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My story doesn’t begin with a career or a credential. It begins with my place in a family and the quiet ways we learn who we are allowed to be.
I grew up as the only girl and the middle child in a highly structured, achievement-oriented household. From an early age, I learned to observe carefully, read emotional shifts, and understand the unspoken rules so I could respond to those around me rather than respond to my own needs and wants. I was sensitive, intuitive, and deeply aware of others, qualities that didn’t always have a clear place to land in the environment I was raised in.
In families shaped by strong personalities and clear hierarchies, harmony often depends on who absorbs tension rather than who expresses it. I learned early that my role was to stay quiet, stay adaptable, and not disrupt the balance, without responding to my own needs and looking within to find answers. I became skilled at smoothing tattered edges, anticipating others' needs, and holding space for them, often without realizing I was doing so, and often at the cost of my own happiness.
This wasn’t framed as a sacrifice; it was framed as being “easy,” “good,” and “mature.” And for a long time, I took pride in that, but I was not feeling fulfilled.
I was raised in a culture that valued certainty, regiment, control, and outward success, which often looked like "being busy," despite that busyness having any real focus. Power was measured in productivity, status, financial stability, and the appearance of emotional security. Emotional sensitivity, nuance, and internal questioning were less visible currencies. I didn’t consciously reject that world. I simply never felt fully at home inside it.
Looking back, I can see how early conditioning shapes what feels familiar later in life.
As an adult, I entered relationships that mirrored the roles I knew how to play: the caretaker, the mediator, the stabilizer, and, sadly, the scapegoat. I was capable, resilient, and deeply committed to making things work, regardless of how much I lost of myself and my own purpose, and I gracefully took the blame so others could feel good about themselves. I believed that if I listened carefully enough, adapted skillfully enough, and gave generously enough, stability and belonging would follow.
And for a while, it did, or at least that is how it appeared on the surface.
What I didn’t yet understand was how easily empathy can slide into self-erasure when it isn’t grounded in self-trust. I had learned how to survive, how to endure, how to manage complexity, but not how to ask myself what I needed or wanted. And let's face it: survival is exhausting. I want to live and to live with abundance.
That awareness came slowly, not as a dramatic rupture, but as a quiet accumulation of questions.
Why did success feel hollow?
Why did doing everything “right” still leave me tired?
Why did my inner life feel richer than the roles I was playing?
These questions didn’t mean something was wrong with my life. They meant that something was being asked to change.
Over time, I began to recognize a pattern, not as a failure, but as an inheritance. I had been trained to prioritize stability over alignment, harmony over honesty, and responsibility over choice. Those skills served me well in many ways. They also carried a cost.
The turning point wasn’t anger or rejection. It was permission.
Permission to pause.
Permission to listen inward.
Permission to acknowledge that the life I had built was not the full expression of who I was becoming, and now I have another responsibility: to show my grown children how to live a life of abundance.
Abundance is the capacity to live from inner sufficiency rather than outer accumulation.
In this context, abundance is not measured by money, status, productivity, or possessions. It is measured by the steadiness with which a person meets life: with clarity, presence, and the ability to respond rather than react.
Abundance looks like:
This kind of abundance does not deny material reality or responsibility. It simply refuses to let external measures define worth or success.
For those of us raising or guiding adult children, abundance becomes something we model rather than something we provide. It shows up in how we listen, how we regulate ourselves, how we live in alignment with our values, and how we demonstrate that a meaningful life is built from choice rather than consumption.
When we live abundantly in this way, we offer others something more enduring than security alone:
Abundance, here, is not about having more.
Abundance is about being anchored enough within ourselves to give freely without depletion, fear, or control. And perhaps most importantly, it is the quiet assurance that we are already enough, which allows us to help others become more fully themselves. That pause is what I now think of as the cairn.
A cairn marks a place on the trail where the path forward isn’t obvious. It doesn’t tell you where to go. It simply reminds you to stop, look around, and choose deliberately rather than by habit.
Standing at that place changed how I understood my past. I no longer see it as something to escape or resent. I see it as the terrain that shaped my strengths: discernment, compassion, endurance, and the ability to hold complexity without collapsing into it.
What I am learning now, albeit imperfectly, is how to pair those strengths with self-authority.
To stop proving and keep improving.
To stop surviving and begin living.
To stop contorting myself to fit expectations that no longer align. and to find my purpose with my rules and my expectations.
This work isn’t about rewriting the past or assigning fault. It’s about integrating what was useful, releasing what is no longer necessary, and choosing forward with intention.
At The Cairn grew out of this ongoing practice.
I am not here as someone who has arrived. I am here as someone who has paused and decided to walk differently. I believe deeply in the power of shared stories, because when we listen to one another without judgment or hierarchy, we recognize parts of ourselves we may have forgotten.
If you’ve lived a life shaped by responsibility, care for others, and quiet endurance; if you’ve done what was expected and still feel a pull toward something truer, you are not alone.
We don’t find ourselves by rejecting who we’ve been.
We find ourselves by listening more honestly to who we are becoming.
I am still at the cairn.
And I’m choosing, again and again, to walk my own life from here.
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