Somewhere between nothing and everything.

Where do we go when we don't quite fit anywhere?

Welcome to my Substack and newsletter — I am so excited to kick this new venture off, and as I do, I figured I should take a moment to properly introduce it — and me.

Maybe you’re already familiar with me, perhaps from my early blog or Instagram, where for nearly a decade I shared teachings, lessons, and reflections to a following of tens of thousands. Or you may know me from the podcast I’ve hosted for 6 years, with over 1.5 million downloads. Or you may have worked with me in my signature coaching program, She Thrives Academy, where I was lucky enough to help transform the minds and lives of countless women. Or you may know me from YouTube, where I currently share my worldly travels with a growing audience weekly.

Or, you may have just stumbled in here randomly, and not know me at all.

However you’ve found your way here, I’m happy you’ve arrived.

Where exactly have you, have we, arrived to?

I’m not so sure.

Building a business on instagram meant that, when I became disillusioned by social media culture in 2020 and I opted to close my instagram account, my coaching business went with it.

And truthfully I am at peace with this, though I do miss working with my incredible students, and I do miss the easy two way communication with my audience that instagram facilitated. But because I was already starting to feel a pull towards a new iteration, a new level, a new realm — thinking and speaking about things that were maybe a bit off brand, but things that felt important and resonant nonetheless, I embraced this change, and took it all as part of the inevitable destruction that growth requires.

Part of the formula for success as an online entrepreneur, and online coach in particular, is stepping into the teacher role and not leaving — providing consistent teachings, messaging and valuable lessons for your audience.

This formula works. My business, by all metrics, was very successful, and this streamlined and ultra-focused approach was all I did for years and years. And I was (and still am!) so grateful to be able to actually help impart even the tiniest of shifts and changes in this way. I love coaching, and sharing what I have learned with others.

But there’s a sneaky underside to this consistency, this positioning. “Off brand” reflections and personal thoughts of certain ilks are not only irrelevant, but can derail your messaging, creating a slow but steady tightening on the boundaries of what you can and should speak about or share.

Success under this formula is a careful and strategic crafting of a very particular type of box, one built on purpose by you, for you, where you then sit, on sturdy ground but tamed and contained, forever? This is the paradox of almost every type of security we tend to create for ourselves. It provides, yes. But it also limits.

And if and when we should feel a stirring, a curious inclination rising within us to peer over the edge and out onto the vast expanse beyond the walls, if we dare to explore terrain beyond this box, we risk losing it all.

But what do we risk if we stay?

So here I am.

I’ve stepped out of the box that has held me creatively captive. I’m in the wide expanse of earth and ocean, moving somewhere between the space of the titles and roles I’ve held, but falling into none in particular. I once wrote,

There’s something about being out here, away from everything I used to know, afloat in a wildly remote part of the world, surrounded by nothing but sea below and sky above... that has me asking myself often, who am I?

Wholly divorcing myself from all the routine, the rhythm, the roles of the life I knew before, with no points of reference left to turn to except some increasingly distant memories that I have to squint and strain my mind to see… who am I?

That’s all we’re ever doing when we attempt to answer that question. 

Reaching into our own personal history, grabbing the most well rehearsed stories, reprising the highly practiced characters we love, or hate, to play.

We use the reference points around us to affirm back to us that this is us — we are the caregiver, the writer, the independent one. We look into the faces of those around us to tell us who we should be. Who are you?

If your grip was loosened, just enough, on the script of your life...

If your own certainty about who you are or are not was blurred just a touch...

If the constructs that give your stories their shape were lifted just so …

If there was nothing, not even your own mind, telling you what role to play…

Who are you?

In the last two years I have consciously given away just about everything that I thought I had and that I thought I was.

I no longer have my house, 90% of my belongings, the business I spent a decade building, or any of the titles that I wore in my previous life. I am afloat in my tiny home with my husband and two dogs, traveling by the wind to new places, always a stranger, always discovering, always remembering.

And since pushing off from these shores, I have been looking for a social-media-free space to share miscellaneous thoughts and ask the big questions — not an as expert, not with how-to’s and 5-steps-for-this-or-that, not as someone who has the answers, but as a friend walking alongside you on the path as we gaze around in astonishment, fear, awe, and wonder at all that surrounds us and arises within us. And I am thrilled to have discovered Substack as the place to do this.

It’s like blogging’s cool older sister, a not-so-underground-anymore but still off the beaten path place that is overflowing with writers of all kinds, sharing long form, nuanced, thoughtful pieces that I have found limitless inspiration in. It’s a standalone network and website but its also connected to my email list, making my posts function as newsletters (right to your inbox!), combined with features that allow me to interact with you again, with no algorithms or ads or attention wars or fucking REELS.

For more on subscription options, head here.

“Lost and found”, to me, speaks to the miscellany of the contents of these posts and reflections, a jumbled collection of odds and ends, of bits and pieces. But it also speaks, of course, to the ways in which we get lost, and the trusted paths by which we return, wholly and openheartedly, to ourselves and the moment that presently enfolds us.

This is my countermeasure, my rebellion against algorithmic rules and content formulas where one knows it all. This is the sky: a boundless expanse bursting with questions and curiosities, a medium constantly shifting, an open arena that is somehow both nothing and everything.

I don’t know where we are.

I don’t know where we’re going.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

xo,

Taylor