Now I think it means trusting yourself enough to know you’ll be okay even when you make the wrong one.

That’s a very different kind of confidence.

I’ve spent too much time paying attention to other people’s opinions. Growing up in a very conservative religious environment, I learned early that belonging came with rules. There was a right way to talk, behave, dress, and interact with other people.

And I got very good at following those rules.

I got good at being liked. At keeping the peace. At trying to understand everyone else’s perspective. What I wasn’t particularly good at was asking myself what I thought.

That followed me into my relationships.

I’ve had three major relationships that permanently changed me and my perspective. One of them taught me, in a very painful way, what happens when you stop trusting your own judgment.

I learned how easy it is to take someone else’s version of you and make it your own.

Sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we do need to apologize. Sometimes we are the ones who need to change.

But there are other questions worth asking:

What if I’m not wrong?

What if someone is angry with me and I don’t need to fix it?

What if someone misunderstands me?

What if I don’t want the relationship anymore?

What if I can listen to someone’s opinion without making it my opinion of myself?

I think that’s what self-trust has become for me.

Not believing I’m always right.

Not becoming so independent that I don’t need anyone.

It’s knowing when I need help. Knowing who to ask. Being able to hear criticism without immediately turning it into shame. Being able to admit when I’m wrong without deciding I’m a bad person.

And sometimes, it’s walking away.

The older I get, the less interested I am in being chosen by everyone.

I still want people in my life. I still want love, friendship, community, and connection.

I just not willing to abandon myself to keep them.

Because people change. Relationships change. We change.

And eventually, you have to become someone you can rely on through all of it.

What does it take to trust yourself?

That’s what I’m thinking about in Episode 6 of Look Who It Is.

Be more confident. Take up space. Stop making yourself smaller.

But maybe confidence is actually the problem.

I’ve never struggled to believe I’m capable. I’ve competed at the highest level of my sport, built a career, started businesses, and figured out plenty of things people once told me were unlikely.

So confidence? I’ve got that. What I’ve struggled with is value, self-worth.

Do I believe I’m worthy of what I want?

There’s a difference between knowing what you’re capable of and believing you deserve the life you’re capable of building.

I think I learned to play small in ways I didn’t recognize for a long time. I grew up with a very specific idea of what a woman was supposed to be, and it took me years to separate what was actually me from what I had learned to be.

I see the same thing in dating.

I can know exactly what I bring to a relationship and still wonder if it will be enough. I can know what I want in a partner and still wonder if someone will choose me.

And disability adds another layer to that.

Last week in New York, I was reminded that there are some opportunities I simply cannot access in the same way other people can. No amount of confidence or work ethic will change that. And I hate that.

Sometimes a limitation is just a limitation and knowing your worth isn’t about believing you can have everything you want. Maybe it’s knowing that when you don’t get it, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

I’m still learning that. Especially as I make peace with being single.

I can want marriage. I can want a partner. I can hope that person exists. And I can also accept that none of it is guaranteed. I’m trying not to wait for someone else to arrive before I start becoming the person I want to be.

I’m still becoming.

Maybe confidence was never the problem.

And then you hit a point where you just can’t do that anymore.

That’s how I feel about my podcast today, leaning heavily on the word *today* because tomorrow I might wake up and feel completely different.

But today, I’m feeling the full weight of how much effort this process takes and how little reward there is in the beginning. I hope a seasoned podcaster or two will read this and send me an encouraging message. (Please do. I could use it!)

Right now, I’m in the trenches.

And it got me thinking about breaking points: Why do we expect reward before we’ve fully weathered the storm? And why does it sometimes feel like everything goes wrong all at once?

For me, it’s usually October.

I’ve called it cursed before. To be fair, October is the month I lost my leg. In the amputee community, we call it an *ampuversary*. There’s also a psychological term for the emotional response that can happen around the anniversary of a traumatic event: an *anniversary reaction*.

It’s a recognized response that can happen to people with or without PTSD. Sometimes the date arrives and, even if you aren’t consciously thinking about what happened, your body remembers. I’ve experienced it, on a spectrum, my entire adult life. Some years a better than others, but October has become my annual breaking point.

We are constantly being asked to adapt. Push through. Be positive. Keep going. But when you hit the breaking point, that all feels like bullshit.

There are plenty of things happening in America that make this year feel especially terrible, and somewhere on that list is the fact that I’m watching work dry up, questioning what I’m building, and wondering whether all this effort is actually going anywhere.

And that got me thinking about algorithms.

I work in marketing, so it’s become a tool that’s part of the process and it’s helped me get as far as I have without a team or a real budget. Algorithm aren’t new, they just became accessible and the foundation is simply: identify patterns and follow them.

People aren’t patterns.

We can wake up one morning and completely change direction. We change our minds. We contradict ourselves. We want something desperately but by the time we get it, we wonder why we wanted it in the first place.

We build careers and relationships and identities around what works, and then one day what worked, doesn’t work anymore.

We are not algorithms.

And maybe that’s part of why breaking points feel so uncomfortable.

We’re so used to adapting.

Adapting to the job. Adapting to the relationship. Adapting to the expectations. Adapting to the thing we said we wanted. Until eventually, there’s nothing left to adapt.

Maybe that’s what a breaking point actually is? Not the moment everything falls apart. It’s simply the moment you realize you can no longer keep adapting to something that isn’t working.

Sometimes that means you walk away. Other times it means you change the system. Sometimes you change yourself. And sometimes you just admit: this isn’t working for me anymore.

That’s the annoying thing about being a person.

Most of us don’t optimize particularly well.

We just keep changing.

And I chose to do it anyway. That’s the part I’ve thought about the most.

Not Why did I marry the wrong person? But Why didn’t I listen to myself?

It’s easy to look backward at a decision that didn’t work and see that it was obvious. The red flags were there. The signs were there. But knowing something and being willing to act on it are two very different things.

And this isn’t just about relationships.

Maybe you’ve stayed in a job longer than you should have.

Maybe you’ve stayed in a friendship that ran its course.

Maybe you’ve lived somewhere you’ve outgrown because leaving meant starting over.

Or maybe you’ve kept trying to make something work because you’ve already invested so much into it.

I’ve done all of these in different ways.

Familiarity can look a lot like compatibility.

When something becomes familiar enough, it can be surprisingly difficult to tell the difference between something that is right for you and something that you’ve simply gotten used to.

Sometimes you can’t just leave.

This is where I think a lot of advice about making big life changes falls short.

We love simple advice: If you know it’s wrong, leave.

But life isn’t always simple. Sometimes it required patience in order to protect something we value. And sometimes staying is simply based in fear and obligation.

Sometimes the thing we’re afraid to leave isn’t even the thing we’re holding onto.

For me, leaving my marriage meant admitting that I had been wrong. It meant grieving a second family I’d become part of. It meant untangling a life we’d built together. And it meant accepting that loving someone wasn’t enough to make us compatible.

I wish I’d understood that sooner.

Listen to Episode 4 of Look Who It Is: Why We Stay When We Know It’s Time to Leave.

And then think about your own life.

What have you stayed in longer than you should have?

And what were you really afraid of losing?

And sometimes, the very things that helped us get through one version of our lives follow us into the next.

Lets talk about what happens when survival becomes a way of living. I’ll break down the coping mechanisms I developed through cancer, athletics, trauma, and simply learning how to navigate the world…and what happened when I started questioning whether I still needed to cope.

Because there’s a difference between being shaped by your past and being controlled by it.

And maybe strength isn’t always about handling more. Maybe sometimes it’s recognizing that you don’t have to keep doing something just because you’ve done it before.

Look Who It Is — Episode 3 is out now.

And then I survived.

Eventually, I became an athlete and competed at the highest level of my sport. I built a career. I became very good at doing the very thing I was expected to do: overcoming

There was just one problem.

I didn’t realize how much my identity depended on it.

I thought the story began with the diagnosis. It didn’t.

It started in 1953, to my mother growing up in southern Utah. She was just five years old when the United States detonated a nuclear bomb in Nevada.

The government knew radioactive fallout would reach surrounding communities. They told people there was nothing to worry about.

Then the sheep started dying.

Thousands of them and my mother was one of the children exposed to that fallout.

And because women are born with the eggs they will carry throughout their lives, the cell my body was eventually built from existed inside my mother’s ovary in 1953.

I’d thought cancer was just something that happened but what if the story you believe about yourself isn’t true? Or at least, only half true?

Look Who It Is — Episode 2 is out now.

The funny thing is, I did accomplished, well, all the things.

I survived cancer. I became an amputee. I learned to snowboard when people told me amputees couldn’t snowboard. I became a professional athlete. I won 24 World Cup medals. I earned a master’s degree. I built a career outside of sports.

And somehow, winning still didn’t make me feel like enough.

In the first episode of Look Who It Is we introduce achievement, self-worth, belonging, and the identity I build around being the person who can overcome anything.

What happens when the life we’ve worked so hard to build no longer fits the person we’ve become?

That’s where we’re starting.

Listen to Episode 1: Why Isn’t Winning Enough?

I’ve done some objectively cool things in my life. Things that, someone else might feel incredibly proud of. But for many years, I’ve had a hard time looking in the mirror and saying Girl. You did that!

And I couldn’t really understand why.

It wasn’t humility. And it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate validation. It’s that I just couldn’t seem to connect with my own accomplishments. They felt strangely distant. Like something that had happened to someone else.

I’ve since learned that trauma can affect both the way we remember what happened to us and how we experience our own memories. Trama can essentially break the connection we feel with our sense of self.

Maybe I never stopped being proud of the woman who won medals. She’s still part of me, just a quieter version that’s harder to see.

Chances are, there’s someone reading this right now that can relate to this feeling of disconnect. They too found themselves in a relationship where their reality was questioned, their feelings minimized, and their needs were always too much.

We stop trusting our own instincts. Stop asking for what we need. Stop celebrating ourselves and start editing our own story. I think eventually we become so accustomed to looking at ourselves from someone else’s perspective that we forget there are other versions of us too.

It’s not that I just stopped putting things on the walls.

There’s something about putting up a photograph, a medal, an accomplishment, or a reminder of something we survived that says:

This happened. I did this. This is part of my story.

And I think that part of my story was so painful, that if I wanted to survive, I couldn’t keep facing it every day.

So, I put it away. I made myself smaller and looked forward instead of back.

At the time, I think it was exactly what I needed to do. But time changed my grief and allowed survival to make room for something new. Pride inched its way back in and helped me remember the real story.

Contrary to what some might believe, pride isn’t always arrogance. Sometimes it’s simply being able to look at your life and say:

Yeah. That was hard. But I did it. And it mattered, because I matter.

Maybe healing isn’t becoming someone entirely new or reinventing yourself into a shinier, more acceptable version. Maybe It can also be finding your way back to the parts of yourself you abandoned in order to survive.

The woman who won medals.

Who built things.

Who kept going.

She’s still here. And she has some walls to fill. Which is a pretty good problem to have.

PS: She’s also launching a podcast on August 25th and the trailers up! Be sure to bookmark it on your favorite platform.

Cancer survivor.
Snowboarder.
World Champion.
2x Paralympian.
Business owner.

And somewhere along the way, I started asking deeper questions.

Why do we keep chasing goals that don’t make us happy?

Why do we stay in relationships we’ve already outgrown?

Why does belonging sometimes require us to become less of ourselves?

And why do we keep trying to prove something we don’t need to prove?

That’s what this podcast is about.

Every episode starts with an idea I’m curious about, a story I’ve lived, or a question I can’t quite shake. We’ll talk about ambition, relationships, identity, worth, belonging, success, change, grief, and the invisible beliefs that shape the lives we build.

I’m not here because I have life figured out.

I’m here because I’ve noticed that the biggest changes in our lives have a way of revealing things we didn’t know we believed about ourselves.

And I think that’s where the interesting stuff starts.

So, this is the beginning.

Look who it is.

[Watch the podcast introduction video above.]

If this sounds like your kind of conversation, subscribe to the podcast here on Substack. Pilot launching August 25th.

You learn pretty quickly that many interviews aren't really conversations. They're performances. You're taught how to answer difficult questions, how to redirect conversations, and how to stay on message.

You also learn something else.

If a reporter wants a certain answer, they’ll keep asking the same question until they get the answer they want, or you stop answer questions.

Many athletes learn to let someone else shape the narrative.

I was no exception.

There’s an interesting concept in psychology: every time we remember something, we aren’t replaying the memory we’re reconstructing it. Each re-telling can gradually change how we remember it.

Over time, the version we tell most often can become the version we remember.

For me, that version started in 2002.

As a teenager, I watched Kelly Clark win Olympic gold in Salt Lake City. It's true that she inspired me to try snowboarding. It’s not true that I watched her and thought “I want to go to the Paralympics one day.”

Despite having been an amputee for nearly a decade, I didn’t really know that much about the Paralympics, but at some point, the story became: “I watched Kelly Clark and from that moment on I dreamed of going to the Paralympics.”

The problem with the truth is that it’s often less polished. Less glamorous. It doesn’t have a perfect beginning. It might not even have a defining moment where everything makes sense.

Real stories wonder, they change, they even contradict themselves.

I started snowboarding because I wanted to prove that amputees can snowboard. And not just amputees, but above-knee amputees. That’s an important distinction, and one that’s easier to understand if you’ve watched this ancient artifact:

Back then, the Paralympics weren't the dream, they simply became the path.

High-performance sports provide structure around coaching, funding, travel, and a community. In the disabled/adaptive sports world, that structure rarely exists outside the Paralympic bubble.

The games became the goal because they opened doors.

I never intended to rewrite the origin. We replaced the curiosity with certainty. The confusion and chaos with intention. Maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to stories where the plots predictable. There’s peace in predictable.

It’s nice to read about someone who’s “made it to the other side” and can make sense of the struggle. To learn that someone was brave enough to prioritize curiosity over clarity.

Maybe our job isn’t to tell the most inspiring version of our story.

The polished version might make a better interview, but the honest version is the one that helps us better understand ourselves.

Hermit crabs spend their lives searching for bigger shells. Not because the old one is broken but becomes it’s too small.

I think humans are the same.

I can’t tell you exactly when I outgrew my own shells. There wasn’t a single moment or a dramatic realization. It was slower, years really. Almost un-noticeable at times.

A hundred little moments where the life I’d built stopped feeling right.

Since life looked successful from the outside, it becomes surprisingly difficult to admit that it didn’t feel the way I wanted it too.

When I finally found the courage to share those feelings, they were met with some version of positivity. “But you did it”, “But you should be proud”, “So many people would love to be in your position”, “You have so much to be grateful for”, “It could be so much worse”, "Maybe you just need a vacation."

(For the record, I did need a vacation. It just wasn't going to solve my existential crisis.)

There’s a saying that people can only meet us as deeply as they’ve met themselves. I've come to believe that responses like this aren’t about the person who's hurting. They're about the discomfort of the person listening: Trying to make someone feel better is often easier than allowing them to feel heard.

Sometimes the most healing thing you can say to another person is simply, “That sounds really hard.”

These days, my tolerance for uncomfortable feelings wrapped in a motivational quote is approximately zero. Not because I’m cynical. Because I’ve learned that you can’t bypass grief, confusion, or change with gratitude.

Can perspective help?

Absolutely.

But only when you’re ready for it.

Back then, I kept trying to squeeze myself into the old me, the one others expected me to be. The woman who could set a goal, put her head down, and make it happen. It never occurred to me that maybe I wasn't lost. Maybe I'd simply outgrown the person I was trying so hard to be.

I thought packing up my life in Utah and moving to Oregon would be a fresh start, and it was, but it was only the first step in a much longer journey.

The dark truth? If I hadn’t gone, I don’t know if I would have survived. I wasn’t just starting again. I was digging myself out of darkness and I underestimated how much healing would ask of me. I wanted to process years and layers-on-layers of pain in a few short months. Boy did I get a reality check! Healing isn’t something we can rush through and simply jump back into the life we once had. The person who tries to go back, isn’t the same version as the one that left.

I’m not the version that moved to Oregon. I’m not the version that lived in Oregon. I’m also not the version that left Oregon. My self-worth didn’t magically return. And the self-doubt didn’t just disappear. (Which, at that time, was unbelievably frustrating!)

Instead, I learned that healing isn’t really about returning or becoming someone entirely new. It’s about creating enough space to meet the person you’re already becoming.

I think that's why the space between one shell and the next feels so uncomfortable. We can’t go back to the old shell, but the new one doesn’t feel right either. It’s easy to think we’ve made a mistake.

Maybe the uncomfortable in-between isn’t evidence that life is falling apart. Maybe it’s just evidence that we’ve outgrown the version we were trying so hard to keep.

How many shells have you outgrown?

You achieved it.

You felt happy.

Repeat.

It sounds obvious now, but when I was younger, I didn’t question it. Looking back, almost every major decision I made was built on that equation.

If I made the Paralympic Team...

If I won a World Championship...

If I built a successful career...

If I found the right relationship...

Then I’d finally arrive. And for a while, it worked.

Yes. Crossing a finish line feels incredible. So does getting a promotion or checking a goal off the list. But that feeling always leaves.

Not because the achievement wasn’t meaningful, but because happiness isn’t meant to stay. It’s a feeling. They come, they go and somewhere along the way, I confused an emotion with a destination. I’d try to hunt it down again.

Another title.

Another accomplishment.

For years, that strategy looked successful from the outside.

Cancer survivor.

Paralympian.

World Champion.

An MBA.

Business owner.

Every chapter added another label. But slowly, one by one, the domino’s started to fall.

My body quit and forced me to walk away from snowboarding.

My abusive relationship ended.

And for a while I thought I was healing.

Then came the layoff and the quiet became louder. I finally had to sit with myself, completely. Not the survivor. Not the athlete. Not the woman with degrees and a résumé.

Just me.

And I realized I’d spent decades chasing happiness...when what I actually wanted was peace.

Peace doesn’t show up because we accomplished something. It shows up when we stop needing accomplishments to tell us who we are. Peace is walking into a room without needing to prove anything. It’s sitting still without feeling guilty.

It’s believing your worth doesn’t rise and fall with your résumé.

I still love goals. I always will. They’re part of who I am. But I don’t expect them to complete me. They’re things I pursue. Not things I become.

Maybe that’s what emotional maturity really is.

It’s finding something quieter. Something steadier. And I think that’s peace.

For the first time in my life...that’s what I’m chasing.

We often picture someone who can’t get out of bed. Who misses deadlines. Someone we can visibly see unraveling in full-blown panic mode.

But as long as we’re performing, showing up, checking boxes.

Still training.

Still working.

Then from the outside, we look successful.

While inside, we quietly run on fumes, 6 cups of coffee, and a 10-minute nap at noon.

The strangest thing is, the very skills that help us achieve extraordinary things can also make it difficult to recognize when we’re not hunky-dory. We’re disciplined enough to keep going while also being responsible enough to ensure no one’s worried about us.

I often don’t realize how exhausted I am because every day starts over again. Strange how that works. Rock bottom would be both obvious and difficult to ignore.

The real scene. The one most of us endure is a slow drift that happens so gradually we barely noticed it. That makes it hard to recognize.

We think it arrives all at once. But really, it arrives one ignored feeling at a time.

“I’ll rest after this project”

“I’ll deal with it next week.”

One more goal.

One more obligation.

(I’m guilty on all four counts!)

We endure right up until the moment we don’t.

Ironically, achievement isn’t the real problem.

My ambition took me to two Paralympic Games, created lifelong friendships, flew me all over the world, and a built a career I loved. My burnout from training for the Paralympics is honestly its own feature film and a story for another day.

The problem was believing that because I could carry it...

I should.

Lately, I've stopped asking myself how much I can carry. And started asking:

(I haven’t done it yet, so I don’t have the answer. You’ll just have to stick around.)

If any of this resonated with you, I’d love to know:

What’s your burnout story?

Were you able to recognize it while you were still in it?

I (rudely) learned about grief in my childhood. I was 8 when cancer took my leg. I was 9 when my heart stopped (twice). I’ve grieved friends and family who didn’t survive their own cancer battle. I’ve grieved my younger self. I grieved a marriage, miscarriage, and a relationship that ended simply because we wanted different things out of life.

Nobody wakes up and says, “I want to be resilient today.” It isn’t a choice. It’s a side effect of survival. We become resilient because what other option is there? My sparkling “resilience” turned into numb tolerance and I stayed in a relationship that loved the idea of me, not the actual person.

Surviving isn’t the same as being okay. We don’t discover resilience because of grief. We become resilient by learning how to cope and get through grief. Sometimes the only place that leads is burnout. Running the same coping mechanism on repeat until everything breaks.

Personally, I collapsed, shut down, went quiet. I don’t have a five-step plan for processing grief, but I do know that the person I’m becoming is grounded, solid. She’s empathetic and insightful, but she’s not easy to manipulate.

She’s someone who isn’t measured by how much she can carry, but by how quickly she puts things down when it’s not hers to own.

I’ve carried grief like a badge and someone needs to say it: Surviving everything doesn’t mean you’re fine. It just means you survived.

Try selling that on a coffee mug.

But the industry shifted. The focus changed. Half the team was cut.

A year later, my boss was also let go too.

I hate to admit that this wasn’t my first rodeo. I’d navigated several career pivots: swapping long shifts in the medical field for marketing, retiring from professional sports and rebuilding from scratch. I knew the playbook: Update the resume. Work the network. Stay visible. Keep moving.

This time, I did all of that and the interviews didn’t come. When they did, they weren’t a good fit. Bills don’t stop just because income does. I started consulting. Small, low paid gigs to start.

What happened next surprised me.

My network showed up. Not in a “LinkedIn-connection” kind of way. In a real way. People I’d met over the years (some of the most remarkable people I’ve encountered, globally!) reached out. Checked in. Passed my name along.

2024 is the year I finally understood why we invest in networking. Don’t skip it. I mean it. Not the business card kind. The genuine, stay-in-touch, show-up-for-people kind.

Those connections led to bigger contracts. Longer contracts. An opportunity to hire and manage others. Slowly, steadily, building. It took two years of consulting and burnout to build a budget and find the bandwidth to stop working for others and start investing in me.

Write the book. Tell the story. Start the podcast.

When I was first laid off, a friendly connection offered me some advice: “You’ve already built something amazing. Why aren’t you sharing it?”

The honest answer was simple: I wasn’t ready. My story has layers like an onion. While I had climbed to the top of my sport, trauma had quietly robbed me of the joy I should have felt along the way. I was frozen. Surviving.

The layoff, as it turned out, was the thing that would crack the ice.

I’m not yet the person I want to be.

But I ‘m proud of the woman I’m becoming.

And she deserves to be celebrated.

So here I am. Follow along. It's going to be honest.