Holiday Survival Guide

November 10, 8:00 PM CST

Live | Free | Q&A

A free live working session for the one who always holds the holidays together.

We’ll sort out which obligations are load-bearing, how to decline without it becoming the story of the year, and what to do when you’re at 40% in a room acting like you’re at 90.

Tuesday, November 10, 8 PM Central.

Everyone who shows up gets the live session with Q&A, plus the full recording and transcript, yours to keep.

Paid members also get the Holiday Survival workbook — your obligations, your capacity, and your actual plan. Plus additional perks HERE.

This one’s free. No catch. I’d rather have you in the room.

Learn More

You’re the one who lived through something unthinkable and went back to work on Monday.

You’re the caregiver who hasn’t had a physical in three years.

You’re the manager everyone escalates to.

You’re the one who holds every appointment in your head.

The Cost of Functioning is about how the world judges people by what it can see from the outside, and uses that to deny what they're actually carrying.

Every week I write about the gap between what you can carry and what you can carry without disappearing a little to make it work.

We’re very good at noticing collapse. We’re terrible at noticing the six months before it, when someone is still getting everything done and therefore assumed to be fine.

Not sure where to begin? Start with what you want back.

I’m supposed to tell you my credentials so you trust me more, I guess. So, I’ve got degrees in psychology and adult learning, an internationally certified trauma-informed coach, and about 50,000 people who follow this work across social media. I also spent a childhood of over-achieving, ten years in a marriage that ran entirely on my ability to absorb things, and a lifetime of managing everyone else’s emotions to avoid feeling my own, which is the credential that actually matters here.

I started the cost of Functioning because when that marriage ended, I went looking for an explanation and found an industry that was excellent at telling me what was wrong with me and useless at telling me what to do about it. Diagnosis after diagnosis. No direction. And underneath it all, a quiet assumption that an earlier version of me was waiting somewhere to be restored.

There wasn’t. There never is. Your nervous system is smart and adaptive, and it moves forward — not backward toward some ideal state that never actually existed.

So I stopped asking what was wrong with me and started asking where I was. That turned out to be a much better question, and it’s the one everything here is built around.

→ See everything included on the Become a Member page