I want to tell you something I haven’t said directly yet.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
Not in the way people say that before pivoting to their plan. I mean it literally. I am in the middle of something I cannot see the shape of, writing about it as I go, and most weeks I find out what I think by writing.
That is not how I have done anything in my life.
For thirty years I ran on what I’ve started to think of as the executive operating system. You identify the problem. You gather the information. You build the system. You deliver. I was good at it. Genuinely good at it. And it worked.
Until it didn’t. So I did what I always do — I made it a project. And somewhere in that project, a question cracked open that the executive operating system had no framework for.
That is not what it’s built for.
The executive operating system is excellent at solving defined problems. It cannot sit with a question that has no deliverable.
What I have learned — and it took longer than it should have — is that the clarity doesn't come first. It comes during. You do not think your way into this. You live your way in. And living your way in means being willing to be in the middle, without knowing how it resolves.
I am in the middle right now. I want to say that plainly because I think most women reading this are in the middle too, and I think we are very good at not saying so.
The middle doesn’t look handled. The middle looks like sitting in your living room on a Tuesday afternoon working through questions you’ve never thought to ask yourself and being genuinely surprised by what comes back.
The middle looks like this.
I don’t know what I’m building yet. But I know I’m building something. And I know the executive operating system did not get me here.
This blog is not the project. It’s the living.
What’s the question you keep circling without quite landing on? Tell me in the comments. I have a feeling you’re not alone.
If this landed somewhere true for you — share it with a woman who needs to read it. And come back next Monday. We’re just getting started. 🌿
Being in it tends to turn into another thing to be good at. You stop trying to figure it out, and about a week later you're checking whether you're doing the not-figuring-it-out right.
I can relate to this. I started my publication with the idea to document our life with our current sailboat and the dream we had to do the boat-life thing full time. It quickly morphed into conversations around midlife reinvention and I saw just how many of us are here on Substack doing some version of that. It's freaking amazing.
Now, we're at a potentially huge crossroads with a boat project and documentary film that could take up the next several years of life. It's so exciting and so overwhelming all at the same time. So I'm here trying to figure it out as I go as well.
What do they say ... building the plane in mid-flight? Yep, that sounds about right!