When They Told Me to Stay in My Lane, I Found My Purpose in the “Rabbit Holes”

For the women who follow the threads, ask the hard questions, and were built to go deeper.

This one’s been sitting in my drafts for weeks…Then, Erin handed me the book “All the Cool Girls Get Fired”. I laughed at the title…..until I didn’t.

Somewhere between the second and third chapter, I realized the book was talking about me, and probably you, too: The woman sitting in her car after work, staring at her steering wheel, knowing that something about her job looks right on paper but feels wrong in her gut.

Maybe you’ve been told to “stay in your lane”.

To stop going down “rabbit holes”.

To quit connecting dots no one asked you to connect.

That was me.

The Lane I Outgrew

In my corporate role, I was hired to fix what was broken, to align teams, to bridge gaps, and smooth communication. They said they needed someone who could see across the whole map. So I did. I asked the questions that no one wanted to ask. I followed the threads, dug into the reports, and reviewed the broken procedures until we hit the truth.

What I didn’t understand then was that sometimes people say they want change until changing things makes it uncomfortable.

The more I uncovered, the quieter the room got and the more confused I was! For me, the answers lived in those rabbit holes, and I just couldn’t let them stay covered.

I loved the people I worked with… the ones who worked beside me and for me, who cared deeply and made the work matter. I saw their spark before they did. I said their names in rooms they weren’t in. I gave credit loudly because I wanted them to feel seen, valued, capable.

That’s what lit me up!!!…. not the title, not the metrics. THEM!!

Still, I couldn’t be quiet. I wasn’t built for silence…. (obviously :) So I kept speaking, digging, discovering. And eventually, that cost me the job.

I was embarrassed… like being “too much” finally caught up with me. But time gave me clarity: I wasn’t wrong. I was just in the wrong room.

The Book That Named It

When Erin gave me “All the Cool Girls Get Fired”, she didn’t even have to explain why. She just said, “Read this.”

That book said out loud what my gut had whispered for years: You don’t get pushed out because you’re not good enough. You get pushed out because you see too much, too soon, too honestly.

It reframed everything. My “mistakes” weren’t all failures…they were clues. My instinct to dig deep, connect people, and name what’s real wasn’t a liability, it was a sort of leadership…just in the wrong context.

That book cracked something open in me. It reminded me that the very traits that got me side-eyed in boardrooms are the ones that make me great in the rooms I walk into now.

From Boardrooms to Nurseries

These days, my meetings happen in quiet, sacred spaces… the kind that smell like newborn skin, filled with newborn cries, half-drunk coffee, and the hum of a tired baby monitor.

I walk into rooms where love and fear sit right next to each other. And I see women…. and men… trying to find their footing again.

Sometimes they’re holding a baby, sometimes they’re holding back tears, but I can always spot the question flickering behind their eyes: Who am I now? I see it because I’ve lived it for myself!!

And just like I used to do in the corporate world, I name what I see. I tell them what they’re doing right. I point out their intuition, their calm, their way of knowing exactly what their baby needs. I advocate for them…. loudly, clearly, without hesitation. Because that’s who I’ve always been. The only difference is now, the rooms I walk into want that kind of frankness and honesty. They welcome it.

The Work That Fits

Erin and I built Beyond Birthing Associates because surface-level support wasn’t enough. We were longing for real conversations in open forums, over polished answers in small spaces.

We thrive in the stuff that makes people squirm a little… that’s our sweet spot. We lean into the conversations most people whisper about or avoid altogether — the ones about vaginal dryness, episiotomies, resentment in marriage, sex that suddenly feels different, hormones that hijack your brain, and the quiet fear that maybe you’ve lost yourself somewhere between bottles and burp cloths.

People used to laugh at us for bringing this stuff up (mostly our big sisters!!)…“Do you really have to talk about that?” Yeah, we do. Because, for us, that’s where the truth lives. That’s where women start to exhale. That’s where the healing actually begins.

We don’t just hold babies; we hold women….in the mess, in the in-between, in the becoming. We hold space for the moment “I don’t know who I am anymore” starts to shift into “I’m beginning to remember her and like who she’s becoming.”

This isn’t about picture-perfect postpartum. It’s about truth. And we’ve never been afraid of that…. in fact, it’s where we come alive.

The Risk and the Invitation

So here’s the truth….I’m not writing this to tell you how great I am or how perfectly I handled getting knocked flat… because that is far from how it actually looked!! I’m writing because I know there are women out there… maybe you…. who are sitting in jobs that look fine on LinkedIn but feel off in your gut. You keep trying to make it make sense, to quiet that little voice that says this isn’t it.

I’m writing it because I don’t want to see one more smart, capable, compassionate woman suffer in a place that doesn’t deserve her. And because I know some of you would be so damn good at this work. You already see what others miss. You already lead with intuition, heart, and honesty… and maybe you’ve been told that makes you “too much.” (Spoiler: it doesn’t. It just means you haven’t found the right room yet.)

That’s why Erin and I built this!….not to prove anything, but to create something real. A space where those “too much” traits are exactly what’s needed. A place where you can talk about the real stuff…the messy, funny, awkward, beautiful truth of being human, and actually be valued for it.

If you’re reading this and something in your chest is buzzing, maybe that’s your gut saying: “Pay attention!” You don’t have to keep trying to fit somewhere that drains the best parts of you. You get to choose work that fills you back up…work that you were meant for!

And if that road happens to lead you into a nursery at 2 a.m., with a baby snuggled on your chest and a mom finally exhaling for the first time all day… trust me, you’ll recognize yourself there!