The Life Shift | Pivotal Moments & Life Change

Some goodbyes don't come with a conversation. They come with a phone you keep picking up and putting back down. Brittany Perham grew up in a house full of friends and happy memories, with a mom who protected her and her brother, and a father whose drinking nobody named out loud. In college, when things got scary, she made one of the hardest grown-up decisions of her life. She stopped answering his...

Some of us carry a weight for so long that we forget it isn't supposed to be there. Chloe Kelly spent 35 years being very good at being someone she wasn't. She learned the rules early. Play sports. Earn man points. Don't stand out. Never let anyone see. She got so good at the performance that even she couldn't see through it for decades. There was a soulmate. A house. A good job. Everything that w...

Maybe you know what it is to be the steady one. The person who shows up, holds it together, and makes sure everyone else is okay before anyone thinks to ask about you. Jeff Abbott has been that person for more than 25 years in emergency medicine, most recently as a Critical Care Flight Paramedic and base manager. On April 26th, 2022, his friend and pilot Jim died in a helicopter crash. Jeff respon...

Maybe you know what it is to lose someone in the middle of building something together. To be left holding a piece of unfinished work and a hole where a person used to be, with no idea how to carry either one. Jan Becker is a filmmaker who set out with his close friend Christian to make a documentary about a vision quest in the high desert. They finished shooting, went their separate ways for the...

Some of us have known something about ourselves for a very long time. And we have spent just as long trying to pretend we didn't. Kate Saint Clair grew up seeing and hearing things no one around her could explain. She was the curious kid who asked too many questions and got lies as answers. The sensitive one who felt everyone else's feelings as if they were her own. For years, she tried to be the...

Maybe you know what it is to finally exhale. To reach a season where the noise quiets down, the plan starts to work, and for the first time you let yourself believe things might actually be okay. Ryan was 24 and living in Denver when he reached that place. He had married young, moved more times than he could count, and spent his whole life feeling unsettled. And then, quietly, life started to come...

Maybe you know what it feels like to hold everyone else together before you are old enough to hold yourself. To learn young that love can leave, and that safety is not something every kid gets to keep. Robin was eight when her mother died. By eleven, her father had chosen a new life over his children and sent Robin and her younger sister into foster care, rather than let them live with the aunt wh...

You know the version of yourself you built to get through. The one who keeps the peace, reads the room, holds it together so no one else has to worry. Maybe you have wondered who you would be if you ever set that version down. This week I sat with Tarah and EJ Kerwin, two therapists who spend their days helping couples find their way back to each other. They came in curious about a therapy they wa...

Have you ever loved someone and felt the fear of losing them arrive in the very same breath? Most of us learn early to look away from that fear. Brad learned to look right at it. Brad grew up the grandson of Auschwitz survivors, carrying a fear of death that felt older than he was. As a boy, he needed proof that the people he loved were still breathing. Then, at eighteen, he told a childhood frien...

Tyler spent years building what the world told him success looked like. The abs, the car, the company. And the world cheered him on. He drove his dream car home one day, pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine, and felt completely empty inside. He didn't know yet that emptiness was trying to tell him something. Then he went to gymnastics class in his late twenties, and a coach told him to...

There are moments in life when someone says something so simple, so obvious, that you almost miss it. And then it stays. It rewrites everything. Joomin Hwang had been dancing since middle school, performing since college, and quietly watching Broadway clips on YouTube long before anyone told him it was possible. What he needed wasn't a strategy. It was permission. His professor gave him that. She...

Maybe you’ve had a moment where you looked around at your life and didn’t recognize it. Not because it was bad, exactly. But because everything you’d been holding together had finally stopped holding. That moment has a weight to it that’s hard to describe. And if you’ve been there, this episode is going to feel familiar. Matt Ross spent decades building things. He grew School of Rock from a strugg...

Some people live their early lives in what Dave Raymond calls blissful ignorance, and he'll be the first to tell you that isn't a bad thing. Growing up as the son of a legendary college football coach, stumbling into becoming the original Philly Fanatic, Dave spent decades inside a life that felt close to charmed. He didn't overthink it. He just showed up, leaned in, and let the joy carry him. The...

Have you ever been so good at becoming what people needed that you forgot who you actually were underneath it all? Taira Soo did that for almost fifty years. Different rooms, different versions, a new self for every chapter. It felt like a superpower. It was also a way to keep from being seen. Then a friend reached across a lunch table, touched a lump, and said the word that changed everything. Wh...

There are moments that don't make sense until much later. And then there are moments that make total sense the instant they happen, even if you can't explain them to anyone else. Kate Clinch sat in a small chapel in Sydney, a self-described non-believer, and felt something she had never felt before. Not a feeling she worked toward. Not a belief she talked herself into. Just a deep, quiet, unquesti...

If you have ever loved someone so much that you quietly rearranged your whole life around them, this conversation will feel familiar. At twenty-two, Andrea Wilson Woods got the phone call that split her life into a before and an after. Her mother no longer wanted to be a mother, and her eight-year-old sister, Adrienne, needed someone. Andrea said yes without knowing what she was saying yes to. She...

There is a version of you that other people count on. The one who shows up, who fixes things, who holds the whole thing together. So what happens when that version can no longer do the thing that made it yours? Robert spent thirty-two years as a surgeon. Then an accident took his hand, and the surgeries that followed took something he never expected to lose. First his career, slowly. Then, quietly...

Have you ever built a life so carefully that you forgot to ask whether it was actually yours? Lora did everything right. The good girl, the good student, the good wife, the good mom. And then, right on the edge of an empty nest and a little freedom, she found out her husband had been living a second life for fifteen years. This is a conversation about what happens after the floor gives way. Lora t...

Have you ever quit the thing everyone could see, only to find the thing nobody could see was still running the show? Zach Brittle is a couples therapist who spent decades certain that alcohol was the danger. He grew up afraid of becoming someone he wasn't, carrying stories about drinking that were planted in him long before he ever had a drop. When he finally put the bottle down in November of 202...

Have you ever kept moving because stopping felt more dangerous than going? Pat knew that feeling better than most. He filled his life with travel and sport and constant motion, not because he loved being busy, but because stillness was where his hardest thoughts lived. Then on an ordinary foggy morning, a wave put him face-first into a sandbar at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. He broke his neck. He...

Have you ever lived a life that worked, on paper, and still felt like you were only halfway in the room? That is where Lena Fein spent most of her life. Not broken. Not miserable. Just partially there, ever since a moment at seven years old when the safest place she had, her own diary, got read out loud and used against her. Lena did everything right after that. School, a career in engineering, a...

Some secrets get handed to us before we are old enough to know what to do with them. Ranae was a preteen in a small Minnesota town when she was sexually abused by boys she had known her whole life. The instruction that followed- stay quiet, or people will think you are bad- became the quiet architecture of everything she built afterward. For decades that belief ran the show. It showed up as people...

Have you ever noticed your life getting smaller without ever deciding to shrink it? Not all at once. Just one canceled plan, one closed door, one quiet no to something that used to feel possible, until one day you look up and wonder where all the room went. That's where Scott Stirrett found himself partway through COVID. He'd already done the hard things once. Left a steady job at twenty-two to st...

Have you ever looked fine on paper and still felt like something was missing. Good job, good marriage, kids who love you, and underneath all of it, a quiet hum of not quite. Drew Norton knew that hum well. He was drifting through his late twenties, chasing money because he thought money was the thing that would finally make him feel like enough. Then one afternoon he came home to find his six mont...

Have you ever had a feeling in your gut that just knew, that told you to keep going even when nothing around you confirmed it? Carly had one of those since she was a kid. And then, somewhere around thirty, it went quiet. If you have ever lost the thing that used to steer you, you already know how unmooring that silence can be. Carly's path winds through a childhood spent on stages, a move to New Y...