For a long time, I believed my work and my identity were deeply intertwined.

Not just connected.
Entangled.

I wasn’t simply a midwife.
I was the founder.
The leader.
The safe place.
The problem solver.
The one holding everything together.

For years, my birth centers were more than businesses to me.

They represented:

• purpose
• impact
• sacrifice
• ambition
• community
• proof of what women could build

They held some of the most meaningful moments of my life.

And if I’m honest, they also held enormous pressure.

When you spend years building something, especially something mission-driven, it quietly becomes part of your nervous system.

You stop asking:
“Is this sustainable for me?”

Because everyone around you keeps reinforcing:
“But look how successful it is.”

And those are not always the same thing.

That realization changed me.

Because there came a point where I could feel that the version of me required to continue carrying everything was no longer the version of me trying to emerge.

I think many women reach this place long before they admit it out loud.

Especially caregivers.
Especially leaders.
Especially high-capacity women who are praised for how much they can hold.

At some point, the identity itself becomes heavy.

Not because the work was meaningless.
Not because the mission was wrong.
But because you can outgrow even the things you once prayed for.

That’s a complicated kind of grief.

People often assume grief only exists around failure.

But there is also grief in letting go of something that mattered deeply.

Grief in realizing:
“I cannot continue being this version of myself anymore.”

Closing my birth centers forced me to confront questions I had spent years avoiding:

Who am I without the title?
Who am I when I’m not constantly needed?
Who am I outside of achievement, responsibility, and service?
What remains when the role disappears?

And honestly?

I’m still discovering the answers.

But what I know now is this:

Identity is not meant to be a prison.

We are allowed to evolve.

We are allowed to become someone new.

We are allowed to release identities that once fit us beautifully but no longer align with who we are becoming.

That doesn’t erase the meaning of what came before.

It honors it.

I will always be grateful for what I built.
For the women I served.
For the lives changed.
For the version of me who carried that vision forward for so many years.

But I’m also learning something equally important:

My worth was never supposed to live inside a role.

And maybe rebirth sometimes looks exactly like this:
not becoming someone entirely different…

but finally meeting yourself outside of what you’ve been performing for survival, success, or belonging.

I used to think identity was something you achieved.

Now I think it’s something you continuously shed and rediscover.

And maybe that’s the real work of becoming.