Tie Your Boat Off

A letter to the woman on the island.

You know the feeling.

Not loneliness exactly. Something more specific than that. It is the particular ache of being surrounded by people who love you completely, and still feeling like no one quite sees where you are going.

You are at a dinner table, or a birthday party, or a Sunday brunch, and everyone around you is talking about things that feel like someone else's life. School schedules, neighborhood gossip, the same safe conversations you have had a hundred times. And you are there, fully present, genuinely loving these people. And also somewhere else entirely.

That somewhere else is the island

The Island Is Not What You Think It Is

When I first found myself there, I did not have a name for it. I just knew that I wanted something different and I could not figure out why that felt like a confession.

I had made choices that were mine. The decision not to have children when everyone around me was building nurseries. The decision to keep becoming when everyone around me seemed comfortable with the version of me they already knew. The quiet, persistent knowing that I was meant for something that had not fully arrived yet.

And with each of those choices came the defense of them. The explaining. The reassuring others that no, I was not lost, I was not confused, I was not going through a phase. The exhausting performance of justifying a life that felt more true than the one being offered to me.

Why should you talk yourself out of your dreams just because they do not fall neatly into the box that others had planned for you?

I did not have an answer to that question for a long time. So I kept explaining. Kept softening. Kept making my wanting smaller so the people I loved would not feel unsettled by it.

That is what the island feels like at first. Like you have been handed something beautiful and you are hiding it behind your back at every family gathering.

The Guilt Nobody Talks About

Here is the part that took me the longest to say out loud.

I wanted more and I felt guilty about it. Both things were true at the same time, and for years I thought that meant something was wrong with me.

Because I already had a good life. A real life. People who loved me, things to be grateful for, no obvious reason to be reaching for something else. And yet the reaching was constant. The quiet voice underneath everything that kept saying: this is good, and it is not quite it.

Wanting more when you already have enough feels almost ungrateful. She knows this. She has talked herself out of her own desires more than once because she could hear how they would sound to someone else.

What more could you possibly need?

The answer, it turned out, was herself. She needed herself back. Or maybe she needed herself for the very first time.

That is not selfish. That is the whole point.

When the Body Sends the Invoice

For a long time I ran on willpower. On standards. On sheer force of self. I was good at it. I could push through almost anything, and I did, and I wore that capacity like a badge.

What I did not understand was that the body keeps a running tab.

The health crisis arrived in the middle of my becoming, which felt spectacularly unfair at the time. I was finally moving toward something real and my body chose that exact moment to say: not like this.

In hindsight it was not bad timing. It was information. It was my body finally saying out loud what it had been whispering for years. That I had been paying attention to everything except my foundation. That ambition without restoration is just a slow leak. That you cannot build a life of true capacity on a body that is running on borrowed energy.

The crisis did not derail my becoming. It redirected it. It is the reason I do the work I do now. Because I know what it costs to ignore that whisper. And I know what becomes possible when you finally stop.

What the Island Actually Is

Here is what no one tells you when you first set foot on the island.

It is stunning.

Lush grass and white sand beaches and palm trees that move in the breeze. Crystal blue water that goes on longer than you can see. The kind of place that makes you understand, finally, what the word abundance actually means. Not the performance of abundance. The real thing. The felt thing.

The second you step onto it something in you exhales. Your light does not dim out here. It radiates. And like attracts like. The more you radiate, the more you find others doing the same.

The island is not loneliness. The island is freedom. It is the place where you stop defending your dreams and start living inside them. It is the place where you realize that the life being offered to you was never the only option. It was just the loudest one.

You are not broken for wanting more. You are awake.

I Am Still Crossing

I want to be honest with you about where I am.

I am about three quarters of the way into my next chapter. Which means I can see it clearly. I know who I am becoming and I can feel the pull of that future with a certainty I have never had before. And there are still weeks where a part of me holds on. Where the old life tugs. Where I feel the weight of all the crossing.

I am not writing this from the other side of the arrival. I am writing it from inside the becoming. Close enough to reach back. Close enough to say: I see you. I know exactly where you are standing. And I can tell you with everything in me that the island is worth staying on.

You do not have to have it all figured out. You do not have to stop loving the people who do not fully understand yet. You do not have to choose between your ambition and your softness, your wanting and your gratitude, your future and the people who shaped you.

You just have to stay on the island long enough to realize you were never alone on it. That others are already here. That more will follow. That the life you kept defending is the one you were always meant to live.

Tie your boat off.

Stay awhile.

If this landed somewhere real for you, you are exactly who I built Coacha Vida Wellness for. The Radiant Reset is a 90-day private coaching experience for women who are done running on borrowed energy and ready to build something that actually belongs to them.

You can learn more here. Or just reach out. The island has good Wi-Fi.