A commitment to show up and write my truth | Day 259 of 365 I woke up in the middle of the night running through everything I had to do. One person needed my help. Someone else needed me to fix a problem. Another had advice, another had a program, and someone else had the thing that was definitely, absolutely, probably going to change my life. Apparently, everyone is a magician now. And still, nobody is solving my actual problem. I don't need more answers. I need fewer things asking me for one. I've been getting only a few hours of sleep most nights lately, and this week has been especially heavy. Somewhere between the responsibilities, the decisions, and yet another notification promising to transform my life, something hit me, and it was almost embarrassing how simple it was. Anyone who's been feeling overwhelmed for a while will probably get this. I need less on my plate. That's it. Feeling Overwhelmed Doesn't Always Mean You Need a Better System I'm not against programs or products. I'm not against doctors, coaches, or asking for help, either. Three programs I use right now have changed my life, and I believe in them so much I'd probably sell their products myself. What sets them apart is that they never made me feel hunted. They told me what the problem might be, walked me through how they could help, and then trusted me to decide. There was no made-up emergency and no emotional chase scene. Compare that to the steady drip of emails and texts. Just following up. Did you see this? Are you still struggling? Is it getting worse? Yes, Brenda. It is. My phone won't stop dinging. When I'm rested, I can spot a sales pitch and keep walking. When I'm running on empty, every ping feels a little more urgent and every promise sounds a little more possible. Maybe they're right. Maybe this is the piece I've been missing. Maybe I really do need one more program, protocol, appointment, login, or person to keep track of. Some days I'd love to throw my phone into the ocean. Unfortunately, there's no ocean nearby. There are woods, though, and streams, and quite possibly an alligator who'd be happy to help me get rid of the phone. Sometimes Help Is One More Thing to Manage I have help in my business, and I'm grateful for every bit of it. I also know that saying so might make some people think I have no business feeling buried. But gratitude and overwhelm can live in the same body. Having support doesn't take away the weight of being the one who still has to decide, explain, approve, remember, double-check, and live with whatever happens next. There are business decisions and household decisions. There are property decisions, appointments, and health worries: my own health, my daughter's, my husband's and more. And there are the people I love who call me when something goes wrong. If you're the one everyone calls, you probably know this feeling. Some days I don't want more people to manage. I want someone capable to look at the whole overflowing plate and say, "I've got this. You don't have to decide a thing." I want the groceries handled and our particular diets remembered without my having to explain them again. I want dinner made, the supplements sorted, and my daughter happy and playing. I want the business humming along and someone other than me keeping an eye on the team. Not forever. A week would be lovely. At this point, I'd settle for a day. Just long enough to remember what it feels like to be taken care of, instead of being the one who arranges care for everyone else. When Rest Finally Comes and You Can't Relax I still remember the day my daughter, who has never been much of a napper, took the nap of her life. You'd think I plowed through my to-do list. Or slept. Or finally had one of those peaceful afternoons mothers daydream about while hiding in the bathroom. I did almost nothing. One of my closest friends called, and before I could get a word out, she said, "You just sat there, didn't you? You didn't know what to do." She was right. I kept waiting for my daughter to wake up. The quiet stretched on, and my body stayed on high alert anyway, bracing for it to end. I couldn't nap because I didn't trust that I had enough time. I couldn't start anything because I was sure I'd be interrupted halfway through. So I sat. The funny part is, I teach nervous system healing. I know that when we finally stop, our bodies sometimes catch up to how long they've been running in overdrive. We might cry. We might lie down to sleep and find we can't. We might sit there, stunned, because our bodies don't know what to do with a moment that asks nothing of us. If you finally get an hour to yourself and spend it staring at the wall, you didn't waste it. You needed that hour to do nothing. The fact that you couldn't do anything else might be the clearest sign of how badly you needed it. How I'm Choosing Less When I'm Feeling Overwhelmed So I've started choosing less. I'm unsubscribing from emails. I'm leaving text lists and muting group chats full of noise I don't want in my life anymore. I'm saying no to offers that don't feel right for me, and I'm learning that's okay. Not every program, product, or solution is meant for every person. I understand that as a customer, and I understand it as the founder of Karma Penguin. If something we create feels right and truly supports you, I'd love to welcome you in. If it doesn't, I understand that, too. A good offer tells you the truth and then lets you make your own call. This week I also had a hard conversation. I told someone, "I'm sorry, but I can't help you with this anymore." I had warned them not to put me in that position. They made their choice anyway, and I couldn't keep carrying the consequences for them. As a friend of mine likes to say, not my pony, not my show. As an animal lover, I remain a little concerned about what this hypothetical show is doing with the pony. But the boundary stands. The conversation was uncomfortable, and there may be more bumps ahead as I keep holding that line. But afterward, I felt lighter, relieved, even a little free. Underneath all the mess, I knew I had finally done right by myself. Choosing less probably won't start with a perfectly organized life. It might start with one muted group chat. One offer you turn down. One problem handed back to the person it belongs to. One quiet hour where you don't "should" all over yourself for not being productive. Rest isn't a prize you earn once everyone else is okay and your list is finally empty. If that were the rule, some of us would never rest again. You don't have to prove your worth by how much you can carry. And if no one has told you lately, let me be the one: you deserve care, too. You're allowed to put something down. About the Author I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Today that lesson looked like muting the noise, turning down what wasn't right for me, holding a hard boundary, and realizing I don't need another life-changing solution. I need less to carry. Day 259 of 365. Still building. Still learning to put things down. Still choosing peace. 🐧

A commitment to show up and write my truth | Day 258 of 365 Today was Joy's first day with us. She's sweet and experienced, ready to work, and she came in with the kind of energy that makes you hopeful about everything you might build together. I already find myself wanting this to be the start of something long. But welcoming someone new has a way of pulling you backward, too. It took me straight back to the person who was there when this whole thing was brand new. I thought about Anne. Anne was our first assistant. She joined us back when we were making it up as we went, which is a nicer way of saying we were drawing the map while the car was already moving. She stayed with us for about eight months, but somewhere in there she stopped being just an assistant and became part of the family. Anne was warm and endlessly grateful, the kind of person who noticed not just the work but the human being doing it. She watched my daughter grow from the time she was tiny. On the days motherhood felt impossibly hard, Anne would remind me to slow down, because it all moves faster than you think. I believed her then. Now, watching my daughter get bigger every time I blink, I believe her completely. When Anne left, there were circumstances around her hours and a painful miscommunication with the company we'd hired her through. I'm not going to get into the details. They aren't really the point of this story. The point is that we cried. All three of us, actually, because my daughter cried too. It wasn't just the end of a work arrangement. It was someone who'd been present for a real chapter of our lives no longer being part of our days the same way. We loved her. We still do. So when an agency placed Kay with us next, I braced myself a little. Would it feel the same? Would she feel like she was stepping into somebody else's shoes, trying to fill a space that wasn't quite hers? It didn't feel the same. It became its own thing, and a good one. Kay is still with us, and she has been incredible. She's spearheaded processes, kept track of more moving pieces than I could ever list, and learned to pivot every time the business shifts direction, which during a growth phase is roughly every twelve minutes. She didn't replace Anne. People don't work that way. She showed up with her own strengths, built her own relationship with all of us, and became essential to whatever we're building next. Honestly, I couldn't do this without her. The Human Side of Business Growth People love saying "business is business," like those three words scrub the humans right out of it. They don't. Yes, a business needs structure. It needs clear expectations, boundaries, and decisions that aren't always easy. Costs and profit matter, because a company has to stay healthy enough to support the people who rely on it for a living. But people come first, because people are the reason any of it works at all. When I talk about treating employees like family, I don't mean the hollow version companies trot out right before asking everyone to sacrifice their weekends for the mission. I mean something much simpler: real relationships form when people build something side by side. They see each other through the hard weeks. They notice when someone's struggling before anyone says a word. They catch what got missed, calm the chaos, and pour their energy into a vision that used to live only in one person's head. That deserves respect. It deserves patience and gratitude, and being treated like it matters. Because it does. Investing in people isn't separate from growing a business. It is the business. A company that only tracks cost and profit misses the very thing that made its success possible in the first place: the judgment, the care, and the quiet effort of the people showing up every day. Today I'm grateful for Joy, who's just getting started. I'm grateful for Kay, who came after Anne and still carries so much of this with me. And I still feel something soft and unresolved when I think about Anne, who helped build the foundation and became part of our story doing it. None of those feelings cancels out the others. I still hope there's a place for Anne to come back to someday. Until then, what she gave us is still here, woven into everything we built after her. Maybe that's the truest thing about business growth: it might start as one person's vision, but the story never stays that small. It ends up belonging, at least in part, to every single person who helped make it real. About the Author I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Today that lesson looked like welcoming someone new while still holding a soft spot for someone who came before her, and realizing I don't have to choose between the two. Day 258 of 365. Still building. Still grateful. Still believing people come first. 🐧

Day 257 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth A few days ago I wrote about being blindsided by someone. I didn't share the details, and I'm still not going to. What I will tell you is this: writing that post didn't fix anything. I hit publish, closed the laptop, and sat right back down inside the thing I still didn't understand. Nobody warns you about that part of writing your life out loud. You don't get to wait until you've worked it all out first. You write the messy middle, you post it, and then you keep living in that same messy middle — except now, people have read it with you. I think about the coaches who shaped me the most, and not one of them showed up with a tidy answer for everything. They pulled from their own lives. They said, plainly, here's what I got wrong, and here's what I'm still figuring out, and let that honesty do the teaching instead of pretending they'd already arrived somewhere I hadn't. I've never wanted to be the version of me who only shows up once the bow is tied on top. So today isn't an ending. It's just an update, from somewhere in the middle. What's Gotten a Little Clearer From the Messy Middle I haven't resolved anything, not fully. But something in me has softened around it, just a little. I keep coming back to an idea about polarity — that most people aren't simply good or simply bad, but some mix of both, living in different rooms of the same house. Let me say the first part loudly, though, so there's no confusion: evil is real. I'm not here to dress it up as a misunderstanding or a bad day. It exists, plainly and painfully, and I have zero interest in explaining it away. But for most of us, most of the time, the real question isn't whether we're a good person or a bad one. It's what we choose to do with the parts of ourselves we'd rather not look at. Because we all have a shadow. The anger we swallow instead of speaking. The choice we made and never told a soul about. The version of us that shows up when no one's watching and nothing's on the line. Having that shadow was never the problem. What actually shapes a person is what happens next — whether you let it stay buried and keep performing the version of yourself everyone expects, or whether you do the shadow work: turn toward it on purpose, even though it's humbling, even though hiding would honestly be so much easier. That doesn't mean broadcasting it to the world. It just means being honest with yourself about it, and choosing, from there, where you go next. That question wasn't only about the person who blindsided me. It landed on me too, the moment I asked myself if I've ever done the same thing — kept something tucked away in the dark because the light felt like more than I could survive. I don't have a clean answer. Maybe I'm not supposed to yet. Writing Through It, Not After It This blog was never meant to be a highlight reel of lessons I'd already mastered. It was always supposed to be me, writing through my actual life — the parenting, the business, the moving, the grief, the growth — while I'm still standing in the middle of it. Not the polished version I'd tell you a year from now. Not the one with a neat three-step takeaway at the bottom. Some days that looks like writing about a September that didn't go the way I'd planned. Some days it looks like writing about someone who wasn't who I thought they were, before I even know what I'm going to do about it. And some days, like today, it just looks like showing up on Day 257 and admitting I don't have the ending yet. Every so often I go back and read my earliest posts, and I cringe — genuinely, toes-curling, hide-behind-a-pillow cringe. I wasn't well health-wise back then, and honestly, it shows. Some of those first posts read like an Instagram caption someone stretched a little too far — a brain dump of whatever I was feeling that day, dressed up just enough to hit publish. If you know what to look for, you can trace the better days and the harder ones right through them. There are posts where I'm clearly coaching myself the way I'd coach a client through something hard. There are posts where you can tell I was just trying something new to see if it would hold. Some of it works. Some of it makes me want to reach through the screen and hug that version of me. I don't take any of it down, though, cringe and all. Every single one of those posts is real, and every one of them was me — exactly where I was, on that day, with what I had. I'll write more about that chapter eventually, what wasn't well and what that actually looked like from the inside. Not today. But I won't pretend it isn't part of the record either. I used to think being trustworthy meant being certain. I don't think that anymore. Now I think it might mean being honest about the not-knowing — telling you where I actually am, clearer than I was but still not resolved, still deciding how much light I'm ready to shine on my own shadows, instead of performing a healed I haven't earned yet. And here's the part that actually gets me, the part I didn't expect when I sat down to write this: I'm not doing any of it alone. People reach out and tell me a post found them exactly when they needed it — mid-mess, no ending in sight, same as me. That's the whole thing, isn't it? None of us actually know how the story ends. We're just lucky enough, every once in a while, to be in the messy middle of it together. So that's today's truth. Not wrapped up. Not fixed. Just written, out loud, the way I promised myself I would. About the Author | Day 257 of 365 I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Some days that healing looks finished. Today it just looks honest — and I'm learning that's more than enough. Day 257 of 365. Come back tomorrow — I'm still going. 🐧

Day 256 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth There was a pause on a coaching call this week that I haven't stopped thinking about. I'd just told a client something I knew they probably didn't want to hear. They had an idea for part of their business and genuinely believed it would make them more money, and I understood why — it wasn't a ridiculous idea, and it wasn't something I needed to swoop in and save them from. I just knew the space a little better than they did, and from what I've seen and experienced, I didn't think it was going to work the way they were picturing it. So I had a choice. I could tell them what they wanted to hear, let them move forward feeling excited, and hope I turned out to be wrong. Or I could do the thing they were actually paying me to do, and tell them what I really thought. I told them what I really thought. I'm changing some details here, because what happens inside my clients' businesses belongs to them — but I recommended they rethink the offer entirely. Instead of the price and structure they'd originally imagined, I thought there was a better way to get them to the bigger goal they'd told me they actually wanted. Then came the pause. I felt it. They were disappointed, and I understood that too. There's a very particular feeling that comes with getting excited about an idea, already seeing it working in your head, and then having someone you trust say, I don't think that's your best move. Most of us have been on the receiving end of that sentence somewhere in our lives — from a partner, a friend, a doctor, a coach, someone at work. And even when we asked for their honest opinion, there's still that tiny internal voice going, yes, but I was sort of hoping your opinion would be my opinion. I get it. Trust in a Coaching Relationship Doesn't Mean Blind Agreement My client didn't immediately say yes, and I'm glad they didn't. They asked me questions — they wanted to understand what I was seeing that they weren't seeing yet. We talked through the strategy: what could happen with their original plan, what I thought could work better, and, most importantly, the bigger goal they were trying to reach in the first place. Then they sat with it for a minute, and said something close to, I trust you. Let's do it your way. I felt an immediate sense of relief. But underneath the relief was something else — recognition. Oh. This is what trust feels like. Maybe I noticed it so clearly because I'd had a very different experience with another client recently — someone I'd known for roughly the same amount of time, so this wasn't about one relationship having years to build trust while the other barely knew me. Both of them had told me they trusted me. But those two relationships felt completely different. With one, I found myself continuing to explain, continuing to prove, continuing to sell the value of my own recommendations, even after we'd already agreed to work together — conversations about price, negotiation, more explanation, more reassurance. None of that automatically makes someone a bad client, and questioning something certainly doesn't mean there's no trust. But there was something in the exchange that never quite settled. The words said I trust you. The experience felt more like convince me. Then there was the other conversation. I gave someone an answer they didn't particularly want. They took a breath, asked questions, listened — and once they understood why I was recommending it, they made their decision. There wasn't some huge declaration of faith in me. There didn't need to be. The trust was in what happened next. The Best Coaching Still Leaves the Decision With You I've realized the clients I work best with aren't necessarily the people who already know exactly how they're going to get where they're going — that's usually why they're talking to me in the first place. But they know what they want, and they know the bigger picture they're walking toward. That changes everything. If someone can tell me, this is where I'm trying to go, I can look at the path they're considering and say, based on what I know, I think there's a better route. Sometimes they agree immediately. Sometimes we talk it through. Sometimes they decide not to take my recommendation at all, and that's okay too. What I never want is for someone to hand me their own judgment and say, you decide everything for me. That's not coaching. They're still the person living their life and building their business. My job is to bring everything I know to the table and help them make the strongest decision they can — and that means there will be times I say something they'd rather I didn't. Caring Enough Not to Just Say Yes I could have agreed with my client this week. That would have been easier — I wouldn't have had to watch the disappointment cross their face, and they wouldn't have had to rethink an idea they were already excited about. We could have both left the call feeling pleased with ourselves. But what would have been the point of that? They didn't hire me to be an expensive person who nods. They hired me for another perspective — my experience, my judgment, my willingness to look at the goal they gave me and say, I think this gets you closer to it, even when the route looks different from the one they originally pictured. I'm never going to tell someone what they want to hear simply because it's easier. Not because I need to be right, and definitely not because I think I know everything. I don't. My job is to care enough to be honest, give the best advice I can based on what I know and what that person has told me they actually want, and then let them decide. That's the piece I've been thinking about since that call. Trust isn't somebody agreeing with everything you say. It isn't never questioning you, and it isn't handing over your own voice just because somebody else has more experience in one particular area. Real trust leaves room for questions — for why, even for I'm not sure — but there's an ease underneath it. You don't feel like you're constantly auditioning for a role you've already been hired to do. You can tell the truth, they can process it, and neither person has to turn the disagreement into a threat to the relationship. Most of us know the opposite feeling too. The relationship where you're forever explaining yourself. The friendship where honesty has to be delivered so carefully that eventually you stop saying much of anything at all. The person who says they want your opinion right up until your opinion isn't the one they wanted. And then, every once in a while, you find someone who takes a breath, hears you out, and says, okay. I trust you. This week, that small moment reminded me how much lighter things feel when trust in a coaching relationship doesn't have to be constantly proven — in business, and probably in a whole lot more than business. About the Author | Day 256 of 365 I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Today, that lesson looked like a coaching call where I said something a client didn't want to hear, and got to watch trust look like a breath instead of a fight. Day 256 of 365. Trust isn't agreement. It's a breath, and then, okay — I trust you. 🐧

Day 255 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth Twenty-five years ago today, the world changed. September 11 is one of those days where, if you were old enough to remember it, you probably remember exactly where you were when you found out. I do — I was in Boston. I remember the airport closing, cell phones that wouldn't connect, people desperately trying to reach each other, and the confusion of those first hours, when nobody really understood what was happening. Then we did. Or we began to. Because I don't think any of us could fully understand, in that moment, just how many lives had changed forever. There was shock, fear, disbelief, grief — and twenty-five years later, there are parts of that day that still don't feel entirely like history. I spent most of my adult life living in New York City, and over the years I've heard so many firsthand September 11 stories — shared across dinner tables and in living rooms by people who were actually there. People who lost someone. People who survived because one ordinary decision placed them somewhere else that morning. People who carried memories they never asked to have. Three of those stories have stayed with me. The Stories I Still Carry One of my friends once told me about a man she encountered that day. He had witnessed people jumping from the towers — even writing that sentence is difficult. Trauma doesn't always arrive as something that can be understood or put into words right away. Sometimes the only thing a person can do is survive the next minute, and then the one after that. He was covered in debris, and my friend could see how much danger he was in, right there in that moment — she was afraid he might not be safe with himself. She didn't know how to fix any of it. She just knew she couldn't leave. So she stayed with him, held a stranger on a day when everything familiar had suddenly become unsafe. Later, he sent her a simple message: Thank you. You saved my life. I've thought about that story many times — not because it makes what happened that day any easier to understand, because it doesn't, but because of what she did. She couldn't change what he'd seen, and she couldn't take the memory away. All she could do was stay. And she did. Another friend carries a very different story. Before the attacks, he'd applied for a job he desperately wanted and didn't get it. At the time, he was heartbroken — another man got the position, and that man died on September 11. Every year, my friend remembers him. He honors him, and he prays for his family. I can't imagine what it feels like to carry those two truths together — grief for another person's life, and knowing that your own circumstances could so easily have been different. Sometimes life leaves us with questions that aren't meant to be resolved. We just learn to carry them. Then there's another story a friend shared with me that has never left me. A friend and client of his had a business near the World Trade Center. He survived the immediate danger, but his son worked in the towers, so he went out looking for him. His son had survived too, and made his way back to the business looking for his father. But his father was already gone, out looking for him. He never came back. There's so much love in that story, and so much heartbreak. I don't know how to separate them. Maybe we're not supposed to. 25 Years Later, September 11 Is Still About the People This is one of the few years I haven't been in New York City on September 11. Most years, I watch the reading of the names, and after enough years of watching, you start to understand something that isn't always obvious when we talk about September 11 as a moment in history: the families kept living. Children who lost a parent grew up. Parents grew older without their children. Brothers and sisters lived another year, and then another, without the sibling who should have been there. People married, babies were born, birthdays came, graduations happened — ordinary life kept moving around a grief that doesn't obey anniversaries. It changes over time, but love doesn't disappear just because years have passed. For years I lived close enough to the memorial that I passed those fountains many, many times, and they never became just another part of the city to me. There were always the names — sometimes a flower tucked into one, a hand resting against the bronze, someone standing still while the rest of New York moved around them. I'd look at the names and think about the person behind each one: someone who laughed with them, who called them with good news, who knew their coffee order, who expected them home, who still misses them. To me, that's what gets lost when we speak about tragedy in numbers. Every number was a person. Every name was a life. What I Carry With Me I don't think there's one correct way to remember September 11, 25 years later. For some people, today brings grief. For others, anger, fear, gratitude, survivor's guilt, memories they'd rather not revisit, or feelings they may not even know how to name. Some families have carried this loss every single day for twenty-five years, and I hope they have space for their grief, and for the immense sadness this day can still bring. I can only share what I find myself thinking about now. I think about the people who died, and the people who survived. The ones who spent hours, days, months, and years searching, rescuing, recovering, grieving, and trying to understand how life could continue after something so incomprehensible. The firefighters, police officers, and first responders who went toward danger instead of away from it. The coworkers who helped each other down stairwells, and the strangers who reached for strangers. The people who stayed with someone who was afraid, who called home, who searched for the people they loved — and the families who have carried those stories ever since. I think about my friend, holding that stranger. She couldn't undo what he'd witnessed, couldn't make that day different, couldn't promise him the feeling would pass. All she could do was recognize that another human being was suffering and refuse to leave him alone in it. To me, it's just a reminder that even in unimaginable suffering, people can still reach for one another. Maybe that's what I want to hold closest today. Not an explanation, not a lesson — just the people. The ones whose lives ended that morning, the ones who loved them and are still loving them twenty-five years later, the ones who rushed in to help, and the ones who stayed beside strangers so no one had to be alone in it. Today I keep coming back to the fountains and the names, the families who've grown and changed around an absence that remains, New York, Boston, the Pentagon, that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania — the confusion of that morning a quarter-century ago — and the stories people have trusted me enough to tell. And I pray — for those who died, for those who survived, for the people who still carry what they saw, and for the families who still carry who they lost. And for all of us — that we don't forget the people behind it. Twenty-five years later, that's what I carry. The people. About the Author | Day 255 of 365 I'm a coach, a writer, an entrepreneur, and a mom — and a longtime New Yorker who still carries September 11 with her, twenty-five years later. For 255 days, I've been writing about what a real life actually looks like: motherhood, grief, healing, faith, love, business, starting over. Today, that means writing about the day the world changed, and the people I still think about because of it. Some things just need to be witnessed, remembered, and held with compassion. So today isn't about a takeaway. It's about the people — the ones we lost, the ones who survived, and the ones still carrying it, all these years later. Day 255 of 365. Remembering those we lost, those who survived, those who helped, and all of us who carry September 11 with us. 🐧

Day 253 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth I had been praying for someone. I hadn't heard from them, and after enough time passed, my mind started filling in the blanks. I wondered if something was wrong. I hoped they were okay. I sent up those little prayers we send when we don't know what else to do: Please let them be okay. Please let whatever they're going through work itself out. The irony of that is not lost on me now. Because while I was worrying about this person, something landed in my lap that made me realize I hadn't known them nearly as well as I thought I did. Someone sent me information. I'm intentionally not sharing what it was, because protecting people's privacy matters more to me than making this story juicier. The details aren't really the story anyway. The story is that I saw it myself. This wasn't gossip passed from one person to another until nobody remembered where it started, and it wasn't an accusation either. Nobody sat me down and said, you won't believe what I heard. It was right there in front of me. My first reaction was basically: there is no freaking way. Not because the proof wasn't clear. It was. Because the person I was looking at through this new information seemed like a completely different person from the one I thought I knew. Before that moment, I would have described them as kind. Funny. Generous. The real deal. And suddenly my brain was trying to fit that person together with this other side I had never seen. They did not fit. If you've ever loved or trusted someone and then had reality hand you a different version of them, you know that specific kind of dizzy. Every conversation afterward gets replayed, and you wonder what you were actually looking at the whole time. How to Trust Yourself Again When Your Judgment Gets Shaken I think that's the part that has stayed with me most. Of course I was shocked by what I learned about them. But underneath that shock came a more uncomfortable thought: how the heck did I not know? I consider myself an intuitive person. I'm usually pretty good at reading people. I notice little things. I pay attention to how people treat other people, not just how they treat me. I've lived enough life to know that someone's words can tell you one thing while their behavior quietly tells you another. And yet, apparently, I am still a human being and not a professionally installed airport security system. Every once in a while, somebody gets through. That's hard to admit, because being blindsided doesn't just change the way you see another person. It messes with the way you see yourself. You start going backward. Was there something I missed? Did I let my guard down? Did I only see what this person wanted me to see? I don't know. I've replayed it enough to realize I could make myself crazy trying to locate the exact moment I was supposedly meant to know something I had no real way of knowing. That's maybe the actual starting point for trusting yourself again: not punishing yesterday's version of you with information you only have today. Hindsight is kind of an nincompoop that way. It walks into the room holding all the evidence and acts like you'd both had it the entire time. We hadn't. I knew the person who had been presented to me. I cared about that person. I believed certain things about them based on what I had actually experienced. Hell, I was praying for them. That doesn't make me stupid. It makes me someone who didn't have all the information yet. Self-Trust Was Never About Always Being Right I don't have a beautiful ending where I've processed all of this and can hand you five things being blindsided taught me about humanity. It's been about five minutes emotionally. I'm still somewhere around wow, I really did not see that coming. But I've been thinking about what it actually means to trust your intuition, because I think I've had that definition slightly wrong. Trusting myself doesn't mean I'll correctly identify everyone's character before they ever get the chance to surprise me. It isn't about becoming so guarded that nobody can fool me again. What kind of life would that even be? Self-trust might just be this: when new information shows up, I don't look away because the truth is inconvenient. I believed this then. I know this now. Neither one cancels the other out, and weirdly, that settles something in me. I don't want this to turn me into someone suspicious of every kind person I meet, interrogating every friendship and every generous gesture because one person reminded me that people can contain sides of themselves we know nothing about. But I also don't want to pretend I didn't see what I saw just because the old version of the story felt nicer. I don't want to be naive again. I also don't want to be hard. I'm still figuring out what's left once you take both of those off the table. I'm still trusting my instincts, still willing to believe most people are good. But I'm also paying closer attention when life hands me evidence that says otherwise about one of them. That might be what intuition actually looks like as we get older. Less about never being wrong about anyone, more about trusting myself enough to face it when I am. I thought I knew someone. Turns out, there was a lot I didn't know. I'm still disappointed. I'm still shocked. My internal radar and I may be having a small performance review. I'm not ready to stop trusting myself, though. If anything, this is probably part of learning how. About the Author | Day 253 of 365 I'm a coach, a writer, an entrepreneur, and a mom — and apparently still someone who can consider herself a pretty damn good judge of character and then occasionally receive information that makes her wonder whether her internal radar called in sick that day. For 253 days, I've been writing about what a real life actually looks like: motherhood, grief, healing, faith, love, business, starting over, learning to trust myself — and, apparently, discovering that trusting yourself doesn't come with a lifetime guarantee you'll never be completely wrong about another human being. There was a part of me that wanted to go backward and figure out what I missed. I'm trying not to do that. I knew what I knew then. I know something different now. Both versions of me were working with the information they had. Learning how to trust yourself again probably isn't promising you'll never get blindsided again. It's knowing that if the truth eventually lands in your lap, you won't abandon yourself just because you wish it weren't true. Day 253 of 365. Still trusting. Still learning. Radar currently undergoing maintenance. 🐧

Day 252 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth Today I feel blah. Tired. Numb. A little irritated. Discouraged in a way I can't quite name. Overwhelmed, and underneath all of it, lonely. I wouldn't call myself unmotivated, exactly. I want to do the things. I just have no idea where to start, and that not-knowing is its own kind of exhausting. I spent most of the day in a business training, and I started out strong. I soaked up more than I expected to, and by the end of it, I could actually see two different pieces of my business starting to take shape. And somewhere in the middle of all that progress, I started feeling behind in life instead of ahead of it. Funny how that works. When Feeling Behind in Life Doesn't Care About Logic There were people further along than me in that training. There were also people who hadn't started yet. I know, logically, that should've given me some perspective. It didn't. I just kept looking at everything I still have to build and felt like I was drowning in it. Right now there are too many platforms, too many half-finished products, too many browser tabs, too many businesses pulling at my attention, and no system telling me what actually comes first. My technology decided to join the mutiny this week too — websites breaking the moment I fix them, email glitching, automations misbehaving, files vanishing, logins I can't remember. If there's a tech inconvenience out there, I think I found it. And then there's the house. We just got home from being away — there's more to that story, and I'll tell it another day — and everything is everywhere. Boxes half unpacked. Things on the sofa, the floor, wherever they landed. Business supplies scattered like confetti nobody wanted. I feel calmer when things around me are organized. They are, at the moment, very much not. So naturally, I spent the day shoulding all over myself. I should be further along. I should have more finished. I should know what I'm doing by now. I should be grateful, for God's sake. Should, should, should — until the word stopped meaning anything and just became noise. And somewhere underneath all of it, I felt really, truly alone. The Moment Feeling Behind in Life Got a Little Lighter After the training, I joined another group inside the same community. I was behind there too — came in late, almost stayed quiet and just lurked. Instead, I spoke up and said, "Hi! Just wanted to say hi. I'm here too." Only three of us were in that little corner. And I'm so glad I said something. We vented. We talked business. We laughed. They were generous with their time and their feedback. They understood pieces of what I was carrying, and they actually helped me untangle a few of them. I don't think I realized how badly I needed that conversation until I was already in the middle of it. Nothing got magically fixed. I was still behind. The house was still a disaster. The technology was still technology-ing, and I still didn't have a clue what I'd tackle first tomorrow. But for a little while, I didn't feel quite so alone in it. And some days, that's the whole win. There's no tidy lesson at the bottom of this one, no five-step plan, no bow on top. Some days don't come with a takeaway. You get through it, and that's enough. Tonight, thunderstorms rolled through for hours — thunder, lightning, the whole dramatic show. Loud and jarring, but strangely cleansing too. Like the sky needed to lose it for a while, same as me. I can respect that. Maybe a day doesn't always need to be figured out. Maybe you just put it to bed and let tomorrow be tomorrow. The work will still be there in the morning. So will the mess, probably. Storms pass. The sun comes back. Tomorrow is just tomorrow. About the Author | Day 252 of 365 I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Today, that lesson looked like too many open tabs, a house that resembled a low-effort burglary, and three women in a group chat who reminded me I wasn't in it by myself. Day 252 of 365. The sun will be back tomorrow. 🐧

Day 251 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth I was sitting in church on Sunday when the priest told a story that followed me all the way home. He'd recently been on a retreat where people were asked to give one another honest feedback. At some point, a parishioner told him that something he'd done had disappointed them. And his first response wasn't curiosity. It was defense. He started explaining why he'd done what he'd done. Why he'd said what he'd said. The circumstances, the reasoning, every piece of context that might prove there was another side to the story. Then, somewhere in the middle of defending himself, he stopped. He realized he hadn't once thought about what it might have taken for that person to walk up to him in the first place. Maybe they'd rehearsed the conversation in the car on the way there. Maybe they were nervous. Maybe some part of them had hoped it would be easier to just say nothing at all. I sat in the pew and thought: oh. I know this one. Very well. Constructive Criticism Can Feel Like an Attack Before It Feels Like Information Not long ago, my husband gave me some feedback. I'll spare you the details — partly because they don't matter, and partly because the man did not marry me so that every disagreement could eventually become a Karma Penguin case study. But he told me something about myself that I did not enjoy hearing. And I reacted beautifully. Calmly. Thoughtfully. With tremendous emotional maturity. I'm kidding, of course. I built a defense so fast you'd have thought I'd been preparing for it my whole life. But I do this. And I do that. You don't understand because— I had evidence. I had examples. Somewhere between becoming his wife and hearing one uncomfortable observation, I had also apparently become my own defense attorney. Here's what makes that especially humbling: I coach people for a living. I've spent years in sales and business, giving feedback, asking for it, helping other people step outside their own heads and see a situation from a different angle. And still, in that moment, I didn't hear information. I felt wounded — almost physically, like I'd been shoved. Not raging anger. Something quieter and more immediate than that. Just hurt. So I reacted from the hurt, the way a child lashes out before she's even figured out what happened. Not my proudest moment. It wasn't until later, once the sting had faded enough for me to actually think, that another thought arrived, uninvited: darn it, he had a point. Which was deeply, deeply inconvenient. Sometimes the Thing We Least Want to Hear Is Worth Examining There's something unflattering I've noticed about us as people: the behavior that drives us absolutely up the wall in someone else is often worth a second look in ourselves. Someone else being defensive? We clock it instantly. Someone else always needing to explain why they're right? Please — we could give a whole presentation on it. And then somebody gently suggests we might do the same thing sometimes, and suddenly the circumstances are completely different. No, no. Mine isn't like that. Maybe it isn't. But what if, once in a while, it is? What if, instead of racing to prove the other person wrong, we practiced saying: "You may have a point. Let me sit with that." Not you're right about everything. Not your opinion now gets to define who I am. Just — maybe there's something here worth looking at. There's a real strength in being able to say that. I haven't always had it. But I'm learning. I Used to Ask for Feedback When What I Really Wanted Was Applause I had another moment recently that showed me how much I've changed. I was on a business call, and I asked several people for real feedback — the honest kind. And they gave it to me. Some of it confirmed things I already suspected needed work. Some of it showed me things I hadn't seen at all. I was grateful. Truly. I could feel how generously people were giving me their time and their honesty. Nobody was trying to diminish me — they were helping me see something more clearly so I could make it better. And I thought about who I used to be. Years ago, I could absolutely ask someone, "What do you think?" But if I'm being fully honest, there were times what I actually wanted to hear was, "You're fabulous. No changes. Everything is perfect." That's not feedback. That's applause with a question mark tacked onto the end. There's nothing wrong with wanting encouragement — we all need people who remind us of what we're doing well. But if I say I want to grow, and then flinch away from every answer that makes me uncomfortable, I don't actually want feedback. I want reassurance. Those are two very different things, and learning to tell them apart has been part of my own becoming. Receiving Constructive Criticism Means Remembering the Other Person Is Vulnerable, Too This is the part of the priest's story that stayed with me the longest. We tend to focus entirely on how exposed we feel when someone hands us difficult feedback. And we are exposed — someone is holding up a mirror and asking us to look at something we may not have noticed, or worked very hard not to. That's uncomfortable, full stop. But sometimes the person holding the mirror is scared too. I've been on that side of the conversation. I've had things I needed to say that I didn't want to say, because I loved the person I was saying them to. You rehearse the words. You soften them. You rewrite the sentence in your head a dozen times and wonder if it's worth the risk of tension, or whether they'll hear your intention at all instead of just the criticism. Sometimes silence would be so much easier. So now, when someone I trust tells me something hard, I try to remember: maybe this cost them something too. Maybe they're only saying it because the relationship matters enough to risk the discomfort. Love isn't always telling us what feels good. Sometimes love is brave enough to tell us what might actually help us grow. Sometimes Feedback Touches a Much Older Bruise I think there's a reason certain feedback lands so much harder than the words themselves would seem to justify. Criticism puts us in a vulnerable spot, and for some of us, that vulnerability isn't new. Maybe there was a parent, a teacher, a coach, someone in our childhood who didn't know how to correct without shaming. Maybe mistakes didn't feel like you did something wrong. Maybe they felt like there is something wrong with you. Those are two very different messages to carry. So years later, someone who loves us can say, gently, "Can I tell you something I noticed?" — and somehow a much younger version of us walks into the room too. I don't think childhood gets to be the excuse for everything we do as adults. But I do think real self-awareness includes noticing when today's conversation has quietly reopened yesterday's wound. The feedback is happening now. The pain we're reacting from might be a lot older. And if we can recognize that difference, maybe we can stop asking the person standing in front of us to pay for something someone else did years ago. That's hard work. It's also freeing work. Receiving Feedback With Grace Does Not Mean Accepting Disrespect This distinction matters to me enormously, so I want to be clear about it: not all criticism is wise. Not all criticism is loving. And not everyone who says "I'm just giving you feedback" is actually offering something constructive. I've been on that side of it too — someone dressing up judgment as help. There was a point when I realized what I was receiving wasn't specific, wasn't respectful, and wasn't rooted in any real desire to see me do better. Lines got crossed, professionally and financially, and I made the decision to stop working with that person. I don't regret it. Because receiving constructive criticism with grace was never meant to mean surrendering your discernment. You don't have to take every opinion home and build it a guest room. You're still allowed to ask: Is this person speaking to me with respect? Is there something specific here I can actually look at? Does this person want something for me, or something from me? Sometimes the honest answer is no. Sometimes you listen carefully, weigh it fairly, and decide, that one doesn't belong to me. You're allowed to set it down. That's not defensiveness. That's discernment. Maybe the Most Important Part Is the Pause I don't think getting better at this requires some elaborate process. For me, it starts somewhere much smaller. Pause. Let the person finish. Don't interrupt halfway through because you've already drafted your rebuttal. Breathe. Notice that you feel hurt without immediately deciding the hurt means they're wrong. Then, once your nervous system isn't shouting quite so loudly, ask yourself: is there truth here? Maybe there's a lot. Maybe there's five percent. Maybe there's none at all. But even five percent of truth can teach you something, if you're willing to actually look at it. And if this is someone who loves you — someone who's earned the right to have a hard conversation with you — maybe ask one more question: what might it have taken for them to tell me this? That question changes everything. Suddenly you're not standing on opposite sides of a courtroom. You're just two people, trying to understand each other. Growth Requires Being Willing to Hear Something Besides "You're Fabulous" I used to think strength meant knowing exactly who I was and defending that version of myself at all costs. I think strength might actually look different. Maybe it sounds more like: "I hadn't thought of it that way." "Tell me more." "That was hard to hear, but I want to sit with it." "You may be right." Those sentences don't make us weak. They don't hand our sense of self over to somebody else. We still get to decide. We can listen, think, pray, reflect — keep what's ours, release what isn't, change what needs changing. That's what real growth looks like. Not blindly accepting everything people say about us. Not blindly rejecting it either. Just becoming brave enough to actually look. Maybe that's what grace looks like in moments like these. Not perfection. Not never feeling hurt. Not smiling sweetly while someone hands you something painful. Just enough space between the sting and the response to choose who you want to be next. I'm still learning that. I suspect I always will be. So the next time someone you trust says something that makes every defense in your body stand up at once — wait, just a beat, before you send them into battle. Let the person finish. Let yourself feel whatever you feel. Then gently separate the wound from the words, and ask yourself the one question my ego would honestly prefer we never discuss: What if they have a point? Maybe they don't. But every once in a while — darn it — they do. And the thing we least wanted to hear becomes the thing that helps us finally see ourselves clearly. Not because someone else got to define us. But because we were brave enough to look for ourselves. About the Author | Day 251 of 365 I'm a coach, a writer, an entrepreneur, and a mom — and apparently still someone who can receive one piece of thoughtful feedback from her husband and briefly transform into a defense attorney with a very strong closing argument. For 251 days, I've been writing about what a real life actually looks like: motherhood, grief, healing, faith, love, business, starting over, learning to trust myself. And, apparently, the slightly humbling discovery that growth doesn't mean we stop having old reactions — it just means we recognize them a little sooner each time. There was a version of me who asked for feedback and secretly hoped for applause. I'm grateful to her — she got me here. I'm also grateful I don't have to stay her. Because sometimes — darn it — they have a point. Day 251 of 365. Let's keep growing. 🐧

Day 249 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth | Karma Penguin In my head, September was the month everything came back together. Our things would come out of storage. My daughter would get her toys and her playroom back. My clothes, shoes, and purses would leave the boxes in the storage unit they've been hanging out in and return to an actual, organized, walk-in closet. I would have my desk again — my ridiculous, Pinterest-perfect desk. I would have a home that felt like me. That was the plan. This was supposed to be my September reset. September showed up right on schedule. We did not. We're still here, in the temporary house, waiting on a life that hasn't quite caught up to the calendar yet. I miss our old place more than I expected to. I miss the concierge team, who somehow became family over the years we were there — there were tears when we moved, and not all of them were mine. I miss the view I used to dream about long before it belonged to me. I miss my closet. I miss the plush bedding and the sofa that actually fit my body, and the West Elm pillows that made the whole apartment feel warm even on the days I didn't. West Elm sent them to me, by the way. I paid them too. This was not a sponsorship — just a woman with a credit card and a deep, unwavering belief in throw pillows. (If you've read my confessions about my pillow obsession, you already know how deep that belief runs.) The furniture here is dark and stiff and not particularly well made. There isn't much color in this house, and there isn't much of me in it either. The layout doesn't feel like me. The light doesn't feel like me. I've tried to argue with that — new sheets, a new comforter, a candle for the desk, a small decorative intervention I staged mostly out of stubbornness. It helped. A little. The candle is doing its absolute best. It is still just one candle in a house that needs more than wax and wick to feel like mine. Most of our belongings are still in storage, including Nessie and Nessoo — my Nespresso machine and her newer sibling. In their place, I've been living through what can only be described as a temporary coffee-drip situation, and it is making me a little miserable in a way that feels almost embarrassing to say out loud. Making coffee used to be the best five minutes of my day. I'd make it, sit down, and just be, before anyone needed anything from me. It was never really about the coffee. It was the one small ritual that belonged only to me. And it was magically delicious. A September Reset Can Hold Gratitude and Honesty at the Same Time I feel a little guilty even writing this. I know exactly how fortunate we are. I moved here from a big city, where I regularly saw what it looks like to have no home at all. My family has a safe roof over our heads right now, and I don't take that lightly, not ever. But gratitude was never supposed to require dishonesty. I can be genuinely thankful for this roof and still know it isn't where I'm meant to stay. Missing my old home doesn't erase how grateful I am for this one. Wanting beauty and comfort and a sense of belonging doesn't make me ungrateful — it just makes me honest about what feels good to me, and what doesn't. None of it turns dark furniture into a colorful couch. Maybe that's what a September reset actually asks of us. Not to force a temporary house into feeling permanent, but to stop arguing with ourselves about how we feel while we're in it. So the new bedding stays. The pillows stay. The candle keeps doing its best, and I'll keep buying it backup. When we finally move, I already know what I'm unpacking first. Nessie and Nessoo are coming out of their boxes before anything else in this house. I'll set them on the counter, make my coffee, sit down, and just be — the way I used to, before any of this started. Home, I think, begins the moment your own small routines find you again. But really, home is anywhere I am with my husband and my daughter, with one small piece of home comfort to go with them. About the Author | Day 249 of 365 I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Nessie and Nessoo are still waiting patiently in storage — I am considerably less patient. This is day 249 of a promise I made to myself: show up and write my truth for 365 days, even through the messy, uncomfortable, inconvenient chapters. If today's post found you living somewhere — or inside a season — that doesn't feel like you yet, I hope it reminded you that gratitude doesn't require pretending. I'll be here again tomorrow, probably still asking one candle and a few throw pillows to do the emotional work of an entire home. Day 249 of 365. Come back tomorrow — I'm still going. 🐧

Day 250 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth In my childhood, Labor Day meant a long weekend — summer ending, school starting, that strange back-to-school energy that always made September feel like a second New Year's Day. Time to get organized. Time to begin again. Nobody explained where the day actually came from. I knew, the way kids know things, it had something to do with workers — not what it actually cost. Funny how differently you can understand a holiday once you know what it cost. Because now, when I hear the word labor, I don't just think about jobs. I think about motherhood, running a household, taking care of people, and building businesses after my daughter goes to sleep — because every day, that's when my workday actually begins. I think about healing, maybe the hardest work I've ever done, with nothing to put on a résumé. And I think about all the work we do every day that nobody really sees. What Is Labor Day Really About? Labor Day didn't start as a holiday. It started as a protest. On September 5, 1882, ten thousand New York City workers took unpaid time off — a real risk when you're already paid almost nothing — to march from City Hall to Union Square, demanding better than twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks, and workplaces that injured or killed people with no accountability. Children as young as five or six worked those same conditions instead of sitting in a classroom. It took more than a decade for that march to become a federal holiday, and only after the 1894 Pullman Strike, when federal troops broke a railroad workers' boycott and killed more than a dozen of them. Congress signed Labor Day into law days later — at least partly to calm a country that had just watched its own government kill workers for asking to be treated like human beings. At its heart, it was never about a day off. It was about people refusing to accept that their lives were worth less than the profit they produced. I'm not putting my own life in the same category as what those workers survived — the scale isn't close. But there's a throughline: the people doing the most essential work are easiest to write out of the story, and their labor doesn't count until someone forces the world to look. That's the lens I've been seeing Labor Day through this year — not just paid work, but the invisible labor we stopped counting somewhere along the way. The Invisible Labor That Still Counts There are so many days I get to the end and think, I didn't get anything done — meaning I didn't get to the business project I'd planned to finish. But if somebody had followed me around with a clipboard, the list would look different: I shopped, cooked, mothered, spoke to clients, made appointments, remembered what everyone needed, solved problems before anyone knew there was one. And somehow I can still crawl into bed thinking I didn't do enough. That's a strange thing, isn't it — how much work can happen inside one day while the person doing it still feels like she accomplished nothing. I don't think I'm alone in that. I have a friend who works full-time at a demanding job and also takes care of her children, her household, and her parents — a thousand other things nobody's counting. There are women everywhere doing some version of this: working, raising kids, remembering birthdays, buying the toothpaste before anyone notices they're out, quietly holding everyone else's life together while trying to hold onto themselves. And because so much of that work doesn't come with a paycheck, a title, or somebody standing nearby saying "great job," we've somehow convinced ourselves it doesn't count. Of course it counts. Motherhood is labor. Caregiving is labor. Healing is labor. Building something from nothing, starting over — all of it is labor. Sometimes the work nobody can see is the work taking the most out of us. I Didn't Know How to Rest, Even in Hawaii I learned something about myself in Hawaii years ago — surrounded by one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I couldn't settle down. It took three days before my body understood there wasn't somewhere else I needed to be. The answer was simply... nothing. Just be there. Just breathe. It sounds ridiculous now — needing three days in Hawaii to learn how to be in Hawaii. I had gotten very good at going, not very good at stopping. Rest can feel uncomfortable at first, when you've spent long enough moving from one responsibility to the next — your body goes still while your mind keeps reaching for what's next. Even now, I can't tell you I've mastered rest. I'm learning that it isn't always doing nothing — sometimes it's not measuring the moment by what it produces, or sitting somewhere beautiful and letting beautiful be enough instead of turning the hour into a chance to catch up. I'm still working on that one. Loving Your Work Shouldn't Require Losing Yourself Here's the part that matters to me: I love working. This isn't a message where work is the villain and happiness means lying beneath a tree — after fifteen minutes under that tree, I'd be wondering what needed organizing. I love being a mother, building Karma Penguin, creating something that didn't exist before, cooking for my family, taking care of people. There's labor in my life that exhausts me and fills my heart at the same time — motherhood might be the best example. The answer isn't a life without work. It's learning that meaningful work and suffering don't have to be the same thing — I don't have to destroy myself to prove I care, or fill every empty space just because it appeared, or complete some invisible quota before I'm allowed to rest. What This Labor Day Is Teaching Me Maybe that's what I want to remember about Labor Day now. Yes, I want to remember its history — the workers who came before us, the people who fought to make work more humane. But I also want to look around at the labor happening right now, especially the quiet, invisible kind. The mother who feels like she "did nothing today" after twelve hours caring for everyone around her. The person caring for aging parents while holding down a job. The entrepreneur working after bedtime because bedtime was the first quiet moment she had all day. The one doing the invisible work of healing, wondering why everyone else seems to be handling life better. I want to tell them something I'm still learning to tell myself: count it. Count the dinner you made, the appointment you remembered, the child you comforted, the healing, the thing nobody else noticed you carried. Your life doesn't become valuable only when it's productive enough for somebody else to measure. And when you've done what you can, you're allowed to stop. You're allowed to stop before you've done everything — there will always be another email, another load of laundry, another list waiting for tomorrow. Maybe Labor Day can be about honoring all of it — the work we're paid for and the work we aren't, the work we chose and the work life handed us — and the person doing it too: work doesn't have to mean you suffer, and rest is not something you have to earn. Maybe you've already done enough. Maybe you were enough before you did any of it. About the Author | Day 250 of 365 I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist who is still learning that a full life does not have to mean an exhausted one. These days, my life is a mix of motherhood, marriage, healing, building businesses, managing a household, and occasionally wondering how it's already bedtime when I haven't gotten to half of what I planned. For a long time, I was very good at counting the things I hadn't finished. I'm trying to become just as good at noticing everything I did. Motherhood and healing both taught me that the most important work often happens quietly, with no finished product to point to — a child who felt safe in your arms, dinner on the table, finally listening when your body asks you to stop. And sometimes the work is learning you're still worthy when you aren't working at all. This is Day 250 of a promise I made to myself: to show up and write my truth for 365 days. Some days that truth is funny. Some days it's messy. Some days I discover what I think only after I start writing it down. Today, I think the truth is this: there is probably more work happening in your life than you give yourself credit for. And you don't have to exhaust yourself before you're allowed to put it down. Day 250 of 365. Come back tomorrow. I will still be here. 🐧

Yesterday, I was incredibly productive. The only problem? None of it was on my list. There’s a unique kind of tired that comes from barely stopping since sunrise. You arrive at midday with your original priorities untouched, patient, and waiting. You've been moving. You've been doing real, useful things. And yet, somehow, they remain undone. That was my yesterday. The Quest for Order in a Temporary Home I had a plan. A real one. We're still in a temporary home. I want to do more than just straighten things up. I aim to figure out how we’re going to live here. What needs cleaning? What should go? What are we missing? Where should things live so that an ordinary morning doesn’t require opening six cabinets while muttering something under your breath that you hope the toddler didn’t hear? I want systems. Not because I need the house to look perfect—I really don’t. I want them because when life is already full, the small things start to cost more than they should. Knowing where something is matters. Having food ready matters. A home that works with you instead of against you before you’ve even had coffee—that matters more than people talk about. I also registered last minute for a conference next week. This means there are things that need to happen before I go: work to finish, arrangements to make. The kind of details that feel manageable but get a lot less funny the night before you leave. So I knew what mattered yesterday: the temporary home, the conference prep, and the actual work. Naturally, I decided to chop vegetables. Why Time Management Is So Hard When Everything Feels Productive In fairness, the food needed attention. There were vegetables in the refrigerator that had entered that narrow window between responsible meal prep and why is there liquid in this bag? So I started chopping. Then cooking. Then going through everything to figure out what we had and what needed to be used before it gave up on us entirely. Before long, I had become a woman with a surprisingly solid food prep situation and absolutely no memory of what I had planned to do that day. The dangerous part? It felt good. That’s the trap. There’s something about finishing a task—even when it isn’t the task you were supposed to be doing—that feels like progress. The chopped vegetables looked great. The refrigerator looked organized. I felt capable, on top of things, and like someone who has her life together. Please do not look at the original list. Then I started making lists of things that need to be ordered. Do we need those things? Yes. Did those lists need to happen right then? No. But they are excellent lists. At some point, I also spent approximately thirty minutes in a conversation about water. Thirty minutes. About water. I’m not sure some actual bodies of water require that level of discussion. There were video calls. There were work things that went well and needed to happen. There was motherhood running in the background of all of it, which is its own full-time position with no predictable schedule and a very small boss who does not recognize office hours. And as of the time I started writing this, the nap had not materialized. I remained cautiously optimistic. But anyone who lives with a toddler knows that hope is a wonderful thing and should never be confused with a scheduling tool. Then I looked at the clock. I had been awake since before sunrise. I had not really stopped. And somehow, the whole day had slipped right by. What did I actually do yesterday? The honest answer was—a lot. Just not the lot I had planned. A Productive Day Can Still Make Tomorrow Harder Here’s where it gets complicated. I don’t want to dismiss everything that happened yesterday just because it wasn’t written at the top of my list. I fed my family real food. I took care of things in our home. I handled work. I had conversations that mattered. I made decisions that needed to be made. I ate a genuinely delicious meal, which I am absolutely counting. There was real good in yesterday. I was happy. I was even a little amused at myself. But underneath all of it was this awareness—the kind you can’t quite shake—that I know myself well enough to know what comes next. Today gets harder. Not because yesterday was wasted. Because some of what I postponed doesn’t disappear just because I was busy. It waits. And it usually waits with interest. This is the thing about time management that I keep learning and then somehow have to learn all over again. I’ve had incredibly productive weeks—weeks where I answered things and fixed things and crossed items off lists like I was training for something. Then I’d get to the end of the week and realize I had done everything except the thing that actually needed to be done. And suddenly, all that momentum had bought me a very special weekend package: stress, rushing, and the feeling that my nervous system had filed a formal complaint. That’s the difference I’m trying to pay more attention to. Not just productivity. Effective productivity. Knowing where my limited energy actually needs to go before I start spending it. The Time Management Lesson I Keep Having to Relearn Years ago, I learned to think about tasks as A, B, C, and D priorities. Apparently, I need to keep learning it—ideally before I’ve already reorganized the refrigerator. The A items are the ones that actually need to happen. There’s a real deadline. A real consequence. A real reason they belong at the top. The B items matter too. Life is better when they’re done. But they can wait until A is handled. The C items are useful, often satisfying, and—if I’m being completely honest—apparently where I like to spend a suspicious amount of my time. And the D items? Things that either don’t need to happen right now or, if we’re being truthful, might not need to happen at all. The problem is that an A item doesn’t always feel as good as a C item. A real priority might involve decisions I don’t feel ready to make. Concentration. Starting something I’m not quite sure how to begin. It might feel heavy before it feels done. Meanwhile, there are vegetables ten feet away just waiting to hand me a sense of accomplishment. Ten minutes later, I have chopped peppers and real satisfaction. This is how they get you. Sometimes Staying Busy Is Easier Than Doing What Matters Most I think this is the part we don’t say out loud enough. Sometimes we aren’t avoiding work. We’re avoiding one kind of work by doing another. And because both things are technically productive, we don’t even notice it happening. We’re not on the couch doing nothing. We’re answering emails. Cleaning something. Researching, organizing, helping someone else, solving a problem that could have waited comfortably until Thursday. It all counts. It just doesn’t all count equally right now. And that distinction matters, especially in stretches when life is already a lot. I have a child to care for. A home we’re trying to settle into. Work I care about. A conference next week that I chose, at the last minute, to attend. A household to run, meals to make, and things to arrange—and oh, apparently a manicure and pedicure that have now become their own small administrative project. I had found a place to go. Problem solved. Until I learned that someone reportedly got a fungal infection there. Problem unsolved. Immediately. There are very few things that will make me restart a Google search faster than the words fungal infection in the context of a pedicure. So now that’s back on the list. New area, new salon, new reviews to read. Another small task that somehow requires more energy than it did before we moved. And that’s life, isn’t it? So much of what wears us down isn’t one enormous thing. It’s the collection of small things—the appointment to make, the food not to waste, the place to research, the drawer that sticks, the item nobody can find, the child who may or may not nap, the ten-minute errand that develops a whole backstory. And in the middle of all of it, we’re still trying to figure out what deserves our attention first. Maybe Good Time Management Is an Act of Kindness Toward Tomorrow That’s what I’m taking from yesterday. Not that I failed—I didn’t. Not that the hours were wasted—they weren’t. There was something good hiding in nearly every part of yesterday, and I want to be real about that. But I also don’t want to keep mistaking movement for direction. Because I’ve lived through the other side of that too many times. The frantic evenings. The last-minute scrambling. The anxiety that shows up when something important becomes urgent—not because it had to, but because I kept giving its time away to things that felt easier. And maybe good time management isn’t about becoming the kind of person who squeezes more into every hour. Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe it’s deciding what actually deserves today’s energy so that future you isn’t standing in the middle of a mess she made for herself, wondering why the you from yesterday was deep in a Google rabbit hole about something that didn’t need to happen until next month. That’s a kind thing to do for yourself. Doing the A thing first isn’t punishment. It’s looking out for the person you’re going to be tomorrow. It’s telling yourself—I know you’re going to have enough to carry. I’m not going to add to it. That one landed for me. Because I don’t need another system that tells me to do more. Most of us don’t. We’re already doing plenty. We just need something that helps us see what matters now, so we stop spending our best hours on what can wait. Yesterday mattered. The food mattered. The conversations mattered. The work I did mattered. My family mattered. The delicious meal absolutely mattered. And maybe part of growing is learning to hold two things at once: I can be proud of everything I did yesterday. And I can make a different choice today. So today, I’m going back to the list. A first. Then B. C can wait its turn. And D? D may never hear from me again. A good day doesn’t have to be measured by how many things got crossed off. But if I’m going to spend my time crossing things off, I’d at least like them to be the right ones. I just need to remember that before I start reorganizing the refrigerator again. About the Author | Day 242 of 365 I’m a coach, a writer, an entrepreneur, and a mother. Apparently, I am capable of working nonstop from sunrise while somehow falling further behind on the one thing I actually sat down to do. For 242 days, I’ve been writing about what real life looks like. The big moments—motherhood, grief, healing, heartbreak, love, starting over, figuring out who you are when everything around you changes. And the small ones too. The vegetables that need chopping before they give up. The toddler who will not nap. The thirty-minute conversation about water. The manicure appointment that turns into a research project. The temporary home we’re trying to make feel like ours while we figure out what comes next. I’m starting to think those aren’t really the small things at all. They’re just life. And maybe learning to live it well isn’t about becoming endlessly productive. Maybe it’s learning to recognize what deserves your energy today—while still giving yourself grace for everything you carried that nobody ever thought to put on a list. Yesterday, I did a lot. Today, I’ll try to do what matters first. Somewhere in between those two things, I think that’s called growing. Day 242 of 365. Let’s keep learning.

Day 247 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth | Karma Penguin I was reading a Reddit thread recently about being stuck in survival mode, and it wasn't really the original post that stayed with me. It was the comments. Person after person saying some version of the same thing: this is me. Some had felt that way for months. Some for years. Some couldn't remember a time when they hadn't felt like they were bracing for whatever was coming next. I kept reading and thinking about how many people are walking around carrying this quietly, because survival mode doesn't always look like someone falling apart. Sometimes it looks like someone getting absolutely everything done. Survival Mode Can Look a Lot Like Having It All Together You answer the emails. Remember the appointments. Make dinner. Take care of everyone. Solve problems before anyone else even knows there is one. People look at you and say, I don't know how you do it, and you smile because honestly, you're not entirely sure either. Adrenaline, coffee, sugar, and sheer determination — whatever gets us to bedtime. I've been that person. There was a stretch of my life when the stress had gone on for so long that my body eventually made it very clear it couldn't keep doing what I was asking of it. I ended up in the hospital. I'm not a therapist, a doctor, or any kind of licensed professional, and nothing here is a diagnosis or medical advice — just what I've lived through. I'm just someone who has lived through long stretches of overwhelm and learned that there's sometimes a big difference between functioning and actually feeling okay. And I think that's what can be so hard to recognize about survival mode — nothing terrible has to be happening at this exact moment for your body to still feel like something is about to. You finally sit down, but you can't relax. You wake up in the middle of the night worrying. Everything feels urgent, and you're a little quicker to snap than you used to be. Something wonderful happens, and instead of sinking into it, a tiny part of you wonders how long it's going to last. You're putting your child to bed, holding this little person you love more than anything in the world, and instead of being completely there, your brain is already somewhere else. I need to answer that email. I forgot to order that. I have to finish that tonight. And suddenly one of the sweetest minutes of your day has become another place you're rushing through. That one gets me. I don't want to rush through my life while I'm trying so hard to take care of it. When Survival Mode Stops Feeling Temporary There's a difference between having a hard week and living through so many hard weeks that tension starts to feel normal. You go for a massage, and the massage therapist practically needs workers' comp after attempting to loosen your shoulders. You finally get a quiet afternoon and don't know what to do with it. Things are actually okay, but some part of you is still waiting — for the phone call, the expense, the problem, the thing that changes everything again. I want to be careful with the word survival. There are people in this world wondering where they'll sleep tonight, whether they'll have enough food, or whether they'll have clean water tomorrow. I have always understood how extraordinarily blessed I am to have those basic needs met, and having a safe place to call home is something I will never take lightly. But gratitude and overwhelm can exist in the same person. Being grateful for your life doesn't mean your body never gets tired from carrying it. This week, I had a conversation with a friend I've known for years. I'll protect her privacy and leave the details out, but I'll tell you this much: she had been pushing so hard, for so long, that her body finally staged its own intervention. Chest tight. Heart pounding. Certain she was having a heart attack. She wasn't. It was a panic attack — years of stress and fight-or-flight finally cashing a check her body had been quietly running up in the background. There was a moment, sitting across from her, when we both just looked at each other. You know this too. Maybe that's what the hundreds of comments on that Reddit thread were really saying. You too? There's something incredibly comforting about discovering that the thing you've been quietly struggling with isn't yours alone. So I'm not going to end this with twelve ways to regulate your nervous system. You have enough lists — maybe today doesn't need another one. Maybe today you simply notice: I've been in survival mode for a while. Not with judgment, not as another thing to fix. Just with a little tenderness for the version of you who has been working unbelievably hard to keep going. You don't have to fix your entire life tonight. Maybe your body simply needs small, repeated reminders that this moment is okay — that you can sit a little longer, hold your child a little tighter, let the email wait five more minutes, drink the coffee while it's actually hot. Look around at the life you've been working so hard to protect, and every once in a while, allow yourself to actually be in it. But the how-to can wait for another day. Maybe that's where we begin. If you ever want a quiet place to land — not another to-do list, just ten or thirty minutes to let your body remember what safe feels like — I made something for exactly that, called The Nervous System Reset (it's a free gift to you): a soft, guided audio and workbook, born out of one too many overwhelming Tuesdays of my own. No perfect streak required. No graduating. You can download it here: karmapenguin.com. About the Author | Day 247 of 365 I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I ended up in a hospital bed learning exactly what it costs to keep pushing past "fine." I've been writing my way back to soft ever since. This is day 247 of a promise I made to myself: show up and write my truth for 365 days, no matter what. No ghostwriters, no filters, no skipping the hard days. If today's post found you at the right moment, I hope it helped even a little. I'll be here again tomorrow — probably still holding a cold cup of coffee, still figuring it out in real time right alongside you. Day 247 of 365. Come back tomorrow — I'm not stopping. 🐧