It started with a sound.
A deep, groaning snap. Then the unmistakable crash of wood on metal. The kind of sound that makes your stomach drop before your brain catches up.
By morning, the wreckage was clear. A massive tree had come down on our garage. One moment, everything was standing. The next? Rubble.
That was January 2024.
And that tree wasn’t just a tree. It was the year ahead in disguise.
Because soon after, everything else started to collapse too.
One by one, almost all the professional partnerships in my life—from my literary agent to my publisher to my web designer—unraveled. Not in a fiery, dramatic way. Just the slow realization that our paths were diverging. I was deeply grateful for what we built together, but we were no longer the right fit for each other.
So I decided to take a sledgehammer to my own foundations. Not just repaint the walls or patch the cracks—but tear it all down and build from scratch.
We love a fresh coat of paint. A quick fix. A minor tweak.
Why? Because it’s safe. It feels productive without requiring us to sit in the discomfort of destruction. And it’s terrifying to admit that what you’ve built—what once worked—can’t take you to where you want to go next.
But when the foundation is cracked, no amount of patchwork will save it. You have to tear it down and start over. And that’s when things get messy.
Because between the old life you just demolished and the new one you haven’t built yet, there’s a strange, shapeless in-between. It’s the moment mid-renovation when you realize, Oh, wait. Now I don’t have a kitchen.
That’s the part no one warns you about. Where everything familiar is gone, but nothing new has taken its place. Where you’re not who you were, but you’re not who you’re becoming yet either.
It’s the caterpillar inside the chrysalis. Not yet a butterfly, but no longer itself. Just a soup of dissolved cells, caught in the chaos of becoming.
And the instinct? It’s to escape. To scramble for the next thing as fast as possible. To grab onto something—anything—that makes you feel stable again.
Like jumping into a new relationship right after a breakup, just to avoid sitting with loneliness. Or taking the first job offer that comes along after leaving your old one, even if it feels wrong, because the uncertainty is too unbearable.
But if you rush the process—if you rebuild too fast—you don’t actually change. You find yourself dating the same type of partner or taking a new job that looks different on the surface, but still drains you in all the familiar ways.
The pattern repeats because you never actually broke it.
In the aftermath of my own destruction, I didn’t rush to rebuild. I let the old structures stay broken. I sat in the rubble, uncomfortable as it was.
And then, slowly, things shifted. The right partners started showing up. Big, bold ideas began to emerge.
One of them? Let’s just say I’m creating something I’ve never done before—an in-person experience designed to shake people out of their old patterns and into something entirely new. I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks, and I can’t wait.
So if you find yourself standing in the wreckage of something that used to feel solid, wondering what the hell just happened—maybe, just maybe, that’s not a bad thing.
Maybe it’s making room. Maybe it’s handing you the gift of a blank slate.
And what comes next might be far better than anything you could have built if you just kept patching up the old.
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