One day, I looked at my face in the mirror. Closely. Something that doesn’t happen often. It surprised me to see that my 41-year-old face was much older than I had noticed before. The lines and wrinkles looked like my mom’s skin. And I was in the same decade of life as the last one my mom had before she died. The realization hit suddenly and reached deep, as I understood in that moment that my time was limited. That there’s no guarantee of more.
In the following weeks and months, I began feeling trapped in my success. Trapped in working 60-80 hour weeks. And I wanted a way out. Not in a deep conviction sort of wanting, more of just a constant, annoying buzz in the back of my mind. A discontentment as I questioned the point of spending so much time and energy working when I already had more than I needed. But I actually loved working. Enjoyed being absorbed in writing a new piece of code and seeing the results of past efforts.
The Vision
While all of this stewed in the background, I attended a food blogger conference. I planned to meet new people and get ideas for our recipe card software. I didn’t expect it to change my life.
In one session, the speaker (Angel Marie) guided a 5-minute meditation. She explained to visualize where I was in my business and where I wanted to be. A scene that had been trying to push its way into my awareness for a while, finally reached me. But this time it had full minutes of quiet, undivided attention.
Images ran through my mind of sitting with a laptop on the living room couch, as if I were watching myself from above. My kids and Steve lived life around me, in a blur of motion. The sun rose and set over and over outside the window as I moved from bed to the couch, to the dinner table, back to the couch, and to bed again. And I sat in the center of it all, my computer and I, as life happened without me. As I tuned out my family, my hunger, my feelings, my world. (Even while Evie practiced makeup and hair skills on me, as shown in the photo above.)
Then it shifted to where I want to be. The swirling motion stopped around me as I stood up and helped get Evie ready for school. Got up when each of my kids came home from school to greet them. Spent the evenings together, no computer in sight.
In that moment, something changed that could not be undone. I could no longer continue living the way I was living. My life had to change. It was no longer optional. I decided that within 1 year I would enjoy being part of the world again and be available to my family at any point in the day. Because I was in full control of creating the life I wanted, with no excuses not to create the life I wanted desperately.
Instantly, I was okay with not being in control of every moving piece in the company and accepting that things wouldn’t be done my way. Because now I understood it wasn’t important. It didn’t matter if there were typos in an email, if every line of code were clean and concise, or every design was perfect. Or even if the company continued growing or not. Those were the costs of creating a life worth living. Costs I was ready and willing to pay.
The Shift
If I had known this moment would completely disintegrate my identity, I probably would have fought it. Hard. But I’m glad I didn’t know that this would be the beginning of months of grappling with who I am, as the layers I’d used to define myself crumbled to the ground. I enjoyed working, after all. I enjoyed the success. I enjoyed feeling powerful in a world dominated by men. And I took pride in the end result of software that helped others build websites they didn’t think possible.
I immediately started hiring to reduce my responsibilities, and clear time and head space. One day after another, I shed responsibility. And something happened that I hadn’t expected. Steve decided to take on the role as CEO. He hadn’t wanted it before. But after internal promotions and more hiring, it had morphed into something he wanted.
An executive coach and a therapist helped me fumble through this foreign path. To step back and let my team do more, give Steve a chance to lead. To try to not say anything in a meeting to see what would happen. To test if closing my computer at 4:00 would cause mass chaos. And then 3:00.
My numbed feelings began to reawaken and emerge from the years of suppression. Emotions had been nothing but a distraction for so long. They had been conveniently forced into submission and caged where they wouldn’t interfere with productivity.
But now, they brought a mix of sheer terror and curious excitement. I didn’t know who I was if not the CEO. If not the company builder and self-made success. If not the powerful woman leader. Peeking under one identity revealed another that was no more substantial, no more than a title worn like a badge of honor. Realizing I had no idea what would be underneath it all, was like learning my whole world was an illusion.
The Jump
And in May 2024, just 2 months after I knew my life needed to change, it did. I announced to my team that I was conceding my title of CEO. By announced, I mean sobbed uncontrollably as they all thought I was going to tell them I was going to die. Ironically, it was partly true. For a part of me died that day. I was no longer the impressive female CEO of a software company. I was no longer the person I defined myself as for so long. She was gone.
Somehow, I reached the role and work hours I thought I wanted — something I thought impossible mere months earlier. The funny thing about learning to hear your feelings, is that sometimes they tell you things you don’t expect. Send you in another direction from the one logic decided.
After shifting to the software engineer role, I found I was still doing things I didn’t want to do. So I hired again. Filled the lead role I had just taken so I could focus on only writing the code I was excited about, rather than dealing with the things that had to be done.
In all of this, I feverishly searched out time alone. Time to spend learning about myself and the person who had been caged within the hyper-focused CEO and software engineer. I took a weekend in early September in a cozy 1-bedroom apartment above a garage in the foothills of the Rockies, 20 minutes from home. The plan was simple: don’t work. I did a puzzle without looking at the box; danced to the music in my AirPods; read The Artist’s Way; wrote about 80 year old me; ate crepes at a restaurant; watched Titanic; watched the sunset surrounded by darting dragonflies, scrub oak, and tall yellow grass; and journaled by a window with a view of passing bunnies and from a hammock as wild turkeys wandered by.
I didn’t know I could have so much fun with no one but me. There was someone in there who had been smothered and held captive by all the identities I had claimed. Someone who was excited to reemerge into the world. To be allowed a moment to enjoy a sunset. To be allowed to take off her shoes and walk through a cold stream. To listen to the dragonflies buzzing and be puzzled by their sharp turns as they seemed to follow an invisible square track above my head.
I realized that the fear of what I’d do when I wasn’t working wasn’t really me talking. Because I had found a glimpse of myself. I didn’t need fancy titles or anyone else to think I was important. None of it mattered. I could see and love the person I found there.
Unfortunately, I didn’t fight off work the whole weekend. On the second morning, I ended up working on my laptop in bed, while feeling like a failure that I couldn’t go two whole days without it. The problem was that I enjoyed it at the expense of myself, and everything and everyone else. It was an addiction that proved harder to escape than a title.
The Sabbatical
The weekend wasn’t nearly enough. After getting a taste of freedom, I planned a month-long sabbatical that would start at the end of October. The first week would be spent alone in a cabin in the woods. A place without WiFi or laptops.
The time came, but my current project wasn’t yet complete. So after my successfully work-free cabin adventure, I resumed the project but without any other responsibilities. No email, no messages, no meetings. The plan was to tack on time to my sabbatical to make up for the days I worked. First an extra week, then two, and three.
The planned time to return to work came and went. The team managed without me. The company didn’t implode. I learned I had a million things I wanted to do, new things to try, and so much to learn. I finally started getting the weekly one-on-one dates with my kids that I had tried to start several times before. But this time, those were my priority meetings. The ones I couldn’t miss. And my kids began changing too. The need for help from therapists dissolved as anxiety levels dropped. My family felt important. Loved.
Other than a relapse or two of days spent working from bed on urgent projects, I had escaped. But those days showed that in my brain, working on coding projects was an all or nothing type of thing. Like an addiction. If I picked it up, putting it back down took far too much awareness and willpower. I stopped seeing or hearing the world around and inside me and the day would disappear forever.
So I walked away from the software developer identity too. Now, it was time to find ways to create memories and leave a footprint in the world.
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