After 40 years in this industry, I’ve learned that plants and women get trapped in some of the exact same ways.
A plant can look fine from the top. Green growth. Maybe even blooms. Enough life showing that most people would call it healthy. Then you slide it out of the pot and see the truth. The roots are circling. Tight. Tangled. Looking for room that isn’t there. No fresh soil. No real stretch. No place to go.
I know too many women living exactly that way.
From the outside, you look capable as hell. You’re running companies, leading crews, solving problems, and carrying the invisible emotional labor of an entire ecosystem while trying not to drop the damn ball.
That’s the first kind of trap: Pot-bound. It’s a slow constriction where your life has become too tight for who you are becoming.
The other way we get trapped is being Uprooted.
Uprooted is what happens when life rips you out of the soil one too many times. A betrayal, a loss, a collapse, or a season so relentless it tugs at the same place again before the last wound has had time to scar. It’s rarely one thing. It’s the layers. The root of you becomes timid. You stop reaching not because you’re weak, but because you’ve learned to expect the tear.
Most women I know in this industry are both: Pot-bound on the surface, uprooted underneath.
You function like hell. You get up, get dressed, and get it done. But functioning isn’t the same as alignment and that is the most expensive confusion I know. You can hit every deadline and still feel yourself disappearing inside the life you built.
It gets heavy here. Spring in New England doesn’t gently tap you on the shoulder. It arrives like a Nor'easter and starts pulling. Nature wakes up fast. Money goes out before it comes in. Someone calls out. Something always slips. The industry calls it the "100 Days of Hell." I call it the 100-Day Sprint.
But whatever the name, it lands on a life that already has no room. Bodies that hurt. Cash flow that feels too tight. The strange erosion that happens when people treat you like the person who finds the lost keys instead of the woman who built the damn business.
Then somebody chirps: Just hire help. Take a day off. Get a massage.
It’s infuriating. Not because rest is bad, but because that advice misses the actual condition. You aren't simply overbooked. You are over-responsible and under-met. You’re spinning your roots in a container that no longer fits, or you’re trying to grow from a system that has been torn up too many times to trust the ground.
Familiar pain has staying power because it is familiar. And fear is powerful. We know what change can cost, so we stay trapped in containers that are too small because at least the suffering is known.
This is why I launched ReRooted. It is the new home for the work I have been doing for years coaching women and leading the Regenerative Business Community. It isn't a seven-step app for alignment. There is no app for this.
It is a real room. A place where we stop performing capacity and start telling the truth. A place where leadership, money, exhaustion, grief, visibility, and longing all sit at the same table without anyone needing to clean themselves up first.
We don’t root more deeply by pretending we’re fine. We root by admitting the ground gave way, or the pot got too small.
I’m going to keep running these free community calls for as long as we can sustain them. They are private and safe. They are a place to sit for an hour in a room where women actually understand the terrain. Eventually, this work will land in a retreat in December for those who want to go deeper, but the doorway starts here.
If you want to try this community on for size, you can register for the invitations here. I’ll send the details straight to your inbox so we can keep the conversation focused and off of public feeds.
Sometimes the first shift is small. You notice the pot is too small. You admit the ground gave way. You say yes to one room that offers a little fresh soil.
Sometimes that’s where the thread begins.