The Woman at the Sliding Door: A Portrait
If you follow any of my work, you know that I lead with my strengths.
Lately, however, I have started writing about those moments that could have crushed my spirit: moments of weakness, vulnerability, and even shame.
In the former iteration of my work, while polished and effective, I left out the moments that brought the biggest lessons, breakthroughs, and gains. Albeit painful at times, these are the moments that offered a path I had not considered before.
They were all sliding door moments; those times when I was presented with two clear paths, both viable, but one was conducive to security while the other led to unexpected growth.
Lately, I have started to choose the latter more consistently.
You are probably doing the same. How many times have you written your profile, adjusted your title, reorganized the timeline, added the newest credential, and moved the dates around?
Each version is accurate, yet each leaves something out.
If you are still reading, you might see yourself in this portrait:
You have spent the better part of your adult life being exceptionally good at work that lived inside someone else's structure. You have led organizations, built programs, served institutions, advised executives, raised families, managed households, cared for aging parents, and delivered outcomes that carried your employer’s name on them.
You have been the operational center of workplaces that could not have functioned without your presence and the invisible architecture of families that never thought to ask what sustaining that architecture required of you.
You may be the woman who chose, deliberately and at high cost, to place your full professional capacity in the service of your household and your children. You organized, educated, negotiated, managed finances, held emotional complexity, and built human beings.
You did that work with the same rigor and intelligence you would have brought to any other institution.
Your track record is real across every structure you have inhabited.
Today, you look at the life you have built, the people you have helped shape, the projects that bear your signature, if not your name, and there is something that remains unnamed and unclaimed.
This time in your life might very well be your sliding door moment. You could continue envisioning a life by your conscious design, or you can claim your rightful place in your own autobiography.
Whatever door you choose, choose it consciously and with the same integrity you have carried yourself with over the decades.
What You Are Carrying
You carry decades of expertise you have fully earned and only partially named. Knowledge built from consequence, from having been inside the experience, from having made the hard call, from having stayed when others left, and left when staying would have cost you everything.
You carry a private body of work you have been developing in the margins of your official life. Ideas you have been turning over for years. A framework you use instinctively and have kept entirely in your body. A way of seeing that the women around you keep asking you to explain.
You carry a biography you keep editing. The experiences are real and layered. The language for what those experiences built in you is still forming. The credential that lives in your lived experience is often the most precise and valuable thing you hold.
And you carry a readiness to contribute that you have felt for some time but have not yet placed within a structure capable of receiving it. It circulates. It waits. It belongs in a conversation worthy of it.
The Questions Underneath the Moment
Perhaps you are carrying one of three questions. Each one is honest, and each one deserves an honest answer.
Which sliding door moment are you still standing in front of, unwilling to choose?
What did you leave on the familiar train that your current biography has never recovered?
What is waiting on the route you have not yet taken, and what would it cost you to find out?
What Becomes Possible When the Work Gets Named
I have been the woman at the sliding door several times in my life. Each time, I gauged the possible paths ahead of me.
I do this work today because I have been where you are now. I knew what my life had prepared me to offer, but lacked either the language or the trust in myself to jump on the train that would take me to the unknown.
The last time, my proverbial coattails got trapped in the doors as they closed behind me. Losing them meant losing an identity that no longer served me.
You are the expert in your life. Every decision you have made, every responsibility you have carried, every threshold you have crossed has deposited something in you that belongs to no one else.
The work of this moment is to name, with precision, what your life has already qualified you to offer.
If you are done circling that question on your own, I invite you to discover what becomes possible when your expertise finally has a structure worthy of it.
