for two weeks every summer, mindvalley university takes over tallinn, estonia.
they host classes by day — teaching everything from longevity, neuroscience, ai, breathwork, entrepreneurship, spirituality, relationships, etc. etc. — all packed sardine-can1 tight so you’re taking notes on the future of technology at noon and reconsidering the nature of consciousness by three.
and at night? the themed parties are abundant enough to qualify as a spiritual teaching of their own.
which means you change clothes at least twice a day, and have double the opportunity to ask: who do i feel like being today?
i must admit, tallinn is an unusually good place to ask.
the old town is medieval — cobblestones, city walls, church spires — i am not mincing words when i say it’s fairytale-esque. and yet it’s made that much more intriguing by the fact that estonia has quietly become one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world.
it doesn’t feel like real life. at all.
even time gets a little slippery.
in july, the sun goes down around ten and returns before five, and in between it never fully commits to darkness. there is something genuinely disorienting about walking out of a party at 2 am and being met with a pale blue sky. after a few days, you stop trusting the light to tell you what time it is.
…but my favorite part is the people.
they arrive and leave in waves across the two weeks. there are the people who return each year and remember exactly what you told them the last time you were together. and then, every day, there are others who meet you with a completely blank slate.
many all of them are wildly accomplished. founders, actors, researchers, investors, people building things i did not know existed until approximately four minutes into the conversation.
and when you introduce yourself over + over, you start noticing what pieces of your identity you reach for.
what you do. where you live. what you have built. what you are building now. the old accomplishments that still make their way into the story, even when you are no longer sure they belong there.
we all have our preferred evidence for who we are.
but eventually the usual answers start to sound a little rehearsed. and you start wondering if you’re answering the actual question.
who am i now?
i’ve been making the mindvalley university pilgrimage since 2023.
this year, somewhere in the highly scientific process of packing for tallinn, i pulled a pastel purple skirt from my closet.2
it is slinky, slightly impractical, and has followed me across several countries and at least as many versions of myself.
i wore it to my first mvu, paired with a matching satin top.
a few nights ago, i wore the same skirt again. but this time, i tied a silk scarf around my neck approximately twenty minutes before leaving the hotel and decided it was a top.
there was no careful plan. no emergency backup blouse folded into my [ oh so tiny ] handbag. no time to conduct a full psychological risk assessment on whether the room would collectively agree with my creative decision.
i looked in the mirror and thought:
this.
then i left.
later that evening, in a fit of nostalgia, i put the two photographs side by side in their own album.
same city. same conference. same skirt. unmistakably different woman.
even accounting for the notorious canon g7x glow, i saw it immediately. there was something more open in this year’s photograph. more playful. less careful.
i resisted the temptation to turn two pictures into a psychological case study — personal growth content has suffered enough, hasn’t it?
but the image stayed with me. because whatever i was seeing in my posture, i had also been feeling internally.
something had begun to loosen.
[ deep, cleansing breath ]
as a “reformed” control freak, i’ve spent the better part of the last few months becoming acquainted with Surrender. as someone who still straightens the labels on every color-coordinated spice in her kitchen cabinet, alas, it has not come naturally.
for years, i believed healing was mechanically simple! i just needed to understand myself! my childhood! my attachment style! my relationship pattern! my enneagram! my human design!
dear reader, i fear there hasn’t been a framework left untouched!
if something hurt, i analyzed it. if someone confused me, i studied them. if grief arrived, i immediately began constructing a narrative that might make the grief feel productive — or, god forbid, located a podcast to explain why in the world i was crying.
sometimes analysis is, in fact, wisdom. but much to my dismay, studying surrender has taught me that sometimes it’s just a sophisticated exit strategy. and a sweet, sweet disguise for… control.3
the practice of surrender, then, is deceptively simple: feel what is there without requiring it to change. and at first, quite predictably, i maintained a consistent D- performance.
which is roughly when i started devouring the “gospel” of david hawkins, determined to think-my-way into not-thinking-my-way through things.
[ nothing says “letting go” quite like grasping onto a table ]
when i looked at this model of consciousness, my brain snagged on what felt like a critical distinction: energetic contraction and expansion.
and perched elegantly at the threshold between them was courage.
this felt significant to me. because when carrying the heaviness of fear, shame, guilt, anger — whatever particular flavor of human suffering is on the menu that day — emotional lightness can feel offensively far away.
joy, peace, love — gorgeous. glowing. big, big fan.
but courage interested me because even when you’re knee-deep in emotional muck, courage moves.
you can be afraid and do one courageous thing. you can be grieving and do one courageous thing. you can feel ashamed, uncertain, rejected, angry, wildly underqualified — and still make one decision that refuses to organize itself around that feeling.
i cannot emphasize this enough, dear reader — this changed the way i thought about playing small.
if fear makes me contract, i do not need to wait until i feel fearless to become bigger. i just need to find the next available act of courage. a tiny trapdoor out of contraction and toward something lighter. more expansive.
suddenly, its place on the threshold made perfect sense to me.
and as someone who had been trying to loosen fear’s grip, courage looked like how i could cross.
[ what's your next available act of courage? tell me. ]
shocking absolutely no one, all roads in my personal development journey eventually lead back to the closet. so i started there.
we talk about fashion as self-expression all the time. but lately i’ve been more interested in what happens immediately before the expression: whether or not we let ourselves do it.
because we interrupt ourselves in clothes constantly. too much. too sexy. too weird. too young. too serious. too casual for a heel, babe.
this is where my argument for clothes as nourishment gets more interesting. overconsumption asks: what can i buy to escape myself? nourishment asks: what can i wear to access more of myself?
sometimes that means sensuality. sometimes softness. sometimes wearing the silhouette you love before asking whether it is “appropriate,” repeating the outfit without issuing a public apology, or putting on the lipstick that feels slightly too visible for coffee — and noting, for the record, that the barista does not flinch.
the point is not to dress bigger. it is to stop dressing smaller than the truth.
to be clear, this is not exposure therapy by way of miu miu. a dress cannot heal your childhood. unfortunately, my insurance provider agrees.
but getting dressed gives us a wonderfully low-stakes place to catch ourselves playing small — and choose differently.
which brings me back to tallinn.
off the heels of a particularly meaty 2025, i arrived this year knowing i had been playing small. not everywhere. and not obviously to people who didn’t really know me.
playing small can coexist remarkably well with a big life. you can build things, travel alone, make money, take risks, walk confidently into rooms full of strangers — and still quietly negotiate yourself down in the places that matter.
fear had become sneakier than that for me. i had gotten exceptionally good at scanning.
💭 something changed. i can feel it. was it something i said? did i ask for too much? should i pull back? give them space?
say something?absolutely do not say something. be cool. be normal. stop thinking about it. why are you still thinking about it?![ nervous system opens seventeen new tabs ]
i had become remarkably fluent in other people’s signals. after spending the better part of a year silencing my own, i could barely hear myself.
i also knew i was somewhere between identities. some of the old answers to who are you? still sounded impressive when i said them out loud. they just didn’t sound entirely like me anymore.
and the new answers? i didn’t have them yet.
so before i left for tallinn, i made myself a commitment. i didn’t need a new title or a fully formed next chapter. i wanted to stop organizing myself around fear.
i needed a different state of mind:
i am her.
not i am becoming her. becoming her leaves a suspicious amount of room for procrastination.
i am her.
less a declaration of who i had already become, and more a decision to stop waiting for proof. because if i am already her, there is really only one useful question left:
what would she do next?
and then, access the courage to do it.
women invest an unruly amount of time trying to understand their own versions of mr. big. an extraordinary amount of female intellectual capital, really, devoted to men whose defining characteristic is that we cannot quite figure out what they want.
i would like to redirect some funding —
i am much more interested in ms. big.
ms. big is not the woman who finally becomes cool enough/pretty enough/successful enough to be chosen by mr. big. that would be a terribly small definition of big.
she is the woman who stops making someone else’s choice mean quite so much about her.
she can want something without immediately talking herself out of wanting it. she can love someone and still hear herself think. she can survive being misunderstood. she can notice fear entering the room without automatically handing it the keys.
that, to me, is the “big.”
not louder. not more impressive. certainly not unbothered. just increasingly able to remain herself when being herself gets uncomfortable.
not because she is fearless. because she knows where the door is:
courage.
when i catch myself contracting now, i try to do something that moves in the other direction. sometimes it matters enormously: say what you mean. ask for what you want. leave. stay. tell the truth.
and often it is almost comically small:
put on a heel, babe.
and maybe this is why the two photographs affected me so much.
three years ago, i came to tallinn and was asked, over and over: who are you? and i wore cmo of a global tax company like a badge of honor to prove how much i deserved to be in the room.
this year, i came back with a very different relationship to the question. mostly, i was less interested in having an “impressive” answer.
because i’m starting to think we answer that question all day long anyway. in what we say. what we tolerate. what we ask for. what we make. all the tiny moments when fear suggests we make ourselves a little smaller and we decide whether or not to listen.
the scarf top was one of those moments.
tying it around my neck was not particularly courageous. not interrupting myself was.
i had an idea. i liked it. and somewhere between this could be a top and walking out the door, i simply didn’t give fear enough time to turn delight into debate.
which, in the end, might be my answer to carrie’s question about god and fashion.
both can become elaborate systems of performance. ways to earn approval. to escape uncertainty. to construct an identity convincing enough that perhaps even we believe it.
but at their most nourishing, neither asks us to become someone else. both ask us to surrender the performance and meet what is already there.
maybe that is the whole point of i am her.
she was never somewhere else.
three years ago, i needed more evidence.
this year, i tied the scarf and left.
sardines are trending. this is topical journalism.
i photographed every outfit in advance so object permanence could not defeat me whilst managing two suitcases.
👹
the "strangely spiritual act of getting dressed" is stunning. Hit in the bones (literally went to go change my outfit), it's like an initiation of the self. There's a phrase in Spanish that goes, "como te ven, te tratan," and your piece perfectly encapsulates the thought. LOVED!
I love the question, "what can I wear to access more of myself?" Dressing should be an expansive act!