I let a third of my business go. Then I opened the books.

What I’ve been scared to say out loud about stepping back

The Uber had a Stanford sticker on the bumper and the driver was wearing the hat to match, so I was grinning before I even pulled the door shut.

I’ve taken a lot of rides like that, the familiar routine: slide into the backseat, pop the laptop open, deliver the little explanation of why I’m traveling in a tone meant to sound important, discuss the masterminds and the stages and the rooms packed with other authors, reasons that felt urgent, like they deserved to be announced… but this time the laptop stayed zipped in my bag and I just talked to him.

He told me he’d gone to Stanford and met his wife there on his very first day (and that the two of them were about to celebrate fifty years 🥹), that he drives now to save up for the trips they still take, and that in a few weeks they were flying to Puerto Rico. And the way he said it, fifty years, you’d think he’d won something.

Then he asked what brought me into town, and I didn’t dress it up. I told him I’d come to see my girlfriends, five women I’ve known for years and made time for every single month this year even though we live six hours apart.

And by the old scorecard that might sound small, about as small as saving airport fares to take your wife to Puerto Rico, but to me it felt like a bigger win than any bestseller ever did.

Then he asked, “What do you do?”

I hesitated, because I’ve collected a whole drawer of polished answers over the years, the ones that go down easy, and what I heard myself say was, “Well, I used to run a really big podcast for women.” The second it left my mouth I could hear how it might land: like I’d failed, or been canceled, or made some strange decision to walk away from something good.

Still, inside my own chest, I was smiling, because sounding like a has-been while feeling more like myself than I have in years is about the closest thing to a flex I’ve got.

And I should be clear that famous is a generous word for what I was, because I’m known in exactly one corner of the internet, to the kind of woman who could define a sales funnel, or the one building her website between school pickups, or the one holding a secret dream to share her story with the world.

It’s the sort of recognition that gets you squealed at in a conference hotel lobby and a completely blank look from the Stanford grad driving you to the airport.

I won’t pretend it cost me nothing to say it that way and watch him file me under “used to,” because some stubborn part of me still wants the answer that makes a stranger lean in. As it turns out, choosing the quieter life means becoming a little harder to explain than I always know how to sit with.

About a year ago I went hunting for proof, because I needed to know I wasn’t inventing a story I only wished were true, and I spent hours combing the internet for women who reached the top of what they built and then chose to leave it behind.

But what I found was that the ones who actually manage it tend to slip back into their lives and get on with them, and the internet forgets them fast, which I love for them and hate for the rest of us, because once the proof disappears the permission goes with it.

It starts to feel like there are only two options (keep climbing or quit entirely), when there’s a third one almost nobody photographs: choosing, on purpose, to trade the loud, big life for a smaller, quieter one.

And I’m not standing on a chair telling anyone to climb down, because I loved my loud years, and I love watching the women still mid-climb, the ones with all that fire in them. We need them, and we’d be in trouble if we all wandered off to our gardens at the same time.

I just want the garden sitting on the menu right next to the mountain, so the woman reading this knows both are hers to pick.

The smaller life won’t make her smaller, any more than the big one ever made me more.

Surely they’re out there, women who had the world served up and chose their kids instead, who had the public’s attention and wanted their privacy back, who looked at the next shiny opportunity and answered with a kind, steady no because it no longer lit them up.

But if that was their story, we didn’t get to read it, and that’s the whole trouble with it.

Peace doesn’t broadcast, so peace starts to look like it isn’t real.

I still picture them, curled on a couch in a sunbeam with a good book, walking their garden rows, standing at a farmers market on a Saturday morning doing useful things in ways their communities can feel while the algorithm stays blind.

And this is where I keep getting tangled. Because not long ago I said out loud that I didn’t want to sell peace, and I meant it, because you can’t package the thing, you have to live it.

And then the marketer in me, the one who’s been building campaigns since before my girls were born, promptly promoted herself to PR agent for peace anyway, and that’s the knot I’m still loosening: how do you point to the quiet without turning it into something else to perform, another slow-living moment staged for the camera?

I don’t fully know, and I’m saying that on purpose, because I’d rather tell you about the knot than hand you a neat little version that isn’t true.

So I tried an experiment. Not out of certainty, but because I could afford to be curious. I stepped back from the work I’d been tending around the clock, I let the loud years go a little quieter, and I waited to see what would happen when I quit pushing.

Being able to run a test like that is its own privilege, one I’m not going to look away from, because I know not every woman reading this has the margin to try it for herself. But I needed to find out whether the thing I teach would still hold if I stopped feeding it, and what it showed me belongs to all of us, not just the women who could afford the test.

This week I opened the books, nerves steeled, the way you brace right before stepping on the scale after a season you didn’t track.

My stomach did that small drop when I saw the numbers, the top line down a full third of it, most of it by choice, and still my body flinched.

We’re all trained to read a smaller number as a smaller person.

But the top line was never the one I was scared of. The one I was scared of was sitting a line underneath it.

And then I kept reading…

What I built had kept almost all of its profit, same margins, far fewer hours, the whole machine humming along on a quarter of my attention and barely noticing I’d stepped out of the room.

And I sat with that for a long minute, past the headline number you’d turn into a graphic, down to the quieter one underneath it, the one that said slowing down hadn’t cost me what I’d been most afraid it would.

You can make less and keep more, you can plant less and give yourself more room, you can set down the loud thing and discover the quiet version was the strong one all along, just waiting for you to stop drowning it out.

My therapist gave me a word for this stretch of life, and the word is titrate. I’ve been titrating down at a pace my nervous system can handle, which for a woman who defaults to all or nothing means going slow on purpose, the hardest part of all of it.

I keep meeting my edges, those moments when there’s truly nothing left to do for work and I have to lift my eyes off the screen and let my actual life rush into the space that opens up.

And lately that space has looked like a seat on the board of our local soup kitchen, helping my daughters price the cups for their first lemonade stand, the three hundred dahlia tubers I put into the ground this spring, ten times what I planted last year, already reaching.

It hit me the other day that when my girls are grown, I don’t know exactly how they’ll describe me, but I do know what they’ll grab for, and it won’t be the makeup I used to put on at the breakfast table before podcast interviews, or the stages, or the flights, or the morning-show version of me talking up the next thing.

They’ll remember the mom who came in from the garden with dirt jammed under her nails, the one planning the food drive at their school, the one at the farmers market on a Saturday with a canvas bag on her shoulder.

They might not remember the stadium where they once sat while I stood on a stage, but they’ll remember the corn on the cob in the backyard at our weekly picnic, and they’ll remember that I was there.

And I love that, because when they’re older they can read the book, they can scroll back through the nine hundred and sixty-eight episodes I made, and those will show them the other version of me.

But this is the one that will stick, and to me, that isn’t a loss, it’s the entire point.

So no, I’m not disappearing to prove any of this. I considered it, the clean exit, going fully quiet the way those other women did, but if I vanish the proof goes with me, and then you keep believing the door was never really there.

I’m staying, staying visible on purpose, still posting, still running the thing, because I never left. If from where you sit it doesn’t look like I slowed down at all, that’s only because the slowing happened where a feed can’t show it, in a smaller team, a quieter calendar, the same work running leaner and, I promise, still running well.

I’m still fumbling through the impossible task of showing you something you mostly have to feel to believe, still willing to look a little like I’m performing the quiet if that’s the price of proving it’s real. I don’t have that part figured out, and I’m letting myself not know yet.

What I do know is that life kept nearly all of its profit and handed back nearly all of my hours, and that the version of me my girls will carry is the one with dirt under her nails, standing in a garden that grows whether or not anyone is watching.

That’s on the menu too, and I just didn’t want you to spend one more day believing it wasn’t.

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