When you just need to get out of your own head...

This past weekend, I took my daughter Annie and her best friend to Orlando for a Noah Kahan concert.

It was her 17th birthday present.

And before you ask — no, I did not actually know who Noah Kahan was.

My daughter, on the other hand, is obsessed. She started talking about the tour months ago, and begged me to try to get tickets.

That in and of itself, was a big deal, because Annie never really asks for things.

If you have more than one kid, you already know they come out completely different.

My oldest, Maggie, has never suffered from an inability to know what she wants.

Her Christmas list every year is always a detailed PowerPoint presentation, complete with links, and includes everything from electronics to makeup to clothes to whatever happens to be trending on TikTok.

Annie, on the other hand, is pretty low maintenance most of the time.

She got a job the minute she turned sixteen. She buys most of her own stuff, and rarely asks for anything.

So when she actually wanted something, there was a part of me that would have moved heaven and earth just to make it happen.

And so last weekend we piled into the car and headed to Orlando.

Truth be told, concerts aren’t really my thing. Too loud, too crowded, too much standing. (If you want to know the truth, I spent most of the night reading a book on my phone between glances at the stage.)

But every time I looked up, Annie was singing at the top of her lungs, having the time of her life. She didn’t even care that her nerdy mom was reading a book at a concert.

She knew every single word of every single song.

She was so happy.

And watching her be that happy made me happy in a way that’s hard to describe.

It was a good night.

Which might not sound particularly profound, except that if I’m being completely honest, the last couple of months have been hard.

Really hard, actually.

So hard that I’ve actually struggled to write this newsletter.

Because the truth is, I don’t feel like I have much wisdom or insight to give right now.

It’s been a hard season in my business, but also for me personally, in ways that I don’t totally feel ready to share publicly quite yet.

Maybe that’s not a very inspirational thing to admit.

But it’s the truth.

And maybe that’s exactly why this weekend felt like such a gift.

Not because anything got fixed. Nothing did. The season I’m in is still messy. The stress is still there.

But for 24 hours this weekend, it all felt a lot lighter.

And I don’t think I realized how much I needed that.

Because the thing about hard seasons isn’t just that things are difficult. It’s that difficulty has a way of becoming the only thing you can see. You get so deep into your own head—analyzing, solving, questioning, obsessing that eventually the problem starts to feel like the whole story. Like there’s nothing else.

But there is so much else.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson once wrote, “The thing about life is that you must survive it.“ And along those same lines, Harriet Beecher Stowe observed, “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”

In other words? The struggle is real. But it’s not the whole story.

The good stuff and the hard stuff exist side by side, all the time. The bright spots don’t erase the struggle. But they do remind you that the struggle isn’t everything.

And sometimes that reminder is the only thing you need.

And so I guess my challenge for you this week is the same one I’m giving myself: find the thing that gets you out of your own head.

Not to avoid your problems. Not to pretend everything is fine. But because reality is bigger than whatever is consuming your attention right now — and sometimes the most important thing you can do is remember that.

Spend time with someone who makes you laugh. Go somewhere you’ve been putting off. Do one thing that has absolutely nothing to do with whatever you’re carrying right now.

The mess will still be there when you get back.

But so will you — and hopefully a little more ready to face it.

Live with purpose, friend, and have a joy-filled week.

xoxo, Ruth

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