You are not where you thought you’d be by now.

Maybe the dream you had for your life ended, or maybe the harder version is true and you can’t even point to a dream at all. You just know that the thing you are doing every day is not it, and you can’t say what it would even be if someone put a pen in your hand and asked you to write it down.

So you keep going. You keep waking up to put your “I’m a productive member of society” outfit and relying on your espresso for less depresso. And you’re really good at it, which is part of the problem, because being good at something is a very effective way to stay in it long past the point where it fits you.

You’re not playing small because you lack ambition. You have plenty of ambition… You play small because making a bold move requires you to risk the thing you’re sure of for a thing you can’t see yet, and your whole nervous system has decided that is a bad trade…

And chances are, you’re hard on yourself about ALL of it. You’re harder on yourself than you would ever be toward a friend or loved one in the same position. You call yourself lazy when you’re simply exhausted. You call yourself ungrateful when you are rightfully starving for something different, something better. You take the fact that you haven’t figured it out yet, and you turn it into evidence that something is wrong with you specifically. That last one is the worst… Because it’s not like everyone else got an instruction manual, and you missed out because you skipped the meeting.

I want to give you a new perspective on all of this, because the lens you’re using at present is likely making everything worse.

Your life is not stuck.

Stuck implies there is no door. Stuck implies that you’ve looked at every exit and found them all sealed. That’s not what is happening to you. There is a door, and walking through it would be highly uncomfortable, and somewhere along the way, you started treating uncomfortable and impossible as the same word. They’re not.

A locked room and a room you are afraid to leave look identical from the inside.

If you believe you’re stuck, you wait. You wait for the market to change, for the kids to get older, for the savings to hit some number that will finally feel safe, for clarity that is supposed to arrive one morning fully formed and tell you exactly what to do.

But if the real problem is that the fix is uncomfortable, then the waiting doesn’t equal patience. Waiting, in this case, is avoidance. And avoidance bills you slowly, and never sends the invoice.

The muscle that pictures alternatives, the one that lets a person daydream their way toward a real decision, atrophies when you stop using it. Psychologists who study this call it episodic future thinking, the brain's capacity to simulate a life that doesn’t exist yet, and the research is clear that it weakens under prolonged stress and low mood. Those are the exact conditions a misaligned life produces. At first, you choose not to imagine the other life because it hurts to want something you’re not reaching for. But eventually, you find that you can’t really picture it anymore, even when you try your hardest. The screen goes blank. And a blank screen feels exactly like having no options, which sends you right back to, “I guess I am just stuck”, which is the lie that started that whole loop in the first place.

That’s the piece I want you to take away the most… The stuck feeling you have isn’t proof that there’s nothing else for you. It’s just proof of how long you’ve gone without letting yourself look or find out.

Now, I’m not going to tell you to blow up a life you’ve spent years building because a stranger on the internet decided discomfort is romantic. Most of the writing aimed at women who feel the way you feel does exactly that, and honestly… That is useless advice because it skips the actual problem. You clearly suspect that something is off, you’ve just lost the permission to take that suspicion seriously and to sit with it long enough to do something about it.

You are allowed to find out. As simple as it sounds, that really is the first move. Not a resignation letter or a five-year plan. Just the smaller, very honest act of letting yourself name where you actually are without flinching, and admitting the reason you haven’t moved isn’t that you can’t, but that moving would ask something of you that staying put doesn’t.

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This feeling, the one I’ve been describing, has a name and a place. It’s the first stage of a much longer process, the one where you know something needs to change and you don’t yet have the language for it or the nerve to choose differently. It’s a recognizable point on a map, and the reason it feels so disorienting is that everyone around you is just letting you believe this is who you are now.

It’s not who you are. It’s where you are.

The two are not the same, and the difference is everything.

If you want to know where you actually are on that map, I built a short diagnostic that locates it. It will tell you the stage you’re in right now, what it’s costing you to stay there, and what the next honest move looks like. Click the button below.

The Mid-Becoming Roadmap Diagnostic

If this article resonated, send it to the woman you thought of while you were reading it. She is probably telling herself she is stuck, too.

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I used to buy into the myth of the clean break because I desperately wanted the simplicity it promised. I spent hours watching YouTube videos and scrolling through feeds filled with lifestyle influencers that were excited to report about their life post-quitting their 9-5 jobs, filming themselves in sunlit coffee shops drinking a matcha while casually explaining how they started making $10k a month the moment they walked away. It is a sexy narrative for sure. And when I made the decision to rebuild my life, I believed my story would be similar… That I would simply make a pivot, turn in my resignation, cross a clear border, and be happily settled on the other side.

But the actual process of change is deeply disorienting. During the early stages of trying to rebuild my life, I spent most of my time feeling completely lost, delusional, and quite literally insane. The most frustrating and exhausting part of my own journey wasn’t a lack of information; it was the crazy, maddening gap between my logic and my actual behavior. I could recognize that my life was so deeply misaligned on a conceptual level, yet my body would continue to default to the same self-sabotaging routines anyway. The harder I fought, the more my own mind was bringing me back to the familiar baseline I was desperate to escape.

I had all the internal insight in the world, but I quickly realized that awareness alone will not change your daily habits. I couldn’t interrupt a subconscious loop until I was willing to step back and map out the true shape of it.

Which is the exact reason I ended up building this framework in the first place. When I was deep in those trenches, I couldn’t find a single resource that spoke to the actual psychological friction I was experiencing. Everything available was either a toxic-positivity pep talk telling me to just manifest a shift or a generic checklist. Neither of those did a single thing to stop me from sliding right back into my old patterns. I built this transition map out of sheer survival because I needed a way to locate my exact coordinates and prove to myself that I wasn't actually losing my mind, but rather navigating a natural path of human unlearning.

You cannot fix an identity crisis with a productivity life-hack, just like you cannot stabilize a new career pivot using the old people-pleasing tools that your nervous system is used to… Looking back at my own journey, I can see that breaking away from an old life always happens in five specific stages, and each one requires a completely different approach if you actually want to make the change stick.

Stage 1: Did I Build the Wrong Life?

This was a time in my life where I had to look closely at the reality I had spent years constructing and admit that I had successfully crafted a life I never actually chose for myself. I had built an entire existence based on external validation, keeping my family proud, and proving that I could be deeply responsible. On paper, I looked highly successful, but on the inside, I felt completely empty. I was trapped in a painful paradox where I was forcing myself to expend all my daily energy just to maintain a cage I had built with my own hands.

Stage 2: Am I Getting in My Own Way?

When I started to make changes in my life, setting hard boundaries at work, starting to say no, and taking steps toward my entrepreneurial journey, my subconscious mind would panic and pull me in the opposite direction. What I did not understand at the time was that every pattern we carry was originally built to keep us safe. The perfectionism, the people-pleasing, the hiding, all of it traces back to a younger version of us who needed those behaviors to survive her specific circumstances.

The nervous system does not distinguish between actual danger and the discomfort of changing your life. It responds to both by pulling you back to what it knows. And a familiar, painful reality will always feel safer to your body than an unfamiliar, aligned one, no matter how clearly your mind can see what needs to change.

It took me a long time to understand any of that. For a while, I just knew that I kept ending up back at square one, and I could not explain why. Eventually, I could name the patterns, trace them, and see exactly what was happening. And I still repeated them. That is when I understood that naming something and interrupting it are two completely different skills.

The Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook exists because of this specific season. It is the seven-day system I wish I had back then, built to help you interrupt the automatic loop, not just identify it.

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Stage 3: Who Am I, Really?

For decades, I performed a highly capable, completely reliable version of myself to earn love and approval… Until my true identity was entirely buried underneath my achievements. I spent years being the most capable person in every room and allowed that to become “my personality”. I eventually had to face the reality that I was just playing a character in a life that made everyone else proud, trading who I actually was for simply being useful. When I finally chose to set down that heavy productivity armor and stop forcing myself to keep it all together, I thought I would find peace. Instead, I landed in a spooky and uncomfortable blank slate where I had to figure out who I actually was when I wasn’t actively producing something to justify my existence.

Stage 4: I’m Ready to Bet on Myself.

Actually taking a real, definitive risk (whether that meant making a massive career switch, enforcing a boundary, or walking away from stability) activated an immediate, very real physiological panic in my body. I realized that rebuilding authentic self-trust required me to develop a terrifyingly high tolerance for visceral discomfort. By discomfort, I mean choosing to let myself be misunderstood by people who preferred my compliance over my growth.

But tolerating relational friction is just the initial barrier; true self-trust is built on something more than enduring uncomfortable moments. I spent far too long waiting for certainty or a sudden wave of confidence before I was willing to make a move, but I now know that clarity never reveals itself through analysis. It reveals itself through action. Rebuilding trust required me to stop looking for a guarantee and start building evidence… Ready or NOT.

Every time I choose to follow through on what I actually want instead of abandoning my priorities, I feed my mind tangible proof that my commitments to myself are non-negotiable. You don't rebuild self-trust by executing a flawless, linear plan, but by showing your nervous system that you can handle the mess, navigate the fear of change, and remain firmly on your own side even when things go completely sideways.

Stage 5: Building the Life I Want.

Over time, I’ve learned that building a more aligned life is a meticulous, daily choice to design an environment, a schedule, and an energy that I actually want to exist in. It takes effort because this sort of practical design runs completely contrary to everything we are conditioned to operate in, and even worse: to strive for.

We are taught to praise hustle culture, to measure our entire worth by how hyper-productive we can be, and to keep ourselves in a state of constant, exhausting overstimulation. When I made the decision to stop running that race and began protecting my daily space, the sudden drop in stimulation was unsettling… It was a physical withdrawal. Sustaining a calm, chosen reality turned out to require just as much intentional work as breaking away from my old life.

Beyond Awareness

Learning to recognize which season I was standing in was a massive turning point for me. It helped me wrap my head around what was going on. But as I always say: Awareness can only take you so far.

I am still actively working through these stages every single day. I am right here in the thick of my own process of becoming who I am meant to be and building the life I actually desire—which is exactly where the name Mid-Becoming comes from.

Along this journey, I’ve picked up a lot of practical tools and learned A TON of hard lessons. I created Mid-Becoming to have a dedicated place to log these tools, build on them, refine them, and make them clearer as I live them out. I am sharing everything I've learned along the way with you to help speed your own process along, make you feel a little less alone, and give you a concrete framework to wrap your head around when everything feels completely chaotic.

Moving forward, you’ll notice a live map tracker attached to the bottom of these weekly essays to give you a clear look at what I am currently developing and testing behind the scenes. Right now, the core philosophy for Stage 1 is actively unfolding through our ongoing weekly essays, and the complete framework for Stage 2 is fully live and operational via the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook.

The remaining seasons are still inside the lab, where I am building out the tools, trackers, and style-specific scripts we need to navigate the rest of this journey without constantly defaulting to our old routines.

Until next Thursday, take care of yourself in whichever season you happen to be standing in right now.

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I downloaded the Substack app three times before I published my first article.

The first time, I opened it, got frustrated by the fact that articles were “posts” and “notes” were something entirely different. My plan hadn’t taken note sinto account, so I told myself I wasn’t ready and deleted the app within the hour. I knew what I wanted to write, but what I was capable of producing that day wasn’t going to live up to the version in my head. The second time, I got further. I wrote about four paragraphs, read them back, decided they weren’t good enough, and deleted the app again. The third time, I kept it.

I had been sitting on the idea of this publication for months, and I was tired of being the reason it did not exist yet.

This isn’t a story about finding courage. It’s a story about finally recognizing what I had been doing for years and deciding I was done letting it cost me things that mattered.

What I called it for a long time

I called that cycle perfectionism, and I said it the way people say it when they mean it as a compliment: “I have high standards”, “I care about quality”, “I don’t put my name on something unless it is ready”.

What I refused to be honest about or say out lout was that nothing ever felt ready. Ready was a moving target I had been chasing for two years across an all-natural body scrub business, a YouTube automation channel, a published book that flopped, and half a dozen other ventures that took me two to three times longer than they should have because I wouldn’t allow myself to launch anything that still had rough edges.

None of those business pursuits were abandoned. I finished all of them eventually. Although I have done enough healing to feel proud of myself for bringing some of those business ideas to life, “finished eventually” is still its own kind of loss. I spent a very long time watching the version of my life that I actually want fade further into the distance while I reworded manuscripts, social media captions, thumbnails, and sales copy that were all fine to begin with.

What I was actually doing

Here is what I understand now that I didn’t then:

It looks like high standards from the outside, and it feels like high standards from the inside. But what it’s actually doing is keeping your work, and by extension you, safely out of reach of judgment.

You cannot fail at something you have not finished.

You cannot be criticized for something you have not published.

You cannot find out that what you built isn’t “good enough” if you never let it leave your hands.

I never had a quality problem. I had a safety problem. And the standard I was holding my work to had very little (or nothing) to do with the actual work. It was always about controlling the moment the world had a chance to weigh in on whether I would be seen as enough… Whether I was worthy.

I spent two years calling that high standards. It was self-sabotage. Specifically, it was the most socially acceptable form of self-sabotage available. It lets you feel productive, disciplined, and serious while you are actively preventing yourself from moving forward.

What changed my perspective

After crashing out post corporate life, my partner and I started going to entrepreneurship meetups and business masterminds. We started asking questions, learning, and researching. We put ourselves in the kind of rooms where people talk about big ideas, money, momentum, and moving fast.

There was A LOT that I gained from this chapter in my life. Truly. But, there was something I kept hearing these people say when they were talking about how they found success and changed their lives for the better: success loves speed.

I know you’re probably thinking “what does that have to do with anything”.

Stick with me.

When I first heard that, I remember thinking, “Yeah, okay, but speed is messy and reckless.” I couldn’t understand how some of these seemingly intelligent, savvy, and meticulous individuals were promoting doing things quickly and without a plan. But that’s not what they meant… It’s about the willingness to put something into the world before it feels ready, gather real information about what does and doesn’t work, and adjust from there instead of adjusting endlessly in a vacuum where literally nothing is at stake because nothing has been released.

The person willing to put something out and gather real data has leverage that the person perfecting their draft at home doesn't. That's what productive actually looks like.

They called it failing fast.

I started calling it failing forward.

I figured, as long as I’m failing forward, at least I am not standing still or going backwards like I had been. That reframe didn’t fix everything, but it unlocked something for me that I hadn’t been able to see on my own…

I finally realized I adopted the belief that getting things right before they’re seen is the responsible thing to do. Sometimes it is. But most of the time, it’s just fear with a productivity costume on.

What it actually costs

The Substack delay cost me a few months. Months of ideas that I never allowed myself to flesh out, readers I did not reach, and a publication that existed fully formed in my head while I convinced myself I didn’t have what it took to succeed yet.

I’m not telling you this to shed light on my regret, or anything similar. I am telling you this because the cost of perfectionism is seldom visible in the moment. It shows up over time, and you only start to feel it in the gap between what you are capable of and what you are actually putting into the world.

And if you are reading this, there is a good chance you know exactly what I am talking about. You probably have a list somewhere (physical or mental) of things you were going to start once you felt ready, once the timing was right, or once the version in your head matched what you were capable of producing. You probably have something sitting in a draft right now that is finished enough but “not quite ready”.

That is your self-sabotage pattern keeping you exactly where it needs you to be.

What comes next

If you don’t know your specific self-sabotage style yet, start there. The free quiz takes three minutes. It identifies your pattern, what it is protecting you from, and what tends to activate it.

Take it here.

The Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook is live today. The Perfectionist is one of six self-sabotage styles covered in it, and of all six, this is the one I am most personally invested in. It is one of my two main patterns. I built this section knowing exactly what it costs to sit inside it.

Perfectionism will cost you years if you let it. Trust me, I would know.

The workbook is a 7-day system built around the specific moment your pattern takes over, before the spiral, before the shame, before you end up back at the beginning with another half-finished thing and a very reasonable explanation for why it is not ready yet.

Get it here.

Forward this to the woman in your life who has been getting ready to start something for longer than she wants to admit.

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The last day I danced, I was 17. I walked out of the studio after teaching my last class of the week, got in my car, and that was it. I didn’t take a moment to walk around the studio, look at the mirrors one last time, or try to remember the feeling of the marley floor against my feet… I just left.

When people asked what happened to dance, I told them it was just a hobby. I said it so many times it started to feel true.

It wasn’t true.

Dance was the first thing that was mine. It was mine in the way that had nothing to do with what it looked like from the outside. Whether people thought I was good or not didn't matter. If I won, great. If I didn't, that was fine. When I was inside it, I wasn't performing for anyone. I was just a kid who loved to move.

I walked away from the first version of myself who had that. And I told the story so cleanly, so convincingly, that I didn’t even notice I was grieving.

Inner child healing gets talked about like it’s a nurturing exercise.

Go back.

Hold her.

Tell her she’s safe now.

And that’s not wrong, it’s just incomplete. The part most people skip entirely is grief. It’s the sort of grief that requires you to admit that what you left behind to become acceptable was real, yours, and is now gone in the form you once had it.

Those are two completely different acts. Most inner child content collapses them into one. That’s why smart, self-aware women can spend years doing “the work” and still feel like nothing is actually moving.

The high achiever’s version of the inner child wound

Most inner child content out there talks about neglect or emotional unavailability in the obvious sense. For example, a parent who wasn’t present or a childhood that was visibly difficult. And if that’s your story, I don’t want to discredit that. That is a real thing, and it matters.

But there’s another version that doesn’t get named as often, that lives in the high-achieving woman who had a good childhood by every external measure. These are the girls like me who were praised, had parents (or a parent) who cared, and were celebrated.

Girls who were celebrated for the “right things”.

For the grades.

For being responsible.

For not being a problem.

For making the adults around her feel impressed or proud.

For being the most advanced person in every room she walked into.

These girls learned that being seen as capable was the safest way to be loved. Of course, no one said that out loud. But it’s not hard to see what got the applause and what didn’t.

Joy without utility didn’t get me any applause. Dance, when it stopped serving my resume (or stopped being a productive after-school activity), stopped getting the applause. Curiosity that didn’t lead somewhere practical didn’t get the applause.

Being excellent, effective, and someone everyone could count on got me the applause. So I became those things at 10, 16, 20, and so on… And somewhere in there, the version of me that just loved things for the sake of loving them got smaller and quieter until I noticed she was gone.

The inner child wound for the high achiever isn't the absence of love. It's love with conditions so embedded you never even clocked them as conditions.

What inner child healing is and isn’t

In my opinion, most of what gets called inner child work is just sophisticated avoidance. Visualization exercises, journaling with impressive self-awareness, and therapy sessions where you articulate exactly what happened and walk out feeling like you handled it... Those things aren’t wrong. They’re just not the same as grieving. And for high achievers, especially, understanding becomes the easiest way out.

I did this for a LONG time. I figured, if I can analyze it, I still have control over it.

I eventually did find my way back into a dance studio years after I walked out of the last one. 12 years later.

After gathering the courage to walk in and wave “hi” to the instructor, I quickly made my way to the bathroom, where I had a whole river of tears flowing down my face. I had finally run out of ways to outsmart the fact that I had called the first thing I ever loved a “hobby” because that was easier than admitting I abandoned her (my younger self) before anyone asked me to.

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Little Aliyah. Circa 2001.

The three things that actually move the needle

I know better than to try and give a “five-step plan” to a high achiever… We both know you’ll immediately try to complete it, and that defeats the purpose.

Instead, I’ll leave you with three places I think this work actually lives.

Grief. Let yourself be sad about what you put down. The inner child is not healed by being analyzed. She is healed by being felt. There is a difference between understanding that you abandoned something you enjoyed and actually letting yourself miss it. One is data. The other is the door.

Noticing what you call a hobby. Right now, today, what in your life are you calling a hobby that is actually a need? What are you doing only when everything else is handled, only when you’ve earned the time, only when it doesn’t cost anything or ask anything of anyone? That thing. That’s where she is.

Doing one thing that has no use. Find the thing you keep putting last because it doesn't produce anything. Don’t think about outcomes, ROI, or even the better version of yourself waiting on the other side. Just think about the thing you want to do simply because you want to do it. I’m sure you already know what it is…

Still becoming

I’m still looking for her, by the way. I’m roughly five years into my journey. I’ve tried so many things to find her: painting birdhouses, going to Disney World as an adult, participating in petting zoos that are clearly for children at the local farmers market, journaling, guided meditations… You name it, I’ve probably done it.

All of these things circle back to the same thing: to get back to the feeling I had before I decided I was too old or too serious to honor my inner child.

I haven’t fully found my way back yet. But I sure stopped calling dance a hobby.

That’s where it started for me. And if you’re reading this, you already know what you left behind.

Go find her.

Here’s Where to Go Next

If this article brought something specific to the surface, that specificity is worth following. The Self-Sabotage Style Quiz takes the patterns your inner child built and names exactly how they’re showing up in your life right now, in the moments before you quit, shrink, or talk yourself out of something that matters.

It takes about 3 minutes, and it’s free. → Take the quiz here.

If you want to keep going with this work, this essay goes deeper into the specific messages that shaped what got buried and why.

→ The Things You Learned Before You Had Words for Them

Know someone who has been doing the work for years and still feels like nothing is actually moving? Send her this one.

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I used to plan vacations for a living.

Not my own vacations. Other people’s. I was a Personal Vacation Planner for a while, which sounds glamorous until you understand what it actually meant. It meant I was chained to a phone from the moment I logged on, terrified that if I stepped away for twenty minutes, I’d miss the sale that would make my month. I had access to two free cruises a year and could never take them. You couldn’t go during high season — January through April was when everyone booked. You couldn’t go in the slow months because slow months meant slow commission, and you were already behind. That left summer, where you competed with everyone else for the same narrow window, and if you were young and childless like me, you went to the back of the line.

I used to sprint through doctor’s appointments and dental visits so I could get back to the phone faster. And I would apologize to guests for the delay.

I would apologize for taking care of myself.

That was when I started to understand that I didn’t just dislike my job. I had started to LOATHE the entire system… The logic that said your time belongs to whoever is paying for it, that your health is an inconvenience, and that the appropriate response to needing a dental cleaning is to apologize to a stranger for being a human being, started to feel backwards.

My partner felt it too. And so we started watching YouTube videos. We watched so many videos of people who quit their jobs and moved abroad, people making money online, people homesteading, off-grid, living completely outside the architecture we had been handed.

I remember telling my mom I was thinking of quitting. I remember lying.

I told her I had been applying to jobs in Higher Ed and nonprofits and hadn’t been able to land anything. What I didn’t tell her was that I had already lined up a bartending job. I knew she wouldn’t understand it. I needed her to see me as someone who had tried the responsible thing and been failed by it, not someone who had chosen to walk away from a “respectable” salary toward a bar shift.

She took pity on me, as I knew she would. She asked, “So what will you do?” in the way that mothers ask questions they’re not sure they want answered.

When I finally told her about the restaurant job, she went quiet. She wasn’t angry, but she was confused. She kept saying “okay, well I hope you know what you’re doing” over and over, desperately trying to convince herself everything would be fine.

Then I told her I was giving acting a real shot, and the bartending job was the side gig. I finally worked up the courage to tell her this was what I had actually wanted for years and never uttered the words out loud. She followed that with:

Not: I know this is hard, and you’re making sacrifices for something that matters to you.

Not: I see what you’re building even if I don’t understand it yet.

Just: “I don’t know why you put yourself through this stress.”

And as much as it hurt me, I understood her. I really did. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was operating from the same logic many of us have been trained in: the one that says security is the goal and that suffering in a stable job is smarter than risking everything on something you love.

She had watched me be responsible my whole life. And now I was refusing to be.

That’s hard to watch when you’ve built your pride around someone’s achievement.

While all of this was happening, my partner and I were spending thousands of dollars on education.

Mentorships on fix-and-flip real estate. Courses on building LLCs and using business credit. How to leverage other people’s money to become an investor. YouTube automation and video production.

We were excited. The way you get excited when you realize the game you’ve been playing has other rules nobody told you about, because the people around you didn’t know either.

So we started sending videos to friends after hangouts. We gave some friends access to online courses that cost us thousands of dollars for FREE. We sent step-by-step tutorials, YouTube shorts, quick explanations of concepts… Anything that people seemed remotely interested in, we were happy to share. Here’s what we were met with most of the time:

“Is this even legal?”

“Are you sure you guys know what you’re doing?”

“Y’all are wild.”

And the quiet chuckles. The eye rolls. The looks that said: Who do you guys think you are?

Meanwhile, my partner had also quit corporate, and we were both working at the same restaurant and throwing everything we had at a life that looked, from the outside, like an insane unraveling.

Here’s what happens when you start to think differently:

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

My grandmother has played the lottery for nearly forty years. There is a running family joke (a warm one, said with love) about the day she wins and retires us all. My mom repeats it sometimes: “Hopefully, grandma hits it and all of our problems will be solved.”

I used to laugh at that. Now I hear it differently.

I hear: I am waiting for something outside myself to change my life.

I hear: I don’t believe my own effort is enough to get me out.

I hear a woman I love deeply, who has worked hard her entire life, who has been handed a story about how money works and has never been given another one.

I’m not angry at it. I’m heartbroken by it.

And when I started seeing these things — really seeing them — the conversations that used to feel normal started to feel like they were pulling me in the opposite direction. Friends running their credit cards for experiences they can’t afford. Co-workers talking about spending their entire month’s check on Beyoncé concert tickets. Family members taking on car payments for cars that would lose half their value as soon as they drive them off the lot. The ordinary consumer rhythms of people who haven’t questioned them yet.

I didn’t feel superior. I felt lonely.

These were my people, and we were starting to speak different languages.

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When you stop agreeing and start making moves that say “I think there is another way”, you aren’t just changing your life, but you’re also questioning theirs (without meaning to).

That’s uncomfortable. And people respond to discomfort in different ways. Some respond with curiosity. Most respond with skepticism. Some respond by slowly pulling away.

None of that makes them bad people. It simply makes them human beings protecting a story that has kept them safe for a long time. The hard part, though, is the part they don’t put on the inspirational posters: you have to let some of those relationships change anyway.

I’m not on the other side of this.

My partner and I sold our house to fund the next chapter. We converted a two-car garage at my mom’s house into our living space. We are not rich. Most people who knew us five years ago probably think we are still out here floundering with no immediate signs of progress.

And many of our relationships have shifted. Some of them in ways I didn’t expect, and some I still grieve a little. The loneliness is real. You know that saying about “being lonely at the top”? It makes so much sense to me now, even though I’m nowhere near the top of anything. I can just see how it happens.

But here’s what I also have:

A partner who is fully in it with me.

New relationships with people who are boldly betting on themselves and building something honest in their lives.

The specific freedom that comes from making decisions that are actually ours.

And my mom, who still doesn’t fully understand us, but who now lives thirty feet away from us and lets us use her washer/dryer without making it weird.

That’s its own kind of love. I’m learning to take it in the form it comes.

Still mid-becoming. Still in it.

The Pattern Underneath This Story

The pattern underneath this story (the one that made me apologize for going to the dentist, the one that made me lie to my mom to buy time, the one that made me need everyone’s approval before I could move) has a name.

The Self-Sabotage Style Quiz will show you yours. It takes 3 minutes, and it’s free. If this post hit close to home, it’s worth knowing what pattern is underneath it.

→ Take the free quiz here

The Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook takes that pattern further. It’s a 7-day system built around the specific moment it takes over, before the apology, before the lie to buy time, before you shrink back down to the size everyone was used to. It’s live now.

If this article resonated with you, please share it with the woman in your life who is making big moves and getting small reactions.

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In my experience, shadow work doesn’t find people randomly. It’s showing up because there is something underneath the surface that is ready to be looked at, and that “something” is worth looking into.

What the shadow actually is

Carl Jung, the psychologist who developed this concept, described the shadow as the unconscious part of your personality. The hidden side. This includes the parts of you that got pushed underground because, at some point, they became inconvenient.

Here is the simplest way I can explain it:

When you were growing up, you figured out which version of yourself got love and which version of yourself caused problems. For many of us, we learned quickly how to be easier to deal with, more impressive, more agreeable, or even invisible (whatever your specific environment required).

The parts of you that didn’t fit that version had to go. But they never disappeared; they just went dormant in the background of who you are. That background version of you is the shadow. And shadow work is the process of finally turning around to face it.

No one does this intentionally… Your shadow self got there because you were a child trying to figure out how to stay loved, safe, and acceptable in the environment you were born into. And you adapted as we all do. Brilliantly, may I add!

The problem is that you outgrew the environment that created these adaptations.

Shadow work in practice

Shadow work is the practice of going back for the parts of yourself you left behind.

Now, that doesn’t mean you need to relive everything that hurt you. And as tempting as it may be, this isn’t the art of assigning blame to the people who shaped you. The “work” in shadow work just involves getting honest about what you buried, why you buried it, and what it has been costing you to keep it there.

I didn’t find shadow work through a book or a course. In fact, I didn’t even know I was doing it. My journey with shadow work came to me because I ran out of ways to avoid my shadow.

For those of you who are new here, just know that I’ve done a lot of big and brave things in my life, like leaving my career (more than once), pursuing acting as a full adult, and building a life that looked nothing like the responsible one I had worked so hard to escape. And somewhere in the middle of chasing the next acting gig the same way I used to chase the next promotion, I had to stop and ask myself a question I had never actually answered honestly:

Sitting with that question — really sitting with it, not managing it or optimizing around it — was the beginning of shadow work for me. I wasn’t calling it that at the time, but that’s how it usually starts: in a moment where you finally run out of distractions.

What shadow work is NOT

Let me clear some things up because the internet has done a terrible job explaining this.

Shadow work isn’t always a dramatic emotional release you force yourself through to prove you are doing the work. Some people cry. Some people get angry. Some people just get very quiet. There is no “correct” way to do it.

It is not a phase you move through and finish. There’s no finished version of this where you get to the end and say, “done, healed, moving on.” The people who have done the most work are probably still doing it every day.

This part is important: it is not a substitute for professional support. If what you are carrying is heavy trauma, significant loss, patterns that are actively hurting you or the people around you, you’ve probably moved past the point of a therapist being optional. Shadow work done alone has a ceiling, and knowing where that ceiling is should matter to you.

And I struggled to include this, as someone who does write about shadow work, but it’s not what most people are posting about online. There’s a formula that you’ll see people use. It’s something like: insight —> breakthrough —> a clean takeaway/happy ending. And hey, sometimes life does happen that way. I don’t take that away from people or even myself, in the times I’ve had a similar trajectory.

But what isn’t posted as often (or at all) on social media are weeks/months of sitting with something uncomfortable before any clarity comes. Those moments aren’t recorded, probably because they don’t make for interesting and click-worthy content, but it really is where most of the work happens.

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How you know your shadow is running the show

It’s in your daily life constantly, if you know where to look.

Hint: It’s seen in the most ordinary parts of your day.

Think about the conversation you replay for three days after it happened. It’s probably not because something catastrophic happened, but something about it got under your skin in a way you can’t explain or shake off. That kind of disproportionate reaction is almost always pointing at something older than the conversation itself.

It is in the way you shrink in rooms you have every right to take up space in. The way you edit yourself before you speak, soften your opinions before you share them, or apologize before you have even done anything wrong (this one is big for women, especially). These things didn’t start with you. You learned them somewhere, and they became your default behaviors.

It is in the ceiling you keep hitting, no matter how hard you work or how many things you change. Different job, different city, different relationship — and somehow the same feeling follows you there. That is not a coincidence or a streak of bad luck. That is a pattern with an origin, and the origin is worth finding.

It is in how uncomfortable it is to receive a compliment, an offer of help, or an opportunity to rest. If your default response to good things is to immediately minimize them, deflect them, or brace for them to disappear, your shadow is in that response.

It is in the gap between how you treat the people you love when they make mistakes and how you treat yourself in the same situation. The harshness, the impossibly moving bar, and the amount of evidence you require before you feel like you have earned anything. That standard did not come from thin air.

Why this is worth doing

I want to be honest here because I think most writing about shadow work oversells what you get on the other side.

If you’re thinking that shadow work will make your life easier, erase negative patterns you have spent decades building, or make hard decisions easier… I hate to tell you this: It won’t.

What it does do — over time, with honesty — is close the gap between the life you are performing and the one you are actually living.

When you stop spending energy hiding parts of yourself, that energy goes somewhere else. When you stop making decisions from a place of fear you can’t even see, you start making them from a genuine place that moves you forward. When you stop running from what you want because wanting it feels dangerous or selfish, you start building something that is authentically yours.

It is the difference between a life you are tolerating and a life you are choosing.

So, what now?

The truth is that most people read about shadow work for months before they actually do anything with it. And that is fine. Reading is part of it. That’s why you’re here.

If you want to understand how your shadow is showing up in your specific behavior, the moments you pull back, the patterns you keep repeating, and the ways you keep choosing against yourself, the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz will show you your specific style in about 3 minutes. → Take the free quiz here.

If you want to see what shadow work actually looks like in practice, this essay shows it happening in real time through a story that caught me completely off guard.

→ What Flipping a House Taught Me About Shadow Work

Know someone who keeps seeing shadow work everywhere and has no idea what it actually means or why it keeps finding her? Send her this article.

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I’m not talking about the kind where you see someone living a life you genuinely wish you had and you feel jealous. That one is easy enough to admit. I think many people can relate to that. It’s almost romantic… The idea of wanting something beautiful that someone else has.

I’m talking about the other kind.

The kind where you look at someone, feel that rush of envy, and underneath you’re thinking:

I am smarter than this person.

I work harder.

I am more disciplined.

So why are they there, and I am here?

Before you pass me off as a hater, be honest with yourself.

It’s difficult to admit that you’ve had these thoughts because they feel (and sound) a lot like arrogance. It sounds like you think you’re better than someone. And we are trained from childhood to keep that thought very far from our mouths.

So we shove it down. We call it jealousy and move on. We hate ourselves a little for feeling it and then say things like “I need to work on my mindset” and scroll away from the post.

But here is what I have learned, mostly the hard way: that specific flavor of envy is one of the loudest signals your shadow self can send you.

And if you keep muting it, you will keep circling the same place for years.

First, what is shadow work actually?

Before we go further, I want to be clear about what I mean, because shadow work has become such a buzz term, and once you’ve heard it so many times, it starts to mean nothing.

Shadow work is the practice of turning toward the parts of yourself you have learned to hide, deny, and push far away. Carl Jung, the psychologist who developed the concept, called the shadow the unconscious part of the psyche. In other words, everything we have pushed out of view because it felt unsafe, unacceptable, or inconvenient to the people around us.

The shadow is not just the dark stuff, though. It is the part of you that holds your anger, fear, and grief. But it also represents your unlived potential.

• The dreams you abandoned before you gave them a real chance.

• The version of yourself you decided was too much, too risky, or too silly to take seriously.

• The ambition you downplayed or never expressed so you would not make anyone uncomfortable.

And envy is almost always the shadow pointing at something specific. It’s highlighting something you want and have been telling yourself you cannot have, should not want, or worse: that you are not the kind of person who gets the thing you hope for.

What my envy was actually pointing at

I spent years watching certain people and feeling that knot in my chest.

Former dance friends who were touring with celebrities, performing at halftime shows, traveling the country… They were doing the thing I had called a hobby and walked away from without grieving.

I was watching people on my social media who seemed to move through their lives freely and with such ease. They weren’t experiencing Sunday dread or suffocating under the feeling that the life they were living was built backwards and wrong…

Small disclaimer: Of course, we are talking about social media, so not everything is as it seems. But I was definitely drinking the Kool-Aid.

And I will be honest about something I wasn’t able to admit for a long time: I didn’t always feel admiration. I was mostly crippling under the hurt of watching people succeed who I privately believed worked less than me, were not as smart or disciplined as me, and cared less deeply than me… All living with a freedom I could not access.

That thought made me feel terrible about myself. Seriously, I couldn’t stand it. So, I called it a bad attitude and buried it as far as I could. I worked harder. I added more credentials. I got another degree. I took the more impressive job… I optimized everything I could optimize.

After ALL of that… The feeling stayed the same because I was solving the wrong problem.

The envy was never about those people. They were just acting as a mirror. What I was actually looking at every time I felt that jealousy was the gap between what I was capable of and what I was allowing myself to do with it. It was the gap between the life I was performing and the one I actually wanted. And what took me even longer to realize: It was the gap between how hard I was working and how misaligned the direction was.

That is what the envy was trying to tell me. Not that I was not enough, but that I was spending everything I had in the wrong direction.

What your envy is pointing at

Here is how I think about envy now, after a lot of uncomfortable time sitting with it:

Envy is directional. It’s not random, and you don’t feel it with just anyone. You feel it looking at people who are living in the vicinity of something you want and have not let yourself go after.

The question I should have been asking myself sooner is not “why do I feel this?”, but “what does this feeling know about me that I am not yet admitting?”

If you envy someone’s freedom, shadow work asks: where have you traded your freedom for approval, security, or the comfort of not having to disappoint someone?

If you envy someone’s boldness, shadow work asks: what have you been too afraid to say out loud, try in public, or commit to without a backup plan?

If you feel envy toward someone you privately believe you are more capable than, shadow work asks the hardest question of all: what are you doing with your capability? Are you actually using it in service of your own life, or are you using it to build something that has nothing to do with what you want?

That last one is a question I had to sit with for a long time.

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Think of your envy as data, and then use it

One of the most important and highly beneficial things shadow work does is take things you have been treating as character flaws and turn them into information.

Envy isn’t proof that you’re a hater, petty, small, or even a bad person. In the shadow work framework, envy is just data. It is your unconscious showing you what you have not given yourself permission to want.

The uncomfortable envy (the kind I described, the kind that comes with the thought “I work harder than this person”) is often pointing at something very specific: a part of your own potential that you are not fully using. Think of these as directions you have been too afraid to take seriously and identities you have been too afraid to claim.

When I finally looked at my envy honestly instead of ignoring or running from it, I saw something beyond arrogance. I found grief.

I was grieving for the version of me who could have bet on herself sooner and the one who spent years proving something to people who were never going to hand me what I was actually looking for.

And underneath the grief, there was something else: a direction.

That envy had known all along where I was supposed to go. I just wasn’t letting it lead me.

What to do with it

The next time envy shows up, instead of feeling disappointed in yourself, get curious. Ask yourself: what specifically is this feeling pointing at? Is this about what they have, or about what I have not let myself try yet?

If you can allow yourself to be honest about the answer, even just to yourself, you have started the work.

Shadow work is not something you can accomplish on a weekend retreat or through a few journaling prompts alone (although the prompts do help). It’s an ongoing practice of telling yourself the truth about what you actually want, what you are actually avoiding, and what parts of you got buried in the process of becoming a version of yourself that was built for someone else's comfort.

Envy is one of the clearest windows into that work. The next time it shows up, let it speak.

If you want to start putting words to what your envy has been trying to show you, these prompts are a good place to begin.

Take It Further

Journaling helps you see what you’ve been avoiding. But seeing it is only the first part. The harder work is understanding why you’ve been avoiding it, what specifically has been keeping you from going after the thing your envy has been pointing at all along. That’s what the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook is built for. It’s a 7-day system that takes the self-awareness this kind of work produces and gives you something real to do with it. It’s live now.

Please consider sharing this piece with someone who needs to hear that their envy is not a flaw. It is a map.

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I want to tell you about the day I quit my job in Higher Education.

After giving a full month’s notice, I packed up my desk and walked out of a building where I had made many memories and spent time trying to advance and learn. It didn’t feel very dramatic at the time. In fact, I felt settled in my decision.

But I left a lot of people confused. To everyone else, there wasn’t an obvious enough reason for me to go. I had just completed my master’s degree. I won a handful of awards, gained recognition in my field, and hosted many successful events for the university.

I had done the thing you’re supposed to do: continue your education, earn the credentials, and wait for the life that was supposed to follow.

And then I left anyway.

The day I did it, I thought I was going to feel relief... Brave even. But I felt like I had just betrayed someone, and I couldn’t figure out who.

That feeling? That was the first kind of guilt.

There are three kinds of guilt. And only one of them is real.

Most of us treat guilt like a single, reliable signal. It shows up, and we assume it means the same thing every time: I did something wrong. But that’s not how it works. Especially not for women who have spent years building lives around other people’s expectations.

The guilt you feel when you start putting yourself first (when you quit the job, say “no”, take the risk, do the thing you’ve been too scared to do) isn’t your conscience. It’s your self-sabotage pattern defending itself.

It shows up in three very specific ways, and none of them are real guilt.

The first kind: Self-betrayal guilt

“I worked too hard for this to walk away from it.”

This is the one that hit me first, standing in that Higher Ed office, running through what I’d tell my boss and my team before sending my official resignation. It wasn’t about anyone else yet. It was about me… The version of me who felt so important defending my Master’s graduate thesis, who had convinced myself that following the responsible path meant I was following the right one.

Walking away from it felt like self-betrayal. Like I was throwing something away that an earlier version of me had sacrificed a lot for.

Here’s what took me a while to see clearly: I wasn’t betraying myself by leaving. I had already betrayed myself by staying past the point where it made sense. Being the person who used her education felt like my identity, and staying the course was my way of paying respect to the girl who earned it.

The second kind: People-pleasing guilt

“I can feel their disappointment, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

My next job actually wasn’t even in my field of study. My next professional move was in Sales. Which means my Higher Ed degree was used for a total of… 5 months? Hehe.

After 3 years or so, I eventually quit that sales job too… to bartend, take acting classes, and do things that made absolutely no sense on paper. Telling my mother was interesting to say the least because she also worked for the sales company. She had just completed about 20 years with them…

When I told her I was quitting, she didn’t really say anything. There were no big conversations, no arguments I could point to. Just a quiet, unspoken shift in the air between us that sat heavy on my chest.

That kind of disappointment is the hardest to carry. Because you can’t argue with silence. You just have to sit in the weight of knowing that someone you love expected something from you, and you chose yourself instead.

That type of guilt shows up specifically when your choice has a face on it. Not just judgment from acquaintances or randoms, but her face. His face. The face of someone whose opinion has always mattered more to you than you’d like to admit. It’s the guilt that makes you over-explain, over-apologize, and find a way to soften the edges of your choice until it doesn’t threaten anyone anymore.

The third kind: Identity threat guilt

“What kind of person does this?”

Acting.

Really take a second to think about how that news landed in my life. I don’t mean I was taking acting classes on the side or treating it like a hobby I was exploring.

I mean: quitting a corporate job with great/steady money, bartending on weekends, auditioning on weekdays, building a life that looked — from the outside — like a spectacular implosion.

The guilt that came with that wasn’t about any specific person anymore. It was about who I was becoming. And underneath all of that, I had the strangest feeling I didn’t have words for yet. But I know now that it was freedom. Quiet, terrifying, completely unfamiliar freedom.

Identity threat shows up when your choice doesn’t just change your circumstances, but the story you’ve been telling yourself and everyone about who you are. You know, the one who uses her degree, makes her mother proud, and has a plan and a mapped-out life that sounds impressive to people at holiday dinners and family parties.

The moment you step outside that identity, the guilt arrives like a floodgate opening, and suddenly you're drowning in questions like:

Was I being selfish?

Was I being irresponsible?

Was I the kind of person who throws away a good thing because she’s chasing something she saw in a movie?

Speaking of movies, here is a scene from The Heat. This was my first self-tape. I’m no Sandra Bullock, but this still makes me chuckle. I didn’t pick that scene by accident. Clearly, I was healing through art.

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So what does real guilt actually look like?

Here's what I've determined after living through all three types and spending a lot of time trying to understand why some guilt felt productive and some just felt like punishment:

Real guilt (the kind worth listening to) feels like clarity. It’s specific. You can point to the exact moment, the exact choice, or even the exact person affected. It conflicts with something you genuinely value, not something you were trained to perform. And most importantly, it moves you forward toward repair, change, or doing something different next time.

Real guilt has a direction. It wants to fix something.

Pattern guilt has no direction. It just wants you to stop.

Pattern guilt feels like dread. It’s hard to name. It doesn’t point to something you did. It points to the fact that someone is uncomfortable, or that a younger version of you would have made a different choice. It doesn’t move you toward repair. It moves you toward self-erasure and shrinking back down to the size everyone was used to.

Here’s the clearest way I can put it:

Real guilt says: “I hurt someone I care about, and I want to make it right.”

Pattern guilt says: “Someone is unhappy, and I need to make it stop.”

Those two sentences feel almost identical in your body. But they are asking completely different things from you. One is asking you to take responsibility. The other is asking you to take the blame for someone else’s discomfort (discomfort that was never yours to fix).

Your pattern is the specific way you’ve learned to keep yourself safe: staying small, agreeable, and in a life you’ve outgrown. And when you disrupt that pattern, even in pursuit of something good, it fights back. Hard.

But if your only crime is that you took up more space than usual, or disappointed someone by choosing yourself, that is not your conscience speaking. That’s your pattern telling you to get back in line.

The guilt gets louder before it gets quieter

Here’s what nobody told me: it gets worse before it gets better.

The first time you hold a boundary, the guilt will be loud. The first time you quit your job, take a risk, or say “no” without a paragraph of explanation, you will feel terrible. You will question yourself. You may even find yourself up at 2am drafting apologies and justifications in your head…

Unfortunately, all of that is normal, and it is no indication that you did anything wrong.

That’s what it actually feels like to do something new. Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between wrong and unfamiliar. It just knows that something changed, and change feels like a threat to a system that has been kept safe through sameness.

If you're not sure which pattern is running your guilt, the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz will show you in about 3 minutes. → Take the quiz here.

What to do when it shows up

The next time guilt arrives, try this: Name which kind it is.

Is this self-betrayal guilt: am I grieving an old identity I’ve outgrown?

Is this people-pleasing guilt: is there a specific face attached to this feeling?

Is this identity threat guilt: am I scared of who I’m becoming, or am I scared that she’s actually who I’ve always wanted to be?

Then ask: Did I actually do something wrong? Or did I just do something new?

Most of the time, you already know the answer, but the key is to be honest.

Take It Further

Understanding which kind of guilt is running you is one thing. Having a real plan for what to do when it shows up in the middle of the week, when your pattern is loud and the new choice still feels fragile, is the actual work. That's what the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook is built for. It's a 7-day system designed around the specific moment your pattern fights back hardest. It's live now.

Know someone who can't tell the difference between guilt that means something and guilt that just wants her to shrink back down? This one is for her.

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Another Tuesday. 2021.

I’m in the shower, and I can’t make myself get out.

Getting out of the shower means logging on, and logging on means another 8 to 10 hours of being a person I don’t recognize in a life I can’t explain my way out of.

We have a virtual personal trainer. The fridge is full of organic groceries (and yes, we have fancy jars and everything is organized, color-coded, and grouped into all things healthy). Sustainable cleaning products are on their way to the door.

The photograph above is from a photoshoot our realtor scheduled for us after buying our first home during a global pandemic, while people around us were losing so much.

To our family, and to our extended circles, we looked like we had cracked the code… Like we were proof that hustle works, that grinding pays off, that the “right” choices eventually add up to something good.

What was really happening

In case no one told you, misalignment doesn’t announce itself. It usually doesn’t come with an obvious villain, a crisis, or a specific reason to blow everything up. There’s no moment where someone pulls you aside and says, “Hey, you’re building the wrong life”.

It’s more insidious than that.

It’s quiet, persistent, and lingering all while being subtle enough to make you wonder if it’s happening at all.

We bought that house during the pandemic and nearly wiped out our savings on:

• Closing costs

• Tree removal (which, btw, totaled $12k)

• Roller shade installation

• Appliances

• New gutters

• And a BUNCH more miscellaneous expenses that continued to come up over the years

We had no idea what we were doing, and we were too proud, or maybe too scared, to say so out loud. To the world, we were a young couple buying our first home while everyone else was in survival mode. We were killing it.

The reality was that I was taking sales calls about canceled cruises, managing customer rage over trips that weren’t going to happen any time soon, and barely scraping together the energy to log on in the morning.

What it actually feels like

Misalignment has a physical signature. If you’ve lived it, you know exactly what I’m describing.

It’s the Sunday dread that starts Saturday afternoon. Hell, for some it starts Friday night… I know it did for me sometimes.

At first, my anxiety wasn’t aggressive… It was a subtly frustrating “not this again” feeling that settles into your chest before the week has even started. It’s a sort of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix, because you’re not actually tired from “doing too much”. You’re tired from being someone you’re not for eight, ten, twelve hours a day.

That kind of performance is expensive in a way that a long weekend or a vacation cannot cure.

It’s an achievement hangover.

You hit the goal: the promotion —> the house —> the title —> the income that finally feels like proof! Yay! But instead of satisfaction, you feel a strange flatness. Or something worse: immediate anxiety about the next thing you’re supposed to want.

And underneath all of it, there’s the thing you can’t say out loud:

I don’t think I actually want this.

If you’re honest, that thought has been sitting in the back of your mind for longer than you want to admit.

Then comes the guilt. The life I was living really wasn’t “bad”. It had real things in it that other people would want. Which is exactly why I talked myself out of my own dissatisfaction, over and over. I should be grateful. Other people have it worse. I’m just being ungrateful.

You can be grateful for your resources and still be using them to build the wrong life.

Both of those things are true at the same time.

The mirror I didn’t ask for

In the thick of the pandemic, my father died.

We had gotten close in my twenties. He was my best friend in the way that only a person who knows the real you can be. He was one of the only people I could tell the truth to.

He died full of should-haves. Full of the weight of a life he had wanted and never let himself live. He was depressed and angry and full of regret, and he ran out of time to do anything about it.

I was furious… At first. But once my anger and denial settled, I was faced with something I couldn’t look away from: I was on the same path. Not the same circumstances, but the same pattern. The same choosing of what looked right over what felt true. The same quiet building of a life I wasn’t actually proud of or happy with.

His death didn’t fix me, but it made it almost impossible to keep pretending.

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What misalignment is actually asking you

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where most writing about misalignment goes sideways. Where it tells you to quit everything, leap into the unknown, trust the universe, burn it down, and rebuild.

Ps. That is basically what I did. More on that later!

But I would NOT give that advice with my full chest. It’s not necessary to blow up your life. The process of unraveling a misaligned life should start with something much smaller and much harder than quitting: honesty.

Just be honest with yourself first. Allow yourself to acknowledge that something is off. Trust that feeling you’ve been explaining away. And give yourself the permission to want something different.

That moment of honest acknowledgment, even if it happens in the shower on a Tuesday, is a huge step in the right direction. It may feel insignificant to you at first, but I promise it is, in fact, the beginning of everything that comes after.

If this resonated, the first thing worth understanding is what pattern is keeping you in it. Because misalignment and self-sabotage are almost always the same wound, just named differently depending on which angle you’re looking from.

→ Take the free Self-Sabotage Style Quiz — it takes 3 minutes, and it will show you the specific pattern underneath the staying.

If you’re ready to go further than naming it, the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook walks you through what to actually do when the pattern shows up. It’s $17 and available now.

If this article resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Welcome to Mid-Becoming. Still in it. Still going.

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Nobody sat you down and said, “Here are the rules for being loved in this family.”

But you figured them out anyway.

You figured out which emotions were welcome and which ones made people uncomfortable. You figured out what earned praise and what earned silence. You figured out how to be the version of yourself that kept things stable, kept people happy, and kept you safe.

And you did ALL of this before you had the language to question any of it.

How the messages get in

Most of the beliefs running your life right now weren’t taught directly. They were absorbed through repetition, through tone, through what was celebrated and what was ignored.

Some of them may have even sounded like compliments.

“I never have to worry about her.”

“She’s so mature for her age.”

“She handles everything on her own.”

Some of them sounded like advice.

“Remember, you can’t fully rely on anyone.”

“You have to be strong and independent.”

“Don’t be so emotional.”

And some of them were rules that were spoken once and never questioned again.

My mom had something she called the 24-hour rule. If something upset you, you had 24 hours to feel it. After that, it was time to move on. She didn’t say it to be cruel. She said it because that was how she survived. I was too young to understand where that rule came from and that it stemmed from her own unresolved trauma that she was passing onto me as “wisdom”. But it made sense to me at the time… It sounded efficient, so I adopted it and learned that there wasn’t room for emotions that lingered.

I became someone who processed fast, moved on faster, and judged herself for any feeling that lasted longer than it “should.”

The messages you didn’t know you were carrying

Here’s what makes this so hard to see: the messages don’t announce themselves. They disguise themselves as personality traits, as preferences, as “just the way I am.”

But when you slow down and look at the patterns you keep repeating, the messages start to surface.

“Don’t be too much.”

This one shows up as shrinking. Apologizing for having an opinion. Editing yourself before you speak. Keeping your excitement small because somewhere along the way, you learned that taking up space was wrong.

If you internalized this sort of message, you might notice that you dim yourself in groups, downplay your accomplishments, or feel physically uncomfortable when you’re the center of attention. You don’t do these things because you’re naturally “modest”. You do it because you learned that “too much” was the thing that made people pull away or resulted in a negative reaction.

“Be grateful for what you have.”

On the surface, this sounds like wisdom. But when it’s used to shut down dissatisfaction, it becomes a silencer. It teaches you that wanting more is ungrateful. That discomfort with your current life means something is wrong with you, not with the life.

If you internalized this message, you probably struggle to admit when something isn’t working. You talk yourself out of your own unhappiness. You stay in jobs, relationships, and situations that don’t fit because leaving would mean you’re not grateful enough for what you were given.

“You have to be strong. Never rely on anyone.”

This one builds a person who looks incredibly capable on the outside and is outrageously exhausted on the inside. It teaches you that needing help is a weakness. Asking for support is a burden to others. And the version of you that is most loved/respected is the one who can handle everything alone.

If you internalized this message, you might notice that you have a hard time receiving help even when it’s offered. You deflect compliments. You power through when you’re struggling because folding isn’t an option. And when you finally break, you feel ashamed of it instead of seeing yourself as a human who is allowed to have a limit.

“Don’t be so emotional.”

This one teaches you to distrust your own inner experience. It says: your feelings are unreliable, inflated even. They’re a problem to be managed, not information to be listened to.

If you internalized this message, you might intellectualize everything instead of feeling it. You rationalize and analyze your emotions instead of experiencing them. Chances are, you can explain your patterns with perfect clarity yet still feel completely disconnected from yourself.

What is most interesting about this is that the message was never “don’t feel.” It was actually “don’t let anyone see you feel.” And eventually, you stopped letting yourself see it, too.

“I don’t have to worry about her.”

This is the one that disguises itself as the highest praise. And for many women (like myself), it’s the one that did the most damage.

Because what a child hears is: the less you need, the more you’re loved. The less trouble you cause, the more valuable you are. The more invisible your needs, the safer your place in this family.

If you internalized this message, you probably became the low-maintenance friend, the easy partner, the employee who never complained. You built an entire identity around not being a burden. And now, every time you have a need, it comes with tsunami-sized guilt that feels completely disproportionate to what you’re asking for.

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Why these messages are so hard to unlearn

These messages are hard to unlearn, or even begin to see, because they didn’t come from bad people. Most of them came from parents, caregivers, and families who were doing the best they could with what they had.

In my case, my mom wasn’t trying to teach me that my emotions were inconvenient. She was trying to teach me resilience with the only tools she had.

That’s what makes this work so complicated... You can love the people who shaped you and still recognize that some (or a lot) of what they gave you doesn’t serve you anymore.

You’re not betraying them by questioning these messages. You’re honoring yourself by finally asking: Is this still true? Was it ever true? Or was it just the best available strategy for a parent/caregiver/loved one with the knowledge and resources they had available?

And if no one has ever given you this permission, let me be the one to do it.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Pick the message from this post that hit the hardest. The one you read and thought, “that one’s mine.” Then sit with one question:

How is this message still showing up in my decisions right now?

Not when you were 10. Not in your twenties. Right now. Today. This week.

You might see it in the way you said yes to something you didn’t want to do. In the way you swallowed your opinion in a meeting. In the way you apologized for asking for help. In the way you moved on from something painful before you were actually ready because your internal clock told you time was up.

That’s the message, still firing behind the scenes.

Seeing it clearly is the first step to choosing something different for yourself.

Where to Go Next

These childhood messages don’t just shape how you see yourself. They shape how you self-sabotage, which opportunities you go after, which ones you quietly talk yourself out of, and why. If you want to see which self-sabotage style your specific messages are built on, the quiz names it in about 3 minutes.

→ Take the free Self-Sabotage Style Quiz here.

Once you know your style, the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook is the 7-day system built around the specific moment your pattern takes over. It’s live now.

Know someone who keeps blaming herself for patterns she didn’t choose and hasn’t yet traced back to where they actually started? Send her this article.

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The scariest thing I’ve done in the past few years wasn’t quitting my corporate job, even though that felt enormous at the time. It was admitting what I actually wanted, out loud, to the people who had an entirely different picture of who I was and what my life was supposed to look like.

I had spent so long being the version of myself that made everyone else comfortable that saying “this isn’t what I want” felt like pulling a thread that would unravel everything. And in some ways, it did. Some people didn’t understand. A number of relationships shifted or ended. Some people are probably still confused to this day.

But the moment I stopped pretending, something lifted. I was finally telling the truth. And that truth, as uncomfortable as it was, became the foundation I continue to build on.

That moment wasn’t dramatic. Nobody applauded it. Nobody even knew it happened.

And that’s exactly what makes it a risk.

The risks that actually change you don’t look like risks

When most people hear the word risk, they picture something you can point to: quitting a stable job, ending a long relationship, or selling everything and moving somewhere new. And yes, those are risks.

But they come with something the smaller ones don’t: built-in permission.

When you make a dramatic move, people understand that something must have happened. They have something to wrap their heads around. But when you say “no” to your mother’s request without an explanation? When you choose what you actually want over what your partner expected? When you admit out loud, for the first time, that you’ve been performing contentment for years?

Nobody applauds that. Some people won’t even understand why it was hard. These risks don’t come with external validation. And for many of us who were raised on external validation, that absence makes the decision feel wrong even when it’s right.

The risks that begin to rewire your life are smaller and quieter than the ones people talk about. They’re invisible to everyone around you. And that invisibility is exactly what makes them so hard to take.

What invisible risk actually looks like

Admitting what you actually want, not to a therapist, not in a journal, but out loud, to someone whose reaction you can’t control. Wanting something specific is dangerous when you’ve spent your whole life being the flexible one, the grateful one, the “I’m fine with whatever” one. Naming your desire out loud means you can no longer pretend you don’t have one. And that opens the door to disappointment or judgment for wanting the wrong thing.

Choosing something for yourself that will disappoint someone else. Sometimes this involves a confrontation. Sometimes it’s just you quietly choosing yourself. Either way, this is the risk that people-pleasers and perfectionists will avoid for years. Your nervous system has been trained to equate other people’s disappointment with danger. So every time you prioritize yourself, your body responds like you’ve done something wrong.

Saying no without a good enough excuse. Not “I can’t, I have plans.” Just no. No explanation, no apology, no follow-up offer to make it up to them. If you’ve ever noticed that you can only say no when you have an airtight reason, that’s not a coincidence. Somewhere along the way, you learned that your no wasn’t valid on its own. It needed justification. Which means your yes has never really been free either.

Doing something imperfectly on purpose. Posting the thing you’re not sure about. Showing up before you feel ready. For perfectionists, this feels physically uncomfortable because imperfection isn’t just a quality issue. It’s a threat to identity. If you’re not the one who does things flawlessly, who are you?

Staying visible after things go wrong. Continuing to show up after making a mistake. Keeping your hand raised after someone criticized your last idea. The instinct to withdraw after being seen is one of the strongest self-sabotage responses there is. Staying visible anyway is one of the quietest acts of defiance you can make against your own pattern.

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You Have to Be Your Own Witness

Here is what makes the invisible risks so much harder to take than the big, dramatic ones. The dramatic risks come with a story. A before and after. Something you can point to and say: that’s when everything changed.

The invisible risks don’t give you that. You say no, and life continues. You admit what you want, and nothing immediately transforms. You do the imperfect thing, and the world doesn’t end. Which means you have to trust your own read on what just happened. You have to be your own witness. You have to know that what you just did was hard, even if no one around you can see it.

That is not a small thing. For most of us, trusting our own experience over other people’s perception of it is the hardest skill we’ve never been taught.

Where to Go Next

Taking the invisible risk is only the first part. The harder part is what comes after, when you’ve made the honest choice and life continues as if nothing happened, when the people around you can’t see what just shifted, when you have to hold a decision that nobody witnessed.

If you want to understand what it actually looks like to stop performing a life that doesn’t fit, and what happens to the people around you when you do, these two essays go there.

→ Everyone Thought We Were Thriving — on crying in the shower every morning while the outside of your life looks exactly right.

→ When You Stop Pretending, Some People Can’t Handle It — on what happens to your relationships when you start making choices that are actually yours.

Know someone who is making real moves and getting small reactions? Send them this one.

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Over the past two days, you’ve taken steps that most people don’t even think to do.

On Day 1, you named your self-sabotage pattern: the trigger, the default behavior, and the short-term payoff that keeps the cycle spinning. On Day 2, you traced that pattern back to where it started and recognized that a younger version of you built it for a reason that made sense at the time.

Now you understand the what and the why.

Today is about the what now.

And I want to be honest with you: this is the part where most people stall. This is where they try to change everything at once, get overwhelmed, and the self-sabotage pattern kicks right back in. I know because I've done this exact thing many times before I learned how to change my approach. For perfectionists like me, this part is especially hard.

Here is the plan: We’re going to take one step. One real, specific, aligned step. And then you’re going to build a bare-minimum plan to follow through on it.

Now, you’re probably thinking: “That’s it?” “All of this build-up for something that simple?”

Here’s why: You will not feel motivated every day. That’s why you must have a plan for the days you don’t.

Why “one step” isn’t settling. It’s strategy.

There’s a reason your brain wants you to overhaul your entire life right now. It feels productive. It feels like you’re finally taking this seriously.

But here’s what’s actually happening: when you try to change everything at once, you’re giving your self-sabotage pattern more room to run free. More goals means more triggers. More triggers means more opportunities for your default behavior to kick in. More default behaviors means more “evidence” that you can’t follow through.

One step does the complete opposite. One step is small enough that your nervous system doesn’t flag it as a threat. One step is specific enough that you know exactly what “done” looks like. And one step, repeated even imperfectly, builds the only thing your pattern has been working to prevent: proof that you can follow through. That proof is what changes things.

Choose your one aligned step

I want you to think about one thing you’ve been wanting to do. Make sure it is connected to the life you actually want. Not the biggest thing. Not the scariest thing. The thing that feels most true.

Maybe it’s writing every day. Maybe it’s moving your body. Maybe it’s working on a project you keep abandoning. Maybe it’s setting a boundary. Maybe it’s showing up in an environment you’ve been hiding from.

Now make it specific and concise.

Here is an ineffective: Get healthier.

That’s an outcome. There’s no way you can see the results of that in a short timeframe. Instead, choose something you could do in 5 to 15 minutes on your worst day and still say, “I did it.”

Examples:

→ “Write for 10 minutes.”

→ “Walk for 15 minutes after work.”

→ “Spend 10 minutes on my project before I check my phone.”

→ “Say no to one thing that isn’t my responsibility.”

Your aligned step should be:

• Small enough to do on a low-energy day

• Clear enough that you know when it’s done

• Connected to something that actually matters to you

I like to call this your minimum. Not your ideal scenario or outcome. Not your “on a good day” version. The version you can do when you absolutely don’t feel like it.

Now plan for the moment you want to quit

Here’s what separates this from every other “just start small” advice you’ve heard.

You already know your pattern. You know the trigger. You know the default behavior. You know the payoff. So, let’s use that information.

Think about your self-sabotage style and ask yourself: when is my pattern most likely to show up this week?

Here are some examples:

• Avoider: It might be after you miss a day and your brain says the whole thing is ruined.

• Perfectionist: It might be the moment your work doesn’t meet your standards.

• Overthinker: It might be when you start second-guessing whether you are choosing the best/most effective method to get something done.

• Pleaser: It might be when your partner says they need you.

• Rebel: It might be when the commitment starts feeling like a trap.

• Hider: It might be when the step you need to take requires you to be seen by a friend/family member.

Name that moment now. Once it’s happening, you’re already inside the cycle, so you might not be able to place your finger on it. Name it in advance, so when it shows up, you recognize it.

Then give yourself one sentence that you’ll say to yourself when that moment hits. Something like:

→ “This is my pattern. I see it.”

→ “This is the part where I usually disappear. I’m staying.”

→ “I don’t need to feel ready. I just need to do the minimum.”

It might sound and feel cheesy. I know it did for me, but remember this is not supposed to function as a pep talk or full-blown journaling session. It’s just a way to state the interruption you need to keep the default behavior from running the show.

The rule that holds it all together

Here’s the simplest rule I’ve implemented in my life, and it’s the one that makes this entire mini-series worth something:

If you do the minimum, the day counts.

And if you miss a day? You don’t need to restart at maximum effort. You don’t need to rewrite your plans. You simply need to do the minimum the next day and keep going.

Your self-sabotage pattern thrives on all-or-nothing thinking. It wants you to believe that if you can’t do it perfectly, you shouldn’t do it at all. The minimum is how you take that power back.

What you’ve built this week

You might not feel like you’ve done much. You read three posts. You reflected on some uncomfortable questions. You may have identified a pattern and thought about what small step to take.

But here’s what actually happened:

Day 1: You saw your cycle clearly. Perhaps for the first time, you were able to step outside of the pattern and observe it.

Day 2: You understood why the pattern exists. Or at least you’ve started thinking about why it exists, which will help you stop blaming yourself for it and start seeing the younger version of you who built it.

Day 3: You chose one honest step forward and made a plan for the moment your pattern tries to pull you back.

All of these steps probably feel small to you (maybe even too small to matter), but this is how you begin to have a different relationship with yourself. A relationship where you stop waiting to “feel ready” and start building evidence that you can follow through.

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Where to go from here

This mini-series gave you the awareness. But awareness alone doesn’t break patterns. Repeated, supported, structured action does.

That’s what the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook is built for. It’s a 7-day follow-through reset that takes everything you’ve started to see this week: your style, your trigger, your default behavior, and your fear, and runs it through a guided system designed to keep you in motion when the pattern fights back hardest. Daily tools, trackers, and style-specific scripts. It picks up exactly where this series leaves off.

→ Read Day 1: Name Your Pattern (So It Stops Running You)

→ Read Day 2: The Version of You That Built This Pattern

Know someone who keeps waiting until she feels ready before she starts? Send her this. She's been ready.

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Yesterday, on Day 1, you started seeing your self-sabotage pattern for what it actually is: a cycle with a trigger, a default behavior, and a short-term payoff that keeps it alive.

Today, we go deeper.

It started when you were a kid.

Your self-sabotage pattern is old

Not old as in outdated (though it is). Old as in: the version of you who built this pattern was young, maybe very young, and she built it because she had to.

Here’s what I mean.

When you were growing up, you learned (through experience, not instruction) what was acceptable and what wasn’t. Not just what behaviors were allowed, but what parts of you were allowed.

You learned which emotions were welcomed and which ones made people uncomfortable. You learned whether your needs were “too much” or your voice was “too loud”. You learned what earned love, approval, and attention — and what got you ignored, criticized, or punished.

So, you adapted. You were a child doing the only thing a child can do: figure out how to stay safe and stay loved.

The problem is that the adaptations you made at seven or ten or fourteen are still running your decisions at thirty-something. And they’re no longer protecting you. They’re holding you back and keeping you stuck.

How this shows up in your self-sabotage style

Every self-sabotage style has a root. And that root almost always traces back to something you learned about yourself before you had the language to question it.

The Avoider may have learned that engaging fully with tasks, conflict, and emotions led to overwhelm or disappointment. So she learned to check out before things got heavy. Disappearing became the safest option when staying present felt like too much.

The Perfectionist may have learned that love or approval was conditional on performance, making mistakes feel more dangerous than just mistakes — they were threats to belonging. So, she learned that the only safe version of herself was the flawless one. If she couldn’t guarantee flawless, she wouldn’t start.

The Overthinker may have learned that the wrong decision had serious consequences: emotional, relational, or otherwise. So she learned to delay, analyze, and seek certainty before committing. That loop looks like indecision, but it’s an old attempt to feel safe before moving.

The Pleaser may have learned that her value was tied to being useful, accommodating, or easy. Her own needs were either invisible or inconvenient. So she learned to put herself last and call it generosity. And now, every time she prioritizes herself, it triggers guilt that feels like selfishness, but it’s really just an old rule she never agreed to.

The Rebel may have learned that structure meant control, and control meant someone else's rules. Somewhere along the way, autonomy became the thing she had to fight to keep. Psychologically, this is called reactance: an automatic pushback when freedom feels threatened. Now, anything that feels imposed (even a goal she set for herself) activates that old threat. Her nervous system doesn't distinguish between "my boss told me to" and "I told me to." The moment a plan starts feeling like an obligation, the same alarm goes off: this is a cage. So she procrastinates, resists, blows up the plan, or does the opposite of what she intended. It's not self-destruction. It's a nervous system that learned to equate commitment with captivity.

The Hider may have learned that being visible, with her opinions, ambitions, and imperfect work, wasn't safe. Maybe she was criticized for standing out, or learned that staying small kept the peace. So she stays quiet, delays showing up, and waits until she feels "ready," which never quite arrives. This sort of pattern is often paired with fear of failure. But the real fear is being watched while she figures it out, not necessarily failure itself.

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This is what inner child work actually is

Inner child work sounds abstract until you realize what it’s really asking you to do: recognize that a younger version of you made a set of rules to survive, and those rules are still real in your mind and body — even though you’ve outgrown the situation that created them.

I’ll tell you where I first saw this in myself.

I was a people pleaser and a perfectionist. And when I traced both patterns back, they led to the same place: a little girl who learned very early that being easy was how you earned love.

I was raised by a single mom who worked hard to give me a good life. I respect her deeply for that. But the reality of our situation meant I spent a lot of time alone, and I filled that space by becoming the kind of kid who didn’t need anything from anyone.

I threw away my own sippy cups at 2 years old because I knew it would impress my mom. I packed my own lunches. I packed my own dance bag. She never asked me if I had tests coming up at school, because she knew I had already studied for them and would ace them. What’s wild is that she never pressured me to be that way. She really didn’t. She was honest about having been a terrible student herself. But I figured out very quickly that being self-sufficient made her life easier.

The praise I got confirmed it. “I just don’t have to worry about Aliyah.” “She’s so obedient and docile.” I was a near-perfect student, not because anyone demanded it, but because perfection was how I got attention. Being low-maintenance was how I got love. Needing nothing was how I stayed safe.

So I kept performing that version of myself. Into my twenties. Into careers I chose because they looked impressive, relationships where I over-gave to feel valuable, and goals I abandoned the moment they required me to be messy, imperfect, or a burden to someone.

The patterns I write about in this newsletter aren’t things I researched. They’re things I lived. And the moment I saw that the little girl who threw away her own bottles was still running the show, something shifted.

My patterns didn't disappear overnight. Honestly, they still show up. I just know them now. I recognize the voice. And I finally understand that these patterns are not flaws. They’re the roots of my survival strategy that had clearly outlived their usefulness.

I share this because I want you to know: when I challenge you to look at the younger version of yourself, I’m not asking you to do something I haven’t done. And it’s uncomfortable. But it’s also the moment you stop blaming yourself and start understanding yourself instead.

What I encourage you to sit with today

Think about your self-sabotage style — the one you identified in Day 1 — and ask yourself one question:

When did I first learn that this was the safe thing to do?

You might not get a specific memory. You might get a feeling, a dynamic, a household rule that was never spoken out loud. That’s enough.

You’re not trying to “heal your inner child” in one afternoon. You’re trying to see her. To notice that she’s still in the room when you’re making decisions about your career, your goals, your boundaries, your life.

Because the moment you see her (really see her), you stop blaming yourself for the pattern. And you start understanding it instead.

That understanding is what makes Day 3 possible.

Tomorrow, we stop looking backward and start moving forward. You’re going to choose one aligned step you can take and build a simple plan to actually follow through, even when the old pattern shows up and tries to pull you back.

→ Read Day 1: Name Your Pattern (So It Stops Running You)

→ Read Day 3: One Aligned Step

If you haven’t taken the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz yet, start there. It names your specific pattern and tells you exactly what’s driving it. It takes 3 minutes, and it’s free. → Take the quiz here.

The quiz shows you your pattern. The Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook is where you actually break it. It’s a 7-day system built around the specific moment your pattern takes over, with daily tools and style-specific scripts for each style. It’s live now.

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Know someone who keeps blaming herself for the same pattern and has never once considered where it came from? Send her this article.

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If you took the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz, you already know your style.

Avoider, Perfectionist, Overthinker, Pleaser, Rebel, or Hider.

But knowing your style isn’t the same as seeing your pattern in action.

Your style tells you how you sabotage. But today, we’re going deeper:

• When does it kick in?

• What does it look like in real time?

• What’s actually keeping the cycle going?

Because self-sabotage doesn't feel like self-sabotage when it's happening.

Sound familiar? That’s your pattern talking. And until you can see it clearly (preferably in your own words and in your own life), it keeps running things behind the scenes.

Your self-sabotage pattern is a cycle, not a single moment

Most people think of self-sabotage as the moment they quit, ghost, or give up. But that’s just the most obvious part. The full cycle actually has three stages, and they repeat every time:

The Trigger → Something happens that makes your goal feel uncomfortable/unmanageable. Maybe you miss a day, and it throws you off schedule. Maybe someone needs you, and it pulls you away from what you said you would complete. Or perhaps your efforts start feeling too public, too imperfect, or too uncertain. This is the moment your nervous system flags your goal as a threat.

The Default Behavior → Your sabotage style kicks in automatically. The Avoider disappears. The Perfectionist starts polishing instead of progressing. The Overthinker reopens their decisions on a loop. The Pleaser puts everyone else first. The Rebel pushes back against the plan. The Hider goes quiet. And as much as it may feel like it, these aren’t choices you make consciously. These are protection mechanisms running on autopilot.

The Payoff → And this is the part no one likes to admit. Your self-sabotage WORKS… in the short term. Avoiding feels like relief. Perfecting feels like control. Overthinking feels like preparation. Pleasing feels like being a good person. Rebelling feels like freedom. Hiding feels like safety. Those payoffs are exactly why the cycle repeats. Your brain got what it wanted: temporary comfort.

The cost just shows up later as guilt, frustration, stuckness, and the quiet belief that you’re someone who doesn’t follow through.

To be clear, that belief isn’t true. But every time the cycle completes without interruption, it gets louder and easier to believe.

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So what do you actually do with this?

Today, I want you to try one thing. Don’t worry, this is not a full exercise… Just a moment of honest observation.

Think about the last time you quit on something that mattered to you. It doesn’t have to be anything grand. But it should be something that is connected to the life you actually want.

Now ask yourself three questions:

1. What was the trigger? What happened right before you started pulling away? Was it a missed day? A moment of uncertainty? Someone else’s needs? A feeling that you weren’t “good enough”? Name it as specifically as you can.

2. What did you do next (automatically)? Not what you wish you’d done. What actually happened? Did you go quiet? Start over-planning? Say yes to something else? Raise the bar until it was impossible? Resist the whole plan?

3. What did it give you in the short term? This is the uncomfortable question. What did quitting, stalling, or pulling away give you? Was it relief? A sense of control? The comfort of not being judged? Be honest. There’s no wrong answer. Remember, the payoff is the reason the pattern exists. It’s not a character flaw. It’s information that is important for you to know.

You don’t need to write your answers down (though it helps). You just need to see the pattern for what it is: a trigger, a default behavior, and a short-term payoff that costs you the thing you actually want.

Why this matters

You can’t interrupt what you can’t see.

Most self-help advice jumps straight to solutions. Let me know if any of this rings a bell…

“Just start small.” “Build discipline in 24hrs.” “Do this (insert vague thing) to hold yourself accountable.”

Literally none of this advice works long-term if you don’t understand what keeps pulling you off track and why your brain cooperates with it.

Your self-sabotage pattern isn’t random. It’s predictable. It shows up in the same situations, uses the same moves, and gives you the same short-term relief every time.

Once you see the cycle, you stop being inside it. You start catching it before the default behavior takes over. That’s when real change becomes possible.

Tomorrow, on Day 2, we’re going to trace this pattern back to where it started. Because the version of you running this cycle? She’s not the current you. She’s the younger version of you who learned that this was the safest way to survive. And that version of you is still making decisions that aren’t serving you anymore.

→ Read Day 2: The Version of You That Built This Pattern

If you haven’t taken the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz yet, start there. It names your specific pattern and tells you exactly what’s driving it. It takes 3 minutes and it’s free. → Take the quiz here.

The quiz shows you your pattern. The Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook is where you actually break it. It’s a 7-day system built around the specific moment your pattern takes over, with daily tools and style-specific scripts for each style. It’s live now.

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If you recognized yourself somewhere in this article, there’s someone in your life who would too. Send it to her.

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Hi, I’m Aliyah. 👋🏼

I graduated high school early, ran straight through to my Master’s degree, and was in my first “respectable” job by the age of 21. I spent years building a resume that made people nod approvingly at family dinners.

I was also crying most mornings, making almost every decision based on how they’d sound out loud, and abandoning things I loved because they didn’t look serious enough. I was sabotaging opportunities I actually wanted because some part of me had decided I wasn’t the kind of person who got to have them.

For a long time, I thought my problem was discipline. Or motivation. Or the right system. It wasn’t any of those things.

The problem was that I kept choosing against myself without understanding why. And no amount of productivity advice, journaling prompts, or motivational content was helping me take a step in the right direction.

But that’s because none of it was asking the right question.

That’s what Mid-Becoming is about: understanding yourself well enough to finally stop getting in your own way.

What You’ll Find Here

This newsletter is for women who feel stuck in a life that looks right from the outside and are finally ready to understand what’s keeping them there.

I write about:

→ Self-sabotage — The perfectionism, procrastination, and people-pleasing patterns that keep you stuck, and how to actually interrupt them.

→ Shadow work and inner child healing — The childhood wounds that are still running your decisions, what you buried away to become acceptable, and how to start going back for it.

→ Feeling stuck despite doing everything right — What misalignment actually feels like in your body, why thought loops like, “I should be grateful” keep you quiet, and what it costs you to keep performing a version of yourself that has expired.

→ Betting on yourself — Why the things you actually want feel dangerous, how to build self-trust, and what it looks like to take the kind of risk nobody applauds.

→ Building a life that actually fits — Not a perfect life. Not a performed one. One that feels like yours.

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Start Here: The 3-Day Pattern Breaker Mini-Series

If you just took the self-sabotage quiz, this series is where you go next.

It’s a series of three posts, designed to be read one per day, that take what you learned about your self-sabotage pattern and actually do something with it.

Day 1: Name Your Pattern (So It Stops Running You) You can’t interrupt what you can’t see. This post shows you your specific cycle — the trigger, the default behavior, and the short-term payoff that keeps it alive. → Read Day 1 here

Day 2: The Version of You That Built This Pattern Your self-sabotage didn’t come from nowhere. This post traces it back to where it started and why it made perfect sense at the time, even though it’s costing you now. This is where the inner child work begins.

Day 3: One Aligned Step You don’t need to do a complete 180 on your life or make huge decisions suddenly. You need one honest choice and a real plan for following through when the old pattern tries to pull you back. This post gives you both.

Not sure what your pattern is yet?

Take the free Self-Sabotage Style Quiz here. It takes about 3 minutes. You’ll walk away knowing your specific style and what it’s been protecting you from. Then come back and start Day 1.

New essays every Thursday, free for all subscribers. If you’re not on the list yet, subscribe below.

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And if this resonated, please forward it to someone who needs to hear that what they're calling a motivation problem might actually be something worth understanding.

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They think they have a discipline problem. A motivation problem. A focus problem. They think they need a better system, a stronger routine, or one completely free week where nothing goes wrong, so they can finally get some momentum going.

Self-sabotage doesn't announce itself. It shows up as a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the thing you said you were going to do didn't get done. And every part of that explanation makes complete sense.

That’s what makes it so hard to catch. And that’s what this article is about.

There are six styles. Find yours.

The Avoider

The Avoider’s pattern is the easiest to miss because it looks like productivity.

This is what avoidance actually looks like for most people. It doesn’t always look like “laziness” or potatoing on the couch while binge watching your favorite Netflix show. It can be a productive-feeling day where the task that actually mattered stayed exactly where it started. And the uncomfortable part is that the busyness felt real. The emails did need to be answered and the laundry did have to get done… None of it was fake. That’s what makes this pattern so convincing and so hard to argue with from the inside.

What you feel in the moment your pattern activates is not a conscious decision to avoid. It’s a sudden, low-level drop in interest, a subtle sense that you don’t quite have the energy it’ll take to complete the task, or a completely reasonable feeling that you’ll be better positioned to tackle it after you handle a few smaller things first.

The thought feels like self-awareness, but it functions like an exit.

By the time you realize the day is gone, the guilt has already set in. And oftentimes, it follows you around for a few days, which makes you avoid even thinking about the thing because thinking about it means confronting the gap between where you are and where you said you’d be.

The Avoider is someone whose nervous system learned, at some point, that full engagement had a cost and that caring too much made the disappointment heavier when things didn’t work out. So her nervous system built an exit… An efficient and completely believable exit that arrives before the discomfort does.

The exit is always there. The work is learning to recognize it before you walk through it.

The Perfectionist

The Perfectionist’s pattern is the easiest to intellectualize because it looks like having really high standards.

This is what perfectionism actually looks like for most people. It looks like just one more read through, one small adjustment, or one more completely reasonable inclination that your work isn’t fully ready.

What you feel in the moment your pattern activates is not self-doubt in the obvious sense. It’s a specific discomfort that shows up the moment something might leave your hands and enter a space where other people can have opinions about it. So you pull it back, you polish it a little more, and you pass it off by telling yourself you’re being thorough.

The thought feels like responsibility, but it functions like a delay.

By the time you realize weeks have passed, the standard you originally set for your work quietly raises itself, because now the thing has to be even better to justify how long it took. Which means it’s even harder to finish. Which means more time passes. The Perfectionist’s loop doesn’t have a natural exit the way other patterns do. It just keeps going until something forces her hand.

The Perfectionist is someone whose nervous system learned, at some point, that the quality of what she produced determined how she was received. So it built a protection response that keeps anything unfinished from ever being held against her.

The standard is always there. The work is learning to tell the difference between something that genuinely needs more and something your pattern has decided will never be enough.

If this one is yours, this essay goes deeper into where it actually comes from. → The Perfectionist’s Lie: How I Spent Two Years Calling Self-Sabotage Something Else

The Overthinker

The Overthinker’s pattern looks like due diligence.

By the time the evening comes around, the decision you made this morning no longer feels like yours.

This is what overthinking actually looks like for most people. It’s not confusion about what to do, but rather a simulation of other people’s reactions running underneath everything, making every decision feel heavier than it needs to be because the decision was never just about you. It was about how it would be received. And your nervous system has been running that calculation since before you even finished thinking the thought.

What you feel in the moment your pattern activates is not genuine uncertainty. It’s a pull toward one more data point, one more opinion, one more reason to wait before you commit to something. Because committing means other people find out. And when other people find out, they have reactions. And you’ve already been rehearsing those reactions in your head for hours before you’ve even made the decision.

The research feels like preparation, but it functions like a stall.

By the time you realize your window of opportunity has closed, you’re filled with guilt and a kind of exhaustion that isn’t about the work itself. It’s the exhaustion of spending all day inside other people’s hypothetical reactions to something you never even did.

The Overthinker is someone whose nervous system learned, at some point, that moving too fast had consequences and that other people’s responses to her choices mattered in ways that felt very difficult to survive. So it built a loop. A thorough, well-intentioned, completely convincing loop that keeps her gathering information until the moment passes.

The loop is always there. The work is acting on what you already know before your brain convinces you that you don't know it yet.

The Pleaser

The Pleaser’s pattern doesn’t feel like a pattern at all. It feels like just being the way you are.

This is what people-pleasing actually looks like for most people: a reflex so automatic you don’t notice it firing. The “yes” that comes out before you’ve checked in with yourself. The boundary that dissolves the moment someone’s discomfort enters the room. The afternoon that was supposed to be all yours until it wasn’t, and no one had to ask you twice.

When your pattern activates, it masks the moment your brain would normally be told to make a decision. It’s a threat response that got wired in long before you had the language for it. For a lot of Pleasers, the origin isn’t actually generosity. It’s a household where the emotional temperature could shift without warning, and the fastest way to bring it back down was to make yourself agreeable. Maybe you were raised in an environment where someone’s mood (or multiple people’s mood) filled every room, and the version of you that stayed small, easy, and low-maintenance was the version that stayed safe.

Your nervous system filed that away. And then you grew up, moved out, built a life, and brought the filing system with you.

Showing up for everyone else feels like kindness. But doing it automatically, before you've even checked in with yourself, is how you've been abandoning your own priorities for years.

By the time you realize how much you’ve handed away, the resentment has already set in. And here is the part that tends to surprise people: that resentment is rarely directed at the person who asked you for your time and attention (at least at first). It’s directed at yourself for knowing, somewhere underneath it, that you were going to say yes before you finished reading the message. For the slow-accumulating awareness that you have spent years sending yourself to the back of your own line.

The impulse to say “yes” is always going to be there. The work is figuring out whether you're offering it or whether it's just leaving without your permission.

The Rebel

The Rebel’s pattern is the easiest to dismiss because it looks like knowing yourself.

This is what the Rebel’s pattern actually looks like for most people: a slowly convincing drift away from the thing that was working, timed almost perfectly to arrive the moment real progress became possible. And here is the part that makes this pattern the hardest to see clearly: the resistance gets strongest when things are going well.

The closer you get to what you actually want, the louder the internal noise becomes.

What you feel in the moment your pattern activates isn’t confusion. It’s a specific discomfort that arrives when success stops being hypothetical and starts being within reach. And here is where fear of success and resistance to structure become the same thing. Because success isn’t just an outcome. It comes with expectations, consistency, and a standard you now have to maintain.

For someone whose nervous system learned early that structure meant someone else had power over her, that someone else’s rules determined whether she was safe or loved or enough, her own success starts to feel like a trap she built herself. The goal she chose freely starts to feel like an obligation the moment it becomes real. And the moment it feels like an obligation, the alarm goes off.

The resistance feels like intuition, but it functions like a ceiling you installed yourself.

The Rebel is someone whose nervous system learned, at some point, that getting too far ahead of where she had always been had consequences. That succeeding too visibly, or outgrowing the version of herself that people knew, was somehow dangerous. So every time she gets close to the goal she actually wants, something in her creates a reason to pull back. And it has nothing to do with how much she wants it. It has everything to do with whether she believes, somewhere underneath all of it, that she's actually allowed to have it.

The resistance is always going to show up, and it will always arrive right when things start working. The work is learning to keep moving anyway, even when every part of you is scanning for a reason to stop.

The Hider

The Hider’s pattern looks like patience.

This is what hiding actually looks like for most people. It’s not an inability to finish things, or lack of ambition, or procrastination in the way people usually mean it. It’s a specific and practiced gap between completing the work and letting anyone see it. It’s the post that’s been sitting in draft mode for weeks or the project you keep meaning to share once the timing feels right.

What you feel in the moment your pattern activates is not procrastination or perfectionism, though it can look like both from the outside. It’s something closer to what psychologists call a visibility wound, an emotional imprint from an earlier time when being seen had consequences. Maybe you were criticized for standing out. Maybe you were taught, directly or indirectly, that wanting to be noticed was the same as being arrogant. So you learned to work on your goals in private, where they couldn’t be judged, misunderstood, or received as less than what you intended.

Waiting to share your work feels like patience. It functions like a way of never having to find out how it would be received, whether it would matter, or what it might change if it actually reached the people it was meant for.

The work you’re most afraid to share is often exactly what someone needed to see.

The urge to wait will always be there. The work is hitting publish before you’ve talked yourself out of it again.

What to do with this

You just read through six different patterns. And if you’re honest with yourself, you recognized at least one of them. Maybe two. Maybe you saw yourself in different styles at different points in your life, or in different areas of it right now.

Recognition is the starting point. It is not the work.

Knowing which pattern is yours is different from knowing how to catch it in real time, in the sixty seconds before it takes over, when it feels like a reasonable decision and not a sabotage. That gap between knowing and actually interrupting the cycle is exactly what the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook was built for.

It’s a 7-day system built around the specific moment your pattern takes over. Not a mindset exercise. Not a list of affirmations. A structured, daily system with style-specific tools and scripts designed to keep you moving when the pattern fights back hardest. It covers all six styles. It picks up exactly where this article leaves off.

It’s $17. Less than lunch. And unlike lunch, it might actually change something.

→ Get the Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook here.

Know someone who does the work, wants the goal, has the plan, and still can't seem to follow through? Send them this. The problem isn't effort. It's the pattern underneath it.

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You followed the advice, checked the boxes, and made all the smart choices. You pursued the degree that made sense, took the job with a good title, and built the life your younger self was supposed to want.

Now you’re here.

And the worst part is you can’t explain what’s wrong. There’s no obvious villain in this story: no abusive boss, no financial catastrophe, or even a single moment you can point to. You just have this persistent, gnawing feeling that you’re living someone else’s life, and you’ve been living it for so long you’ve forgotten what yours was supposed to feel like.

That feeling has a name. It’s misalignment. And there’s a reason everyone is talking about it right now.

Global employee engagement has dropped to its lowest levels since the pandemic. A PwC survey of over 56,000 workers found that more people are currently considering leaving their jobs than during the mass resignations of 2022. The career ladders people were told to climb are failing. The nine-to-five that was supposed to deliver security is delivering something closer to numbness. And the people who did everything right: got degrees, took “respectable” jobs, and impressive resumes, are the ones sitting in meetings thinking: I cannot do this for another decade.

The signs you’re living out of alignment

• The Saturday Night Dread: You know that unsettling anxiety that hits you on Saturday afternoon? It’s not just “the Sunday scaries.” It has nothing to do with your workload next week. It’s your body literally panicking because it knows you’re about to force it back into a life that stopped making sense for you a long time ago.

• The Exhaustion Sleep Can’t Fix: You are constantly exhausted because playing a character every single day is the most draining thing a human being can do. You’re exhausted from pretending to be the version of you that everyone else expects. No amount of sleep is going to fix that, because you don’t need rest… You need your reality to be more in sync with who you are and what you want.

• That Envy You Can’t Shake: When you see someone on social media quit their corporate job, move to the coast, or just blow up their life to start over, you get that heavy knot in your chest. You think its jealousy, but its not really that you want their specific life. You just want what they gave themselves permission to do: choose.

• The “Achievement Hangover”: You worked so hard for the promotion, the apartment, the house, the milestones. But when you got them, you felt absolutely nothing. Or worse, you just felt anxious about the next thing you’re “supposed” to want. You’re running a race you don’t even care about, chasing a finish line that keeps moving.

• The Constant Daydreaming: When you catch yourself staring out the window, mentally rewriting your career, your relationship, or your city, that isn’t harmless escapism. It’s information. It’s your brain trying to show you what you actually want.

The successful but empty paradox

I get why you’re stuck. Your life is good. You have real accomplishments, privileges, and a setup that other people would kill for. And that’s exactly why you feel too guilty to admit you’re miserable.

These are some of the thoughts that kept me stuck for a while: “I should be grateful.” “Other people have it so much worse.” “I’m just being selfish.”

Get this straight: You can be incredibly grateful for your life and still recognize that you are building the wrong one. Those two things can exist at the same time.

You convinced yourself you wanted this because it’s what “successful” people do. It’s what your parents, your college, and society told you security looked like. You were good at it, and you confused being good at something with actually wanting it.

Wanting something different felt too risky, too indulgent, or too late. So you just… Stayed.

The cost of staying

The longer you stay, the more it costs you across every area of your life.

The physical toll is real and underreported. Tension headaches, digestive issues, insomnia, and a lowered immune response are not random. They are your body’s response to sustained misalignment. Your mind can trick itself, but your body knows the truth.

The emotional cost is the one most people recognize last. It’s a low-level, permanent anxiety where you can’t even enjoy the things that used to make you happy anymore. Eventually, it starts to feel like you’re watching your own life happen from the passenger seat.

The relational cost can be an ugly one. The resentment that builds toward people who didn’t force you into this life, but whose expectations shaped it. The distance from yourself that eventually creates distance from everyone else. The exhausting performance of being someone recognizable to the people who’ve known you a certain way.

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Stop Paying for the Wrong Directed Path

The longer you stay, the more invested you become in the narrative that this is what you wanted. The more you’ve sacrificed for a path, the harder it becomes to admit it was the wrong direction.

But holding on just because you spent a long time investing in something is a terrible reason to stay. Acknowledging that you are lost or stuck isn’t a failure. It is the first completely honest, brave thing you can do for yourself.

You have permission to choose something else.

Where to Go Next

If you recognized yourself in this article, you already know something is off. This essay goes further into what it actually costs to keep showing up for a life built for everyone’s approval but yours.

→ Everyone Thought We Were Thriving

If you want to understand what’s keeping you from making a change even when part of you knows you need to, the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz is where that answer lives. It takes 3 minutes and it’s free. → Take the quiz here.

Know someone who has everything she was supposed to want and still dreads Sunday nights? Send her this article.

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Sources: Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report, 2025. PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, 2024.

I was sitting in a work meeting when I realized I had stopped listening entirely. I wasn’t distracted or zoned out… I was just gone. I remember watching my manager talk and thinking, with complete calm, that I could not do this for another decade. Maybe not even another year.

I had a professional job, a steady income, and a career path people nodded approvingly at during family dinners. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do.

And I was miserable in a way I could not explain to a single person in my life. Because what was I supposed to say?

So I didn’t say anything. I just kept showing up. Kept performing. Kept waiting for the feeling of “this feels right” to arrive… It didn’t.

The problem was that I had spent so long building toward what looked right that I had no idea what I actually wanted underneath it.

That problem has a name.

The trade you made without realizing it

You likely chose a practical path that made sense and proved you were serious, capable, and had your life together.

Maybe it was a stable job over a creative pursuit.

Maybe it was a relationship that checked all the right societal boxes over the one that actually felt like something.

Maybe it was the city you moved to for opportunity over the environment or lifestyle that was truly calling you.

You didn’t think of these things as giving something up. You thought of it as growing up. You told yourself you could always do the other thing later. First, you needed to be responsible.

Later has a way of never arriving.

Once you have built a life around being someone who has it figured out, that identity starts to feel like the only thing keeping you afloat. You stop being able to tell the difference between what you want and what you have convinced yourself you should want.

When “fine” becomes the thing you cannot survive

You wake up and realize you’ve been performing a version of yourself for so long, you really aren’t sure who is underneath it. You have optimized for stability, approval, and an impressive track record of not failing.

The career you worked hard for feels like a cage. The life you built feels like someone else’s blueprint. And the worst part is you can’t even articulate what is wrong, because nothing is wrong exactly. You just don’t feel alive in your own life.

When I finally admitted to myself that I couldn’t keep performing the version of my life that I had created, I did what any rational person would do… I quit my stable job in Higher Education and took a corporate sales job that paid twice as much.

Totally normal, well-adjusted decision-making.

The sales job was supposed to fix those feelings for me… More money, more freedom, and more proof I could bet on myself and win. And for a while, it worked. I was good at it. I made more money than I ever had. I felt competent again.

I was still performing and optimizing my life for everyone else’s approval but my own (just with a bigger paycheck).

The decision that made no sense to anyone but me

So I did something that made even less sense to the people around me. I walked away from the money to pursue something I had dreamed about since I was a child.

Acting.

I became a bartender. I drove for every rideshare app I could get on. I took acting classes. I auditioned. I booked a couple of times. I made far less money than I had in a decade.

And everyone, I mean everyone, had an opinion about it.

“But you were doing so well.”

“Don’t you think you should have a backup plan?”

“What if this doesn’t work out?”

The subtext was always the same: you are being irresponsible. You are throwing your life away.

I wasn’t throwing my life away. I was finally ridding myself of the life my mother wanted for me, that others congratulated, and the one that looked impressive on paper.

For the first time, I was building a life I was proud of.

The acting did not pan out the way I thought it would at the time. I am getting back into it now after a few years away. But that is not the point. The point is, I finally worked up the courage (and gathered the psychological tools along the way) to stop asking what the smart move was and started asking what I actually wanted.

Once I gave myself permission to ask that question, everything shifted.

I started building toward alignment instead of achievement.

And that’s led me here — through a dozen different jobs, pivots, experiments — all in service of the same thing: A life I don’t have to perform my way through (unless I’m acting, of course).

I won’t lie and say I have it all figured out. I haven’t really found the one perfect path. I’m not sure that even exists.

But I did stop treating my own desires like they were negotiable.

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Why you are still stuck

You know something needs to change. You can feel it: low-grade anxiety, the Sunday night scaries, and the sense that you’re living inside someone else’s idea of a life.

But you can’t move.

Moving forward would require you to stop being the person everyone relies on you to be. Your identity has been your armor for years. It has kept you safe and made you feel valuable. Letting go of it feels like free-falling. Instead, you stay, research, plan, and wait for the “right” time.

I had to ask myself one question before anything could shift:

My answer: more disconnected, more resentful, and further from the thing I actually wanted. That did not make the decision easy, nor did it eliminate my fear.

But it made staying feel more dangerous than leaving.

What it actually takes

You can’t build a life you are proud of while still protecting the version of yourself that is keeping you stuck. It is not going to step aside because you set a goal or made a plan.

It needs to understand what it is protecting you from, what staying stuck is actually costing you, and what moving could safely look like. That is the work.

And it starts with understanding your specific self-sabotage pattern, the precise way it operates, and what it’s guarding.

Where to Go Next

If you recognized yourself in this article, you already know something is off. The next essay goes further into what it actually costs to keep showing up for a life that was built for everyone’s approval but yours.

→ Everyone Thought We Were Thriving

If you want to understand what’s keeping you from making a change, even when part of you knows you need to, the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz is where that answer lives. It takes 3 minutes, and it’s free. → Take the quiz here.

Know someone who has built a life that looks right from the outside and cannot figure out why it still feels like something is missing? Send her this piece.

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Self-sabotage is not a discipline failure. It is a protection response.

Some part of you made a decision, before you were conscious enough to override it, that staying where you are is safer than moving toward what you want. And until you understand what that part is protecting you from, no system, no habit stack, no accountability partner will touch it.

The Pattern You Keep Repeating

Maybe it looks like this:

Then the resistance shows up. So, you spiral back into the same stuck place, but this time you have an extra layer of self-judgment.

Or maybe it’s subtler than that.

You don’t resist the action, but you resist wanting it. You know what you want, but admitting it feels so dangerous. So you stay in analysis mode, keep your options open, or tell yourself you’re “not ready yet,” even though you’ve been “not-ready” for months.

Either way, the underlying experience is the same: You feel split.

Part of you wants to move. Part of you won’t let you. And the harder you push against the resistance, the stronger it gets.

Why the resistance gets stronger the harder you push

Most advice treats stuckness as an obstacle. It positions it as something in the way, a wall to push through, or even a weakness to fix.

Here is what that framing misses entirely: the resistance is not in the way.

It is the response. It is your system doing exactly what it learned to do, protecting you from something that once felt genuinely dangerous to want.

You learned early what kept you safe, what made you valuable, and what helped you avoid the specific kind of pain your particular childhood handed you.

Your nervous system built a system around those lessons. A very efficient, very loyal, very inconvenient system.

These protections worked and helped you survive your early environments. But now, they just keep running in the background, even when the original threat is gone.

Even when staying stuck costs you more than moving forward ever would.

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The three kinds of friction — and which one is actually stopping you

After working with this in my own life (and watching it show up across dozens of conversations), I’ve noticed that internal friction tends to show up in three distinct ways, and most people are fighting the wrong one.

1. Emotional Friction

“I know what I want, but I’m avoiding the emotions that come with it.”

You’re are not confused about what to do. You are defended against what doing it will make you feel. The goal requires grief, or anger, or vulnerability, and your system will not let you go there. So you stay busy instead. You stay in your head. You mistake the avoidance for uncertainty.

2. Identity Friction

“Moving forward would require me to be someone I don’t know how to be.”

Moving forward would require you to become someone your current identity cannot hold. You are the responsible one. The capable one. You are the one who does not ask for help, make a mess, or admit that she really doesn’t have it together. The thing you want requires you to loosen that. To be unrecognizable for a while to people who have known you a certain way. That is not weakness. That is the specific cost of changing, and it is real.

3. Directional Friction

“I’m pushing toward something that doesn’t actually feel right.”

This is the trickiest one because it can look like the other two. You are pushing toward something that makes sense on paper. Smart. Practical. Everyone agrees it is the right move. But something keeps hitting the brakes. Because deep down, the goal is not yours. It was built on expectation, comparison, or fear of what happens if you admit what you actually want. The resistance is not stopping you from the goal. It is trying to tell you something about the goal.

What Happens When You Stop Forcing

Pushing harder against a protection mechanism makes the protection stronger.

What works is getting underneath the protection to find out what it is guarding. That means asking a different question:

Not “why can’t I do this” but “what does some part of me believe will happen if I do.”

The answer is usually something you haven’t said out loud yet or sounds irrational when you name it. Something that made complete sense at eight or twelve or twenty-two, and has been running in the background ever since, deciding what is safe to want.

Naming it doesn’t dissolve it completely, but it’s the only thing that makes it interruptible.

If you want to go further than naming it

Start with the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz. Three minutes. It identifies your specific pattern, what it is protecting you from, and what tends to activate it. It’s free.

Take it here.

The quiz shows you your pattern. The Self-Sabotage Pattern Breaker Workbook shows you what to do when it shows up. It is a 7-day system built around the specific moment your pattern takes over, before the spiral, before the shame, before you end up back at the beginning.

Get it here.

If this article resonated, forward it to the woman in your life who has read every self-help book and still cannot figure out why she keeps ending up in the same place.

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There is a video on my phone of water pouring into our basement like a scene from a disaster movie.

Not a slow leak. Not a drip. Pouring.

We had just fired and rehired contractors for the third time. We were already behind schedule. Already over budget. And now I’m standing in someone else’s basement in shoes that were NOT made for this, watching money leave our lives in real time, thinking “this cannot be happening”.

That was a Wednesday, I think. Honestly, the days blurred together in a way I haven’t experienced before or since.

Perfectionism is a constant, but it especially loves to show up when everything is falling apart, and people are watching. That’s when you find out what it’s actually made of.

And what it’s actually made of is fear. Specifically, the fear that if you can’t control how this looks, people will finally see the truth about you.

What perfectionism looks like when the universe stops cooperating

My partner and I bought our first investment property: a fix-and-flip. We had a plan. We had a timeline. We had people lined up to help us.

One by one, the plan stopped… Well, planning.

The contractors we hired weren’t doing the work correctly, so we let them go and found new ones. Then those ones had to go too. We were outsourcing, rehiring, managing timelines that kept shifting, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, we realized that if this house was going to get done, we were going to have to do a significant amount of it ourselves.

So that’s what we did.

From the outside, I’m sure it looked like chaos. And honestly? From the inside, it felt worse. And people knew we were doing this. People were watching. And the version of the story they were seeing looked nothing like the version I had planned to show them.

That gap between the story I wanted to tell and the story that was actually happening was eating me alive.

Then the tree fell.

I need you to picture this.

We are close. Not done, but close enough that I can see the finish line. Close enough that I had already organized a meeting with our listing agent and was pitching dates to come photograph the house. Close enough that I have allowed myself, for the first time in months, to take a deep belly breath and a long open-mouth exhale.

And then a tree came down and ripped the power lines clean off the house.

Not just the house we were working on, but every house on the street.

I stood there looking at those wires for a long time. There was nothing to do. You cannot out-plan a fallen tree. You cannot work harder to prevent power lines from going down.

For someone who had spent my entire life believing that enough preparation, effort, and control could prevent any disaster, that moment was its own kind of education.

The universe was not reading my project management notes.

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Before we go further, a note on what shadow work actually is and isn’t.

Because I know what some of you are thinking. Shadow work sounds like lying on the floor, crying about your childhood for three hours. Or burning sage. Or something your favorite wellness influencer does on a Tuesday morning with a latte and a linen journal.

And let me be clear: Sometimes it is those things. Sometimes that’s exactly what is required. But it doesn't always look that way.

Shadow work is simply the practice of getting honest about the parts of yourself you’ve learned to hide. Think about the reactions you explain away, the patterns you keep repeating despite knowing better, and the internal rules you follow without ever actually agreeing with them. For some people, that process goes deep and gets painful and takes time. For others, it starts with a moment of observation or a question you finally let yourself answer.

What it is: a way of asking why — not to punish yourself with the answer, but to finally understand it.

What the basement and the tree were actually trying to show me

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about perfectionism after living through that flip:

Perfectionism is not about standards. It is not about caring deeply or wanting things to be good. Those are the stories we tell ourselves so we don’t have to look at what’s underneath.

What’s underneath is this: somewhere along the way, you decided that your worth was conditional on your output. That whatever you were reaching for (love, safety, or approval) was available to you only if you performed well enough, didn’t make mistakes, or could control how things looked.

For me, that decision was made very early. I was the kid who packed her own lunch, who aced tests nobody asked her to study for, who made herself easy and competent and low-maintenance because she figured out fast that this was how you stayed loved. Flawless performance wasn’t a choice. It was my survival strategy.

And survival strategies don’t retire just because you grow up and buy an investment property. They come with you. They show up in the way you lie awake in the middle of the night, calculating what people think when they look at your half-finished house. They show up in the way a fallen tree feels less like a logistical problem and more like a personal failure.

That’s the shadow. The part of you that decided a long time ago that imperfection meant danger. The part that is still, at 30-something, trying to protect you from a threat that doesn’t exist.

What shadow work for perfectionism actually looks like

I want to be specific here because “do shadow work” is the kind of advice that sounds profound and means nothing without some steps.

For perfectionism specifically, shadow work looks like this:

Journaling your worst-case scenario all the way to the end. Not stopping at “they’ll think I’m incompetent.” You have to go further. They think I’m incompetent, and then what? They tell someone, and then what? Everyone finds out, and then what? Keep going until you hit the actual fear at the bottom. Almost every time, it traces back to something that happened before you had the right words to question or explain it.

Investigating why you’re procrastinating. Perfectionism and procrastination are the same thing, wearing different sneaky outfits. When you can’t start or can’t finish something, ask yourself: What am I afraid people will see if this isn’t perfect? The answer is always about what the task represents.

Choosing done over perfect. On purpose. Practice deliberately feeling the discomfort of imperfection so your nervous system learns that nothing catastrophic will happen. We listed that house. We did the best we could with what we knew. Hell, we even painted the interior ourselves. I’m sure it would have looked much better done by professionals. But we listed it, it sold, and the world did not end.

Identifying whose voice your inner critic is using. The harshest voice in your head wasn’t you to begin with. It came from somewhere else: a parent, a teacher, or an environment that taught you that mistakes had consequences. Shadow work asks you to find that voice, name it, and understand that it was trying to protect you. And then gently, but firmly, let it know that you don’t need that kind of protection anymore.

The part I didn’t expect

We profited on that house.

The imperfect, contractor-fired, basement-flooded, power-line-severed, painted-by-hand house sold. And we made money on it.

I want to be careful not to wrap this up too neatly, because the lesson is not that “imperfection always works out.” Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the basement really does ruin everything.

But the deeper lesson, the one I have come back to many times, is that the perfectionism didn’t protect me. The standards I held myself to, the sleepless nights, the spiral every time something went visibly wrong… None of that made the house better, made the house sell faster, or made the process less brutal. What got us through was not control. It was just continuing to show up in the mess, covered in sanding dust, doing the next thing.

The imperfect self, the one who doesn't have it together, the one covered in sanding dust with no idea what comes next, she was there the whole time.

And she's the one who actually finished the house.

That’s what shadow work eventually shows you. It’s not meant to show you that your standards are wrong, but that you were never as dependent on them as you thought.

Where to Go Next

Most people who recognize themselves in this article have been calling it perfectionism for years. That’s not wrong. But perfectionism is the behavior. The shadow is what’s underneath it. If you want to understand what’s actually driving it, this is the next essay worth reading.

→ Shadow Work Is Not What You Think It Is

Shadow work shows you where the pattern came from. But knowing the origin doesn’t always tell you how it’s showing up in your life right now. That’s what the Self-Sabotage Style Quiz is for. It takes the “why” you just uncovered and shows you the how: your specific behavioral pattern, the moment it tends to activate, and what it’s doing when it runs without your permission.

It takes about 3 minutes and it’s free. → Take the quiz here.

Know someone who keeps calling herself a perfectionist like it’s a personality trait and has never once asked where it came from? Send her this one.

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