Over the weekend, a Bible study prompt sent me somewhere I didn’t expect. It drew on C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, first published in 1942, a series of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, coaching him on how to lead a person away from God. What makes the book unsettling is that Screwtape rarely recommends anything obviously wrong. He prefers to work through what’s good.

So I tried an experiment. I asked ChatGPT, which knows a fair amount about my life and work from our conversations, to write a Screwtape letter about me. My question came straight from that study: how might I be pursuing good things for God while forgetting to pursue them with Him?

What came back was uncomfortably personal, and you don’t have to share my faith to recognize yourself in it.

My first thought after reading it was how I could turn it into something useful for you. Then I noticed this reflex was exactly what the letter described.

Called, or needed

Screwtape starts with my work.

“She sees possibilities everywhere. An article that might encourage someone. A conversation that could change a life… Whisper that the work is important. Remind her of those who need what she has to offer.”

Then comes the instruction that stopped me: “remove the distinction between being called and being needed.”

It’s true. I see possibilities everywhere, and nearly every one of them looks like something I should do. An idea for an article turns into a draft. A conversation with someone in transition becomes a plan for how Betweenward™ might help people like them. All of it is good work, which is what makes the line so sharp.

Being needed feels like being called. Both feel urgent, and both tug at the part of me that has always wanted to help. The difference is that a calling is mine to answer, while a need can belong to anyone who notices it. When I stop telling them apart, every need I notice becomes an assignment.

I did this exercise on Sunday. I’m writing about it the evening before it publishes, and that delay is part of the story.

One belief, every room

The longer I read, the more I saw one belief running underneath every paragraph: that I have to earn my worth by being useful.

Peace is where it first hides. Screwtape advises Wormwood, “Whenever she finds a moment of peace, remind her of something she may have forgotten to worry about.”

Receiving is harder still. “Discourage her from needing what she so generously offers,” he writes, and then he lists the excuses I already use: other people have enough troubles of their own, and I’m fortunate compared with others.

Time gets the same treatment. Screwtape wants the years ahead to feel “less like an invitation to cherish the present and more like a deadline she dare not miss.”

Each of these is the same belief in different clothes. If my value comes from what I contribute, a quiet afternoon is wasted, and accepting help feels like a debt.

Why the pause feels like failure

This belief runs through nearly everyone I’ve coached in the in-between, whatever they believe about God. Coaching people through this pattern has made me quicker to recognize it in myself, though I’m not immune.

In The In-Between Isn’t a Waiting Room, I wrote that capable people tend to misread the pause between chapters as personal failure. Screwtape’s letter showed me why. A pause produces nothing. If your worth comes from what you produce, the pause feels like losing your worth.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the two halves of mattering: feeling valued and adding value. The letter showed me a capable person who lets the second half stand in for the first. Too often, I feel valued only while I’m adding value.

What Screwtape feared I’d find

Near the end, Screwtape names what he fears most. His patient might discover:

“That trust sometimes looks like leaving an important thing unfinished… That faithfulness may require her to disappoint someone, decline an opportunity, or allow another person to carry a responsibility she could have managed herself. Worst of all, she may discover that she is loved even when she produces nothing, solves nothing, improves nothing, and helps no one.”

That last line is the one I’m still sitting with. For readers who don’t share my faith, I’d put it this way: you matter on the days you produce nothing.

I believe that about every client I’ve worked with. Believing it about myself takes a different kind of practice, and this week gave me a small chance to try it. Since Sunday, I reread the letter several times. Every instinct I have said to turn it into an article right away. Instead, I let the idea wait until I was ready to share it, which is why you’re reading something I finished the evening before I published it.

Write your own letter

Anyone can try this. Find a quiet half hour and a notebook, and start with one question:

If someone wanted to wear you down using only your best qualities, how would they do it?

Then, if you want to go further:

• What am I carrying that no one asked me to carry?

• Where have my strengths turned into obligations?

• Am I offering myself the same patience I offer others?

If you use an AI assistant that already knows something about your life and work, you can ask it to write the letter, the way I did. Here’s a version of my prompt to adapt:

Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, write a letter from Screwtape to Wormwood imagining how my strengths and good intentions might wear me down or pull me away from what matters most to me. Draw only on what you know about me, and don’t invent details. Make it thoughtful and specific, not harsh.

If faith is part of your life, you can ask the question the way I did. Whatever comes back, treat it as a mirror. It can only reflect what you’ve shared, and you decide what’s true in it.

And yes, I noticed the irony of turning this into an article anyway. I’m letting that one go.

Ask yourself this: Where have you mistaken being needed for being called?

Sources

Lewis, C. S. (1942). The Screwtape Letters. Geoffrey Bles.

Letter excerpts are from a Screwtape-style letter ChatGPT (OpenAI) generated for the author, October 2026.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for people moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps people reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life, and co-founded Betweenward™ with Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D.

In November 2022, Michael J. Fox accepted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. By then, he had lived with Parkinson’s disease for more than thirty years, and many in the room knew him for his foundation as well as his films. He used part of his speech to go back to the beginning.

He was 29 when the diagnosis came. “Then I entered into seven years of denial, trying to make sense of it all,” he told the audience. “I told very few people. And they kept my secret.”¹ Through those years, he kept working, and he has since talked about turning to alcohol to cope.² He went public in 1998, while starring in Spin City.

One line from that night stays with me: “I only knew that it would get worse.” The diagnosis was certain. Letting it in took him seven years.

The script we reach for first

Sociologist Arthur Frank spent years listening to how people tell the stories of their illnesses. In The Wounded Storyteller, he describes the story most of us reach for first, which he calls the restitution narrative: “Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, but tomorrow I’ll be healthy again.” Frank calls it the story our culture prefers.³

It’s also the story capable people have lived by in every other part of their lives. A plan breaks, and you fix it. A job ends, and you find a better one. Competence is mostly the skill of putting things back the way they were, and it works so often that we stop noticing it’s a script at all.

Seen this way, Fox’s seven years were the script still running. When everything you know says hard things get fixed, accepting one that won’t takes time.

I know that script from the inside.

Ten years of fixing

Jim has played sports since he was five. When his back started giving him trouble, he was still playing competitive baseball and softball, and he could run like a deer. Walking was what hurt.

So we did what capable people do. We found a spine specialist, then a new approach each time the last one fell short. Over ten years, that meant four back surgeries and a spinal cord stimulator, with injections for temporary relief in between.

I was the researcher. Every time something didn’t work, I went looking for the next thing that might, booked the scans, and rearranged our calendar around the next appointment.

After the fourth surgery, a specialist told us he wouldn’t recommend another. The odds it would make Jim worse were 50/50, and he said pain management was the best long-term plan.

The ride home was silent, each of us working through it alone. That evening we cried together, and Jim said, “I can’t handle worse.” So we turned the energy we’d spent chasing a fix toward everything pain management could offer.

Even then, the letting go came in pieces. Baseball and softball went first. Jim tried his best to hold on to golf and bowling, until golf became too much walking and twisting. Bowling lasted longest, until the night he came home from the alley and said, “I think I need to be done.” I agreed, and it hurt us both to say it.

We spent ten years trying to fix something we couldn’t fix. Degenerating discs only go one direction. What we could change was how Jim lived with the pain. “It is what it is” became our mantra, and now we plan everything, even the smallest outing, around his medication schedule so he’s as comfortable as possible.

When the script breaks

Frank describes two other stories people tell once restitution stops working. One he calls chaos: a life that “cannot be imagined improving,” told by someone too deep inside it to step back. Chaos stories are hard to listen to, so they often go unheard. The other he calls the quest, where people accept the illness and look for a way to make it useful.³

People rarely move between these stories in a straight line. Chaos often comes first, and a quest tends to grow out of it once someone is willing to listen. Fox’s life after 1998 is one of the best-known quests there is. Within two years of going public, he had started a foundation for Parkinson’s research, and he has written about living with the disease in several memoirs.

Where the script hides

Most readers won’t face a diagnosis like Fox’s or Jim’s. The script runs anyway, in milder forms that are easier to miss. You may see it in a job search aimed squarely at the role you just lost, or in a marriage you keep working on until it feels the way it used to. Sometimes it’s a body you keep training back toward how it moved before.

Each of those efforts can be the right one. What’s worth noticing is the assumption that rides along with it: that the goal is to get back to what was. As long as that’s the goal, the time in between feels like failure, and every month that normal doesn’t return counts against you.

In The Ripple Journey™, the Inner Wave is where the script is allowed to break. It’s the pause where you let what happened land before reaching for what’s next. For Jim and me, that pause began on a silent ride home and took years to finish.

Living inside what changed

In 2020, Fox stepped away from acting. Parkinson’s had made it hard to remember lines and work on set, and he later called the decision “non-emotional and kind of ok.” In 2026, he returned for a role in the third season of Shrinking, playing a character with Parkinson’s. He asked for the part himself. It’s “not the beginning of any campaign to reestablish my career,” he said. “Just do that for its own sake. I don’t have an agenda.”⁴

That’s what The Ripple Journey™ calls Still Water: living more honestly and fully inside what has changed, rather than returning to what was.

Our version is smaller and closer to home. For years, our shared social life ran through Jim’s games and the friends who came with them. When he stopped playing, we found that each other’s company filled what the games had left open. It’s amazing what we talk about when we’re not rehashing the results of a ball game. Our friends come to us now, and I get to entertain again, something I hadn’t done in years because we were always heading out to watch or play.

Ask yourself this: Where are you still waiting to get back to normal, and what might open up if you stopped waiting?

Sources

¹ Cohen, L. (2022, November 21). Michael J. Fox says he was in “7 years of denial” after Parkinson’s diagnosis. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michael-j-fox-parkinsons-diagnosis-7-years-of-denial-i-only-knew-that-it-would-get-worse/

² Guggenheim, D. (Director). (2023). Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie [Documentary]. Apple TV+.

³ Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. University of Chicago Press. (Restitution, p. 77; chaos, p. 97; quest, p. 115.)

⁴ Michael J. Fox gives retirement update amid return to acting: “I don’t have an agenda.” (2026, January 29). Parade, reporting Fox’s interview with the Los Angeles Times. https://parade.com/news/michael-j-fox-gives-retirement-update-amid-return-to-acting-i-dont-have-an-agenda

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for people moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps people reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life, and co-founded Betweenward™ with Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D. Her articles’ client stories are composites of several people she’s worked with over the years, with details changed to protect their privacy.

The meeting was on Dana’s calendar as a fifteen-minute check-in. It ran forty.

By the end, she knew three things. The division was being folded into another one. Her role would end in six months. And leadership wanted her to run the transition: move the projects, place the people who could be placed, and keep the work steady right up to the last day of a job she’d spent eleven years building.

“Honestly, there’s nobody else we’d trust with this,” the VP said.

Dana said yes before the sentence was finished. By then, saying yes was a reflex, as automatic as reaching for a pen. Somewhere between the conference room and the parking garage, the math of it landed: six months of carefully taking apart her own work, with a team watching to see how she handled it.

That night, a text from her brother lit up the phone. Their mother’s lease was ending, and the family needed to decide about a move. “You’re so much better at this stuff than I am. Can you take the lead?”

She typed, “Of course,” and set the phone face down on the counter.

Nobody in either conversation had done anything wrong. The VP meant it as a compliment, and so did her brother. Both of them were right, too. Dana was good at this, and always had been. That was the whole problem, though it would take a while to see it.

Nobody decided this

If you’d asked anyone at her company when Dana became the person who handles the hard things, no one could have named a day. It was never a decision. A tricky client went to her once, then again. New hires who needed patience got routed her way. One spring the budget process fell apart; she pulled it back together, and after that the budget belonged to her. Each handoff made sense on its own, and she said yes to every one. Over eleven years, it all added up to a job description nobody ever wrote down.

Researchers have tested this instinct in its simplest form. In a 2015 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a team led by psychologist Christy Zhou Koval gave people ten essays to divide among four mentors who differed only in how much self-control each had shown in everyday life. The most disciplined mentor ended up with about 32% more essays than the least disciplined one.^¹

Nobody in that study meant to overload anyone. Giving the extra essay to the disciplined mentor felt like good judgment. That’s what makes the pattern so hard to see from the inside, because every single choice to lean on the reliable one looks reasonable. The weight shows up only in the total.

Calm under pressure

A month into the wind-down, Dana’s annual 360-degree review came back. The timing felt almost funny: feedback on a job that was ending.

The comments were glowing. Calm under pressure. Never drops a ball. The person everyone goes to. One colleague wrote that she made hard things look easy. She read that line twice.

Hard things did not feel easy. For weeks Dana had been sleeping badly, waking at four to go over which team members still needed placements. She wrote transition plans at night and handled her mother’s move on weekends. None of that showed up in the feedback. Not one colleague had noticed she was tired.

This is the part of the research that stays with me. In another 2015 study, Koval’s team gathered 360-degree feedback on 403 working MBA students from more than 2,200 coworkers and supervisors. The employees with high self-control reported making real sacrifices and feeling burdened by how much others relied on them. Their colleagues saw the sacrifices clearly. What they missed entirely was the burden.^¹

That’s what Dana’s colleagues saw. Every ball she kept in the air looked like proof she had room for one more.

You’ve got this

At home, things were good. That was part of what made it hard to explain.

Dana and her partner had been together long enough to finish each other’s grocery lists. When she came home the night of the meeting and told the story, her partner listened, poured two glasses of wine, and said what the people who love her always say: “You’ve got this. You always do.”

It was meant as faith, and she took it that way. Still, lying awake at four the next morning, she noticed something she didn’t want to say out loud. Even at home, she was the one who had it: the mortgage refinance, the vet appointments, the holiday plans, and now her mother’s move. Nobody had assigned any of it. Each piece had drifted to her the same way the budget had at work.

Koval’s team found this pattern at home, too. In a study of 139 couples, people with high self-control actually reported happier relationships overall. They also felt their partners relied on them more, and that reliance left them worn out from helping. The fatigue wore down their satisfaction, even in relationships that were working.^¹

Being the one who always has it costs something, even when the person counting on you loves you.

Picked for the work

The last big event before the division closed was a farewell lunch for the team. Dana planned it, of course. She booked the room, collected money for the cake, and wrote a toast that made two people cry.

Afterward, a handful of her team headed to a bar down the street. She heard about it the next morning, mentioned casually, the way people mention things they assume you already know. Nobody had meant to leave her out. One person said they figured she’d be buried in transition work. Another didn’t think it was really her thing.

She laughed it off, and it stung all day.

A 2021 study by a team that included social psychologist Roy Baumeister helps explain what happened. The researchers gave 285 adults short descriptions of people with high or low self-control and asked whom they’d want along in different situations. For duties and obligations, participants chose the person with high self-control. For vacations and parties, they tended to prefer the one with less.^²

Dana spent years being chosen. It never occurred to her to notice what she wasn’t chosen for.

I’ve always known

The company offered outplacement coaching as part of the transition package, which is how Dana ended up in my virtual office. She canceled twice. There was too much to do.

I should say here that Dana isn’t one person. She’s several clients I’ve worked with over the years, woven into one story, with more than a little of me in her, too. If she sounds like someone you know, that’s the point.

About twenty minutes into our first conversation, after she’d walked me through the transition plan, the placement list, and her mother’s move, I asked what she wanted next for herself.

She was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “And I’m embarrassed that I don’t. I’ve always known.”

That sentence is the one I hear most from people like Dana. They have spent years being the answer to everyone else’s problems, and when the question finally turns to them, the silence feels like failure. That silence is the in-between: the stretch after what was and before what’s next, where the old tools of planning, follow-through, and the reflexive yes have nothing to hold on to.

I’ve written before that this pause isn’t a waiting room. For the reliable one, it’s also the hardest room to stand in, because everyone around her is still handing her things to carry. Her reputation leaves no room for the pause, and neither does she. The work of the Inner Wave, letting what’s ending actually land before reaching for what’s next, might look like Dana dropping a ball.

For the first time in eleven years, that might be exactly what she needs to do.

One honest sentence

A few weeks later, Dana had coffee with Ray, a former colleague who had lost his own role in a reorganization two years earlier. She’d helped him rework his résumé back then.

He asked how the wind-down was going, and she started into the version she’d been giving everyone: on track, team in good shape, a few placements left. But she stopped herself halfway through.

“Actually,” she said, “this one is hard for me.”

Ray didn’t offer a plan or a pep talk. He nodded and said, “Yeah. Mine was too. What’s the hardest part?”

She talked for most of an hour. Nothing got solved, but she drove home feeling lighter anyway.

That’s the Middle Wave: someone who has stood where you’re standing, witnessing what you carry without trying to fix it or take it off your hands. For the reliable one, it’s also practice at something that doesn’t come naturally: letting someone see the cost, not only the output.

That weekend, Dana called her brother. She told him she couldn’t lead their mother’s move alone this time and asked him to take on the housing research. There was a pause on the line, and then he said, “Of course.”

She still doesn’t know what’s next. Somewhere along the way, though, she stopped treating that as a problem to solve by Friday.

If you’re the reliable one

When Koval returned to this research in an essay earlier this year, she noted that the demands on capable people pile up across work and home at once.^³ More than a decade after her first study, the pattern she found is as familiar as ever.

You don’t have to stop being the reliable one. It may be enough to let one person see what it costs.

Is there a Dana in your life? Send this their way. It may be the first time someone noticed.

Share

Research cited

¹ Koval, C. Z., vanDellen, M. R., Fitzsimons, G. M., & Ranby, K. W. (2015). The burden of responsibility: Interpersonal costs of high self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(5), 750–766. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000015

² Röseler, L., Ebert, J., Schütz, A., & Baumeister, R. F. (2021). The upsides and downsides of high self-control: Evidence for effects of similarity and situation dependency. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 17(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.2639

³ Koval, C. Z. (2026, February). Self-control is a strength, but being too good at discipline can backfire. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/self-control-is-a-strength-but-being-too-good-at-discipline-can-backfire-275634

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for people moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps people reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life, and co-founded Betweenward™ with Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D.

A career ends before you’re ready to be done with it. A body stops moving the way it used to. Caring for someone else starts shaping every hour of your day. A world seems to change its rules faster than anyone can teach them to you — a marriage, a diagnosis, a home that empties.

Different rooms, the same floor plan underneath. We move through plenty of transitions in a lifetime, some fast, some slow, but the pattern underneath tends to repeat, and so does the way it feels while you’re standing in it.

Moving forward feels uncertain, and going backward isn’t something you’d even consider. So where does that leave you? We call it Betweenward. You’re standing in a room between what was and what’s next, and that room turns out to be real, with its own shape and its own timeline. It deserves your attention, whether anyone ever taught you to recognize it or not. Most people don’t; they rush right through it instead.

That’s a mistake because researchers have studied this space more than once, and what they’ve found changes how we should treat the in-between.

The middle isn’t one thing

Nearly fifty years ago, a former literature professor named William Bridges started writing about change, and noticed something that held up across every transition he studied: the outside event and the internal process are two different things, and the internal process moves through three stages: an ending, a middle he called the neutral zone, and a new beginning.

Bridges wasn’t the first to notice the middle has its own shape. Decades earlier, a French anthropologist named Arnold van Gennep studied rites of passage across cultures and found the same three-part structure everywhere: separation from an old status, a liminal middle belonging to neither the past nor the future, and eventual incorporation into something new. Cultures that built rituals around this didn’t treat the liminal stage as wasted time. They built ceremony around it because they understood it did the work that nothing else could.

Both maps agree on the shape: an ending, a middle, a resolution. The Ripple Journey doesn’t reject either one. It expands the middle they both compressed into a single stage, and it tells a different story about what the resolution itself looks like. That expansion didn’t come from theory. It came from thirty years of living through my own transitions, thirteen of them also spent watching the same pattern play out in the people I’ve coached: one middle was never enough room for what actually happens there.

The Drop is the ending Bridges described, whether it builds for months or breaks open in a single afternoon. What follows isn’t one neutral zone. It’s at least two distinct kinds of work, and they don’t arrive together. The Inner Wave comes first: permission to actually let what happened land, before reaching for whatever comes next. The Middle Wave comes later, often unplanned: a conversation with someone who’s stood where you’re standing, or someone willing to witness what you’re carrying without trying to fix it. Those are two different needs, on different timelines; both equally real.

Here’s where the Ripple Journey diverges most from the older maps. What we’ve found on the other side of the Inner Wave and Middle Wave is subtler than either theorist’s ending. We call it Still Water. It doesn’t resolve into the kind of new beginning van Gennep and Bridges each described: a single moment you can point to and say that’s where the old version of you stopped, and the new one started. It’s less a destination you reach than a place you notice you’re already standing in, once the questions that used to weigh on you finally loosen their grip.

That’s the shape of the whole arc. Knowing the shape doesn’t make the beginning of it any easier, though, and there’s a reason this particular stretch catches so many capable people off guard.

Why this time feels different

The people who end up here have almost always been the one who figures it out, not once, but reliably, over and over. They decided fast, adapted, moved forward before anyone had to ask twice.

That history is exactly why this particular stretch feels so disorienting. The tools that always worked before are still good tools. They just weren’t built for this room.

Something in you hasn’t failed, even though it feels that way. You’ve stepped into territory those tools were never built for, maybe for the first time, because every other time, you rushed straight through to what’s next instead of letting yourself actually stand here. That standing-still moment isn’t just a feeling. It’s been studied.

Why the pause matters

Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun spent decades studying what happens to people after their lives are seriously disrupted. They found that what separates those who are changed for the better from those who are just changed isn’t the disruption itself, or even how much time passes afterward. It’s what kind of thinking happens during that time.

They call the unhelpful kind intrusive rumination: the involuntary, repetitive replaying of what happened, which tends to keep people stuck rather than move them forward. The kind that actually predicts growth, they call deliberate rumination: chosen, effortful reflection on what the disruption means, what it’s cost, and who you are on the other side of it. The difference isn’t whether you think about what happened. Almost everyone does. What matters is whether the thinking is something happening to you, or something you’re deliberately doing.

That’s what the Inner Wave is: the deliberate kind of reflection Tedeschi and Calhoun found people need to come out the other side changed for the better, rather than just changed. If you’ve been feeling guilty for not already knowing your next move, you’re aiming that guilt at the wrong target. The pause isn’t what’s standing between you and progress. It is the progress.

Skip it, and the questions don’t disappear. They wait, and tend to resurface later, in the middle of whatever you rushed toward instead.

If this is you

If you’re standing in that space, especially if you’re the one holding everything together for everyone else, you’re not passing through.

You’re already one of us. Subscribe, and stay as long as you need the company.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for people moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps people reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life, and co-founded Betweenward™ with Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D.

Two Drops, One Ripple

The ambulance came fast that evening. One phone call, and suddenly everything else in my life went on hold — the business, the calendar, and the version of the day I’d planned. People recognize that kind of disruption instantly. Say the words “he was rushed to the hospital,” and everyone understands: this is a crisis.

I think of moments like that as a Drop — the single event that lands in the middle of a life and sends ripples outward, changing the shape of everything around it. A diagnosis is a Drop. A phone call in the night is a Drop. And the Ripple is what comes after: the widening, unsettled water you’re left navigating once the surface has been disturbed, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years.

That week in the hospital was a second Drop, though almost no one would have called it that. There was no siren or single moment to point to; just seven days of being present, useful, and invisible all at once. Because it didn’t look like a crisis, it didn’t get treated like one. And for a while, I didn’t treat it that way either.

Both Drops belong to the same Ripple: the ongoing work of loving someone whose body needs more than love can fix. The first kind gets casseroles, phone calls, and people asking if you’re holding up. The toll from the second kind accumulates imperceptibly, in a hospital room over a week, in a home over years. There’s no single moment anyone can point to; just the accumulation, and the silence around it.

So I started looking for anyone else who might know that silence.

The Car You Suddenly See Everywhere

I started googling, listening to podcasts on the drive home from the hospital, and reading interviews late at night when I couldn’t sleep. And then I noticed something else — the same thing that happens when you buy a car in a color you thought was unusual, and suddenly you see it everywhere. Once I started looking, I found caregivers everywhere. Some private, some public, some as unlikely as a late-night comedian.

Jay Leno talked with Hoda Kotb on Today about caring for his wife, Mavis, through advanced dementia, and what struck me wasn’t the hardship; it was how he framed it. He described the toughest part of her decline: every morning, she relearns that her mother has died, and grieves it fresh, as if hearing it for the first time. He’s watched that happen for years. And in the same conversation, he reflected on what marriage vows actually mean once you’re called to live them out. Nobody expects to be tested on “for better or worse,” he said — but even the worse isn’t that bad.

I recognized that voice. It’s the same one in my own head most days — the one that finds meaning in the folding of towels, the shaving, the small tasks nobody assigns you but you do anyway because love looks like that now. Leno and I have never met, and our situations aren’t the same. But we’ve landed in the same emotional place: caregiving as honor, not burden.

Here’s what caught my attention, though, listening to that interview closely: every question was about Mavis. How is she doing? What’s she like now? What’s the hardest part of watching her decline? Not one question, in that interview, or in any other coverage I could find, asked how he was doing. He wasn’t asked about his health, his sleep, or what years of caregiving have cost him emotionally, physically, or mentally. One of the most visible caregivers in America, someone reporters clearly find compelling enough to keep asking about, still isn’t being asked the one question I was about to find waiting for me in a hospital room of my own.

What the Research Confirms

Once I recognized that pattern in his interviews, I wanted to know if it held beyond the two of us.

Family caregiving in America has exploded in the last decade. Caregiving in the US 2025, a joint report from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, found that 63 million Americans — roughly 1 in 4 adults — are now providing ongoing care for an aging or seriously ill loved one, a 45% jump from just ten years earlier. One in five of us rate our own health as fair or poor. Nearly a quarter say they struggle to care for their own health while caring for someone else’s.

And the same report’s state-by-state companion, Caring Across States, found something I recognized immediately: healthcare systems routinely overlook caregivers, with few ever being asked about their own needs, despite their work being essential to how the system functions.

That gap isn’t new. An earlier Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School study, published in JAMA Network Open, found that while most caregivers said healthcare workers listened to them and asked whether they understood the patient’s treatment plan, fewer than 3 in 10 were ever asked whether they needed help managing the caregiving itself.

What’s changed since then isn’t the gap. It’s the number of us standing in it. Twenty million more caregivers have joined the ranks since 2015, and the questions being asked of us haven’t kept pace.

The system knows what it needs to know to treat the patient. It still doesn’t ask what it would need to know to protect the person standing next to the bed.

The Room Full of the Wrong Question

I saw exactly what that gap looks like from the inside, during Jim’s hospitalization.

For a week, Jim’s room had a rotating cast. The hospitalist came by each morning, then the cardiologist, and the pulmonologist. The attending nursing staff checked in every couple of hours with medications, blood draws, and vitals. The respiratory therapist came four times a day, and the physical therapist whenever his strength allowed. Each one asked him how he was doing, and asked me what I’d observed — his breathing, his appetite, his mood.

I was happy to answer every question.

In seven days of rotating shifts and digital check-ins, no one asked how I was doing. [Author’s Note: except Jim.] The cardiologist didn’t. The nurses and techs who saw me there daily didn’t. No one on staff, across every discipline the hospital had, thought to ask how I was managing the business I still had to run from the couch in his room, or the household that didn’t pause because Jim was in a bed on the fifth floor.

And every afternoon, I was the one helping him brush his teeth, wash up, shave, and comb his hair — because no one on the nursing staff ever did. I wasn’t doing it for efficiency. I was doing it so he could feel like himself for a few minutes a day, in a place designed to strip that away.

Nobody in that room considered me part of the patient. And in the ways that mattered to my own health, I wasn’t being treated as one either.

Why No One Asks

I’ve wondered, more than once, why this gap exists. I don’t think it’s because doctors and nurses don’t care. Every one of them who came through Jim’s room was kind, careful, and clearly good at their job.

I think it’s simpler and sadder than that: there’s no chart for me. No vitals to record, no treatment plan that needs my consent, and no box on the form. The system is built to track the person in the bed, and everyone standing beside it falls outside the frame. I don’t believe it’s from cruelty, but because nobody designed a place for us to be seen.

That doesn’t make it acceptable. It does make it fixable, if enough of us name it out loud.

So I’d like to ask you directly, whether you’re reading this on Substack, or you clicked over from Facebook or LinkedIn wondering if this was about you:

Have you felt invisible in a room full of people caring for someone you love?

And if so, why do you think the system is built this way? Is it really just an oversight, or is something else going on?

I’d love to hear your answers in the comments. This is exactly the kind of thing Betweenward exists to talk about because none of us should be figuring it out alone.

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for people moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps people reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life, and co-founded Betweenward™ with Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D.

I know the fixer reflex because I’ve lived inside it my whole life.

So when my client told me what happened, I recognized the look on her face before she finished the story. One of her team members, usually the most buttoned-up presenter she had, showed up late to a product launch meeting with an important client and stumbled through it. Unprepared. Off his game in a way she’d never seen from him. The client noticed. She could feel the relationship wobbling in real time.

She’d already built the plan by the time she sat down with me. She was going to reach out to the client herself, smooth things over, and quietly start looping in a more seasoned team member for anything client-facing going forward. Efficient. Protective. The kind of move that saved her more than once before.

“What would happen if you let him find his own way through this?”

She looked at me like I’d asked her to do something reckless.

She sat with that question longer than usual. I watched her turn it over, resisting the pull to answer it the way she answered everything: quickly, competently, with a plan already halfway built. For a few seconds, she didn’t fix anything. She just sat in not knowing what the right move actually was, which, for someone who’d built a career on always knowing, was its own kind of hard.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I’ve never let someone sit in a mess like this before.”

I wasn’t there to give her the answer either. My job was mostly to keep asking the next honest question, so she had somewhere to put the discomfort besides a fast solution.

That not-knowing was the beginning of something, even though it didn’t feel like progress. It rarely does, in the moment.

What Came Next

Over the following weeks, she didn’t disappear into fixing, and she didn’t leave her team member to flounder either. She asked him what was going on, and learned about the situation at home that had thrown him off. She asked him what he thought he needed, rather than telling him what she’d decided he needed. It was slower than her instinct wanted, and required her to tolerate a version of “in progress” that had no guaranteed ending.

He asked for two things: a little grace on deadlines for a few weeks, and a chance to rebuild the client relationship himself rather than have it quietly taken from him. Neither was a guarantee. She could have overridden both requests in an afternoon and probably felt more in control doing it.

She didn’t. She gave him the grace and stayed close without stepping in, checking in without checking up. Three weeks later, he asked for a second meeting with the client himself, prepared this time, present in a way he hadn’t been the first time around. The client agreed. The account held because she’d let him fix it.

What Staying in the Mess Actually Cost Her

I don’t think people would have called what she did brave if they’d been watching. There was no dramatic conversation or visible risk. From the outside, it probably looked like she simply did less than usual.

But I know what it cost her because I know the feeling from the inside. Every instinct she had was built for speed and certainty, and she spent three weeks doing the opposite: staying slow, staying uncertain, resisting a fix she could have executed in an afternoon. That kind of restraint doesn’t get applause. Nobody sends a note praising the crisis that didn’t happen because you let someone else grow into solving it.

This is where I think the Inner Wave of a transition often hides in plain sight. It happened in a pause like hers: sitting with a discomfort long enough to actually notice it, instead of moving past it toward the fastest available relief.

What I Tell Myself When the Reflex Kicks In

I still feel that fixer pull constantly, in my own life and with clients. It hasn’t gone away. What’s changed is my relationship to it. I’ve learned to notice the reflex arriving, the same fast, competent certainty my client felt, and to ask myself a version of the same question I asked her: is this actually mine to fix?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and I move. Often, especially with the people I love most, the answer is no, and the harder, quieter work is staying with them.

Where in your life is the reflex to fix asking you to move faster than the situation needs?

If something in this article struck a chord and you know someone who might benefit, please share it.

Share

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes about the quiet, unglamorous work of becoming who you’re meant to be next.

Join us in the Betweenward™ Community.

Subscribe now

At first, I couldn’t place the sound I heard.

I’d just climbed out of the water at Slide Rock, still catching my breath from the cold, standing on the bank while the July sun dried my shoulders. The creek in front of me looked exactly like it had ten minutes earlier. It was clear and moving at its usual unhurried pace over the red rock. Nothing about it looked capable of what I heard coming.

There was a low rumble at first, somewhere upstream, low enough that I almost mistook it for thunder. Then it got louder, closer, until it wasn’t a sound anymore so much as a presence, something moving toward me with a power the creek didn’t have a minute before.

I stepped back from the bank instinctively. And then, I watched the water change before my eyes. It was the same creek and the same rocks, but they transformed in what felt like seconds into something faster and darker. It carried branches and debris I hadn’t seen anywhere near it before.

I stood safely back and felt two things at once: awe at how fast it happened and a quiet, physical gratitude that I’d gotten out when I did.

What I Recognized in the Water

It’s taken me a while to understand why that moment has stayed with me the way it has many years later. It wasn’t so much about the flash flood, although that was scary. It was about how ordinary everything looked right up until it wasn’t.

I’d been in that water minutes earlier, and nothing about it warned me. There was no shift in color upstream or change in temperature. My senses didn’t catch anything before my ears did. The disruption didn’t announce itself. It just arrived, fully formed, while I happened to be standing close enough to feel its force.

I’ve thought about that morning every time I’ve found myself back in the messy middle of a transition, which, if I’m honest, has been more times than I expected by now. A diagnosis. A loss. A decision that upended a plan I’d built a life around. None of them announced themselves the way I wish they had. They arrived the way the current at Slide Rock did: sudden, loud only once they were already close, and impossible to have fully prepared for no matter how carefully I’d been watching the water.

What the Current Taught Me, Once I Was In It

Here’s what I didn’t expect. Standing on that bank, watching the current change, I was both afraid and amazed. There was something almost holy about it. It was a force moving through that canyon with a power I had no part in and no control over.

That’s stayed with me too, longer than the fear did. Because most of the disruptions I’ve lived through since have carried some version of that same, uncomfortable truth: the force that scared me also made me keenly aware of how fast a life can shift, and how much of what I thought was solid ground was really just calm water — temporarily.

I think this is part of what the Middle Wave of The Ripple Journey™ holds. It’s that strange mix of fear and clarity arriving at once, neither one canceling out the other.

What I Know Now About Standing on the Bank

I wasn’t in the water when the current changed. I’d gotten out minutes before, for no immediately apparent reason. I’ve wondered since whether it was luck, instinct, or divine timing. I suspect the latter. Regardless of the reason, what I did once I heard the sound matters: I stepped back. I didn’t argue with the water or wait to see if it was really as strong as it sounded before I moved.

I wish I could say I’ve always responded to life’s sudden currents that well. I haven’t. Some I’ve stood too close to for too long, certain I could outlast them before they reached me. But I’ve gotten better, slowly, at trusting the sound before I can see the water, and at believing a change is real before it’s fully arrived. And I’ve learned to move accordingly, rather than wait for proof.

The creek at Slide Rock went back to looking calm within an hour, the way these things do. You’d never have known, walking by that evening, what had moved through it that afternoon. I think most of us have experienced a few stretches of water like that. Calm on the surface, with evidence of the flood still there if you know where to look.

What sound have you learned to trust before you could see what was coming?

If something in this article struck a chord and you know someone who might benefit, please share it.

Share

María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes from the moments that taught her the most, including the ones she didn’t see coming.

Join us in the Betweenward™ Community.

Subscribe now

My husband looked at me one morning last month and said, “You seem like yourself again.”

I had to think about that for a second, because I hadn’t noticed the shift until he brought it to my attention. Somewhere over the previous few weeks, the bracing had eased. I was still watching and adapting, still aware of all the things that had changed since his new diagnosis. But I wasn’t white-knuckling my way through the day anymore. The house felt less like a problem I was managing and more like home again.

That’s the closest I can get to describing Still Water from the inside.

It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no morning when you wake up and think, I’ve arrived. It’s more like one day someone you trust tells you that you seem like yourself, and you realize they’re right, and you feel something loosen a little at the thought.

What Another Drop Taught Me About This One

There was a morning not long ago when I stood in our kitchen and noticed the green oxygen tubing running from the bedroom into the living room. My husband was still sleeping. The house was quiet. And something about seeing that tubing made the weight of what had changed land differently than it had before.

We’ve been on a caregiving road for a while, he and I. New diagnoses layered on older ones, new equipment, new routines built around a body that keeps asking us to adapt.

I know the Ripple Journey from the inside, not just because I keep living it, but because living it is what gave it a name. This latest Drop set the waves in motion again. There was the internal reckoning, the honest conversations we needed to have, and then the slow reaching out to friends who could sit with me in it without rushing me toward a brighter interpretation.

And then, slowly, the settling.

What I know about transition is that it moves in waves. The Drop hits, the water is disturbed, and what follows isn’t tidy or sequential. And then, eventually, there’s a quieter kind of steadiness on the other side. Urgency softens. The hard thing is still present, but it’s no longer running the whole show.

That settling — not resolution, just the return of breath — is what I’ve been calling Still Water for years. Writing about it as part of a framework is one thing. Living through another Drop and finding my way back to Still Water is another thing entirely.

What I Got Wrong About Still Water When I First Named It

The Ripple Journey didn’t start as a framework. It started as the pattern I kept noticing in my own transitions — and the name came later. When I first described Still Water, I think I imagined it as a destination. The place you get to after all the hard work. And there’s something true in that because it does come after. But calling it a destination implied it would stay, and that’s not quite right.

Still Water is more like a state you return to. Or maybe: a state you practice returning to. Because the waves don’t stop, new ones come. And I’ve had enough Drops by now — professional, relational, health-related, the particular accumulation of things that life hands you after 50 — to understand that what shifts isn’t the disruption. What shifts is the trust that you can find your way back through the waves.

That trust is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through enough transitions to have earned it. That’s not optimism, exactly. It’s closer to evidence. You’ve come through things before, and you know it now in your body, not just in your head.

The Green Tubing Is Still There

I want to be clear about something, because I don’t want this to read as a tidy ending.

The situation hasn’t resolved. My husband’s health is what it is. The equipment is now part of our home, our routine, and the texture of a day. Some mornings are heavier than others. The grief that lives at the edge of a long caregiving relationship doesn’t disappear because you’ve found your footing again.

What changed is something smaller and more real than resolution. I stopped fighting the weight of it. At some point, I just let it be what it is. It’s hard, and it’s ours, and also full of the ordinary things we love about our life together. His humor came back first. That helped more than I can say.

There’s something about letting yourself stop performing okayness that gives actual okayness room to return. I don’t know how to say that without it sounding more prescriptive than I mean it. I just know that when I stopped trying to carry it gracefully and started carrying it honestly, something shifted.

For Wherever You Are In This

If you’re reading this in the middle of your own long transition — a job that ended, a role that changed, a future that looks different from what you expected — I’m not going to tell you that Still Water is waiting on the other side if you just do the right things. That’s not how it works, and you probably already know that.

What I will say is that the water does calm. And sometimes the first sign is someone who knows you well saying, "You seem like yourself again." Or noticing that you laughed at something without it costing you anything. Or realizing that you made a decision this week without rehearsing all the ways it could go wrong.

Small signs. Easy to miss.

Worth paying attention to.

If something in this article struck a chord and you know someone else who might benefit, please share it.

Share

María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes from the steady practice of learning to live honestly again amid what has changed.

Join us in the Betweenward™ Community.

Subscribe now

“I think I might be overqualified.”

She didn’t say it with confidence. She said it almost apologetically, as if naming it might somehow make things worse.

We were talking about a role she had just been passed over for. On paper, she was more than capable — years of leadership, proven results, the kind of experience most organizations say they want. And yet, she didn’t get the call.

Not because she lacked something, but because, somehow, what she brought didn’t seem to land.

At one point, she paused and said, “I know I have something to offer … so why does it feel like it doesn’t count?”

It’s a question I hear more often than people realize.

When experience stops translating

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that can happen at this stage of a career.

You’ve spent decades building something — skills, judgment, resilience, perspective. You know how to navigate complexity. You’ve led, solved, adapted, delivered. And yet, in certain rooms or conversations, it can feel like none of that is fully seen.

Sometimes it shows up in subtle ways. An interview that ends more quickly than expected. A polite but distant response. A comment about being “overqualified” that doesn’t quite make sense, and hits home hard.

Other times, it’s quieter than that. You start to question how to talk about what you’ve done. You wonder if your experience translates anymore. You catch yourself editing your story, trying to make it sound more current, more relevant … more acceptable.

Underneath all of it is a deeper tension: if everything you’ve built still matters, why doesn’t it feel that way right now?

What’s really happening

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, both through my clients and my own life:

Your experience isn’t the problem. But it may not yet be positioned so it can be fully seen.

Much of what you’ve built wasn’t designed for this moment — not because it’s outdated, but because you developed it in environments where its value was already understood.

Inside an organization. Within a role. Under a title that helped others translate it.

When that structure changes, whether by choice or circumstance, you’re often left holding something incredibly valuable, but without the same context that once made it obvious.

That’s where the disconnect begins.

The shift most people miss

It’s easy, in those moments, to assume something has been lost. That you need to update, repackage, or even downplay parts of your experience just to stay in the conversation.

But what if that’s not the real work?

What if the real work is learning how to see your experience differently — so you can express it differently?

Because experience, at its core, isn’t just a list of roles or accomplishments. It’s pattern recognition, judgment shaped over time, knowing what matters, and what doesn’t, without needing to prove it every time. It’s the ability to walk into complexity and find your footing.

That doesn’t disappear. But it does require a new way of communicating it.

Sometimes the environments you’re pursuing aren’t designed to recognize the depth you bring. Sometimes the language you’re using doesn’t fully capture it. And sometimes — and this is the harder truth — the next chapter you’re meant to step into doesn’t look like the one you’ve been trying to return to.

A better question

That realization doesn’t always come with clarity right away. It can feel like standing in between, no longer wanting to go backward, and not yet seeing exactly what’s ahead.

But this is where something important begins to shift.

Instead of asking, “How do I fit into what already exists?” a different question starts to emerge:

Where does what I bring actually belong now?

That question opens up entirely new possibilities. Not because you’re starting over, but because you’re starting from experience, just in a new direction.

What’s still true

If you’ve been feeling this tension lately — the sense that you have more to offer, but aren’t sure how it’s being seen — you’re not alone.

It’s a real part of transition. And it’s not a sign that your value has diminished.

It may be a sign that it’s ready to be expressed differently.

Because your experience hasn’t lost its value, it may simply be waiting for the right context and the right conversation to come fully into view.

If this resonates, you’re not the only one navigating this question.

These are the kinds of conversations we have inside Betweenward — conversations about what still matters, what’s changing, and what might be possible from here.

So, I’m curious…

Where has your experience felt most valuable, and where has it felt hardest to translate right now?

If you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear what this moment is looking like for you.

María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

Join us in the Betweenward™ community.

Subscribe now

There comes a moment after discernment when something else must happen.

You begin to see what drains you and recognize what you’ve been tolerating. You feel the bend in your own life — the subtle curve of strain that has gone unnoticed for too long.

And then you’re faced with a quieter question: If this no longer fits, what will you protect instead?

For many of us, the first shift is awareness. The second is restraint. But the third is more difficult. It requires a decision. It asks us to act on what we now know.

Not dramatically or impulsively. But deliberately.

The Myth of Infinite Capacity

For much of our lives, capacity has been a point of pride. We were praised for our endurance, admired for our availability, and trusted because we could handle what others could not.

Being capable became part of our identity. Being dependable felt virtuous. Being responsive signaled value.

Over time, this subtle equation forms: the more we can carry, the more we matter.

Emotional labor slips easily into this identity. We become the steady one, the listener, the one who absorbs tension so others don’t have to. We say yes because we can, stay available because we’re able, and step in because it feels generous.

But generosity without discernment eventually becomes diluted. Our energy spreads thin as our time fragments. And the very qualities that once felt like strength begin to feel costly.

As we move further into this chapter of life, our relationship with time shifts. We begin to feel more clearly that it is finite, not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, undeniable one. Research on adult development suggests that when time feels more bounded, we naturally become more selective. Meaning rises above maintenance, and depth begins to matter more than momentum.

This isn’t urgency. It’s clarity. And clarity, if honored, becomes stewardship.

When Protection Feels Selfish

Stewardship sounds noble in theory. But in practice, it often feels uncomfortable.

When I began limiting the open times on my calendar for client sessions, I felt hesitation. When I guarded my weekends more carefully, I worried about disappointing people. And when I made space for my husband and the small, unremarkable moments we share, guilt surfaced more than once.

I have spent decades being available. Shifting that pattern felt, at first, like withdrawing something valuable.

But underneath the guilt was something stronger. I knew that if I didn’t begin protecting my time sooner rather than later, the cost of waiting could be emotionally catastrophic.

Not because something dramatic would happen overnight. But because regret accumulates quietly. It forms in the spaces we didn’t claim, in the evenings we surrendered too easily, and in the conversations we postponed. It gathers in the ordinary moments we assumed would always be there.

What I feared most was the possibility of losing something I could never reclaim.

That realization changed the equation.

Stewardship Is Not Withdrawal

Stewardship is the careful tending of what is finite.

It’s the recognition that energy, attention, and presence are not infinite resources. And it’s the understanding that what we protect shapes what we experience.

To steward something is not to hoard it, but to honor it.

When I make room on my calendar now, I’m not stepping away from contribution. I’m choosing where my contribution is most wholehearted. When I limit availability, I’m not becoming less generous, but more intentional about where my generosity flows.

There’s relief in that. Peace. Gratitude.

Relief because I’m no longer overextending by default.
Peace because my choices reflect my priorities.
Gratitude because I can feel the difference when I’m fully present instead of partially available.

Those emotions aren’t indulgent. They’re instructive. And they signal alignment.

Choosing Without Regret

Discernment narrows what we’re willing to tolerate. Stewardship determines what we’re willing to protect.

You don’t have to overhaul your life to practice it. You may only need to protect one evening, one conversation, or one stretch of time that belongs fully to you and those you love.

For some, stewardship may look like fewer meetings. For others, it may mean declining roles that once felt obligatory. It might mean saying, “Let me think about that,” instead of an automatic yes.

The form will differ. The principle remains the same.

What you protect today shapes what you’ll remember tomorrow.

I don’t want to look back and realize I was present everywhere except where it mattered most. I don’t want the habit of availability to cost me irreplaceable time.

So, I’m learning to make room. Not out of fear, but out of devotion.

Stewardship, in this season of life, isn’t selfish. It’s wise.

And wisdom, when acted upon gently and consistently, leaves fewer regrets in its wake.

María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for transforming work and life.

Join us in the Betweenward™ community.

Subscribe now