There are seasons of life where everything feels like it’s being pulled into sharper contrast.

That’s what this season feels like for me.

Maybe it’s the Saturn-Neptune tension in the air right now. The push-pull between structure and fog. What’s real and what’s imagined. What’s solid and what’s dissolving. But lately, I’ve been feeling the shifts in my body before I can even fully name them with words.

At Soulward Summit, I found myself in the middle of an activation called Therapaint, processing an emotion I didn’t realize I was still carrying so viscerally: the clawing feeling of being projected onto.

Not just misunderstood. Not just unseen. But that deeper, more invasive feeling of being grabbed at energetically. Interpreted. Pulled on. Reduced into someone else’s version of who you are.

We were outside on the lawn, splattering paint against paper, moving emotion through the body. And at some point, I stopped painting.

I dropped to my knees.

And I started clawing at the paper.

Hard enough that my press-on nails tore through the gloves I was wearing. You could see the marks in the paper after. The physical evidence of something I had clearly been carrying for a long time.

And as intense as that moment was, what struck me most was what happened after.

Because the very next day, I was in a completely different kind of room.

A VIP integration day where I felt deeply held. Witnessed. Received. I was gifted a card that said:

What I want, I can achieve.

And it hit me that this is what life has been showing me lately in such an undeniable way: the contrast between rooms that hook you and rooms that hold you.

The difference between being projected onto and being fully witnessed.

And once you feel that contrast in your body, it becomes almost impossible to ignore.

The world is showing me contrast right now. Deep contrast. Between the rooms where I feel projected onto and the rooms where I feel deeply seen and held.

And honestly, I think this is one of the clearest ways I’ve ever understood what visibility actually asks of us.

Because for a long time, I thought the goal was simply to be seen. But being seen is not the same thing as being met.

To be truly seen is to be witnessed. To be heard is to be received. But to be projected onto is to become a screen for someone else’s fear, assumptions, discomfort, insecurity, and need to categorize what they don’t fully understand.

And when you’ve spent a lot of your life feeling unworthy of being fully considered, that distinction matters. A lot.

Some rooms hold you. Some rooms hook you.

There are rooms where people are with you. Where you feel safe, honest, received, and held in your full humanity.

And then there are rooms where you can feel the energy trying to grab onto you. Interpret you. Reduce you. Place you. Pull meaning out of you that was never yours to carry.

That’s the energy I’ve been thinking about lately.

The clawing energy of projection.

And once you’ve felt the difference in your body, it becomes very hard to unsee.

What’s been shifting

Recently, I’ve been doing some deeper release work (hello Cord Cutting with Marguerite! ) around smallness and around a very specific wound:

the feeling of being unworthy of being considered.

Not just misunderstood. Not just overlooked.

But the deeper, subtler feeling of people deciding who you are, what you mean, or how they want to hold you without actually taking the time to meet you.

That’s a very particular kind of pain.

And when you start releasing it, something changes. You become much more sensitive to the difference between being witnessed and being projected onto.

You notice which spaces feel spacious. Which ones feel grabby. Which ones feel like truth. And which ones feel like someone trying to fit you into a script they already wrote.

That’s what’s been getting louder for me lately.

Soulward Summit gave me a body-level reference point

One of the clearest examples of this for me has been Soulward Summit. Not just the event itself, though that was absolutely the highest and biggest expression of it. But everything that kept living after it.

The voice memo conversations across time zones that somehow already carry more depth than some connections I’ve had for years. The side texts. The group chats.

The names of the chats alone telling on the energy: HOT GIRL FNDRS 🔥💖. Super Yacht WhatsApp.

You can tell a lot about a room by what people feel safe enough to name inside it. That matters to me. Because those spaces don’t just feel “safe” in the way people often talk about safety online. They feel alive. They feel playful. Honest. Unforced. Like people actually getting to be themselves in real time.

No clawing. No flattening. No weird energetic undertow of projection.

Just resonance. Just chemistry. Just the kind of connection that keeps unfolding because something true was opened.

And once you feel that kind of room in your body, it becomes almost impossible to keep romanticizing the ones that only ever asked you to shrink.

That contrast has been hitting me hard lately.

Because once you remember what it feels like to be in rooms where people are genuinely with you, it becomes a lot harder to normalize spaces where people are just trying to make meaning out of you.

This has everything to do with visibility

Because here’s what I’m realizing:

A lot of women think they have a visibility problem. But often, what they actually have is a projection wound.

They’ve spent so long trying to protect themselves from being misunderstood, misread, flattened, or reduced that they unconsciously start shaping their expression around avoiding distortion.

And that changes everything. It changes how you write, how you sell, how you explain your work, and how much of yourself you allow people to actually encounter.

I felt this so deeply recently during a marketing masterclass inside Authentic Business Club.

There was a conversation around context. How much context does someone need to understand your work? How do you create a smaller freebie or offer that still “makes sense”? How do you help people access your work without the full backstory?

And I realized how much of my own history lives inside that question.

Because for so many years, I was trying to make my work make sense to people who were never actually entering it through resonance. I was trying to pre-explain myself into safety. Trying to translate something potent into something instantly digestible. Trying to remove any edge that might make someone misunderstand me. And in the process, I watered down what I was actually here to say.

The hidden cost of trying to be understood by everyone

There is absolutely a place for context.

But there is also a point where context stops being clarity and starts becoming self-protection.

That line is everything.

Because when you’re still trying to earn the right to be fully considered, you will over-explain, over-contextualize, over-soften, over-qualify, and over-package your truth until it loses its original charge.

Not because your work isn’t clear.

But because some part of you is still trying to create immunity from projection.

And that’s not possible.

Not in leadership. Not in visibility. Not in art. Not in business. At a certain point, your work has to be willing to stand on its own feet. Not because everyone will understand it immediately. But because it is true enough to hold.

The projection field

The more visible you become, the more you enter what I think of as the projection field.

This is the space where people stop simply receiving you and start filtering you through their assumptions, their discomfort, their insecurities, and their need to categorize what they don’t fully understand.

And if you don’t understand this, you will spend a lot of energy trying to become more “accurate” to people who were never actually seeing you clearly to begin with.

That’s where women start shrinking.

That’s where they start softening their voice, making their work more palatable, and editing out the parts that carry the deepest charge.

Projection can feel like danger if your body still associates being misunderstood with losing belonging.

A quick Human Design note, because it matters

In Human Design, the projection field has a more specific meaning.

It’s especially relevant for people with 2-line and 5-line profile, where others tend to see not just you, but what they imagine you are here to do for them.

If you carry 2-line energy, you may notice that people naturally “call out” gifts in you before you even feel fully ready to name them yourself.

That can be beautiful when it comes from the right people and the right timing.

But when it comes from the wrong rooms, it can feel like pressure, depletion, being pulled into roles you never consciously chose, or being seen for a talent without actually being met.

Sometimes what looks like recognition is just projection with good branding.

If you carry 5-line energy, this can feel even more intense. Because 5-line projection often comes with people seeing you as the answer, the fix, the disruptor, or the one who can save, solve, or restore order.

Which sounds powerful until you realize how often that means people are relating to a role instead of a real person.

That’s the trap. You become deeply visible, but not necessarily deeply known.

And that’s where discernment becomes everything.

And even if you don’t have a 2 or 5 line in your profile, I still think the broader conversation matters.

Because in practice, anyone who is highly visible, deeply expressive, naturally magnetic, or building something outside the usual script will encounter projection.

Especially trailblazers.

Especially women who are no longer willing to be legible only through other people’s comfort.

So what do you actually do with this?

If you’ve been reading this and recognizing yourself in it, the answer isn’t to try to eliminate projection.

You can’t.

Not if you want to be visible. Not if you want to lead. Not if you’re doing anything that exists outside of what’s already been approved or understood.

Projection is part of the terrain.

Especially if you are building something that doesn’t have a clear reference point, expressing yourself in a way that isn’t easily categorized, or moving in a way that challenges what people have been taught is “normal.”

In other words:

If you’re a trailblazer, you are going to be projected onto.

That doesn’t mean something has gone wrong.

It means you’ve stepped outside of the script.

1. Anchor back into your inherent value

Before anything else, this is the foundation:

• You are not valuable because you are understood.

• You are not worthy because you are correctly interpreted.

• You are inherently valuable in who you are and in the magic you bring by existing as yourself.

Projection doesn’t change that. Misinterpretation doesn’t remove that. Someone else’s story about you doesn’t define that. If anything, this work is about returning to that baseline over and over again.

2. Learn to identify whether you’re being met or being cast

This is such an important distinction.

Ask yourself:

• Do I feel nourished by this room, or depleted by it?

• Am I being met, or am I being cast?

• Is this recognition, or is this expectation?

• Is this a space where I can stay whole, or one where I immediately start editing myself?

Because once you start asking better questions, you stop taking every energetic experience at face value. And that changes a lot.

3. Stop organizing your expression around avoiding projection

This is where so much of the energy leak happens. Trying to say it perfectly, explain it enough, soften it just right, or add enough context to prevent misunderstanding.

But what’s actually happening underneath that is this:

you’re trying to create safety through control of perception.

And that will dilute your work every time.

Instead, the shift is simple:

Let your work be clear.

Let it be true.

Let it carry its full charge.

And allow people to meet it from where they are.

Not everyone will.

And that’s okay.

4. Build and choose the right rooms

This is the part we don’t talk about enough. It’s not just about tolerating projection. It’s also about becoming more available for spaces where you are actually witnessed.

Where you don’t have to translate yourself constantly. Where you’re not being flattened into something more digestible. Where your nuance is allowed to exist. Where your presence is met, not managed. Those rooms exist.

And once you experience them, your standards change. You stop trying to be for every room. You start building and choosing the right ones.

Final reframe

A lot of what feels like a visibility problem is actually a threshold of self-trust.

Not:

Can I be seen?

But:

Can I remain rooted in who I am even when I am being interpreted?

Because once you can do that, projection stops being something you organize your life around. It becomes something you notice without collapsing for. And that’s when your work starts to land differently.

You stop trying to be for every room. You start building the ones that can actually hold you.

I was sitting around a bonfire after Soulward Summit (a conference I co-hosted) surrounded by women I trust, when I said something out loud that I think I’m still learning how to live with:

I’m the villain in a lot of people’s stories.

Not because I’ve never gotten it wrong. I have. There are friendships and relationships where I can look back and say, yeah, I could’ve handled that differently. I’m not interested in pretending I’ve moved through life without impact. I care deeply about how I affect people. Sometimes, probably to a fault.

I’m the kind of person who, if I’m driving and my friend in the passenger seat has a wonky back, I’ll literally make sure the tires on my side of the car go over the speed bump instead of hers.

That is how I move through relationships.

I am thinking about your comfort.
Your bandwidth.
Your feelings.
Your context.
The invisible thing you’re carrying that maybe no one else would notice.

And I think that’s why this particular kind of grief has been so hard to name.

Because underneath all of the conflict, the projection, the misunderstandings, the “I never meant it that way” conversations, the thing that hurts most is actually very simple:

I am deeply considerate. And I do not feel deeply considered.

That’s the wound.

And lately, it’s been impossible to ignore.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself tracing a pattern that honestly stretches back years.

Different people.
Different circumstances.
Same ache.

A friend sends something inflammatory to someone close to me, gets called out, and instead of taking it up with the person who set the boundary, routes the whole thing through me → during one of the biggest, most important weekends of my life.

Another friend, someone I thought was one of my closest people, can’t seem to answer a simple logistical question I’ve been asking for over a week about whether she has the capacity to show up for something that matters deeply to me. I gave her an out. I made room. I made it easy. “If you don’t have the bandwidth, that’s okay. I just need to know.” And instead of a clear answer, I got delay, ambiguity, emotional flooding, and a whole lot of context in place of clarity.

And then there are the older stories.

The friendships where I could feel something had shifted, but no one said anything. So I was the one who opened the door. I was the one who said, Hey, if something’s off, let’s talk about it. Only to find out they had apparently been hurt by me for months or years…and by the time they finally brought it to me…

They weren’t asking for repair.

They were presenting a case.

That part is brutal.

Because when someone has been privately building a story about you for long enough, your actual intentions and sometimes even your actual behavior become almost irrelevant.

You’re no longer in a conversation.
You’re in a courtroom.

And I think that’s why some of these dynamics have felt so impossible to heal.

Not because I wasn’t willing, but because by the time I got there, I wasn’t being met as a person anymore.

I was being met as a symbol.

That’s the part I’ve been trying to understand.

Because I don’t actually think I’ve been the villain in all of these stories.

But I do think I’ve often been the mirror.

And there’s a difference.

A mirror doesn’t create what’s there.
It reflects it back.

I’m starting to realize that in some relationships, what people were reacting to wasn’t necessarily me. It was what got stirred up in them around me.

Their insecurity.
Their resentment.
Their unspoken expectations.
Their disappointment.
Their fear of not being chosen.
Their discomfort with my boundaries.
Their discomfort with my capacity changing.

That last one has hit especially hard.

Because when I zoom out, one of the clearest patterns I can see is this:

People are often very comfortable receiving my capacity. They struggle when that capacity changes.

And that has been one of the most painful things to admit.

Because I have been a person with a lot of capacity.

I’m the one who checks in.
The one who organizes.
The one who remembers.
The one who follows up.
The one who notices when something’s off.
The one who makes the plan, builds the room, carries the emotional context, softens the edges, keeps things moving.

I know how to hold a lot.

But the older I get, the more I’m realizing that some people didn’t actually know how to relate to me.

They knew how to relate to what I provided.

And the moment I stopped over-functioning because I was under-resourced, heartbroken, burned out, leading something big, or simply trying to choose myself for once, the relationship got exposed.

That’s not an easy thing to say out loud. But it’s true.

There was a season of my life, after I was laid off from Twitter, in the uncertainty of my new direction but certain of what I didn’t want to continue, when I was not okay. There were so many unknowns (financially, emotionally, etc) but that’s a story for a different day.

I was depleted in a way that changed my availability. Not in a dramatic, “I’m disappearing and ghosting everyone” way. In a very adult, very human way. I was honest about it. I said, I don’t have the same capacity right now.

And what I learned in that season was heartbreaking.

Because some people who I had shown up for through divorces, miscarriages, breakdowns, spirals, life implosions, all of it…did not know how to stay in relationship with me when I was no longer able to provide that same level of access and emotional labor back.

They didn’t say, “Hey, I miss you. This feels different. I’m having a hard time with the shift.”

Instead, I became “cold”. Distant. Different. The problem.

That’s what I mean when I say I think I’ve been miscast.

Not always misunderstood.
Miscast.

There’s a difference between someone not fully getting you and someone assigning you a role in their story that has very little to do with who you actually are.

And if you’ve ever experienced that, you know how disorienting it can be.

Because it makes you question everything.

Was I selfish?
Was I too blunt?
Was I not supportive enough?
Was I too much?
Was I too unavailable?
Too focused on myself?
Too harsh for naming what was true?

I have spent years trying to answer those questions responsibly.

Not performatively. But genuinely.

I’ve been in the “I’m the common denominator, so I must be the problem” spiral.

I have spent more money on therapy around friendship wounds than I’d care to admit. I’ve done conflict work. Communication work. Attachment work. Nervous system work. Repair work. I have tried, over and over again, to become a safer, clearer, more emotionally responsible person to be in relationship with.

And while that work has mattered deeply, here’s what I’m also realizing:

No amount of self-work can protect you from being miscast by people who rely on your over-functioning.

There are some dynamics where no amount of your insight, accountability, softness, or skill will ever be enough. The role you’re being asked to play was never actually about truth.

It was about comfort.
Access.
Control.
Convenience.
A version of you that was easier to consume. And when you stop being that version, people who benefited from it don’t always know what to do.

I also want to say something that feels important here.

I know enough about myself to understand that I naturally hold a bit of a projection field (5/1 Manifestor 🙋‍♀️). People often don’t just relate to who I am. They relate to what they assume, expect, fear, need, or assign onto me. That’s real. I could write a whole separate piece about that and I will.

But what I’m more interested in here is what it feels like to live inside that dynamic in actual relationships.

To be someone who is often experienced as “strong” and still feel profoundly unsupported.

To be the one who sees everyone’s context and still feel like no one can clock the moment you’re in.

To be hosting one of the biggest events of your life and find yourself fielding emotional shrapnel from people who, if the roles were reversed, you would have gone out of your way not to burden.

To make room.
To make it easy.
To make the path clear.
And still be met with fog.

That’s the part I think a lot of us don’t talk about.

Because it’s one thing to say, I’ve been hurt.

It’s another thing to admit:

I’m grieving the realization that some of the people closest to me could not rise to the moments that mattered to me.

That’s what has been cracking something open in me.

Not just the conflict itself.

The timing.
The attunement.
The lack of regard.

Because when you are someone who is constantly accounting for other people’s context, it hurts in a very specific way when they cannot seem to account for yours.

It’s not just what happened.

It’s when it happened.

And that reveals more than I think we want to admit.

What made this impossible to ignore wasn’t just the pattern.

It was the contrast.

I got one of those texts during the conference (15 min after getting off stage to kick off the whole thing), while I was literally in a room I had built, surrounded by 40 women (and one supportive king) who saw me clearly, who weren’t projecting onto me, who weren’t asking me to distort myself to be digestible.

And I remember looking up from my phone, taking it all in, and realizing something I don’t think I could’ve seen as clearly anywhere else:

I am not too much. I am just no longer available for relationships that require me to become less myself in order to maintain them.

That same day, the speaker on stage asked:

Where is your energy leaking? What are you ready to release?

And without overthinking it, I wrote down:

“Maintaining relationships at all costs.”

That’s what I’ve been doing.

Holding on.
Explaining.
Bridging.
Softening.
Trying to preserve connection even after something essential had already left the room.

And being in a space where I didn’t have to do that, where I was seen clearly without effort, made it impossible to keep negotiating with relationships that required me to.

And if there’s one thing I’m walking away from Soulward Summit with, it’s this:

There are rooms where you do not have to earn your belonging by over-functioning.

There are rooms where your muchness is not a problem to solve.
Where your sensitivity is not a burden.
Where your truth doesn’t need to be diluted to be received.
Where your presence is not just tolerated, but deeply welcomed.

And maybe that’s the real grief in all of this.

Not just seeing what no longer fits.

But finally experiencing what does.

Because once you’ve been in a room where you feel:
seen,
heard,
held,
expanded,
and met…

it becomes a lot harder to keep bargaining with relationships that require self-abandonment to maintain.

That’s the power of community.

Not just being surrounded by people.

But being surrounded by the right people.

People with heart.
People with capacity.
People who can celebrate you without resenting you.
People who can meet your humanity without projecting onto it.
People who don’t need you to become smaller in order to stay connected.

That’s the kind of room I want to keep building.

Not just for myself.
But for the women who have spent years wondering if they are too much, too intense, too honest, too sensitive, too hard to hold.

You’re not.

You may have just been trying to bloom in places that could only tolerate your pruning.

Not physically loud, necessarily…information loud. Advice loud. Opinion loud. Every corner of the internet has a framework, a blueprint, a step-by-step system that promises to show you the “right” way to do something. Five ways to make six figures. Ten steps to grow your Substack. The exact routine every successful founder supposedly follows before 7 a.m.

Scroll long enough and you’ll find someone confidently explaining the exact opposite of the thing you just read.

It’s overwhelming in a way that didn’t exist even a generation ago. Today we absorb more information in a single day than someone living a few centuries ago would have encountered in their entire lifetime. When you think about that, it becomes obvious that clarity isn’t just about making better decisions anymore.

It’s about filtering signal from noise.

And if you don’t have a strong internal signal, the noise will make decisions for you.

When the Life You Built Stops Making Sense

For a lot of people, the first crack in the system shows up around their Saturn return.

Somewhere around your late twenties or early thirties, the life you carefully constructed begins to feel strangely misaligned. On paper, everything might look correct. You followed the rules. You made the responsible choices. You built something that made sense according to the models you were given.

And yet something inside you quietly starts asking a different question:

Is this actually mine?

Because when you look closely, many of the decisions that shaped your life weren’t consciously chosen. They were inherited. Stories you absorbed about what success looks like. Stories about adulthood, money, relationships, career paths, and stability. Expectations that came from parents, teachers, culture, and the invisible rules of whatever environment you grew up in.

For many women especially, there was never a clear blueprint for living an independent, self-directed life. Our mothers often didn’t have that option in the same way we do now, and our grandmothers certainly didn’t. The examples of women designing their own lives…

→ making their own money
→ building their own paths
→ defining their own identities

…were usually distant figures we saw in media or admired from afar. They weren’t models we witnessed up close.

So we inherited structures built for a completely different reality. And eventually there comes a moment when you realize that the life you designed was built using an outdated map.

Alignment: Figuring Out What Is Actually Yours

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I have written more mission statements than I can count.

Corporate America.
Side hustles.
Startups.
Rebrands.

Every time I started something new, I followed the same business plan rubric like it was gospel: executive s…

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I’ve been in Brazil for two weeks now and the contrast is…LOUD. This trip, although intended to be a vacation with a friend, has turned into a philosophical journey of noticing and deep conversations around how we’ve chosen to live. Here’s some more context before I dive into the topic of violence and its impact on our day-to-day.

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