For months the story I told myself was simple: the relationship ended, and with it went everything I thought I was building. The house I lived in with him, my everyday routine, the dogs, the quiet job I loved, of taking care of someone, cooking for someone, waiting for someone to come home. Of course I’m sad, I told myself. That version made sense. It was tidy. It also wasn’t the whole truth.

I’m someone who likes to grieve things in order, one at a time, the way I try to do everything. So I kept waiting to finish with the relationship before moving on to the next thing. Except there wasn’t just one thing. There was the relationship, the income I used to be able to count on, the career I thought I understood, and underneath both of those, two people I’ve lost that I never actually let myself grieve. I wasn’t carrying one backpack. There were more that I didn’t even know about. No wonder some mornings just standing up felt like the whole day’s work.

My grandfather died of cancer a few years ago. He was the person I loved most in this world. I never had a relationship with my father, and without ever saying it out loud, my grandfather became the reason I believed nothing truly bad could happen to me. The day he died, I felt naked. Not sad first, exposed first, like a wall I didn’t know was holding anything up had quietly been taken out from under the house. Like standing in an empty street where anything could happen to you.

Life didn’t pause to let me catch up. I lost my job not long after. Then I lost a close friend to cancer too, someone I sat with through her last days at the hospital, a loss big enough that it deserves its own post, not a mention inside this one.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a relationship arrived.

I gave that relationship a role it was never built to hold. I think I needed someone to be the protection I’d lost, so I made him into it, bigger than any one person should have to be. When he left, the hole he left behind was bigger than the one that was already there before he showed up. I don’t actually think I’m grieving him. I think I used him to cover a hole I hadn’t dealt with, convinced myself I was safe again, and built a life that looked exactly like the one I’d always wanted. It just wasn’t real, because a real thing doesn’t end in a single day. Some days I look back and it feels less like my own life and more like I was living someone else’s.

While all of that was happening underneath, on the surface I kept building. I put up a website, I started writing here, not only in my notebook, I took on new clients, I learned tools I didn’t know six months ago. Some weeks it looked like nothing was happening, but that was just how it looked, there was something happening I couldn’t see yet. I was laying foundations underground, in the dark, without being able to see any of it from where I was standing.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I went to Mallorca, to stay with my brother. I smiled again there, the real kind. For a while I let myself believe that meant I was cured. Looking back, I think it was just another way of covering the same hole, a nicer one, but covering it all the same.

What I’m starting to understand now is that the real work isn’t about him, and it isn’t only about my grandfather either. It’s about a belief I built without noticing: that I need someone else standing between me and the world in order to be safe. Nothing bad has actually happened to me since my grandfather died. I’ve handled everything that’s come my way since, on my own. But some part of me hasn’t caught up to that yet, still goes looking for a protector to hand the fear to instead of holding it myself. Maybe it’s the father I didn’t have. Maybe it’s just how I learned to feel loved.

I don’t think that gets solved by finding the right person, I think it gets solved by giving myself everything I keep looking for outside, so that the next time someone stands next to me, it’s because they actually see me, not because I needed somewhere to put my fear.

For now, I’d rather feel the hole than fill it with the wrong thing again. I think if I stay in it long enough, and look straight at it instead of around it, it starts to hurt less. That’s the only way I know to cross this bridge. And I’m sure that on the other side of it, there’s only good things waiting.

You don’t become someone new without letting an old version of yourself die first. That’s what this was really about. I write about what’s underneath the surface, because most of what happens here isn’t about what it looks like at first. If you want the real version, subscribe.

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Not because she loves it that day. Not because she woke up motivated. But because she made herself a deal: show up anyway. Move. Then come home.

She keeps the house clean. Not performatively clean, genuinely clean. The kind where every room feels like the person who lives there is taking the whole thing seriously.

She puts on cream before she goes to sleep. She cooks for herself, real food, not just what’s fastest. She changes out of her pajamas even on days when no one’s going to see her.

She says no.

This one is maybe the biggest. She used to say yes to everything because she didn’t want to disappoint anyone. She used to reshape herself to fit whatever the person in front of her needed. She didn’t think of it as losing herself. She thought of it as being easy to be with.

Now she says no and waits to see if the world ends.

It doesn’t.

This is who I’m building.

She’s not there yet. There are still days when she skips the cream and says yes to something she didn’t want to do and eats whatever’s in the fridge standing up. But the direction is clear in a way it hasn’t been in a long time.

For most of my life I was good at taking care of things. Projects. Other people. Budgets. I made sure everything ran. I just forgot to put myself in the list of things that needed taking care of.

The strange thing about loss is that it strips everything down. The version of yourself you kept for other people. The identity you built around being someone’s partner. The routines that were really someone else’s routines that you adopted because it was easier. When that falls away, you’re left with something you maybe haven’t looked at closely in a while.

Yourself.

Just you, in your apartment, at 11pm, with your laptop and your clean kitchen and the person you’re quietly, steadily, on purpose trying to become.

I don’t know exactly who she is yet. But I know what she does.

She goes to pilates even when she doesn’t want to.

For now, that’s enough.

If this landed, I’d love for you to subscribe. I write here about the slow, specific, unglamorous work of building yourself back up.

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I need money. There’s always something to finish: a client to follow up with, a website to build, a listing to update, a post to write. The work is real. The need is real. So staying home feels completely justified.

And it is, in a way.

But if I’m being honest with myself, the work isn’t the only reason I stay.

I wake up most mornings in the same place I fell asleep: laptop nearby, Pepi somewhere close, the day beginning exactly where the last one ended. I shower. I make my bed. I cook. I change clothes. I keep the house clean in a way that would’ve surprised the me of a year ago.

I go to pilates. That’s the one exception. I go even when I don’t want to, even when I’d rather stay horizontal, and I’m genuinely proud of that.

But I don’t go on dates. I don’t make plans to meet people. When someone suggests something social, I have the answer ready before they finish the sentence: I can’t, I’m working.

And everyone accepts it, because I am working. It’s not a lie.

It’s just not the whole truth.

The whole truth is that I don’t want to start over. Not yet.

There’s a part of me that knows that someday the economic excuse will run out. Someday I’ll be okay financially and I won’t have a ready reason to stay home. Someone will ask “are you seeing anyone?” and I won’t be able to say “I’ve just been so busy.” I’ll have to say “no, not really. I’m not ready.”

And I’m not ready.

I went to Mallorca alone and it did something good to me. I walked, I breathed different air, I came back with something I didn’t have before. And then I came home and went straight back inside.

I’m not saying this is bad. I’m saying it’s true.

Rebuilding has a social version and a private version. The social version is the one people want to see: the dates, the going out, the getting back out there. The private version is quieter: sitting with yourself long enough to remember who you are when you’re not defined by someone else.

That takes more time than people think. More than I thought.

Someday I’ll be ready to go back out. I think I’m getting there, slowly, one pilates class at a time.

But today I’m here. With my laptop and my clean house and the work that’s real and the excuse that’s only half the story.

And honestly, for now, that feels like enough.

If this resonated, I’d love for you to subscribe. I write here every week about the real, unfiltered work of rebuilding when the life you had stops fitting.

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I remember standing there in a dress I’d chosen carefully, smiling the way you smile when a stranger is doing you a favor, and thinking: they think I never studied. They think I’ve never worked a day in my life. They have no idea I ran global finance transformation projects before I met him. They see a woman who needs help finding a job, like a father calling in a favor for his daughter. Not someone who earned her place at any table she walked into.

I didn’t correct anyone that night. I just smiled and let it happen.

He was sixteen years older than me, a well-known businessman with a handful of companies to his name. I was structured, careful, not someone who dated older men or fell fast. But I admired him, and somewhere along the way I fell for him completely, harder than I’d planned to fall for anyone.

I was ambitious back then too. By then I’d already spent years at Accenture, working my way up through PMO and financial roles, before becoming a Program Manager leading Finance Transformation for Dell Technologies across all of Latin America, coordinating cross-functional teams through a full systems migration for the region. I had built a career from nothing, studied hard, earned it. But somewhere in the beginning of us, I picked up an idea that sounded wise at the time, that he needed to take up the space of “the man,” and I needed to take up the space of “the woman.” That if I gave him the room to be seen, that was what made me a good partner.

So I gave him the room. I stopped speaking up in meetings with his friends. I stopped suggesting, producing, building anything of my own, because that space belonged to him now.

He never once told me to stop working. What he did was fill the calendar: the land, the trips, days at the countryside with no internet, hours that ran on his schedule instead of mine. We were always following wherever his businesses needed him next. None of that was ever him forbidding me a job. It just wasn’t built for one either. Somewhere in there, without either of us naming it, he ended up running the whole show. I let him. Manipulated or not, I was an adult, and I said yes to that invisible arrangement, one silence at a time, believing it was love.

I didn’t turn that house into a home with him, I built it for us. He’d been living alone in it before me, and it showed: broken furniture, a garden nobody had touched in years, nothing that said someone lived there on purpose. Day by day I turned it into a home. New sheets, new comforters, furniture repaired or replaced, the garden brought back to life. I did the routine, and for a long time I believed that was a beautiful life because I was happy in a lot of it: the mornings, the land, the animals, having him beside me. But there was no wedding, no children, nothing tying that life to me beyond him. And the work that used to challenge my mind wasn't there anymore.

Then one evening we were talking about a project, our future, like any other night, and the next day he told me he’d “gained clarity” and asked me to leave the house I’d spent a lot of my time turning into a home. No fight I could point to, no slow ending I could see coming. I packed what I could and went to my apartment, and I never spoke to him or saw him again.

There was no closing conversation. Only the leaving.

I cried for three months straight. I had some savings, and they got me through about two months, but after that there was nothing left, no income of my own, since he’d been the one covering things. I was too depressed to function on my own, so my grandmother bought me a flight to Mallorca, where my brother lives and the summers are kinder. Around then I ran into my ex and asked if he could help me cover fixing my car. He told me to ask my grandmother, since she’d already bought me a plane ticket, as if the years I’d spent orbiting his decisions, his schedule, his idea of what mattered, counted for nothing the moment it stopped being convenient for him. To him, I’d gone on vacation. He had no idea I was crying every day, barely eating, and that it was my brother who got me out of bed each morning and made sure I ate. I didn’t answer him back. Right there, I understood there was nothing left to say to him. And that’s where my new path began: building it as if he didn’t exist.

My brother took it from there. He made me a plan every single day just to get me out of bed, and since it was summer on the island, that helped more than I expected. One afternoon he looked at me and said, start using what you’re capable of. He brought up something from years earlier, a stand of juices nobody wanted to buy, and how I’d somehow sold every last one. Use that, he said. You’re capable. That’s where I bought my first bags to resell. (I wrote the full story of how that started here.)

But the bills didn’t care how I felt, and that turned out to be the thing that saved me. I had to do something, so I did something, without any plan for where it would lead.

Then it was building a website, then another, then one for my own company, and slowly SMIRACCA came back to life. Somewhere in there, someone asked me to write for them, and for the first time in a long time I felt something I used to know well: being good at something, and being seen for it.

I don’t blame him. I was happy in that life, and I still miss pieces of it. But there was a version of me who wasn’t in that house anymore, and I couldn’t see her missing until she was the only thing left.

I understand something now I didn’t then. Two people can shine at the same table. My light was never going to dim his. It only ever dimmed because I let it.

Every time I made something new, a kit, a small system, whatever it was, it went into a post. Which made sense at the time. But posts get buried. Scroll back far enough and even I forget what’s there.

So I built one page that holds all of it.

Everything, in one place →

If you’re already a paid subscriber, everything on it is already yours. No new payment, no new signup. Just open the post for whichever one you want and it unlocks like it always has.

Right now that’s two things:

AI for Real Life. A short quiz that builds you a personalized AI toolkit for whatever you’re dealing with right now: job search, life admin, content, clarity.

The Get-Paid System. What I built after I got tired of chasing people for money. Automated billing, the message that moves clients over without drama, the emails you get to stop writing.

More will get added here as I make them. This page is just where you’ll always find them, instead of digging through old posts.

Everything, in one place →

Like I’d be trading the one honest thing I had with a client, the relationship, for a Stripe notification.

There was something cold about the idea of a card being charged without me first sitting down to write an email. I thought the personal thing to do was send the invoice myself, explain it again, wait patiently and follow up politely if I needed to.

So that’s what I did.

I finished the work. Sent the invoice. Waited a few days.

Then I opened my inbox and wrote:

“Just following up in case this got buried.”

A week later, I wrote it again. A little less soft this time, but still careful enough to make it sound like I wasn’t waiting for money I had already earned.

I told myself this was part of being good with clients.

Being reachable. Being flexible. Being understanding. Never making anything feel uncomfortable.

But the relationship was never in the invoice.

It never lived in the moment I typed “no rush!” when there was, in fact, a rush. Rent still had a date. My credit card still had a due date. The rest of my life didn’t become flexible just because someone hadn’t opened an email.

That part wasn’t personal.

That part was just me being unpaid and pretending to be casual about it.

I wrote about the afternoon this finally clicked, the cold coffee, the Stripe tab, the settings I’d been avoiding for months, in The afternoon I finally stopped chasing payments.

What I didn’t say in that post was what happened afterward.

Nothing dramatic happened.

No client suddenly respected me more. Nobody congratulated me for building a billing system. There was no big moment where I felt like I had officially become a business owner.

The invoices simply stopped depending on my memory.

Once recurring billing was on, I had fifteen minutes of maintenance a month instead of four emails per client.

I checked that the charges had gone through. I looked for an expired card or anything that needed my attention. I compared what came in with what I expected.

And then I closed the tab.

I stopped deciding how many days I should wait before following up.

I stopped rewriting the same message to make it sound friendly enough.

I stopped opening my inbox already annoyed at someone who probably hadn’t thought about the invoice at all.

Most importantly, I noticed that I had more of myself left over for the work a client had actually hired me to do.

That was the part I hadn’t expected.

I thought automation would remove something human from the relationship. Instead, it removed the quiet resentment that had started building underneath it.

Because it’s difficult to feel completely present in someone’s project when part of you is wondering whether they saw your last email.

It’s difficult to be generous with your attention when you’re using some of it to calculate when it becomes socially acceptable to ask for your own money again.

And it’s difficult to feel like an equal in a professional relationship when you’re constantly trying to make your follow-up small enough not to bother anyone.

Automation didn’t make me care less.

It gave me more room to care about the right things.

The work. The result. The details. The problem the client had actually asked me to solve.

I spent ten years managing million-dollar budgets before paying $75 for an Etsy course to start over.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to build a system. It was that every system I had ever built belonged to someone else’s operation.

Someone else’s company.

Someone else’s budget.

Someone else’s definition of success.

This was the first one I built entirely for mine.

It was small and boring. A few settings, a billing date, a card on file and an automatic receipt.

But that small system became part of something much bigger. It helped me stop treating every payment like a separate emergency. It gave me enough mental space to focus on the next project, the next client and eventually the work that allowed me to make $1,400 from my bed a few weeks later.

Not because Stripe changed my life.

Because the boring parts had finally started working quietly in the background.

Somewhere along the way, I had picked up the idea that being endlessly available was what made me trustworthy.

Reachable.

Willing to chase.

Happy to re-explain.

Flexible enough to keep rearranging my own expectations around someone else’s timing.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think it made me tired.

And tired isn’t the same thing as personal.

A system can collect a payment. It can send a receipt. It can remember a billing date and notify me when something goes wrong.

It cannot listen carefully during a conversation.

It cannot understand what a client is really trying to build.

It cannot notice the detail that doesn’t quite make sense or care whether the final result feels right.

Those are the personal parts.

Those are still mine.

The system didn’t replace me. It replaced the task that had been draining the version of me my clients were actually paying for.

The part of my work that’s mine, the care, the thinking, the attention, and the way I show up, doesn’t live in an invoice.

It never did.

If you’re new here: I write about rebuilding a business and a life from the ground up, one honest system at a time. A few places to start:

• The afternoon I finally stopped chasing payments

• How did I end up here, paying $75 for an Etsy course

• I made $1,400 from my bed. Here’s the story

If any of that sounds familiar, I’d love to have you along.

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Want to build the system?

I turned everything I built, the reminders, the billing rules, the boundary scripts, the exact language I use when someone pushes back, into a small kit called The Get-Paid System. You don't need to be a subscriber to get it, it's $15 one-time. Or subscribe for $8/mo and get this kit plus everything else.

You can access it through the link below:

See The Get-Paid System →

Because getting paid shouldn’t depend on how many times you’re willing to ask.

Finish the website. Send the invoice. Wait three days. Send it again, a little softer this time, “just following up in case this got buried.” Wait some more. Send it a third time, less soft. Get paid, finally, and feel relieved instead of proud, like I’d won an argument nobody knew we were having.

I did that same dance again on Tuesday. Cold coffee next to my laptop, gray winter light through the window, the kind that makes 4pm feel like it’s already night. I opened Stripe to send one more invoice to one more client, and instead of typing it out by hand for the tenth time, I just sat there for a second and thought: I’m so tired of being the one who has to remember.

It wasn’t dramatic. Nobody was watching. I didn’t even tell anyone that day. But something in me had quietly stopped agreeing to be my own accounts-receivable department.

What I actually did instead of sending that invoice was

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It became a story about rebuilding.

In this episode, I share what changed when I stopped asking, “How do I get my old life back?” and started noticing the life I was already creating.

Sometimes pain writes the first draft.

Peace is what teaches us how to read it.

Find more of Becoming Sofi at becomingsofijournal.substack.com

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I learned something about bicycles I didn't expect to need.

If you stop pedaling completely, even for a second, even at low speed, the physics change. What was manageable while moving becomes impossible while still. You can’t balance a bicycle that isn’t going anywhere. The only way to stay upright is to keep going.

I think about this constantly lately.

Not because I planned to. Because it turned out to be the only thing that’s actually true about the year I’ve been living.

I didn’t choose the moment my life changed. I didn’t plan to be starting over. I didn’t choose this ending, and for a while I couldn’t get past that. I kept looking for the place where I could have done something differently. Said something differently. Loved better, harder, smarter. As if the ending were a problem I could have solved if I’d just been more.

At some point I stopped looking for where I went wrong and started asking a different question:

What do I do now?

Not a destination. Not a plan. Just: what’s the next pedal?

There’s a tarot card called The Hermit.

In most decks, he’s walking alone at night, carrying a lantern, moving through something vast and dark. He doesn’t look lost. He doesn’t look afraid. He looks like someone who understands that this particular part of the journey requires going alone, slowly, with only enough light to see the next step.

That image became mine this year without me choosing it.

I moved into my world. Quietly, without announcing it. I cleaned things. I organized things. I went to pilates at hours I used to spend doing something else. I sat with my laptop and learned tools I didn’t know existed. I wrote here, to people I’d never met, about things I was still figuring out in real time.

None of it felt like a strategy. It felt like: this is the next pedal. And then this. And then this.

Here’s what I didn’t see coming:

I walked into a pilates class not knowing a single person. I didn’t have a story to tell yet, I was still in the middle of living it. And those women embraced me like I’d been there for years. I still don’t fully understand why. Maybe it’s the energy you carry when you’re rebuilding something. Maybe people can read it. Maybe it’s simply what happens when you show up somewhere new and don’t try to perform a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet.

My painting teacher, someone who has known me for years, sat with me one afternoon and said things I hadn’t let myself hear. That I have everything I need. That I’m sharp and capable in ways I consistently underestimate. She said it the way people say things when they genuinely mean them, not to make you feel better, but because they need you to know.

And his sister. The woman I thought I might lose along with everything else when the relationship ended. She still calls. She wrote on my birthday: “Happy birthday to the goddess of the calas. You’re my little sister. You always make me laugh, even on my worst days. You’re unique.” His family still sees me. Not because they have to. Because something in them knows who I am, separate from him, separate from the relationship, just... me.

None of these people were part of a plan. They appeared because I was moving.

I think we tell ourselves a particular story about rebuilding. It goes like this:

First, I heal. Then I figure out what I want. Then I build clarity about where I’m going. Then, from that stable, clear, healed place, I start moving.

But that’s not how any of this worked for me.

What actually happened was: I moved because I had no other option. And the moving created the next thing. Which created the next.

The handbags came from Mallorca, which came from needing to leave, which came from not being able to breathe in my own apartment. The Etsy work came from a client who asked if I could help, which came from me mentioning what I was learning, which came from learning it in the first place just because I had hours and a laptop and nothing else to fill them with. Becoming Sofi came from needing somewhere to put thoughts I didn’t know how to carry alone, and it became the thing I’m most proud of building this year, without ever planning to build it.

In the version of this story where I waited until I felt ready, until I had clarity, until I knew with certainty what I was building toward, I am still sitting at the same table, waiting.

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.

I don’t always want to pedal.

Some days the bicycle can fall. I get off it completely. I lie in bed and I cry and I miss the version of myself I was inside that life, the one who had a garden and a morning routine and someone she was building something with. Those days are real and they’re allowed and I’ve learned not to turn them into evidence of how badly I’m doing.

I cry. I rest. I give myself the day. And then, because the bicycle won’t balance if I stay still forever, I get back on.

Not because I have it figured out. Not because I feel ready. Because the alternative is staying on the ground, and I’ve been on the ground enough to know that even moving slowly is better than not moving at all.

I spent a week unable to get out of bed this June. An entire week where nothing happened, nothing moved, nothing got done. And then something shifted. The wave came back. And in the five days after that I made $1,221, delivered bags, reconnected with clients, and wrote two posts I’m genuinely proud of.

The week I couldn’t move wasn’t failure. It was part of the pedaling. You can’t be going the whole time. But you also can’t stay stopped.

Here’s what I know, a few months into the chapter I didn’t choose:

I don’t know where this is going. I genuinely don’t. I don’t know what the business looks like in six months, or what this newsletter becomes, or who I’ll be when this particular chapter closes. I don’t have the field yet, or the version of a future I can picture clearly.

What I have is the next pedal. And then the next.

And the people who keep appearing when I move.

And the quiet, daily discovery that I am more capable than I knew, and more resilient than I feel, and more interesting to myself now than I was when my life made more sense.

That’s enough to keep going.

It has to be.

Hit reply and tell me: what’s the thing you keep doing even when you don’t want to? The pedal you always come back to. I read every single one.

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AI for Real Life

There is this thing that happens when you are going through something hard.

You know that thinking more clearly would help. You know that if you could just get outside your own head for a minute, you might find the next step. But your brain is too full, too tired, or too tangled to do it on its own.

That is where I kept ending up. During the weeks when everything felt like too much, I kept wishing I had something to think with me. Not a coach. Not a course. Not another thing to add to the list. Just a structured way to process what was happening and figure out what to do next.

So I built it.

It is called AI for Real Life. It is a $10 kit with step-by-step prompts for the situations that actually pile up: the email you have been avoiding for three weeks, the week that went completely off the rails, the decision you keep circling without landing anywhere, the moment when everything feels too much.

Here is how it works: you answer five questions about where you are right now. Then you get a personalized set of prompts, written so that the conversation actually helps you think rather than just generate words.

It is not a course. There are no videos, no homework, no certification. It is a thinking tool. For real life.

I made it because I kept needing it. And because I kept hearing the same thing from people around me: I know AI could help me, but I do not know where to start.

Now you do.

Get AI for Real Life →

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Already a paid subscriber? You already have access to the interactive kit, no extra payment needed.

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This isn't about how to get over it. It's about what you might be building right now, even when it looks like nothing.

Find more of Becoming Sofi at becomingsofijournal.substack.com

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In this episode: what changed between Mallorca and now, the 80/20 of getting real work done on the hardest days, and why I’m finally talking about what I know, not just what I feel.

Read the post this episode is based on: You Don’t Have to Get Dressed to Make $1400

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Somewhere between staying in bed because I couldn’t face the day and actually getting up, I became more fluent in AI than I’ve ever been in anything. Nobody saw it happen. I wasn’t posting about it. I was just sitting with my laptop, half in pajamas, figuring out how to make something useful out of the hours I used to spend waiting to feel better.

This Saturday I built an entire content system for a brand, start to finish, using AI. Not as an experiment. As actual paid work. I’m charging $800 for websites I can build in two or three days now. I’m charging $600 to set someone up on Etsy completely, the shop, the listings, all of it. Etsy is having a moment and I happen to know exactly how to move inside it.

Here’s what nobody talks about. There are people grieving right now who still have to be at a desk by 6am. They put on real clothes. They take the bus. They smile at people because the job requires it, even on the days they can barely stand up straight in the shower. And eventually the body sends the bill for all of it, because you cannot fake fine forever without paying for it somewhere.

I’m not interested in that version. I want to talk about the other one. How you make money from your bed and your laptop while you’re still grieving, without forcing your body to perform a timeline it isn’t on yet. How you keep enough income coming in to not panic, while still going slow where you need to go slow.

This doesn’t mean doing nothing. I still try, most days, to walk. To get to pilates. To get outside, even just to the grass for ten minutes. To clean my own house because an ordered space helps an unordered mind. But I do all of that at my own pace, not a pace someone else assigned me.

If this is something you want more of, stay close. I’m putting together the actual steps, how I use AI tools like Claude to do this work, what it costs to learn, what it can realistically earn you. Not a hustle culture pitch. A real path for the days you’re in bed and still need to eat.

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Monday started normal. Pilates in the morning, then work. In the afternoon I drove over to drop off a bag my painting teacher had bought from me, someone who adores me and always has, and what was supposed to be five minutes at the door turned into an hour of tea. She said some hard things, gently, the way someone says things when they’re trying to take care of you, not hurt you.

She told me I let him manipulate me. That I’d already gone back more times than I could justify, and it always ended the same way, with him hurting me again. That I have everything I need to sell, that I’m sharp and put-together and good at this in a way I don’t usually let myself believe.

I didn’t think much more about that conversation. I had another bag to deliver, in a gated neighborhood I’d never been to, and it was already getting dark.

A police car stopped me halfway there. My phone had died, and everything I needed, my ID, the address, was on it. Within minutes there were fifteen officers around my car on an empty road. I was dressed up, alone, and crying, and they were talking about taking my car and leaving me there in the dark. It didn’t feel like a routine stop. It felt like the kind of moment where you are more exposed than protected.

I found a bakery that was still open and they let me use their phone to call my mom.

Here’s the part that surprised me, sitting on that curb shaking. The first person I thought to call wasn’t him. For years, anytime something went wrong, he was the reflex. This time he wasn’t. My parents came. A lawyer got on the phone. It ended up being a fine over one missing paper, but everything that happened in between didn’t need to.

My mom ended up driving my car home because my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I showered and slept until the next day.

The rest of the week looked smaller, but it wasn’t quieter. Tuesday was work and therapy, no sales, nothing in, which used to feel like failure and now mostly just feels like a Tuesday. Wednesday I went to the gynecologist for results I’d been waiting on since something came back abnormal six months ago. This time everything was fine, and I don’t have to go back in six months, just once a year now. That kind of relief doesn’t post well on Instagram, and it mattered more than almost anything else that happened this week. Somewhere in there I also delivered another bag, sold and gone, the third one of the week without me even stopping to notice.

After that I picked up my grandmother, 91, from her pedicure. She lives forty minutes away and has spent years quietly holding parts of my life up, financially, emotionally, and in May she moved into my apartment for two weeks just to take care of my dog while I was in Mallorca. I took her to the fish market, gave her a bath, did her hair, changed her sheets so she could nap in something clean and soft. We ate lunch at her place. I picked up what she needed from the pharmacy. By the time I got home I was wrecked. I got in the shower, put on the kind of robe you save for nights you can’t talk yourself into anything else, and fell asleep almost instantly.

Today, Thursday, I had nightmares about him before I’d even opened my eyes. I stayed in pajamas while my apartment got cleaned around me. Pilates in the afternoon felt good, the way it almost always does. Then I got in the car to drive home and started crying, because my address is different now. Sometimes my car still wants to turn toward the house where I used to live, the one with the garden and the pool and the lake and the dock, not the apartment I come home to now, and it takes me a second to catch myself and remember I don’t live there anymore. I picked up meat for milanesas I’m not breading until the weekend, and a new shower I’m not installing myself. Tonight it’s soup, because it’s winter here.

Nothing got fixed this week. Nothing resolved itself in some dramatic, before-and-after way. The night the police pulled me over, I noticed that the instinct I used to run on without thinking, calling him, wasn’t automatic anymore. But today my car still tried to drive itself to the house where we used to live. Both of those are true at the same time. I sold five bags this week, with two more deliveries tomorrow, and I’m building something on my own that I’m genuinely proud of. Most days, moving forward is the easier part. It’s the stopping that gets me, the half second where I look back and miss a life that doesn’t exist anymore, even while I keep walking away from it on purpose. I’m not going to pretend that part isn’t still there. I’m strong, and some days I still need to be held up.

What’s the thing in your life that used to be automatic, that you sometimes catch yourself still reaching for, even while you’re moving on from it?

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I came back from Mallorca on June 13th with two suitcases full of bags and belts I’d bought to resell. I had spreadsheets ready, prices set, a plan for which colors to post first. I didn’t open any of it for a week.

I want to be honest about what that week actually looked like, because the version where I “hit the ground running” isn’t true. My birthday happened somewhere inside that week and I don’t remember much of it. I wasn’t posting, I wasn’t messaging anyone, I wasn’t doing anything except getting through the day.

Here’s the part I used to be ashamed of, and I’m not anymore: that week wasn’t a failure. It was what I needed. I think of it like surfing. You don’t fight the wave that isn’t there yet, you sit on the board and you wait. Some days you wait a long time. You rest, you talk to whoever’s on the board next to you, you let your legs hang in the water. The mistake isn’t waiting. The mistake is thinking you should be paddling the whole time.

On the 19th, the wave came. I felt it before I understood it, just a small shift in energy. So I made a plan for that one day. I decided I was going to take care of myself. I got dressed like I meant it, went to pilates, left the house, went to the club. Small, ordinary things. Then I posted one photo of the bags.

Here’s what happened in the five days after that:

Here’s the part I’m actually proud of: the card I bought that inventory on hasn’t even been charged yet. By the time that bill shows up, it’s already covered, with profit left over. I didn’t go into debt to make this happen. The money came in first.

Half of that came from physically packing suitcases and messaging people about color combos. The other half came from analytical work I’ve done for years, the kind nobody sees because it doesn’t look like a before-and-after. Both happened in the same five days. Neither would have happened the week before.

I’m not sharing this to say “look how productive I am.” We’re people, not robots. We don’t have the same energy every day, and it’s not always about depression, sometimes it’s just a hard week, a hard month. Give yourself permission to be however you actually are. The energy comes back on its own time, not on a schedule, but it does come back, and when it does, it shows up like a wave, all at once.

What I can tell you is that having a plan ready for when the wave comes makes a real difference. Not a plan to force the wave faster, a plan for what you do the moment you feel it: what you wear, where you go, what the smallest first action is. I had mine ready without realizing it, that’s the order I’m talking about. I want to get better at building it on purpose, and I want to build it here, with you, post by post.

If you’re in the waiting part right now, that’s not a

problem to fix today. But when your wave comes, I’d like to help you have a plan ready so you actually ride it instead of just watching it pass.

What does your version of “getting dressed and going to pilates” look like, the small thing you do first when the energy finally shows up?

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Before him, I was a Finance Transformation Manager at Dell Technologies. Global team, steady paycheck, a whole identity built around being capable and independent.

Then I fell in love, and I let all of that go. I left the multinational to work for myself, because he helped me financially and we lived together. I moved into his world: the countryside, the horses, the dogs (three of them, two his, one mine). I wanted to marry him and have a child. I was, genuinely, happy.

What I miss most isn’t dramatic. It’s the mornings. Walking out to the garden with his coffee. A kiss before he left for the fields. Getting the room ready. Him saying “tomorrow we go to the campo,” and me packing everything we’d need. Sitting on a horse, watching the land, nothing interrupting me except the animals. No glamour in any of it. Just peace, and the man I loved, next to me.

Then one day, in the middle of an argument, he left. I moved back into my old apartment, the one from before I was someone’s. I felt like I’d gone back to zero.

I went to Mallorca, to my brother’s. And there were moments I felt nineteen again, traveling alone, figuring out a day with no one waiting for me. It was strange to feel that young and that lost at the same time.

Here’s what I’m starting to understand: I’m not just grieving him. I’m grieving the version of me who lived inside that life, the one who got to wake up next to someone, who had a garden and a kitchen and a routine that wasn’t hers but felt like home anyway. I’m grieving a Sofi who thought that was enough, who didn’t notice she’d stopped showing up for herself somewhere along the way.

Because I loved that life. But I never once, in all of it, took care of me. I orbited him completely. So when he was gone, and everything that came with him was gone too, there was nothing left underneath. My life stopped making sense, because most of what made sense had been borrowed from someone else.

My therapist put it simply: you can have a relationship that beautiful without losing yourself in it. The difference is whether you keep orbiting yourself while you share your life with someone, or whether you hand the whole orbit over to them. Because when they leave, and people leave, the first version of you survives. The second one doesn’t.

So that’s the Sofi I’m grieving right now. Not just the relationship. Her. The one who lived for a man and a house that was never hers, until the day it all disappeared.

I’m trying to build something that’s mine this time.

Have you ever grieved a version of yourself, more than the person who left?

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Nobody saw any of that. Nobody knew it was my birthday.

This is what rebuilding looks like when nobody’s watching.

My mom called. She wanted to come over to make me a cake. I told her I preferred to be alone. She got upset.

For a second I felt guilty. She meant well.

But then I thought……I have to respect what I need too. I spent too many years living for other people. Doing what everyone else wanted. Trying not to disappoint anyone.

And here I am. 36. Having to rebuild everything. Because I forgot to build myself.

Messages came in all morning. Friends. My grandmother writing "your grandma who loves you muuuuch.". His sister wrote: “Happy birthday to the goddess of the calas.” She called me her little sister. Said I always manage to make her laugh, even on bad days. That I’m unique.

His family sees me.

He sent: “Hope you’re having a nice day.”

Make that make sense.

Every message felt like a knife. Not because they were unkind. Because he hadn’t written yet.

The person I thought I was building a life with. Who three months ago said he would call. Who somehow forgot.

And then, at 3:45pm, he did write.

“Happy Birthday! Hope you’re having a nice day. Sending a kiss.”

Like a message from a former boss. Like a courtesy. Like nothing.

My friend saw it and said: that’s a horrible message.

And she was right.

But here’s the strange thing……it hurt less than the silence. Because at least I existed enough for him to remember.

The heart is that complicated.

I ordered sushi. I ate the cake my grandmother told me to pay with her card. I lit a candle and made three wishes. Except I made four, because I needed four.

To smile again. To feel well and loved again. For this pain to leave. To find stability.

Nobody’s perfect.

Then I got back into bed. It was 3:30pm and it felt like 10 at night.

I put on Dutton Ranch. Cowboys, open fields, a life that looks like the one I was building.

When I lived with him we had dogs, land, open air. I lived outside. I didn’t know how to be sad indoors.

Now I’m learning.

Watching this show, I don’t feel like I lost that life. I feel like I’m dreaming it from somewhere safe. And maybe one day it comes back, different field, different man, different version of the story.

I’m 36. My whole life is still ahead.

Not the life I imagined. Not the field I imagined. Not the man I imagined.

But maybe another one.

I just want to want things again. To have hope again. To believe I can fall in love again, build that life again, with someone who actually chooses me.

Meanwhile, my floors are warm. It’s raining outside and I can see the drops falling into the pool from my balcony. Pepi is snoring in the living room. My apartment is cozy and beautiful and entirely mine, every corner something I chose, something that’s me.

The world can fall apart.

In here, I’m safe.

Tonight I’m going to sleep sad. Tired. But I survived.

Nothing got solved today. But nothing got worse either. And when you’re already at the bottom, that’s actually something.

Tomorrow is a new beginning. A new year of my life. It will still hurt, I know that. But one day at a time. Keep writing my story. Keep reinventing. Keep discovering work I never imagined doing. Keep learning who this version of me actually is.

Maybe this Sofi that’s being built is more aligned with who she really is than the one I was trying to be before.

And this new way of working from anywhere, as long as there’s internet means I can still dream of my Dutton Ranch. Different field. Different story. Same dream.

I’m going to sleep with a broken heart. But also with a small light that says: keep going. You can do this. Get through this part and the light is on the other side.

Like turbulence on a plane. They tell you to fasten your seatbelt. It shakes. It’s scary. And then it stops, and they let you unbuckle again.

I’m in the turbulence right now. But it doesn’t last forever.

And despite everything, there are so many people who love me. Who wrote today. Who worried. Who were paying attention.

Even Eli, the woman who cleans my house, sat at the foot of my bed this morning, held my feet, and said:

“This is going to pass, Sofi. You have to be okay.”

And I think she’s right.

What was the birthday you least expected?

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I still had invoices to send, expenses to load, emails to answer, a presentation to prepare, a dog to take care of, and a life that didn’t magically pause just because I had too much to do.

I could feel myself slipping into that familiar panic:

“I’m never going to finish this.”

And then something interesting happened.

Instead of replaying five hours of video and resigning myself to spending the entire day taking notes, I kept looking for another way.

I searched.

I asked questions.

I tried tools that didn’t work.

I got frustrated.

I tried again.

Eventually, I managed to get the subtitles.

The problem that had felt impossible at 7 a.m. suddenly became manageable.

Not solved completely.

But manageable.

And I realized how often we believe that doing things the hard way somehow makes us more responsible.

We think being productive means suffering.

Watching every minute.

Taking every note by hand.

Carrying every burden ourselves.

Never asking for help.

Never using shortcuts.

As if exhaustion were proof that we care.

But maybe it isn’t.

Maybe becoming the person we’re trying to become isn’t about proving how much we can endure.

Maybe it’s about protecting our energy.

Because energy is not unlimited.

Especially when you’re rebuilding your life.

Especially when you’re grieving.

Especially when you’re trying to make ends meet, reinvent yourself, take care of people you love, show up for work, and somehow still remember who you are underneath all of it.

Using AI didn’t make me lazy today.

It didn’t mean I cared less about doing a good job.

It simply gave me back a few hours of my life.

Hours I can now use to finish my work properly, take Pepi out later when it’s warmer, call my grandmother, shower, breathe, and maybe even rest.

For a long time, I thought strength meant carrying everything alone.

Lately, I’m starting to wonder if real strength looks different.

Maybe it’s knowing when to ask.

When to adapt.

When to let tools help you.

When to stop turning every task into a test of endurance.

You don’t get extra points for doing everything the hard way.

You just get tired.

And if you’re rebuilding your life, protecting your energy isn’t laziness.

It's an act of self-respect.

Maybe becoming yourself isn’t about becoming stronger.
Maybe it’s about making life a little gentler.

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