Hey, I'm Michelle
I am a licensed nurse, anthropologist, certified life coach, feminist, and geek.
For around 30 years I was a mixed bag of anxiety, depression, and shame. I believed I wasn’t an actual person, just an outlier trying to emulate what real people do, and I wasn’t very good at it either.
I spent so much of my life feeling like a pretender. I tried to find the magic combination of clothes, opinions, interests, and jokes, that would prove I was normal (to myself as much as anyone else). It was exhausting, and even when it worked, I didn’t feel normal.
I didn’t know how to exist in the world. I was desperate to feel noticed and loved, while simultaneously believing the longer someone was near me, the more likely they would see through me. I receded into video games to cope. I waited for something to change, or someone to rescue me, just like the nerdy fantasy stories and games I lived in.
Sometimes I just wanted my game to be over with.
On New Year’s day, like so many other women, I dragged myself to a gym with a resolution I assumed would fail. I flipped through podcasts on the treadmill and picked one that said something about feeling better. I just wanted background noise.
That day changed everything. I was introduced to life coaching and thought work. There was an explosion. Something unlocked inside my brain. It just made so much sense. I knew in my soul it was truth.
In that moment I realized at 30+ years old I hadn’t started. My game was on pause. I had been living my life without myself, stuck on level one.
No one teaches us how to start. So many of us, including me, make it up as we go along and get it backwards. Then we toss in the bombardment of a thousand mixed messages that all women are handed at birth. We end up disoriented and stuck on “pause” mode. Our brains and thoughts are a mess. We don’t understand them. We mistakenly believe it’s normal. We think it’s the way life is supposed to be, we just aren’t good enough to figure it out like everyone else has.
