Episode #049
The Summer Ambitious Women Started Opting Out
For years, the message was clear: work harder, push through, build the thing, chase the goal.
Now I have the conditions I want and am realizing I have no idea how to live inside of this reality.
In this solo episode, I reflect on a surprisingly difficult season of spaciousness and confronting the discomfort of no longer striving.
This is about ambition, identity, motherhood, burnout, and the strange feeling of getting exactly what you wanted only to discover that the adjustment is harder than expected.
Getting What I Wanted and Struggling to Live Inside It
For years, I wanted more space.
I remember one of my best revenue years in business also being one of my busiest. The thought running through my head constantly was: I just need space.
I wanted a summer where I could be with my kids without squeezing work into every available opening. I wanted to stop responding to “Mom, can we...?” with “Just give me a few more minutes.” I couldn't imagine how I would ever create that kind of freedom. This summer, I did.
I don't have active client work. My book is with the proofreader. My website is with the designer. My kids have ten weeks off, and for the first time, I'm able to move through the summer without a heavily scheduled work calendar.
It's been much harder than I expected.
I'm accustomed to having deadlines, clients, projects, and people who need something from me. Give me too much to do and I know exactly how to operate. Give me a wide-open day and I start looking around wondering what I'm supposed to do with myself.
I’m realizing I legitimately don’t know how to be.
I've experienced this kind of space once before, after moving to Pittsburgh. When the usual demands disappeared, I felt anchorless. This summer has brought some of that feeling back.
I got the space I'd been asking for. Now I'm learning how unfamiliar it feels to actually have it.
Opting Out of the Role of the High-Achieving Woman
As I've been trying to understand why this season feels so disorienting, I've started noticing a larger conversation happening among women around me.
A lot of us know how to be the fixer, connector, helper, high achiever, or person who can absorb everything. We've spent years becoming exceptionally capable at those roles. I know how to be the high-achieving mom. I know how to be the high-achieving business owner. I also have a picture of what opting out entirely looks like. What I haven't had is a clear model for the space in between.
That question feels especially complicated around motherhood.
I've intentionally kept being a mom separate from much of my professional identity. My work wasn't about motherhood, many of my clients didn't have children, and I never wanted my personal life to become part of a personal-brand sales pitch. I've probably overcorrected.
I've also been sensitive to what people might assume if I openly said I wanted to prioritize my kids or put less energy into my business. I've been called a trad wife. I've heard the implication that talking too much about your children means you don't take your work seriously.
So even saying, I'm taking the summer off with my kids and making zero dollars, triggers an almost immediate impulse to explain the circumstances that make that possible.
I can hear myself doing it. And I'm trying to stop.
Why Ambitious Women Are Tired of Proving Themselves
This summer has also made me pay closer attention to the cultural moment we're in.
Women in midlife are being encouraged to choose themselves, establish boundaries, prioritize their health, and stop putting up with things that no longer work for them.
At the same time, many of us are exhausted.
If you're a millennial, chances are you've spent much of your adult life fighting for the version of career success you were told would follow if you worked hard enough. Many of those promises haven't held up.
I'm hearing a version of that exhaustion constantly from women entrepreneurs: I don't want to keep marketing myself. I just want to do good work. The striving itself has become tiring.
I recently read an essay by leadership and culture strategist Jerry Ashley Bremer about leaving a full-time leadership role after years of being strategic, self-sufficient, capable, and able to perform under pressure. One line in particular stopped me: she wanted her life back at the center.
It gave language to something I've been struggling to articulate myself.
I'm used to work being one of the primary ways I measure whether I've done enough with a day. Without it, I've had to look at how much I'm actually carrying elsewhere.
When Work Stops Being the Measure of a Productive Day
Even with all this space, I'm tired at the end of the day. My immediate reaction has been to judge myself for it.
Kim, you're not even really working right now. How can you be tired?
Then I look at what I'm actually doing. I'm helping my mom move between states. I'm choosing furniture, measuring rooms, answering texts, and watching one of my parents begin to slow down. I'm making sure my kids aren't spending all day on screens. I'm meal planning, making dinner, working around the house, gardening, moving my body, and managing the logistics of everyday family life.
I feel full-on in life. And yet, because that effort doesn't produce the kind of feedback work does, I don't always register it as accomplishment.
There are no client emails saying “great job.” No deliverable gets checked off. No revenue number tells me whether the day counted. I feel like I'm just keeping the trains moving.
This may be one of the biggest adjustments of this season for me: living without constantly reaching for the next marker that tells me I'm moving forward.
Learning How to Live Without the Next Thing
I don't know what's on the other side of this summer.
My book will come out. Maybe it will create new opportunities for my business. Maybe it won't. Maybe my book will simply be out in the world.
For now, I'm trying to read a lot. I'm making my home more comfortable. I'm moving my body, getting outside, taking the extra-long way on a walk. Even saying that out loud can trigger the feeling that it doesn't sound like enough.
So I'm sitting with a very different message: We're okay. Like it's okay to just be.
I know I'll work again. I'll perform and make things and pursue ideas because those parts of me haven't disappeared. Right now, I don't know what the thing after the thing is. So I’ll reserve these days for books and sunshine on my face because, as it does, winter is coming.
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