How to Know When Your World Has Gotten Too Small
Why pouring everything into one place will eventually cost you
One year, when my daughter was too little to remember Christmas anyway, we did basically nothing to celebrate. Low-key dinner with my in-laws. No decorations at home besides a little felt tree stuck to the wall. That was it. That was Christmas.
I could have gone home to see my family or hosted them here. I deliberately said no. I was too stressed, too overwhelmed, too empty to handle the logistics of being around the people I love most. So it was just me, my husband, and my daughter. A quiet Christmas that felt more like hiding than resting.
I told myself it was fine because she wouldn’t remember.
But I remember. I remember not having the capacity to carry the mental load of the holidays on top of everything else. I remember feeling like even the bare minimum was almost too much. I remember thinking this is just a season, I’ll come back to myself eventually.
I didn’t, though. Not for a while.
So how did I get there?
I had been working remotely for years before the pandemic, but when lockdown hit, I was only about a year and a half into building a life in Chicago. Tentative friendships. The beginnings of a network. Roots that hadn’t taken hold yet.
And then everything froze. The meetups stopped. The networking events disappeared. After being online all day for work, I couldn’t bring myself to log on again for virtual happy hours with friends back home. I just didn’t have it in me.
When your social life disappears, your job fills the space. My coworkers became my only community. My Teams channels became my water cooler. My laptop became the container for almost every meaningful interaction I had. I didn’t notice how small my world was getting because I was still so busy inside of it.
Then I got pregnant.
I think all new parents go through a haze. Your world narrows to feedings and sleep schedules and just getting through the day. You tell yourself you’ll resurface eventually. When the baby is older. When things settle down. When you can think straight again.
But I entered motherhood and leadership at the same time, and that haze never really lifted. Instead of resurfacing, I leaned harder into work. I kept chasing growth in my career, kept saying yes to more, kept thinking that if I could just reach the next level I would finally feel like myself again.
It didn’t work that way.
The more I climbed at work, the more I was pouring my best energy into problems I couldn’t control and ending my day at home with nothing left. I was giving my sharpest thinking to my job and leaving scraps for everything else. My husband and I stopped making plans together because we were both just trying to get to bedtime. I stopped texting friends back because I was too depleted by the end of the day. I stopped doing anything that was just for me because there was always something more urgent.
Unfortunately, even the hours I was pouring into work weren’t good hours. I was getting things done, sure. Checking boxes. Keeping the machine running. But without replenishing myself in any other domain of my life, even the work became grinding.
My world had shrunk down to the size of my laptop screen. That’s not a metaphor. My community, my friendships, my sense of self... they all existed in this virtual ecosystem that was draining me. And outside of it? I had almost nothing.
And then work went from hard to harder.
A series of curveballs hit at the same time. Things outside my control that made my job, the one place I had been pouring everything into, suddenly feel unstable. The details don’t matter. What matters is that I had spent years withdrawing from every other part of my life, and when the one thing I was invested in started shaking, I had nothing left in the bank.
No reserves. No safety net. No other sources of identity or support or joy to fall back on.
My body started keeping score. I wasn’t sleeping. My blood pressure was out of control. I was irritable with my family, snapping at the people I loved most. I was anxious all the time, the kind of anxiety that sits in your chest and doesn’t leave. I was this close to taking a leave of absence. This close to starting medication just to get through the day.
I had built a life with no shock absorbers. And I was falling apart.
One morning I woke up and thought: I’m not going to live like this.
Not “I should probably make some changes.” Not “maybe I’ll try to find more balance.” Just: I’m not going to live like this. Something has to be different. Now.
That wasn’t a goal. I didn’t write down a 90-day plan or set a target. It was more like a direction. A line in the sand about what I was willing to keep accepting. And from that direction, I could figure out what to do next.
So I stopped waiting to feel ready and I started moving.
I set up weekly calls with two of my closest friends. I joined a coworking space. I reached out to five former colleagues from my more entrepreneurial days, including three who had always been like mentors to me. All of this within maybe a month.
I stopped spiraling about things at work I couldn’t control and started putting that energy into things I could. I volunteered at my daughter’s school. I started actually talking to other parents at the playground and setting up playdates, so that I could have community and my daughter could too.
Each conversation, each coffee, each small investment outside of my corporate world felt like coming home to myself. I started to remember who I was before my entire identity got swallowed by my job title. I started to feel more stable. More grounded. More like a whole person instead of just a function.
The more I invested outside of work, the more capacity I had.
I’m not sharing this because I think my story is unique. I’m sharing it because I know it’s not.
I know there are other women whose worlds have shrunk down to the size of their laptops. Other moms running on fumes and telling themselves it’s just a season. Other people pouring their best energy into work and wondering why they feel so empty everywhere else. Other people one or two curveballs away from discovering they have nothing to fall back on.
If that’s you, I want you to know there’s a way out. You have to start looking honestly at where your time and energy are going. You have to start investing in the parts of your life you’ve been neglecting, even when it feels like you don’t have the bandwidth. You have to start believing that filling your own cup isn’t selfish, because it’s truly what makes everything else possible.
The work now is about protecting what I’ve rebuilt. Making sure the new patterns stick. Noticing when I start to slip back into old habits and course correcting before I end up back where I started.
This year was different before December even started.
We put the tree up early. I watched my daughter place the star on top, her face lit up by the glow of it. We had breakfast with Santa. We walked around looking at Christmas lights. I had everyone’s gifts bought and wrapped weeks before Christmas, sitting under the tree like they belonged there. I made the plans for my family to fly in. I had the capacity for all of it.
And then a respiratory virus ripped through our family in the early part of December and a stomach bug meant within 24 hours of my family landing in Chicago, we were all hunched over buckets and passing saltines around. That’s how we spent Christmas day: my whole family sick together in my living room.
I’m not going to pretend that was magical.
But my daughter had already gotten her magic. She’d gotten weeks of it even, and I’m the one who gave it to her.
That’s what this work is for. Not a perfect life. Just enough in the tank to show up for the one you have.
My daughter will remember this Christmas season. And I’m so proud I could give that magic to her.
I loved this!