Finding my way back to myself
I spent decades building a life that looked like success. Then everything broke open, and I had to figure out who I actually was. This is that story.
For much of my professional life, I thought I knew exactly where I was headed. I spent more than thirty years building a successful career in a high-pressure industry and assumed my path would continue in that direction. Like many ambitious professionals, I measured success through achievement, responsibility, and the opportunities that came with continued advancement. I fully expected that one day I would become a CEO in my field.
Then my husband died.
“Faced with the reality that life is both precious and finite, I began reexamining what mattered most to me and how I wanted to spend the years ahead.”
His loss changed far more than my personal life. It forced me to confront questions I had never stopped long enough to ask. What emerged from that reflection was the realization that the life I had been building no longer aligned with the life I wanted to live.
I no longer wanted the pace, pressure, and demands of climbing the corporate ladder. I wanted a life that left room for meaning, creativity, relationships, and the things that truly mattered to me. That realization eventually led me to step away from the career I had spent decades building and launch my first business.
Like many reinventions, entrepreneurship brought both freedom and challenges. Building something of my own required me to learn new skills, rethink old assumptions, and define success on my own terms. For a time, it felt as though I had successfully created a new chapter.
Then that business imploded.
As painful as that experience was, it ultimately became the catalyst for a deeper exploration. The questions I found myself asking weren’t simply about business strategy or career direction. They were questions about myself.
- Why did certain things seem to require so much more effort than they appeared to require for others?
- Why could I thrive in some situations and struggle intensely in others?
- Why did solutions that worked beautifully in one area of my life completely fail in another?
Those questions eventually led to a late-life AuDHD diagnosis.
The diagnosis brought clarity, but it did not bring a roadmap. While there were resources focused on autism, ADHD, trauma, nervous system regulation, productivity, and personal growth, I struggled to find practical guidance for understanding how all of those elements interacted within a single human being trying to build a sustainable life.
What began as a search for answers gradually became a process. I started paying attention to patterns. I mapped the places where different needs, strengths, and traits supported one another, and the places where they seemed to pull in opposite directions. I experimented with accommodations, routines, environments, and ways of working. I became fascinated by the difference between what looked good in theory and what actually worked in practice.
Over time, I realized I wasn’t simply gathering insights. I was building a framework.
The more I refined it, the more I discovered that many of the struggles I had carried for years were not personal failures. They were often the result of competing needs that had never been recognized, understood, or accommodated. When those contradictions became visible, it became possible to work with them rather than against them.
“Simple to say does not mean easy to do. I don’t believe the goal is to create an easy life. I believe the goal is to create a life that works for you.”
Years later, that process continues to shape my life. Things that once felt overwhelming now feel manageable. Not because life has become easier, but because I understand myself more clearly than I ever have before.
Today, my work brings together everything I have learned through my professional experience, personal losses, entrepreneurship, late diagnosis, research, writing, and ongoing experimentation.
Through programs, writing, speaking, creative exploration, and conversation, I help people better understand themselves so they can build lives that reflect who they truly are rather than who they believe they should be.
At its core, my work is about possibility. It is about learning to see ourselves clearly. It is about understanding our wiring rather than fighting it. And it is about creating lives that fit us, even when those lives look different from what others expect.
If you’ve found your way here, there is a good chance you are asking some of the same questions that once led me to this work.
If so, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
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