The Way Home, Part 2: The Breadcrumbs
How a nanny falling through, an expo I almost skipped, and thirty minutes with a stranger started the slow journey to put me back together.
If you haven’t yet, go back and read Part 1. At the end, you left me quietly coming apart at a windowless desk, running on no sleep, sure that something was wrong with me. Let me back up to the fall of 2019, because this is where it all started to unravel. And then, weirdly, start to heal.
We had to let our nanny go. I won’t get into the details, but it was a child-safety thing, the kind that makes your stomach drop and your decision instant. We gave her a month’s notice and we worked with an agency to find a replacement. We hired one after a couple weeks and lots of interviews. Our kids were one and a half and three and a half, right in the thick of stranger danger and slow to warm up to anyone new. So I took two weeks of PTO to be home and help the new nanny settle in and learn all our little routines.
Within the first three days, my husband and I looked at each other and just knew it wasn’t going to work, so we let her go fast. And then we were back to square one, except now my two weeks were evaporating while we interviewed frantically, called in different agencies, reached out to everyone we knew for recommendations, and did all the things you do when you’re desperate to find the right person who can also start immediately. My two weeks ran out. So I had to do something I’d never thought I’d do: I took a leave of absence.
I was home with my babies for ten weeks.
I know how that sounds. Ten weeks home with your kids, what a gift. And I love them more than anything. But that baby-toddler stage is genuinely one of the hardest things I have ever done, harder for me than any trading floor, and every single day I felt more of myself slipping away. Looking back, I think I was somewhere in postpartum depression or anxiety, I just didn’t have the words for it then. I was also grieving the sudden loss of the original nanny. I felt like I was drowning. I was desperate to get back to work to feel a little more like myself, and I also didn’t even love my work. Both things, at the same time.
At the very end of 2019 we finally found her, the nanny who would go on to be the perfect fit for our family for the next few years. I went back to work and for a minute it felt good to be back in my groove. But something in me had shifted. My nervous system was still stuck in that white-knuckle, fight-or-flight place from the whole ordeal, and it would not let go.
So I did another thing I’d never really done. I started seeing a therapist. I’d been exactly once before, in a crisis, about ten years earlier, and opening up to a stranger did not come naturally to me (understatement of the century at the time). Around the same time I started seeing a homeopath too, who I still see today. I was throwing everything at the wall, trying to find my way back to myself.
And then came the wellness expo.
The thing about the expo is that I almost didn’t go. My old massage therapist had a booth and knew I was struggling, and she told me to swing by on a Saturday, that there’d be all kinds of vendors. Going somewhere by myself, for myself, on a weekend, was so far outside my normal that it’s almost funny now. But I got dressed and I went, even though I had an undercurrent of anxiety running through me.
I walked in and it was a lot. Vendors everywhere, mediums, psychics, massage therapists, sound healers, all these things I knew absolutely nothing about. I texted my friend, “I’m here, where’s your booth?” She wrote back that her daughter had come down with the flu and she wasn’t there. Uh-oh.
Old me would have turned right around and driven home. The whole reason I’d come wasn’t even there. But something in me said, well, you’re already here, and this is a big deal, you showed up somewhere completely alone. Might as well look around.
There was a room running rotating sessions, and I checked the schedule, and five minutes from right then there was a “Group Sound Healing Session” with someone called Zen Within Academy. I didn’t know what sound healing was. I didn’t know what any of it was. But it was what was happening next, so I walked in.
Katie and her husband Josh were at the front of the room. She led a guided meditation and then they used their instruments for what she called frequency healing while the rest of us just sat there quietly and took it in. I’d tried meditation in the past and never really got anywhere with it, so I didn’t have high hopes, but maybe the guided version was exactly what I needed because I was able to drop right in. I was shocked and felt drawn to the woman up front. She looked about my age. She mentioned she’d spent many years at another major bank before doing this work, and something in me sat up. Here was a woman from my exact corporate world who had crossed over into whatever this was. I could not stop noticing her energy.
At the end I did something completely out of character. I walked up to her, thanked her, told her I’d never experienced anything like it and that I was only there by total fluke. I took her business card. And something told me to book a one-on-one session, even though her website was vague and I could not have told you what the session even was. I just thought, I’m following these breadcrumbs, and the breadcrumbs led me here.
That was six and a half years ago. I’ve seen her at least once a month ever since. (She’s also become one of my dearest friends, but that part comes later.)
Funny timing: right after I booked, I got sick. Twelve days flat in bed, a kind of sick I’d never known. This was March 2020, so, yeah, I guess it wasn’t the flu. By the time I surfaced, the world had shut down, and my scheduled in-person appointment became a virtual one. Me, at home, in lockdown, husband working down the hall, new nanny with the kids downstairs, about to have a session I could not have described to you if you paid me.
I had no idea what “12th dimensional healing” was. I went in anyway, feeling weirdly called to it.
We talked a little about what was going on, the whole nanny spiral, how my body was still stuck in survival mode even though the actual emergency was long over. And then she did something I’d never done: inner-child work. She spoke to a younger version of me. At the end there was this guided activation where she did all the talking and I just listened.
And while she was talking, tears started rolling down my face. Silently. I wasn’t trying to cry. I wasn’t even sad, exactly. They just came.
Today these kinds of tears happen to me fairly regularly, but back then? I hadn’t really cried in about thirty years. Not at sad movies, not when someone was hurt, not at anything. I’d gone numb somewhere back in childhood and just stayed there. And now here I was, sitting in my own house in front of a Zoom screen with tears sliding down my cheeks and no idea why.
I said to her, “I don’t know what that was. I don’t know what’s happening. But I guess I’m supposed to come back.” Because clearly something had moved in my body that I did not consciously do. That was the moment I was hooked.
The thing I’ve come to love about this work, more than the talk therapy I’d tried, is that I don’t have to show up already knowing what’s wrong. I don’t have to dig for the topic. It just surfaces. I’ll think we’re going to talk about some argument with my husband, and then something small from the drive over comes out instead, and that turns out to be the real thing. For once in my life, I don’t have to have it all figured out.
What I didn’t know yet, sitting there with those thirty-years-late tears, was that these monthly sessions would end up doing something all my spreadsheets never could. They were going to give me permission to blow up the entire life I’d spent fifteen years building.
But first I had to get past two things standing in the doorway blocking my exit: my identity, and the money.
I’ll save that part of the story for Part 3 tomorrow.
Before you go
Have you ever followed a breadcrumb that made no logical sense at the time, and it turned out to matter? Hit reply and tell me. Those are my favorite stories to read.
Talk soon,
Kristen ❤️