I was raised to be an overfunctioner. Rural settings, constant moves, and instability created a parentified child who grew into a hyper-empathetic, overfunctioning adult. In every relationship and every career setting, I showed up as the door prize…the unexpected dynamo who quietly won everyone over.
“I just want to be a receptionist,” a partner teased me in a sing-song voice when, two years later, I was managing Human Resources.
I built a career on noticing everything before anyone else could. I read people before I even knew their first names. I anticipated needs before they were voiced, managed outcomes before they became problems, and held systems together that were never mine to hold. It made me exceptional at my work.
It also meant my nervous system never once believed it was safe to stop.
Years into my corporate career, my husband became ill and later died. My overfunctioning didn’t simply intensify, it became an addiction. I needed the adrenaline to keep going until even that wasn’t enough. I left corporate America to start my own “thing.” Actually, make that “things.”
At first, every business I built became another proving ground. Every new venture was another opportunity to start over, to demonstrate my worth, to prove that I could survive whatever life placed in front of me. Until my body could no longer sustain what I required.
A genetic disease I could barely pronounce—Ankylosing Spondylitis—used that opportunity to attack my heart, my lungs, my joints, and my digestive system. What looked like a health crisis became the existential crisis that ultimately saved my life.
For the first time, I began dismantling my own success. Piece by piece, I examined the operating system that had built my life. Eventually the puzzle became clear. I wasn’t lacking motivation, grit, or character. I was lacking congruency.
A self that must endlessly prove itself can never fully inhabit the expertise it has truly earned. A nervous system fueled by dopamine, adrenaline, and constant responsibility cannot simultaneously heal, regulate, rest and regenerate.
So began my third reinvention. Not an adaptive reinvention, but a congruent one. It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t inspiring. It certainly wasn’t seamless. It was messy, filled with loss, betrayal, despair, uncertainty, and doubt.
But I stayed with it. I walked my own talk… only baby steps at first. I stopped trying to become someone worthy of success and began learning how to embody the person I already was. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, healing began to replace proving. Congruency began to replace performance. Order emerged where survival had once organized everything.
I stopped trying to earn my value through exhaustion. I stopped believing everyone else’s needs belonged ahead of my own. I disappointed and annoyed people. I set boundaries. I let go of perfection. I became less impressive to some and far more honest with myself.
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