What I Know at the Halfway Point
That I Didn't Know in January

I'm a transformational coach and yoga and awareness teacher, and the founder of Verisage — a coaching practice for women rebuilding identity after life's biggest transitions. This piece opens a five-part June series called Six Months In, built around the midyear moment: not a productivity reset, but an identity reckoning. This first one is personal.

On New Year's Eve, I sat alone and wrote in my journal. I was hopeful — genuinely, almost giddily hopeful — about what the year ahead could become. I had my goals. I had my plans. I had a word that had come to me quietly that morning, in a message from someone whose perspective has always mattered to me.

The word was allow.

Allow yourself to ride the momentum. Allow yourself to achieve the goals. Allow yourself to launch, to flourish, to become the version of yourself you've been holding at arm's length. I wrote it in my journal that night with something close to electricity running through me. No one is stopping me but me. I meant it. I believed it. And I had no idea — not really — what it would cost me to actually live it.

Six months later, I know something I didn't know then: I came into this year thinking "allowing myself" was about momentum. About action. About finally getting out of my own way long enough to execute. What this year has actually been teaching me — slowly and not always gently — is that allowing is first and foremost an act of surrender. Of releasing my grip on how I thought things were supposed to go.

I did not always do that gracefully.

The peace I thought belonged to someone else

There is someone in my life who brings me peace — whose presence settles something in me. For a long time, I thought that was about them. I know now it is about me. The peace was already there. I am just learning to find it without needing someone else to unlock it first. That has been one of the quieter lessons of this year, and one of the more important ones.

And now, in this season, my oldest son moved out.

I knew it was coming. I thought I was ready. I was not ready. Not because I doubted him — I have always known that the moment I release my oldest, he flourishes. I have watched it happen his whole life. But this time he was the last one, and the house was quiet in a way it had never been, and the version of me that has organized her entire identity around being needed — that version had nowhere left to go.

My mother said something to me around that time that has stayed with me. Something about letting my oldest find his way. Something about it being time for me to build my life. And I remember sitting with that phrase — build my life — and feeling it land differently than it would have in January. Because in January, I thought I already knew what building looked like. Goals. Plans. Execution. I had the whole thing mapped.

What I didn't know yet was that the real building couldn't start until I stopped performing okayness long enough to actually feel what was happening. Until I stopped reaching for something to fill the quiet and learned to sit with it instead. Until I let the empty rooms be empty for a while, and listened to what they had to say.

What I know now

Here is what I know at the halfway point that I did not know in January:

I know that I am the only one holding myself back — and I know now exactly how that works, which is different from just suspecting it. It is not laziness. It is not lack of vision or desire or discipline. It is the sophisticated, well-intentioned work of a mind that learned early to protect me from pain by keeping me small enough to stay safe. My mind is not my enemy. But it is not always my guide, either.

I know that allowing yourself is not a one-time declaration. It is a practice. Some mornings I wake up and I allow. Other mornings the old gravity pulls hard, and I have to choose again — not because I failed the first time, but because becoming is not a single moment. It is made of a hundred ordinary moments, most of them unglamorous, many of them quiet.

I know that this season — the one where my sons are grown and the house is mine and my purpose has room it has never had before — is not a gap between what was and what's next. It is the thing. I just had to grieve long enough to see it.

I am releasing the idea that I have to earn the right to take up space. I am releasing the version of peace that only comes when someone else provides it. I am releasing the belief that being alone in a season means being without.

Six months in, I am not who I was in January. I am not finished. I am not behind. I am in the middle of something real — and for the first time in a long time, I am not trying to rush past it.

I am allowing myself to be here. Right in the middle of it.