The Door Was Already Open

Fifty-Five and Done Waiting

I was handed the most brilliant birthday question this morning.

It’s way better than “how do you feel to be a year older,” which nobody past a certain age actually wants to answer honestly.

The question was: What did I learn about myself that most surprised me this year? I made a lighthearted joke about learning I have control issues, which anyone who’s known me more than a minute already knows, and there’s no way I just clocked that, lol. I told her I’d need to sit with it.

My first thought was about resilience, and overcoming the grief that’s rocked my world these last two years. Turns out, I can even survive deep soul grief. But then, I’ve always been resilient. I’ve built businesses out of nothing, twice. I homeschooled three kids and kept the house running after I became a single mother. I’ve run marketing behind New York Times bestsellers and still made family dinner most nights. I would have told you, and meant it, that I don’t wait for permission. I’ve never once looked like a woman who does.

I headed to my labyrinth for a walk and asked myself the question again. And what came up had nothing to do with resilience.

I’ve been waiting for permission.

Not from a boss, not from my mother, not from anyone I could name if you pushed me. I’ve been waiting for someone with more letters after their name, more followers, more institutional weight than mine, to tell me my worldview was worthy of being shared. Worthy of anchoring an actual business, out loud, with my name on it, instead of something I practice privately and never quite say plainly.

I’ve been living this way for years. It’s what I’ve been doing with clients behind closed doors. It’s how I’ve run my own life, whether I called it that or not. That business is worldbuilding, whether the person running one admits it or not. That reciprocity isn’t a value you bolt onto a strategy, it’s the mechanism that keeps a thing alive, the same way it keeps a forest alive. That nature is, literally, the source of what sustains us. That love really is the answer to almost everything, even business.

None of that is new information to me. I knew it before I had words to go with it—building bridges in the woods with my best friend as a kid, helping others to tie their shoes when we were all still learning. I had it in the lab at Zeneca, running reactions that behaved exactly like living systems if you paid attention rather than forcing them. I’ve had it for over a decade working with companies where I’ve helped other people’s ideas about connection and worth reach millions of readers, while filing my own under things I believe personally, not things I’d stake a business on.

That’s the part that surprised me. Not the beliefs. That I still wanted permission.

I mean, what did I think was going to happen?! That someone would magically come in and say, you know what, these ideas are serious enough to organize a life around, not just true enough to be interesting at a dinner party. Fifteen years of evidence sit in my own resume that I know how to build something that works. And I still wanted a stamp. From who, I genuinely don’t know. I looked for the face behind that requirement today and couldn’t find one.

I turned fifty-five today, and somewhere around the second lap of my labyrinth, I realized I have still been checking the door for a person who was never going to walk through it. Nobody’s coming to tell me the mycelium is real, or that love holds more weight than we give it credit for. I’ve known both my whole life.

The door’s open. It has been the whole time. I just kept waiting for someone to invite me through it.

I’m not waiting anymore. I’m just walking through.