Say What You Need to Say. So Everyone Can Be Free.
If I Were to Say What I’ve Never Fully Said Before in One Post, It Would Be This.
There comes a moment in every woman’s leadership journey where she realizes she’s been holding back…not just from others, but from herself.
For me, this moment didn’t arrive with a bang. It came like a quiet, recurring echo in the background of my brilliance. A tightening in the throat. A backlog in my creative womb. A swelling of insight I never quite let spill, except into the private containers of my closest clients or the tidal wave of my own voice notes.
I’ve always noticed the nuance of things.
And I’ve always had a lot to say (even as a child).
So I’ve said it in Voxers. I’ve written it in endless draft notes. I’ve whispered it into the pages of my journals and spoken it in intimate containers where safety was already established. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped letting the depth and nuance of my truth touch the public page (which is weird because that’s how this entire business and life I live got started). Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I didn’t know how to say it (and that’s very important) and was also afraid of what might happen if I said it.
It’s a strange and painful thing to have the medicine…and withhold it.
For years, I told myself I was being discerning, responsible, intentional. But the truth is, my fear of being canceled turned into being silenced—by myself.
And in the name of protecting what I had built, I found myself slowly, carefully dimming the frequency that built it in the first place.
I think it was Oprah who once realized and said, "I’ve been pretending to be less than I am so people will feel more comfortable around me."
That line hits different when you’re the kind of woman whose words and work are meant to shake foundations, to feel into the collective wound, to touch the inflammation of our culture and help it heal within a woman. Because if your life’s work is designed to touch what’s tender, what do you do in a world that only wants things to be simple, jovial, and for entertainment only?
Apparently, you write. To process and move the energy, and then to get it out into the world at 10pm (way past your bedtime).
You write to stay alive, living, and with meaning.
To stay connected. To stay on the side of truth, even when your voice trembles and your reach drops.
That’s what today is. A coming home to voice. A stepping back into the wide open field of expression. Not to convince or convert. But to live. To let what I’ve been saying in private finally take its place in public.
Because I cannot keep operating like this.
I cannot keep hoarding the nuance of this work for the “initiated.”
The medicine is for all of us now.
I’m so deeply grateful to the astrology at the moment. It’s helping me move through and over the exact blockage that’s had me stuck in the loop of self-protection and performance. And I’m also deeply grateful for Substack because besides a website blog (which no one reads anymore, let’s be real), where else does real thought leadership live these days?
So here I am.
And this is what came through when I finally asked myself inside Write to Rise—the 5-week container I walked myself through to tap into my next level expression and am now walking others through—“If I were to say what I’ve never fully said before…”