I blew up my life a couple of months ago. 

I quit my job, sold my house, bought a camper, started at least four side hustles, and began planning a move across the country.

People who didn’t know me well were worried about me. The reality was that I had wandered away from part of myself. Someone who was trying to emerge again. I made this decision the way I make all my decisions. With a deep sense of conviction and awareness that my intuition was leading me somewhere new. I always trust this.

Here’s how it happened.

I had been feeling burned out for awhile. On the surface, my life was everything I worked for. Great job. Recently promoted. Beautiful house. Network of friends. Stability. But I felt trapped inside my own life.

I kept reminiscing about when I was younger. I don’t totally know how to describe it except to say I was a wanderer. I worked odd jobs. I traveled to visit friends. I wandered around my neighborhood at night, pondering life and praying for people. Then I got married, graduated from college, and felt like I needed to lock in and be responsible.

I started teaching. I loved the kids, but I hated the job. There were so many rules. I barely slept. I used to keep cheap box wine in my room to help me sleep. I called it bedroom wine. Looking back, I think my body knew long before my mind did that it wasn’t working.

Six years later, I left teaching because I thought I would break. But I was panicked. We owned a home, and I didn’t know how we were going to pay the mortgage. So I started substitute teaching. I turned our house into an Airbnb and hosted guests in our spare bedroom. Sometimes we rented the whole thing out on weekends and stayed with my in-laws. I even tried to start a t-shirt business.

Then I caught a break. An old friend heard I was between things and recruited me to be a project manager for an ed tech company. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was doing something I was born to do. My mind raced. My heart was full. I could help people without changing who I was.

Just over a year in, I helped turn around a project that would have bankrupted the company. I saved them over a million dollars. I was promoted.

I struggled in my new role.

I felt like a player who loved the game and got benched. Suddenly, I felt responsible for everyone and everything. The pit in my stomach came back along with the anxiety. So I left.

A couple months later I was recruited again by another friend. This time to a larger, internationally known education platform. On my first day, my manager told me I didn’t fit the culture. I was a misfit. I didn’t have an advanced degree. I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. He told me to lay low and he would help me do important work in a safe space.

I was crushed.

For almost five years, I struggled between playing small enough to belong and the part of me that wanted to change everything. Save everyone. Change the course of the company. And honestly, I did make a big impact there considering how little was expected of me in the beginning. But I grew increasingly unhappy.

I had to become more polished. Controlled. Strategic. I had to compete. I had to constantly prove I deserved to be there. Of course, no one explicitly said it that way. But that was what was expected.

Eventually, I started feeling the same way I felt when I was teaching. I stopped sleeping. I no longer drank, so bedroom wine wasn’t an option. Instead, I sank into myself. I got slow. Disoriented. Existing. 

The thing is – it wasn’t the jobs that were the problem. It was me. Trying to squeeze into a space that was too small or the wrong shape. I was trying to pretend. And I suck at it. 

By that point, I had been seeing a therapist regularly for years. I had also been getting life coaching and became certified as a coach. Coaching tended to enter my life when I was standing at the edge of something I knew I needed to face or change. I was in a coaching session with my best friend when something shifted. 

As she was holding space for me, I heard the old familiar sound. The timer was going off. My time in this place was finished.

And for the first time, I didn’t sense that I was moving on to another role at another company.

Loloba was singing to me. She was calling my soul back to my body. Back to the girl who wandered. Back to the version of me who felt most alive in motion and uncertainty and possibility.

These years of suppressing who I was had eaten away at my confidence. My body was tired. Heavy. I thought that part of me was gone.

But something had always been true about me. I was brave. And I trusted my guidance.

So I put in my notice. We listed the house. It was sold to the first people who saw it.

Since leaving that life and starting this new one, I’ve felt emotional and unsteady at times. But I also feel something I haven’t felt in years.

Alive.

As we’ve moved into our camper and started our journey, I feel like I can breathe again. Sometimes, as we’re eating dinner outside somewhere new, looking at mountains or lakes or trees or scrub oak, I suddenly feel my heart fill up. My eyes too.

This is my life. I’m actually living it.

And I think a lot of women are carrying this feeling around. We carry our lives and our families on our backs for so long that we eventually stop hearing ourselves underneath all the noise. We become responsible. Productive. Successful. Useful to everyone except ourselves. Enslaved. Cut off.

Until one day, something inside us starts singing.

That’s why I coach women at crossroads.

Because I know what it feels like when your soul is trying to call you back into your own life.

If this resonates with you and you would like someone to hold space for you, book a free consultation using this scheduling link: https://scheduler.zoom.us/jessica-pingel-vtl8w5/free-coaching-consultation.