I’m a mom, a remote worker/leader, and a cycling instructor.
I was born in Boston but spent middle school and high school in the UK before returning stateside to go to UVA. I fell in love with indoor cycling in college and rediscovered it 5 years later after half a decade spent running Apple Retail stores, having a baby and leaving retail behind for tech startups.
My blog should be a library, not a publication, but until I get my Dewey Decimal system in order, you can checkout my best articles so far here:
This blog is about me, but it’s about you, too. You! Maybe not you you, but someone close to you. Or someone who used to be close to you who you’ve distanced yourself from. You aren’t me, but maybe you know me a little.
I started writing for me, now and then, and then thought of who it may be broadly applicable to after, succinctly outlined below:
Target audience: people who drink or smoke or exercise or eat or yell or scream a little too much. People on the edge, people in the shadows, people carrying the whole world around on their shoulders and resenting the world for it.
Target audience (v2): people who choose to smile even though they are hurting, but know somewhere deep down that they are faking it, or do fake it, or wonder how to fake it less.
It isn’t that you’re sad, you just aren’t happy. You’re empty. You’re busy. You’re doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results.
Mindlessness is the cause of the decade long funk I’ve succumbed to. How strange to be an adult and to wait for a signal that you’re doing it wrong.
I’ve done none of this life thing conventionally. I had a kid, learned to drive, bought a house, found my dream job, and fell in love...and then I started to see myself. But I believe it took things happening out of sequence to get there.
This is all, on the surface, too easy. I’m not a psychologist. My experience may not be broadly applicable. You might laugh at the naivety, the softness of my darkness, how it pales in comparison to what you’ve been through. I don’t mean to compare or prescribe, rather to learn from my journey in some way.
There are many paths to a fuller life. The one I’ve taken, largely accidentally/serendipitously, is not for all. Not because it’s hard or scary, but because it is just one of a million possible routes to fulfillment, to a life lived in.
The thoughts I’m sharing are largely free of labels. My identity is important and it isn’t. How would you read this if you thought I grew up in the hood, or started a venture capital firm, or was gay or straight or smart or dumb or some mixture of the above? Labels make me someone other than you, allowing you to distance yourself because it isn’t immediately applicable to you.
I’ve always felt off on an island, that there is no one out there quite like me, who feels how I feel and will understand the observations and struggles I share. I’ve realized though, the further I go, how normal and regular many parts of my existence and experience of the world are. I would never have realized this though without looking up, without people around me that help me look up.
If we went out drinking for a night, and you asked me to tell you how I got to where I am at today, this site is a collection of some of the things that I’d share, from 9pm at the bar until we watch the sun come up at 6a in a park somewhere. Everything else are the things I’d share between the hours of 9-5 about the future of work.
I’m talking to you, wherever you are. It’s a two way conversation. I’m talking to you in confidence. As a friend. This isn’t watered down. It can’t be. I feel my heart beating furiously as I write. Do you feel it beat as you read? It may get weird, or painful, or just too real this thing we’re doing here, but that’s kind of the point. To be a little less polite and a lot more direct. I hope that you engage completely. I hope that when the dark and twisty stuff happens, you react in some way. Then the sorrows I share aren’t mine, their ours. And the joy, too. It will only happen though if you take the leap with me, if you think and laugh and cry and respond and give into the awareness of a lived in life.
I hope that you connect.