The Mandala Motherhood Podcast

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

The beginning of July always sneaks up on me.

This whole messy, holy path I’m on – of trauma healing, doula work, reclaiming my voice – starts here, with the birth of my first child on July 3, 2014. I was overdue, swollen, and so so hot (it was July after all)...and completely unprepared for what was about to happen. 

I gave my power away without even realizing it.

I remember shaking on the operating table. They told me to hold still. That’s the moment that’s still stuck. It sums the whole experience, the full set of expectations: Be quiet. Be small. Don’t move, let the doctors do what’s best. Because they know what’s best – not you.

I’ve carried the weight of that ever since.

My first birth is why my fourth – almost exactly five years later, on July 4, 2019 – felt so loaded. I had a plan that time, and I clung to it like my life depended on it. Because in a way, it did. I didn’t know it then, but I see it now: I needed that birth to be redemptive. That was how I thought I’d get my power back.

But it didn’t work.

Near the end of my pregnancy I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition. I had to give up my plan for our safety. Hooked up to monitors, restricted to my room, relying on synthetic hormones to force labor is not what I wanted. I was angry and uncooperative. 

When my baby was finally ready to come, he got stuck. Three minutes. My midwife was screaming. I was pushing with everything I had, and it wasn’t good enough.

When he finally slipped earthside he was silent. Blue. Not breathing. I thought he was dead.

Last week, he turned six.

***

Usually around this time of year, I write something about my birth traumas. Ever since I found the strength to talk about these truths, I’ve written about them – because people don’t understand what trauma actually is. “At least you have a healthy baby,” is about as far as most people can go. Not because they’re cruel, but because it hurts to think about. So they placate it away.

But if thinking about someone else’s pain hurts you, imagine what it feels like for the person trying to live with it – trying to make sense of what happened, to find any kind of solid ground. And the only thing they hear is: “Well, your baby didn’t die – so what are you complaining about?”

I’ve done so much inner work over the last ten years, trying to survive my brain in the wake of those traumas, that I barely recognize that mom shaking on the OR table. I love her. And I revere her. Honestly. But I’m not her anymore, because I don’t need to broadcast my pain to prove it was real.

Still – I want to keep healing out loud, because it makes the world a little softer for the next woman who’s still in the dark. Still thinking she’s the one who’s broken and wrong, simply because the world doesn’t know how to hold her pain.

But this year…I’m just so damn tired.

I was invited into a “real” position at a hospital, about a year and a half ago – a seat at the table, they said. A chance to speak for the patient’s experience. I was ecstatic. I wanted to create change, and I brought my full self to that table. But I know a lack of integrity between words and actions when I see one. I resigned from that position in March – not because I didn’t care, but because I cared more than they did. I had to fight too hard to be heard.

When a pregnant client tells me she wants to switch providers because her OB made her feel small or dismissed – I secretly thank god I’m not pregnant. Because I don’t know where to send her. I don’t know where any of us can get care that sees us as whole people, not just bodies on a table.

This year, my trauma anniversary didn’t hit so hard. I spent a couple of days in nervous system freeze. Smiled. Cut the ice cream cake. And tried not to let my kids think any of it had to do with them.

But your mom being sad on your birthday is a hard thing to understand when you’re six.

***

Last week, just as I was coming out of the fog of those trauma days, Dadu had a stroke. 

Dadu – Bengali for “grandfather” – was my husband’s grandfather by blood, mine by marriage. The patriarch of the Bhaduri family. And an amazing human being.

He was born in Kolkata, India in 1922. He studied medicine and worked around the world as a surgeon before settling with his wife and children in southern Maryland in the 1960s. There, he practiced family medicine until he retired – at age 76. 

Dadu loved medicine. His favorite pastime was reading anatomy books and sketching little organs and systems on napkins while he explained them to you. That and cooking, which is where we connected. He taught me to make traditional Bengali dishes – meat and vegetable curries, puffy luchi flatbreads, and all kinds of dal – recipes that are now staples in my household. There was a little sign in his house that summed him up well: Go everywhere. Talk to everyone. Eat everything.

Dadu passed away yesterday. He was 103 years old.

The stroke was terminal, so we knew the end was near. His daughters – three nurses and one chef – kept vigil, and he passed peacefully. 

We wore white. Because in Hindu tradition, death isn’t an ending. It’s just a transition.

And transition is a space I know well.

So I cooked food. I listened to stories. And I held space. Because even through my own tears I’m fluent in the landscape of grief – where everything familiar falls away and something raw and holy begins.

Birth and death live close to each other. Both ask us to loosen our grip. To bear witness. To stretch and grow in ways we don’t think we can, but we do. Because that’s what it means to be human.

Dadu wasn’t just a human, though. He was a legend. 

Dadu was a doctor who practiced before hospitals were allowed to make profit – before care was dictated by billing codes and insurance companies. He treated people. And he remembered them.

They remembered him, too. He’d run into former patients at the grocery store. On airplanes. In totally random places, on the regular. At his 100th birthday party more than 100 people showed up – not because he was Important with a capital I, but because he had made them feel important. Like they mattered. He saw them. He cared. 

It’s that simple. He was a doctor who cared.

***

This is all I’ve got today – aside from a pile of unanswered emails, unwashed laundry, and a schedule unexpectedly wiped clean to make space for a bereaved heart that’s still learning how to keep beating.

There are threads I could pull, but I’m not ready. Not yet. Because I need to sit in this space a little bit longer. So I can keep remembering what it felt like to be seen and held by someone who understood my body but didn’t use it to dismiss my humanity.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — get in touch with me. I’d be honored to hold that space for you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

Earlier this week, I did a scary thing: I gutted my entire website.

I’d been circling this project for months – not because anything was actually wrong with the website. I just didn’t like it anymore. Because it didn’t feel like me.

I’m not somebody who likes to stand still. I like to build. Mandala had been in a state of quiet evolution for over a year. But through all those iterations, I kept struggling to name what it had actually become. 

Then I went to the beach in June, and my body finally figured it out: the signal inside of me was no longer matching the story that site was telling. And my body needed cohesion.

So I started over. Time to rip some shit apart.

At first, though, I bargained. Because it’s summer. And I have less time in the office and other fun projects I’d rather be working on. Actually anything seemed more fun than redoing something I’d already slaved over. That copy was good. I believed in it. And it held a very brave version of me – one who had to stretch just to say it in the first place.

But revision always asks us to stretch again. Into new shapes.

I know this well, because I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. And, over the last 18 months or so, I’ve been writing a novel. (Pssst—if I can stop getting stuck in revisions, I might even finish this draft before the end of summer…) 

Honestly? The process is the same. First you make it exist. Then you make it true.

Sometimes that means cutting out things that aren’t bad, they just don’t belong anymore. Not in this version. Not with how the plot is turning out, or how the characters are evolving.

But it’s super fucking hard to let go of things that used to fit.

***

Earlier this spring, we traded in our busted-up skidloader – one that felt like a carnival ride last serviced in 1970 – for a new-to-us 2016 model. It’s the fanciest thing we own. It’s newer than all of our cars. And, most importantly, the steering’s tighter, the hydraulics don’t leak, and we can finally do more than just nudge heavy things from over here to over there. We can actually get things done.

Our first project was clearing brush at the top of this hill, so we can install a permanent parking pad for Pearl (our bus). If you ever need to really feel something – power, momentum, catharsis – climb into this thing and rip 20 years of overgrown invasive honeysuckle out by the roots with a grapple bucket. It’s a whole thing.

But down at the bottom of that hill is a giant, gnarled apple tree. 

Most people who tend fruit trees prune them down so they don’t get ginormous and you can actually reach the apples. But this tree…isn’t like that. It’s massive, and nobody had touched it in ages. So this year, I climbed inside it with a pole saw and started cutting. (Yes. I had to insert myself into the tree. It was an ordeal.)

Once I got in there I realized – so much of it was dead. Which made sense, I guess. No air flow in there, no light. 

So I started cutting. 

And I took off more than I meant to.

That’s the thing about pruning: it doesn’t always feel careful. Sometimes you don’t even realize what you’ve let go of until you’re watching it turn to ash in the burn pile.

Oh, and yeah – we burned those branches in a Wild Woman fire. It just felt right.

***

Like I said, I did a lot of cutting. And I ended up with a lot of woodchips in my bra. So I shimmied down my shirt and shook things out a bit. And that was that. 

I didn’t realize until later – when I was undressing for the shower – that something else had fallen out, too. My Reiki heart was gone. I’d carried that little thing in my bra every single day since my attunement. A small green-and-white crystal I picked out at the end of my training. “Don’t think about the choice,” Karen had told me. “Just feel which one is calling.”

That’s a hard thing to do. But I did it anyway. And then I charged it with my symbols, made it sacred. It made me believe I could do this – for real.

When I realized it was gone, I thought I was supposed to panic.

And I didn’t.

Which was weird. 

At first I thought maybe it was because I’d found something sacred against all odds before. A few years ago, Cora lost a tooth at a campsite. She thought it was a fishbone and spit it out in the gravel under the picnic table. It wasn’t until tooth-brushing time (read: dark) that she realized it was missing – and then promptly panicked because she wanted to claim her tooth fairy prize. 

So I went outside with my phone flashlight, realized every single piece of gravel under that picnic table looked exactly like a five-year-old’s tooth, gave up hope completely – and then immediately found the tooth.

So this time, when I realized my Reiki heart was gone, I told myself: You’ve done this before. It was just a little crystal, about the size of a nickel – green, white, and gold. Kind of exactly like the grass-and-woodchip mess I dropped it in. If I could find a tooth in a gravel pit in the dark, surely I could find a crystal in the grass in broad daylight.

Except I couldn’t. And I didn’t.

Even then – at the realization – the panic I expected never came. I was there, knees in the grass, looking…and then I just stopped. And went inside and had a drink, because it was hot.

I didn’t need to keep looking. Because I didn’t need the heart.

I’m not that version of myself anymore—the one pretending to believe, or relying on something outside of me to prove it. I don’t need the training wheels. I actually just believe.

So I left it. Let it sink into the soil under that tree like an offering. And an anchor. A quiet little ceremony for the things we’d both outgrown.

***

Not gonna lie – when I finished with that tree, Alex kind of gawked at it. And I felt a little embarrassed. Like when your kid finally agrees to a haircut (thank the Lord) and you get a little overzealous with the clippers. Suddenly you can see their eyes! And they can see the world!

Even when it doesn’t look bad – it’s disorienting. And vulnerable.

But it makes space for the light.

And that’s the point of this entire piece, the part I needed a name for: this moment in my life doesn’t feel polished or sure-footed. 

It feels in-between. A fish bag moment, like I’m being carried in a sloshy little sack from the goldfish booth at the carnival to a new (hopefully bigger, fingers crossed) aquarium. 

I didn’t just clear space – I let go of good things. Things I cared about very much. The Reiki heart. The website. The stories I used to need to tell in order to feel sure.

I cut back more than I meant to…and I don’t yet know what will grow back in its place.

But I do know this: growth doesn’t wait for guarantees. You don’t get to have the new thing before you let go of the old one. You don’t get to try on your new identity at TJMaxx and give it to the fitting room attendant if you didn’t quite love it. You take it home and pull out your sewing machine and the Bedazzler if you need to because this thing can’t be returned. 

This morning, Jacob found an Aldi bag labeled “boys size 6” and wanted to unpack it. (He turns 6 on Friday.) I said, “Yes – once you go through your drawers and take out what doesn’t fit you anymore.” There’s no room for the new until you make space.

All of this? Just me making space. Clearing brush. Pruning trees. Revising pages. Telling the truth, even when I’m afraid. Especially then. Because that’s what becoming feels like. It’s not clean, it’s not comfortable – and that’s exactly how I know it’s working.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — get in touch with me. I’d be honored to hold that space for you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

We pulled out at 5am, the bus packed to her gills and the kids too excited to sleep. Amish milk from the store down the street on the dash – Alex’s preference over coffee. (P)Earl barreling down 95 with the windows open, because the A/C only works when we’re parked…just wind and wild intention.

If you’ve been to a Wild Woman event, you’ve met Pearl. She’s our bus – but also a symbol. Of freedom, faith. Of building something real, even when it’s inconvenient. She’s been with us through a hundred versions of ourselves, and she holds more than gear and groceries. 

She holds story.

Last week, Pearl took us to Myrtle Beach.

It took a couple of days for my nervous system to catch up to the fact that I was on vacation. To unclench, to stop bracing, stop solving. I’d been pushing my way through a messy spring – stretching my business in new directions, Alex going back to the office, the kids pouring out of school with their limbs akimbo and their never-ending list of needs. But somewhere around Tuesday, my breath got deeper. My mind got quieter. And I remembered what it feels like to be a person instead of a system.

When that happened, something shifted.

A new fiction piece I’d been circling for months poured out of me. I wrote 8,000 words in three days. And with that came a sudden, solid sense of direction. A next evolution. A quiet yes I didn’t have words for until then.

Mandala has always been a creative pursuit. It evolves as I do. And I’m still here – still recording podcast episodes, still planning Wild Woman Gatherings, still offering perinatal support and Reiki – but my voice might not show up in your inbox as often, or as intensely. At least for this season.

I want to keep writing fiction. It’s not exactly Mandala, not yet – but it’s where my voice is leading me next. So I’m following it.

And I want to keep building something Alex and I have been quietly tending behind the scenes: a real estate development business that feels like both grit and grace. I’ve missed being in spaces that challenge me, systems that need decoding, environments that aren’t built to coddle. And I’ve found myself drawn, again and again, to spaces that need reclaiming. Buildings, yes – but also some buried parts of myself I forgot I could come home to.

So I’m not disappearing. I’m shifting where I speak from.

I’ve been in a long season of creation – birthing new offers, integrating winter lessons, building containers to hold others. But now I’m heading into a cycle of learning again. Listening. Practicing. Building capacity for the next iteration of who I’m becoming.

Pearl’s still parked outside. I’m just charting a new map.

Stay tuned. Buckle up. It’s only getting hotter from here. 🔥

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

I’m officially one week into summer vacation, and it’s both exactly what I needed and more than I can handle. Taking mornings at my own pace and having fewer appointments gives my nervous system space and feels like freedom. But being with my kids 24/7 is triggering somatic memories of COVID times, when I was also home all day…back then caring for an infant, two toddlers, and homeschooling a first-grader. By myself.

That wasn’t hard. It was impossible.

Lately I’ve been feeling that “impossible task” energy creep back in. Even though I’ve felt it before, I only first named it a few weeks ago, when I realized I was carrying Alex’s return-to-office stress. He was the one commuting, yet somehow my body was bracing.

I didn’t know what to call the feeling at first. But I recognized its shape: grumpy, irritable, low-key pissed. Tension in my face, in my shoulders. Hard to focus. Wanting to be alone. Quick to snap. 

Most of us have a catch-all term for this kind of state. In Sadie World, I call it anxiety. Think of it as your personal default label for nervous system dysregulation. Like naming your kid, you get to pick the word that fits your vibe. And naming it is good. Truly. Because awareness is a skill. But once you name it…what then?

Welcome to the junk drawer. This is where named-but-not-yet-understood nervous system dysregulation goes. When you’ve glanced at the feeling just long enough to know something’s up – but not long enough to figure out what it actually is, or what you ought to do with it.

The problem? You know how hard it is to find anything when the matches and spoons and cling wrap and chip clips and charge cords and Chinese restaurant sauce packets are all chilling in the same space and collectively being called “junk.” That’s about how easy it is to decode dysregulation when you’re calling it all by the same name.

If you want to understand what your body’s really trying to say, you’ve got to sort through the mess.

So let’s start sorting.

Imagine you’re an alien learning to be human, and someone hands you a bucket of utensils. You know they’re for cooking and eating, but…which one flips eggs? What do you use to cut butter? To eat olives? And why are there so many kinds of spoons?!

At first, all the tools feel interchangeable. But over time – with curiosity, and trial and error – you begin to sort. To learn the different flavors of your dysregulation. 

Because all dysregulation kind of feels the same at first. Kind of like all tea just tastes like…tea. A bit bitter. Earthy. Dry. But if you drink enough tea, and pay attention, you start to notice the differences. Darjeeling is light and twiggy. English Breakfast is bold. Earl Grey tastes like perfume and eighteenth-century sophistication.

Sensing your dysregulation is the same. If you sit with it long enough – not just stuff it into a junk drawer – patterns emerge. Eventually you’ll find yourself saying something like, “Oh, THIS is a spoon! One uses this to eat soup. How interesting.” 

And your life will change forever.

Let me show you what I mean. Here are a few real-life examples from Sadie World. Yours might look totally different – and that’s kind of the point.

• Performance panic: I’m going to visit a friend in downtown Lancaster. I have to parallel park. What if I hit another car? What if I’m too close to that fire hydrant? What if someone’s watching me and I look like an idiot needing 17 tries to get this right?? That tight, frantic, I NEED TO DO THIS RIGHT feeling? That’s a flavor.

• Running late spiral: I’m trying to get the kids out the door for a pediatrician visit. We’re already late. One kid scrapes her leg climbing into the car. Do I go back in for a bandaid and risk missing the appointment? My blood feels hot. My brain floods with urgency. Another flavor.

• Creative exposure twitch: I write something raw and share it. (Like this.) Did I say too much? Was I too weird? Did I make people work too hard to understand me? Will they still like me? That simmering freak-out about how I’ll be received? Another one.

Each of these situations looks different. But early on, they all feel the same. That’s why the sorting matters. 

But back to this week’s flavor – impossible task dysregulation. What defines this one? It doesn’t respond to action. Most nervous system distress has a fix-it impulse attached to it. You’re flooded, so you do the thing – calm the kid, finish the task, send the text – and the pressure lets up. But this one? No matter what you do, it doesn’t go away. It hums underneath everything. You rest and still feel like shit. You finish the task and still feel behind. You give in to the screaming kid and still feel upset.

Impossible task dysregulation is like a hunger that doesn’t respond to food. You keep eating but you’re never satiated. Until you start to wonder if maybe this isn’t hunger. Maybe it’s something else, like your body trying to tell you: this can’t be fixed by doing more.

So if doing more doesn’t help…what are we actually trying to fix? What’s the impetus for all that pressure that Just. Won’t. Let. Up?

Impossible task dysregulation originates from any expectation you’ve internalized without questioning. Taking a friend soup when they’re sick – even if you don’t have the spoons to make your own family dinner – because that’s what a good friend does. Making your kids a “real” lunch (something better than Bagel Bites and sliced strawberries) while you’re writing a grant proposal – because that’s what a good parent does. It’s anything you’re trying to achieve or hold together because you think you have to – not because you’re consciously choosing to.

And that’s really important. Because nobody feels good about doing stuff they never actually agreed to.

So who told you that you have to do all this stuff?

This here is the kicker: nobody did. Nobody! Not directly, anyway. The script you’re following was pieced together decades ago from subtle, sometimes-misinterpreted cues – filtered through the lens of a seven-year-old just trying to survive. (Hint: That seven-year-old is you, whether you had a “hard” childhood or not. Growing up is rough, guys.)

You didn’t agree to all these bullshit expectations. You just inherited them.

But now they live in your bones. I have to do this. I have to keep going. Because stopping feels…dangerous. Like the wheels will fall off. The house will collapse. 

Or someone will stop loving you.

This is the operating system we’re all running, until we do the inner work to update our software. But once you can clearly see the bugs in the system – everything changes. You stop thinking the problem is you. You stop sprinting to catch the carrot and disembark that hamster wheel, climb the bars of the cage, and bite through that string with your teeth. 

That’s where the power is. Not in burning down your life and moving to New Mexico in your vintage RV. Just in seeing the shape of it clearly.

Right now, for me, the impossible task is this: Parent fully. Lead the family into our summer routine (which is still nebulous and nowhere close to forming organically). Run a business. Handle the house. Prep for the vacation we’re leaving for in two days. Oh, and also squeeze in that pediatrician appointment. 

And – if the stars align – maybe I can get into my office and write. Because that’s what keeps me sane.

But Lucy, ten going on sixteen, is mad that I won’t make her fettuccine Alfredo from scratch for lunch. Cora cried the whole ride to the pediatrician because I wouldn’t turn around for that bandaid. I have a full day of office work to knock out before we leave and a suitcase that’s still empty and I am only one person with one nervous system and one flag. Which is currently waving.

Cue impossible task dysregulation. 

I used to override it and just keep pushing. Old me would’ve diced that garlic and grated the cheese – seething the whole time, yelling at everyone, and finishing the day with a buttload of resentment and zero words on my page. 

Then I started seeing it…but I wasn’t willing to stop. Because preteens are mean, and I feel like a bad mom when I feed them frozen foods.

But now? I’m tired. I’m over this dog and pony show. And I want to stop – I just don’t know how to do that yet without consequence. 

But here’s the magic I found: When I finally named it – this is impossible – the pressure broke. Just a little. Just enough for me to make a tray of Bagel Bites, slice a quart of strawberries, and disappear into my office to write this. 

So I could begin the work of…whatever’s next.

And I’m not exactly sure what that is. But I think it starts with reading the fine print of the soul-mortgage I signed without understanding. 

I think it’s a refinance.

Rates are better now. And I don’t owe what I thought I did.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

Today has been a doozie.

It’s the last day of school, and my entire schedule ecosystem is about to shift. I’m so ready for the break – and excited to sleep in – but apprehensive about how my kids being home will affect my space and my rhythm (which I’ve really been loving these last few weeks since Alex went back to the office).

I had dreams of writing something stellar again this week. Last week I had all the fire and the words and the drive. But today? I need slowness.

There are a lot of unknowns coming. Not just the logistics of summer, but the emotional terrain of it – how the shift will land in my body, how the days will stretch and fold. This is the first year I didn’t arrange “official” summer childcare, besides my mom popping in a couple days a week so I can see clients. The rest, we’re just winging.

So I’m stashing that linguistic gold into a file for later. Choosing a nap. Going outside with my kids. Letting myself honor this one very specific day – the day when summer break is at its longest.

But before I sign off, I want to make good on something I said I’d do – because the words still matter, even when the speaker is tired. Some things are worth finishing, even if you don’t have the same fire you started with.

Last week I talked about power leaks – the subtle, hardly-detectable ways we shrink ourselves in an attempt to control how someone else is feeling. I told you about catching myself doing that: taking on Alex’s stress about his schedule change. And I said I’d tell you how I shut it off.

So here it is.

My lightbulb moment came when I realized I’d been looking at the whole thing through the wrong lens. I kept asking myself, “How is this affecting us?” But us is a slippery word. 

What does us even mean?

I’m someone who likes to dissect semantics because it’s fun. But also because language is powerful – and sometimes, language is where the leak starts. So I needed to get to the bottom of us.

So I thought of this like a math equation, where 1 + 2 = 3. In this example, let’s say 1 is me, 2 is Alex, and 3 is this nebulous us. In math, one plus two equals three. But in life, Sadie plus Alex doesn’t equal…Salex. Because we’re not one being. We’re two distinct individuals who are in relationship.

The us I really needed to be concerned with wasn’t some merged third identity – it was the intersection where our lives overlap. The left side of the equation. The way our two wholes operate side by side, simultaneously. When I thought about it that way, and when I looked closer, through this lens – I realized the situation didn’t just have one impact, like I’d been assuming. It actually had three:

1. How is this change affecting Alex? That part is for him to articulate and manage. I can be aware. I can support. But it’s not mine to hold.

2. How is this change affecting me? That’s for me to manage. And honestly? I’ve been doing a stellar job. Gold star.

3. How is this change affecting our relationship and shared responsibilities? That’s for us to co-manage. As a team.

Once I realized what wasn’t mine, I put it down. Once I could see what was mine, I felt proud of how I was navigating it. And because our partnership is strong, I could trust that we’d figure out the shared parts together.

I still feel sad for Alex. He’s still deep in the throes of transition, and I still want to help. But I’ve stopped trying to carry something I can’t actually touch. And that’s a good thing – because as it turns out, I need that bandwidth now to manage my own schedule change. 

But it also made me better support for him. Because now, instead of trying to stand in his shoes, I’m standing beside him – where I can actually hear, reflect, and give him space to live his own life.

The stress I felt at the time was so burdensome – but the way this played out leaves me grateful that I’ve spent the last couple of years learning how to listen to it. 

Doing this stuff is hard. (That’s why it’s called inner work.) But it’s worth it. Because, as that turns out, decoding messages from your nervous system is another secret backdoor to getting your power back. 

There’s a lot of wisdom in your nervous system. The trick is being able to tolerate the discomfort until you know what it means.

This has been a really rich theme for me lately, and I’ve got more to say – especially about the sneakiest kind of power leaks: the ones that don’t even involve other people. But that’ll have to wait until my fire returns.

For now, I’m going outside. And in case you need it, you can borrow my permission slip: To stop over-functioning. To put down what isn’t yours. And to choose how you want to show up today based on what you’re feeling and what your body needs.

That’s what I’m doing. And it’s more than okay. 

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

Last Monday, my husband Alex went back to the office. He’s been a federal employee for nearly a decade—working fully remotely for the last few years—and we’d known the shift was coming. We just didn’t know when, or where he’d be assigned.

We got nine days’ notice.

The good news? He’s on a compressed schedule—four tens—to cut down some of the drive time. The bad news? Those days are long. He’s out the door before the kids are up and drags his weary self back home just as I’m serving dinner. Then it’s a blur of bedtime and collapsing into bed himself, only to get up and do it all again. He’s lost six hours of personal time each week to the commute, and now it’s basically just me and the kids for four days straight.

The Sunday before he started back, our whole house was a mess of grief and anxiety. I was preemptively mourning the loss of connection with my partner and dreading the load of managing four kids and an entire household largely by myself. I expected to flounder. I thought the mornings would fall apart without his help, that I’d lose momentum in my work now that I have to be home for the afternoon bus, that our marriage would start to strain under the weight of less time and fewer emotional spoons.

But when the house emptied out that first morning—Alex at his new office, kids at school—something opened up in me.

For the first time since having children, I had real space. I was alone. Not for a quick errand or an hour in between things—truly, uninterruptedly alone. I didn’t have to give a hug in the middle of a task, eat when someone else was ready, or even close the bathroom door. I didn’t have to sync to anyone else’s rhythm. I got to make my own. 

It was entirely disorienting – and absolutely gorgeous.

So I did weird stuff. Had full conversations with my dog. Sang dumb songs that I’d be mortified to belt out in front of other humans. Ate random snacks when I felt like it instead of breaking for lunch midday. I gave myself permission to do whatever I wanted—and it felt like the culmination of everything I’ve been working toward: resting in my power. 

Letting slowness lead. Letting creativity emerge without obligation. Trusting that doing things differently—more present, less performative—isn’t laziness. It’s just the feminine way of being. And I am finally, finally learning to trust it. 

The week worked. Mornings ran smoother without him. I tackled months-old clutter. Business ideas sparked. My motivation to cook returned. Everything felt…aligned. And I thought: This is the payoff. This is what I’ve been shifting toward. This is what it looks like when I stop leaking energy and start living intentionally. 

And then Thursday came.

Alex walked in the door after a long week—disillusioned and sitck-a-fork-in-him done. I, alternatively, was lit up and ready to reconnect. “Let’s make dinner,” I said. “Let’s hang out. I missed you.” But he couldn’t meet me there. He wasn’t mean. Just unavailable. Still tangled in his own overwhelm of work stress, family responsibilities (that should now happen when, exactly?), and no time to breathe.

Still, it hit me sideways. I felt sad. Then rejected. Then grumpy as hell. We ended up having a nice evening—we talked, traded foot rubs, curled up in our underwear watching Frasier reruns—but the funk didn’t lift. It wasn’t until I was getting in bed that I was able to name it: anxiety. But it was a confusing variety, because I couldn’t place the origin. So I went to sleep. I figured I was probably just tired.

But the next morning it was worse. I woke up agitated and just plain pissed off. So I sat with it (coffee in hand)...until I realized what had happened: I’d taken in his discomfort. And I wasn’t managing my own energy anymore. I was trying to manage his.

That realization stunned me. Because we’ve done the work— years of therapy, and real change. I thought we were past this. But here it was: an old tap I hadn’t sealed. Leaking power.

Even in relationships you’ve worked hard to repair—even in the healthiest dynamics—your power can still drain through old pipes. Because codependency isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it looks likes this:

💧 You can’t enjoy your coffee because your husband is mad he can’t find matching socks—so you go into fix-it mode instead of staying in your own moment.

💧 You hold off on serving dinner because your chronically-late MIL isn’t there yet—so everyone else sits hungry while you wait.

💧 You stop singing in the car because your preteen groans—so you shrink your joy to avoid her reaction.

💧 You share a bold idea with someone you trust, and they shoot it down—so you pretend it was just silly, that it didn’t matter. Even though it did.

These are micro-leaks. The subtle ways we give away our power without realizing it. And they almost always share one thing in common: Your joy starts to feel dangerous.

Why? Because we’ve been taught that it’s morally wrong to feel good when someone else feels bad. That when others are in pain, the right thing to do is dim ourselves in solidarity. So when someone can’t access what we’re feeling, they orbit us – trying to siphon what they can’t source. Not because they’re malicious. Because they’re dysregulated and they don’t have the awareness—or tools—to shift that for themselves. 

This is the sneaky side of codependency. Not the obvious, over-functioning kind we all know about. The subtle kind. The kind where your joy feels suspicious because someone else is struggling. The kind where your nervous system picks up someone else’s signal and starts trying to solve it, even if they haven’t asked you to. The kind that feels like love…but doesn’t actually help. It doesn’t move the system forward. Because it’s not a circuit. It’s a drain.

Here’s the truth we haven’t been taught: Human bodies can’t heal emotional states for others. No matter how much we want to. But the instinct to try? It comes from care. We mirror pain because we think it proves we care. Because we’ve been taught that joining someone in their dark is the way to show love. But matching without grounding doesn’t heal. It amplifies.

What actually helps is modeling a different frequency. Staying grounded in your own energy. Not jumping in the pit of despair with them. Instead: Drinking your coffee while it’s hot. Singing even when your kid rolls their eyes. Eating when the dinner is ready—without waiting for the time-blind straggler to catch up. This is nervous system leadership—and it’s exactly how coregulation actually works. (And, spoiler: it’s literally what I do in Reiki.)

Last Friday, when I realized what I was doing—when I stopped trying to fix Alex’s feelings and got back into my own lane—the anxiety vanished. Like flipping a switch. Like my body exhaled and said, thank you for stepping back from this impossible task.

Power leaks are usually like that: quiet, subtle, and totally solvable. They’re hard to spot, though, because they’re underground. They don’t rupture; they simply seep. Water’s still coming out of the hose, so you tell yourself it’s fine…there’s just less pressure. So you squeeze the trigger harder and then wonder why you’re so tired. This is what an energetic leak feels like. The hose is cracked under the driveway, and you don’t even know you’re losing water.

But once you name it, it can’t keep draining you. Once you hear the hiss, you know where to dig. And once you find the crack, you can’t unsee the water it steals—or the parts of yourself it asks you to abandon just to keep the flow going.

Reclaiming your power isn’t a one-time declaration. It’s an ongoing, evolving, situational practice. You have to face the same dynamic again and again…but if you’re paying attention, you’ll start meeting it differently. Each time with more awareness. More grounding. More discernment. And that moment when you notice what you couldn’t see before isn’t failure—it’s growth.

You can’t rest in your power if it’s still leaking. You can’t water the garden of your life if the hose is cracked under the driveway. And you sure as hell can’t bloom when your roots are shriveling from drought.

So this week—take two of Alex’s new four-day work marathon— I’m not trying to fix anything except my own leaks. And I’m asking you: Where are yours? Where does your joy start to feel dangerous? Who’s in the room when you shrink?

That’s where your tap is open. Next time, we’ll talk about how to shut it off.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

I had to cancel last weekend’s Wild Woman Gathering – and it gutted me. 

But I saw it coming. By midweek, it had been raining for days, and the soil was already soaked through, holding more than it had capacity for. The gathering field is wetland-adjacent, making field conditions often precarious at this – the wettest – time of year. 

So on Wednesday I didn’t even need to check the forecast. I could feel the answer in my body. The land wasn’t meant to hold more. It needed rest. Just like you don’t brush your hair when it’s soaking, because it’s more likely to break – neither do you trample a saturated field, turn it all to mud, and call it sacred. 

My farmer-turned environmentalist brain knows this. I spent years working as a pasture management specialist before I ever started this work. And the number one rule: you don’t turn high foot traffic onto wet pasture. Hooves (or boots) destroy the soil structure, and the damage takes seasons to undo.

So I called it off. Cried a little. Made my apologies. Refunded event fees. And still – even with the mud underfoot and a wicked storm rolling in during the exact time we would’ve gathered – I second-guessed myself. Because that’s how deep the programming runs. To perform. To deliver. To prove that I’m reliable. Worthy. Enough.

You feel this, too. I know you do. It’s in the moments when your body begs for rest but your brain, trained by a thousand years of patriarchy, tells you that rest is weakness. That ease is laziness. That being trustworthy means never backing out. Never changing your mind. Never letting other people down – even when pushing through means betraying yourself.

And so you keep pushing. Smiling. Over-functioning. Forcing things because they’re on the calendar. And calling it strength.

Cancelling last week’s gathering was painful – and that pain was a wake-up call. A reminder of how often I’ve confused power with push instead of alignment. Power doesn’t always look like standing up and speaking out. That’s just the masculine form of power – the one we see constantly in this culture, usually being weaponized and performed. 

But feminine power? The kind where we’re resting instead of reacting? Where we’re listening and responding instead of blindly charging ahead?

We almost never see that modeled.

So I’m here to tell you: this type of power is real. It matters. And not only do you have permission to lean in to it – you have to. Because if you don’t, they’ll keep calling your depletion devotion and handing you applause for running yourself into the ground. Because when we don’t call out — and actively disrupt — this bastardized version of what power is… we pass it down.

Your kids are watching you to learn what power looks like in a woman. What gets praised. What gets swallowed. What gets left behind, or trampled. Or done anyway, just because we said we would. 

We’ve forgotten how much power there is in staying still. In surrendering to what is – not because we can’t handle it but because we’re choosing not to. And that’s something we need to relearn. To start embodying again, if we want to create a different, softer existence – for our kids, and for ourselves.

Resting in your power can look like retreat or resignation – but it’s not. The difference is the attitude, not the action. It looks like staying quiet when your mother-in-law is being ridiculous and you just can’t with her shenanigans anymore but you know she won’t actually absorb a damn thing you have to say. Not jumping in to play Judge Judy between siblings who are old enough to figure it out themselves. Saying no to that party invitation because you want a night to chill in your underwear watching Frasier reruns on the couch. Closing the door when you need fifteen minutes of alone time without being talked to or touched – and not explaining why. It looks like choosing not to perform strength in a way that costs you softness — but to hold steady, allowing it to emerge naturally through presence.

Leave the mess. Let the group chat go unanswered. Go take a bath instead.

This isn’t losing ground – it’s learning to stand differently. More deeply. More honestly. More you.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

Ever since last week—when I declared that I’m holding firm on boundaries around emotional labor—my body has been BUZZING. Not constantly, but close. Every time I give the dysfunction back instead of contorting myself to keep others comfortable (which is often, apparently), my body floods with energy. My heart speeds up. My arms tingle. It feels like anxiety or panic—but only in my body. Mentally, I feel calm. Clear.

At first, the dissonance between my brain and body was jarring. Confusing. I wondered if I wasn’t coping as well as I thought I was. Because if I’d really grown, why was my body on fire, screaming danger?

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized—this isn’t regression. It’s not stagnation either.

It’s expansion.

Betraying myself to keep the peace—like I used to—drained my energy. Every time I did it, I handed my power over to someone else. But now? I’m holding my power. I’m no longer leaking it through over-functioning, chasing, fixing, or explaining dysfunction away with excuses and excessive grace.

And now that I’m holding all that energy instead of bleeding it out—it’s a lot. It makes sense that my body’s not used to it yet.

I’ve seen this pattern before, in different forms: it takes time for the body to catch up to the brain. Change starts with pulling up the old belief (“I have to show everyone grace”) and replacing it with something truer (“I get to decide where and how I offer grace”). But we aren’t just brains—we’re layered, complex humans. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual. Energetic. A new belief in your mind isn’t enough. It’s just the start.

The anchoring happens when you live through the same experience again—but this time, you stay with yourself. You hold the new belief. You don’t abandon it when it gets hard. And eventually, your body starts to trust it. Because bodies don’t believe words. They believe repetition.

This is the part we don’t talk about enough. When you really start showing up differently—not just thinking about it, but doing it—your system doesn’t settle right away. It surges. It scrambles. It buzzes like a fuse box learning to hold a stronger current.

It’s not broken. It’s adapting.

So now, when I feel that strange combo—mental clarity and physical fire—I don’t panic. I don’t discharge it. I sit with it. I let it move through me. Because this is what my system is learning: how to hold the charge without abandoning myself.

And that? That’s what makes me powerful as hell.

If you’ve been feeling it too—wired, a little raw, maybe even questioning if you’re doing it wrong—you’re not. You’re just carrying more of yourself than you ever have before.

This isn’t a breakdown. It’s the build.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

I’ve always cared deeply about being a good person. A nice person. Someone who makes others feel safe and comfortable and seen. It’s part of who I want to be — and probably part of who you want to be, too.

But lately, something in me has been shifting.

It started when I realized that not everyone is able to meet my care with care. That some people take my softness as a signal that I’ll absorb whatever they throw — last-minute cancellations with no follow-up, disappearing in the middle of making plans, treating my time like it’s flexible but their is sacred…or sending vague, chirpy check-ins that ignore the hard conversation they bailed on.

If you’re someone who’s naturally attuned to others (or trained yourself to be), it’s easy to think: this is just part of being a good friend. A good partner. A good human.

So we let it go. We stay nice. We make excuses. We hold the door open even after it slams in our face.

Because people are human. And humans deserve grace — especially when they’re hurting. Right?!

But at some point — maybe after the five hundredth no-show, half-apology, energy-sucking interaction that went nowhere — I started to wonder…where’s my grace?

The truth is, constantly being the bigger person isn’t noble. It’s exhausting. And usually it doesn’t truly serve the person we’re trying to love.

That was the hardest part for me to see.

Because when we keep absorbing the impact of other peoples’ unaccountability without naming it, we teach them it’s fine. That care doesn’t need to be mutual. That harm can go unacknowledged as long as they’re having a hard time. But that’s not actually kind. That’s enabling.

And enabling isn’t grace. It’s codependence in a nice dress.

Refusing to carry someone’s emotional slack isn’t abandonment. It’s a kind of truth-telling. It says: I care about you enough to not let you keep showing up this way.

I’m learning to stop chasing clarity where it’s not being offered. To stop making excuses for people who keep showing me exactly who they are. To stop over-functioning just to keep the peace. Not out of anger — but because that emotional labor should never have been mine to begin with.

And if you’ve been feeling worn down, too — not just tired, but tired of yourself for letting it keep happening — maybe it’s not burnout after all. Maybe it’s your boundaries waking up. And maybe that’s the beginning of something better.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

 

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

 

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

I’ve always had a tumultuous relationship with time. My dad, a former Marine, was timely like his life depended on it — and me, a straight-A perfectionist, learned early that being late meant you didn’t care. That kind of training makes you efficient, sure. It also makes you chronically stressed and compressed, doing the math about whether there’s “enough” time to earn someone else’s approval.

Decades later, I still feel the pressure — and the shame. Not just around punctuality, but deadlines, too. The pressure to be on time, finish on time, perform on time hijacks presence. My focus shifts to output and obligation, and I lose the felt sense of presence. No space for art. No space for life — which is, let’s face it, unpredictable, messy, and nonlinear.

And I keep coming back to the same truth: squirrels don’t have watches or calendars. (I don’t know it’s always squirrels for me, but here we are.) They follow the sun. The season. Their own internal rhythms — nature pointing them towards their greatest good. That’s how I want to relate to time: to use it, not be used by it. To space things out. To move slower. To live inside time, not race against it.

I’m still trying to untangle this knot — it’s a big one. But the question I’m sitting with right now is this: What actually happens when I abandon my own rhythm to meet someone else’s timeline?

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.