Where the Paths Diverge

On kicks, crossroads, and choosing the flame

I can’t seem to do anything inauthentically.

It’s a blessing and a burden, this wiring of mine. I witness my own life as it moves through me — the crossroads, the contractions, the moments when the universe clears its throat — and then I write it down.

So here I am, writing this in real time, from the middle of another threshold.

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I’ve received what I can only call three kicks in my professional life. Not whispers — I’m someone who can ignore a whisper — but unmistakable, full-body kicks. Each time, a pattern: a high-stress environment, unclear expectations, a supervisor I couldn’t seem to please no matter how carefully I showed up. Each time, the slow erosion of confidence I wasn’t used to losing.

I stayed at my first organization for fourteen years. I didn’t leave until I was asked to. And I am so grateful for that disruption — without it, I might never have walked through the door that was waiting on the other side. That’s the thing about comfort. It’s a trap disguised as safety.

The second kick came faster. I recognized it this time, started quietly making plans — and then the difficult supervisor left instead. I took that as a sign to stay. I chose comfort again.

The third kick felt like a kick and a slap.

This time, I knew what it was. I set a boundary with clarity and calm. I said plainly that I would not continue working under someone who didn’t trust me. I gave the situation one final chance. When verbal aggression followed, I acted. I made my exit — quickly, intentionally, with my dignity intact.

And again, what I feel is not fear or regret. What I feel is gratitude.

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I want to hold that word for a moment, because I know it can sound like a spiritual bypass. Gratitude can be a way of glossing over the real — a performance of okayness when what’s actually happening is loss, disorientation, a very real question of how to pay rent.

Those things are also true. I need income. I need health insurance. I loved the work I was doing. I loved a lot of the people.

But I’ve learned something about myself: I am someone who will stay inside a system long past when the system deserves my presence. Not out of weakness — out of loyalty, endurance, a genuine belief that if I just give more, show up better, bridge one more gap, something will shift. That quality has served me in real ways. It has also, more than once, cost me.

This kick was different. I exited on my own terms. I modeled for my children that no job is worth compromising your self-worth. And I landed — as I have before — in the unexpected arms of a community that showed up for me.

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My layoff in early 2025 was far from singular. The nonprofit sector lost nearly 29,000 jobs that year — more than quadrupling from the year prior — as federal funding cuts rippled through organizations that had spent decades quietly holding the social safety net together. Tens of thousands of former federal employees were asking the same questions I was: What comes next? What was real? What gets to survive this transition?

And underneath those questions, a more ancient one: What were we built for?

I’ve been sitting with that one for a while now. Because here’s the thing about institutions crumbling — they clarify. When the structures that held our professional identities start to loosen, we have to locate ourselves somewhere else. In values. In craft. In the quiet, stubborn knowing that doesn’t need an org chart to exist.

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My next chapter involves working for a local journalism outlet doing the kind of work I’ve believed in my whole life: real stories, by real people, about real communities. It’s not a departure from my values. If anything, it’s a return to them. Local news is one of the few remaining places where the work is genuinely about people, not metrics; about bearing witness, not performing impact.

It also gives me a container — structure, community, purpose — while I continue building the work that feels most like mine to do. Goddess in Training. The podcast. The Transition Doula practice. The business that came to me in a dream two years ago and has been patiently waiting for me to fully say yes.

I am saying yes.

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This Wednesday, you’ll meet Maritza Schaefer — founder of the Brujas School, creator of the Liberation Magic Method, and one of the most grounded, articulate thinkers I’ve encountered on the intersection of personal transformation and systemic change.

Maritza grew up in a family of Chilean witches, and she has spent decades bridging the world of social justice organizing and spiritual practice — because she knows, as I know, that they are not separate things. She told me something in our conversation that landed with a full-body thud: that the systems of oppression work best when we are disconnected from ourselves, disconnected from each other, and unaware of our own power.

That’s the essay I’ve been writing for over a year here on Substack. It’s also the essay my professional life just handed me again.

The personal is the political. The inner work is the outer work. And a woman who knows her worth, who can feel a contraction in her body and honor it as signal rather than suppress it as inconvenience — that woman is a different kind of threat to a system that needs her to stay small.

I have received three kicks from the universe. Each time, I’ve emerged more precisely myself.

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Hecate stands at the crossroads holding her torches — not to show you which path is safe, but to illuminate all of them. She is the goddess of thresholds, of liminal spaces, of the wisdom that lives at the in-between.

I’m standing in the in-between right now. And I’m not in a hurry to leave it.

This is not a moment for logic. This is a moment for listening.

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Working with Me: Transition Doula Support

If you are in your own in-between — the disorienting space that follows an ending and precedes what comes next — I walk alongside people in exactly this territory. Relationship dissolution. Identity shifts. Career pivots. The moments when life asks you to become someone you haven’t fully met yet.

Transitions are not problems to be solved. They are passages to be witnessed and moved through with intention. If you feel called to work together, reach me through the link in my profile.

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