The Honey Isn't The Point

The most unsettling thing my husband ever did was look relieved, and I’ll come back to that, but first you need to know about the shower.

The day I hit six figures, I didn’t pop champagne or call my mom or do anything worth documenting. I just walked into the bathroom, turned on the water, and stood there in the same Herbal Essences and the same tiles and the same ordinary Tuesday I’d had a thousand times before, except this time my bank balance had just confirmed the number I’d been chasing for three solid years of early mornings and late nights and everything-I-had entrepreneurship.

I stood there half expecting the universe to notice. Maybe the water would feel warmer. Maybe some previously inaudible frequency would kick in, or maybe at minimum, I would just feel like a person who had finally made it somewhere that mattered, someone whose shampoo should probably be fancier by now.

Instead I stood there and checked in honestly, maybe for the first time in months, and what I found in my chest was this: I was still in the race but I didn’t know what toward.

My nervous system had been running at a level where the moment I hit the milestone I was already scanning for the next one, because the thought of slowing down felt like failure. And underneath the emptiness was something worse, this quiet dread that asked: if this doesn’t feel like it, what will? Do I need to go after more?

I got out, dried off, made a color-coded spreadsheet. Then I sat Drew down at our farm table overlooking a cornfield in Wisconsin and said the most honest thing I’d said in years:

“Screw six figures. I was so much happier when I made half of that.”

He looked relieved in a way that told me everything, the kind of relieved that only builds up over years of watching someone you love disappear into a dream they’re not sure is even theirs anymore, and I realized right then that while I’d been chasing some “someday” version of our life, the real one had been happening without me.

How many of us are doing that, painting this picture of what life will look like when we finally arrive, while the people who love us most are just quietly, patiently waiting for us to be here now, today, in the ordinary nature of it all?

He was about to get his wife back, and I was about to start figuring out who that actually was.

Something is happening to women right now and I don’t think we’re talking about it correctly. We keep calling it burnout, and or a midlife crisis, which is interesting to me because the word crisis implies it came out of nowhere, when most of us have been white-knuckling building toward this reckoning for years, adding weight to a pile we stopped naming a long time ago.

I read something recently that I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about, that high-achieving women are burning out and losing themselves not despite their success but because of it, and that a third of them have thought about walking away from everything they built. And then the numbers started coming in: over 330,000 women left the workforce entirely in 2025, and I don’t think all of it was childcare costs. I think some of it was women finally getting still enough to hear something they’d been outrunning for a long time.

And yet getting still is the one thing we seem least willing to do, and honestly I’ve written about this before because it keeps finding me, this particular resistance to just stopping. The world figured out a long time ago that a woman in motion is a woman who keeps spending.

So we get served the linen shirt right after we spiral about not having enough, the wrinkle cream right after we linger too long on someone else’s face, the motherhood hack right after we wonder if we’re doing it wrong, and our attention is the currency we hand over willingly because staying in motion means we never have to get honest about what we actually find when we stop.

Every click tells them a little more about our insecurities, so we keep getting fed exactly what keeps us from ourselves.

And we keep buying, and we keep adding more to already full plates, and we keep scrolling into the lives of strangers at midnight and calling it connection.

It’s avoidance with a really good return policy. Underneath all of it, underneath the targeted ads and the full carts and the parasocial friendships with women whose highlight reels we know better than our own reflection, is the question we’re numbing ourselves with so we don’t have to answer: is this actually my life, and if I stopped performing it for a minute, would I even recognize what’s left?

The feeling that’s been building isn’t a malfunction and it isn’t ingratitude. It’s something older than that, something planted long before this particular season, finally pushing through.

Because here’s the thing about the map we were all handed. The degree, the career, the relationship, the house, the kids, the followers, the revenue, the life that from the outside looks like everything. It was drawn by people who weren’t us, for a destination we never got to choose, and we followed it faithfully because we were good at following things faithfully, and because the map looked right, and because everyone around us was using the same one so it must be correct.

And then we arrive and we stand in the shower with our Herbal Essences and our color-coded spreadsheets and we check in and find something we weren’t expecting, still in the race, still don’t know what toward, and the dread has more room in us than we thought it would.

That feeling is information. It’s the most honest thing your body has said in years, and it deserves more than a scrolling session and a cart full of things that will arrive in two days and fix nothing.

Last week my sister sent me a voice message, and it keeps finding me in the in-between moments, mid-shower, halfway through the dishes, that blank stretch right before sleep. It just walks back in and sits down and stays awhile.

It wasn’t even a call, just a voice note, the kind that comes days after the conversation you were actually having in your own head, the kind that’s so good you listen to it twice.

We’ve both stepped away from parts of our careers lately, in different ways, we’ve both been in some version of a spotlight, both quietly figuring out how we wanted to show up and what that was actually worth. And she said something I’ve been holding up to the light ever since, turning it over, letting it do its work.

Her words were simple: it’s been so interesting to see who I am when no one’s watching.

She said it like good news, and for her it was, finding out that the things she loved were still hers even when nobody was seeing them. My version of the same question felt a little more complicated.

Because I’ve had my life online for more than half of it. I got a Facebook account freshman year of college, which means for over twenty years I’ve been, in some form, curating and sharing and building a version of myself that could be seen, and I don’t say that cynically at all.

I genuinely loved it, the connection, the community, the way a true story can make someone feel less alone at the exact moment they need it. But somewhere in those two decades the line between who I am and who I am when people are watching got complicated in ways I’m only now honest enough to really name, and my sister’s words landed somewhere in me that had been waiting for them.

Because here’s the thing I’ll tell you about my life right now, the embarrassing, completely brand-incoherent truth: I spend most of my free time in my garden. Not a little herb situation on a windowsill or anything cute like that, I mean I’m out there amending soil and researching regenerative farming and planning an orchard and getting genuinely absorbed by whether the pH levels are right for the dahlia variety I want next season.

My phone sits in the dirt while I pull weeds and listen to a friend talk through her business, and I can listen because I’ve been there and I know that world and I love her letting me into it, but it doesn’t feel like my world anymore. I look around and I’m out here solving problems for weeds while she’s reworking her webinar for the twentieth time, and neither one of us is right or wrong, it’s just different, and for the first time in a long time I’m not trying to close the gap between where I am and where I think I should be.

And then there are the bees. We keep bees on our property and we don’t harvest the honey, we do the work, we care for them through each season, we hope they survive our bitter Minnesota winters, and we genuinely expect nothing in return.

The ROI on keeping bees can’t be measured on a spreadsheet, and my 2019 self, the one who made color-coded spreadsheets to try to quantify her own happiness, would not have understood this version of me at all. My 2026 self honestly doesn’t care even slightly, and I think that particular shift, from needing the return to trusting the tending, is what I’ve been trying to name.

What would you do if not one person knew about it?

Not what you'd do if you were brave, or if money wasn't a factor, or if your audience wouldn't be confused by it, but what would you actually choose today if the whole performance requirement just disappeared, if nobody was targeting you with what you should want next, if nobody was feeding your insecurities back to you in a perfectly curated ad, if the audience just went home and it was only you and a random morning?

I think a lot of us have been living inside other people’s answers to that question for so long we’ve genuinely forgotten we get to have our own, and finding your way back to it is less dramatic than it sounds. It’s quieter. It’s slower. It feels a little like setting something heavy down in the middle of a parking lot and just walking away from it.

I saw a video recently of a woman who moved to Paris mid-life, bought a four-hundred-square-foot apartment right in the middle of her story, said it wasn’t the plan but it was hers, and the comments were full of women whispering me too into a stranger’s screen at midnight. Women who looked from the outside like they had absolutely arrived, doing the same check-in in their chests, waiting for the feeling, finding something else instead, something that had been planted there long before they were ready to tend to it.

That check-in, the honest one that happens when the house is finally quiet and the screens go dark and nobody needs anything from you for maybe the first time all day, isn’t the problem. That’s you, becoming more awake to yourself, and it’s worth paying attention to even when it’s uncomfortable, especially when it’s uncomfortable.

My sister is still herself without the audience. She still decorates her house the way she likes it, still cooks real food, still arranges flowers in her vases a specific way when someone brings them home, and she is the same person she always was, just more hers now, more settled into the version of herself that exists whether anyone sees it or not.

The showing didn’t create her. It was just layered on top of her, and she’s finding out what’s underneath, and I think that process, that slow becoming, is some of the most important work a woman can do in whatever season she finds herself in.

I’m still out here teaching, still very much building, still writing things I hope find the person who needs them, just also in the garden with my phone in the dirt and my hands in the soil and bees I’ll never harvest from, because some things you care for simply because they deserve to be cared for, because the tending itself is the whole point, because not everything that matters needs to be seen to be real. The work you do when nobody’s watching is still work. The life you’re living in the in-between moments is still your life.

The map was wrong, and I knew it long before I was willing to say it out loud. I knew it in the shower that morning, standing there with water on my back and the familiar dread settling into my chest, still running, without knowing what I was running toward. I knew it at the farm table when Drew looked relieved.

I knew it every time I arrived somewhere I’d worked for and found the stillness instead of the confetti, and I stood there in all that space wondering what I’d done wrong, not knowing yet that the spaciousness itself was the gift, that the quiet I’d been outrunning my whole career was actually the thing I’d been looking for.

Maybe you know it too. Not maybe, actually. I think you’ve known it for a long time. That quiet you keep outrunning isn’t a wrong turn.

Something you planted before you were ready, in the dark, without knowing what it was, just waiting for you to stop running long enough to let it grow.