“The Heartbeat: The life you give up for the one you want to have.”
A weekly email for women entrepreneurs of color filled with powerful mindset techniques to create a life + business you love.
Today’s our last day on Maui.
We’ve spent the last five days here, and the Island (like Hawaii always does) has treated us with kindness, serendipity, and magic.
It was Wilder’s first time back since we moved off Kauai when she was a year and a half years old.
“Are you local?” a cashier asked us one morning, as we ordered banana macnut pancakes.
I still have my Hawaii driver’s license and secretly told myself that I would move back before it expired, so I could stay kama’aina (local).
That gives me until my birthday this upcoming year: July 2024.
Hawaii is my soul place.
It’s my true home.
It still breaks my heart almost every day that I’m not living on Kauai, or on Maui, or on Oahu.
Yet, in order to create the kind of life for my daughter that would serve her best…
It involved giving up the life I thought I wanted for the wonderful one I now have.
I had to move off Kauai to find places where I’d be around fellow entrepreneurs and build the thriving branding & content marketing agency I now have.
I had to get divorced, even though my culture and society told me that a “healthy” family is one where the parents stay together, so that I could be in the remarkable relationship I’m in now with a man who loves me beyond belief.
I had to dive deep into a healing journey on all levels — financial, physical, mental, emotional, and most importantly, with self — to become the healthiest I’ve been in my life.
And, even on the mainland, I had to give up the kind of education I thought I wanted for my daughter (private alternative schooling) to see that the mainstream public school down the street provided precisely the kind of opportunities that challenge my daughter to explore her growing edges.
It doesn’t mean I won’t move back to Hawaii. It just means that the path home doesn’t look the way I thought it would.
And, because of that, I’m growing into the woman I am meant to become.
One “sister life” at a time.
What’s a “sister life?”
A few years ago, I bought a copy of Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. Prior to her publishing the book, no one knew that after the popularity of her book, Wild, she was the voice behind the advice in the “Dear Sugar” column, where she responded to questions from readers about everything like careers, children, break-ups, grief, aging, depression, and more.
In one chapter, a reader was struggling with whether or not to have children with their partner — they loved their partner but weren’t sure if starting a family was the right path for them.
Have a child? Don’t have a child? What should they do?
Cheryl wrote back about her own experiences, about having to choose one path or another, and the consequences of those choices.
But, what she wrote that struck me the most was in regards to the grief one feels for a life they will never know:
I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do, but salute it from the shore.
I read that chapter again. And again.
Then, I put the book down, looked up, and felt the weight of my own grief for the life that I thought I would have.
The one where I was married.
The one where I got to see my daughter all the time.
The one where I stayed on Kauai, the most beautiful place on the planet.
Maybe you also have a sister life…
We’re not taught how to grieve in our culture.
In fact, we’re not taught a lot of the basics of how to be a human.
There’s an assumption you should already know how to “do” the thing, before becoming aware and assessing, before moving into action.
If you’re going through a phase where you’re ready to create a new sister life and need help bridging the gap between the one you’re living now to the one you want to launch into, let’s chat below.
Love,
Judy
P.S. I included links to the books I mentioned above via my Amazon affiliate link. Order however you’d like if they speak to you!
P.P.S. If you know of someone who’d like this issue of The Heartbeat, please feel free to forward it along to them. Mahalo.
Let’s chat.
The story you tell yourself is how you create greater mental + emotional health, and create a life you love.
If you’re ready to take a leap, let’s chat.
