I was exploring my moon sign with Moon Omens this morning when one sentence stopped me.

Balance strength with softness.

I read it twice. Then I put my phone down and just sat with it, because it landed somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

Here’s the thing about a sentence like that. You can only really hear it when you’re ready to hear it. A year ago I would have read those same words and rolled my eyes. Like yeah, right. This morning they cracked something open.

For most of my life, I would have told you strength was my best quality. It might have been my only strategy.

I figured things out. I carried people. I survived things I don’t always talk about. I built businesses. I kept moving when moving felt like the only option I had.

Somewhere along the way, out of wounds I am just starting to understand, I became hyper independent. Not on purpose. It was just what kept me safe. If I don’t need anyone, no one can leave. If I carry it all myself, no one gets the chance to drop me. If I stay strong, I stay safe.

So I never asked for help, even when I was drowning. I did everything myself, quietly, so that no one could let me down. And there was a resentment tangled up in it too. Like fuck you, I’ll do it myself. I don’t need anyone anyway. Receiving anything, help, love, support, felt almost impossible. Like my hands didn’t know how to open in that direction.

That version of me got me here, and I’m grateful for her. She kept me alive. She kept the whole thing standing when it easily could have come down.

But she also never rested.

When I lost my son in 2020, I heard “you are so strong” a few too many times.

And then I couldn’t hold it together anymore. Grief does that to you. It doesn’t care how strong you are. That was the first time I knew in my soul there had to be another way to do life.

This wasn’t some gentle awakening. I didn’t go looking for it. Grief thrust it on me. Losing my son forced me to evolve, whether I was ready or not. The Neuro Identity Evolution certification I’m in now is me finally putting language to what already broke open.

You don’t know until you know. And I didn’t know.

I didn’t know any other way to exist except hustle and grind. That was the whole operating system. Go. Do. Handle it. Next.

It’s not that I looked at strength and softness and chose strength. It’s that I never knew both were on the table. Softness wasn’t a door I was refusing to walk through. It was a door I didn’t know existed. Existing in both was never a choice I was avoiding. I just couldn’t see it from where I was standing.

You think you’re making choices. You’re not. You’re on autopilot. Go go go, survival mode, running the only program you were ever handed.

Strength alone isn’t my only option anymore. Softness has entered the room and she wants to play.

And she didn’t just show up today. She’s been here the whole time. Quiet. Patient. Waiting for me to have enough room to finally hear her.

The softer part.

Not weak. Not fragile. I want to be really clear about that, because I think we get those words confused.

Just softer.

She’s the woman who doesn’t have to force every outcome. The one whose nervous system can finally exhale after being braced for so long. The one who can receive instead of always being the one who carries. The one who can trust instead of gripping tighter every time things get uncertain.

But just because I know better now doesn’t make it feel safe to live there yet.

I keep waiting to feel like I’m losing something by softening. Like I’m giving up the edge that kept me safe.

But that’s not what’s happening.

I don’t feel like I’m losing my strength. I feel like I’m expanding it.

Here’s the thing I can’t stop noticing though.

We’re obsessed with strength. We hand out medals for it. We build entire brands around grit and hustle and pushing through. “She’s so strong” is one of the highest compliments we give a woman, and I’ve worn it proudly for years. I still catch myself reaching for it.

But nobody claps for softness.

Nobody says wow, look how well she lets herself rest. Nobody celebrates the woman who finally set the weight down. We’ve quietly decided softness is what you settle for when you run out of strength. Like it’s the backup plan. When really, I’m starting to think it might be the other half of the whole thing.

Because strength without softness is just armor. It protects you, sure. But it also keeps you braced for a fight that ended a long time ago. You end up guarding a life that’s actually safe now.

The healthiest version of me isn’t the strong one or the soft one. It’s both. It’s knowing when to hold the line and when to let my shoulders drop. When to act and when to receive. When to lead and when to let myself be held for a minute, without treating it like a failure.

And for the first time, I think I’m ready to set the old way down. Not throw it away. Just loosen my grip. Stop white knuckling a life that doesn’t require white knuckling anymore.

I spent so long in survival mode that softness wasn’t even in my vocabulary. It wasn’t part of anything I knew, or anything I ever said out loud. I didn’t reject it. I just never met it. And I’m wondering now how much I missed, not because I chose wrong, but because I didn’t know there was a choice to make.

So I’ll leave you with the question I’m sitting with today.

Where in your life have you been living in only one world, not realizing you were always allowed to live in both?

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m just noticing out loud. And maybe, for now, that’s enough.

About a month ago I was scrolling Facebook and I couldn’t get away from it. Ad after ad. Influencer after influencer. Everybody suddenly an expert on GLP-1’s, everybody with a link, everybody with a discount code and a before photo.

And I just stopped and thought, how can anyone trust anything on social media anymore?

That was the moment. Not a business plan. Not a strategy. Just a gut punch of how did we get here, and who is actually looking out for real people trying to feel better in their own bodies.

So I decided to do something about it. I’m creating a local event. In person. Real people in a real room having real conversations. I’m calling it Beyond the Buzz, because that’s exactly the point. Let’s get beyond the buzz and the hype and the noise and actually talk to each other.

Here’s what it is. An open house. You walk in, and in the room are local vendors I have personally worked with on my own healing and wellness journey. These are the people I trust with my body, my health, the stuff that actually matters. No speeches. No sales pitches. Nobody cornering you to close a deal.

You come with your own questions. You walk up to whoever you want to. You ask. That’s it. It’s the in-person version of the thing we’ve all lost, which is being able to look someone in the eye and go, okay, but does this actually work, and watch their face when they answer.

Now here’s the part I don’t usually say out loud.

I almost didn’t do it.

Not because I didn’t believe in it. I did, all the way. It was the other stuff. Putting myself out there to be judged. Hosting something with my name on it and knowing people get to have opinions about that. And the quiet one, the one that whispers the loudest, what if nobody comes.

That’s the fear that kills more good ideas than anything else. Not failure. Just the possibility of an empty room and the story your brain writes about you if that happens.

Old me would have let that win. Old me would have kept the idea safe in my head where it couldn’t embarrass me.

But the woman I’m becoming clicked into group after group after group and cross-posted it anyway. Copy, paste, post. My nervous system didn’t even flinch.

Until it did.

Then came the laughing emoji. Then came the anonymous comment. And yes, it stirred some shit up in me for a minute.

Because being seen means people get to react. Some clap. Some laugh. Some hide behind anonymous and take a little swing. That’s the deal. You don’t get to reach people without also being reachable by the ones who just want to poke.

Old me would have reacted. Old me would have defended. Old me would have typed a whole paragraph, receipts ready, tone just polite enough to look like I wasn’t bothered while being completely bothered.

But I took a breath instead. I felt it. And I let it move through me instead of firing back.

Because the people judging from the sidelines are rarely the ones brave enough to build something. A laughing emoji is not a stop sign. An anonymous comment is not a verdict. And an empty-room fear is not a good enough reason to stay small.

So I’m putting it out there anyway. The event is real. The room is real. And I would rather show up fully and be misunderstood by a few than shrink myself down to the version nobody could possibly have a problem with.

Post it anyway. Say the thing. Build the room. Not everyone is going to get it, and that was never the assignment.

Today’s intention: I let myself be seen without needing everyone to understand me.

My mom has lived on Lake Mallalieu, in Hudson, WI since 1993. I have a lifetime of memories on that water. So when the fight over the lake blew up, I wasn’t watching from the outside. I was in it.

Here’s the short version. The lake has been declining for decades. Sediment building up, year after year. Then a dam breach dumped a fresh load in and pushed the whole thing to a head. The breach wasn’t the real problem. It was just the match.

My mom and a lot of the lake folks have been fighting to fix it for years.

And that’s where the noise started.

On one side, save the lake. Make it healthier for the people who live on it. On the other side, ‘save the swans’. That one got pushed by a gal in town, and a river conservancy lined up behind it.

I stood back and watched both sides get louder and louder. And the louder they got, the more annoyed I got. Because they were fighting like enemies over the exact same thing.

Both sides want a healthy lake. That’s it. That’s the whole fight. Two groups screaming at each other on the way to the same place.

Here’s what actually happened, once you cut through the yelling.

The lake association won a state grant to improve the lake’s health. Dredging would’ve been ideal, but it’s too expensive. So the next best option was a drawdown. To do that, they needed the Wisconsin DNR’s approval, and that’s a whole process.

The process only starts when all four municipalities that own the dams on the lake sign the application.

And this is the part everyone missed.

Those signatures were never a yes to the drawdown. They just started the DNR’s science-based review. The research. The part where actual experts figure out whether a drawdown would help or hurt the lake and the waterways around it, including the St. Croix.

The signatures didn’t approve anything. They just opened the door to finding out. But people were so stuck on these were signatures to approve the drawdown.

So the anti-drawdown side fought to get a municipality to pull its signature. And yesterday, the St. Croix County Board of Supervisors rescinded theirs.

That killed it. The whole process, stopped.

So now we’ll never know. Would the drawdown have helped? Hurt? Gotten modified into something better? Nobody knows. Because the research never got to happen.

That’s the part that gets me.

People didn’t vote down a drawdown. They voted down the chance to find out if it was a good idea. They shut the conversation before anyone had the information to actually have it. They missed the wholeness of this project because they were stuck in their own muck. Tunnel vision.

And I’ll be honest about where I land. I get conserving the St. Croix. I get protecting the river. But a healthier lake means healthier water flowing into that river. So the side fighting the process was fighting against the thing they say they want. That’s the part that doesn’t add up for me.

Here’s my lesson.

If people would pull themselves out of the muck for one second and rise above it, they’d see the two sides were never that far apart. They’d see the vote wasn’t even about the drawdown. It was about whether to let ourselves learn something.

The view changes when you rise above the noise.

Down in it, all you see is your side and the enemy. Up above it, you see the truth. Everybody wanted the same lake. And in the fighting, they lost the one thing that could’ve gotten them there.

That’s the real Lesson with Lori. The lake was never the point. It was just the mirror.