Fortitude Fridays

Vol. 135: Feeling Stuck? Follow the Breadcrumbs & More

Welcome to Fortitude Fridays—part mindset training, part field notes from real life. I share what I’m learning, testing, and using to help you take better care of yourself, strengthen your mindset, and keep showing up—week after week.

Here are a few ideas as you head into the weekend.

Read time: 7 mins

This Week’s Snapshot:

• Quote: Hope
• Tactic: How To Get Unstuck
• Small Thought: Work Hard Then Smart

Truth: That’s the funny thing about hope. Nobody else gets to decide if you feel it. That choice belongs to you. -Rumi (KPop Demon Hunters) Hope is not pretending life is easy. It is refusing to let the hard parts have the final word.

Tactic: Follow Your Breadcrumbs

Make the list. Pick one thing. Bring it back.

Hey friend.

You may or may not have noticed, but Fortitude Fridays has been quiet for a long while. Eleven weeks, actually.

I didn’t stop writing because I stopped caring. Honestly, I think I stopped writing because I cared too much.

Maybe you know this feeling. The thing you used to love starts to feel like a burden. The habit that helped you feel grounded quietly disappears. The book stays unopened. The walks or workouts stop happening. The bedtime gets pushed later. The hobby gets buried. The calm gets replaced by noise, obligations, and the pressure to keep up.

From the outside, you still look fine. Still working. Still answering messages. Still caring for people. Still getting things done.

But inside, you know. You are not quite yourself. Not falling apart. Just off.

And honestly, that quiet kind of stuck can be harder to name.

That is where I have been.

Every time I sat down to write, it felt like it had to be good enough to justify the silence. Good enough to explain where I had been. Good enough to be helpful. Good enough to prove I still had something worth saying.

So I would start, hate it, trash it, and let another week pass. Then I would feel even more pressure to come back with something good.

A lovely little cycle. Write draft. Hate draft. Delete draft. Feel bad about deleting it. Avoid it for another week. Toss in some guilt, a little imposter syndrome, and a blinking cursor taunting me.

Very productive. 0/10. Would not recommend.

The truth is, the last couple of months were a grind and I was in a rut. Not in a dramatic, everything-is-burning-down kind of way. More like… I just wasn’t myself.

I wasn’t sleeping great. I felt scattered, drained, unfocused, and stuck. Not severely wrong. Not in some deep dark place. Just not normal for me.

And my normal is pretty low-key neutral. Steady. Grounded. Able to find joy in small things. Able to do the work I care about without feeling like I was dragging myself through mud.

But I wasn’t living there anymore.

A several weeks ago, I found myself googling "how to get unstuck" like the internet was going to hand me a neat little answer in six bullet points. I even saw doctors. I had things checked. I wondered if something physical was showing up as brain fog, stress, or feeling off.

Thankfully, everything came back clean. Which was a relief.

But it didn't solve why I was still...weird.

And maybe the funniest part, if we are using the word “funny” very loosely, is that this situation is exactly the kind of thing I help coach people through.

Look at your life. Really look. Notice where your energy is going. Notice where it is coming back. Notice where there is no room to recover. Notice where you are creating pressure that does not need to be there. That gives you a place to start.

I know this. I coach this. But I could not see it clearly in myself because it had become my personal blind spot.

And isn’t that how it goes? We can see patterns in other people from a mile away, but when we are the ones living inside the pattern, it just feels like life.

It feels normal. Until it doesn’t.

The Red Queen theory

Looking back, I think I had fallen into a version of the Red Queen Theory.

The Red Queen hypothesis was proposed in evolutionary biology in 1973. The simple idea is that organisms sometimes have to keep adapting just to survive because everything around them is adapting too.

The theory was inspired by a line from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, when the Red Queen tells Alice:

“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Oof. That is exactly what it felt like. Trying harder. Holding myself to higher standards. Always feeling behind. Never getting ahead.

In regular life, the Red Queen theory can feel like doing more and more just to stay where you are. More effort. More pressure. More output. More proving. But somehow, no real movement forward.

And when you feel behind or not quite yourself, the answer seems obvious: run faster, try harder, stay motivated, reinvent, get more disciplined, catch up.

But sometimes more effort is not the answer. Sometimes you have to stop running long enough to ask:

What did I stop doing that used to make me feel like me?

What helped me start coming back

I took out a piece of paper and drew a line down the middle. On the left side, I wrote: Things I was doing when I felt happier, healthier, and more like myself.

On the right side, I wrote: Pick one. Bring it back.

That was it. No life overhaul. No dramatic transformation plan. Just a roadmap for one thing I could actually do every day.

For me, the list was pretty simple: walking more, reading more, listening to my favorite music again, drinking more water, going to bed earlier, workouts, stretching, time with those I love, paying attention to nutrition, setting better boundaries around work and rest, and laughing with my family. These became the breadcrumbs I could follow.

The basics stabilized me. The walks. The water. The earlier bedtimes. The nutrition. The boundaries. They helped me feel less scattered. Less like I was running on fumes.

But joy brought pieces of me back. The books. The music. The sunrises. The hugs. The laughter. The ridiculous Fortnite games with my family.

That last one mattered too. Because sometimes getting unstuck is not just about doing the “healthy” things.

Sometimes it is about remembering the things that make you feel joyful and alive.

I knew I had disappeared for a while. But I stuck this list in a place I would see EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Then slowly, I started reappearing. Some days I nailed a couple from the list, others it was just one.

And I want to be clear: I am still in this. I am not writing from the other side, all fixed and glowing with perspective. I am still practicing, still messing up some days, still adding things back in.

So for today, writing this issue is one of them. Not because it feels perfect. Because writing Fortitude Fridays used to make me feel like myself.

So if you ever find yourself there — not falling apart, not in crisis, but stuck in a rut — try this: make the list of things that you were doing when you felt happier or healthier, then pick one thing, and implement it.

Not ten things all at once.

Just one.

Small enough that it does not become another source of pressure. Simple enough that you can actually do it. True enough that it leads you back to you.

Bringing it home

Maybe you need this today. Maybe you don’t.

Either way, keep it somewhere in your back pocket.

Because at some point, most of us hit a season where we are still functioning, still showing up, still getting things done… but we know we are not quite ourselves.

And when that happens, maybe getting unstuck does not mean becoming a whole new person. Maybe it means returning to the things that were quietly helping you feel like yourself before life got too loud.

I am still in this.

But I truly believe the way back is not found in one massive breakthrough or becoming an entirely different person.

It is found in the small things we choose to do, one at a time.

Because the small things are not small.

They are the architecture of our lives.

They are the breadcrumbs.

And sometimes they are the way back.

So here I am, following one of mine.

Small But Mighty: Working smart is not the opposite of working hard. It is the wisdom earned from working hard. You have to put in the hours before you can see the shortcuts. You have to learn the details before you know which ones matter. And you usually have to do it wrong a few times before the right way becomes clear.

Wow:

Pro athletes are incredible. Click image to watch.

Thanks for reading. To all the teachers, fellow nurses, and moms out there — I hope you feel deeply loved and appreciated this weekend. You carry a lot. You give a lot. And you make this world better in ways people do not always see. Until next time…

You got this,

P.S. If you’re new—welcome! I’m so glad you’re here. You’ve just stepped into a community of people who are showing up, doing the work, and getting after what matters. We’re all about learning, growing, and building real momentum—together. Let’s go!

​​​​​​