There’s a moment — and if you’re in it, you know exactly what I’m talking about — where you look up from the life you’ve been building, doing, managing, and maintaining, and you think: is this it?
Not with despair, necessarily. Sometimes with genuine curiosity. Sometimes with a low-grade grief you can’t quite name. Sometimes at 2am, and sometimes in a staff meeting where you’re nodding along and simultaneously wondering what would happen if you just… didn’t.
I’ve spent a lot of my professional life inside healthcare and workforce development, watching women — brilliant, capable, exhausted women — navigate the specific terrain of mid-career. Not early career, where the path feels clear and the energy is high and there’s a script to follow. Mid-career. The stretch where you’ve earned enough to know what you’re doing, you’ve given enough to wonder what it cost, and you’re awake enough to ask whether what’s ahead looks anything like what you actually want.
This is the season that interests me most. And it’s the season I work in now.
A line I’ve been sitting with lately: “The courage it takes to leave behind what’s not for you anymore is the same courage that will help you find your way to what is.”
I think about this a lot. Not because it’s a tidy thought, but because it’s a true one — and because it reframes something that most of us have been taught to experience as loss into something that is, in fact, an act of integrity.
I know this because I’ve lived it. Several times, in several directions.
I left a marriage of eighteen years. Not in a blaze of drama, not overnight — but after years of knowing, in that private and inconvenient way you know things, that I had outgrown the life I was in and was performing a version of myself that no longer fit. I walked out without fighting on my way through the door, because by the time I left, I had already done the fighting. Mostly with myself.
I’ve left roles that paid well and looked good on paper, because I finally got honest enough to admit that I was restless not from ingratitude but from growth. The restlessness was information. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to stop treating it like a problem to be managed and start treating it like a compass.
I’ve let go of relationships — friendships, professional partnerships — that had been genuinely important to me at one point, but that had quietly become one-directional. Not with bitterness. With grief, actually. Because those losses were real, and I think they deserve to be named as such rather than dressed up as “moving on” in a way that strips them of their weight.
And then, in the middle of all of that leaving, I started building something. Wildbrush Collective didn’t come from a moment of perfect clarity. It came from a long series of smaller yeses — yes to the coaching certification, yes to the hard conversation with myself about what I actually wanted my work to look like, yes to the possibility that what I’d spent twenty years learning could become something I owned rather than something I contributed to someone else’s vision.
That yes was terrifying. It still is, some days. But it was also — and I mean this — the most aligned thing I’ve ever done professionally.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe, from my own life and from sitting across from women who are doing this reckoning in real time: the transition doesn’t usually start with a dramatic exit. It starts with a small, quiet shift in how you respond to the word yes.
For most of us — especially those raised to be agreeable, helpful, and appropriately ambitious (not too much, not too little) — yes has been the default. Yes to the committee. Yes to the extra project. Yes to the role that stretches you past what’s reasonable because that’s what high performers do. Yes to staying in situations, relationships, organizations that no longer reflect who you’ve become.
And for a long time, that yes kept the machine running. It built the resume. It earned the respect. It proved the point.
But there comes a season — usually somewhere in the 35-to-55 stretch, though I won’t pretend it follows a calendar — where that reflexive yes starts to cost more than it returns. Where you say it and feel something in you deflate, just slightly, in a way you might have once ignored but can no longer quite dismiss.
That deflation is information. It is not a character flaw, and it is not ingratitude.
What I’ve watched happen when women begin to listen to that signal — when they get curious about it instead of just pushing through it — is something I can only describe as a reorientation. Not a crisis. A course correction.
They start to notice what fills them and what drains them. They start asking different questions — not just can I do thisbut do I want to? They start giving themselves permission to be discerning about their time, their energy, their expertise — the very things they’ve spent years building.
And then, slowly or all at once depending on the person, they start saying no. To the things that shrink them. To the obligations that are really just someone else’s priorities wearing the costume of necessity. To the version of themselves they outgrew three years ago but kept performing out of habit, or fear, or a deep-seated belief that they didn’t have the right to want more.
That no is not a closed door. It’s the thing that makes space for the open one.
The courage that quote is pointing to isn’t a different kind of courage depending on whether you’re leaving or arriving. It’s the same muscle. You build it by using it. Every time you tell the truth about what’s not working — to yourself, to someone else, in a decision that costs you something — you are strengthening the exact capacity you’ll need to walk toward what’s next.
That’s not nothing. In fact, I’d argue it’s the whole thing.
You’ve spent a long time being useful to everyone else’s vision. It is not too late — and you are not too old, too far in, or too responsible — to say yes to your own.
If this is the season you’re in, I’d love to be in conversation with you. Wildbrush Collective exists for exactly this — the women who are ready to do the work of building what’s next. [Link in bio.]
