I spent more than a decade trying to claim my seat at other tables – fancy dining tables, board room tables, his table or her table, despite finding the most value at the table that raised me. And then one day, without any warning, I found myself at another table: the operating table, clinging to what little life I had left.

In that fragile moment so much came into focus, the way it does when someone dances with death.

The multi-million dollar businesses I had built, the magazine features, the big names I had advised, the international stages… they all faded into the background as I awakened to what was real.

I was about to die, and I had spent my better years seeking a rightful seat at the wrong tables.

What do I mean by that?

I had spent years pursuing. Pursuing freedom “for my family.” Pursuing income “for more freedom.” Pursuing opportunities. Pursuing the approval of people I wanted to notice me. I called it ambition, drive, building a legacy. And some of it was those things – I’m not going to sit here and tell you everything I built was meaningless, because it wasn’t.

But I was building at the dining room tables of life. Dressing the part, performing my way through it, optimizing, strategizing, hustling and choking out the parts of myself that actually mattered. My marriage was surviving my ambition, not thriving alongside it. My kids were getting what was left of me after the business got the best of me. My faith had become a compartment I opened on Sunday mornings instead of the foundation upon which I was supposed to build. And I couldn’t see any of it because from the dining room table, everything looked exactly right.

And then it happened. The moment you see in movies or books, but this time it was happening to me.

They hoisted my limp body onto the operating table, and that’s when I heard it.

A dripping sound. No, more like running water, the faucet not quite on full blast, more like halfway. Consistent and steady. I remember lying there wondering where it was coming from.

Did someone leave the sink on while they were washing up to prep for surgery?

Maybe someone knocked over a bucket of water?

My eye caught a glimmer of something beyond the table on the floor, moving outward towards the walls.

It wasn’t water I was hearing. It was me.

Blood. My blood, pouring out of my body, onto the floor, making its way beyond the edges of the table, creating a growing pool beneath me.

I saw someone grab something to mop it out of the way. I heard the operating team’s shoes sloshing through it on their way to me. I felt a warm hand grab mine as my body convulsed. Everything flashed white, and then I was gone.

I lost my son that day. After delivering him – a stillbirth – I nearly lost my life.

Doctors described my survival as “medically improbable”. I had lost more than half my blood volume.

In the minutes of chaos leading up to that moment, the thing I was most terrified of wasn’t dying. It was the thought that I’d spent the best years of my life chasing things that God never asked me to chase and that I was about to meet Him with a résumé where He was looking for a life.

That thought has never left me, really. It propelled me to write a book, Your Big Next, and now to write these letters to you.

The person who went into that operating room – the performer, the striver, the one who measured her worth in revenue and recognition – she did die on that table. The one who woke up was someone else. Not better or fixed, necessarily. Just… awake. The kind of awake where you can see what your life actually looks like instead of what you’ve been telling yourself it looks like.

You want to know the thought that wrecked me most?

If I had died that day, my kids would have grown up saying, “Mom was impressive.” Not “Mom was present,” and I knew the impact of that truth would affect them in ways they never deserved.

I decided on that table – or maybe God decided for me – that I was done living a life that would make a good LinkedIn profile but a garbage eulogy.

That’s what this is. Our own Kitchen Table.

I’m going to write about what happens to your marriage when your ego gets tangled up in your revenue. About the lie of “having it all” and what my grandmother would have said about it. About pulling my kids out of school to homeschool them when I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing, but a strong conviction on my heart. About faith, not the kind that is saved just for Sundays, but the kind that sounds like begging God to save your son and waking up to find out He didn’t, and choosing to stay anyway. About the coaching industry I helped build and the parts of it I can no longer defend. About what it actually looks like to be a driven, ambitious type who chose to let her husband lead the family and how that sentence alone will make half the internet lose their minds. All of that among a thousand other conversations that aren’t being had, but should be.

I’m going to tell you with the same commitment to truth that I found at the dimly lit, water ring-stained kitchen table of my youth.

But I want to be honest about what this is NOT, because if you’re looking for the standard stuff, I will waste your time here.

The Kitchen Table is not another newsletter about business, a motherhood blog, or a self-help publication with 5-simple-steps to transform your life. I’ve been all of those things at various points in my career and I’m done separating myself into different categories.

This is where it all lives together – the many nuances of life – because that’s what feels the most honest to me. Our ambition and our doubt, our faith and our despair, our calling and our cost, the dichotomies that make us human. That’s life. Real life.

I’m going to write about things that most people are thinking but nobody is saying out loud.

Some of this might make you as uncomfortable as it makes me. At least we’re in good company, I suppose. The kitchen table was never a comfortable place. It’s where you heard the thing you didn’t want to hear from the person who loved you too much to let you keep believing your own nonsense.

This is for you if you feel the fracture.

You know the one, that hairline crack between a life that looks right and a life that feels wrong. Between what you’ve built and what you were actually called to build. Between the résumé version of you and the 2am version of you. Between the life you’re living and the life you’ll wish you’d lived.

You might be a founder who can’t stop building because you’ve forgotten who you are without the company. A parent who feels pulled back towards your family but is terrified the world will forget you. A leader who hit every goal and still feels hollow. A couple trying to raise a family against the grain of this messed up world. A person whose faith has been beckoning, but has taken a backseat. A person who’s been told she can have it all and is starting to suspect that was the most expensive lie she ever bought.

I’m not here as a guru, an expert or an advisor. I’m just the chick with her gaggle of kids still detoxing her ambition who’s finally more hungry for congruence than clout. Who nearly bled out on a table and woke up knowing that God didn’t save her life so she could go back to wasting it.

So pull up a chair, there’s room at this table.

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