I reread something I wrote in my 20s and realized she knew things I’ve been trying to remember ever since.
Finding the Original "Why"
It was past midnight.
I was flipping through old pages on my original website — drafts I wasn’t sure I’d ever published, pages sitting half-finished in the backend for years — when I landed on one titled simply “Why.”
I almost scrolled past it. But the title stopped me, because that’s always an important question.
It was a piece I’d written around 2018, right out of graduate school, when the idea of my business was still more conviction than plan. The framework has always come from the journey, not from a textbook.
So I reread it.
I was shocked and impressed. There was also pride — I felt proud of this younger version of me who wrote boldly with endless hope and conviction. She understood things that are still applicable and true now: the idea that courage is not the absence of fear but doing it anyway; the concept of exponential growth, where change initially feels like a flat line, until time gives momentum to results; the question of regret — the pain of looking back and wishing you’d taken the shot.
She wrote something else that stopped me: “But what I do know is that in the past, every time I feel failure, everything will be okay.”
That line hit me because I know why it works, and is easier said than done.
For a lot of people, when you ask what the fear is actually about — yes, the emotions are uncomfortable, but the real fear is the helplessness. What can be paralyzing is feeling that the pain will last forever when you don’t know when it ends.
Think about it: when the class is going to end in 15 minutes, at the 30-minute mark you’re like, ok just 30 more minutes. There’s a countdown. You can tolerate it because you can see the end. But when you don’t know how long this lecture will last, when there’s no timer, no guaranteed outcome — that’s where the anxiety seeps in.
My younger self knew that.
She wrote it before she had the framework, before the vocabulary, before she’d been through what came after.
And she was right.
When the Trail Fades
Reading her, I realized she wasn’t saying anything I don’t already know.
The concepts haven’t changed: the pain of regret, the acceptance of risk, the normalcy of fear, and the worthwhile belief that you’ll always get through it. These are still important principles in decision-making.
That’s when I recognized the pattern: Rupture, Reorientation, Reconstruction is a process that repeats. Not because something went wrong, but because that’s the cyclical nature of growth.
When I trace it back, the pattern is apparent.
In elementary school, it was: once I get into that gifted program, I’m going to be all set for college. Then: once I get into college, I’ll have the good job. My parents will be proud of me. I’ll finally feel like I made it. Then graduate school. Then the license. Then the career. Each stage carried the same implicit promise — that the next thing would be the thing that finally made it all make sense.
And there’s a certain safety in following the path. It’s one laid by society, and even though you’re still looking at the next thing, there’s comfort in knowing that once you reach it, it’ll mean something, because everyone agrees it does. The gifted program, the degree, the license are all validated legible milestones. Together, they create a blueprint to follow.
The hardest moment — for me and for almost everyone I’ve worked with — is when the blueprint runs out and the path fades. You’ve got the degree, the license, the career. Then you’re faced with: Now what? What am I going to do with that?
That’s why transitions are difficult for many. The path that’s guided your decisions has faded. That’s when the first rupture hits: when the structure you built stops matching the person you’ve become, the impact is intense.
For me, it was quitting the job and building the business and the travel that followed. Some people never fully face that moment. The fear pushes them back onto the path they set for themselves when they were younger — and that’s exactly how you get to the midlife crisis that arrives years later.
The rupture doesn’t disappear.
It just gets deferred.
Return is Not Regression
But here’s what no one prepares you for: it happens again.
Life — at least as I’ve experienced it and as I’ve watched my clients experience it — moves in something like five-to-six-year cycles of rupture and reconstruction. The process looks different as you gain more experience. Sometimes the rupture is no longer something that catches you off guard. If you’re paying attention, you notice the signals earlier — when things start telling you something isn’t right.
And from past experience, you know that avoidance won’t help. Waiting won’t help.
The point is that change is the only constant — and yes, it’s hard. The discomfort, the uncertainty. But it can also be exciting. You discover something new. You get to reinvent yourself. It’s why people feel a sense of freedom when they travel — you’re somewhere nobody knows you, and for a moment, you stop performing the version of yourself you’ve been maintaining.
I see it with clients. They’ll say: I just figured it out, and now I can’t believe I have to do it again. Or: I thought I had this figured out, and now I’m back to not knowing.
The frustration is real; change in any direction comes with uncertainty and risk. It can be both exciting and terrifying at the same time.
And I get it. Because the thought of “Oh my God, I just returned to this place where I don’t know what I’m doing” — that’s a real feeling. It’s just not an accurate story.
There’s a rupture, a reorientation, a reconstruction, and then there’s the return. Return is a word that can be interpreted in many ways. But it’s not the same as a repeat or a redo, because every time you go through the process, it’s not the same. You have additional wisdom, more insight, more tools. Sometimes just by being older you have more resources — or maybe it’s harder now because you have more responsibilities.
But the path is neither entirely linear nor entirely circular. It’s more like a string of beads, each one distinct, the string getting longer. You’re not returning to a previous bead. You’re returning to the process of threading them.
The important distinction that I wish someone had named for me before the second rupture and the third is this: you are returning to a process, not to a baseline.
You’re not going back to being the version of yourself who didn’t yet know what you know now. When people say I have to do this again, they’re not exactly wrong. But “again” doesn’t mean you’re starting from zero — it means you’ve arrived at part one of a process you’ve done before.
The topic may be different, but the path is familiar. You’re high-performing. You’re in a place that few people reach. You are not at zero.
And the question isn’t whether you know what to do — it’s whether you learned the process or just followed the instructions.
Did you learn the answer, or did you learn how to find it? Did you learn that 2+2 equals 4, or did you learn how 2+2 gets to 4 — so you can figure out that 3+3 equals 6?
That’s why the return matters. It forces you to take inventory of not just of what has not worked, but also of what has. You’re never starting from nothing. At each stage, you’re coming back to something familiar: the discipline, the resilience, the pattern recognition that got you here.
But not everything applies to the next chapter.
The success that got you here — if that success was built on the drive for prestige, for external validation — and the next thing you’re looking for is worth, fulfillment, something that actually feels like yours? Then what you did before isn’t going to work. But the hard work, the knowing what motivates you, the evidence that you’ve gotten through it before — that part you keep.
Separating what to let go of and what to hold onto – that’s the wisdom of experience.
Moving Before the Proof Is There
After years of clinical work, I arrived at a moment of a unplanned realization: the framework I’d been developing with individuals — the way identity structures build, the layers that serve you brilliantly until they don’t — wasn’t something I’d constructed intellectually. It came from observation and lived experience, from sitting with hundreds of people navigating the same territory. And at some point, I could see that it applied beyond the individual. It operated at the level of teams, organizations, systems.
That realization itself was a forward movement, not a return to zero. But it still required the same thing every return requires: figuring out again, questioning again, redesigning. How do I translate what I know — what took years of sitting with clients to understand — for people who haven’t spent years in a therapist’s chair? The topic is different. But you’re not starting over.
The framework is solid — it emerged naturally from years of clinical work, from patterns that kept showing up regardless of context. Knowing what to do, being able to do the work well — that part is clear. What’s less settled is the external side, which is the natural next step of growth.
There’s sometimes that predictable internal pressure to have all of that already assembled in order to feel credible. But that’s essentially waiting for external proof that can only come from acting on what you already know.
Recognizing that translation is still in process isn’t a weakness. It’s just an honest account of where the work starts.
The same is true at scale. In organizations, the same principles play out. There is no determination of right versus wrong. It’s about being strategic: knowing what still applies, what needs to be let go, and what needs to adapted to where you are now.
Regardless of whether it’s an individual mid-career or a leadership team mid-transition, the mechanism is the same. The ruptures, the resistance to return, the tendency to wait for external confirmation before trusting internal signal — that’s all part of the process.
Seeing Her Differently
She knew how to latch on, lock in, and go.
And that shit worked.
What Travels
Life takes from you what no longer serves you. What you carry forward — the tenacity, the commitment, the willingness to move before the proof is fully there — that’s the wisdom in the return.
It doesn’t pull you back to where she was, but to what she had.
The gift of the Return is not just the tools and the pattern recognition, but the reminder that you’ve done this before, that the version of you who started with nothing but conviction is still in there somewhere, and that the process of going back to her isn’t weakness or failure.
Before all the frameworks, the dedicated vocabulary, and the attempts to make the work legible, there was already an internal signal pointing to what’s real.
She listened to it.
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