The 2 AM Awakening: When “I Can’t Do This Anymore” Became “It’s My Turn”

Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Angel Fire, New Mexico

The oldest of seven children learns early that her job is to take care of everyone else.

For 46 years, I perfected the art of making other people’s lives work. First, it was my six younger siblings. Then my husband, our three boys, and for 25 years, the high-achieving executives who trusted me to be their right hand. I was the one who made everything flow seamlessly - the EA who anticipated needs, solved problems, and created that sense of “everything is exactly as it should be” in their businesses and lives.

I loved working alongside these leaders. It gave me incredible opportunities to travel and grow. But deep down, I always knew I could do and have what they were creating. I felt bogged down by responsibilities for others - always taking care, never being taken care of.

My husband Jim and I had talked about moving to the mountains for years. “In 3-5 years,” we would say, but we never found the place that felt right. Until we stood on a piece of land in Angel Fire, New Mexico, and I felt it - that electric current flowing through my body, into my heart, deep into my womb. The same vibration I had felt when we bought our first house 32 years earlier. My body recognizing home before my mind could catch up.

But the real turning point came on a book tour in Los Angeles. I was traveling with my female CEO client to launch her second book - helping her build her dreams, as I had done for decades. At 2 AM, lying exhausted in my hotel bed, it hit me like lightning: I can’t do this anymore. I want to go home.

Not just home to Chicago. Home to myself. Home to the life I had been putting on hold for all these years.

The conversation with my client was surprisingly easy. She was feeling the shift too. We both knew she was ready for something new, and I could not take her where she was going next. Two women recognizing they had outgrown the container they were in together.

That is when Jim and I made the decision: 2025 would be our year. We would sell the house we had lived in for 32 years and finally build our life in the mountains. Not to retire - we are not done yet. To finally focus on our success, our dreams, our purpose.

Now I wake up every morning surrounded by the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Every five minutes, I can look out my kitchen window to see Wheeler Peak and watch how the sky has changed. Afternoon storms build towering clouds that scramble over the peaks, bringing driving rain and electric energy, then clearing to reveal blue sky and the scent of sage and lavender.

Under the strawberry full moon, standing in our meadow, I felt that familiar electric current again. Source, guides, angels and ancestors with me. In the quiet places, my words are said and heard. My name is recognized. My work is recognized.

For the first time in my life, I am not building someone else’s dreams - I am living my own.

And now I help other high-achieving women leaders do the same. Not just by teaching them how to work with an executive assistant, but by showing them how to receive support. How to stop being the one who does everything for everyone and start being the one who gets to focus on her biggest vision.

Because I can look them in the eye and say: “I know what it feels like to lie in a hotel room at 2 AM and realize you can’t do this anymore. I know what it is like to spend decades making everyone else’s dreams come true. But I also know what it feels like to finally choose yourself.”

You do not have to wait to come home to yourself. Your dreams are calling you right now.