Nobody gives sad girls podiums

I guess sad isn't really the word.  Apathetic. Disenchanted. Tender in a way that has occasionally bordered on disgust. Tired of witnessing the state of the world and then being told that the spiritually responsible thing to do is vibrate higher.

Any spiritual teacher will tell you that your thoughts shape your reality. Where attention goes, energy flows. What you focus on expands.

I believe all of that.

But I have also found myself wondering: when does reality get to be reality?

When do we get to put down the responsibility of turning every difficult thing into medicine long enough to admit that some things are devastating? That systems are failing. That there are seasons that are boring and lonely and disappointing. That sometimes you can believe deeply in the intelligence of life while simultaneously feeling very unimpressed with the experience of being alive inside of it.

And before anyone becomes concerned: no, this is not an emergency or cause for concern. I say that because anytime I have spoken publicly about apathy, depression, grief, tenderness, or simply feeling the extremity of this world, there has inevitably been someone who believes the appropriate response is to suggest medication, intervention, or concern for my safety.

I find that fascinating.

We live in an extraordinarily beautiful, confusing, miraculous and incredibly violent world, and somehow feeling all of it too deeply is treated as human error.

I don't desire to numb my ability to feel the world. I mean, sometimes I do, but I ultimately know it's just delaying the inevitable. What I really want right now is to learn how to remain here without abandoning myself because of what I feel. Lately, that has required a kind of honesty I haven't always been willing to offer to you all. And that's simply because nobody gives sad girls podiums.

We give podiums to the woman who has it figured out. The brave woman. The embodied woman. The woman with the framework. The woman who turned her breakdown into five steps. The woman who disappeared for six months and returned radiant, thin, wealthy, engaged, spiritually integrated, with a healed gut, ready to tell you that everything happened for a reason. (And then sell you a course on how you could achieve this too!!!).

I haven't had that kind of season. This is not a comeback share (Also, I have nothing to sell you). This is just my honest reality and truth:

This season of my life has been remarkably underwhelming. Nothing particularly cinematic has happened.  There has been no implosion. No deaths in the family. No dramatic encounters. Not even a situation-ship that triggered my attachment style. There has not been one event I can point to and say, there that's where it went to shit.

And yet it has been one of the most psychologically intense chapters of my life.

There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes when nothing is technically wrong and yet nothing is really right. There is nowhere to direct the discomfort. No villain. No emergency. Just you and the unknown.

At the end of 2025, I went back into my consulting and guidance work with perhaps more determination than ever before. Since leaving the Big Island in 2024, this felt like a huge realignment – I felt like I was finally back in action. I strategized. I repositioned. I refined. I stayed up into the late hours chasing creative high. I built frameworks. I stayed consistent. I thought about what people needed, what the market needed, what businesses needed, what my audience needed from me.

I was so ready!!! Or at least, I thought I was. And then something profoundly humbling happened:

Not very many people seemed to want what I was selling.

Of course there were great clients here and there. Dozens of discovery calls. Potent projects. Evidence that the work itself works. But between those moments? Crickets.

Literal stretches of weeks and months without inquiries. Clients ghosting. Readers replying to emails with gratitude for my words but never booking.  Some engagements ending before I thought they would. Things I believed were building momentum simply… didn't.

And I wish I could tell you I met all of this like some perfectly regulated embodied woman who immediately recognized that the universe was lovingly redirecting her. I did not. I pulled way back. Stopped trying. Stopped writing. And eventually even logged off Instagram.

I stared at the ceiling at night wondering what was wrong with me. I questioned whether I had become irrelevant. I questioned whether I'd misunderstood my own gifts. I questioned whether I had spent years developing a body of work no one actually wanted.

And perhaps most painfully, I questioned the story I had told myself about my own life.

Because I had believed that if I listened closely enough, worked honestly, followed my intuition, and devoted myself to the work I believed I was here to do, there would eventually be some kind of confirmation.

Not necessarily fame.

Not even extraordinary wealth.

But movement.

Some sort of evidence that said:

Yes. Keep going. 333. You're on the right path.

Instead, I kept arriving at silence. And silence is an extraordinarily confrontational teacher. You can project almost anything onto it.

Maybe you're failing.

Maybe you're early.

Maybe you're delusional.

Maybe you're being redirected.

Maybe you're supposed to persevere.

Maybe you're supposed to quit.

Maybe this is surrender.

Maybe this is self-sabotage.

Maybe you need another strategy.

Maybe you need to stop strategizing.

There were days I could make almost any spiritual philosophy support whichever answer I was hoping was true. Which was part of the problem because what I eventually realized within myself is that I have spent a lot of my life developing language around purpose.

Calling.

Legacy.

Vocation.

I have asked myself relentlessly whether I am fulfilling whatever it is I came here to fulfill.

Am I being useful?

Am I honoring what was given to me?

Am I creating something meaningful enough?

Am I becoming the prayer my ancestors prayed?

That last one has carried enormous weight for me.

It sounds beautiful and it is beautiful. But somewhere along the way that beauty became pressure. Purpose had become a performance metric. I wasn't simply trying to live my life anymore. I was trying to fulfill a prophecy. And it started to really exhaust me.

There was an astronomical amount of expectation sitting on top of my life force that I had mistaken for devotion. Only recently have I begun to understand that perhaps the deepest surrender being asked of me wasn't surrendering the outcome of my work. It was surrendering the idea that my work and my life constantly needed to justify themselves. That it needed to carry immense meaning in order to feel good. That every season needed to be productive. That every ending needed to immediately reveal what it had made room for. That every sacrifice needed a reward. That every act of letting go guaranteed something better would arrive right behind it. 

That one has been particularly painful. Because I really did believe that. Let it go and something greater will come.

Sometimes it does. And sometimes you let something go and there is just… space. For longer than you would prefer. No quick replacement. No shiny manifestation. No evidence that you made the correct decision. Just an empty chair where something used to sit (or laundry used to pile up on). And you learn whether you actually released it or whether, secretly, you had made a trade with God.

I'll give this up if you promise me something better.

That isn't surrender. That's negotiation. And I have done a lot of negotiating with God. With life. With my work. With my own desires. And I'm tired of it. So fucking tired.

So I started asking different questions. Literally just within the same few sleeps of writing this...

What happens if I stop treating my life like an emergency that needs to be fixed?

What happens if I stop organizing my choices around the imagined courtroom of everyone else's opinion?

What happens if I live at the pace that actually suits me?

What happens if I want what I want before I know whether it is strategic, scalable, impressive, socially appropriate or profitable?

What happens if intuition isn't something I consult after I've exhausted all reasonable options? What happens if it gets the first vote?

This sounds simple until you actually try it. Because so much of what we call choice is actually programming.

I have lived a fairly unconventional life. I have made many choices that were authentically mine. And still, if I look closely, I can see all the invisible places where I have calibrated myself around other people.

The rhythm that would seem responsible. The business model that would make sense. The version of success my peers would recognize. What my family might understand. What strangers on the internet could respect. How quickly something should happen. How much money should validate it. How hard I should be working. How happy I should feel. How certain I should sound before speaking.

We are constantly studying one another for instructions on how to be alive and then wondering why our own lives feel strangely unfamiliar. And that is what led to the experiment I'm in now:

If I genuinely prioritize my intuition, my desire, my timing, my process, and my way of choosing — what kind of life starts to be built?

I desire to know which parts of my life are actually mine and which parts I inherited without consent. That concept feels particularly alive to me while watching what is being exposed culturally. Take the global buzz on the Cornell fraternity members. Violence against women is nothing new. This is actually very old news, which is why this moment feels even more frustrating, tiresome, and almost annoying. Like, haven't we figured this out yet?!

I believe what we're watching is one of the biggest acts of unearthing around institution-based dependency. What gripped my attention about this movement is the bigger question exposure like this asks:

What happens when the systems we were taught to associate with legitimacy cannot guarantee the things we assumed legitimacy would provide?

Prestige.

Protection.

Authority.

Safety.

Truth.

We are taught very early to transfer enormous amounts of trust into these institutions.

Go to the right school. Earn the right degree. Know the right people. Receive permission from the right governing body. Then you will be legitimate. Then you will be safe. Then you will be allowed to speak. Then you will be qualified to know what you know.

We were taught we must pay tuition and in doing so lost our own intuition.

When I first began speaking about the new paradigm around 2021, particularly in business, I kept returning to the idea that our obsession with credentials and institutional validation would eventually begin to weaken.

Not to say that teachers are unnecessary or that training, mentorship, or mastery don't matter. They matter enormously. But there is a difference between learning from something and giving it sovereignty over your knowing.

There is a difference between education and permission. There is a difference between expertise and authority over another human being's inner life. And I think many of us are discovering how much authority we have unconsciously outsourced.

Not only to schools.

But to businesses.

Governments.

Industries.

Families.

Communities.

Algorithms.

Friends.

Lovers.

Coaches.

Consultants.

Guides.  (Yes, even my own work)

Every system carries programming about who you are allowed to be within it. Families do this with laser precision. Cultures do it. Industries do it. The internet might do it the fastest.

And eventually the questions become personal.

Who would you be without the reward structure?

Who would you become if nobody clapped?

What would you make if there were no market research?

Where would you live if nobody needed to understand why?

How slowly would you move if slowness wasn't interpreted as failure?

What would you stop forcing?

What would you admit that you want?

What have you called unrealistic simply because the current system doesn't know how to hold it yet?

Those questions have been swirling inside me without even a language until I sat down to write this. Because even my belief that something was fundamentally wrong with my life because I wasn't happier, more successful, more certain or further along was allegiance to a system. I had internalized an acceptable timeline and then I was silently punishing myself for failing to meet it.

Maybe nothing had gone wrong. Maybe some seasons are for tending an interior world that nobody else can see. Maybe some identities dissolve without immediately being replaced. Maybe there are periods when your external life becomes remarkably quiet because something internal is becoming impossible to ignore. Maybe we aren't always supposed to monetize the metamorphosis. Maybe we don't need to announce what the cocoon is offering while we're still inside it. Maybe there really is static between channel changes. And that is where I think I have been. In the static.

And maybe some of you are there too in your own ways. Actually, I know you are if you're still reading. Hi. I see you. It's ok. I wrote this for both of us.

What I know without a doubt is that we sit at the precipice of great change within our inner and outer world. Our value systems are shifting. Our relationship to work is shifting. Our relationship to institutions is shifting. Our relationship to nature, community, money, success, authority and even ambition is being unearthed.

And when the structures that once gave us the illusion of safety begin to reveal their limitations, of course it feels destabilizing. The old playbooks don't work particularly well anymore and the new instructions haven't been written.

So maybe this is the part where we stop waiting for instructions. Our safety cannot come exclusively from a credential. Our worth cannot be bestowed by an institution. Our knowing cannot perpetually require an external witness. Our life cannot be considered successful only when it resembles somebody else's evidence of success. Our worth cannot be measured by how many people hire us. There has to be something underneath all of that.

Something quieter. Older. More intimate.

Our knowing.

Our discernment.

Our relationship with Source.

Our truth.

Our authenticity.

Our unique coding.

Maybe a life well-lived isn't guaranteed by successfully locating the puzzle pieces you think you are missing.  Maybe the work is remembering you are whole as is – beyond all of the programming that told you otherwise. Maybe sovereignty is the slow recovery of everything you handed away because somebody convinced you they knew better. 

I don't believe suffering is automatically sacred or that every disappointment secretly contains a gift. Sometimes disappointment is simply disappointment. Sometimes it's information about what you want less of. Sometimes it makes good art. 

And perhaps this is why I needed the underwhelming year. My disappointment eventually showed me how much of my life I was still trying to earn. How much permission I was still seeking. How much I wanted the world to confirm that I had chosen correctly before I fully committed to choosing myself.

I don't want to live that way anymore. I want to become radically honest. I want to stop hiding. I want to start living out loud and at a pace that suits me. I want to let a desire exist before demanding that it produce something. I want to make beautiful things simple because I want them. I want to change my mind without creating a philosophical defense of why. I want to trust the seasons when I'm magnetic and trust the seasons when I'm invisible. I want to stop requiring every part of myself to become useful before I let her belong.

And yes, I still believe our realities are shaped by our beliefs. But I think I understand that it differently now. Because our beliefs don't emerge in a vacuum.

Our beliefs are shaped by families.

By institutions.

By capitalism.

By culture.

By trauma.

By religion.

By algorithms.

By whatever we were rewarded for becoming.

So perhaps the work isn't simply to “think better thoughts.” Perhaps it's to become curious about who taught you the thoughts you're thinking. Your reality may be shaped by your beliefs, but your beliefs may still be shaped by the program. And remember, sometimes there is static between channel changes.  I'm learning not to mistake the static for failure.

I trust my ability to move through dense seasons of confusion and underwhelm.  I trust my ability to outgrow the boxes I have kept myself in. And I also trust myself to lead my life with enough grace that what is untrue eventually becomes impossible to maintain.

And despite everything -

the disappointment,

the violence,

the absurdity,

the grief,

the uncertainty…

I still trust humanity.

Because maybe we're not here to figure it all out in one season in order to secure validation of our existence. Maybe we are all simply the prophecy in motion.

Yours in business and being,

Tahiti