Unapologetic Bridge Burning

This newsletter was supposed to help women in healthcare navigate burnout.

I had plans, a vision for Rose Ranch, a whole thing mapped out. That dream is dead now. Corked and drowned, and I'm not mourning it.

What happened instead was five years of unraveling everything I thought I knew about myself. It started during COVID when I was a burned-out Hollywood marketing professional who'd built a life that looked successful but felt like slow poison.

I ran from that life not knowing where I was headed. What followed was the full spectrum: stone heart to complete breakdown to dark night of the soul.

Then I overcorrected, became the yes-woman who twisted herself into whatever shape felt safe for everyone else's comfort. No boundaries, no voice, totally suppressed.

The middle ground took longer to find than I expected.

When I finally used my voice to have the conversations that needed having, when I redrew the lines that had gotten too blurry, most of my relationships didn't survive. The old me would have tried to end things gracefully, with explanations and careful consideration for everyone's feelings.

Instead, I poured kerosene and lit the match.

For the first time in decades, I didn't feel like I owed anyone an explanation for living according to my own values.

Yesterday, a friend in LA said, "Welcome back, Macala. I've missed you."

When I told her I didn't know where to begin writing about any of this, she reminded me:

"You've always written. That's how we met."

So Mind, Meaning and Matter starts over here.

Raw material from a woman who's back to being familiar to herself, but not broken this time.

A woman unwilling to live outside her own beliefs.

I don't know what this becomes, but it won't be careful.

Here’s the first hit.

Mind

What does five years of breathwork, mindfulness, yoga, and 250 self-help books teach a woman?

There's nothing wrong with you.

There never was.

Stop fucking paying to be told there is.

There's nothing wrong with you.

There never was.

The problem is you believing there was.

There's nothing wrong with you.

There never was.

You just bought the lie that there was.

Meaning

I learned embodied presence riding a horse up a mountain.

Meditation apps? Useless.

Retreats? Pointless.

They're teaching you techniques while your soul is screaming about what's actually eating you alive.

Overthinking, stress, anxiety — symptoms.

Your soul knows the real problem.

Address what's actually destroying you and those symptoms vanish.

Presence isn't something you practice. It's what happens when you stop avoiding what hurts.

Stop downloading solutions. Start facing what needs facing.

Your soul has the answers.

The apps don't.

Matter

Think about the parts of yourself you've been taught to leave behind.

The destructive part. The messy part.

The part that burns bridges and makes choices that hurt people, including yourself.

The part that's selfish, that's too much, that doesn't fit into polite society's expectations of who you should be.

What If We're Not Meant to Shed Our Difficult Parts?

Listening To (for the sixth time):