You Were Never the Problem
A love letter to the woman at the threshold of everything
If you’re anything like me, somewhere…at some point, you had to give up something that mattered to you.
Something deep within you, about you—your soft heart, or your power, a personality trait, a secret dream—it had be sacrificed on the altar of practicality and the needs of others.
It had to be abandoned so that you could survive.
And you did exactly that—survive.
What I want to tell you from walking this path is that the self you abandoned in order to be loved in an environment too small for your wild heart—she’s still there. And she’s ready for you to wake up.
I know this because you’re here. Because something in you—that quiet, persistent, inconvenient little flame—led you to my corner of the world. And flames like that don’t exist in women who are truly satisfied. They exist in women who know, in their bones, that there is more.
So let me be the one to tell you the truth: You were never too much. The fact that you had to hide wasn’t your fault. And you are so much more than the the voice in your head saying, “not for you.”
This path is for the woman who went underground to survive.
And now, a part of you knows it’s time to rise to the surface.
This is a love letter to that knowing. And to you.
The Story We Were Given
For thousands of years, the stories that shaped us—the myths, the religions, the fairy tales, the cultural scripts passed down through families like heirlooms—cast women in a very particular role. Not the hero. Not the protagonist. Not the one whose inner life, whose desires, whose becoming was the whole point of the story.
She was the supporting character. The helper. The one whose purpose was to tend to the journey of someone else.
In a world that cast you that way and couldn’t hold all of you, of course you got smaller.
And when you grow up inside that story, you don’t know it’s a story. It just feels like reality…like the way things are. Like the truth about who you are and what you’re meant for.
So you learned to read the room before you expressed a need. You learned to shrink your dreams to a size that wouldn’t outshine someone else or make anyone uncomfortable. You learned that your worth was located in your usefulness—in how much you gave, how well you managed, how seamlessly you held everything together for everyone else.
You learned to be good.
And you were so good at it.
But this wasn’t goodness based in who you are. It was obedience in disguise. And when is survival dressed up as virtue, it has a cost. And the cost is you—the real you. The one with hungers she barely lets herself name and a voice she can’t hear underneath everyone else’s.
If you take nothing else from this, please know: it was never your fault. It was the water you swam in before you were old enough to know you were swimming.
Now, it’s your inheritance to examine. And if you’re ready, it’s your story to rewrite.
The Woman Who Went Underground
So let’s talk about the part of you that couldn’t survive in the environment you were given.
She didn’t disappear. She went underground.
She went underground when you learned that wanting “too much” made people uncomfortable. She went underground when your desires were called selfish, your dreams called unrealistic, your needs inconvenient. She went underground in the church that told you your body was a problem, in the relationship that slowly convinced you your perspective didn’t matter, in the family that loved you but couldn’t really see you.
You tucked her away in your own underworld, safe and sound.
And on the surface, you adapted. You performed. You learned to live small. You learned to reroute your aliveness through approved channels—the responsible hobby, the socially admired relationship, the accepted career path, the dreams that were practical enough not to frighten anyone.
And still she whispered, that underworld self.
Sometimes, late at night, you visited her. Sometimes, when everyone else was asleep and you finally had an hour that belonged to you, you remembered her. In the pages of the novels you read when no one was watching—the ones where women were wanted, seen, chosen, and loved in a way that felt almost unbearably real and yet out of reach—you touched her. But she faded, leaving you with nothing more tangible than an ache.
But she was always there. Whispering.
There is more. You were made for more. Come find me.
Walking the Spiral Path
I didn’t walk into my own underworld to find that part of myself. I went in to rescue a man. My man. And while I was the under the earth, exploring the dark corners of myself with a flashlight, he was doing…nothing.
So I began to walk the spiral. The labyrinth of my own heart. I figured if I was all alone down here, I might as well decorate the place with fresh flowers.
And without even really meaning to, I found the center.
There, waiting for me like a treasure chest only I had the key to, were the desires I hid to stay safe.
The perspective I had silenced to keep the peace.
The intuition I relinquished to keep approval.
The self I gave up to be loved.
They were all there, intact, and waiting for me.
And now, this is the work I do with other women walking this path. Because I know firsthand that understanding the labyrinth is not the same as walking it.
Walking the spiral isn’t about sitting on top on the pattern, pointing to it and impressing your therapist with your intellectual analysis of what’s wrong with you and why. Don’t get me wrong—that’s a great way to understand. But it doesn’t let anything shift.
Going into your own Underworld means tasting the seeds of you and gaining the ability see in the dark—looking below the patterns to what was there before them. It means meeting the parts of yourself that went underground and earning their trust back. It means learning to tell the difference between your real voice and the chorus of inherited voices you’ve been mistaking for your own.
It is not always easy. The labyrinth has dark stretches. There are places where you won’t be able to see very far ahead.
But because I walked it alone, you don’t have to. And I promise you—what you find at the center is worth every step.
Hello from the Other Side
When I finally found the courage to leave the well-manicured path of evangelicalism, my “perfect” relationship, and my good girl persona, I had no idea what would be on the other side—if there even was another side. I could be walking off a cliff! To fall straight into an abyss! Even more trapped, alone, and unloved than I was now.
But that’s not what happened.
I want to tell you what I have watched women discover on the other side of this spiral, because I think you deserve to know what you are walking toward.
The first thing they realize is that they are not the problem. In fact, they never were. They discover that they are not too much—they’re in the wrong environments. They discover that their “bad” qualities—their sensitivity, their hunger, their refusal to be fully satisfied with a life that doesn’t fit—were their greatest gifts. And more often than not, the people around them starting breathing a sigh of relief—“finally…you’re being yourself. We’ve been waiting.”
They discover that their body—the one they’ve been starving and managing and controlling and apologizing for—is not the enemy but the map. It’s been the GPS that has been holding their truth all along, waiting patiently for them to come home to it.
They discover that the shift toward being seen rather than just useful—toward giving from fullness rather than from fear—instantly defines their relationships as life giving or life draining. And the relationships that are draining seem to be replaced by the Universe as soon as they’re ready.
They discover that the outer world—their career, their creative life, the daily texture of their existence—begins, almost mysteriously, to reorganize itself around who they actually are. Not because they hustled harder or optimized better, but because they finally stopped abandoning themselves. And the world, it turns out, matches their energy, rather than asking them to fit in.
They wake up one morning and realize: this is mine. This moment, this body, this life…it’s mine. And it feels fucking good.
You don’t fall off a cliff. You learn to fly.
This Is for You. For us.
I am not writing to you if you have it all figured out.
I am writing to you if you have a life that looks fine—or even good—on paper and cry in the car on the way home from work, for reasons maybe even you can’t fully articulate.
I’m writing to you if want more but feel guilty about it.
I’m writing to you if you’ve been to therapy, done the reading, knows your patterns…and still can’t shift.
I am writing to you if you close your romance novel at 2AM and lie in the dark next to a partner who doesn’t get it, wondering if it’s too late to want a love story like that.
I am writing to you if you are so deeply, expertly good at handling your shit and taking care of everyone else that you have forgotten that you’re allowed to be taken care of, too.
I am writing to you if you have a voice inside—quiet but persistent, inconvenient but undeniable—that says: there is more. you were made for more. come find me.
When I look at my coaching business, it’s clear–I didn’t make any of this for the cool girl with the perfect makeup who’s got it all figured out. I made this for us: the doomscrolling, smut goblin, terrified-but-intrigued, secretly wild women.
And I want to say, as directly and as tenderly as I know how: we were right! That part of you was always right. Even if the world told you she was the problem.
You really were made for more, and the life that feels just out of reach and too good to be true is not a mirage. It is not a pipe dream. It is not for a different kind of person—a bolder one, a luckier one, a prettier one, a more well-resourced one—one who somehow ended up with fewer obligations and a cleaner past.
It’s for you. It has always been for you.
You just have to be willing to walk toward it.
Welcome to The Threshold 🗝️
There is a moment, in our favorite stories and in real life, where the heroine stands at the edge of the known world and decides.
Not whether she’s ready (she’s never perfectly ready), but whether she is willing. Willing to walk toward the thing that has been whispering her name. Willing to find out who she is when she stops performing who she’s supposed to be. Willing to accept the divine assignment of finding and creating her highest good. Willing to become, finally and at last, the main character of her own story.
That moment is called The Threshold. 🗝️
It’s how I built my signature coaching methodology, and my clients tell me that hiring me to guide them along the spiral path…is the best decision they’ve ever made.
And if you are here, reading these words, feeling something in your chest that is equal parts longing and terror…
you are already standing at it.
The only question is whether you’ll step across.
I hope you do. And if you need support and directions in walking the path—or if you just want someone to hold your hand while you do it—click here, because I am waiting for you. And so is the self…and the life…you’ve been dreaming of.
It’s time. 🗝️
