a clean mirror Podcast

the (re)architect

here’s something nobody told me when everything started falling apart: it was supposed to. not in the toxic positivity, everything-happens-for-a-reason way. in the structural way. the life i’d built wasn’t built on my foundation. it was built on templates. on what success was supposed to look like. on the version of me that would be chosen, promoted, loved, left alone. and, when you build on someone else’s blueprint...eventually the whole thing cracks. i’ve rearchitected my life more times than i can count. career. relationships. geography. identity. the things i believed about what i deserved. the things i believed about what was possible. all of it. torn down to the studs. rebuilt. torn down again. every single time, i thought: this is the one i don’t survive. every single time, i was wrong. there was a period where i was afraid of my own shadow. not metaphorically. energetically. like i had all this suppressed stuff — old grief, old roles, old versions of myself that needed to die — and it was sitting in AND on my chest. an unwanted companion. it was often hard to move. even harder to speak. as if, i couldn’t dare want the things out loud. then i started the burn off process. not beautifully or gracefully. this wasn’t the cute rebrand with a new headshot sort of pop-out. this was the gut-wrenchingly real…ugly, messy, extended devolve. the kind where people in your life get uncomfortable because you’re no longer performing the version of you they signed up for. the kind where you sit in a room and feel your own pulse and realize you’ve been holding your breath for years, maybe even decades. i didn’t become someone new. i became the person i was before the world got to me. the rebel. the path forger. the one who was never actually afraid...ME - buried under everything she’d become for other people. i think about what it costs to fight for yourself. not in the girl boss, bet-on-yourself, motivational poster way. in the way where fighting for your joy means disappointing someone. where fighting for your voice means saying the thing that makes the room go quiet. where fighting for your desire means admitting you want things you were taught to be ashamed of. your soul. your happiness. your grief. your sensuality. your visibility. whatever the thing is — and it’s different for everyone — whatever that thing is that you’ve been circling but haven’t let yourself have yet. it’s worth the fight. even when it breaks everything around it. especially then. i keep meeting people who are mid-collapse and who think something has gone wrong. their marriage is shifting. their career doesn’t fit. their relationship with their kids is…different. the identity they built is cracking at the seams. they come to me panicked. like they need to fix it. patch the walls. just hold the structure together. and, i’m like...well, what if you let it fall? what if the falling apart is the architecture. what if the cracks are the blueprint. what if the thing that feels like destruction is actually your life trying to reorganize itself around who you actually are instead of who you’ve been pretending to be. i’ve watched it happen. in myself. in the people i sit with in circles. in the conversations that start with “i don’t know what’s happening to me” and end with “oh. i think i’ve always known.” that’s what this is. the writing. the circles. the conversations. all of it. not advice. not a program. not a five-step framework for becoming your best self. just...a space where fighting for yourself doesn’t need to be justified. where falling apart is recognized as a form of arrival. where someone is modeling what it looks like on the other side — messy, imperfect, still under construction — so you can trust that the rearchitect is worth it. things break. you rebuild. things break again. you rebuild closer to the truth. that’s the whole thing. would love for YOU to sit with me. Get full access to a clean mirror at acleanmirror.substack.com/subscribe [https://acleanmirror.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]