Hi Reader,

It's been a while. How are you doing? Really?

I've been hearing versions of something for years. But right now it's louder — the job market, the political climate, the general sense that the ground keeps shifting under everyone's feet. The conditions that make it hard to think clearly aren't going away anytime soon.

"I can't even think."

A client said it almost in passing, somewhere between describing her full-time consulting role and the real estate certification and the AI certifications and the fractional work and the volunteer commitments. She wasn't complaining. She liked most of it. She had said yes to all of it on purpose. But somewhere inside the tower of good decisions she had built, there was no window left to look out of.

Another client had ideas and a running list to prove it. She's a mom with young kids and a life that runs entirely on have to's, with little room for want to's. The exercise habit she kept meaning to restart. The friends she hadn't actually seen in months. The trip that had been living in her head for two years. By the time she got to the part of the day that was technically hers, she was so depleted she could barely make dinner decisions, let alone career ones. The ideas stayed on the list. So did everything else.

What both of these have in common is that they follow you home.

You can't turn it off. The mental list that never actually gets shorter. The decisions that circle without landing. The vague sense that something important is getting away from you while you're busy managing everything else. You lie awake not because you're anxious exactly, but because your brain hasn't found the off switch. Eventually you fall asleep and wake up tired, and there's that two-second window right after the alarm where you're just a person in a bed. Then it all comes back.

During the day you keep up. You're capable and people know it. But somewhere in the middle of keeping up, you've lost track of what you actually want. Not in a crisis way. In a slow, quiet way. The thing you said you'd figure out later keeps getting pushed to later. The version of your life you actually want feels like something you'll get to eventually, once things calm down.

The people around you feel it before you've named it. A partner who stops asking how it's going because the answer is always some version of the same thing. Kids who get the leftover version of you after work has taken the real one. Colleagues who get competence but not spark. Friends you've been meaning to call for three months. Opportunities that passed while you were too underwater to notice them, or too exhausted to act. The decisions that don't get made because there's no clarity left to make them with.

And here's the part nobody says out loud: you can't really talk to anyone about it. You can't tell your boss. You can't tell your team. You've probably tried to explain it to the people closest to you and it came out wrong, or they said something useful-sounding and unhelpful like "you just need a vacation" and you smiled because arguing felt like too much energy. So you carry it. Alone. Which is, as it turns out, part of what makes it so heavy. And the longer you carry it alone, the louder it gets.

When I quit my job at Microsoft at 30, I was certain about my plan: rest, and then clarity would follow. What I hadn't anticipated was that I was also walking away from my entire social world. Lunch, the debrief after the bad meeting, the launch celebrations. When that's gone, the quiet isn't peaceful. I took other jobs in the years that followed. I kept moving. But I was stuck the whole time, mentally and emotionally, circling the same questions without anywhere to take them. It took me four years to figure out what I actually wanted. I didn't have a me.

Too much and too little create the same problem. The signal gets lost either way.

What breaks it isn't a better system, a cleaner inbox, or a weekend away. It's having somewhere outside your own head to take the noise. A place where someone asks what you actually want — not what's urgent, not what looks responsible, what you actually want for your life — and then just waits. Without an agenda. For the real answer.

Most of us haven't been asked that question properly in a long time. And most of us, when we finally get to answer it somewhere safe, are surprised by what comes out.

I have a few openings this summer for people who are ready to find out. If you recognize yourself in any of this, that's exactly who I work with. Book a free conversation here.​

Warmly,
​Becky

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