A Reminder of Self

There is something powerful about reading the words of a past version of yourself and realizing she is not gone.

Lately, I have felt exhausted in ways that reach far beyond being physically tired. The kind of exhaustion that settles into your nervous system after years of carrying grief, responsibility, heartbreak, public pressure, massive life transitions, and repeated winters that arrived before you fully recovered from the last one.

And when you live in that kind of prolonged hard long enough, it can start to distort your memory of yourself.

You begin to identify more with the worn-down version than the vibrant one.

More with the heaviness than the hope.

More with the survival than the spirit.

Reading my chapter from Scars to Stars reminded me of something important.

The woman who wrote those words was hopeful. Deeply hopeful.

Not naive. Not untouched by hardship. By the time I wrote that piece, I had already survived the destruction of my family’s 104-year-old business, profound grief, identity loss, physical pain, trauma, heartbreak, and years of rebuilding myself from the inside out.

And still, she believed in life.

She believed in possibility.

In purpose.

In reinvention.

In connection.

In creating meaning from devastation.

In the idea that beautiful things could still exist after enormous loss.

Reading those words now feels emotional because I know what was still ahead of her.

She did not yet know that winter would return.

That life would ask even more of her.

That there would be betrayals that shattered her lived reality and sprayed bullets into her deepest core wounds.

Public leadership that would test her endurance.

The death of her father.

The slow ache of children growing up and a once-full house becoming quiet.

She did not yet know how tired and alone she would someday feel.

But I also realized something else while reading her words:

I am still her.

Not exactly, of course.

Life changes us.

Pain changes us.

Responsibility changes us.

Loss changes us.

But the core of me is still there underneath the exhaustion and survival.

The woman who dreamed.

The woman who wanted to sparkle.

The woman who kept getting back up.

The woman who believed life could still hold extraordinary things after devastation.

The woman who kept choosing growth, connection, creativity, love, and meaning over bitterness.

She is still here.

A little more weathered.

More discerning.

Carrying more grief in her body than she once did.

But not gone.

I think sometimes we need reminders of who we have been, not to pressure ourselves into “getting back” to an old version of ourselves, but to remember that exhaustion is a state of being, not an identity.

I am tired right now.

Deeply tired in some ways.

But I am not only the tired version of me.

Somewhere underneath the wear and tear of the last couple of years,

the gladiator still exists.

The hopeful woman still exists.

The part of me that is bright, shiny, magnetic still exists.

And maybe that matters more than I realized.