have seen in films. Sometimes it looks like the most dil…
I had always been a reader in a casual sense. Becoming a serious reader at 26 rewired my thinking in ways I am still discovering.
Casual reading informs. Serious, sustained reading with demanding books rewires the cognitive infrastructure you use for everything else. The differe…
Serious reading changes how you think, not just what you know. The quality of your ideas is par…