It is early morning, the coffee is hot for once; the kitchen is dark except for the light over the stove, and the house will not wake for another hour.

Helping is the most natural thing in the world to me. It’s like breathing. Sitting across from someone while they find the thing they already know, holding the silence until the real sentence arrives, holding space for them while they get there.

And yet, I have been in this country for thirty years and I have asked for help maybe a handful of times. I could name them. I would not need both hands.

The rule was in my own handwriting

The autumn I went back to corporate, I wrote every night for two weeks. Not the gentle kind of writing. The kind where the page is the only place I am allowed to tell the truth without flinching. The same word kept surfacing and I kept circling it. Failure.

Somewhere in the third week I got underneath it and found a set of rules I had never agreed to live by. One of them was heavier than the rest. A real reinvention is something you do alone, running on empty, asking nobody for help.

I know exactly who wrote that one. I did. The thirty-year-old who left the corporate life for the first time wrote it, and I have been taking orders from her ever since.

Nobody imposed this on me. I drafted it, I filed it under humility, and I ran an entire adult life on it without once checking whether it still described anything.

What it costs on the other side

In July a colleague wrote me a note about my work, the job and the writing both. He had been watching, apparently. He wrote down what he saw: the learning every day, the writing, the fact that I finish things.

I read it and I thought, that is generous of him. Generous is the file it went into. He handed me a sentence about myself that I could not have written, and rather than keep it, I credited it to his kindness and moved on to the next item on the list.

So here is what I actually think is going on, and it is less flattering than the version where I am simply a generous person.

Two words on the mirror

Here is what moved it, and it took almost nothing.

That same July I wrote the name of one person I trusted on a Post-it and stuck it to the bathroom mirror. Not as a plan. Just as an acknowledgment that I was not going to do this alone.

Then two more notes went up next to it, one word on each. Flourish. Thrive.

The name was already up there beside them. I had stuck the ask and the reason for it in the same reflection as my own face, every morning, and it was a long time before I read the three notes as one sentence.

I am not going to tell you I am cured of this. I will tell you that the asking has started to come out of my mouth, occasionally, in real time, and that it does not feel like weakness anymore. It feels like the price of the two words.

You probably do both of these too

If you are the person everyone calls, you know the first half of that title without me explaining it. Ask yourself when you last made the call in the other direction.

This is where Future Scripting turns around and looks the other way. I teach you to write the future in present tense and in detail, because your nervous system believes what you write in detail. I wrote the version where I do it alone for thirty years, out loud, at dinner parties, in the answer I give when someone asks how I got here. Of course it is the one I believe. I had never once written down the version where I ask, so it had nothing to go on.

Then put the name where you will see it next to your own face.

Write it first. Live it second.

With love and courage from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. What are the two words you would put on your mirror? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

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You bought the journal, chose the pen that makes a small pleasure of the downstroke, and sat down full of real hope. Then you did the single thing most likely to strangle all of it. You compared.

I know this panel intimately, because mine used to convene every morning before the house woke. In the dark I would open the notebook, and before a single true sentence made it out, the marking began. Not good enough. Who do you think you are. The cold coffee went colder while I argued with people who existed only in my own skull.

Here is what I wish someone had told me sooner. The panel is not measuring your writing. Look closely and you will catch them leaning back, marking you before your pen has touched the page, because none of them ever came to read. It is measuring you against an audience you built from your own fears, and that kind of audience will always vote the way the fear wants. That is its entire function. The panel exists to keep you safely unwritten, because an unwritten life cannot be judged, and it has confused safety with kindness.

So let me say this plainly. You are allowed to fire them.

For years you have tried to reason with this panel. Reasoning keeps them seated. Firing them ends the meeting. So clear the table. The page was never an audition. You owe a performance to no one, least of all a jury that let itself into a room that belongs to you.

What is left when they go is quieter than you expect. Just you and the honest scratch of a pen that does not care whether the sentence is worthy, only whether it is true. In that quiet there is exactly one comparison worth making, and it has nothing to do with the woman and her ten books. It is you, today, against you yesterday, last month, last year. That line moves. Watch it, and you will find it is the only scoreboard that ever told you anything real.

The panel will knock again; they always do; however you do not have to open the door.

With love and courage from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S: I am curious about you. Who sits on your panel? The writer with the ten books, the mother, the teacher who graded you in red, the version of you who was supposed to have done this by now, or (be honest) the one who has been there so long you stopped noticing the chair. Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

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For the past two weeks, my Business Innovation rotation was in the risk department. The assignment looked simple on paper. Sit with the team, learn what they protect and how they think. What the paper left out was the mental posture the work demands. To find the holes in a system, you have to become the person who would climb through them. You start reading an ordinary process the way a burglar reads a house, checking which window stays unlocked and which door everyone trusts because it has always held.

Then, somewhere in the second week, something shifted. I was reading an ordinary approval workflow and a question arrived before I invited it: where would I get in. That was the moment I knew the coat had stopped feeling like a coat. The mindset had moved in.

That got me thinking about how many brains we actually carry.

My mornings belong to the artist brain, the one that tolerates mess and keeps asking what if at strange hours. In my private practice I wear the coach and mentor brain, the one that listens more than it speaks and trusts that the person across from me already carries the answer. When I was running schools, I lived in the educator brain, watching for the moment someone was ready for the next step, then getting out of the way. And at General Motors I spent a decade in the project manager brain, thinking in dependencies and deadlines, quietly asking of every plan, what could slip.

Each one is a posture, a set of questions you can practice until they start asking themselves. The criminal brain belongs to the same family. It simply optimizes for a darker question.

Now for the honest part, the part these letters exist for.

While I lived in the criminal brain, my creativity dropped. Not slightly. My scripting and journaling pages went thin, two paragraphs where there are usually four. Ideas stopped finding me in the shower and the car park, which is where they usually do. Some mornings I sat at this same counter with the pen feeling heavy in my hand and produced almost nothing. That has not happened to me in a long time.

At first I blamed tiredness. Sitting here this morning, I think the truth is simpler. A brain that spends all day scanning for threat has no spare room for play. Creativity needs a nervous system that feels safe enough to wander, and I had spent two weeks training mine to expect an intruder at every window. Your nervous system believes what you practice, not just what you intend.

Which brings me to Monday.

On Monday I move into the legal rotation, and I have a hypothesis. I am stating it plainly so you can hold me to it. My creativity is going to come back, and it may come back stronger. Legal thinking still examines systems, but it examines them from inside the rules rather than against them. I suspect that difference matters more than we assume. So I am writing the prediction down this morning, before any evidence exists. Write it first. Live it second.

You get to watch the experiment with me. Same counter, same coffee, and next Saturday I will tell you whether the hypothesis held.

Write it first. Live it second.

With love from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S: I am curious about you. Which brain do you live in most days? The artist, the coach, the educator, the project manager, or (be honest) the one checking the windows. Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

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I have been sitting here doing math instead of writing, which is how I know something is off.

The fridge broke in March. The dishwasher in April.

This morning I opened the tab for the savings account before I opened the notebook. Everything I earn from writing on Substack goes into it. I named it emergency.

August is the lowest month I have had in a twelve months.

The low month is not the thing. What stopped me is what I was looking at while I did the math. The money I make from the work I care most about lives in a container I labeled for disaster.

For years I told myself I kept hitting the same ceiling. This morning I do not believe that. I know exactly how to start over, and I have never let myself past the beginning.

The bread

I know when that woman was born. I can put my hand on the exact aisle.

Someone took me to a grocery store in the first days.

In Poland there was one kind of bread. The kind you bought after standing in a long line for it, the kind everyone bought, and you did not think about it any more than you think about which sky to stand under. Here there was a wall of it. White, wheat, rye, seeded, sliced thin, sliced thick, in bags, in paper, brands I could not read stacked above brands I could not read. All of it in a language that was still only sound to me, the way water is sound.

I stood there and I couldn’t move.

For thirty years I have told this as a charming little scene, and it wasn’t charming. My face went hot. My hands were doing something with the strap of my bag. Behind me the store kept going, carts, voices, someone waiting to get past, and there was nothing in that wall I could sound out and nobody I could ask, because asking requires words. I had fifty dollars and a dictionary I wasn’t going to open in public.

I stood there long enough that it became embarrassing. I had crossed an ocean and I couldn’t choose a loaf of bread.

Here is what I noticed only this year. I have no memory of what I put in the cart.

Thirty years of telling this story and the ending has never been in it. Not once. I do not know whether someone reached past me and picked something, or whether I took the nearest bag to get out of the aisle, or whether I left with nothing. The standing is what I kept. The part where it resolved did not seem worth carrying, so I did not carry it, and now it is gone.

The fifty dollars has been in my bio for almost thirty years. It opens talks. People learn it about me first and then hand it back to me at the end of the night. She came here with fifty dollars and a dictionary, and look at her now.

I was proud of it. I am still proud of it. She was brave in a way I am not sure I could be again, and she deserves to be talked about.

A story you tell that many times stops being a memory and starts being a major part of your identity.

The arithmetic

Fifty dollars only means what it means next to zero. 5 and 0 or 50…

There is nothing mystical about how the zero gets kept there, and I want to be precise here, because I did not break the fridge. I opened an account, I gave it a name, and then I routed my writing income into it.

Emergency is not a goal. It is a room with a door that only opens when something goes wrong. Money that goes in there is not on its way to anything. It sits there waiting for a bad day, and bad days do happen.

The savings account was the second thing I did. The first was the price. I turned on paid subscriptions within six months of starting to write here. Then I set the number low, left it there, and took another eighty or ninety percent off it every time I made an offer. I was keeping the numbers low, because I did not believe anyone would pay to read me, and underneath that I did not believe I should be paid for work I love doing.

I have taught Future Scripting pointed forward. Write it in present tense, in detail, and your nervous system goes to work making it familiar, then making it true.

What I did not account for is that the origin story is also present tense. Every single time. I came here with fifty dollars gets the same rehearsal as anything I write on a Sunday morning about the year ahead, and it has a thirty year head start. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail. It does not check the date on the page.

The opening balance

So I am putting it down. Nothing about her needs throwing away.

So, the pen. The same three steps I teach going forward, turned around and pointed at the story you already have.

See it (in your mind’s eye.).The last time someone asked how you got here, you had a sentence ready. Put yourself back in that room. Hear yourself deliver it..

Write it (by hand.) Put the sentence on paper, then write it again with the number moving. Present tense, same girl in it, except now the arriving is where the counting starts. Mine goes like this:

I arrived with fifty dollars and a paper dictionary, and that was the opening balance. The number has been climbing for thirty years, and I am the one who moves it.

Act it (as it already happen.) Say the second version out loud. Something will argue back, and it will be fast. Write down what it says in its own words. Then use the new sentence the next time someone asks, before you feel ready to.

The coffee has gone cold. The house is starting to move. It’s time for me to go and live it as it already happen…

With love and courage from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. What sentence do you lead with when someone asks how you got here? Hit reply and send me the line. I read every one.

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A letter on two sentences somebody handed me, a poem in Polish, and the twenty years I did not write.

It is Saturday and the house is still asleep. The light coming through the kitchen window has that thin quality it takes on in late August, when the heat has not left yet but the mornings have started to turn. A bag of school supplies sits by the door waiting to be sorted. Folders, glue sticks, a package of pencils still in the plastic.

I have been sitting here with my coffee thinking about the years I did not write.

A hospital bed at fourteen

At fourteen I wrote in a journal from a hospital bed. My leg was rotating forty-five degrees off center and so it had to be set in a cast. The hospital ward was full of old people and the corridor outside smelled antiseptic and rancid at the same time.

The doctor had already told me that I would most likely spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair.

I wrote that I wished I could be like the other kids and just go to school instead of being stuck in that room. Get me out of here so my life can start. I also wrote that I am going to prove everyone wrong one day, that I will run and dance and climb mountains again. I deeply believed it.

The notebook was a school notebook. Lined paper, cardboard cover, the kind you buy in a stack in September. I was not in school that year, so I wrote in it instead.

Thirty-four years later I sat next to my son’s hospital bed with a notebook in my lap, and what happened in that room belongs to him. What I can tell you is that my hand reached for the notebook before it reached for an answer, the way it had at fourteen, before I had decided anything.

The girl in that ward was writing to find out what was true and to talk herself into what came next, and she was not writing well by any standard anyone would apply. Writing well was never what those pages were for.

The sentence that cost me two decades

Between that notebook and this kitchen table sits everything, and almost none of it is on paper.

I stopped writing at twenty-one.

We were standing in his living room and I had handed him a single page, the newest poem I had written, in Polish. He was Polish too, so he could read it. I wanted him to say it was good. I held my breath the entire time he read it.

He finished, handed the page back to me, and said,

“This is really stupid, why do you waste your time on poetry?”

It landed like a punch. I was not going to cry in front of him, so I walked out with the page in my hand and dropped it in a garbage can on the way, and I decided somewhere between his living room and that garbage can that I was done.

By then I was already in America. I had almost no English, so Polish was the only language I could still be myself in.

I did not pick up another notebook for more than twenty years.

What I miss

The ache is not about the books I might have written.

What I miss is the ordinary record. What I noticed on a Tuesday in a year I can no longer date. What frightened me at twenty-six and turned out to be nothing. The things I would have understood years earlier if I had written them down and then read them back.

Those years were not empty. Fifteen years inside one company. More than one life taken apart and started again from the beginning, in a language I had to build from nothing. All of it happened, and none of it made it onto a page. I was living a life I was not keeping, and I had no idea how badly I would want it back.

What I would tell the girl with the school notebook

For a long time I thought I would return to writing once I had something worth saying. Once I understood what the last twenty years had meant. Once I could tell you how the story ended, from the safe side of it, with the lesson already extracted and tidy.

That day was never going to arrive, because that is not how the page works.

The page is not a report you file after you have figured your life out. It is where you rehearse being the one who figures it out. The woman you describe in present tense at a kitchen table where nothing is at stake becomes the woman who walks into the room on Monday. Not in one morning. In accumulation, the way school supplies become a school year.

Two lines this week

Take a blank page. At the top, write the sentence somebody handed you, in their exact words, with the quotation marks and their name if you can stand it. Mine is up there in this letter, which took me until this morning to type.

Get it out of your head and onto paper where it can be looked at in daylight instead of running underneath everything you do.

Underneath it, write one sentence in present tense, as though it is already true. I am a woman who writes every morning before the house wakes. Whatever your version is.

Then look at the two lines and notice which one you have more evidence for, and which one you have been quietly collecting evidence against.

Mine went into a garbage can on my way out the door, and I did not write another line for more than twenty years. The writing came back eventually. It came back in English, the language I was still building that year out of a paper dictionary and three children who corrected me mid-sentence, and I have not written a poem in Polish since.

Yours, from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. Tell me in the comments, or hit reply, because I read every one: whose sentence are you still carrying, and how long have you had it?

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It is Saturday morning, not yet six. The house is asleep, the coffee is hot in my hands, and the refrigerator hum is the only company in this kitchen. I have been sitting here since the light was still gray, thinking about eight o’clock on Tuesday morning.

I went into her office carrying an idea I had been turning over since a piece in Harvard Business Review sent me down a rabbit hall a few weeks earlier. Bespoke AI workshops for leadership teams, grounded in the neuroscience of trust, and in what is actually happening in our brains when we sit down with these tools.

She listened all the way to the end.

Then she said, “This is brilliant, and here is how you go about getting this done.” She pulled a scrap of paper toward her and started writing names, in the order to go to them, and slid it across the desk.

What I keep returning to is not the list. It is the part before it, when nothing in me was defending anything.

This morning I want to tell you why it took most of my working life to sit in a room like that with a woman.

What I could not find

For all fifteen years at General Motors, I was quietly hungry for a female mentor.

I had mentors, and they were good ones. Men who opened proverbial career doors, men who told me the truth about how decisions actually got made, men who put my name in rooms I was not standing in. I am grateful to every one of them.

And still there was a part of me that was “dying” , that is the honest word, dying for a woman to walk ahead of me and turn around. I wanted to watch one of them carry herself into a room that had already made up its mind. I wanted to hear how she said no. Mostly I wanted someone who knew in her body what that table cost, because she had paid the same bill.

The one I prayed for

A woman at the C-suite level at GM; agreed to mentor me, and I felt like I had won a million dollars. I walked out of the building that day lighter than I had walked in for years.

It took me a while to see what the altitude had done to her.

She was brilliant and she had survived, and to survive up there she had adapted. Her office ran at the clipped pace of the men she sat with, with the same allergy to anything soft. Except an orchid on her desk.

She was harder on me than any of my male mentors had ever been, and she was harder on purpose. If I was going to make it in a man’s world I would need thicker skin and a shorter voice, so she gave me the training she had received.

She said, “You are not putting in enough hours and effort.”

I was working twelve and fourteen hour days. I was doing an analyst role, a project manager role and a planner role; and carrying a third that had never been backfilled. It took me a long time to count them.

I did not defend myself. I wrote it down as something to fix about myself.

I sat across from the woman I had prayed for and never once stopped performing. The thing I had been looking for had been trained out of her long before I arrived.

She gave me a great deal, and none of this is a complaint about her. What she showed me, without meaning to, was the shape of the hole. I knew precisely what I had been yearning for, because I was sitting two feet from where it should have been.

So I became her instead

When I left corporate, I made myself a quiet promise. I would be the female mentor I had spent all those years wishing for. If I could not find her, I would be her for somebody else.

Through the consulting years and the years running schools, that is what I did. I told women the truth with kindness attached to it. I named their gifts back to them before they could argue me out of it. I let them watch me be soft and effective in the same meeting, because I had needed so badly to see that combination exist in one person.

A few days ago this came through on my phone, from the teacher who, I sensed was in need of having someone believing in her more than she was able at the time to belive in herself (the way I yearned someone to believe in me):

“With back to school season upon us, I have been doing a lot of reflecting lately and wanted to express gratitude. Thank you for all of the coaching, mentoring, guidance, grace, patience, pep talks, manifestations, and the million other ways you supported me in my growth. Thank you for believing in me before I believed in myself. So grateful we crossed paths.”

I read it standing at the counter and had to put the phone down.

Believing in me before I believed in myself. She had described in one line the exact thing I could never find at GM.

Which brings me back to Tuesday

The woman whose office I sat in this week is the mentor of my dreams.

She listens all the way down, past the words to the thing underneath them. She challenges me and my ideas. And most importantly she believes in me in ways that I can not see or recognize, yet..

Here is the part I keep turning over.

I am not sure I would have recognized her twenty years ago. I would have been too busy performing to notice what she was handing me. I spent all those years pouring encouragement into other women, naming their gifts out loud, believing in them early. That is a long apprenticeship in what the thing looks like up close. So when it finally sat across a desk from me at eight in the morning and let me think out loud with nothing in me braced, I knew it on sight.

I am suspicious of anyone who tells you the universe keeps a ledger. What I will tell you is that giving something away for years is how you learn its face. You hand it to other people without a receipt, and by the time someone finally hands it back, you know exactly what you are holding.

There is a reason I want this on paper and not in your head. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail. The detail is the whole instruction.

So here is your work this Saturday, before your head talks you out of it.

Line one: the name of one woman you could be that for this week, and the exact sentence you are going to say to her. Not a compliment. The thing she cannot yet say about herself.

Line two: the mentor you are still waiting for, in present tense, as though she is already in your life. Not her title. What she says to you when you bring her the thing you are afraid of.

Line one is how you learn to recognize line two.

With love from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. Hit reply and tell me: who was the mentor you were dying for, and did you ever find her, or did you become her? I read every one.

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I have told the story of my life so many times that I stopped hearing what I was saying. Few Wednesday’s ago, I heard it, because it came out of my own mouth in front of a room of directors who run international schools, and I watched it land.

We were at the start of four hours together, and we began the way I always begin, with one thing about you that nobody else in the room knows. One of them said Montessori had never been anywhere in her plans. “I wanted to travel and cook,” she said, and then she found this work and never looked back. The next had wanted to be a police officer since she was a girl. Another told us how her family ended up in New York, which was not a plan either.

Then my turn.

“I’m a Montessorian by accident,” I said.

A little later, “I got a degree in psychology, and then, as one does with the psych degree, I ended up in marketing.” They laughed. I laughed. It is a good line. It has gotten that same warm little laugh for years.

When the Zoom ended I went out to the garden and sat down. The yellow hibiscus was open. A woodpecker came to the seeds and worked at them for a long time, unbothered by me, and I let my shoulders come down for the first time in four hours.

That is when the phrase came back.

And the rest of them came back with it. A room full of people who run schools in different corners of the world, and one after another we had described the work we have given our lives to as something that happened to us while we were on our way somewhere else. Not one of us said, I chose this, and then I got good at it.

Let me tell you what actually happened, because I owe myself the truth, and because I suspect some of you are telling the same story about your own lives.

I came to this country at twenty one with fifty dollars folded in my pocket and a paper dictionary. I learned English from three children, ages four, six, and eight. I was their au pair for eight months, and they would stop me mid sentence, tiny and merciless, and make me say the word again until my mouth got it right. I can still feel the heat in my face, the frustration, the small fierce pride when a sentence finally landed clean.

And then the moment I always tell like a punchline. My son, six years old, buckled into the back seat on the way to his Montessori school, turning to me and saying, “Mom, you’re here all the time. How come you don’t work here?”

He had counted the hours I spent in that building and reached the only conclusion available to a six year old.

Here is what those hours bought, and I got to watch it work again on few Wednesday’s ago.

In the first hour I asked everyone to pick one real person, one conversation they had been avoiding, and to carry that same person through the rest of the day so nobody could hide inside a hypothetical. Then, before anyone was allowed to speak out loud, I gave them one minute of silent writing, because the first thing out of our mouths is almost never the thing we mean.

Late in the morning I asked one of the directors to read out what she had written in that first exercise, the one where you put down the story you are carrying about a person and then take out the word that makes it permanent.

She read her line. “This person will listen to me.”

Then she stopped. She was still looking at it, and I could hear her reading it back to herself. “It’s again about me,” she said. “How can I make it about her?” And she rewrote it out loud while the rest of us sat there. “This person will bring suggestions how to improve things.”

My entire contribution to that minute was mm-hmm. Not filling that silence is the hardest thing I know how to do, and it took me years to learn that the sentence I would have handed her is never as good as the one she finds.

None of that fell out of the sky. I built it, year after year, conversation after conversation, through mistakes you never saw and a thousand small corrections I made to myself the way those children once corrected me.

So why do I keep calling it an accident?

I grew up in communist Poland, where you learned early which sentences could be said at the table and which ones could not be said anywhere at all. I was seven or eight when my mother told me, in the family room, over tea and cake, about a relative of ours who kept saying out loud that the kamienica, the apartment building, had belonged to his family. This was a country where everything belonged to the government. He said it anyway, more than once. And then he was gone. Nobody knew where he had been taken. Nobody knew how. My mother did not put a lesson at the end of the story. There was no need.

If you came to your work sideways, through the unpaid hours and the child who asked the right question at the right red light, you probably do this too. You say you fell into the thing you have given your whole heart to. And then you turn around and know, without knowing how you know, that the quiet teacher down the hall is not actually fine. That is years of watching people closely, and it belongs to you.

I have been teaching Future Scripting for a while and I have always pointed it forward. See it, write it down, act as though it has already happened. What I did not see until Wednesday is that it runs backward too. You cannot script a future on top of a past you refuse to own. The evidence has to be yours before the new sentence will hold.

So, the pen exercise. Three lines.

Line one. Write the sentence you use when someone asks how you got here. The whole thing, in your real words, the one you have said so many times it comes out on its own. Then cross out the word accident, or luck, or fell into, whichever one is doing the hiding.

Line two. Write what you actually did instead. The hours. The volunteering. The year you stayed when leaving would have been easier. Put in the numbers if you have them, because your nervous system believes what you write in detail, and it has been listening to the other version for years.

Line three. Write the sentence you will say the next time someone asks. Present tense. As though you have been saying it that way all along.

Mine, since I am the one who asked.

I chose this work. I was in that building for years before anyone paid me to be there, and then I got good at it. I am a Montessorian at heart, writer and a creator on purpose.

It came out stiff. I wrote it anyway. Write yours stiff too, and then write it again next month when someone asks you at a party, and again the month after that, until the true sentence is the one that arrives on its own.

The accident was only ever in the sentence.

With love and courage,

Magdalena

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Every house starts with a deep hole. Before the concrete, before the framing, before anyone argues about where the windows should go, a machine arrives and takes out what was already there. That part is loud and ugly and produces nothing you would ever photograph. It is also the only reason the rest of it holds.

Three years ago I re-started writing. It began in a hospital room with James. He looked at me and asked, “Mom, am I going to die?” There was nowhere in that building to put what that question did to me. So it went on paper, because a notebook was the only thing in reach that could hold it.

I wrote in the waiting room. Those rooms are always cold, and the antiseptic smell gets into your coat and stays there for days after you go home, and next to my hand there was a cup of bad hospital coffee going cold because I kept forgetting it was there. I filled pages in that chair. Nobody looked at me twice, because a woman writing in a hospital waiting room looks like a woman filling out forms.

Nothing got built that season. The digging was the work.

James is flourishing now. He is back to sports, competitions, public speaking and the “normal” things that teens do; and the notebook from that month is in a box I do not open often.

Where the footings go

The writing changed when the hole stopped getting deeper. The question underneath it got quieter and much less dramatic: what am I designing, who am I, who am I becoming.

Those three questions are footings. Nobody walks a friend through a new house and stops at the foundation. You take people to the kitchen. But everything you will ever stand on rests on that pour, and if it is uneven you spend the next decade wondering why the doors do not close properly in a house that photographs beautifully.

I had built on uneven ground before. Fifteen years at General Motors, walking out in 2019 to start my coaching and consulting business. Montessori schools, which I started running that same fall. Every one of those was a real structure and some of them were beautiful, and I put each one up without ever writing down who was going to live inside.

So this time I wrote the footings first. Present tense, in detail, most of it un-shareable. Months of it. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail, and detail is the whole cost of admission.

Then I got to frame the spaces

Once the foundation held, the writing turned into design.

I drew a space for community before there was anyone in it, and you are standing in it right now. Then I drew a space for time, and that one took the longest, because I had spent my whole adult life at the bottom of my own list. Not off it. On it, at the bottom, underneath the work and the family and everyone else’s priorities, in the place where you put the things you get to if anything is left.

I had tried the systems. Time-blocking, the twelve-week year, Franklin planners, three-hour focus blocks I never once sustained. Some of it helped for a while. None of it stuck. Every one of those was built by somebody else, for somebody else’s brain, in somebody else’s season of life, and each time one failed I concluded that I had.

Then I drew a space for money. I inherited a whole set of opinions about money and had never once chosen my own.

The sentence I grew up inside was that we did not have enough money. It was not said once. It was said the way people say the weather, and it was said with the emphasis on enough. By Polish standards we were middle class. From the outside we were considered well off. Inside the house there was never enough, and both of those things were true at the same time, which is how a sentence like that survives without anyone ever testing it.

I packed that sentence at twenty one along with everything else I brought over, and I ran an entire adult life on it without once checking whether it still described anything.

I get to move the walls

This is the part I did not expect, and I would not have believed it when I was still standing in the hole.

A space I write can be moved. If it stops working, or if I outgrow it, I take the wall down and put it somewhere else, and the cost is another morning and another page.

I outgrew the corporate space and rebuilt it. I outgrew the version of the work space I framed in the fall of 2019, the one with the schools were in.

Then I framed something I had never built anything like before. The Courage to Create Academy was a description on a page for seven months before it was anywhere else, and the spaces inside it are the ones I have just walked you through, because they were the spaces of my life first.

Seven months is a long stretch of ordinary weeks in which the thing is not finished and nobody is waiting for it.

What it looked like was mornings. Up before the house, before the street, before anyone in the world had asked me for anything. That hour is not inspiring. It is dark and it is quiet and it is the same every single time, and on most of those mornings the entire output was one section of one workbook. That is what building an academy looks like from the inside, and it never once felt like progress.

The Academy is made out of those mornings and nothing else. It is open now. People work inside it. It was a sentence in a notebook before it was anything anyone could walk into. I am proud of this house. I do not say that easily, and it took me until my fifties to say it out loud without immediately qualifying it.

What you are designing?

You are already doing this. You are designing something right now, in a notebook or in your head at two in the morning, and the only real question is whether you are doing it on purpose.

Draw or script it this week. One page. The space, the light in it, who you are inside it, what happens there. Do not build anything yet.

Write it first. Live it second.

With love from the in-between,

Magdalena

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P.S. Tell me in the comments which space you are drawing. I read every one. And if you want to draw or script with me, and the community join the Courage to Create Academy.

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For years I only wore three colors to work: black, navy and a special brown that was actually more beige than anything but I loved it so much I allowed it to exist in my wardrobe. And yes, I am one of those people who believed that as long as I was showing up to work every day in solid, dark colors, no one would be able to tell that I was a slightly awkward, slightly overweight, slightly out-of-place woman in her mid thirties who got nervous speaking in public and often felt like she was pretending to be someone she was not. I believed that as long as I was dressing well and showing up on time, no one would be able to tell that I was actually a hot, nervous, slightly-impostor-y mess on the inside. That was the story I told myself for years, anyway. The truth was more boring: I was afraid of being visible.

Buy hot pink cashmere

I want to say that I scoffed at the idea. But I was unsettled by it. For years, I had worked to cultivate a public image, one that served as a strategic mask. In order to command respect, I worked diligently to present a persona that exuded gravitas.

The morning I put it on

This little sweater cost a pretty penny, cashmere is never cheap. The morning of the meeting I slid it over my head and my skin instantly began to prickle and break out in a cold sweat. The sweater felt so wrong that I was mortified before I even walked into the meeting.

As I walked into the room, some of the people looked at me in surprise and then in amazement, some of them in shock. They were doing the math of a very serious navy blue business suit with a hot pink sweater. A few of them looked puzzled, but others looked at me with a hint of admiration. But what really surprised me was that not one person’s eyes scanned me out of recognition and then slid right on by me as they usually did.

Looking at me with that sweater on was a different story. I was more myself in it than I ever was in my usual neutral tones. Some people had obvious reactions. A few snickered or did a double take. Others just looked confused, as if they couldn’t work out why I would wear something that loud to a meeting where I was asking for money. I was fine with all of it. I was bolder than I had ever been, and more direct. The jokes that came afterward, once people had finished complimenting me on my ‘audacity’ and my ‘guts,’ made me slightly uncomfortable. But the attention itself, the being looked at with interest, I was fine with. It was the first time in a very long time that I had felt truly visible.

Now I teach it in reverse

I did it all wrong and that’s why this works. First I got the object and then I wrote the woman who could wear it. I brought my nervous system into the most exposing scenario first and let it figure things out as it went. I got to be terrified in front of a room of people while negotiating for funding, and that was enough to give me a stomachache and a pretty sharp understanding of just how frightening it is to find out who you are while everyone watches.

Before the sweater, there is a page

You don’t have to do it in that order. This is the main thing I want you to take from this letter. Before the sweater, before the room, before the big meeting where you will finally say your thing, there is a page. On that page you see her first, the bolder version of yourself, walking into a room, un-ignorable, saying the thing plainly. You feel the prickle and the lift of your skin as you read about her, so by the time you get to the morning of the meeting, the sweater, the raised hand, the wild idea said out loud can be your last rehearsal instead of your first.

Your nervous system is tricked by your writing into believing whatever you’ve written in detail. So write down the bolder version of yourself again and again, until she stops being a costume you put on to go to work and becomes the person you already are.

So, what is your thing? That is what I am asking, really. It doesn’t have to be a sweater. It can be a lot simpler. It can be you speaking up in a meeting before you are sure you have the right words. It can be an idea you have been carrying around for years that has been wearing a groove in your head. It can be an article of clothing. Whatever it is, it is likely to be much simpler than you imagine and yet somehow more than you are willing to acknowledge. That is how you know it is right for you.

Whatever your idea is, write it out first, get to know the person who can execute it, and then go out and do it. That uncomfortable feeling is the measure of how much room you just made for yourself.

Write it first. Live it second.

Yours, from the in-between, Magdalena

PS: Tell me in the comments: what is your hot pink sweater, the thing you already know you're afraid to put on?

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To the one who has known for a while.

I have written about writing the future into existence. I have spoken and led workshops about the power of your imagination, how your pen is your permission slip. But I have been leaving out a big piece of this — the part between the script and the life. The stretch of time between one workshop and the next, between deciding to write a book and actually writing the book. This is where I spend most of my time. And starting today I will be writing from here, from the space between the promise and the becoming.

The plan is to write these letters every Saturday morning. The letters will give insight into life behind Courage to Create and the journey that the author is on, holding down a full-time job and, on top of that, running various workshops and developing herself as much as possible. The author does this all as she continues to become the person she has not yet become. This will be an experiment of a 3 month period (Q2). In the end of Q2 it will be decided if this form of expression will continue or if it will be a season that was a season in life for the author.

That is to say, I will promise you the real version of how this is working out for me, regardless of whether it turns out to be a great version or not.

This is a letter for you if you know something in your life needs to change and you already know what that is. Year after year, you wake up knowing. For four seconds, you might even pause to write an email about it. No? I used to think I was being so responsible writing those emails and I was just avoiding. I read lots of stuff about burnout (Brené Brown, etc). And then I read a lot of stuff about boundaries (that one book everybody talks about). I got so much better at knowing about my own burnout. But nothing changed for me.

After I finally acknowledged that I was burned out, I read a lot of books about the subject, including Brown’s work on vulnerability as well as a great book on boundaries that seemed to be recommended to every exhausted creativer I know. But reading about it didn’t change anything for me.

The one sentence is what moves us. One line of truth. If we were to write down what we really want for ourselves (before we hit delete because it feels so uncomfortable) – that one line would become our blueprint for living into our dream already. It would be our rehearsal for the life we have yet to lead. It would be our mental, emotional and physical rehearsal all condensed into one sentence of truth.

Here is this week’s letter, while the ink is still wet.

Friday I led a session of Courage to Create where we mapped out the strengths of every single person in the room on a screen. Not one of them looked surprised. They already knew. What they were struggling with was stopping to acknowledge and celebrate those strengths instead of pretending they didn’t exist.

That same afternoon someone I valued walked out of our group, right before Easter, with no warning and no conversation.

After the group session I went to my car in the parking lot and sat there for a while. What I couldn’t get around was that life was moving. And even though I was a part of facilitating this space to recognize people’s strengths it didn’t mean that real life would pause for me to prepare for it. And it hasn’t. The question now is, will I continue to circle around looking for ‘right’ conditions, or write the next line of my life? I have circled. I know what it costs that, and what it feels like to stop.

So the letters I will be writing are real-time accounts of my journey. I will write about my workshops, about my parking lot encounters after hard days, about the single sentence that I wrote at 5:47 am that suddenly moved me to action in ways that I had not anticipated. Sometimes I will share the stories of other people who are in their own in-between space. We are all in different spaces similar to one another, but we each have our own stories to tell. I will write about these things as they happen, without waiting to see how they ultimately turn out.

If you are already a member, these letters will arrive at your mailbox every Saturday. If you are not a member yet, you can join here and the next letter arrives at your mailbox next week.

Same stolen hour next Saturday.

Magdalena

P.S. I almost did not send this letter out. It is way easier for me to write to you about the magic of writing the future into existence with a pen and paper then it is for me to actually pick up my pen and start writing when I know someone can watch me!

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Letter 04

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Loved this? Forward it to someone who loves sticky notes, wants a diffrent type of courage and has at least three empty notebooks while still becoming….

With love, Magdalena

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With love, Magdalena

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