Shared Moments with Michelle

Welcome back. This is Day 10, our last day of ten days exploring purpose and meaning, and we made it. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

Before anything else, I want to thank you for spending this time with me. Whether you have listened every day or found your way through these conversations at your own pace, you made room to consider things that get pushed aside in everyday life. I hope you’re beginning to see something about yourself a little differently.

No final answer

I do want to be really honest with you. Ten days of listening cannot tell you your purpose, and I do not believe anyone can hand you that answer. What I do believe is that seeing your own story more clearly changes what you recognize and what you’re able to choose for yourself. That brings us to today, and to the next honest step.

An honest step does not have to be a dramatic decision, a complete reinvention, or a plan for the next ten years. It is something you have known for a while and have not given yourself permission to acknowledge. It could be a conversation you’ve been avoiding. It could be admitting that the life you have worked so hard to maintain no longer reflects what you want. It could be setting a boundary, going back to an interest you pushed aside, or admitting that you have outgrown a version of yourself you worked very hard to become. The size of the step is not what makes it meaningful. The honesty behind it is.

An honest step also brings a reaction. Your chest tightens, an excuse arrives quickly, and an old voice offers a reason to wait. Doubt returns after the step, the way it returns after permission. That does not mean you chose wrong. It means you’re changing something that has been in place for a long time, and trust is built by acting, not by waiting to feel sure.

The holidays

There is something else I want to talk about, because we are heading into the holiday season, and this time of year brings a great deal of what we have explored over these ten days right to the surface.

The holidays bring us back into familiar relationships, familiar houses, and familiar roles. You can spend years learning to trust yourself, say what you need, and set healthier boundaries, and then find yourself at a family table feeling like the person you were twenty years ago. The responsible one. The peacemaker. The one who keeps everyone comfortable and quietly carries the emotional weight so everyone else can enjoy their day. You agree to something you do not want to do because saying no brings up guilt. You feel frustrated with someone before the conversation has even begun. Old resentments rise. Expectations you spent years trying to meet return almost without your noticing.

There’s a real reason it feels so familiar. Relationships are where we first learned who we needed to be in order to belong, to be accepted, or to keep the peace. Those patterns do not disappear because we grow older or become more aware of them. You can love your family and still recognize dynamics that bring out responses you no longer want to live from. Both of those are true.

For some of you, the holidays are not about a crowded table at all. They bring grief, loneliness, a strained or distant relationship, or the empty chair of someone you love. The pressure to make the season look a certain way lands differently there, and it carries its own old stories.

It is one thing to recognize a pattern while you are sitting quietly, reflecting on your life. It is definitely another to recognize it in the middle of a conversation, when someone says one sentence and you are taken right back to an old feeling. That moment is where the work becomes real.

Why November 9

I want to share something about the timing of my next Awakening to R.I.S.E. group, because I went back and forth about beginning during the holiday season. At first, I wondered whether it would be better to wait until January. The holidays are already full of gatherings, responsibilities, and expectations, and adding anything to the calendar can seem like the last thing a person needs. Then I thought about what this season brings to the surface, and I realized it was one of the most meaningful times to begin this work. Waiting until January means unpacking everything afterward, when it could have been explored while it was happening.

Awakening to R.I.S.E. is my three-month private coaching experience. Inside it, we are not talking about identity, conditioning, and subconscious patterns as ideas. We work with how they show up in your actual life. We recognize the story being activated, understand what is underneath your response, and practice a different way of showing up. Picture coming to a session after a family gathering while it’s still fresh. We look at what came up, what you felt, what you believed in that moment, and how you want to respond the next time.

Our next group begins Monday, November 9, and I’m welcoming up to ten people. Each person has weekly private coaching with me and a weekly Story Circle, and we work with your NOW Goal, so you are not only understanding where you’ve been, you’re becoming clear about where you are heading. We will work around the holidays themselves. The intention is not to add pressure to a full season. It is to give you real support while you are living your real life.

The next step

If you have spent these ten days recognizing yourself in the stories we have talked about, and you are beginning to realize that understanding those stories and patterns is only the beginning, I would love to have that conversation with you. I invite you to book a complimentary 45-minute Story Breakthrough Session. We begin with your story. You tell me what you’ve been noticing and what you want to understand or change. You do not need to have the answers before we meet. I will explain more about how Awakening to R.I.S.E. works, and together we will see whether it is the right next step for you. If you want to begin with the November 9 group, book your conversation soon enough that we have time to talk before it starts.

A thought to carry

This series has been one of my own honest steps. I wanted to share this work in my own voice, through conversations that felt natural to me, and I’m still in the middle of my own becoming. I am very grateful that you allowed me to share these moments with you.

Purpose and meaning are not destinations waiting somewhere in your future. They’re tied to how you live, the relationships you tend, and the person you are becoming along the way. You do not have to know where everything leads. You do not have to wait for a quieter calendar or a new year. You can start with what is true for you today.

I’d love to hear in the comments what your next honest step is.

Thank you so much for spending these ten days with me. This is the end of our series, and it does not have to be the end of what you have started discovering about yourself. Your next honest step belongs to you.

That was today’s shared moment, and our last one in this particular series. Until next time, have a wonderful day.

-Michelle

P.S. Our next Awakening to R.I.S.E. group begins Monday, November 9. If you already know you want to join the November 9 group, book your call and tell me so, and we’ll get you started.

Welcome back. This is Day 9 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

Yesterday, we talked about trust and why permission was never the missing piece. Today I want to talk about direction, and what changes when you stop aiming at a finish line and start walking toward a North Star.

The verdict inside a finish line

A finish line is a goal that has a verdict hidden inside it. When I hit this number, when this launches, when this person finally approves, then I will be someone who made it. A goal like that carries a sentence underneath it, and the sentence is not really about the goal. It’s about worth. It is the old story saying you will be enough once you arrive.

So you arrive, and the relief lasts a few days. Then the line moves. There is a bigger number, a better launch, another person to impress. The finish line was never the problem. The story attached to it kept the finish line from ever being reached.

A North Star works differently

You never arrive at a North Star. You orient by it. It tells you which way you’re heading and who you are becoming on the way there, and it lets you make today’s decisions without waiting for a result to prove anything. Specific results still matter. I want them, and I’ll talk about mine in a moment. The difference is that the results serve the direction. They are not the place where I find out whether I’m allowed to feel at home in my own life.

My own NOW Goal

Here is my own, because I would rather show you than explain it. I wrote a NOW Goal. A NOW Goal is written in the present tense, as though it is already true, and that is not a trick. It gives my mind a place to stand while the work is still happening.

My particular NOW Goal is about building a business that replaces my previous income through work that I actually love. As most of you know, I’m launching Lived Logic in the summer of 2027. That is a commitment I made to myself, and I will get it done.

Past that launch, I have a vision. I’m growing Lived Logic toward a community of 1,000 readers, and I’m building at least $15,000 a month in sustainable income through my writing, collaborations, partnerships, my Substack, my books, retreats, and the coaching that I choose to do. Whether all of that arrives by summer 2027, I do not know, and I’m okay with that. Building an audience, relationships, and sustainable income takes time. I’m not changing the direction because the results have not arrived yet. That is what the NOW Goal does for me. It keeps me anchored to what I’m creating, even when the timeline unfolds differently than I imagined.

A NOW Goal is more than a statement

I want to explain something about the NOW Goal, because hearing mine could make it sound as though all you need to do is write down what you want, put it into the present tense, and start working toward it. There is more to it than that.

The goal itself is only one part. Before we can create a direction that reflects who we are, we have to understand what has been influencing us in the first place. We look at the stories we’ve carried, the expectations we accepted, the beliefs we developed about ourselves, and the patterns that keep showing up in our lives. We also explore what matters to us, what we want to experience, and the kind of life we are choosing to create. That can be very different from the goals we have spent years pursuing.

Then we connect that understanding to a direction. We are not simply choosing a result. We are recognizing who we are becoming and what needs to change in how we think, respond, and decide as we move toward it, including the stories controlling those things. So I don’t really see the NOW Goal as a goal-setting exercise. It becomes part of the deeper identity work, and it’s something we keep working with as life unfolds.

A goal that grows with me

There’s another part of the NOW Goal that matters just as much. It is not something I write once and never revisit. It grows as I grow. When I reach a milestone, whether that takes six months, two years, or longer, I get to recognize what I have created and decide what comes next.

The magazine launch is one milestone. Growing to 1,000 readers is another. As the magazine grows, the readers will grow, so I set my goal at just 1,000 readers for now, because that is a stretch at this present moment. Building sustainable income that replaces what I earned before is another. I had a very well-paying job, and then the company made different decisions in different directions, so I’m no longer earning that previous income.

I want you to know that each one matters, and reaching one does not mean the journey is finished. My experiences will keep shaping what I want, what I value, and what I’m ready to create, and my NOW Goal can change right along with me. That is why I do not see it as a finish line. It gives me direction today without limiting who I become tomorrow.

I am not further along than I am. I’m creating the magazine. I’m writing, recording episodes, and building the different pieces of this work. I have nothing to hide about that, and I would rather you hear me in the middle than hear me at the end, because the middle is where life happens.

What the goal is really for

Underneath those numbers is what the goal is really for. I want to spend my days writing, creating, bringing people together, and doing work that sounds like me. I want a life I enjoy living, not another business that asks me to give up the things that matter. I have spent years learning, building, and trying different ways of bringing my work into the world. I did not want to build my entire life just around coaching. Although I love doing it, I wanted expansion. I still love guiding people through the deeper work, and the writing, the creating, and gathering people. I am building a business that makes room for all of it. What has changed is that I’m no longer trying to fit everything I love into a version of success that was never mine.

That is the part I would ask you to listen for in your own life. Think about the result you have been chasing, the one you have been telling yourself you will feel good about once it is done. Listen for the sentence underneath it. Listen for an expectation you have carried for years, a belief about what success should look like, or an idea of who you thought you needed to become. The goal on top can be completely valid. What you hear underneath it tells you whether it is a finish line or a direction.

The work inside Awakening to R.I.S.E.

In my coaching, I listen for both what someone is reaching for and who they believe they have to become to reach it. This is one of the reasons the NOW Goal is part of Awakening to R.I.S.E., my three-month private coaching experience. Together, we do that work, and we look at what is standing between you and the life you are choosing to create. There is a difference between choosing a goal because it reflects what matters to you and choosing one because you believe achieving it will finally make you enough.

Your NOW Goal becomes an anchor throughout our work. As you recognize old patterns and old stories, you step out of the stories behind them and reach your milestones. We revisit that direction, and we let it grow alongside you.

If you’re ready to explore what that could look like in your own life, I invite you to book a complimentary 45-minute Story Breakthrough Session with me.

A thought to carry

A North Star does not ask you to be finished. It asks you to know which way you’re facing, and to let that decide what deserves your attention today, even when the larger result has not arrived yet. I am not waiting to feel like someone new who made it. I’m choosing the direction I live and build toward right now.

I’d love to hear in the comments what you heard underneath the result you have been chasing.

Tomorrow is our last day together…

Welcome back. This is Day 8 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

Yesterday we talked about the cost of keeping everything together. Today I want to talk about what keeps us waiting, even after we know exactly what we want.

What we’re waiting for

We can all name something we’re waiting for. It might be the book we haven’t written, the conversation we haven’t had, the direction we haven’t taken, or the decision other people won’t understand. We’ve thought about it, researched it, and talked about it. We’ve told ourselves more than once that the timing isn’t right.

Taking time to make a thoughtful decision is wise. Life involves real responsibilities, and our choices affect other people. I’m talking about something different. I’m talking about looking for someone else to validate a choice that is genuinely ours to make. There’s a difference between considering someone’s perspective and giving them authority over our own life.

Permission arrives, and the doubt stays

Here’s what I’ve noticed about waiting for permission. Picture someone who finally gets it. A friend says, “Go for it.” A family member agrees. A mentor gives their blessing. There’s relief for a day, maybe two. Then, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, the doubt comes back. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe it’s going to fall apart. So they ask someone else, and then someone else, because the first yes didn’t settle anything.

That’s the part that surprises people. Permission arrives, and the doubt stays. It stays because what was missing was never permission. The person already had their answer. What they didn’t have was trust in it, and the permission they were waiting for couldn’t give them that.

Two stories from From Hell to Rebirth

I know what it’s like to learn the difference. I want to share a story from my book, From Hell to Rebirth. This was the moment I felt drawn to yoga. My perception was that it wasn’t Christian, and a lot of that came from other people’s opinions. I wrote that it didn’t feel true to me, so I persisted. I researched, I prayed, and I kept looking until I found a path that fit my faith. I became a certified instructor. When the old thought, “I am not good enough,” tried to win again, I shut that door really quickly, because I would not hear of it.

I also wrote about a time I went to the emergency room to have a tick removed when I was re-bit. A nurse told me I shouldn’t even be there. My first response was to walk out. Then I stopped and spoke up for myself. What mattered wasn’t what was discovered afterward. It was that I stood up for what I knew I needed, and I wrote that I was proud I didn’t take people’s judgments as I had done so much in the past.

Self-trust is built in moments like those. It doesn’t come from one grand decision. It comes from the ordinary times when our familiar response would have been to question ourselves and back away.

Where my work comes in

This is where my work comes in, because trusting yourself on the day someone questions you takes more than deciding to. Take someone who is about to make a choice their family won’t understand. They can promise themselves they won’t need anyone’s approval, and then the first raised eyebrow arrives. There are several layers underneath that reaction. One is the story they’re carrying, something like, “If someone disagrees with me, it means I’m selfish.” There’s a physical response: a tight chest, an unsettled stomach, an urge to explain until everyone in the room is comfortable. There’s also a lack of practice, because this person has spent years doing the opposite.

The work I do addresses all three. We rewrite the story, looking at where that belief came from and what meaning someone attached to it. We rewire the response, working with the body’s reaction so they can feel the discomfort without automatically returning to the old behavior. Then we retrain, which means practicing the new response in real situations until it becomes familiar. Rewrite, rewire, and retrain are how we move from understanding to living differently.

That is the work inside Awakening to R.I.S.E., my three-month private coaching experience. R.I.S.E. stands for Reclaim, Inspire, Strengthen, and Empower. We reclaim the parts of ourselves we lost sight of beneath old stories and expectations. We inspire a different possibility by reconnecting with what we genuinely want. We strengthen our self-trust by practicing new responses and making conscious choices. Then we empower ourselves to carry those changes into the way we live. The experience is shaped around the person, not an identical set of lessons. I’m not there to decide what’s right for you. I bring the guidance, tools, and deeper work to help you develop greater trust in your own judgment and begin making choices that reflect it.

If you recognize how often you look for reassurance before trusting what you know, or how often you back away from something that matters because of someone else’s response, this is work I can help you with. I invite you to book a complimentary 45-minute Story Breakthrough Session with me. Remember, you don’t need to have it figured out before we talk. We’ll begin with what’s happening in your life and what’s underneath it.

A thought to carry

Trusting yourself doesn’t mean you always have certainty, and it doesn’t mean you’ll never need advice or support. It means those perspectives can inform your decisions without replacing your own judgment. Permission was never the missing piece.

I’d love to hear in the comments what you have been waiting for permission to do.

Tomorrow is Day 9, direction, and why a north star is different from another finish line.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the series so far. I’m excited to share Day 9 with you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to today’s shared moment.

-Michelle

P.S. There are two more conversations in this series. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome back. This is Day 7 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

Yesterday we talked about what has always mattered to us. Today I want to talk about what crowds those things out, which is the quiet cost of keeping everything together.

What competence hides

From the outside, keeping everything together looks like competence. The bills are paid. The house runs. The calendar is full. The people who depend on you are taken care of, and nothing is obviously falling apart. That’s the problem with it. When nothing breaks, no one notices what is being paid to keep it that way, including the person doing the paying.

The cost rarely shows up on any list. It shows up in our energy, in a body that’s tired in a way rest doesn’t touch, and in conversations we only half hear because our mind is already on the next thing. It shows up in the things from yesterday’s episode: the creating, the quiet, the time outdoors, the people you love, all waiting for the day when everything is finally handled. That day never comes, because there is always something else to handle.

What I wrote in Awakening: Truth Be Told

In Awakening: Truth Be Told, I described a long season when our life looked stable from the outside, while beneath the surface it was anything but easy. I wrote that people rarely see the emotional cost of a life built that way. They see the paycheck, not the loneliness. They see stability, not the nights you lie awake wondering.

I also wrote about what happens to a person who becomes the one who keeps things together. It becomes almost impossible to imagine letting anything slip. You don’t allow yourself to crumble because you fear the ripple effect. You carry the emotional load. You carry the spiritual load. You carry the relational load.

The cost in our relationships

There’s another cost that rarely gets named, and it shows up in our relationships. When we become the person who handles everything, we get so used to anticipating what everyone needs that we forget what it feels like to let someone take care of us. We offer help before anyone asks. We notice what needs attention before anyone else sees it. We arrange our priorities, make ourselves available, and keep finding ways to make things work.

As I mentioned earlier, this creates loneliness. You’re surrounded by people who depend on you, and you can still feel that no one understands what you’re carrying. You want someone to notice, but you’ve become so practiced at appearing capable that it’s hard for anyone to see when you actually need support. Then resentment starts to creep in. You feel frustrated that you’re always the one handling things, and when someone offers to help, you hear yourself say, “I’ve got it.”

You might notice the cost in smaller ways: a short fuse with the people you love, a feeling of being on duty even when nothing needs you, or relief when plans get canceled followed by guilt about feeling relieved. Those experiences deserve attention. They can be telling you that the way you’ve been carrying your responsibilities is taking more from you than you’ve recognized.

Responsibilities and identity

Here’s the distinction I want to stay with today. There’s a difference between having responsibilities and building your identity around being responsible for everything. Caring for people, keeping your word, and doing meaningful work are part of a full life, and many of those commitments are ones you would choose again. The difficulty begins when being responsible stops being something you do and becomes who you believe you have to be.

That identity can become tied to your sense of worth, belonging, or safety. Being helpful may have earned you approval when you were younger. Keeping everything calm may have meant avoiding conflict. Your circumstances may have asked you to take on responsibility before you felt ready. Those experiences shape the beliefs we carry into adulthood, and the responses that helped us then become familiar long after the circumstances change.

I believe that’s why stepping back is so hard. You can know that you deserve rest and support, and the moment you try to set something down, an uncomfortable feeling appears. You feel guilty. You worry about disappointing someone. You imagine what would happen if you weren’t there to handle it. It isn’t always something you can resolve through reasoning alone. There may be an emotional response connected to a belief you carried for years.

Setting boundaries, asking for help, and making time for yourself are all good advice, and yes, they can help. However, they may not be enough on their own. Knowing what you need to do and being able to do it are two very different things, and the gap between them is often made of guilt, fear, and old beliefs about what it means to need something.

The work I do

This is the problem I see in the people I work with. They’re capable, dependable, and tired. They’ve been holding everything together for so long that they can’t picture putting some of it down, and when they try, the guilt or the fear stops them. Understanding why they do it doesn’t release them from it. The belief itself needs attention, along with the feelings that come up when they begin to change.

That is part of the deeper work I do in Awakening to R.I.S.E., my three-month private coaching experience. We look at the identity that developed around being responsible for everyone and everything, the beliefs underneath it, and the emotional responses that make change difficult. We work with the subconscious patterns, the body’s responses, and the meaning someone has attached to being needed, and we practice a different way of relating to the responsibilities that matter to them. It is shaped around what is actually happening in your life, not a fixed set of lessons.

If you’re recognizing yourself in this, especially the feeling of being responsible for everything while struggling to make room for yourself, I invite you to book a complimentary 45-minute Story Breakthrough Session with me. You don’t need to know where the pattern began or have a plan for changing it. We can begin with what’s happening in your life and what’s underneath it.

A thought to carry

A life can look fine from the outside and still be costing us things we haven’t counted. Naming that cost is the beginning of deciding whether we’re willing to keep paying it.

I’d love to hear in the comments what you are carrying right now.

Tomorrow is Day 8, waiting for permission, and what we’re really waiting for.

Thanks for listening today. That was today’s shared moment, and I can’t wait to see you tomorrow for Day 8. Have a great day.

-Michelle

P.S. There are three more conversations in this series. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome back. This is Day 6 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

For the last five days, we’ve been looking at patterns, roles, stories, and what life has taught us. Today I want to turn toward something warmer and a little closer to home: what has always mattered to you, and what keeps drawing you back even when its form changes.

What gives life meaning

When we talk about purpose and meaning, it’s easy to start looking for something we’re supposed to accomplish. We think about careers, goals, responsibilities, and the contribution we’re expected to make. Yet some of what gives our lives the greatest meaning has very little to do with what we accomplish.

It’s easy for the things we genuinely enjoy to become something we’ll get to later. Maybe you’ve always loved creating, or spending time outdoors, or having a conversation, or bringing people together. There could be something you loved when you were younger that slowly disappeared as responsibilities increased and life became more complicated. It can happen so gradually that we don’t notice when we stop making room for those parts of ourselves.

What it looks like for me

I can tell you what that looks like for me. I love to write. I love meaningful conversation. I love quiet, and being outdoors near the mountains and the water. I’ve also loved creating spaces where people can be heard. None of those is a job to me. They were there long before I knew how to turn any of them into work, and they kept pulling at me through every season, including the seasons when I had no energy to follow them.

In From Hell to Rebirth, I wrote about a women’s retreat I attended back in 2019 in Washington State. There was no internet. I was off the grid in the forest and on the beach, and I wrote that unplugging for a few days and connecting to nature began to heal my soul in a way I didn’t think was possible. I felt rejuvenated and grounded. I also wrote that for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who never once judged me, people I could be comfortable in my own skin with, and people I could safely share pieces of my story with, without the shame.

When I read that now, I notice what it was made of. It was made of nature, quiet, and belonging. They weren’t a career path or a goal. They were some of the things that have always mattered to me.

The messages we received

Each of us received messages growing up about what was important, what made a person successful, and what was expected of us. They came from family, school, relationships, or simply the world around us. Over time, we begin to accept those messages as truths about ourselves.

Picture someone who is naturally creative and who learns along the way that creativity isn’t practical. They become responsible and dependable, very good at taking care of whatever needs doing. Then, years later, they feel drawn toward creating, and every time they consider making room for it, something tells them there are more important things to do. What looks like a scheduling problem may have something deeper underneath it. There could be a belief about what’s practical or worthwhile that they’ve never really thought to question.

I believe there’s a difference between what we consciously believe and the patterns that have become part of how we automatically respond. All through our lives, we develop beliefs about who we are, what we’re capable of, what makes us valuable, and what we have to do to feel accepted or safe. Those beliefs become deeply familiar to us. They shape how we see ourselves, and we don’t make every decision with conscious awareness of what’s driving it.

A person can genuinely want to pursue something meaningful and feel uncomfortable making themselves a priority. They can recognize a natural gift and immediately doubt whether they’re good enough to use it. They can know an expectation no longer fits their life and keep following it. That’s why knowing what we want doesn’t always mean we know how to move toward it.

The subconscious layer

There’s a subconscious layer to this that fascinates me. Our earlier experiences shape the automatic associations and emotional responses we develop. An old belief can keep feeling true long after we’ve consciously begun to question it. We can tell ourselves we’re allowed to choose differently, and then feel guilt, fear, or resistance when we actually try.

Take someone who learned early that keeping everyone happy was the safest way to stay connected. As an adult, they genuinely value relationships and helping others, but they also find it hard to say no, to voice a different opinion, or to make a decision that could disappoint someone. The difficulty isn’t that they don’t know how to say no. It’s the feeling underneath, and where it came from. Awareness alone doesn’t change that. Understanding where a pattern came from doesn’t make it stop.

Being good at something doesn’t automatically mean it gives our lives meaning, either. We develop abilities through necessity, responsibility, and experience, and they can serve us well. What draws us toward something is a different conversation, and both deserve attention when we’re thinking about how we want to live.

The work I do

If any of this sounds familiar, I want to tell you about the work I do. The people I work with often come in knowing something isn’t right. They feel disconnected from what they genuinely want, or they realize they’ve spent years making decisions around what everyone else expected of them. Even when they can see it, they don’t know how to change it. Or they make some of those changes, but it doesn’t stay. It keeps happening again.

In my work, we go into those deeper layers. We look at the stories someone has accepted about themselves, the experiences that formed those beliefs, and the subconscious patterns that are still running the show today. I pay attention to the emotional response that comes up when someone moves toward something they want, whether that’s self-doubt, pulling back, or even guilt or shame. That response gives us something to explore, because there may be a belief or an earlier experience influencing what happens in the moment.

My work brings together identity, subconscious beliefs and stories, emotional awareness, nervous system practices, and the tools I’m trained in, so those familiar responses can begin to change. We aren’t just naming a limiting belief, talking about it, and hoping it goes away. We look at what gives it its hold. We build a different understanding, and then we embody it and practice living from it. I also bring in some Human Design elements and IGNITE Her Frequencies as additional lenses on natural qualities and familiar patterns. They don’t tell anyone who to be. They add another layer of perspective.

What I love about this work is that we get to meet the person underneath the problem. Someone comes in believing they need to find their purpose, or be more disciplined, or make a better plan. As we explore what’s underneath their experience, we may discover that a lack of desire or ability was never the real issue. There may be an old belief, a familiar emotional response, or a pattern or story they’ve kept repeating without understanding why. I don’t hand anyone another identity, and I don’t tell anyone who they should become. The work is understanding what has been shaping your life and building something that genuinely reflects you.

That is the deeper work behind Awakening to R.I.S.E., my three-month private coaching experience. If what we’re talking about today feels familiar, I invite you to book a complimentary 45-minute Story Breakthrough Session with me. You don’t need to arrive knowing exactly what’s wrong or what needs to change. We’ll look at what’s happening in your life and the stories and patterns underneath it, and find some clarity…

Welcome back. This is Day 5 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

Yesterday, we talked about the stories we carry and how a belief can start to feel like the truth. Today I want to talk about what life has actually taught me, and what I’m understanding differently at fifty-two. You’ve heard pieces of my history this week, so I don’t want to retell those specific pieces. I want to tell you what I carry out of it, and what this season is showing me.

What I carry out of it

There’s some understanding you can’t really get from reading about it. You can know the words for it, and nothing in your life changes. Then you live through something, and the words finally mean something.

Life happens to us, but we get to happen back. I take what I’ve been through, because looking back, it was the very thing I needed to get me to the place I needed to go, without my even knowing it.

When I wrote my first book, From Hell to Rebirth, about six years ago, I wrote that we have to ask ourselves where we’re placing our energy and what is of highest priority. I wrote that freedom is a choice, and that every single moment of the day can be a new beginning. I understand those words differently now. At fifty-two, I’m beginning to live differently with the wisdom I’ve spent a lifetime gathering.

A season, and a lens

What has helped me in this particular season is discovering Human Design, which I use as one lens among several. I’m a Manifesting Generator with a 6/2 profile, also known as the Role Model and the Hermit. In that system, the sixth line moves through three life cycles. The first is learning through direct experience, up until around thirty. Then comes being on the roof, stepping back to observe and make sense of what I’ve lived, up until around fifty. Around fifty, the third cycle begins, called coming off the roof, when that understanding starts to show up in how you live instead of in how much you can explain.

I turned fifty in 2024, and my Chiron return came that June. In the Human Design work I’ve studied, Chiron marks another stage of maturing, a time when the wisdom we’ve gathered begins to influence how we contribute. It doesn’t replace who we already are. It adds a layer to it. I don’t see fifty as the start of a decline. I see it as another stage where everything I’ve experienced can find a different expression.

A lot of my aha moments have come from this new way of being, and they’re not coming from learning something new. They’re coming from recognizing things about myself that I’ve known on some level for years, but hadn’t allowed myself to trust.

What my reports gave me

That’s why I want to say something about my reports. My reports didn’t give me another identity. They gave me language for what I already knew about myself, but had learned to question. Different experiences can do that for us. Sometimes they give us a way to understand qualities we’ve questioned, and other times they help us recognize that we’ve been measuring ourselves against expectations that never really belonged to us in the first place. A report isn’t meant to tell someone who they have to become. For me, it’s a way to explore what may have been there all along, and what I’ve learned to doubt.

That’s one of the reasons I love exploring these reports with other people. It’s fascinating what can happen when someone begins recognizing qualities they’ve questioned for years. Sometimes the report becomes the beginning of a much deeper conversation about identity, conditioning, and the life they want to create.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between who I’ve always been and what life has taught me. There are qualities that have been mine for as long as I can remember. Then there’s what I’ve learned just by living. They’re two different things, and they’re coming together in this season. My natural gifts didn’t appear because I turned fifty-two, or because I received another report. They were always mine. What has changed is how much I understand about them.

Taking care of myself first

One of the biggest changes in this season is learning to take care of myself first. For most of my life, I’ve focused on getting through things and handling whatever needed handling. Now I’m paying attention to my health, my energy, and what my body needs from me. I’m also learning to recognize my triggers, and what I do when I’m in one.

Something I’ve been understanding more deeply is how much of who we think we are was shaped by things we learned long before we were old enough to question them. Childhood experiences, the expectations placed on us, the ways we learn to gain approval or feel safe, and the meanings we attach to hard situations can become part of how we see ourselves. Over time, those beliefs get so familiar that we stop recognizing them as beliefs. We experience them as the truth about who we are, what we’re capable of, and what we deserve.

What I do when I’m triggered

Here’s what I do. I clean. Yes, I know. Cleaning. Something triggers me, I find something to straighten or organize, and suddenly I’m busy. Sometimes I simply like a clean house. Other times I’m keeping myself busy because sitting still would mean feeling whatever has come up.

That pattern has a history. I was a headbanger as a child, and I wrote about it in From Hell to Rebirth. I did it when I was overwhelmed, frustrated, or couldn’t say what I was feeling, and it didn’t fully stop until I was twenty-one. I wrote that once it stopped, food became my go-to way of dealing with my emotions. To this day, I still rock and sway. Now I’m obsessed with cleaning.

Looking back, I can see that the physical pain felt like relief, and that underneath it was shame. It was self-harm, a way of punishing myself. I understand that far more deeply now than I did when I first wrote about it six years ago.

What I’ve noticed is that the layers don’t unravel all at once. I can recognize a behavior I’ve carried for years and then discover another pattern I hadn’t even considered before. Sometimes an ordinary activity can also be a way of avoiding what I’m feeling, and I’m learning to recognize the difference.

Recognizing a pattern is not the same as changing it

I’m also learning that recognizing a pattern doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve changed it. I can understand where a response came from and still find myself repeating it, especially when something triggers an old belief or an emotion. Those responses have often been with us for years, sometimes beginning in childhood, and they can continue influencing the decisions we make long after the circumstances that shaped them have changed.

Understanding the pattern is an important beginning, but there’s more involved in changing the stories we’ve believed and learning to respond differently. We’re going to explore more of that as we move through these ten days.

I recognize how this same awareness reaches into other parts of my life, including the way I approach my work. What I’m discovering now is that I can appreciate what I’m capable of without feeling that every ability needs to become another commitment. I’m restructuring my work to make room for taking care of my health, spending time with my husband, writing, and creating things that genuinely interest me. I want to bring more voices and different lived experiences together through Lived Logic.

You may have your own version of this. It might be working longer hours, reaching for your phone in every quiet moment, always finding something that needs fixing, or being the person who’s available to everyone but yourself. The difference is what’s going on underneath. Sometimes a response has become so familiar that we don’t even recognize there’s something underneath it worth understanding.

It doesn’t depend on being my age. Someone at twenty-eight might be realizing that achievement …

Welcome back. This is Day 4 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

For the last three days, we’ve been noticing our patterns, our roles, and what stays the same underneath them. Today I want to talk about the stories we carry about ourselves, and how something we’ve believed for years can begin to feel like the truth.

How a story becomes the truth

It tends to go like this. Something happens. We make sense of it, because that’s what people do, and the meaning we land on usually feels like the only reasonable one. Then something similar happens, and the meaning gets stronger. After enough years, we’re no longer interpreting anything. The story has become the way things are. We don’t hear it as a story. It just sounds like common sense.

A vow I didn’t know I’d made

I lived inside one of those stories for a long time, and I wrote about it in Awakening: Truth Be Told. It began with fear. I wrote that for years I wasn’t managing my illness as much as I was managing my terror of going back to the darkest places I had already lived through. I had been through collapse once, and I didn’t intend to go through it again. So I built structure. I had my protocols. I was disciplined. I was vigilant, and I believed all of it kept me safe. I wrote that I felt I had built enough internal structure to prevent myself from having another collapse.

That is how I described the vow. The fear of what had happened before became the anchor to everything I did. I wrote that control becomes the unconscious vow you make, and that vow was never again.

Sometimes a vow like that develops so quietly that we don’t even recognize it until there has been some growth and some wisdom. It begins as a response to something that genuinely frightens us, and over time we start treating it as the only sensible way to move forward. Then it looks like wisdom. From the outside, I looked disciplined and strong. From the inside, I was staying ahead of something I was afraid of.

When the story keeps running

What interests me most is how long a story like that keeps running after the circumstances change. By the time I was in a job where the hours left no room for rest, the vow had settled into how I lived. I wrote that I shut down the parts of myself that needed softness, rest, or reflection. I thought that if I just worked harder, stayed productive, and kept moving, nothing could catch up with me.

When I became sick again, I tried to push through it. I treated myself. I forced myself to function. I refused to stop. I wrote that it wasn’t bravery. It was the subconscious, doing what it had learned to do, and what it had learned was survival through overfunctioning.

Then my body said what my mind wouldn’t. By 2022, the façade collapsed. I wrote that my body had reached its limit, but my mind refused to admit it. In Awakening: Truth Be Told, I called my body the truth-teller. By the fall of 2023, the breaking point wasn’t physical. It was emotional. I wrote that I could not pretend to be in control anymore.

When I looked back, I could finally see the story that had been running the whole time. I wrote that it was the old blueprint: push harder, do more, stay strong, keep going, don’t stop. It was the part of me that believed slowing down meant I would be swallowed by life again. Control had convinced me that stopping was failure and that asking for help was weakness.

None of it had felt like a story to me. It felt like being responsible. It felt like being smart. It felt like the only way to stay safe. It was a form of protection.

I began recognizing how unfamiliar rest had become to me. Slowing down wasn’t always peaceful. Sometimes it brought up the very feelings I had spent years trying to stay ahead of. Keeping busy felt familiar, and that familiarity made it easier to continue the same pattern, even when I recognized what it was costing me.

Seeing it for what it was

What began to loosen it was seeing it for what it was. I put this line in the book, and it’s one I come back to: control is a pattern, not an identity. It is something you learned, not something you are.

Something you learned has a beginning. It came from somewhere, and it was doing a job. In the book, I described it as an identity that once helped me survive and later kept me stuck, and both of those are true of the same story.

These patterns can show up in ordinary routines, habits, and the expectations we carry into each day. Sometimes staying busy, keeping everything organized, or always being prepared has less to do with what we enjoy and more to do with what we’ve learned makes us feel secure. The stories underneath those behaviors don’t necessarily announce themselves. They sound like simple facts about who we are: I’m not creative. I have to earn my rest. Everyone depends on me. I can’t afford to make a mistake. Somewhere along the way, an experience became an interpretation, and that interpretation became a rule we stopped questioning.

Seeing a story as a story doesn’t automatically make it false, and it doesn’t mean it has to go. Some of what we believe about ourselves is true, and some of it was true for a season. What changes is that it becomes something we can look at, instead of something we look through.

A thought to carry

There’s something worth sitting with about the stories we carry. They don’t always create obvious problems, and we don’t necessarily experience them as limiting. Sometimes they simply become the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. They can influence our decisions for years without ever drawing attention. That’s why awareness matters. We first have to recognize that there’s something there to reconsider.

Sometimes the things we believe are simply true about ourselves are the very things we’ve never thought to question.

There may be nothing you need to figure out today. Perhaps something in this conversation will simply sound familiar the next time you hear yourself say, “That’s just how I am.”

I’d love to hear in the comments if something sounded familiar.

Tomorrow is Day 5, What Survival Teaches About Living, and what stays with us after the hardest seasons.

Have a great day.

-Michelle

P.S. There are six more conversations in this series. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome back. This is Day 3 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with Day 1, The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation.

Yesterday, we looked at the roles we learned to play and how easily they become part of who we believe we have to be. Today I want to talk about what’s left when a role loosens its grip, and what stays the same even as our lives change.

When a role loosens its grip

When we begin to see a role clearly, a quiet worry often shows up behind it. If I’m not the strong one, or the dependable one, or the one with the answers, then who am I? It’s a fair thing to wonder. Sometimes it helps to look at what has been consistent all along, underneath every role we’ve ever had.

A dream I wrote about

I want to tell you about something I wrote in Awakening: Truth Be Told, because it speaks to this. In the book, I described a dream. In it, I saw a woman in complete surrender with the most beautiful white wings. I asked who she was, and the answer I was given was, that is you.

I wrote that I was being shown who I had always been beneath fear, illness, and survival. She was me, and not the me who had learned to survive by shrinking and shape-shifting for everyone else. I wrote that what I was witnessing was not a character or an archetype, but my own essence, uncovered.

What I noticed about her was not what she did. She had a warm, comforting presence that made other people feel at ease. She was compassionate and deeply empathetic, and she understood what others were feeling without a word being spoken.

I also wrote that the dream became a metaphor for the abilities and passions inside me that I had buried beneath guilt, shame, and survival. It pulled me inward and asked me to pay attention to what felt true, not just what looked acceptable.

What stayed with me about that dream was the recognition of something familiar, something that had remained present through all the changes in my life. The illness, the years of rebuilding, and everything I’ve experienced have shaped who I am today. Those experiences have become part of my story, but they haven’t erased the qualities that have always been mine. I could recognize those qualities in the woman I saw.

A thread through the seasons

When I look at my own life, I can see a thread running through the different seasons. I’ve taught, written, coached, and now I’m creating a magazine and this podcast. The forms keep changing. What I notice underneath is that I keep being drawn to people’s stories, to honest conversation, and to making room for people to be heard before anyone tries to help them.

Even the name of this podcast is part of that. I came up with Shared Moments with Michelle more than five years ago, when I first thought about starting a podcast, and I’m only now bringing it into the world. The idea stayed with me while almost everything else around it changed.

What stays

You may have your own version of this: something that has been true of you in every job, in every season, and in every version of your life, even when the circumstances looked completely different. It might be the way you notice the person standing alone at the edge of the room. It might be how you make a plain space feel beautiful, or how you stay steady when everything around you is loud. Those qualities rarely show up on a resume, and they’re often the last thing we think to mention about ourselves.

Sometimes those qualities are easiest to recognize in the things we’ve continued doing simply because they matter to us, even when nobody was asking or expecting anything. They aren’t the role or the title. They’re quiet and a little ordinary, which is exactly why they’re easy to overlook.

We keep learning, and what we’ve lived becomes part of us. When a role changes, we don’t start from nothing. Something comes with us.

A question to carry

I’ll leave you with one question for today.

What has stayed true about you through every role you’ve had?

It may take a while to put a name on it. Sometimes it shows up in the way other people describe you, or in what you find yourself doing without thinking about it.

I’d love to hear in the comments what came to mind.

Tomorrow, I want to explore the stories we carry about ourselves, and how something we’ve believed for years can begin to feel like the truth, even when we’ve never stopped to question where it came from.

Thank you for being here.

-Michelle

P.S. There are seven more conversations in this series. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

Welcome back. This is Day 2 of our ten days on purpose and meaning. If you’re just joining us, you can start with DAY 1: The Frustration That Keeps Returning. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation, with a few thoughts that did not make it into the recording.

Yesterday, we talked about the frustration that keeps returning, even after we’ve tried to change what’s happening. Today I want to look at one thing that can keep us returning to familiar patterns without our noticing: the roles we’ve learned to play, and how easily they become part of who we believe we have to be.

How a role begins

A role is something we learn to do that works. It might begin because someone needed it. It might begin because it was noticed and rewarded, or because we loved it, or because life simply asked it of us. We become the dependable one, the caretaker, the achiever, the peacekeeper, the one who always has an answer. Some of those roles we choose, and we’re glad we did. Others we slide into without ever deciding.

What I’m curious about is what happens over time, because a role that starts as a good answer to a real need can slowly turn into a rule about who we’re allowed to be.

The strong one

I know this one from the inside. In my book Awakening: Truth Be Told, I wrote about strength, because for years I prided myself on being strong, independent, and capable of navigating storms without needing anyone to steady me. I was the dependable one. I was the one who kept everything running smoothly. Looking back, I wrote that even before I got sick, I wasn’t fully living. I was managing, carrying, enduring, and trying to be everything for everyone.

Then chronic illness did what it does. I described it as something that tears down the walls you build around your strength. It strips you. When I came home from treatment, something surprised me. I wasn’t the woman who could do it all anymore. I wasn’t the one who kept everything running smoothly. I wasn’t the strong one, the dependable one, the one others leaned on. Those parts of me had been peeled away, layer by layer, and who was left felt softer and more honest. It was almost disorienting.

What I understood then, and I put it in the book this way, is that I had been living in survival mode for so long that I thought survival was my identity. Being tired had become normal. Being overwhelmed had become familiar. Being the strong one had become expected. Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten how to be human, how to feel, and how to rest. The biggest one for me was learning how to receive.

I also wrote something I still believe. I thought I was being strong, but strength without awareness is often just self-abandonment in disguise. I don’t question the strength it took to get through those experiences. What I’ve had to reconsider is why I believed being strong meant I always had to handle everything.

That’s where surrender came in for me. It never meant becoming passive. The way I put it in the book is that it does not mean I stopped doing my part. It means I stopped playing God. I could still take responsibility, make decisions, and keep showing up. What I let go of was the belief that everything depended on me holding it all together.

You may recognize something like this in your own life, even if your circumstances have looked nothing like mine. Maybe you’re the person everyone counts on because you’ve always been able to figure things out. You handle the unexpected, you take care of what needs doing, and you make sure everyone else is okay. After a while, the people around you get used to that version of you, and you get used to it too. That doesn’t mean you don’t love the people who depend on you. It means that being capable of carrying something is different from having the capacity to carry it all the time.

When doing becomes being

This is the distinction I want to stay with. We learn a role, we get good at it, other people begin to depend on it, and we start to identify ourselves through it. Over time, that role can become so familiar that we no longer recognize where the responsibility ends and our identity begins.

Being capable of building something is not the same as wanting the life that comes with keeping it going.

Being good at something does not mean that thing has to become your entire identity.

Whatever you happen to be good at, whether it’s organizing, solving problems, caring for others, leading, or bringing people together, there can be a difference between something that comes naturally and something you keep doing because everyone, including you, has come to expect it. Both can be true of the same skill.

What I know how to do

I’ve seen a smaller version of this in my own work. I recorded thirty-one coaching videos for a series called R.I.S.E. with Michelle on my Naturally Thriving with Michelle YouTube Channel. I knew the material, and I could teach it. What I found out is that I didn’t enjoy being on camera, and I didn’t enjoy the structured format of teaching. I didn’t stop valuing what I had learned. It still shapes my writing and the conversations I have, including this one. The ability is still there, but the expression has changed.

Keeping what still matters

I want to be careful here, because none of this is about questioning every responsibility or reconsidering every role we have taken on. Some of the things we do are meaningful precisely because we chose to commit to them. There are roles I treasure and would choose again. Being a wife and a mother is deeply meaningful to me, and so is being a writer. Those are parts of my life that I value and continue choosing, even as the ways I express them evolve.

Looking at a role clearly doesn’t make it less meaningful. Some roles served a season and no longer need to define us. Others continue and take a different shape as our lives change. What we learn inside them, like perseverance, care, or skill, stays with us either way. There may be a role in your life that you love, another you’ve outgrown, and perhaps one you’ve never really stopped to examine.

A question to carry

I’ll leave you with one question for today.

Which role are you playing right now that you’re not sure you chose?

You don’t have to judge it or decide anything about it. Just notice how it became part of your life, what it has given you, and whether it still feels like something you want to choose.

I’d love to hear in the comments which role came to mind first.

Tomorrow, I want to explore what remains consistent about us, even as the roles we play and the lives we live continue changing.

Thank you for being here.

-Michelle

P.S. There are eight more conversations in this series. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is the first of ten conversations about purpose and meaning, and I’m glad you’re here. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation, with a few thoughts that did not make it into the recording.

If you read my long-form article this week, The Road That No Longer Fits, you know that I spent months adjusting my business, including my offers, my pricing, and my tiers, and that it came with a lot of frustration. I’ve come to see that frustration as information and not as failure. Today I want to go underneath that.

If we’re new to each other

I’m Michelle Potter. I’m an author, a Certified Next Level Human Architect, a Certified IGNITE Her Frequencies Guide, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Lived Logic, a magazine of real voices and lived stories. I’m the author of two books, From Hell to Rebirth and Awakening: Truth Be Told, and I write here on Substack. My own journey through chronic illness, healing, and personal transformation has shaped how I understand identity, resilience, and the stories we carry.

What I stand for is simple. People deserve to be heard before they are helped. Everyone has a story worth hearing, and no one should have to earn their place at the table. My work is told through lived experience, and someone else’s lived experience does not have to become your truth for it to be worth hearing, so take what fits and leave the rest.

The question I kept asking

For months, there was a question I kept asking myself, and it turned out to be more useful than any answer I found. The question was, what am I doing?

Over about six months, I kept changing things. I reconsidered what I wanted the business to look like. Every decision made sense when I made it, and I would feel some relief for a little while, the kind of dopamine hit that comes from changing something. Then the frustration would come back, and the same questions came back with it.

The honest answer to what am I doing was that I was trying to do too many things at once. I was building offers, adjusting programs, creating content, and trying to keep every piece moving while still trying to have a life. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I became so overwhelmed that I could no longer tell what actually mattered most.

Nearly every question began with how

Looking at it now, I notice that nearly every question I was asking began with how. How do I do this better? How do I get myself out there? How do I make this work? I was putting a great deal of energy into the how and almost none into a different question.

Do I want the life this takes?

Getting out there usually points toward social media, and I am not a huge fan of it. I really like my quiet times. I try not to scroll, because it is easy to fall into comparison traps, watching how far along other people seem to be in their businesses and their success. In most cases, you are looking at a highlight reel, and every person is in a different season or a different chapter of their life.

What my quiet time showed me

If you have read my books, you know I write a lot about visions and downloads, and I receive them quite a bit. In my quiet times, I usually get flashes of scenery, snapshots in a sequence. They are very much puzzle pieces: scenes, signs, symbols, colors, numbers. I have to put the pieces together to understand what is being presented.

In my quiet time, I saw those snapshots of what I want my life to look like. That is when I realized that what I had been doing and what I wanted did not go together. They were not in alignment.

Capable is not the same as wanting

Here is part of why that was so hard to see. I knew how to build programs. I knew how to create content, organize a community, and develop an offer. I spent years learning and refining those skills, but something was still missing.

Being capable of building something is not the same as wanting the life that comes with keeping it going.

It took me a long time to separate the two.

When frustration does not mean the wrong road

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to hear all of this and decide that frustration always means you’re on the wrong road. It doesn’t. I lived with chronic illness for a long stretch of my life, and I’d be misleading you if I suggested that every hard thing can be solved by choosing differently. There were years when I was frustrated with my limits and with not knowing what the next day would bring. I wanted things to change, and wanting it did not give me the power to make it happen. I looked for answers. I went through harsh treatments. I kept going. Some things helped and some didn’t, and on many days, getting through the day was enough.

I wasn’t frustrated then because I had built the wrong life. I was frustrated because I was living through something I never would have chosen, and there was no way around it. Telling someone in that place to simply follow what feels right leaves out illness, money, family, relationships, and everything else that narrows the choices a person actually has.

That is a different frustration from the one I’m describing here. With my business, I did have room to reconsider, and for a long time I didn’t recognize that.

Two kinds of staying

I’ve come to think there are two kinds of staying. Sometimes we stay because there is no other alternative and we’re doing the best we can with what we have. Other times we stay because we’ve decided that changing would mean giving up, wasting what we’ve already put in, or admitting that something didn’t work.

Those two situations deserve different questions. In the first, we might ask what support or adjustment would help us get through this. In the second, we might ask why we’re holding on so tightly to something we are free to change.

Our reasons change without announcing themselves

When something isn’t working, the first instinct can be to quit, or to adjust: another strategy, another routine, another plan. That instinct has served me my whole life. It can also become a way of avoiding a harder question. If I stay busy enough finding solutions, I never have to stop and ask whether the thing I’m trying to fix still matters to me.

Our reasons for doing something also change without announcing themselves. We start a career because we love the work, and years later we’re maintaining it for the security, or the recognition, or what other people expect. We take on a responsibility out of love and never check whether the way we’re carrying it can even last. We commit to a dream and keep pursuing it long after what we want from life has shifted. None of that makes the first decision wrong. We chose with what we knew at the time, and we can honor that without staying committed to the same form forever.

A question to carry

I’m not asking you to go looking for what’s wrong with your life, and I’m not suggesting that frustration means you need to make a big change. You may be carrying something that calls for patience or support. Some commitments still matter deeply even when they’re hard.

My question for you is this: what keeps coming back for you? If something comes to mind, try being curious about it. What is the story that is on repeat? Sometimes noticing that something keeps happening in a different form, and that you feel the same way each time, is the beginning of understanding something you’ve been living in for a long time.

Tell me in the comments: what keeps coming back for you?

Tomorrow, I want to look at the roles we pick up along the way, and what happens when something we learn to do becomes something we believe we have to be.

Thank you for being here.

-Michelle

P.S. There are nine more conversations in this series. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.