I'm going to tell you something that might sound like an excuse to anyone who hasn't lived it.
I build in rotation.
I work on something until it reaches the point where it needs three uninterrupted hours of focused attention — the kind of hours that require a closed door and a quiet house — and then I set it down. Not because I've lost interest. Not because I'm afraid of finishing. Because my daughter just woke up from her nap, or the chickens need water, or it's Tuesday and Tuesdays are for being in the sandbox, not at the desk.
So I rotate. I pick up the project that fits the available shape of my attention. The cookbook gets worked on during nap time. The website gets built after bedtime. The mentorship framework gets refined in voice notes while I'm walking the orchard. The deep editorial work — the kind that requires me to hold an entire manuscript in my head — that waits for the rare weekend when she's with her dad and the house is mine.
This is not a productivity problem. This is the math of building something real while raising someone real, alone, on a piece of land that also needs tending.
And I'm done apologizing for the shape of it.
Here's what the internet will tell you: post daily. Show up consistently. Build in public. Feed the algorithm. Create content about creating content. Turn your morning routine into a reel, your grief into a caption, your child's face into engagement.
Here's what my body tells me: no.
Not "no, I'm scared." Not "no, I'm not ready." Just — no. The way you'd say no to food that doesn't smell right. The way your hand pulls back from a hot surface before your brain registers why.
The performance model of visibility asks me to take something slow and deep and embodied and flatten it into a format designed for scrolling. It asks me to interrupt the actual work — the writing, the building, the mothering, the living — to perform the work for an audience that will see it for three seconds before swiping.
That's not visibility. That's a tax.
And I've watched enough women pay it — watched them build beautiful platforms while slowly hollowing out, performing wellness while losing their own, documenting a life they're no longer actually present for — to know it's a tax I'm not willing to pay.
This is the question I've been sitting with. Not "how do I get over my fear of being seen" — I don't have that fear. I've walked through ceremony in foreign countries. I've told my cancer story to strangers. I've birthed a child and rebuilt my life from the ground up, in public, more than once.
The question is: what does visibility look like for someone whose work is deep, slow, embodied, and resistant to performance?
It looks like books. Things you can hold. Things that arrive in the mail and sit on your nightstand and get dog-eared and passed to your sister. Things that work without wifi.
It looks like a website that says what I actually think instead of what the algorithm rewards. Writing that finds the right people because it's true, not because it was posted at the optimal time with the right hashtags.
It looks like word of mouth. One woman reads the book, does the practice, feels something shift in her body, and tells one other woman. That's how medicine has always traveled. Not through funnels. Through bodies.
It looks like a door that's open but not loud. You find me because you were looking — or because someone who knows sent you. Not because I shouted over the noise. Because you were already listening for something quieter.
Everyone will tell you you're behind.
The internet will show you twenty-three-year-olds with six-figure launches and email lists of fifty thousand and a team of five. It will show you people who started last year and are already "scaling." It will make your pace feel like failure and your thoughtfulness feel like hesitation.
Here's what I know from years of growing things — actual things, in actual soil, in actual seasons:
Nothing that lasts is built fast.
A tree doesn't apologize for taking seven years to fruit. Sourdough doesn't rush its rise because someone's hungry now. The woman who's been quietly building her body of work for a decade while raising a child and tending land isn't behind the woman who launched a course last month. She's operating on a different timeline entirely. And when her work enters the world, it will have roots so deep it won't need an algorithm to hold it up.
That's not a cope. That's ecology.
I know what your days look like. I know the laptop open on the counter while the pasta boils. The voice note recorded on the walk to the mailbox. The ideas that come at 2am and may or may not survive until morning. The guilt of working when you should be playing and the guilt of playing when you should be working and the way those two guilts eat each other in a loop that never resolves.
I know you have something. Something real. Something that's been building in you for years — maybe since before she was born, maybe because she was born. And I know the world keeps telling you to package it into a format that makes you feel like you're selling your own bones.
You don't have to.
You can build in rotation. You can work in the shape your life actually is instead of the shape Instagram says it should be. You can let the work take the time it takes and trust that the people who need it will find it — not because you performed hard enough, but because truth has its own distribution channel.
It's slower. It's quieter. It doesn't photograph well.
But it's yours. All the way down.
And when you're ready — not when the algorithm says you should be, not when the coach says your launch window is closing, but when you're ready — it will be the most solid thing in the room. Because you built it the way you build everything: with your hands full and your feet on the ground and absolutely no one's permission.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.