We Are Not Lost. We Are Using Old Maps

The particular torture

If I were in charge of punishments in Hell, my particular form of torture would be this: give someone their soulmate—and then make them completely incompatible.

That was me and my ex.

From the outside, we had the perfect life. Inside it, I was anything but.

I gripped, muscled, and mind-over-mattered. I tried to force our marriage into a conventional structure that was never going to work. We would take two steps forward and one step back. A lot of times, five steps back.

I thought the problem was that I hadn’t figured out how to make it work yet.

So I tried harder.

The harder I tried, the more rigid I became. I was braced against an ongoing storm—in my marriage and in a home with two toddlers, plus renovations. Eventually, like a tall tree that could no longer bend, I snapped.

Worse, I had become a warriored version of myself I didn’t like.

On Christmas Eve, with our children only 3 and 4, we hit the eject button. (Thank God my parents were out visiting, as I didn’t have the strength to play Santa Claus. See photo of my baby girl and my mama.)

I didn’t have a new map. I only knew the one I was following was breaking me. We like to imagine transformation as a courageous leap toward a clear new future. Mine wasn’t. I left because I could no longer handle any of it, especially the effect it might have on the children. But I had no clue about what map to follow next.

When strength becomes performance

For most of my life, I thought strength meant carrying more. I became the strong one. The busy one. The one who gets shit done.

Women are praised for that. We are expected to succeed professionally while remaining loving, maternal, attractive, agreeable, and emotionally available—and never make anyone uncomfortable with our honest thoughts, our ambition or power.

When something isn’t working, we are taught to question our effort before we question the structure. So we grip, polish, perfect, explain, accommodate, and carry more.

The dangerous part is that contortion can mask as competence. You are still producing. Still holding everything together. Everyone may even admire you for it.

But you are quietly gnawing off pieces of your life force. Your essential being.

Adaptation allows you to remain yourself while responding to life. Contortion requires you to abandon yourself to preserve a structure. One is resilience. The other is slow self-demolition.

Misogyny, like racism, does not survive only in its most obvious expressions. It also lives in assumptions and deep-seated beliefs—in our relationships, workplaces, financial systems, and in our own heads—as the standards we hold for who we must be to deserve love, respect, or the right to lead.

You cannot perform your way back to life. You have to regenerate.

Difficulty is information

I believe in grit. Grit has helped me build companies, restore homes, raise children, care for land, and begin again.

But grit is a tool—not a universal answer.

Sometimes difficulty means the work matters. Sometimes it means you are learning. Sometimes you need more skill, help, patience, or time.

And sometimes difficulty is information: the structure is incompatible with the life trying to exist inside it.

The work is learning to tell the difference.

No amount of grit can make an incompatible structure compatible.

Nature reads the conditions

Since I was young, I always turned to nature as my therapist. Nothing has changed. The bond has only gotten stronger and more meaningful.

Nature doesn’t blame a seedling for failing to thrive in depleted soil. It asks what the seed needs: water, rest, space, sunlight, nutrients, time.

Nature does not remain in full bloom all year. It grows, rests, releases, replenishes, and begins again. Winter is not failure. Quiet is not broken. The roots may be deepening even when nothing looks productive from the outside.

A Taoist teaching gave me another image: a reed survives a storm not because it is stronger than the wind, but because it can bend without losing its roots. It yields—and then returns to its own shape.

More recently, during a medicine retreat in Ojai, I walked out of a glass dome where I had been trying very hard to have a profound experience. But I stayed vigilant. And then had to leave the dome before going into a bad headspace.

Outside, I leaned against an oak tree and let it hold me.

For the first time in a long time, I stopped being the one doing the holding. I wasn’t managing, fixing, producing, or searching for the right answer. I was simply part of it all. And that’s when the aperture on my lens expanded. And I could not only see more, but feel the undercurrent of power that runs through us all.

Breaking news from a lifelong tree hugger: trees hug us. We just have to let them.

That is the kind of strength I want now—rooted enough to remain myself, soft enough to respond, secure enough to receive, and focused enough to bring my visions to life.

Regeneration is not control

My definition of regeneration works across homes, land, and life: stop forcing life and start creating the conditions for it.

Regeneration is not another buzz term or perfection project for me. For me, it begins with a pause: to feel, to notice what is depleted, what might be scary, what needs tending, and what wants to emerge.

On land, that may mean restoring soil instead of demanding greater yield from depletion with chemicals. You do not command a seed to grow. You tend the conditions that make growth possible.

In a home, it may mean listening before tearing it down and painting it white —preserving the history and character that still hold life while adapting the space for a unique representation of all that matters to you. (It’s your nest. Not Pinterest’s. Not the Jones’s!)

In a life, it means asking whether the structures around you—and within you—have the conditions for your full, authentic self to flourish. As Marianne Williamson has said, “You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.”

This is what I have been learning to do on my land, with my homes, and most importantly, with myself.

The black sheep may not be lost

For much of my life, being the black sheep felt like evidence that something was wrong with me.

I was the one who kept following an inner pull—even when it confused people, disappointed them, or made me look reckless. Every time I followed my heart, I seemed to pay for it in disapproval. Too much. Too restless. Too unwilling to accept the map I was handed.

Then—BAM—it occurred to me: perhaps the black sheep isn’t the one who lost the flock. Perhaps she is the one who noticed the flock was following an old map.

This is not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It is the willingness to listen closely enough to recognize when a structure requires you to abandon yourself—and to become curious about what wants to emerge instead

I understand now that I wasn’t failing at my life. I was trying to succeed inside a map that required me to contort.

That realization does not erase the grief or make the years easy. It does something more useful: it allows me to stop treating the mismatch as an indictment of strength.

Now, when something is hard, I try to practice a simple framework:

Pause. Feel. Act.

Pause before automatically pushing harder.

Feel what is actually happening—what is depleted, frightened, braced, or trying to emerge. I ask: What story am I telling myself? What are the constructs of my thoughts and feelings, and where did they come from?

And beneath all of those questions:
Is this map I want to follow?

Then act from a centered, calm place—not from panic, performance, or the reflex to prove how much I can carry.

Sometimes the action is to persist. Sometimes it is to ask for help, change the conditions, loosen my grip, or walk away.

I am not trying to stop being a warrior. I am learning to choose when to be one.