Become Who You are
January 2025-
Recently, at a Holiday party, as I was stating my age, a
30-year-old something, with probably the intention of pleasing me, exclaimed:
“Oh wahoo, you are 51? You certainly don’t look like it!”.
To which I answer:
“Oh, yes, I do; I know that I do.
And I am so pleased I do.
Thank you, though.”
I like Maya Angelou’s quote:
“Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor
their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What
that is is aging.”
It’s been hard work to grow up during the past five decades
(with still many years to go, I hope).
I am now at a place where I can look back and take stock of many things I have
harnessed through life experience, whether through personal drama, collective
upheavals, or deep introspections.
I can now see the ebbs and flows of my life & journey, inner & outward.
The move to NYC in my early 20s was not full of hopes and dreams but propelled
by my running from home. Running away from a way of living, of thinking that I
was carrying so deep in my belly that it took me to turn 35 to act on it and
reclaim myself. It is the year that I became a single parent (my boys were 5
& 7 then) & a solo entrepreneur at the helm of a disintegrating
business (addictions of my then partner).
I had pulled the string at last & at the image of the world economy (it was
2008); everything was unraveling in my personal life & only to reveal what
I could not see before.
Clarity emerged from the chaos.
And to follow, I launched what turned out to be a decade and
a half of deep work on all fronts:
I was resuscitating a dying business, raising two kids who became two
teenagers, opening a 2nd business, finding my voice & reconnecting with my
instincts & life force, harnessing courage & inner fortitude, and
changing my carer ( becoming a transformational Coach) while running businesses
& launching my boys in life & finally wethering a world pandemic
(restaurants have been hit hard, financially & physically by it).
My friends describe me as fierce, courageous & a
“straight shooter.”
My Coaching clients hire me & keep working with me for my honesty, my utter
incapacity to lie to them & my impeccable ability to sit with them in
excruciatingly difficult life situations.
I have been through so many fires that the proximity of the heat doesn’t
frighten me.
Solo parenting & entrepreneurship have taught me to embody my values deeply
& to know how to manifest them in real life.
Long Covid finally has forced me to harness a fine-tuned understanding of my
body & of how to manage my energy & spirit.