Nobody Told Me I Was Allowed to Fall Apart

I am not a woman who admits when she’s overwhelmed.

I have all the credentials—bachelors, masters, and even a PhD—all from great schools. I have spent my career in rooms where showing your hand was a liability. I built a lobbying firm. I have been the person people call when the situation requires someone who doesn’t flinch. Vulnerability was not in the job description. Plowing through was.

So, when Lexington arrived — and everything I thought I knew about structure, capacity, and control started to quietly rearrange itself without my permission — I did what I always do.

I plowed through.

I woke up early. I kept the schedule. I answered the calls. I managed the feeds. I held the house. And every time someone asked how I was doing, I said fine. Because I was. Mostly. And because realizing that there was an alternative — admitting that I was somewhere between functioning and falling apart — felt like failure.

Nobody told me that failure was ever an option.

Here is what I know now: while plowing through feels like strength—it is not. That is a flow state and “flow” state is only meant to get you through short bursts of time. Athletes operate in it during an intense game. It’s the ability to block out everything else and focus on the task at hand. It is not meant to be lived in. Flow state is not a virtue — it’s a defense mechanism. It’s what your nervous system does when the overwhelm is too large to process in real time. You stop feeling it. You just move. And you keep moving until — somewhere in the exhale at the other end of it — you look up and think: how did I do all of that? And who was I inside through all of that?

The first reset wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t announce itself. It was more like a slow leak — the gradual recognition that I had been operating on a version of myself that needed to be more than recalibrated. Not abandoned—but reset.

And the hardest part wasn’t pivoting the plan or the act of resetting in and of itself. It was giving myself permission to need it. It was a breaking point that things needed to be changed so that they didn’t fall apart.

There is a specific kind of guilt that lives in high-performing women who become mothers. It’s not the guilt people talk about — the working-mom guilt, the not-present-enough guilt. It’s something quieter and more corrosive. It’s the guilt of not being as okay as you present yourself to be. The guilt of having cracked, even just a little, in a life that looks full and managed from the outside.

I had to learn — slowly, without anyone giving me permission — to be overwhelmed. I had to learn that the only permission I needed was my own.

Missing a beat didn’t make me less of a strategist. It didn’t make me any less credentialed. Less of a boss. Less of a mother.

It made me human. And it made me someone who was actually present in her life, rather than managing it from a distance. So, I reset to build the right rhythms, schedules, cadences, and called on my village for help when and how I needed it.

The self-permission I wish I had given myself sooner:

You are not less.
You are evolving.
And evolving always requires a moment of not knowing.

The schedule will be reorganized. The capacity will return. The version of you who comes out the other side of this reset will be more accurate than the one who went in — because she will be recalibrated. Not dismantled. Rebuilt.

I’m so glad you are here. I’m also a mother who had to learn — later than I would have liked — that those two truths are not in competition.

That lesson cost me something. I want it to cost you less.

Bio: Jennifer M. Stewart is a Ph.D, strategist, political insider, and founder of one of Washington's most effective lobbying firms. She writes about recalibration — what it means to be all of those things and a mother, from the middle of it.