A reflection on work, purpose, and the moment we decide what kind of life to teach our youth.
Today, my 15-year-old son told me he wants to get a job.
He is an artist and an animator. The kind of person who sees things before they exist.
When I asked him why he wanted a job, he gave an answer that felt both logical and deeply familiar: he wanted money so he could support himself and pay for the things he needs to become a better artist.
And that gave me pause.
Because beneath that answer was a lesson so many of us absorb early and rarely question:
Work first, so you can afford to become what you already are.
The more I sat with that, the more I realized this is not just a parenting question. It is a leadership question.
We often inherit a model of success that teaches people to separate survival from meaning. We normalize trading time, energy, and originality for the promise that one day, after enough proving, enough earning, enough exhaustion, we might finally have permission to invest in what we are actually gifted to do.
And then we wonder why so many people feel disengaged.
Why calendars are full, but people feel disconnected.
Why capable, creative individuals lose clarity, energy, and conviction over time.
I see versions of this everywhere, in workplaces, in culture, and if I am honest, in myself too.
Leadership is not only about driving outcomes. It is also about recognizing when a system is teaching people the wrong lesson.
In that moment with my son, I realized I had a choice. I could reinforce the default script, or I could challenge it.
So instead of telling him to get a conventional job first, I asked a different question:
What if your art is the thing that begins to support you?
What if he started offering commissions, building a portfolio through real collaboration, learning how to translate other people’s ideas into work that carries both skill and value?
That conversation was about more than money. It was about whether we teach people to delay their calling or develop it.
As leaders, parents, managers, and builders of culture, that question matters.
Because every system teaches.
Every norm shapes identity.
Every repeated message tells people something about what is practical, what is valuable, and what kind of life is available to them.
We do not just teach people how to work.
We teach them what kind of future they are allowed to imagine. Or better yet, that the future they imagine themselves is allowed.
And I think more of us need to stop and ask:
Are we helping people build lives that are sustainable, integrated, and meaningful?
Or are we simply preparing them to function inside systems that disconnect them from who they are?
That is not a small question.
It may be one of the most important leadership questions we can ask.
This is a note for anyone who’s ever felt they had to compartmentalize themselves to be accepted.
A reminder I’m carrying with me as I write and share this journey: you are who you are—every part of you.
Today I am going to write something even more personal from me to you because I think someone out there needs permission to stop splitting themselves into pieces.
After reading yesterday’s post, you might be wondering:
“What on Earth could she be sharing today, considering her previous post?”
Well, for a long time, I believed I had to present myself in pieces, depending on the room and who was in it with me.
There was the professional version for certain spaces.
The creative for private hours.
The spiritual kept soft, quiet, tucked away like something too tender to carry out loud.
I am choosing to write this here, because maybe, just maybe, you know that feeling too.
Like you have to edit yourself down to what’s easiest to understand. Like your joy needs a label, to be understood by others, to be valid and accepted in that room you are in. Like your depth needs to be toned down so it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.
But here’s what I have learned–slowly, and sometimes the hard way:
We are not meant to be split.
We are not meant to be sorted into neat categories or compressed into one “acceptable” identity. You can be intelligent and imaginative at the very same time, and one does not detract from the other; it actually enhances it.
You can be grounded and whimsical.
You can be logical and deeply feeling.
You can be ambitious and devoted.
You can love structure and still crave mystery.
You can be all of it, every single piece, even when it doesn’t “make sense” to others. I think it is because somewhere along the timeline, we were taught to be neat. Categorized. Easier to place. Easier to collect, even.
And when you challenge that narrative of old, when you stop apologizing for your complexity, well, something beautiful happens.
Your life starts to feel like it belongs to you again.
That’s what I hope this space becomes– a soft space to land for the parts of you that don’t fit into just one box. A reminder that integration isn’t messy or confusing…it’s powerful! It’s the most honest kind of strength and bravery.
It is also how this story came to be. This story holds the parts of me I used to keep separate.
Sera, Lily & The Fox Prince is a portal, yes…but it’s also a mirror. It holds the themes I return to again and again: trust, courage, friendship, the ache of winter, the pull of the unknown…and the quiet, steady truth that love isn’t always loud, but it is always real.
If you’ve ever felt pulled between who you are and who you’re “supposed” to be, this story was written for you, too.
So if you’ve ever felt like you had to shrink yourself to be understood…
This is your reminder:
You are who you are–every part of you.
The most powerful lives are integrated ones.
And the most meaningful work is the kind that stays true across every room you walk into.
Welcome to the adventure that I call mine.
Leave a comment below if you are brave enough, tell me: “Where have you had to split yourself–work, creativity, faith, parenthood, relationships?”
I’ve always been the kind of person who flinches at the first real cold snap. I count the days until the sun feels warm again. I treat January and February like something to endure rather than live inside of. Which is funny, in a way, considering I live in New England.
I chose this. I built a life here.
I know the rules: the gray, wintry skies, that gust of wind that just happens to find each and every seam in your coat, the way your bones feel the weather before your phone does.
And still… every year, winter arrives, and I brace for it like an argument I didn’t ask to have.
But this year, I made a decision.
Not a dramatic, cinematic one—just a quiet vow I kept repeating to myself each time I felt the dread of the coldness of winter.
I’m trying to fall in love with winter.
The goal is not tolerate it. Not “make the best of it.” Not grit my teeth through it and reward myself later with spring.
Fall in love.
I wanted to stop treating the cold like an enemy and start treating it like a teacher. It should be like a season that belongs in the story of my life, instead of a long footnote between the chapters I actually enjoy.
And winter, being winter, immediately tested me.
We’ve had more snow this year than I can ever remember. Snow didn’t simply fall and melt politely in a day or two this season as it always has in the past. Instead, it piled and stayed. At one point, it felt like the world had narrowed to white and silence. Even now, there’s nearly two feet still on the ground, as if the earth itself is refusing to let go.
It’s been the kind of winter that makes you understand why people used to fear it.
The kind of winter that makes you wonder if spring will ever arrive again.
And yet—this is the strange part—something in me has softened.
Not fully. I’m not out here claiming I’ve become a winter person overnight, the kind who thrills at icy mornings. Though… I do have to admit that two pairs of nice wool socks are a game-changer!
But I have almost stopped despising it.
Almost.
And I didn’t expect the thing that would help me get there would be… my own book.
The Unexpected Gift of Returning to My Story
Lately, I’ve been rereading Sera, Lily & The Fox Prince.
There’s a particular kind of vulnerability that comes with returning to something you made. When you’re drafting, you’re inside the work. You’re too close to it. You’re solving problems, shaping scenes, worrying about pacing and proofing, and the thousand tiny choices that make a world feel real.
But when you reread it later, something changes.
You become a reader again.
And suddenly you’re seeing the world through your characters’ eyes—through Lily’s quiet steadiness, through Sera’s fierce warmth, through the way the forest breathes and watches and holds its secrets. Through my two daughters’ eyes.
You remember not only what you wrote, but why you wrote it.
And as I reread, I realized how much winter lives inside the book—not just as weather, but as metaphor.
Winter in my story isn’t only cold. It’s a mood. A threshold. A proving ground.
It’s the season that asks you whether you can keep your goodness when everything feels hard.
Whether you can stay grateful when you are tired of being brave.
Whether you can keep your love intact when the world tries to shrink it into survival.
There’s a line in the book that has been echoing in my mind as the snow keeps lingering outside my windows:
“Perhaps Winter is only lingering to see if we will still be grateful when Spring arrives.”
When I wrote that, I knew it was true for the characters. I didn’t realize it would become true for me.
Seeing Winter Through My Daughters’ Eyes
Here’s the real truth underneath all of this: I wrote this book for my children.
My daughters, especially.
I wanted them to have a story that felt like a lantern. Something brave and tender. Something that reminds them that strength doesn’t always look like shouting—it can look like staying kind. Staying connected. Staying steady. Choosing good in a world full of temptation and distraction.
And rereading the book now, in the middle of a relentless New England winter, I keep thinking about what they would notice.
Children don’t look at winter the way adults do. Adults measure winter by its inconveniences: shoveling, icy roads, canceled plans, brutal cold.
Kids measure winter in magic.
They notice the hush that comes after snowfall, the way everything looks freshly remade. They notice the sparkle on branches. They notice how sound changes. They notice the way the world becomes a giant blank page.
Even when they complain about it, they still feel the wonder.
And somehow, rereading my own work has helped me borrow their eyes again.
It has helped me see winter not only as something to survive an endure for a few months, but as something that holds beauty. Beauty that you can’t access in any other season.
Winter has its own language. It speaks in quiet, in endurance, in small lights.
Falling in Love Doesn’t Mean Pretending It’s Easy
I used to think that if I couldn’t enjoy winter, it meant I was failing at gratitude. That I needed to move somewhere warm and tropical so I could enjoy the whole year.
But I don’t believe that so much anymore.
Trying to fall in love with winter doesn’t mean I have to pretend the cold isn’t hard. It doesn’t mean I have to romanticize exhaustion or ignore the heaviness that can come with long stretches of gray.
It means I’m learning to stop fighting reality.
It means I’m learning to ask: What is winter offering me, if I’m willing to receive it?
Some days, the answer is simple.
It offers me permission to slow down.
It offers me the quiet I keep claiming I want.
It reminds me that rest is not laziness.
It offers me the truth that warmth feels warmer when you’ve known cold.
And lately, it has offered me something else too, the strange, humbling experience of being comforted by my own words. Because I wrote them for a reason, and now I need them as well.
Almost There
I’m not fully in love with winter yet.
But I’m closer than I’ve ever been.
I’ve stopped glaring at the snow like it’s personally insulting me. I’ve started noticing the beauty in the way it collects on branches. I have fallen back in love with the magic of icicles. I’ve started lighting more fires to enjoy the coziness of it, rather than as an extra source of heat.
I’ve started rereading the passages that feel like they were written to carry someone through.
And sometimes, when I look out the window and see that the snow is still there—still deep, still bright, still refusing to leave—I don’t feel dread.
I feel something gentler.
I feel the smallest, most surprising flicker of affection. I see my daughters playing out in the snow and sense the magic they feel of the world being transformed before their very eyes. The way that you can see something so familiar transform into something anew.
Maybe winter is lingering to see if I’ll still be grateful when spring arrives.
Maybe winter is lingering to teach me how to be grateful before it does.
Either way, I’m listening.
And for the first time in a long time, I’m not only counting down the days until spring.
I’m learning how to live inside the season I’m in.
If you are also trying to make peace with winter, I shared a companion reflection on Science with Sabrina.
