I didn't plan
any of this.

In 2005, at the age of 39, I was diagnosed with celiac disease after a lifetime of feeling not-great-to-ill. The path to healing was letting go of gluten and saying yes to everything I could eat instead of mourning what I couldn't.

So I started writing about it — long letters to friends who wanted to know how I was managing. My brother finally asked me to start a blog so he could read my stories on the weekends instead of getting an email every morning.

That's how I inadvertently started the world's first gluten-free food blog, Gluten-Free Girl. Changing my plan worked out.

What I loved most about that work was not creating the recipes, although I'm a damned good recipe creator now. I loved connecting with the women who gathered in the comments section. I was writing my stories — spilling mushroom stock on my woolen slippers, the triumph of a raggedy fig newton that didn't taste half bad — and by showing up as myself, I was somehow emboldening other women to show up as themselves.

I showed them that allowing ourselves to live in the moment, imperfectly, learning, is the true joy in life. I didn't know yet that this is what I was born to do.

I met a kind-hearted man who was a chef and became my husband. We taught culinary getaways in a Tuscan villa, appeared on the Food Network, and won a James Beard award for one of our three cookbooks. My blog was named one of the top 50 food blogs in the world by The London Times. I gave speeches in front of hundreds of people. We brought two incredible kids into our shared life.

And much of the time, I was hyper-vigilant, sleep-deprived, and doubting myself entirely. You can win awards and be plagued with anxiety. You can publish five books and still doubt yourself as a writer. You can live your whole life and never quite belong to yourself.

One evening, after a stressful day filled with financial meetings, cookbook deadlines, and dozens of problems to solve, I stood at a window watching sheep in a field. And this thought rose, unbidden: I guess I'm not a writer anymore. My body knew that something had to change.

The next day I had a mini stroke. It took away my words and the feeling in the left side of my body for nearly twenty-four hours. It was terrifying. It was also — I can see this now — the call to adventure for a journey I needed to walk through slowly.

My doctor told me all of my tests came back healthy. "But we know that emotional stress can cause physical damage." So he gave me the most astonishing homework assignment I've ever received: write down every story you've told yourself about why you're not good enough. And then, one by one, rewrite them.

I have ADHD and CPTSD, but I was undiagnosed until well into my 50s. I realize now that I spent decades masking both, performing productivity, waiting for a standing ovation that might release me from the dread of not being good enough. My own passions and desires were buried so deep backstage that I could no longer find them.

So I wrote down those stories, day after day, until I could see it clearly. I let go of Gluten-Free Girl after thirteen years. If I know anything about my brain now — a brain built for joy — I know this: when the joy is gone, I cannot stay.

I turned back toward my decades-long Buddhist mindfulness practice, and my deep interest in neuroscience, and I began writing my way into a different life. That writing became my memoir, ENOUGH: Notes from a Woman Who Has Finally Found It. Brené Brown recommended it. The Washington Post recommended it. Thousands of women have told me it helped them to look at their own stories with a clear eye.

More journeys followed — because life keeps asking, and the trip up the spiral staircase keeps bringing us back to the same place, only wider after the climb. Each one brought me closer to understanding my wild and tender-hearted self.

That's how I began to break free of the stifling spaces I had stuffed myself into as a child, to fit in, to please, and to make myself smaller.

Each time I broke those boxes, I found I could breathe and be me more easily.