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This is not quite the episode I had planned for this week. Actually, I didn't think I'd get one out at all. And if you've been following on social media or the news, you probably know why. I live in the southeast portion of Hawaii Island. I've lived here for about five years now. And this past week, or I guess by the time you hear this last week, Hurricane Lala came through the islands. My family is safe. Our home is safe. We lost power, and there are certainly inconveniences that come with that, but we're okay. A lot of people here are not. Hawaii Island took an enormous hit. There are homes that were damaged, roads and bridges that were damaged, people who lost things that simply cannot be replaced. An entire community was demolished by flood water. And right now, while I'm recording this, there are people waking up trying to figure out what their lives look like after everything changed in a matter of hours. So I want to be really careful with this episode. I'm not going to take someone else's devastation and turn it into a cute metaphor about relationships. For people who lost their homes, their belongings, their sense of safety, this isn't a metaphor. This is their life. But living through this week has made me think a lot about something I believe almost every person listening to this podcast understands in some way. The unknown. For days leading up to the hurricane, that's where we lived. You watch forecasts, you watch the track, you watch the wind speed, you prepare, you buy what you can, you charge everything, you make plans, and then you wait. How bad is this actually going to be? Will the track change? Will our house be okay? Will everyone we love be okay? What is tomorrow morning gonna look like? And there comes a point when you've done everything you can do, and there's nothing left to do except wait. Then the storm comes and eventually it passes, and suddenly there's a different kind of unknown. What now? As I sat with that question, I realized that I've spent a lot of my life living in some version of it. And I think a lot of you have too. Maybe your storm wasn't a hurricane. Maybe it was the day you realized your marriage wasn't what you thought it was. Maybe someone died or someone left or you lost a job. Maybe your health changed. Maybe you finally left the relationship and then woke up the next morning and realized that leaving was only the first decision. Now you had to build a life. Or maybe nothing dramatic happened at all. Maybe you just woke up one morning and realized I don't want to live like this anymore. And then came the terrifying question. Okay, so what now? That's what I want to talk about today. Not having the answer, not knowing exactly what comes next, and learning that maybe you don't actually need to. Welcome back to Pattern Breakers Collective. I'm Lisa. Today's episode is gonna be a little different. Usually we're talking specifically about relationships, emotional abuse, cores of control, trauma bonds, people pleasing, self-abandonment, the patterns that keep women stuck in relationships and lives that are hurting them. We're still gonna touch on some of that today, but I want to zoom out because uncertainty isn't exclusive to unhealthy relationships. It's part of being human. And this week has reminded me just how quickly the things that we believe are certain can change. I think most of us have this quiet assumption that tomorrow is gonna look roughly like today. We make appointments for next month, we plan vacations six months out, we buy groceries for the week, we talk about what we're gonna do next year. We have to live that way. You can't wake up every morning thinking everything could completely fall apart today and still function. So we build our lives around a certain amount of assumed stability. And most days it works until something happens that reminds you that you were never actually promised any of it. And that can be terrifying, but I also think there's something important that we get to see about ourselves in those moments. Not that everything happens for a reason. I don't believe we need to put some inspirational bow around painful things. Sometimes terrible things just happen. But when life becomes uncertain, we get to see something that we don't always notice when everything is comfortable. We get to see how we respond when we can't control the outcome. And for a lot of us, especially those who have been spending years surviving unpredictable environments, that's where things get really interesting. Human beings really don't like uncertainty. We like to know. Even when the thing we know isn't particularly good, there's something strangely comforting about predictability. And I think that's one of the things that people sometimes misunderstand about women who stay in unhealthy relationships. From the outside, someone might look at the situation and think, why would you stay there? Why wouldn't you just leave? Anything would be better than this. But your nervous system doesn't necessarily hear anything would be better. Sometimes it hears anything could happen. And those are very different things. You might be miserable in your marriage, but you know how this marriage works. You know his moots, you know what sets him off, you know when to talk and when not to, you know what happens when he's angry, how long the silent treatment usually lasts. What version of yourself keeps things relatively calm? Is that healthy? No, but it's familiar, and familiar can feel safer than unknown. Now, imagine leaving. Where will I live? Can I afford it? What happens with the kids? Will he make this difficult? Will I be lonely? Will I regret it? Will anyone ever love me again? What if I can't do this? Suddenly, the painful life that you understand is competing against a future that you cannot predict. And sometimes the nervous system says, stay with what you know. Not because it's good, because we've already learned how to survive it. And this doesn't only happen in unhealthy relationships. People stay in jobs they hate because at least they have a paycheck. They stay in friendships where they feel small because they've been friends for 20 years. They stay in identities they've outgrown because they don't know who they are without them. Sometimes we choose a painful known over an uncertain possibility. And I think that we need to have compassion for that. But compassion doesn't mean we never challenge it, because eventually we have to ask: is this actually safe? Or is it simply familiar? Those are not the same thing. This is especially important for women who grew up in chaos or who have spent years in unpredictable relationships. You can become incredibly good at anticipating. You read rooms, you read faces, you notice changes in a tone that nobody else notices. You think five steps ahead, you prepare for every possible outcome. And sometimes people call that being organized or intuitive or incredibly responsible. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it's hypervigilance. It's a nervous system that learned if I can predict what's coming, maybe I can protect myself from it. That strategy may have kept you safe at some point, but eventually it can harden into this belief that you need to know what's going to happen before you can make any decision at all. And that becomes an impossible standard. You can't know whether leaving will be easy. You can't know whether a new relationship will work. You can't know exactly what your life is going to look like a year from now. And if certainty becomes the requirement before you move, you may never move because life doesn't offer that kind of guarantee. Familiar is not the same as safe. A life you've learned to survive is not the same as a life worth living. And a nervous system that says, stay, because we know this is not wisdom. It's protection that outlived the thing that it was protecting you from. Preparation and control are not the same thing. This is probably one of the biggest things the hurricane reminded me of this week. There was a lot we could do. We could prepare, get supplies, charge devices, make sure we had water, think through what we would do if the power went out, secure things, check on people, pay attention to the emergency information. There were real actions available to us, and taking those actions mattered. But eventually, you reach the end of the list, and the storm is still coming. That's the moment that I think a lot of us struggle with because preparation gives us something to do, but control gives us the illusion that if we do everything correctly, we can guarantee the outcome. And we cannot. Those are very, very different things. Preparation says I've done what is reasonably within my power. Control says, if I think about this long enough, maybe I can eliminate uncertainty. And uncertainty doesn't negotiate. I am someone who can research the hell out of something. I can analyze it, think through every possible scenario, make a plan A, plan B, plan C, and probably all the way out to plan Q just in case. And there is absolute value in being prepared. But there comes a point when preparation turns into an attempt to negotiate with something that cannot be negotiated with. And I have spent a lot of my life trying to do that second thing. I see women do this constantly when they're considering leaving a difficult relationship. Well, I need to know I'll be okay before I leave. And I understand that completely. But what would actually prove that to you? Can someone guarantee that you'll never be lonely? No. Can someone guarantee that you won't struggle financially? No. Can someone guarantee your children won't have feelings about it? No. Can someone guarantee that you won't miss him? Absolutely not. Can someone guarantee that you'll never question your decision? Nope. So, if the requirement is I need proof that everything will be okay before I make a change, you've created a requirement that life can never satisfy. And waiting for it means waiting indefinitely. But what if we change the question? Instead of asking, how do I know I'm gonna be okay? What if you asked, what would help me become more capable of responding if things are not okay? That's different. Now we have something to work with. Maybe you need financial information, maybe you need emotional support, maybe you need a legal consultation, maybe you need a safety plan, maybe you need therapy, maybe you need to stop pretending you have to figure this all out completely alone. And suddenly we've moved from trying to predict the future to building our capacity to meet it. That is self-trust, not I trust myself to always make the right decision. I don't know about you, but I have made some spectacularly bad ones. Self-trust is something more realistic than that. It's I trust myself not to abandon myself when things get hard. I trust myself to ask for help. I trust myself to change course if new information comes in. I trust myself to survive disappointment. I trust myself to respond. And that is incredibly different from needing to know what the outcome is in advance. During this storm, we couldn't know exactly what was going to happen. We could prepare, and then we had to respond to what actually came. Life works that way too, and maybe healing does too. You don't need a 10-year plan. Sometimes you just need enough preparation to take the next step. I think this is where people get overwhelmed when their lives change. We immediately zoom all the way out. Let's say you're considering leaving a 20-year marriage. Your brain doesn't stop at where would I stay next month? Oh no, your brain is already at Christmas six years from now. What happens when our daughter gets married? Where will everyone sit? What happens when we have grandchildren? Will I spend Christmas alone? What if he remarries? What if I don't? What will retirement look like? You haven't even made the first phone call yet, and your brain has already constructed 17 hypothetical futures. No wonder you're terrified. Or maybe you've already left and you're sitting in a new apartment surrounded by boxes thinking, how am I supposed to rebuild my entire life? And the answer to that is you're not. Not today. Today, maybe you unpack the kitchen. Maybe you call the insurance company. Maybe you cry. Maybe you go to work because life, bizarrely, keeps requiring ordinary things from us, even when things feel completely different. Maybe you call someone and say, Can you just stay on the phone with me for a little while? That's enough for today. That really is enough. This is actually one of the things I'm watching happen around me right now in the aftermath of the hurricane. When a disaster happens, you don't rebuild an entire community the next morning. First, you assess what happened, what's still standing, what needs immediate attention, who needs help first, what resources are available, what can wait. And then you start one thing at a time, and that's it. I think we can give ourselves the same grace when our personal life falls apart. You don't have to rebuild your entire life while you're still standing in the wreckage. Take inventory first. What is okay? What isn't? What needs attention right now? What can wait until next week? What decision actually has to be made today? And what decision are you trying to force yourself to make because uncertainty makes you feel uncomfortable? Those are different things that require different responses. I know we want some huge answer, some beautiful five-step plan that tells us exactly how to rebuild. But sometimes resilience is incredibly unglamorous. Sometimes it's simply, I don't know how I'm going to do all of this, but I know what I need to do today. And today is enough. Not forever, just today. I want to tell you something about the last few days. We've been without power at home since the storm, and I don't know when it's coming back. I'm lucky to have the ability to have an office located in an area that power gets prioritized. There are crews working all over the island, roads that need attention, communities dealing with damage far more significant than anything happening at my house. And there's a strange thing that happens when you're sitting inside a situation like this. You want to do something. At least I do. I am not particularly good at sitting around feeling helpless. But there's a reality that I have to face. I'm not a first responder. I'm not a lineman. I'm not operating heavy equipment. I can't restore the electrical grid. I can't repair a washed-out road. And wandering into places where emergency crews are trying to work because I desperately want to feel useful does not make me useful. It makes me one more person that they have to worry about. So I've had to ask myself a different question. What actually belongs to me right now? And the answers have been pretty simple. I know how to support people emotionally. So I have offered free crisis counseling over the next couple of weeks to people who are struggling. I know how to use my voice. So I'm sitting here making this podcast. I know how to check on people. So I reach out and I ask, are you and your family okay? Do you need anything? I have two capable hands, and when it's time to help rebuild, I can use them. And right now, I can stay out of the way because sometimes that's a responsibility too. There's a humility in recognizing that this part isn't mine. And I think that that's something that we lose sight of when we're scared. We start believing that if we're not controlling everything, we're doing nothing. But that's just not true. There is an enormous space between controlling everything and being completely powerless. And that's where agency lives. I think this applies to so many moments in life. If someone you love is struggling, you may not be able to fix it, but maybe you can just sit with them. If your adult child makes a decision that you don't agree with it, you may not be able to control it, but you can decide what kind of parent you're going to be while they navigate it. If your marriage is ending, you cannot control how your partner behaves, but you can decide how you care for yourself through it. If you're living in an unhealthy relationship and you aren't ready or able to leave, you may not be able to change your entire situation today. But maybe you can make one phone call, tell one person the truth, get one piece of information, put one support in place. That's agency. Not I can make everything okay, but there is something here that belongs to me. And when everything feels out of control, sometimes finding the one thing is enough to help you put your feet back underneath you. Something else I've been thinking about this week is how much we need other people. And that's interesting for me to sit with because I think a lot of women in this community have become incredibly good at being the person that everyone else needs. You're the one people call. You're the one who figures it out. You're the one who stays calm. You're the capable one. And being capable can become such a strong part of your identity that receiving help starts to feel really uncomfortable, like it means something bad about you. But look at what happens when an entire community is affected by something. Nobody has everything. Someone has equipment, someone has food, someone has professional training, someone has a place for people to sleep, someone knows how to organize, someone knows how to listen, someone has physical strength. And maybe someone doesn't have much of anything right now because they're the one who just lost everything. Their job isn't to contribute equally. Their job right now might simply be to receive. I really want to sit with that for a moment because I think that women need permission to hear it. There are seasons of your life when you will be the person helping, and there are seasons when you will be the person who needs help. Neither one determines your worth. You don't have to earn support by being useful first. You don't have to immediately repay someone for showing up for you. And you don't have to apologize because this happens to be the season when you don't have anything left to give. I think we've built this strange mythology around strong women. Oh, she's independent, she's resilient, she handles things, she doesn't need anybody. And I don't necessarily think that's strength. I think sometimes that's survival dressed up as independence. Because real strength can also sound like, I don't know what to do, can you help me? Can you sit with me? Can I stay with you? Can you help me understand my options? I don't want to be alone tonight. That's not weakness, that's community. And community is actually one of the most powerful things available to us when our lives change. This matters especially for women coming out of unhealthy relationships because isolation is one of the most powerful tools of control. Sometimes it was deliberately created by an abusive partner. Sometimes it happened gradually because maintaining friendships became exhausting. Sometimes you stopped telling people what was happening because you were embarrassed or tired of hearing why are you still with him? So you stopped talking. And eventually your world became very small. Part of rebuilding, maybe one of the first parts, is allowing people back into it. Not everybody. We don't have to hand the keys to Everyone who knocks, but safe people, people who don't require you to perform, people who can tolerate sitting beside you while you figure things out. Because sometimes support isn't somebody coming in with a solution. Sometimes it's somebody saying, I don't know either, but you're not doing this part alone. There's something about the word rebuilding that I've been sitting with this week. We hear it after disasters all the time. We're gonna rebuild. Of course we are. But rebuilding doesn't necessarily mean recreating exactly what existed before. Sometimes you can't. And sometimes, honestly, you shouldn't. I think that's true after any major life disruption. There can be this desperate urge to get back to normal. After a breakup, after a divorce, after a loss, after leaving an abusive relationship, after your life changes in some enormous way, you think, I just want to feel like myself again. I understand that. I have felt that. But what if the goal isn't to become exactly who you were before? What if you've learned something? What if your needs have changed and your priorities are different? What if the version of you who existed before the storm was already exhausted, already compromising too much, already living a life that didn't quite fit anymore? Rebuilding gives you an opportunity to ask questions that normal life sometimes lets us avoid. What still matters to me? What doesn't? What am I carrying forward and what am I done carrying? Who do I actually want to be around? What kind of life actually feels like mine? And I don't mean that in some toxic positive, everything happens for a reason and now you get to build something better kind of way. No. Sometimes you would gladly take your old life back. Sometimes you didn't ask for reinvention. Sometimes you would give anything to have not learned the lesson. And I think we have to honor that part too. But if change has already happened, eventually the question becomes what do I build from here? Not how do I make this like it never happened? We can't. And not how quickly can I get over it? That's just not how grief works. Just given what is true now, what do I want to build? That's a gentler question. And you may not know yet, and that's okay. There may be a period between the old life and the new one where you don't recognize yourself. And I think that we rushed that period. We want the transformation montage. Three months later, new apartment, new haircut, new career, new confidence, new woman. Real life is messier than that. Sometimes rebuilding looks like sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes, wondering where the hell the can opener is. Sometimes it looks like having a wonderful day and then crying in the grocery store. Sometimes it looks like feeling incredibly strong at 10 in the morning and completely lost by four in the afternoon. And sometimes progress is simply realizing six months ago, this would have destroyed me for a week. Today, it hurt for an hour. That is rebuilding too, quietly, piece by piece, without anyone watching. You don't have to earn your resilience by doing this gracefully. You don't have to handle it well. You just have to keep going one unglamorous, uncinematic, sometimes very ordinary day at a time. And then I watched people remind each other how much we still have. People checking on neighbors, people sharing information, people offering what they had, first responders going towards situations the rest of us were being told to stay away from, crews working to restore what can be restored, people simply sitting beside other people who were devastated because sometimes there isn't anything useful to say, and showing up anyway is everything. I don't want to turn that into an inspirational lesson because for the people who lost homes, for the people whose communities were washed away, this isn't inspiring, it's painful, it's frightening, it's exhausting, and it's going to take a very long time. But watching all of this has reminded me of something that I want to carry with me. We don't always get to choose what changes our lives. Sometimes the storm comes anyway. Sometimes the relationship ends, sometimes someone dies, sometimes the job disappears, sometimes our health changes. Sometimes someone who we trusted turns out not to be who we believe they were. Sometimes we make the choice ourselves because we finally realize that we can't keep living the way we've been living. And suddenly we're standing in a life that we don't recognize yet. Maybe you are there right now. Maybe your life changed recently. Maybe you're considering changing it. Maybe you're still standing in the middle of something that you genuinely have no idea how it's gonna turn out. I don't have a magical answer for you. I'm not sure you need one. I think maybe you need three questions. Just three. One, what actually needs my attention right now? Two, what belongs to me to do? And three, where do I need someone else? That's enough. You don't have to rebuild your entire life today. You don't have to know who you're gonna be five years from now. You don't have to convince yourself that everything is gonna be okay. Sometimes you simply have to trust that when the next thing comes, you'll meet it. And when you can't meet it alone, you'll reach for somebody who can stand there with you. Maybe that's resilience, not I know I'm gonna be okay, but I don't know yet, and I don't have to know yet. I can prepare, I can respond, I can ask for help, I can help someone else when I'm able, I can rest when I'm not, I can do what belongs to me and release what doesn't. And tomorrow, I'll figure out tomorrow. Thank you for sitting with me for a slightly different episode of the Pattern Breakers Collective this week. This one came from a very real place, not a planned content calendar, not a structured draft, just me sitting here without power at home, thinking about uncertainty and what we do with it. To those of you who live here in Hawaii who are listening, please take care of yourselves and each other. There's a lot of recovery ahead. And if you're struggling emotionally with what's happening, I'm offering free crisis counseling over the next couple of weeks for people affected by Hurricane Lala, please reach out. That offer is very, very real. And for my broader pattern breakers community, if your storm looks different, if you are facing the end of a relationship or trying to decide what comes next, rebuilding after emotional abuse, or simply realizing that you don't want to keep living inside the same patterns, you don't have to figure that out alone either. The 12-week group program and options for individual support are all available on my socials or at patternbreakerscollective.com. Reach out anytime. If today's episode made you think of someone who is standing in their own version of what now, send it to them. Not because this episode has the answer, but maybe because they need someone to remind them that they don't have to have the answer yet, and that where they are right now is a place where it's okay to simply not know. If you haven't already, I'd really appreciate a rating or a review wherever you listen. It helps more women find this podcast and become part of this community. For now, I'm going to keep doing what I can do. I'm gonna go check on people, offer the support I know how to offer, and be ready to help when help is needed, and stay out of the way when people who know how to do something better than I do need the room to do it. And apparently, I'm gonna keep waiting for the lights to come back on at home. Because that's what's mine to do today. And whatever you're facing, maybe you don't need to figure out the whole thing either. Find what's yours today. Do that. Let someone else help you with the parts that aren't. And we'll figure out tomorrow when tomorrow gets here.