It was New Year's Eve, and I was hiding.
Everyone I loved was downstairs. My husband, my cousin who's also my best friend, her partner, all of them laughing by a lake in the Berkshires, watching the sunset and making incredible memories together. While I was upstairs, hunched over Slack, finishing the last details of a client's launch. Just ONE more message. It was always “one more thing to handle” before I could let myself go down and be part of my own night.
By the time I finally came down, the party had moved on without me.
I poured a martini I didn't need, then another, and woke up the next morning with a headache and the sinking feeling that I'd built a business that kept pulling me out of the rooms I most wanted to be in.
Here's how I got there. During the pandemic, my coaching practice took off. I was living in Ireland, working across time zones, on Zoom close to eight hours a day, and running program coordination for a coaching school through its biggest cohorts ever. Most of my private clients were holistic practitioners whose in-person work had vanished overnight, and I felt responsible for all of it: their launches, income, confidence, knowing exactly what to do next. I answered messages at all hours and called it “being a good coach.” I was completely fried.
I knew better, which is the part that stings.
What the body knows
The body tells the truth before the mind is ready to.
Because for 12 years I was a licensed massage therapist, and I learned that the body tells the truth before the mind is ready to (hello, The Body Keeps the Score!). Ninety percent of the time, the tension I felt in clients' bodies was because their life was out of alignment; they weren't living the way they were supposed to.
Before that, I watched a family member nearly lose their life to that same thing on a much bigger scale, when they got cut off from their values and their sense of choice. I'd spent years helping other people stop hurting their bodies when they were abandoning themselves.
Then I looked up on New Year's Eve and saw I was doing it to me.
Rebuilding the work
So I rebuilt how I worked.
I got honest about the difference between what was truly urgent, what I was inventing in my own head, and what I was absorbing from someone else. I stopped being the emergency contact for everyone's business and emotions. I clarified what my coaching container was actually for and set real boundaries around when and how clients could reach me. I learned to hand ownership back to a client without going cold. I even stood up for myself and left the coaching school.
What changed
That gave me my life back in ways I can point to.
I started painting again after 12 years. I spent more time in the garden. When I visit my ten nieces and nephews, I'm in the room with them now instead of locked away answering messages. Around that same season, I was moving through a two-year fertility journey that didn't end the way I hoped, and the boundaries I'd built taught me that my needs and my energy were worth honoring anyway, even without the family I thought I'd have. That's something a lot of childless-not-by-choice women carry, and it changed me.
And the clients who come to me now show up ready to do the work, so I no longer feel like I have to carry anyone up the mountain.
Why I care
So many women start businesses for freedom and slowly recreate the exact thing they left.
This is why I care about the work I do. I know the courage it takes to leave the expected path and start something of your own. I also know how easy it is to walk out of one cage and build another one out of client DMs, blurred boundaries, and the belief that everyone's success rests on you.
The belief under all of it: the way you show up when no one is watching is one of the truest measures of your life. I help booked-out service providers build a business that reflects their values behind the scenes, in the calendar, the boundaries, the decisions, the way a 9 p.m. client message gets handled.
Because success doesn't count for much if it costs you your health, your joy, or your relationship with yourself. And for those of us who can choose differently, I think we have a responsibility to.