The Kind of Crazy I Have Learned to Love About Myself

In a world that values money, I am not rich.

There, I said it.

I am not a financial giant. I have not built a multimillion-shilling empire. My coaching practice is not bringing in the kind of money that makes people look at my life and immediately conclude, She has made it.

And yet, in other worlds, I am incredibly wealthy.

In a world that values influence, I have built something.

In a world that values emotional maturity, self-awareness and healthy relationships, I have accumulated a kind of wealth that took me years to earn.

In a world that values presence, I am rich in time with my daughter.

And in a world that values meaningful work, I have built a life around something I care deeply about.

The strange thing about success is that you can be a failure in one room and a success in another without changing a single thing about yourself.

Sometimes, the room changes.

The measuring stick changes.

The people doing the measuring change.

And suddenly, so does your perceived worth.

I was reminded of this recently at a wedding.

I met a woman I hadn't seen in years. The last time I had seen her, I was newly married. She had come to give us a wedding gift, and during that visit, my husband had spoken to her about helping me find a job at the large East African company where she worked.

She had offered to help me transition into the company, and I remember that being a very real possibility in my life.

Years later, we met again.

We exchanged pleasantries, caught up briefly, and then she asked me how my coaching business was doing.

And, perhaps because of the history behind that question, I felt it.

Not because she had said anything cruel.

She hadn't.

But suddenly I was confronted with the life I had chosen and, perhaps more importantly, the life I could have chosen.

I thought about the mentorship opportunity she had once suggested.

I thought about employment.

I thought about stability.

And I thought about how my working life had actually begun.

Because I have to be honest about something when I tell the story of my career:

I have been privileged.

My career did not begin with me sending out hundreds of CVs into the void and receiving rejection after rejection.

My first job came through my father.

I had just finished college, and my dad was helping me look for work. He called a friend who had an opportunity for me.

I went to the establishment.

And I waited.

I remember waiting for that doctor for what felt like the entire day.

Eventually, she arrived, and instead of sitting down for some formal interview in an office, we went to a restaurant and had a meal while she interviewed me.

I got the job.

And I started the very next day.

That was my first experience of how privilege can open a door.

But privilege opening the door didn't mean I didn't have to work once I entered the room.

I started as an administrator.

By the time I was leaving, I had moved into management.

I stayed there for several years, until I got married and was preparing to move to another town with my husband.

My next significant employment opportunity came after marriage.

About six months into my marriage, after the honeymoon period had worn off and I was ready to return to work, my in-laws helped organize an interview for me.

Again, someone opened a door.

Again, I walked through it.

I remember sitting in the director's office and being interviewed.

I got the job.

In the weeks that followed, I started working there.

Eventually, I found myself responsible for more than a hundred people.

That experience taught me things I still use today.

It taught me about leadership.

People.

Systems.

Professionalism.

Accountability.

How organizations function.

How to create structures that allow people to do their work properly.

And when I eventually started my own coaching practice, I realized that those years had followed me.

Even though I am now running what is essentially a company of one, I still care about systems. I still care about professionalism. I still think about how my clients experience my work. I still create structures that support the people I serve.

So when I tell you that privilege helped me get some of my opportunities, I am not trying to erase my own effort.

And when I tell you that I worked hard, I am not trying to erase the privilege.

Both things are true.

People opened doors for me.

And I learned how to stay in the rooms I entered.

Eventually, however, I had to make a very different kind of choice.

I could pursue the stability of employment.

Or I could continue building my own thing.

And I chose entrepreneurship.

Sometimes I look at that decision and think:

Christine, you really are a little crazy.

Because what kind of person looks at a relatively stable career path and says, You know what? Let me make this much harder for myself.

Apparently, me.

And this is where I have had to become honest with myself.

My willingness to take enormous risks is one of my greatest assets.

It is also one of my greatest liabilities.

It has given me the courage to build something from scratch.

But it has also made me financially vulnerable.

And I don't want to romanticize that.

Money matters.

Financial stability matters.

Being able to provide for yourself matters.

There are very legitimate reasons why someone might look at my choices and think they are impractical, foolish or even irresponsible.

They may be right.

But there is another truth that matters too.

I am not making these choices from a place of survival.

That distinction is important to me.

I have had opportunities.

I know what conventional employment can give me.

I know that I can work hard.

I know that I can perform.

I know that I can build a career.

But right now, I have also chosen to be present for my daughter while she is little.

I have chosen to build my coaching practice.

I have chosen to write.

I have chosen to create.

I have chosen a slower and much less financially predictable path because, somehow, I have found contentment here.

And perhaps that is what makes me feel a little crazy.

I am a feminist.

I believe women should have opportunities.

I believe women should be able to have extraordinary careers, make extraordinary amounts of money, lead organizations, build businesses and occupy rooms where decisions are made.

And yet here I am, deliberately putting my career on a different kind of timeline because I enjoy being with my daughter.

I enjoy caring for her.

I enjoy watching her grow.

I enjoy this season of my life.

People say she won't remember these years.

They're probably right.

But I will.

And I don't think every meaningful thing a woman does has to be converted into economic productivity before it can be considered valuable.

Perhaps that is why the question about my business at the wedding stayed with me.

Because financially, there is a version of my life where I could probably be doing much better.

But financially successful and unsuccessful are not the only categories through which I know how to measure a life.

I have built a community of more than 40,000 people across my platforms.

I have worked with hundreds of women through one-on-one coaching.

I have watched women learn to question the family dynamics they once accepted as normal.

I have watched women develop greater autonomy.

I have watched women learn to think critically about relationships that had previously defined their self-worth.

I have written more than 200 articles over the years, taking the things I have lived through and turning them into lessons that other people can use.

I have published books.

I have published ten wellness journals.

I have taken experiences that once lived painfully inside me and turned them into resources that can travel further than I ever could.

One of my books can be accessed by a firstborn daughter on another continent.

A woman I will never meet can open something I wrote and find language for an experience she has struggled to explain.

That matters to me.

It matters enormously.

It may not have translated into financial freedom yet.

But I refuse to call it nothing.

I have built something.

And perhaps this is where I have started to understand that success is contextual.

In a world that measures everything by money, I may not look particularly successful.

In a world that measures success by influence, I have evidence that I have made an impact.

In a world that measures success by conventional career progression, my decision to pursue entrepreneurship may look like a step backwards.

In a world that values autonomy, creativity and meaningful work, it looks very different.

In a world that measures a woman's value by how aggressively she pursues her career, choosing to spend these years deeply involved in my daughter's life may look like a strange decision.

In my world, it is one of the things I am most grateful for.

And then there is another part of me that I have learned to love.

My whimsy.

My willingness to believe in things that other people find a little ridiculous.

I think about this whenever I watch Korean dramas.

There are people who think Korean dramas are silly. Soap operas. Ridiculous stories where two impossibly beautiful people spend sixteen episodes refusing to admit they are in love.

And honestly?

They're not entirely wrong.

I have stayed up absurdly late watching fictional people take an unreasonable amount of time to hold hands.

I have sacrificed sleep waiting for a first kiss.

I have watched characters fall in love, get jealous, misunderstand each other, reconcile and finally confess their feelings after what feels like an entire geological era.

And I love it.

Because underneath all the drama, there is something about that kind of storytelling that speaks to a part of me that refuses to become completely cynical.

I am still a hopeless romantic.

I still believe there is something beautiful about anticipation.

About tenderness.

About being surprised by love.

About allowing yourself to feel something deeply even when the world tells you to be more realistic.

And perhaps that is the same part of me that chose entrepreneurship.

The same part of me that looks at a conventional path and wonders whether there might be another way.

The same part of me that believes I can take the difficult road and build something meaningful.

The same part of me that can look at a season of motherhood and say, I actually like being here.

The same part of me that can spend years writing about healing because I believe someone's life might genuinely become better because I put my experience into words.

My whimsy is not confined to romance.

It is the part of me that keeps looking for possibility.

It is the part of me that is willing to risk looking foolish for the possibility of experiencing something beautiful.

And I think that is why I no longer want to get rid of it.

Because there are rooms where this part of me will look ridiculous.

There are rooms where my financial situation will be used to measure my intelligence.

Rooms where my career choices will be interpreted as failure.

Rooms where motherhood will be interpreted as a lack of ambition.

Rooms where entrepreneurship will be interpreted as irresponsibility.

Rooms where my boundaries will be interpreted as selfishness.

Rooms where my refusal to participate in dysfunction will be interpreted as arrogance.

And I can spend my life trying to convince those rooms that I am not what they think I am.

Or I can leave.

Not necessarily physically.

Sometimes leaving simply means stopping the need to be understood by people who have no framework for understanding your choices.

Because perhaps you are not failing.

Perhaps you are simply being measured by people who value something different from what you value.

Maybe the problem isn't always that you are too little.

Maybe you are standing in a room that has no language for what you have become.

And this doesn't mean that every criticism is wrong.

Sometimes we really are making poor decisions.

Sometimes we need to grow.

Sometimes our choices have consequences that we need to take responsibility for.

I know mine do.

I know that entrepreneurship carries financial risk.

I know that choosing motherhood and flexibility has economic consequences.

I know that wanting a meaningful life does not exempt me from the realities of money.

But I also know this:

I don't want to become so desperate to look successful that I build a life I don't actually want.

I don't want to become so concerned with proving that I am ambitious that I stop noticing that I am happy.

I don't want to spend so much time trying to convince people that my life is valuable that I forget to actually live it.

And I don't want to kill the whimsical parts of myself simply because someone else considers them impractical.

Maybe there will come a time when my business makes much more money.

I hope there is.

I am still ambitious.

I still want financial freedom.

I still want my work to grow.

But I don't want to postpone my contentment until then.

Because today, I have a daughter who wants to breastfeed while I am trying to write.

I have women whose lives have been touched by my work.

I have books in the world that I once had to imagine before I could publish them.

I have thousands of people who have chosen to listen to what I have to say.

I have lessons from my own life that have become useful to somebody else.

And I have this slightly ridiculous, wonderfully inconvenient part of myself that still believes life should contain some romance, some possibility, some risk and some whimsy.

So perhaps I am not rich in every room.

Perhaps I am not successful by every measurement.

Perhaps there are rooms where I will always look like I have made the wrong choices.

But I am learning that I don't have to make myself smaller, harder, more conventional or more financially impressive just to earn a place in every room.

I want to find the rooms where my particular kind of life makes sense.

The rooms where impact counts.

Where emotional maturity counts.

Where presence counts.

Where creativity counts.

Where motherhood counts.

Where ambition doesn't have to look like exhaustion.

Where financial success is welcome but isn't the only evidence that a life is working.

Where being a little crazy isn't something I need to apologize for.

Because maybe the goal was never to become sensible enough to fit everywhere.

Maybe the goal is to build a life where the things that make you uniquely you are not merely tolerated, but valued.

And perhaps, after all these years, that is the kind of success I am most interested in.