I Thought I Was Falling Apart But I Was Finally Becoming Me
Recalibrating
Let me tell you a story of how I lost it all, this time for real, and I built it back to be even better.
Almost every woman I know has had a time of total upheaval in her life, a divorce, a breakup, death, kids leaving the house, being laid off…the list goes on.
But what if you could have a profound recalibration before a more aligned second act?
I think you can become substantially more aligned and influential as you age provided you stop abandoning yourself to carry impossible emotional loads or constantly resurrect things that are already dead.
The power comes from synthesis of all that you are, you have:
lived
lost
rebuilt
learned
refined herself
integrated complexity
That kind of person becomes compelling because people can feel the earned depth.
But what if you can take it a level beyond:
transformation
becoming
radiance
reinvention
longevity
purpose
emotional evolution
beauty connected to meaning
Because you’re not selling fantasy from the outside. You’re speaking from lived metamorphosis.
There are seasons in life when the familiar structures begin to dissolve quietly, almost imperceptibly at first, and then all at once you realize you are no longer standing on the ground you thought you knew.
The work you built your identity around shifts.
The roles that once defined you loosen.
The future you had been carrying begins to blur at the edges.
Even your sense of self becomes less fixed than it once was.
What if we have to break apart before truly becoming?
I have lived through one of those seasons recently.
It was not graceful and did not arrive with clarity or ease.
A person I trusted turned on me. A company I had poured myself into closed.
Financial stability disappeared. The scaffolding of daily life fell away, my identify was stripped away, and with it came the disorienting experience of no longer being able to point to a single, coherent version of who I was becoming.
In hindsight, I understand how often people reach for language that softens these kinds of passages. Reinvention. Pivot.
New chapter.
But in real time, it feels closer to erosion or complete hell.
After 3 months of trying to figure it out, I decided to stop trying and sat in a Vermont hotel room. I remembered I was writing a novel called Hysteria about a woman who keeps finding reasons not to die (it was originally about my fibroid surgeries and then crystallized into a story about a startup founder creating a startup around fibroids…that collapses).
I remembered living in France with my hot French boyfriend and my writer ex and living on Newbury Street or in Venice beach and all my travels and food adventures and living life.
I remembered that I am a journalist first. I remembered who I actually am underneath all the survival.
There is a kind of stripping that happens when life removes what can no longer hold. Not only external structures, but the internal ones as well. The identities formed through effort and expectation.
The ways of being that were once necessary but become too small for what is emerging.
When one thing ends but the new thing has not yet fully formed
I have been thinking about something I once heard about Pluto in astrology (I have Pluto in my first house).
It is described as a force of death and rebirth, though the language misses something essential about the experience itself. It feels like a gradual undoing of what is no longer sustainable, followed by a long and uncertain period where nothing yet feels fully formed.
And perhaps what makes it so difficult is not the ending itself, but the interval that follows it. I’ve noticed this too with friends going through an upheaval, it’s not when your husband leaves or your job is gone…
That’s a knife to the heart, but the wound that doesn’t heal or heals all wrong is what is left behind for months…maybe years. It’s the moment when the familiar is gone but the new has not yet arrived in a way that can be lived or named.
There is no clarity, just a nervous system is still adjusting to the absence of what once held it together.
It is a kind of in-between space that resists explanation while you are in it.
I suspect many women experience this more than we tend to acknowledge.
Especially those who have spent years building, holding, adapting, and carrying. Ironically, it’s the most capable of us, the high achievers, likely a lot of firstborn children, that carry everyone else while sort of carrying ourselves.
There often comes a point where something begins to surface beneath all of that function and we desire coherence. Or even more than that—we want honesty and the unabated truth.
We want to live a life that no longer requires so much self-abandonment in order to sustain it.
What if?
What I have come to understand is that these transitions are not tidy and they unfold in layers and waves. First comes the loss of certainty, then fatigue, then hope, then a kind of internal quiet where old motivations no longer quite work, but new ones have not yet fully taken shape.
When I lost hope because nothing I was doing was working, it forced me to rethink.
What if all of this is wrong! What if nothing is supposed to return. What then?
Well, that scared the shit out of me which probably surprises people, since I take big bold risks and live a very adventurous life!
But obviously, clearly, doing bold things hurt me. That’s until I realized…doing bold things with someone ELSE hurt me, but what if I did something on my own, and trusted me?
This is when, not to sound like I “saw the light,” I um…
Saw the light.
Not as a fixed identity, but as a deeper sense of presence. I became less concerned with performance and in proving myself and more anchored in what feels true to me.
Suddenly I could see the so-called friends who subtly insulted me or tried to fit their dream into mine. I started getting pissed off at people nit-picking my coming soon page because 1) I was still forming the thing and 2) they never created anything, so how dare they insult the process.
Don’t take directions from someone who has not been where you are going
But….we do.
And we often live our lives around external validation. Until we aren’t and I am going to call this phase of life: perimenopause or over 50, or midlife or whatever you want to call it, there is a day when we are less willing to build in ways that require disconnection from ourselves.
That’s when there is a growing simplicity in what we are drawn to, even as the outer circumstances remain uncertain.
We are drawn of course to other women going through the same thing—but not the ones who critique us or are afraid to step out of the box.
No, we want the ones attempting to climb out of the box, hanging halfway over the box, dropping into the unknown outside of the box.
Stepping into the light
This is part of why I am creating Lumine which I have not officially revealed yet but is on the coming soon page.
Lumine is an old English word, derived from Latin illuminaire, that means to shed light, give sight to, or enlighten (spiritually or mentally).
I wanted my next act to be a word that represented this literal light at the end of a tunnel, but also to allude to the enlightenment and wisdom of getting older, and most important: to express joyful happy vibes.
I hate cheesy and obvious phrases, but stepping into the light, and not dimming your light also rang true for me, because I like so many women, maybe you too, have shrunk myself to fit and made myself as small and invisible as possible too many times.
I think one of my final straws with a certain person was when I lit up a room at a party and this was too much for the person who decided I should be hidden.
Lumine is an expression of what becomes possible when a woman stops abandoning herself in order to hold everything else together. It is a space for vitality, meaning, beauty, and emotional honesty to exist at the same time, without requiring perfection as the entry point.
Lumine is a way to celebrate becoming you
Lumine is an expression of what becomes possible when a woman stops abandoning herself in order to hold everything else together.
It is a space for vitality, meaning, beauty, and emotional honesty to exist at the same time, without requiring perfection as the entry point.
What is, it exactly? Well, it’ll start with a methodology, a way to embrace a new life body and soul over the course of 3 months, which is really just the start, but a guide through the most challenging parts of becoming you.
It’ll be delivered via an app so, in small sessions each day you’ll embrace a new life!
Then my plan is to host retreats and offer more personalized guidance which can include anything from astrology to personal training to listening and coaching, or to even help you build something new.
Lumine will evolve as things do but I hope you can join me on my journey.
Your most luminous chapter may emerge not despite what you have lived through, but because of it
There is a different kind of life that begins to emerge when we stop trying to return to who we were and allow ourselves instead to become who we are becoming.
Sometimes what first feels like falling apart is simply the beginning.
I am building for the women who know what I mean when I say,
“I know there is another version of me.”
“I want to feel radiant again.”
“I want my life to feel beautiful and alive.”
“I am tired of shrinking.”
“I want to come back to myself.”
“I want to feel desire, energy, possibility again.”
“I want a life that actually feels like mine.”
Somewhere along the way, I realized that the women who become truly luminous are rarely the ones who avoided hardship, but the ones who walked through fire and emerged more fully themselves.
Lumine was built for the woman who senses that her most luminous chapter may emerge not despite what she has lived through, but because of it.
I’m building it behind the scenes and will be ready to launch in the Fall.
