38 Lessons at 38: Rooted in Who I am Becoming
38 reflections from a year of growing, grieving, and beginning again
We often have no idea what we are doing. I told a friend today that this has felt like one of the most difficult seasons of my life, even harder than pregnancy and giving birth. Pregnancy came with physical pain, but it also came with a clear outcome. I knew I would eventually meet my daughter.
This season feels different by stretching me in ways I have never experienced before. I am learning how to live with uncertainty, release what I cannot control, and trust what comes next even when I cannot see it clearly. From the outside, moving to Hawaiʻi may look like paradise. People may imagine beaches, rainbows, sunshine, and a life that feels like vacation every day. but paradise does not protect you from grief, financial pressure, loneliness, relationship challenges, parenting fears, or the discomfort of becoming someone new.
One year ago, I had no idea I would be living here. In 2025, my daughter experienced several seizures within one week. It was one of the most heartbreaking and frightening seasons of our lives. After MRIs, EEGs, medical appointments, and many unanswered questions, we were grateful to learn that there were no additional neurological red flags. Her condition has remained stable with medication, and we continue to hope she will remain seizure-free and eventually grow out of it.
That experience changed us. It reminded my husband and me that life is happening now. We did not want to keep postponing joy, presence, or the life we longed to create. On paper, we had what many people consider success: six-figure corporate careers, a large home, family trips, professional titles, and stability. Yet we were still asking ourselves whether the life we had built felt as meaningful on the inside as it looked on the outside.
We made the decision to redirect our lives by moving to Hawaiʻi. We left behind familiar routines, relationships, identities, systems, and certainty. We entered a chapter that has required us to grow and grieve at the same time. Much of that transformation has been quiet.
This post is a reflection on the lessons that have rooted me in who I am becoming. Last year, I wrote about self-love, wellness, relationships, purpose, and creativity. This year, I am less focused on becoming more impressive and more committed to becoming grounded in how I live my values.
The values guiding me in this season are: presence, peace, growth, self-trust, aloha, nature, family, and purpose.
I hope these lessons inspire you to reflect on who you are becoming, question the status quo, and notice the beauty already present in your life.
🌱 Presence
1.Presence asks me to live here and now. My mind often tries to rush ahead, solve every problem, or prepare for every possible outcome. Hawaiʻi keeps inviting me back to what is actually happening now.
2. Ordinary moments become essential when I pay attention. Bedtime routines, playground afternoons, neighborhood walks, grocery store errands, family drives, and coffee conversations may look small, but they are often the best moments to remember.
3. A slower life is still a meaningful life. Slowing down has helped me notice how full my life already is without urgency.
4. Attention is one of the purest forms of love. When I give someone my full attention, especially my daughter, I communicate that they matter.
5. Time feels different when I stop treating every moment as a task. I am learning to experience time rather than constantly optimize it to savor the experiences even more.
🌊 Peace
6. Peace is not the absence of hard things. Protecting my peace is the ability to remain connected to myself while hard things are still happening.
7. My nervous system cannot thrive in constant urgency. I am learning to notice when my body feels tense, activated, rushed, or unsafe, and to respond with care rather than judgment.
8. Protecting my peace sometimes means stepping away. Not every situation requires my immediate reaction, explanation, or emotional labor.
9. Creative expression helps me return to myself. Lego, meditation, drawing, coloring, watercolor, poetry, affirmations, and journaling are not simply hobbies. They help regulate my emotions and make space for what I am feeling. Some examples have been creating Rooted in Becoming Journal and Healing in Hawaii.
10. Calmness is a superpower. Choosing calm can be an intentional act of strength, discernment, and self-leadership.
🌿 Growth
11. Grief supports your growth. Sometimes grief is proof that I am changing, releasing, and making room for a new life.
12. I can grieve a life I chose to leave. Choosing a new chapter does not erase the meaning of the old one.
13. Growth can feel disorienting before it feels liberating. When old identities no longer fit and new ones are still forming, uncertainty can feel like emptiness. It may actually be expansion merging from the growth.
14. Becoming requires both roots and room. I need to stay grounded in who I am and also allow myself to evolve beyond who I have been to create space for the new.
15. I do not have to force every season to be productive. Some seasons are for planting, some are for waiting, some are for grieving, and some are for blooming.
🌸 Self-Trust
16. Every return to myself is an act of self-trust. I may get overwhelmed, distracted, uncertain, or emotionally thrown off. What matters is that I know how to come back to myself.
17. Self-trust is built through small moments of listening inward. It grows every time I honor what I need, tell myself the truth, or follow my inner compass. It's been helpful to used the Inward Out cards to reflect more deeply within.
18. I do not need complete certainty to move forward. Sometimes I only need enough clarity for the next honest step.
19. My inner authority becomes stronger when I stop outsourcing every decision. Advice can support me, but I still have to live with the choices I make.
20. Receiving is part of emotional maturity. I am learning to receive love, help, affirmation, friendship, care, and support without feeling like I must immediately earn or repay it.
🌺 Aloha
21. Aloha is becoming a way of being. It is care, respect, presence, compassion, responsibility, and how we choose to relate to one another.
22. The shaka reminds me that connection can be simple. A small gesture can communicate warmth, friendliness, understanding, or “we are good.”
23. Belonging grows through participation. Attending my first Rotary Club meeting reminded me that community is not something I only find, it is something I help create.
24. Meaningful relationships are relational, not transactional. The people who matter most are not valuable because of what they can do for me. They matter because of how we witness, support, and grow alongside one another.
25. Community care begins with how I show up locally. Service, kindness, conversation, and presence can be meaningful even when they are not visible online.
🌳 Nature
26. Nature does not rush what is meant to grow. Gardens have reminded me that every living thing responds to its own season.
27. A healthy ecosystem needs more than one source of nourishment. I need relationships, creativity, movement, solitude, meaningful work, rest, reflection, and joy. No single role can sustain my entire life.
28. Rainbows do not erase the rain. They remind me that beauty and difficulty can exist in the same sky.
29. Mountains teach me to be grounded without becoming small. I can be rooted and still rise high to climb over any obstacle.
30. Palm trees teach me that resilience includes flexibility. Strength is not always standing rigidly. Sometimes strength is bending without losing my roots.
💛 Family
31. My daughter is teaching me how to see the world again. Her imagination, curiosity, language, play, and observations help me notice what adulthood taught me to overlook.
32. Parenthood is not only about shaping a child. It is also about allowing a child to reshape me and she is my greatest teacher in this life.
33. Safety can look like consistency, comfort, and repair. My daughter does not need perfection, she needs to know that love remains available, especially after hard moments.
34. Family transitions require compassion for different grieving timelines. We can choose the same life change and still experience it very differently.
35. A meaningful family life is created in repeated moments of care. Love often looks like medication routines, meals, playground trips, bedtime books, rides, appointments, laughter, and showing up again tomorrow.
✨ Purpose
36. Purpose feels more sustainable when it matches the season of life I am in. I am grateful to be part of The People Piece team, working with people whose values align with how I want to serve and live. I am also grateful to support nonprofit clients whose work centers community, hope, healing, and impact.
37. I am becoming a growth enabler. My work helps people understand themselves, build capacity, access their strengths, and create conditions where they can thrive.
38. My purpose is becoming less about proving and more about cultivating. I want to cultivate people, ideas, relationships, communities, creative expression, and spaces where others feel safe enough to grow.
What I Have Been Creating in This Season
Over the past year, I created the Rooted in Becoming Journal to help people reflect on grief, growth, and change
I started Healing in Hawaiʻi as a way to document the beauty, healing, nature, and personal transformation I am experiencing here
I began developing a Becoming Aloha Journal to explore what it means to embody aloha as a way of living
I explored Human Design and learned that I am a Projector, which gave me another lens for understanding my energy, relationships, and natural way of guiding others
I returned to the gym, both on my own and with my husband, as we prioritize our physical and emotional well-being
I took myself on solo dates
I explored botanical gardens and allowed nature to become one of my greatest teachers
I started living with less and became more conscious of what truly matters
None of these experiences exist as isolated accomplishments. Together, they reflect a quieter transformation. I am building an ecosystem for the person I am becoming. an ecosystem where I can be rooted and still grow, where my family can evolve, creativity can regulate me, my work can align with my values, grief is allowed to teach me, I can receive support, and I can live with greater presence, purpose, peace, and aloha.
Be Resilient Like a Palm Tree
Today, my friend Gardenia organized a virtual watercolor activity to celebrate my birthday. I am so grateful for her friendship and for the opportunity to begin my birthday morning with creativity, reflection, and connection.
As I looked at the painting I created, I began thinking about the palm trees I see throughout Hawaiʻi. Palm trees experience wind, rain, heat, and storms. They survive because they refuse to move, know how to bend and stay connected to their roots while responding to the conditions around them.
That is the kind of resilience I want to embody to be built on flexibility, self-trust, community, rest, reflection, and knowing how to return to myself.
At 37, I was learning to celebrate the life I had built.
At 38, I am learning how to stay rooted while that life changes.
Even though I do not have all the answers, I am still grieving and growing while learning how to live inside uncertainty.
The best parts if that I am intentionally being more present, reflective, receiving, connected to nature, grounded in what matters, trusting myself, and more rooted in who I am becoming.
Happy 38th birthday to me. 🌺