The undertow

and what's underneath its pull

Mar 31, 2026

What a year can hold

Today is my last day at the company I joined at 23 years old. It’s also my 32nd birthday. In exactly two weeks I will sit in silence and meditate for ten days at a Vipassana retreat.

The timing is not a coincidence.

The two things that actually matter

Gad Saad writes in The Saad Truth About Happiness that there are two decisions that determine the quality of a life more than almost anything else: choosing the right life partner, and finding meaningful work. Not just pleasurable or impressive work, but the kind that gives you a sense of purpose you can feel. (Listen to Saad speak on these decisions below, if you’re curious!)

I use my own version of this as a gut check. If I were at the end of my life looking back, what would have made it feel full?

One: that I loved and was loved by my true person. My husband is that. That box has been checked for a while and I do not take it lightly.

Two: that my work gave me meaning. That I felt passionate about what I was building and went to sleep at night feeling like my days had a point.

That second box has been quietly unchecked for longer than I admitted to myself.

The art of the managed life

I am good at forward motion. I suspect a lot of you are too.

When I felt stagnant at work I made internal moves. New role, new challenge, new thing to learn. It worked well enough to keep going. And outside of work, life kept handing me real and beautiful things to pour myself into. I moved to New York, earned my MBA, got married, traveled a ton. I built a full, fun, busy life.

What I understand now is that I was also using all of it. Not consciously, but the momentum of big life events is very good at drowning out a quiet gut feeling you are not ready to face. You don't notice the undertow until you're already being pulled.

The next chapter was going to be motherhood. I could feel it. A new identity to grow into, a new purpose to organize around. Something that would finally make everything feel complete.

It got taken away from me twice.

For the first time in years, there was nothing left to hide behind. Just me and the question I had been deferring.

What the losses actually asked of me

I want to speak directly to the women reading this who are in their fertility or motherhood journeys.

Grief has a way of getting specific on you. You think you’re grieving one thing and then you realize you are grieving several. The loss itself, the future you had already built in your mind, and sometimes (if you’re willing to follow the thread all the way down) something older than that. A need that was already unmet before any of this started.

I’m not saying the losses were a gift. They chewed me up and spit me out. I’d not wish them on anyone.

What I’m saying is that they asked me a question I needed to answer, and I’m glad I finally heard it.

What a year of real work looks like

This is not a glow-up story. It’s more like an excavation.

Therapy, to start to understand what was actually underneath. A career coach, to get honest about what I actually wanted. Slow and intentional yoga that taught me to sit in stillness when all I wanted was to outrun everything.

I started walking outside without headphones, journaling at 5am, connecting with nature in a new way. Not because anyone told me to, but because the quiet was finally giving me something back.

I cut my hair off, began writing publicly. I launched Eggs and Ops to make women’s health a less isolating and confusing place. Started building Dita, an app for women navigating loss, as a solo founder with no roadmap.

None of it was linear, but all of it was necessary.

What is actually possible in a year

A year ago I was at my birthday celebration, one loss in, doing the work but not yet the deep work. Today I am a different person inside what still looks, from the outside, like the same life.

Same husband, same city. Different everything else.

If you are in a hard year right now and cannot see what it’s building in you, I want to offer you this: the depth of the excavation determines the quality of what gets built on top of it. The harder you’re willing to look, the more that becomes possible.

You do not have to have it figured out. You just have to be willing to stop running.

What comes next

I leave my company today with genuine gratitude for 8.5 years of real growth. And I leave knowing it is time.

Dita is being built live. Eggs and Ops is climbing. Vipassana is in two weeks. I am being very intentional about what I pour myself into next, because I finally know what I am pouring toward.

There’s fear and uncertainty. But this is the most alive I’ve ever felt. A year is a long time, and more can change than you think.

Happy birthday to me.

If this resonated, share it with a woman who needs it today.