In this piece, Vinamrata shares how she finally summoned the courage to take a bet on herself and quit the corporate path to explore her creative passions, which led her to writing and directing. She’ll share how she’s gotten to the point of making her film After Moonrise, including writing the script, built out her team, cast her actors, secured her location, and is shooting in less than eight weeks!

If you want to learn more about Vinamrata, you can follow After Moonrise on Instagram for updates and subscribe to her Substack, The Next Chapter, to get a more in depth look at her journey.

Vinamrata’s piece is below, enjoy!

Leaving Corporate For A Creative Career

Two and a half years ago, I quit my job as a Lead Product Manager at Match Group to do…something.

I had some vague ideas about things I wanted to try (YouTube! Coaching! Novel writing!), but no concrete direction.

Before that, I had built an 8-year career in product management, steadily climbing the ladder from a Stanford Computer Science degree to Google APM, to startup product leader, and finally to Lead PM at Match Group. But I still didn’t feel fulfilled.

When I share this with people, the most common question I get is How do you decide to give up something stable for something uncertain?

The truth is: It was a long time coming. Deep down, I had always known I wanted to do something different from a product someday. But timing isn’t a straightforward thing to figure out, especially as we get older. There are always more responsibilities and factors to take into consideration, not to mention the fear.

What if this new thing isn’t as successful as my current thing?

What if I go broke?

What if I look like an idiot in front of others?

I don’t know if I ever overcame this fear. Instead, I accepted it wholly—until it became a no-brainer to do the thing, anyway.

Finding My Way Back to Writing

Before I discovered computers or product management, I had a first love: writing.

I’ve always been drawn to words, and stories have helped me feel a sense of belonging and connection during a chaotic and lonely childhood.

But despite my love for words, I never thought of writing as a career. Maybe it was because there were no creatives in my family, or because I was too scared to bet on myself, but I threw myself into math and science instead.

Almost a decade later, on a boat ride in Cartagena, Colombia, I remember having this nearly spiritual experience where I felt like the water was telling me to start writing again.

At the time, I was working at Thumbtack, a pre-IPO startup, with some of the strongest product leaders from Meta and Google, which was a deliberately calculated career move so I could start a startup or grow into product leadership. Despite the progress and accolades, it just didn’t feel…enough. Whenever feelings about dissatisfaction came up, I’d push them away.

The boat ride felt like a sign.

Maybe my path exists outside of product.

But believing that meant giving up a big chunk of my identity, something that felt so foreign and unsafe and bad that I couldn’t accept it.

So, I did the next best thing: I signed up for a short story writing class.

During the class, I felt like a part of my brain that had been dead had finally woken up. I loved my writing assignments, even though I still didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the process. When I moved to New York a few months later, I built on this by building a regular writing routine, even hiring a writing coach and going to writing conferences and workshops to improve my writing chops.

Falling Out of Love With Product

Over time, as my interest in writing increased, it became increasingly complex to manage both my product and creative career—especially as my dissatisfaction with product increased. While I had been excited about using my product skills to become a social entrepreneur, I became increasingly jaded about whether venture-backed startups could truly maximize impact. If startups weren’t going to be my thing… then where was I headed? I thought about product leadership, but successfully navigating company politics and making my vision “come to life” felt like I had sold out, betrayed my values for the sake of corporate performative culture.

I needed a new purpose, a new mountain to climb.

My Failed Attempt (And Why it Didn’t Work)

I had realized some version of this truth in 2021, but at the time, it was too hard to accept fully. If I wasn’t a PM or chasing something that felt big, then I wasn’t special; if I wasn’t special…then who was I? This is why when a startup reached out to me with a head of product role, I caved. “It’s what I’ve always wanted,” I convinced myself.

Instead of taking the uncertain path and finding myself, I took a “mini-sabbatical”: two months where I checked off every single item on my backlog: tennis lessons, writing classes, and my NYC bucket list.

A few weeks into the role, I quickly realized I had made the wrong choice. The company was not ready for a head of product, and I was not prepared for the ensuing level of chaos and dysfunction.

Looking back, I realized that this was partially because I hadn’t taken the opportunity to give myself a break and actually clarify what I wanted next! Instead, I jumped into something because I was too scared of the uncertainty required to find clarity.

Making The Bet to Chase The Uncertain Path

Eventually, I left that startup job for Match Group, which was, in many ways, my dream role: I had an incredibly supportive boss, significant scope, and decent work-life balance. Yet I didn’t feel great. Ultimately, it got to a point where taking a break didn’t feel like an option, but rather the only option.

So, I started saving up for it, and six months later, I handed in my notice. It was one of the scariest yet proudest moments of my life. But I couldn’t help but wonder, had I taken too long to make this decision? I already knew something wasn’t right in 2021, but it wasn’t until the end of 2023 that I made the move and took the plunge.

For a while, I felt shame about my “failed” mini-sabbatical. Maybe if I were braver, I would have taken this plunge sooner. But I realized that this is an impossible ask. I had to work through so many scripts—about self-worth, ambition, impact, money—while making sense of my desires that there’s no way that I could have dove in so quickly. Instead, it’s a process, something that I cultivated by taking intentional actions and smaller breaks to prepare for the bigger step.

I’m so grateful I stepped away when I did, because I was finally ready to give myself the space to really explore and figure things out.

Now, I’m pursuing writing and directing by making my first short film: After Moonrise. It’s a mother-daughter story inspired by my relationship with my mother and grandmother. It’s been an absolute labor of love getting this film into production: from interviewing tens of producers, cinematographers, and production designers to countless revisions of the script to fundraising to casting, I’m still in shock that I’m actually making a movie. I am so incredibly excited to finally bring this story to life when we shoot in October.

Take Your Time Making The Bet

So if you’re someone trying to follow your dreams but too scared to take the plunge, here’s my advice: take your time.

Let it come to you. These decisions are never easy, and there are so many different forces: family, identity, money, just to name a few. At some point, leaving will feel like the inevitable choice, which will make it easier to pursue—even if it feels like it’s too late.

Leaving is never a linear path.

Thank You for Reading!

I’m so thrilled that Vinamrata was open to sharing more about her experience leaving tech to create her short film. If you’re excited by her film and want to support her, you can do so in a few ways. I’ve personally given to her crowdfunding campaign for After Moonrise, which closes in a few weeks. While they’ve reached their goal, any additional support is always appreciated and helpful in the film making process.

Keep tabs on After Moonrise through the film’s Instagram below.

Follow After Moonrise on IG

For more peeks behind-the-scenes, you can subscribe to Vinamrata’s Substack below and continue following her filmmaking journey.

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2024 was a year that challenged me in ways that I did not expect nor wanted. However, I learned a lot about my own sense of integrity, how to navigate tough conversations, and my level of resilience. My garbage year turned into fertile soil and those seeds planted reluctantly have bloomed into a beautiful bed of roses. 2025 has been a blessing.

Last year, I kept telling myself, “I can do hard things.” While that kept me going during times of deep grief, I realized that in the school of Law of Attraction1, it means I’m attracting hard things. I reflected on my belief that things had to be hard to be worthwhile. This year, I’ve leaned into “it can be easy” and I’m happy to report that it can, in fact, be easy.

Another big milestone for me was in January 2025, my sister and I decided it was time to end our podcast, Build A Wealthy Spirit, after four wild years. I wrote my reflections about our experience in our newsletter.

Build A Wealthy Spirit Podcast

210. End of the Build A Wealthy Spirit Era

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a year ago · 19 likes · 7 comments · Michelle Elisabeth Varghese

One thing I did not expect was the flood of love we received from friends, family members and strangers who had listened to our podcast at some point. It was so sweet to have so many people reach out and tell us that something we shared helped them make a positive change in their personal finances and their relationships. I’m proud of Build A Wealthy Spirit and even though we won’t be recording more episodes, that time of our lives is in a time capsule forever on your favorite podcasting platform.

Present:

Last year, Write of Passage, David Perell’s online writing course, shut down forever. I loved working with the WoP team and am grateful I had two great years with them.

From those ashes, an unexpected phoenix arose for me. A student who’s essays I had edited, reached out and asked if I would be interested in writing coaching. I decided to try it out and have been partnering with six writers since January.

It’s been so meaningful to work with such talented writers who are eager to write, publish and share their personal stories. They each have their own specialty and I’m learning a ton through reading their pieces and following their journeys.

Check out their writing! , , , , and .

If you’d like to join us, you can find out more about partnering with me here! Chances are we are well matched if you’ve written online, are looking to share more consistently, want to refine your craft and also build an audience in a meaningful way.

Through these conversations with writers, I’ve been learning a lot about writing craft, AI and marketing2 specifically and will have some thoughts to share about modern writing coming up.

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Future:

I’m going to Paris!

My mom is retiring next week. Ten seconds after she made that decision, she booked a ticket to visit a friend in France for the first time. When my mom asked me to join her, I listed one zillion reasons why I couldn’t make it happen including needing to work out for a body transformation3 challenge I’m in.

In reality, I work remotely, I have a flexible schedule and humans invented body calisthenics. So I didn’t have a good reason to stay home.

I’m now very excited to explore Paris (and likely Brussels!) with her. Outside of flying through Europe, my mom has never visited the continent. It’ll be fun to try and keep up with her fast feet and never ending energy as we explore such an iconic city.

I received this well meaning advice recently from someone further along the entrepreneurship path than me. 

Was it recently? The message seems to be on repeat. Like the time I lost internet connection driving in the desert and was stuck listening to Jack Harlow’s CD for two hours.

It seems that every few months, someone wants to warn me that the writing path, the podcast path, or the entrepreneurship path is not worth pursuing because it’s difficult and unpredictable. 

Worse, sometimes they want me to explain how I’m going to make money or what my goals are. This is a trap. Whatever plan I scrape up in the moment is simply an opportunity to poke holes and discourage me. 

The interesting thing is that I find that these people are well intentioned strangers. I imagine the goal is to help me see that I should be more realistic. People who are successful are the exception, not the rule. You have to know somebody. You have to pay somebody. You have to get lucky. 

When people tell me to be realistic, what they are saying is that they do not think that I am resilient. I can’t handle seeing my savings go down. I can’t handle burning out. I can’t handle the same challenges they went through.

My biggest accomplishments came from the moments that I leaned into being unrealistic. I was naive. That was my superpower. That allowed me to aim higher than what others expected of me. I was one of the few students in my high school in Michigan that went out of state for college. I didn’t have the top grades. What I didn’t realize was that everyone else applied to one or two schools out of state. Harvard, Yale, University of Michigan. I applied to ten. I’m glad I didn’t ask anyone else for their thoughts on what I could accomplish. 

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Now, I wish I could say I’ve never been this negative person, but I have. I have felt the need to protect someone else on their journey. “Most people quit,” I say, well intentioned. Luckily, the best people don’t listen. They smile politely and a few years later, I see they’ve done something incredible. Something shifts. I’m inspired by them. 

Sure, I get into trouble too. I have days where I’m nervous about money. I end up living in a desert in the middle of nowhere. But I survive and then I thrive. 

I meet cool people on the internet that I then get to meet in San Francisco, Palm Springs and Charleston. 

People write to me and tell me that they relate to my essays on quitting alcohol, my sabbatical mindset or simply being an Indian woman that loves to dance. 

I’ve gotten paid opportunities from my writing. I’ve learned that success isn’t binary. I can freelance and support communities while I write. I apprentice with people who I admire. I know now that I can always go back to my old job in sales. That’s not a punishment, that’s a blessing. I also now know that has its challenges too. 

I worked in a safe corporate environment. For five years, I had so much fun working in tech and living in San Francisco. But I shifted from living my best life to feeling too comfortable and bored. 

I moved cities, I switched jobs. 

Surprise! A global pandemic.

I was fired. 

I learned that I am resilient. And if I am resilient, I can embrace naivety. Naive people go into new scenarios ignoring the warnings of other people. They don’t need to know all the problems they could encounter. They don’t account for everyone else’s pitfalls. They know somewhere deep inside that they will run into problems and still somehow move forward. 

I don’t need to be told to consider an easier path because there is no easier path. That’s not how life works. People become sick. People lose their jobs. People run out of money. Everyone runs into challenges. It doesn’t matter if we try to do everything “right” or if we go off doing our own thing, throwing the playbook out the window. 

I have embraced naivety. I follow my intuition and my interests. No one has to warn me that this journey will be difficult. It has already been difficult. 

But, we are resilient.

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Exciting News!

In March, and I will be launching our first live course: “Turn Your Layoff Into a Sabbatical.”

I often write about my two year sabbatical that I took after I left my career in software sales. I was fired and was not ready to hop back into the interview circuit. On top of that, I was living in a new city during a global pandemic and I realized that I hadn’t built a life around the things I valued.

For me, my sabbatical allowed me the opportunity to live with my parents and sister for a year. After that, I moved to a desert in the middle of nowhere with my sister and worked on creative projects like my podcast and my writing. My sabbatical didn’t look like anyone else’s, but it was perfect for me.

One thing I’ve realized in writing about my experience is that the details of my sabbatical may have been unique, but the internal struggles were not. I’ve spoken to so many people in this past year who either left their job in tech or were unfortunately let go. There are certain themes that come up. For example, it took me months to not feel guilty that I wasn’t working from 9-5. I felt like I wasn’t “productive” because in the corporate world, I was so used to having to justify how I was spending my time. I learned to shift from a corporate mindset to a sabbatical mindset.

If you or someone you know has left your job recently and are looking to take a pause, come join Tobi, me and others who are on the same journey. I’m excited. It’ll be a container to share your feelings and experiences with others. At the same time, we’ll walk through some of the common scripts that pop up when you diverge off the well known path.

Learn More Here!

Writing Coaching

I’m a personal writing coach who works one on one with writers who are interested in improving their writing and growing their audience. This includes in line edits and high level feedback on non-fiction essays. I also share growth strategies for building gan audience on Substack that line up with each person’s goals. For me, audience growth on Substack is not about icky tricks. It’s about sharing high quality writing consistently and knowing how to connect with people online in order to build a like minded community.

Guest Writing

I joke that I became famous for not working. This is because my essays on sabbaticals and living off the traditional path is what drew people to connect with me. I love writing on this topic and if you’re looking for an essay on that topic, I’d love to chat.

Pathless by Paul Millerd

What Do Your Parents Think? | Guest Issue by Michelle Varghoose

Hey Boundless readers! I’m off on paternity leave for March and am handing over the reins to some trusted friends. Today’s guest issue is hosted by Michelle Varghoose who I talked to on her and her sister’s podcast a couple of months ago. It was one of my favorite conversations…

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3 years ago · 42 likes · 17 comments · Michelle Elisabeth Varghese

Podcast Interviews

I love joining podcasts and discussing topics around sabbaticals, identity, personal finance and pursuing a creative field. If you’d like for me to be a guest on your podcast, feel free to send me an inquiry at michellevarghoose@gmail.com 

I remember walking around the stacks filled with colorful books, running my fingers over the spines, waiting patiently until one called out to me. 

When something caught my eye, I’d hook my tiny index finger on the top of the book and commit to my selection. 

To get a sense of the book, I’d plop down on the library floor, crack open the first page and start reading. I remember the rush that came with finding something so good it took me to another world. A world that would only be interrupted by the librarian on the loudspeaker, announcing the library closing.

Whenever I left the library, my bag would be overflowing with books, the plastic cutting into my palm as I dragged the bag to the checkout line. I was there so often I memorized my library card number and learned to sweet talk my way out of the late fees I always seemed to accrue. 

I remember when I was gifted my first Kindle. It was long before I owned a laptop or a smartphone. My reading world was transformed. This magical, white device with its dull gray background and tiny black letters would transport me to any fiction world in a second. I owe many sleepless nights to getting absorbed into a story on my Kindle. 

The distractions were limited. 

Back then, distractions meant the smell of Indian spices hitting my nose and burning my eyes as my mom cooked in the kitchen. Or the sound of my dad snoring nearby on the couch. If needed, I could always remove myself by going to my room and closing my door. 

I had no idea then that distractions would take on a life of their own. That a decade later they would be embedded into the reading experience. 

I’m nostalgic for those days to a point of frustration. I’m reading less and less these days. Not only books, but anything that’s longer than 2 minutes. 

I’d be happy to get absorbed into a piece, but the distractions are now big flashing lights on my computer screen, reminding me of a green crop top I looked at for five seconds three weeks ago. Or a video popping up with the details of Kim Kardashian’s latest lover. The price I must pay for reading anything for free. 

If I find myself on a real newspaper site, I often max out on free articles. I’ll debate paying for a subscription, but that thought is fleeting. 

As I consider it, my fingers take on a life of their own, opening up a new tab, instinctively typing in “T” for twitter. My prefrontal cortex becomes overwhelmed with the dopamine hit of a thousand random thoughts that I forget whatever it was I was looking at. 

News articles collect online dust in my Chrome tabs until my computer becomes so slow I’m forced to declare bankruptcy and close everything out. 

I used to love reading the newspaper. 

When the Detroit Free Press came to our house each week, I’d open up the giant pages and search for the comics or Mitch Albom’s latest editorial. Along the way, I could read up on anything else in our local news. My palms would turn black, the ink from the paper rubbing off on me. If something resonated, I found a pair of scissors and cut the section out, saving it under my bed for the future. 

I’ve always enjoyed having a sense of what’s going on in the world, but long form journalism is now strictly behind a paywall. Meanwhile, social media websites with no journalistic integrity baked in are free and built to be addictive. Clickbait and misinformation written as thoughtful questions dominate the internet. 

The context switching, distractions and shallow understanding of the world is wearing me down. 

So I’m moving towards paying for reading again, but if I’m paying, I want to remove the distractions as well. An online subscription to access articles doesn’t appeal to me if it still includes the harassment of ads and pop up videos. 

I crave the physical. 

I want newspapers and magazines. Ads that take a softer tone, have a clever tagline and can be left behind on page two. I miss the feeling of getting absorbed into a piece without the temptation of a dopamine hit being one click away. 

I’m ready to take a break from my Kindle. It’s now filled with hundreds of books I’ve bought on a whim and the main page is dedicated to sponsored new ones I can “buy now with 1-click.”

I admit that my days of getting absorbed in one book on the library floor has been replaced with scrolling content from my toilet. The deep reading of a book or newspaper has been replaced with tiny snippets, screenshots with no sources and ads pulling me away from reading anything longer than a tweet. 

So I am committing to buying and reading more physical things.

Reaching for God, I said a few silent Hail Marys as I thought to myself, “if I die on this plane, my mom is going to be PISSED.”

I’m not usually scared of flying or angering my mother. 

But I’m usually not hiding something from my parents either. 

This was back in August, my sister, Sammie and I were flying to South Carolina. 

Sammie had given her work two months notice at the beginning of the month and we had started to plan our move out of small town California. Knowing we wanted to find a place we could settle into in South Carolina, we decided to make a trip across the country and look at apartments. 

Sammie and I thought it would be fun to surprise my parents with our move. We imagined calling them from our new home once everything was done. Our parents planned to retire in South Carolina and worried about us constantly in our small town, so we believed they’d be so happy with the surprise. 

Between Sammie and I, we’ve moved ten times around the United States. We were confident that we could handle moving from California to South Carolina without the support of our parents.  

Flying in that metal tube in the turbulent sky was the first crack in my confidence. 

In the sky, all I could think about was how my parents didn’t know I was on this plane. That they thought my sister and I were thousands of miles away, sleeping safely at home. 

The man sitting in front of me didn’t make things better. He loudly proclaimed, “stop kicking my seat!” thinking the shakiness of the plane was me kicking his seat like a petulant child. I alternated the rest of the flight praying for my safety and cursing him. 

We survived our red eye flight and though we had to wait an hour for our rental car, I could only feel a rush of joy when we finally reached our hotel. The air inside the lobby was thick with humidity and possibly mold, but I didn’t let that bother me. I started to dream of taking a shower and slipping in a quick nap before we toured the apartments. 

The hotel had other plans. 

As soon as we walked in, the woman at the front desk said, “We don’t have any rooms available.”

We explained to her that we had booked our reservation for the night before. She showed no emotion as she looked up our reservation. 

“Your reservation was canceled.”

I staved off tears, my sister and I could only stare at her, but she didn’t offer any explanation. 

Finally, my sister said, “what?”

It turns out, when you book a hotel room for the night before, you still have to call to check in at the appropriate time. Otherwise, they charge you a fee and cancel the whole reservation. 

After many questions, the woman at the front finally told us we could rebook online if there was a room available. 

Luckily, there was, and we were able to still check in early. 

Between our flight being delayed, the car rental taking an hour, and our issues with the hotel, I barely snuck in a shower before Sammie and I went to look at our first apartment. 

I knew we had an issue as soon as we walked in. The property manager was surprised to see us, and as she looked at her computer, she said she didn’t have our tour in her system. 

At this point, I started to wonder if I was clueless with how technology worked. 

She was nice enough to quickly show us their sample room, but afterwards, it seemed like she had no interest in renting out to us. 

When she explained the application process to us, she highlighted that it was very strict. 

Our income had to be 3x our rent when we moved in. We knew this would likely be a requirement, but we thought we could work around it if we had enough money in our savings or could pay a larger deposit. 

“No. You have to have 3x income when you apply.”

This complicated things for us because my sister was planning to take a sabbatical after leaving her job. Since it was becoming clear this apartment was not the one, we decided to ask her all our questions about renting. 

“What if we’re working remote,” my sister asked, as she technically had a job for another two months. 

The property manager shook her head, “we will call your job to make sure you are actually working remote, because people from California will try to lie about it.” 

Maybe she wasn’t trying to make it personal, but as my sister and I drove back to our hotel to rest before our other tours, we tried to understand why there was no flexibility around this requirement. If this was the case everywhere, we were going to have to reconsider our plans for finding a place before we moved. 

Back in our damp hotel room, I sat on our bed, hand in my heads. The flight, the car rental, the hotel, the apartment complex, everything was piling up and I was going into a negative place, convinced the universe was telling us this was the wrong move. Worse, I couldn’t even call my parents, the two people in my life who always manage to have optimism in chaos.   

While I was happy to dive into sadness and pessimism, Sammie was not. 

“We simply need a new plan,” she told me. 

That’s when I realized that even though everything was going wrong, it didn’t mean we were out of luck. 

If all the apartments were equally as strict, we could always call our parents, confess our failed plan and ask for help. Worst case, our parents would love it if we moved in with them instead. We had a lot of support from our family, even if they didn’t know yet what we were plotting. 

The inconveniences we ran into made me appreciate how blessed we are. We have two supportive parents and that no matter what, we would have a place to call home. 

After Sammie’s pep talk, we decided to focus on staying optimistic and being open and honest with the places that we toured. The second half of the day went comically smooth. 

All the other property managers were kind, friendly and took the time to explain all our options for applying for a lease. By the time we were done, we had an application in for our favorite place. A top floor apartment with six big windows facing beautiful, lush trees. 

The trip almost ended on a high note, but there was one more challenge brewing in the Atlantic. 

A storm climbing up the east coast caused thousands of flights to be canceled, including ours. Sammie and I were rebooked for separate flights. She would be flying through Charlotte to get home and I’d have to go through Dallas. We’d both land about 8 hours later than we had intended. Our flights would meet in Arizona in the evening, and we’d finish off our trip with a 3 hour drive home. 

Despite this final challenge, I felt differently on the way home. The plane once again shook violently in the sky, but my heart was more at peace. I looked out the window and caught the beautiful red and oranges of the sunset. My eyes welled up with tears, but I wasn’t sad anymore. I felt joy and felt inspired. 

Moving was hard. It’s always hard. It’s inevitable things will go wrong. But that also made me appreciate the good things I have in my life, specifically the support system I have around me. 

At baggage claim, I ran to my sister and enveloped her in a big embrace. 

“We made it!”

As one of the only women in the trumpet section, I enjoyed being one of the best. I loved fighting for first chair with a kid named Kevin and having my band directors praise me for being a rising star.

My sophomore year of high school, I fell from grace. 

A new band director took over and was not impressed by me. In tryouts, I slipped on a note and was condemned to last chair. I was bitter and felt misunderstood. At the same time, I was seated next to the only other woman in the trumpet section, my best friend Amanda. We’d giggle and gossip in between boring harmonies and roll our eyes at the men who seemed to take themselves too seriously. 

I rationalized that I was happy in last chair. I had no desire to pursue a degree or career in music. I didn’t feel encouraged by my band director.  So I figured there was no harm in staying in the back. 

When I was last chair, I lied to myself and was convinced I was still great at playing the trumpet. I rationalized that I was taking private lessons, and in my free time I played in the county's youth symphony orchestra. But as time went on, the gap between my perceived status and actual skill grew and grew. 

I stayed in last chair and Kevin kept getting better, eventually becoming our section leader.

I didn’t challenge myself so I didn’t get better. I wasn’t getting better, so I fell behind. Soon, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I wasn’t the victim of one mistake. I was mediocre. 

My senior year, I dropped band. I told my band director I needed to make space for AP classes but I knew in my heart that I was no longer excited to show up every day and play. 

There’s a certain lure to mediocrity. Like a siren’s sweet song, it’s called to me many times, entrapping me over and over again. 

I’ve recognized this pattern in myself, whether it’s playing the trumpet or settling in my sales career. I start out doing pretty well and something knocks me down. My pride is initially hurt by the setback, but instead of continuing to work hard, I realize that I don’t have to work hard and risk feeling disappointed again. Instead, I can embrace the comfort and safety of mediocrity. 

Mediocrity is tempting because there are no expectations for people in the middle. Not bad enough to be eliminated, and not good enough to be promoted, these are the people that band directors and later in life, managers, didn’t have the time to focus on. 

At my first sales job, I rested at a similar state of mediocrity. After about 3 years, I was comfortable and had no desire to mess that up. I realized that if I tried to get promoted, I would be forced to chase the dangling carrots set up by my bosses. If I hit 100% of my quota, no more no less, I rationalized that I was still a good worker. I told myself this was great. I could enjoy my life, travel, party and eat out every night without taking my job too seriously. 

In year 4 and 5, I became bored with my job. I was impatient with my clients because their problems were so predictable. I played around with the idea with going for a promotion, but I had already solidified my reputation as being fine, but not great and there was a long line of people ahead of me. 

I decided to move from San Francisco and with that change, find a new job. I chose a company that was known for sales excellence. From the beginning, I was excited by the challenge and the atmosphere of pushing yourself. 

Going from a company that was comfortable to one that pushed me was a tough transition. 

My team had problems from the start, my manager was let go after six months, and my new manager made it clear that he didn’t have much faith in my ability to succeed in the role. When he told me I should be interviewing, I double downed and pushed myself to work harder. I thought I was working hard when I had started the job, but nothing compared to my work ethic when I doubled down and spent many extra hours honing my skills. 

I did get better. I got shout outs from my managers, won little challenges and even started helping my peers. It was too little too late though and I still lost my job. 

Strangely, even though that was easily one of the most stressful periods of my career, I felt really good about myself. It had been many years before I had challenged myself to improve, to put in the hard work instead of settling for mediocrity. 

Realizing that I had this capability, a second thought creeped into my mind. Why was I working so hard at this specifically? To become a sales rockstar? Sales was a career I fell into, desperate for a full time job and health insurance after I graduated college. 

I learned so many great things, but I had dreamt about writing since I was a young girl. I graduated college thinking I’d find a job writing for some company but struggled, got scared and chose a stable career instead. 

Moving up the corporate ladder was never my dream. In some ways, choosing a “stable” career was another way I had settled in my life. Losing my job, I saw exactly how “stable” that career was. I decided to take a break from the corporate world to get back in touch with my real desires. This time, I knew I could tap into the ability to work hard and deal with any setbacks. 

And the setbacks did come. I struggled to get started. Shockingly, it’s easier to tap into an intense (and anxious) work mode when you think you’re going to lose your job. I had a lot of negative thoughts and wondered if I could ever have enough discipline to even publish one essay. 

But I also knew that if I pursued the thing that got me excited, I could find the discipline. I had learned in my last sales job that it’s a muscle to be built like anything else. 

During my sabbatical, I learned about the relationship between taking action and confidence. I found it hard to believe in myself before I got started. But I realized that if I could get myself to start, even without the full belief in myself, the confidence would likely follow. 

So I started a podcast with my sister. I started writing a piece here and there. I took a writing course and promised myself that I would lean into it 100%. No more mediocre. Not in the thing that was most important to me. 

I published weekly for months, and ironically, my own success burnt me out. I took a break, but I wasn’t even worried that a break would be a setback for me. Unlike playing the trumpet, or my career in sales, I was willing to work through any problems. Sure, I’m probably a bit wiser than I was before, but I also think part of it is being in alignment. I have no desire to settle for mediocrity in this realm. 

Looking back at my life, the downsides of embracing mediocrity are more clear to me. 

In choosing to be average, to do less than what I was capable of, I reinforced this negative belief in myself without even realizing it. I tried to lie to myself and say I wasn’t mediocre, I was simply not trying. At the end of the day, it had the same negative effect. 

I know too, that you can’t be the top 1% at everything. To be the best takes a lot of time, energy and money. Part of my issue was that I was investing a lot of my energy in the wrong places. I did a lot of things I felt like I should do, even though I always had a strong inclination for something else. When things got difficult, I had no enthusiasm to push myself. 

Every experience teaches us something. Without having my job at risk, I wouldn’t have remembered that I had the capacity to work hard. I’m grateful for everything I learned in sales. I also realized that I had spent years in this field avoiding going after my real dreams. I wanted to be creative. I wanted to write. Now, I am doing those things. 

I know there’s always going to be a temptation to choose a more comfortable path. For me, that is the more dangerous path.

Tie me to the mast as the ship passes, I no longer want to answer the siren’s call of mediocrity.

After my sister's surgery (she’s doing great) and traveling to Philadelphia for a wedding (absolutely amazing time) I found myself struggling to write. 

Now, depending what platforms you follow me on, I’ve either been very prolific or noticeably absent. 

Incrementally, I’ve been adding more and more to my plate, but I didn’t realize I was doing this. By burning out, I was forced to stop and take stock.

I started writing a newsletter to accompany my podcast - . I’ve been writing three Twitter threads a week as part of my role as mentor for my writing course. I’ve expanded my role in other online communities as well, which adds up to mentoring three times a week.

I did not acknowledge any of this to myself and didn’t change anything in my schedule over the past few months to accommodate the things I was adding on. However, my response was some bad lifestyle changes.

Procrastination disguised as night owl tendencies meant I was creating and publishing content closer and closer to 2:00am. The way my schedule was set up, after those late nights, I’d wake up early the next morning for meetings with writing friends across the world. Usually with little to contribute because I was still tired. Inevitably, after a string of Zoom meetings, I’d collapse on my couch for a nap. Hit repeat.

I said yes to every opportunity and every conversation that came my way because I was excited and didn’t want to sacrifice anything. My schedule was a vacuum, filled up by every freelance opportunity, requested phone call and random text message. 

What I didn’t realize was that my creative energy was being drained at the same time. 

The first time I realized I was burnt out, it was when I pushed off writing my weekly essay for this Substack. I had cleared my schedule for the day, I wasn’t busy with all the things I listed above. Yet, I putz around my home, unable to open my laptop and write. Digging deep inside my mind, I searched for a topic, but for the first time, nothing came up. I checked Twitter, did my laundry, washed my hair and found time for everything but writing.

Then the guilt kicked in. How could I miss writing an essay? I managed to do so when I was traveling for weddings, during my sister’s surgery and when I was balancing paid gigs.

Looking back, I realized I wanted to rest but didn’t want to give myself permission to do so.

I had a few conversations with my writer friends and saw that even though this was the first time I missed my self-imposed writing deadline, I’ve been complaining about burn out almost every month.

I fill up my calendar, overwhelm myself, get tired, and finally recognize I’m burnt out. I’d take a break for a week and then slowly start the same cycle again.

If I looked back on my calendar, I could practically schedule my burn outs. Each month, I’d feel a sense of overwhelm and exhaustion but refused to give anything up.

This helped me see that I had a broken system in place. Which makes sense, because my system was built on an open schedule and good feelings.

When I put together my writing schedule I had no jobs, no online friends, and my only other piece of content was my podcast. 

So I took my own advice and started to think about my next few months and what I wanted to prioritize. I enjoy mentoring, but if I’m writing three Twitter threads a week, I need those mini Twitter pieces to help my essay writing, not drain my creative energy. 

I like talking to people, but having calls all morning leaves me drained for the rest of the day. I’m not great at switching from long conversations to staring at a blank page, willing a perfect piece to come out. I’m a bit of an ambivert, I enjoy talking to people, but it does take up a lot of my energy. 

When I dream about ten years in the future, I always come back to my writing. I love writing essays every week. I hope to one day be a great writer. To me that means publishing pieces that I feel are high caliber. I like a lot of the essays I publish, but I am also hungry to keep improving. When I was sliding late into the night to hit my deadlines, tired and unmotivated, I didn’t feel like my writing is improving.

The tweeting, zoom calls, even mentorships, were all the fun additional opportunities that come from my writing, icing on the cake. But icing alone makes me sick1. And no matter how much you slather on, it definitely can’t hide a poorly baked cake. 

So, eventually, after lots of guilt, anxiety and even a few seemingly unrelated fights with my sister, I decided to have some self compassion for myself and admit I was burnt out. 

I put a pause on online meetings and have let myself sleep instead of pushing to hit my writing deadlines. I stopped checking my Twitter in the mornings, and replaced that time with sipping coffee and listening to podcasts. 

I breathed and finally listed out everything I have to do each week. Looking at my old system, I realized that it was mostly based on feelings and that wasn’t going to cut it if I wanted to keep writing, podcasting and tweeting every week. In Canva, I fashioned a cute little content calendar and printed it out. I am saying “no” more often, building my calendar intentionally, not passively. My goal is to rotate in more planned breaks, so that I give myself permission to pause instead of waiting until my candle wick has reached its end.

Have I solved my problem? It’s hard to tell. Maybe in another month, I’ll be complaining about burn out again. But at least this time, I’m trying something different, and I’m happy to be writing here again.

They were sold a bad deal. 

Not by me. Almost a year earlier, a salesperson who was long gone, had transitioned my client to a new product and it seems like the sales person forgot to mention to the company that they were on a premium plan that they did not need. 

Now this company was my client, their renewal was coming up, and churn was in my future if I didn’t get them to resign the same bad deal. 

On the calls leading up to the renewal, I asked a thousand questions to see if I was wrong. 

Did they ever use the extra security?

No. 

Did they have a purpose for the fancy extra tools that were included?

No. 

Amazing.

The company was happy with the product and wanted to renew at a flat rate. They weren’t being scammed, they didn’t know a cheaper option existed that seemed to better fit their needs. A few tens of thousands of dollars cheaper. 

It wasn’t a deal I would’ve sold them. I’m not blaming the sales person before me, I see how this happened, but that person was long gone and the hot potato was in my hands. 

What made things worse was I was a few months into a new job and realized that they had a pretty wild policy for deals that churned. 

If the client renewed their contract for any less money than the initial deal, that is considered churn. 

At my old sales company, if you were expected to bring in a deal and it didn’t come in, you had to make up for the money by selling or upselling another company so that you could hit your quota.  

At this new company, I was not only responsible for hitting my quota, I also had to give the money back to the organization that had been paid out in “my” bonus from the year before. Money I had never received because I wasn’t the sales person who had originally closed this deal. 

So I was stressed. 

The day of my renewal call with my client, everything seemed to go wrong. 

I made it clear to my manager that I needed her on the call because I was worried the client would ask about the premium product they were renewing. They may even just say, “Oh, there’s a cheaper option? Let’s do that.” 

My manager was a killer sales woman and I knew having her in my corner would help me combat any objections. 

At the least, if everything blew up, she’d see that it wasn’t my fault. 

I hopped on a zoom call with my client and waited a minute for my manager. 

She wasn’t there.

She was notorious for showing up late to everything, so I started the presentation without her. 

Ten minutes. 

Twenty minutes. 

As time inched forward, I started to get worried. I dragged through the details of every slide deck I made. I could see the CTO was getting impatient, but he was kind enough not to rush me. 

40 minutes into the meeting, my manager finally showed up. 

We finished the call, got the green light from the client to send over the new contract. I even pulled in a few extra dollars because I scaled back their discount. 

I don’t remember if my manager apologized for showing up late, but instead of providing criticism at the end, she simply let me know that I did a good job. 

I did do a good job. Through some clever positioning, I convinced the company to resign and even increase their spending. 

Yet, I felt terrible. 

In my whole sales career, I had never felt like I had sold a deal out of integrity until that moment. 

Sure, I always try to get the most out of every deal, but in a proper sales role, you’re trained to qualify a potential client and sell them something that solves their problems. 

My success in sales came from building great long term relationships. I was strict on discounts (as in, no discounts) because I believed in the quality of the products that I sold to my clients. If I thought they didn’t need something, I would tell them that. 

My relationships were so good that at my last company, there were multiple times my managers would assign me clients that had issues with their sales representative and asked me to help smooth things over.

This deal felt different. Even though I got the outcome I wanted, I didn’t feel great about it. I didn’t even show my client the cheaper option because I was so afraid they’d say they’d prefer to go with that one.

That deal taught me a lot about who I wanted to be. 

When I was reflecting on how I felt, I realized that I acted out from a place of fear. 

I wasn’t only nervous because I didn’t want to pay the money back. Looking back, I’m sure I could’ve argued that the situation was unfair. Even if I was punished for it, I would have at least felt as though I did the right thing. 

After closing that deal, I promised I wouldn’t compromise my integrity for a deal again. Even if that hurt me. 

Of course, no promise to the universe is complete without a test. 

A few months later, another client of mine was struggling. 

Our relationship had started out poorly. They were given to me the same way the other was, with a lot of promise that they’d one day be a huge client. 

Instead they ambushed me early on and demanded I bring our CEO into a conversation with them so that they could add more money onto their contract. 

I looked over the contract at saw that they were oversold, but based on the ambush, I could see how the previous salesperson saw their eagerness and signed them up for the biggest deal possible. 

I had to tell them no, I would not bring our busy CEO onto the call and would also not consider upselling them until they started using all the products. 

A few months later, the COVID shutdowns wrecked their business. They sold retail software and a few of their biggest clients went bankrupt. 

Their team was stubborn at first and didn’t want to admit their struggling business meant they had overpaid for their contract. 

After talking in circles with them over a few different meetings, I finally sat them down, went through every number and projection with them and forced them to acknowledge that they were going to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars with our current deal. 

They asked me if I could help, and I promised to go to bat for them. 

My old manager had been let go, so I approached the new guy that took over and explained the situation to him. I asked him if he would support me by escalating my request to extend their contract up to our CRO. 

Before promising that he would, he asked me if that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t hesitate to say yes. 

I was a little bit naive at that moment, but I also knew I was doing the right thing. 

My client’s contract was extended and they ended up saving money on the deal. 

The next quarter, they renewed at a higher price, their business booming after their retail clients pivoted to online stores. 

I never made any money off that deal because I was fired before my client renewed their contract. By extending their contract out another quarter, I failed to bring in a large deal to the company and missed my quota. 

It does seem inevitable that I was going to be let go. Maybe denying them the contract extension would have kept me above water for one more quota. But I realized I didn’t like the rules of the game I was playing. I didn’t feel good about closing deals that were bad for my clients. 

I’ve been thinking about this incident recently because I’ve been reflecting on my money mindset. There are a few different money scripts that I am looking at tackling, but one thing that has stayed true over the last couple years is that I never want to make money out of integrity. 

I’m at a place in my life where I can make decisions from an abundance mindset and I want to honor that. When I was working on the first deal in this piece, I was so afraid of losing my job if the deal went poorly or having to pay out of my own pocket if the company didn’t renew. 

The difference in a scarcity mindset and abundance mindset is easy to see in sales. 

Whenever I was struggling to hit my quota, I would be desperate to get any deal in. When I had my best quarter, I could easily say no to “bad” deals and ironically cared more about my clients welfare. 

What I learned in my last sales role when every deal I received was a dumpster fire was that the scarcity mindset wasn’t serving me or my clients. 

So many things were out of my control, but halfway through my time at the company, I decided to stop compromising my integrity to try and make deals happen.

I started to actively seek out new companies to sell to so that I could build a strong positive foundation for our relationship. I became more comfortable pointing out when our product wasn’t a good fit for a company. I focused on improving the experience of working with me. My solutions architects were put to work when I kept hosting free lunch and learns for my clients engineering teams. 

Things turned around for me, but it was too little too late. 

At the least though, I left my job with integrity.

My sister and I watched I am Not Your Guru during my sister’s surgery recovery phase and we both felt inspired by it. It’s possible, a few too many days locked up in a hotel room dealing with food poisoning had taken us to a dark place. We needed Tony to bring a positive ray of motivation and off beat dancing into our lives.

So if you’ve seen me doing a “raise the roof” like motion with my hands and giving impassioned speeches this week, it’s because of Tony Robbins. 

The documentary led us to buying the book, Awaken The Giant Within and while doing one of Tony’s exercises, I realized I had a limiting belief that is once again popping up its ugly head. 

The exercise is straightforward, list out all your positive and limiting beliefs. What surprised me was that I was still carrying the negative beliefs that I’m not hard working and am disorganized. Beliefs that are not far off from my old fear that I wasn’t a doer.

I wrote about not being a doer when I wrote about Charlie Gilkey’s book, Start Finishing. Naively, I assumed I had crushed this negative belief, tricking myself into believing that writing about it meant that I had solved my problem forever. 

However, these past few weeks I’ve been off my A game and it seems a little disruption in my schedule can push me into a negative headspace. 

When I’m hitting my self imposed deadlines, have my schedule under control and am generally performing well, I show myself that I am a doer. That I can get things done. 

When my life gets a little chaotic, I start to feel overwhelmed by the things that I have to finish and my growing to do list. When my essays came out late a couple weeks in a row, I started to question myself instead of taking the time to see if something needed to change. 

Doing Tony’s exercise, I found myself asking, “Why is this a limiting belief? What is this preventing me from accomplishing?”

I realized I was slipping into a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset1. A fixed mindset is when you think you are born with your abilities and have little option to change them. A growth mindset leans into the idea that with time and effort, you can become better at almost anything. 

Every month this past year, I thought my schedule would get lighter at some point and it never did. Next week I’ll be free, my weekends won’t be filled, I can finally catch up on reading Substacks and get ahead on planning content for my podcast. 

This is a blessing because as I’ve been exercising my “doing” muscle, new opportunities have come my way. I have more people reading and commenting on my pieces which means more engaging from my side too. 

However, I was ignoring the fact that I was adding new projects onto my plate and continued to read, write and engage whenever I felt like it. I started to lose sleep after procrastinating my deadlines and knew something needed to change. 

My limited and fixed mindset went straight to believing I wasn’t managing my workload because I was inherently disorganized. That I was overwhelmed and falling behind because of some fatal laziness character flaw that lives inside of me. 

Listing out these beliefs helped me see that I was still holding onto them. I found examples to prove they were wrong like my publishing streak and the positive feedback I’ve received on the work I’ve done. After that, I saw the limiting beliefs served me because they let me avoid putting together a system and content schedule for myself. I always think I love not having a schedule, but a lack of structure in an increasingly busy week has been slowly turning my hair grey. 

As much as I enjoy a late night writing session, I don’t like to get to bed late and then turn up to my morning meetings sleep deprived. I have so many topics I want to dive into but I put them off because each week I don’t feel like I have enough time to focus on them. 

While I’m having fun taking on new mentorship roles, I have to admit those take time to prepare and will take time away from creating new pieces. Surprisingly, it turns out that I can’t add something to my schedule without taking into account that I’ll have to invest time and energy into it. 

My problem isn’t that I have a crazy back to back schedule. It’s inconsistent but not unpredictable. My issue is that I think I love working purely based on my feelings and my mood, but then get stressed and start to doubt myself when I feel overwhelmed. It’s time to admit I need a system in place. 

What surprised me was how freeing it felt to admit this. It was easy to throw a pity party for myself and indulge in negative self thought. However, that was unproductive and could’ve spiraled into laying on my couch avoiding my problems. Seeing that I could change my situation if I was willing to sit and make a plan was way more satisfying.

So Tony Robbins, as trite as it sounds, came into my life and taught me an important and timely lesson. I am a smart, capable person who does get things down. 

At the same time, I have big ambitious goals for the rest of this year and beyond. If I want to maintain the output I have been, even increase it, I have some changes to make. It’s time for schedules, content workflow plans, and maybe even a Notion page dedicated to all this. 

*Insert hyperactive raise the roof motions* 

Which seems silly to say when I knew it would have some challenges.

My sister had surgery last week. That’s a big deal but everything related to her surgery went perfectly. The team at her hospital could not have been more compassionate and efficient.

A few days status post surgery, my sister took many walks at sunset, transitioned from applesauce and popsicles to solid foods and though a little tired, was healing quickly. 

Surprisingly, a couple days ago my sister woke up in the middle of the night to throw up. It turns out she may have gotten food poisoning or ate something that caused her stomach to rebel. It’s almost comical how she ended up with a seemingly unrelated sickness while recovering from her surgery.

Then a couple days later, my mom, our personal recovery nurse, came down with the same thing. 

Both are doing well! My mom and sister are resting and sticking to a BRAT diet.

That being said, my essay for this week is short.

I wanted to write about how my mom has been making friends with all the other sick people and their families in our hotel. She’s gotten so popular that my sister and I often end up leaving her behind in the lobby as she swaps life stories with the different denizens of Marriott. 

I also need to get some rest and try to find some order in my life, so that piece will have to be written another day. I appreciate all of you!

Around the corner, I heard another elevator come and go.

I hit the button again, wondering if I had somehow messed up that simple task. 

“What’s the saying?” An older man in a gray, long sleeve athletic shirt and blue shorts walked up to me. “A watched pot never boils?”

I paired a light laugh with a smile, both to be polite and because I was happy to have someone nearby to validate that the elevator was taking an exceptionally long time. 

I didn’t have a lot of energy for small talk though, and I stared back at the silver doors. Zoning out, I reflected back on my chaotic week.

A few days earlier, my sister and I had driven up to the nearby big city so that my sister could have surgery. We met up with my mom who had flown in to help take care of my sister during her recovery phase. Outside of being a loving mother, my mom was a nurse for a couple decades so in a time like this, she shines.

Though my sister’s surgery wasn’t a tricky one, we were all still eager to get on the other side of it. Not that any of us acknowledged our Big Feelings, a term I learned reading a children’s book last week. As we got closer and closer to the surgery day, we became more tightly wound and every decision turned into a mini fight. Do we take out food or eat in? Who’s going to drive? At one point, my mom refused to get out of the car to make her point. I may have yelled. Stubbornness is strong in my genes.

Luckily, my sister was assigned to be at the hospital at 5:30am, so on the day of her surgery, she was in and out by the time my mom and I ate lunch. The surgeon called to let us know everything went “perfectly” as soon as he was done and my mom may have cried once, twice, possibly five times.

When we picked my sister up, she was a little high off the combination of meds they gave her for anesthesia but otherwise had wide eyes and looked great. In the hotel room, she asked us to shut all the drapes so she wouldn’t trigger a migraine and then she promptly fell asleep. 

Relieved, I realized I was tired and hadn’t had enough coffee. My mom mentioned she saw they had put out a fresh pot downstairs so I went to grab some for us.

In the lobby, I realized that was one of the first moments I’d been alone since we had arrived in town a few days earlier. The week had gone from chaotic to calm, but it was nice to have a minute with my own thoughts.

A pint of green ice cream caught my eye in the hotel lobby and I went to go check it out. My sister’s throat was going to be sore for a few days and the plan was to slowly introduce soft foods back into her diet. I looked at the small tub of Talenti’s Mediterranean Mint, honestly a little disappointed because I thought it was pistachio. Then I chastised myself because that’s my favorite ice cream, not my sisters. Ice cream would be a nice surprise though. $8 felt a bit overpriced, though I chastised myself again for being cheap.

Feeling myself overthinking the decision, I put it off. 

Ping. 

When the elevator finally arrived, the older gentleman and I smiled at each other as we walked in. Pushing 2, I asked him for his floor which happened to be the same one.

“How long are you here for?” he asked me as the doors shut. 

“Sunday,” I left a couple days off since I didn’t know him. I wasn’t too worried though. The hotel sat on the hospital campus, so it was common conversation to talk about how long people were staying and inevitably, why they were there.  

“I have a box of popsicles if you’re interested,” he continued, “I leave tomorrow, so I don’t have a need for them anymore.” 

While popsicles do seem like a classic villain troupe for luring children, I was too tired and touched by the offer to let my fear of being kidnapped kick in. 

Plus, my mom was waiting for me. Also, I’m an adult. 

“That would be amazing! My sister had surgery this morning and it would be perfect for her throat.”

“In that case, I have a box and a half for you.”

As we walked out of the elevator, we realized we were neighbors. 

“I’ll come knock on your door in a bit,” he promised as he walked into his room.  

I stood outside my own door for a second, wondering how all this was happening. My mom must have heard me because the door opened and she peeked out of our dark haven to find me simply standing there.

A few minutes later, as promised, the man knocked on our door. 

As my mom and I opened it, I realized he didn’t have a box of popsicles in his hand. Instead he had a large cardboard box filled with hummus, crackers, Activia yogurt, corn dip, a variety of Naked juices, frozen breakfast sandwiches, sauerkraut and of course, boxes of honey suckle and coconut popsicles.

“I have my last radiation session tomorrow and figured I’d find someone to give all this food to. If you have any left over when you leave, pay it forward.”

He came and went quickly. My mom and I stood in our dark hotel room shocked. I saw tears start to form in her eyes but before she could cry, my sister opened her eyes. 

“Hey, how are you feeling?” I asked her. “Do you want a popsicle?”

There’s no noise worse than my morning alarm permeating my lucid dream state. Despite this, I decided to double down on this audio torture for a month by attempting to wake up before the sun. 

In 2020, during the COVID lockdowns, I read The 5AM Club by Robin Sharma. The title here tells you the underlying message. Wake up at 5:00am. 

I loved it. So much so that I bought into the idea that I should wake up at 5:00am. “Own my morning, elevate my life,” I was sold. 

This was a bit radical for me, a self diagnosed night owl. Back when I was in university, during exam week, I would walk home from the library as the sun came up and often ran into my roommates at Collegetown Bagels. They would be getting coffee and breakfast to start their day while I was grabbing a chocolate croissant as a treat before walking home to collapse on my bed.

In 2020, though, I was determined to change. I was working remote for the first time and had full control of my schedule. At the same time, I had come face to face with my shortcomings. My company was slowly making my teammates disappear and it was evident that my job was on the line. 

Since I was convinced I was the problem at my job, I believed I was struggling because I hadn’t been as productive or as industrious as I could have been in my first six months. My plan was to become a better worker and see if I could prevent myself from getting fired. 

Looking back, it’s easy to see that I was in a vulnerable state of mind, desperate to find a quick fix between the pages of a self help book. 

For a month, I tracked my wake up times and I never managed to wake up at 5:00am for two days in a row. I’d usually get out of bed after a few hits of the snooze button, ruining my sleep for an hour or two before getting up “early.”

At first, I beat myself up for falling short. I felt as though I was confirming to myself that I was undisciplined. When I paid attention though, I realized something important. 

I didn’t like it. 

Even when I was up early, I found the mornings to be cold, dark and boring. It was eerie to me and all I could ever think about was going back to sleep. 

The only thing I enjoyed was that I was finally waking up before the chipper bird that seemed to have made a home outside my bedroom window. Eliminating thoughts of bird murder first thing in the morning was a more positive start to my day. 

Other than believing it was good for me, I didn’t have a reason to wake up early. In the morning, I would do some journaling and a little bit of yoga, which was nice, but I never felt any spark or burst of enthusiasm that early in the morning. 

It was hard for me to admit that the 5:00am-ish starts weren’t working for me. I thought maybe, I could change, force myself to become a morning person. The 5AM Club made it sound like enough willpower would get me there. Maybe it could have.

Then I realized, that wasn’t the point. 

When I paid attention to my mind and my body, I found that while some people may prefer early mornings, I never enjoyed mine.

For one, I hadn’t admitted to myself that my work anxiety was affecting my sleep. I rarely got the sleep required to wake up that early because I would have nightmares about sales deals falling through or my clients getting angry. 

Also, I felt completely different at nighttime. The magical muse would meet me at sunset. I would start churning out email sequences to send clients in the morning and often find myself lost in flow1.

Recognizing this, I switched my schedule to work later into the night and allowed myself to sleep in until my first Zoom meeting. 

Trying to wake up at 5:00am and join the elusive 5:00am Club was one of my first real stabs at becoming a more productive person. While I was still ignoring a lot of problems that were going on in my life, I’m happy that after that first month, I checked in with myself and decided the 5:00am Club wasn’t for me. 

I learned an important lesson during that time. It’s alright to test and experiment new habits, but just because Robin Sharma dedicated a whole book to it, doesn’t mean it is the right fit for me. More importantly, that’s completely fine. There’s no need to beat myself up if my morning routine doesn’t match someone else’s. 

Since reading The 5AM Club, I’ve read around 35 other books I’d consider as part of the “self help” genre. I’ve learned to be open to new ideas or habits, but I also test and filter everything to see what works best for me. When something isn’t a fit, I no longer feel guilty when I reject the idea and move along. It’s rarely a binary, there’s often something that intrigues or inspires me, but I no longer feel the pressure to fit into someone else’s mold of productivity.

This has worked well for me. When I look at myself, I see that I went from someone who felt undisciplined to someone who is a doer. However, this wasn’t because I perfected each and every single productivity hack. The secret was separating the confident “shoulds” of each book with what I observed was best for me. 

During my sabbatical, I turned off my alarm clock and let my body wake up when it needed to. I needed a couple months to catch up on my sleep debt, but once I did I noticed a change in my sleeping schedule. 

I found that my natural circadian rhythm combined with crappy blinds resulted in a sleep schedule that mirrored the sun cycle. In the summers, I started to gradually wake up earlier each morning, opening my eyes to the sun peeking through my window.

The peace I’ve felt in those early mornings has been incomparable to the bleary, stressed filled mornings in 2020. 

Sometimes, I even wake up to the birds singing. These days, I have no desire to murder them.

1. Share daily 

2. Respond unabashedly to everything that catches your eye 

3. Casually link to your writing where relevant 

If something feels uncomfortable, give it a few tries and see if you feel better or worse. 

Abandon anything that doesn’t feel good. 

Now to my essay. 

Selfishly, I would like you to share and promote your writing1. 

I don’t mean an ambiguous you. I mean literally you. 

You, who is reading this from your toilet, your couch, your uncomfortable work chair balancing a dog in your lap and a child pulling your hair. 

Your writing is good. It’s interesting. I’m a fan.

Ask yourself, “what good thing could happen if more people read my writing?”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to be a mentor with the writing course that launched my own online writing success, Write of Passage. 

The theme of the week is the “D” word, distribution. 

This caused a bit of an uproar. Promoting is icky! 

People don’t like distributing their work for a lot of reasons. Here were some of mine:

Being Anti Social media was my thing. 

What if nobody reads my stuff?

What if somebody reads my stuff? 

What if I say something so wild and controversial that I’m run out of this small town?

What if I’m boring? 

I was lucky. All these fears went through my head two years ago, when I started a podcast with my sister. 

My stages of distribution grief for my podcast looked like this: 

1. I don’t want to share the podcast with anyone.

2. It would be nice if *someone* listened to my podcast. 

3. I’ll create one Instagram post. 

4. Why am I not a raging success yet?

5. Ok, this will take some effort but it’s worth it if people find and listen to my podcast.

While I was trapped in a cage of perfectionism, my sister texted our friends to let them know we launched a podcast. She created our first posts on Instagram. She even shared those posts on her personal social media pages, something I still find hard to do today. 

Initially, I was annoyed because I wanted her to be stuck in the cage of perfectionism with me. But almost immediately, we heard back from our friends. They told us they had already hit play and were so excited for our next episode. 

Over the last two years, I’ve seen how promoting our podcast and building an audience helped to keep us publishing every week.

When someone told us they started an emergency fund after listening to our episode on the topic, we knew we were having a small impact. Little moments like that made it worth showing up each week. 

If we hadn’t made an effort to share our podcast, I have no doubt that we would’ve given up. The effort to create and publish to a silent void week after week would have been too much. 

When I started writing online, I felt the same hesitations I felt before about promoting our podcast. This time, I decided to immediately step out of my cage of perfectionism and lean into the fear. I launched my Twitter account to share my writing. 

When I started on Twitter, I didn’t know where to find my private messages, let alone how to grow a following. I had yet to enter the corner of productivity Twitter where there were no shortage of people promising to show me how to 10x my Twitter following. 

I happened to hear someone say on a podcast that all you had to do was tweet everyday to build an audience, so I decided to try that. 

I started tweeting every day and my only followers were two of my best friends and a random guy I knew growing up who somehow immediately found my pseudo pseudonymous profile. 

I thought I said don’t share my data, Twitter.

For the first month, I tweeted pretty consistently and no one liked any of my tweets. Not even my three followers. It’s ok, I still love you, besties.

I had one hit when Tim Ferriss retweeted my comment about how cozy he looked in his podcast video. I got 15 likes. 0 to 15! How’s that for 10x-ing my followers? 

When I joined Write of Passage and started writing consistently online, I realized that Twitter and Substack were great ways to stay connected to all my new writer friends. 

I added everybody I met, unconcerned that the list of people I was following was lapping my followers. The optics weren’t good, but I didn’t want to have to self select who to follow2. 

During this same time, wrote about how people have “Twitter pods” which are basically a group of people who will quickly like or engage with your Tweet so that the almighty algorithm will see that it’s popular and boost your tweet. 

Instead of thinking about putting together a Twitter pod, I took this as permission to engage with any Tweet that caught my eye on Twitter. 

“Look at me,” I thought, “it isn’t creepy that I liked my friend's Tweet 2 minutes after they posted. It’s engagement.”

With that permission, I was soon roaming around Twitter, commenting on everything. It felt like I was crashing a wedding, engaging with the guests before anyone could tell I wasn’t actually invited.  

Need a podcast rec? Here’s one of Jay Shetty’s that inspired me.

Photo of your dinner? Yum! I love sushi. 

Stressed about your day? Sending good vibes ✨. 

Recently, a few people have told me that they love my “reply game” and that it’s worth emulating. I didn’t realize this was a thing. I only knew that I liked when people engaged with my Tweets. I figured there was no harm in me showing up in their comments as well. 

The surprising thing is, this worked pretty well! People not only started finding me on Twitter, they also started reading my Substack as well. This was my main goal, to share my writing. After the Substack platform, Twitter is my #2 source of subscribers. 

The numbers are simply numbers though. I’ve made connections on Twitter and Substack that have turned into real friendships and opportunities to work with people I admire. 

Back to you. 

Don’t worry, I’ve tested it out. You can be a kind, authentic person on the internet and still find your people. You don’t have to go to the depths of Dante’s inferno to build an audience.

Choose a platform you feel comfortable with. I like Twitter because I enjoy writing and it’s easy for me to share links to my Substack and podcast. 

Share every day3. If I have two interesting thoughts in a day, I’ll schedule the next one for tomorrow morning before I wake up. The added benefit is that if I do that, I don’t immediately second guess myself and panic delete my tweet. 

Comment and engage with your internet peers. Look at my comment section on Substack! I love giving and receiving comments. Apparently, this is also “engagement.” I give you permission to be loosey goosey with it. 

Leave a comment

Casually share your own links and promote your work. This doesn’t have to be icky or weird. The best people who do it do it so well you don’t notice. Look, I promoted my own work three times in this essay. Oops I did it again!  

Chances are, you will run across somebody saying something relevant to something you wrote. It’s OK to leave a nice comment and then say, “I wrote about it here too, for reference.”

Your writing is good. That one essay you wrote? Hilarious. Beautiful. Moving.

Help people find it.

Selfishly, I’m hoping this means my Twitter feed will be better too. 

At that moment, my sister Sammie was peering at me from my laptop as we recorded another episode of our podcast, Build A Wealthy Spirit, together. That week we were experimenting with Tim Ferriss’ Dreamlining exercise from The 4-Hour Workweek. 

We both used his framework to create our dream lives. Sammie was right to be concerned about mine. I had focused a good chunk of my Dreamline on one thing. 

“Skincare products. I miss spending $40 on lotion, it’s the dumbest thing in the world, I thought it was dumb when I was doing it…If I had $100 million, I would buy every single skincare product that I could possibly want.”

Looking at myself on my half of the video call, I could see the pimples that kept popping up on my face. Sammie and I had moved to the desert a few months earlier and my old lotions and cleansers were not a match for the dry air. 

Bad skin was an easy visible problem for me to tackle. Dreaming bigger than that felt uncomfortable. I was never good at being vulnerable and even when thinking about my dream life, I struggled to even admit there was anything else I wanted. 

Our Dreamlining episode was still on my mind when a few weeks later, I was on the phone with my cousin Julie, listening to her try to convince me to get into manifestations. 

“I happened to wake up at the crack of dawn, so I went up to the roof of my apartment to watch the sunrise and journal. I wrote down how I wanted to make friends in New York City. While I was journaling, I felt a wet nose touch my hand and saw a happy little Goldendoodle by my side. I looked up and saw a beautiful woman apologizing for her dog. We ended up chatting up there for two hours!” 

Julie’s eyes sparkled as she recounted the story. I could see how the magic of the situation, the serendipity of writing down her wish and seeing it come to life immediately, had affected her. 

“That’s amazing. I want to be into manifestation, but for some reason I can’t get into. I like to think I’m open minded, but for some reason it’s hard for me,” I confessed. 

Julie’s own experience was too fresh for her to let me off the hook.

“Why not try it? I was reading up on the physics behind it and…”

I couldn’t tell you what she said after that because I never took physics and immediately zoned out when she delved into the science. Something about electrons and energy fields.

While she educated my zoned out self, I reflected on how lit up she looked when she spoke about her experience that morning. It was a stark difference to the feeling of uncertainty and anxiety she had had when she originally moved to New York City a few months earlier. The way she was radiating, I wondered if she was become a super attractor right before my eyes.

She was right, I didn’t see any harm in asking the universe for something. Of course, the thing that came to mind was lotion once again.  

So I looked up ways to manifest and found some things that resonated with me. 

I started with visualization. As I lay in bed at night, I envisioned opening my medicine cabinet to reveal a treasure trove of creams and cleansers. I pictured each pimple disappearing while the scars faded. 

Gratitude was next. I’d whisper, “I am so happy and thankful for clear skin and the perfect lotion to quench my parched face.” 

A key part of manifestation is to then let go of the wish and trust that the universe was taking care of it. The first time I “let go”, I had to pry my mental fingers off the manifestation, but I did manage to relinquish control and let it fly away into space.

A couple weeks or months later, Julie got a new job as a product manager for an online skincare company that focused on creating “powerful, personalized skincare formulas.” 

After her first day of orientation, she called me up and told me that a perk at her new job was the opportunity to gift a friend a lifetime1 supply of skincare products. 

“Since we talk so much about skincare, I knew you’d be the best person to give it to!”

I never dreamed there was a company out there giving away a lifetime supply of lotions, cleansers, sunscreens, lip balms and tiny acne patches. 

I thought back to our podcast on Dreamlining. I thought back to the nights where I laid in bed, visualizing a world where I had access to rich, creamy lotion and high quality cleanser. 

I thought, I wasted this on LOTION!

Nothing makes you feel like you dreamt a little too small when the universe hands you exactly what you asked for and you realize it’s unscented lotion. 

No shade to the universe, my skin looks amazing now.

I decided to chalk this up to a tester. The universe letting me know it was listening and possibly laughing at how easy I was to please. 

If I believed that the universe was giving me what I asked for, I knew I was going to start asking for a lot more than clear skin.

However, it was hard for me to dream big at first. Whenever I first tried to imagine a greater life for myself, I found myself coming up against my own limiting beliefs.

I thought back to the Dreamlining exercise I did with my sister, why did I keep struggling with painting a rich life for myself? 

I realized a big part of manifesting is being vulnerable and admitting that I have dreams that may seem unattainable to myself and to others. Bigger dreams than what other people in my family had in the past. Going past the pimples and acne scars to look inside me and see what my secret hopes and wishes I held in my heart.

The one that I came back to over and over again was the one that scared me. I wanted to write, but I was scared to try and fail publicly. 

I knew I had to push past this though. I laid in bed and focused on visualizing again.

When I closed my eyes, I saw myself at a dinner party that I’m hosting in my beautiful home. Somewhere where I can see the forest outside my floor to ceiling windows and a peek of the setting sun. I realized in my life, I’m not alone. I’m surrounded by supportive friends and family members. I imagine we’re gathered to celebrate my successful writing project. I’m filled with joy because the people in my life have also launched their own projects and everyone is creating something that they love. 

I put together this visualization before I took my writing class last October. Before I launched my Substack. Before I made friends who are writers, YouTubers, and different kinds of creators.

While I was practicing my manifestations, I also learned that manifesting big things didn’t just end with closing my eyes and imagining the things I wanted. I realized that if the universe was giving me the things I asked for, I had to be careful with my speech. 

Saying things like, “I don’t need the money” or “I don’t care if we get big” were negative manifestations. It was telling the universe that I was rejecting those things. 

So I stopped. I stopped saying I didn’t want things that I would love to have. I enjoy writing, but would I love it if I was paid to do this? Heck yes! Bring on the abundance. 

Another interesting thing happened. By admitting I wanted things bigger than myself, I found I had to be more open and vulnerable. People asked me all the time for what I want in my future, and I had to be honest because I didn’t want to curse myself with a negative manifestation. 

I do believe the universe conspired to help me. But being vulnerable and telling people my dreams allowed them to conspire to help me too. My newfound earnestness and enthusiasm attracted people who loved rooting for me. 

There’s so much more positivity around me than negativity and with that comes an abundance of opportunities. My vibes are so high that things come my way before I even realize I’m asking for them: job opportunities, writing opportunities, a free bagel at the airport Panera. 

During Write of Passage at the end of last year, one of the mentors had us write FutureMe emails to ourselves. FutureMe would then deliver it to us in six months. I received mine last week.

On November 1st, I had 20 subscribers to my Substack, was tweeting to probably the same amount of people, and knew nothing about two out of the three communities I’d end up working with in 2023. Making money this year wasn’t even on my radar. All I knew was that I could attract what I asked for, so I wanted to be intentional. Even writing this was an act of vulnerability, I worried for a minute that I’d receive this email and nothing in my life would’ve changed. But I realized it was better to dream big and fall short than to prevent myself from having hope in order to spare my future feelings.

I didn’t stop at my material goals, I challenged myself to be even more vulnerable and I shared with my friends during Thanksgiving that I was actively looking for my husband and that I wanted their help. Suddenly, they had friends to set me up with.

I opened up even more and wrote an essay about my search for a partner. I helped the universe by throwing in my own $1000. I hope by manifestation logic, the universe will help me pay for that too2.

Michelle Varghoose

Rearranged Marriage

For the past two years, my dating life has been dryer than the desert I call home. This was by design. For one of those years, I moved back home with my parents after losing my job. My goal that year was to sort out my life. The second year, I moved to the aforementioned desert town with my sister and have been focused on growing our podcast and writing …

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3 years ago · 58 likes · 47 comments · Michelle Varghoose

Admitting that I wanted to find a partner was a big step for me. I thought it was obvious, wouldn’t everyone assume that I was looking for someone? A few friends pointed out that since moving to the desert, it seemed as though I had also deserted the opportunity to meet an eligible partner. Moreover, I didn’t tell anyone that this was a priority in my life. I hadn’t even fully admitted it to myself because you know, vulnerability.

I was inspired though to write about how I was looking for a husband and that encouraged people to reach out to make introductions. 

I’ve started to feel so confident in my ability to attract things, that I’ve started telling people that I’m going to meet my husband soon. Some of my friends are a little confused by my confidence (which is a little rude), and I can see I lose a few of them when I start to explain how it’s cosmically written in the stars for me. 

All this to say, try manifesting. Think of something you want. Visualize yourself having it. Don’t try to control how you receive it or in what time period. Let the universe know you are ready to receive it. 

And I suggest dreaming big, because you deserve a lot more than a lifetime supply of lotion.

I thought back to this past weekend; I ran outside in the rain, I danced a little too close to my coughing friend, I sat next to the sniffling family on the plane home. I had to admit, I was sick.

I tried to ignore these symptoms during my back to back zoom meetings, but when the evening came, I found myself curled up on the sofa, ready for a nap. 

In the back of my mind, something nagged at me. 

I still have to write my essay for the week.

As I closed my eyes, I started planning another late night of writing so that I could hit my self imposed deadline. 

A lesson in self compassion was coming for me. 

In the last couple years, I’ve been exposed to the idea of self compassion, which differs from self love. I always felt as though I loved myself. Sure, I have little insecurities, but I’ve generally been happy with who I am. 

Self compassion is more about having empathy for myself. 

As I laid on my couch, tired and visibly sick, I turned to beat myself up. 

Why did I wait so long to write my essay? 

Why do I keep staying up to write these pieces in the middle of the night?

Deep down, I feared that missing my writing deadline would mean that everything I’ve worked towards would fall apart. Maybe I’d never write again. Maybe my writing group would kick me out. Maybe I hadn’t actually built a sustainable habit. 

I discovered self compassion during my sabbatical. In the infinite search to better myself, I was reading every self help book I could get my hands on. So when I noticed I was starting to become very critical of my sister, my mom, basically anyone who crossed my path, I knew I had an issue and figured there would be a book out there that could help me. 

To my surprise, my Google searches for books on criticizing others turned up the suggestion to read books on self compassion. Kristin Neff’s Self Compassion was one of the most popular books for this genre so I bought it on audible. This is when I realized the relationship between criticizing others and a lack of self compassion for myself. My own internal critic was projecting itself onto the people around me. I started to run through Neff’s exercises around self compassion and found so much inner peace when I learned to be kind to myself. 

Laying sick on my couch, I faced my inner critic once again. The person inside of me who was scared that if I missed my deadline, I was bound for failure. This inner critic had no faith in my ability to keep writing every week. 

Realizing I was stressing myself out, I knew I had to make a decision. Logically, I knew staying up late had already had a negative impact on my health, and doing so while I was sick was only going to slow down my ability to get better. 

A self compassion trick I like is pretending as though my problem is a friend’s problem. I imagined a friend telling me that they were sick, but wanted to ignore that so that they could get an essay out earlier. 

I can’t even imagine encouraging anyone to do that. I’d have empathy and tell them, “it’s ok, no one will even notice and what’s the point in continuing to suffer?” 

So I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night. I guess I wasn’t perfectly fine with the decision, as I still had dreams about writing this essay. Still, I woke up feeling well rested and motivated to write this piece. 

I’m happy I had the tools to recognize I needed rest and decided to lean into self compassion. And maybe I was a little careless when I was away this weekend, but I also forgive myself for enjoying life and spending too much time in the rain.

I saw another woman pop up with her curly haired baby seated on her hip. She held her hand to her eyes, as if she was looking for a ship, not a SUV in a sea of vehicles. Her little girl held her tiny hand up to her eyes as well. When her driver arrived, he took the carseat from her father who was lingering behind them and set it up for them in the backseat.

Staring out the window, I watched as one person after another was picked up by a loved one, friend or Uber driver. These intimate moments looped on for hours like an infinite film strip rolling one scene after another. 

I spotted an older man who lifted a suitcase into the trunk of his black van before turning to the young man next to him and giving him the most aggressive handshake I’ve witnessed. He maintained a huge grin as the handshake extended from seconds to minutes. I wondered if he was the man’s grandpa or Uber driver.

Trapped in airport purgatory, pushed to the back of baggage claim when I arrived too early for my flight today, I got lucky and found a metallic table facing the airport arrivals pickup area. I witnessed hundreds of tiny precious moments between loved ones, friends and Uber drivers as I sat there and pretended to work.

At one point, I looked away at the scenes playing out in front of me and back at my laptop that sat in front of me. This tiny metal gadget is the birthplace of so many of my own intimate relationships. Unlike the people hugging in front of me, I’ve never met the hundred something people I’ve connected with online.

I’m surprised by how moved I was by watching the “in real life” relationships of strangers. It made me miss the friends I’ve known for years, the ones I’ve seen in person and have known for over a decade.

My life has become so online these days. I’m in multiple communities where I chat with people across Discord, Circle, Twitter and it seems every month there’s a new app to connect with my online friends. 

Every week, I’m in Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting, staring sometimes at 10 or 15 faces, making jokes while everyone else laughs silently on mute. 

There’s no clumsiness with heavy suitcases or awkwardly long handshakes. The worst case situation online is extended silence. 

I’m planning to be offline this weekend as I travel for a friend’s wedding. I’m ready to embrace the people I’ve known for decades and spend time catching up and sharing our new philosophies on life. Kids will be screaming nearby and when we say goodbye, it’ll linger in the air as we separate, not cut off abruptly by a well timed “end meeting” click. 

What surprised me is how much I’m already missing my online friends.

As much as it sounds dystopian to sit in the middle of a desert and talk to people in tiny little video boxes all day, it’s been so wonderful to find like minded people online. I smile when I see my friends comments roll through on Substack, and I love getting a very intimate peek in people’s lives reading everyone’s pieces. 

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Every week I get to connect with people across the globe to talk about writing, but those conversations often turn to music, then technology and then sometimes death.

My online friends can be in Idaho or Milan, San Francisco or Lisbon, yet they can pop up on my screen at any moment for a chat.

All this to say, when I look back out into the endless loop of relationships streaming in front of me, I do miss the people I used to be able to hug and hold so easily. But I also appreciate the ones that are now in my life because of the internet, friends who are only a comment or DM away.

Maybe in the grand scheme of things, no matter how I meet these people, I can always hope to grow the kind of friendships where one day, I’ll find myself picking them up at the airport, meeting in real life, struggling to lift their suitcases into my trunk.

Turning to my friend smiling, I said, “I will never leave San Francisco.”

A couple years later, I looked out into the city skyline from the top of the Fairmont Hotel as the crowd of people who had been listening to the live music in the Crown Room with me streamed out the main doors. I was deep in my own thoughts when a stranger popped up next to me. 

“Why are you crying?” she asked, intruding into my introspective moment. 

I blinked back tears, not realizing that anyone had noticed me let alone saw that I had a couple tears running down my cheeks. A combination of too much red wine and the foggy cityscape had made me emotional. She was the first person I ever told my secret too. 

“I think I’m going to move out of San Francisco.” 

A few months later, I packed my bags and flew to Austin. When I landed, I blasted Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten into my empty apartment and danced around.

Drench yourself in words unspoken

Live your life with arms wide open

Today is where your book begins

The rest is still unwritten

The lyrics aligned so perfectly with my life at that moment that I felt the music in my bones, overtaking me with a rush of emotions. I knew big changes were happening in my life. My new job was the perfect next challenge to help me move up in my sales career. Austin was a city I had wanted to move to for years and I knew I was destined to build a community there. 

Five months later, none of that was true. Covid shutdown Austin and the rest of the world. By the time the year ended, I lost my job and moved back to San Francisco to live with my parents. 

That felt unexpected but it doesn’t compare to the fact that I now live in a small desert town. A place that I had no idea existed until the day my sister got an email from a clinic here asking if she’d be interested in interviewing. 

“We plan, God laughs,” has always been one of my favorite quotes.  

I think back on this phrase often, usually right when my life plans escape my tight grip, slipping through my fingers like a rogue balloon escaping into the sky.  

I’ve come to accept that I have no real control over my future. Yes, I can try to play the long game, assume success and hope for an amazing outcome, but I’ve learned that life is always ready to throw a curveball. I’ve let go of trying to make the perfect plan. 

People, though, have been curious to know what my plans for the future are. What are my goals? The subtext is often, “how do you plan on making money?”

I understand that, “I don’t know” can seem like a flippant, unfocused answer. It’s not specific, measurable, achievable, relevant or time bound. There is nothing S.M.A.R.T. about how I envision my future. 

Still, I’m happy and feel fulfilled in the work that I’m doing. With every unexpected life event, I’ve learned to lean into the unknown. I optimize to make today a good day and hope that I can make tomorrow a good one too. 

I enjoy writing and I would like to keep writing. If I can keep writing and money is coming in, that’s awesome. If more people find my essays and enjoy them, that’s even better. Ideally, I’ll get a little better with each piece I write too. 

Part of manifesting a good life is letting go of the details, letting go of the need to control the outcome.

I’m leaning into new experiences, joining different online communities and turning strangers into friends. I’m cultivating an openness for a future that I may enjoy, but don’t know exactly what that looks like yet. 

The art of writing itself has changed so much over time, how can I know what the future holds? 

200 years ago, writing meant literally putting pen to paper. I’m not sure how that turned into a book. Maybe a buddy with a printing press could churn out a handful of copies for you. 

A year ago, I was on a girls trip in Santa Fe, telling my friends, once again, that I wanted to start writing online. I was in the middle of a Masterclass marathon where I was attempting to watch the classes of all 22 writers in the course. I only got through about 4 when I decided I should take their advice, stop watching videos on writing and start telling my own stories. 

Today, I write essays on something called a Substack which I created a mere six months ago. I’m dangerously close to sending this out to 600 of you (598). That’s wild. I had no idea I would be here. 

In ten years, will I still be writing on Substack? Maybe. Or maybe I will be feeding my essays into a human shaped robot that translates my stories into little movies that it projects onto the ceiling. 

As we watch my little robot movies, I’ll tell my kids that people who wrote things used to want to be something called a “New York Times Bestselling Author” and that you had to be courted by one of a handful of publishing companies to have a chance at achieving that. 

Today, when people ask me about my future, my mind wanders to the infinite possibilities of tomorrow and I wonder if I can even come close to predicting the right reality. 

All I know is that today I like writing. If I write an essay every week, I’m hoping something good will happen. Something that makes me happy and lets me keep doing what I enjoy doing. 

As far as I’m concerned, everything else is still unwritten. 

Thank you for discussing '“the future” with me and for giving me this theme as inspiration for this essay!

This question was a game writer and director, Nora Ephron, used to play with her friends over her lifetime as a way to kill time when waiting for things like a dinner reservation. I’ve come across her anecdotes about this many times due to my unhealthy fascination with Nora Ephron. I’ve read her essays, devoured her biography, watched her commencement speech and scoured the internet for any snippet of interviews with her1. 

I like this question because it pushes me to think about what key things are part of my identity in any given moment. Over time, it’s interesting to see what words stay and which ones disappear.

If I had asked myself this question in 2020, unfortunately software sales woman would have been one of my five things. If I was being self aware, which I often was not, another word to describe me would’ve been anxious. I was about to lose my job and my main focus every day was fighting to keep it.

I didn’t think my job title mattered that much to me. Sales isn’t the type of career people are impressed with and almost no one ever wanted to hear me talk about it. But when I lost my job, I missed the title. Suddenly, a word that described me for years had become obsolete. The replacement word was unemployed. Losing my job was the sobering realization that a large chunk of my identity was tied to how I made money. 

Once I was no longer working, I found myself in Title Transition, an existential crisis. 

I knew I wanted to take time off work and vaguely wanted to take on creative projects, but I didn’t know what that meant for me. There weren’t any role models for this in my network.

I had a desire to be a writer, but I was never brave enough to publish anything online. My drafts would collect dust in my Google Drive folders as I would type something up and then be way to scared to look at it again. 

I wanted to call myself a podcaster, but when people asked me how much time I spent on it, I was embarrassed it wasn’t 40 hours a week aka the equivalent to a full time job. Not to mention it wasn’t making any money. 

I felt like I hadn’t earned those titles because I didn’t have any material success to point to. Subconsciously, I thought that was a requirement. 

If I didn’t have followers or dollars, what right did I have to co-opt those words for myself? 

The beauty of having time off work was that I had plenty of time to sit in my existential crisis. 

One thing I noticed after exiting the corporate world was that one of my five words was happy. Even though I didn’t have a job title and often questioned my purpose in life, I was happy. 

I enjoyed sitting on the sofa, cup of chestnut tea in my hand, simply thinking. I listened to podcasts and read tons of books. I used my free time to follow my interests and another word cropped up to describe me, learner. 

Consuming information was rewarding, but I still felt the calling to write and create. Taking a look at my ego, I realized that my problem wasn’t that I didn’t have material success, my lack of confidence was coming from a lack of action. 

So I shifted my focus to doing. I enrolled in a writing course and started publishing online. I started to value the time and energy I put into my podcast and stopped worrying about if I had enough success to earn a title. With each step I took, I started to feel more confident in the work I was doing. I was leaning into the things I enjoyed, and that alone gave me permission to start evolving my five words. 

As I sit here writing, my five things are writer, podcaster, friend, sister, daughter. 

I’m happy with these five things because the first two focus on my love of creating, which today includes writing essays and podcasting. The last three things focus on my relationship with others which is a huge priority for me right now. 

In Nora Ephron’s commencement speech at Wellesley College, she brought up her five things question again. She wrapped her story up with some pointed wisdom. 

Whatever those five things are for you today, they won’t make the list in ten years. Not that you still won’t be some of those things, but they won’t be the five most important things about you. 

Looking over my own evolution over the last three years, I see the truth in what she’s saying and find comfort in her words. I am always evolving and the best I can do is try to lean into the things that bring me joy and fulfillment today.