A note before we begin: this isn't a Thursday Skillset or a Sunday Mindset issue. This is something different — and something I've been wanting to do for a long time.
I'm calling it Becoming. It's my personal dispatch — the unfiltered, still-in-progress story of building this business and this life from the inside. I don't know yet how often it will come, or if it will find its own home eventually. But I know I needed to start. More on that below.
Last month, on a Monday afternoon, driving in the rain, listening to Jason Isbell and crying, I realized it was time to take my own advice.
I know. Very dramatic. Very angsty teenager posting on LiveJournal. Bear with me.
Here's what you don't know about the last seven months. Or really, the last decade.
In December of 2024, I found out that I had a dental infection from a badly performed root canal — one that had been quietly destroying my health for nine and a half years.
Nine and a half fucking YEARS.
During that time, I collected diagnoses — chronic Lyme disease, hormonal dysfunction, chronic joint pain, long COVID, histamine intolerance, thyroid dysfunction, and the list goes on — the way many of us do when your body is doing something nobody can quite figure out.
Some of those diagnoses were real. Some were real but incomplete. All of them were expensive, exhausting, and humbling in ways I didn't have language for at the time.
And the whole time, at the root of a significant portion of it — literally at the root — was an infection in my jaw (you know, right next to my freaking brain) that NOBODY caught for nearly a decade.
When I finally found out, my first feeling wasn't anger. It was relief.
Oh. That's what it was. Now we can actually heal.
I thought that was the ending of that story. It turned out to be the beginning of a new, harder chapter.
Because healing from 9 ½ years of chronic infection isn't a switch you flip. It's a long, nonlinear, sometimes demoralizing process of your body slowly, cautiously deciding it might be safe to repair itself.
There have been months that felt like progress. Months that felt like regression.
And all of it happening while I was also navigating a bunch of other health challenges:
A bad fall in January, complicated by a genetic degenerative neurological condition called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) — that affects my peripheral nerves, primarily in my feet and ankles.
Mold in my bedroom ceiling that nobody knew about for months, silently adding to a body already working overtime.
A nervous system that has been in some version of survival mode for so long that "baseline" stopped meaning what it used to mean.
I'm not telling you all of this for sympathy. In fact, that’s why I’ve been avoiding telling you.
I'm telling you because I have done the "not feeling my best lately" version of this conversation approximately 1001 times, and I am done with that version. That version is still hiding. And I don’t hide.
This is what has actually been going on.
Here's where it gets complicated. And true. And almost embarrassing to admit.
I am grateful for this extremely difficult chapter in my health.
Not in a toxic-positive, everything-happens-for-a-reason way.
Not in a way that erases how frightening some of this has been.
Or how exhausting it is to build a business you believe in from inside a body that is staging what feels like a sustained and very determined protest.
But truly, deeply, in my bones, grateful for a very specific reason: my body has forced me to slow down in a way that nothing else ever could.
I have been trying to learn the lesson of ENOUGH for probably my whole life, but especially the last six years.
Six years of knowing — since a dog attack in 2020 that broke something open in me and started all of this — that I use busyness as armor.
→ That hustle has been, for most of my adult life, a very effective and socially acceptable way of not feeling things.
→ That the DOING has kept me at a safe distance from the BEING.
I know this. I have known this for years. I have written about it. I have talked about it with clients. I have posted on social media about it. I have built an entire philosophy around it.
And roughly every few months, something would slow me down — a flare, a crash, another bout of COVID, a bad few days — and I'd think: this is it. This is the reset. This time I'm actually going to slow down.
And I would mean it completely.
And then I'd feel a little better. And I'd be right back in hustle mode.
The body, it turns out, is more patient (and persistent) than I am. She kept raising the stakes until the lesson had nowhere left to go.
Here's something I ask every client I work with when we get to the positioning work.
I have them make three lists.
Skills — what are you genuinely good at?
Passions — what do you love, what do you geek out about, what could you talk about for three hours without noticing?
Triumphs — and this is the one that matters most, and the one people almost always get wrong at first. Triumphs doesn't mean achievements. It doesn't mean the impressive line items on your resume or the revenue milestone or the award. Those things matter, but they're not what I'm after.
What I'm after is the hard shit. The thing you went through that broke you open and changed who you are. The experience that was so difficult, so disorienting, so not what you planned — that you came out the other side of it a fundamentally different person. Deeper. More compassionate. More real.
Because here's what I believe with everything I have: the hardest things we've been through are the things that make us who we actually are.
Let me repeat that:
The hardest things we've been through are the things that make us who we actually are.
They're why I can sit with a client who is in the middle of something genuinely terrible and meet them there without flinching. Not because I have the answer. Because I've been in the middle of something genuinely terrible too. More than once. In more ways than one.
They're why I can hear someone's shame — about their business, about their choices, about the gap between who they are and who they thought they'd be by now — and respond with kindness instead of judgment.
Because I know that gap. I have lived in that gap. I am STILL living in that gap.
And I want to be honest about something: I don't think that gap ever fully closes.
As you grow, as you heal, as you build the life you've been working toward — you evolve. And with evolution comes a new version of the gap. A new distance between who you are and who you're becoming. I don’t think that's a problem to solve. I think that's just what it means to be someone who is actually trying.
What I've come to believe — and what has become the core of everything I do — is that the goal isn't to close the gap once and be done. It's to learn to live inside it with more grace. More honesty. Less armor.
That belief is, in a lot of ways, where the Essentialist CEO came from.
When I first started thinking about living an essentialist life — about building a business that doesn't cost you your soul, about choosing depth over volume, about the radical act of slowing down in a world that rewards speed — I was deep in the grip of hustle culture.
Not building this business yet. Just thinking. Just noticing. Just starting to get curious about something that felt important but didn't have a name yet.
I want to pause on that for a second, because I think it matters.
The ideas you keep coming back to, the concepts you can't stop circling, the thing you're turning over in your head at 38 that you don't quite have language for yet — pay attention to those. Six years later, that thing might be the entire ethos of your business.
By the time I named this and built it into something real, I'd made genuine headway. The hustle addiction wasn't gone (not sure it ever will be), but I understood it differently.
I'd done real work. The Essentialist CEO wasn't a lie I was telling — it was a direction I was actually moving in.
And I still am. Moving toward it. Not arrived.
In the seven months since I launched this business, I've gone from zero revenue to probably surpassing $50k this month — mostly while working 25 to 40% of the hours I'm used to.
Not because I found some magic system. But because being forced to slow down made me ruthlessly clear on what matters. What is actually essential. And that clarity has made me more effective, not less.
It doesn't mean things are easy now. They're not. But they're different — because I am so much more intentional about what truly needs to happen.
And I’m so much more self-compassionate when I simply cannot do something I planned because my body needs to rest.
I'm regularly asking myself: what do I actually need to get done today? This week? What can I let go of?
And the only reason I'm able to sit here writing this at all is because I gave myself space — space to feel what I'm going through, to have the realizations, to get curious about them instead of running from them.
The slowing down didn't cost me the business. It built it.
I tell my clients this constantly. The concepts I teach, I am still learning to implement myself. Not as a disclaimer. As the truth. The work doesn't end because you named it. You just get to go deeper and recommit to it, over and over and over again.
Nothing is one and done. It's all a journey. The gap doesn't close — it just becomes more familiar territory, easier to manage, more natural to navigate.
Some people might call that fraud. (I've called it that, in my own head, at 3am)
Here's what I actually think it is: it's the most honest thing I know how to do. Build toward what you need. Teach what you're still learning. Let the work be part of the becoming.
But here's where it got complicated. And where I have to be really honest with you.
I have gotten comfortable with vulnerability in ways that used to terrify me.
I've talked publicly about my divorce.
About my second marriage and what it took to get there.
About being diagnosed with ADHD. About imposter syndrome and fear and the specific loneliness of building something from scratch.
I've pulled back curtains that I used to keep very firmly shut, and I've found, every time, that the thing behind the curtain is the thing that actually connects. But this one I kept.
Not because I didn't know it was there. But because it felt too complicated. Too raw. Too unfinished. And because — if I'm being completely honest — I was afraid of what you'd think.
I was afraid that talking about how tenuous my health has felt, how much I've been struggling, how hard it has been to build this thing from inside a body that keeps changing the terms — I was afraid that would make me look like someone who couldn't hold it together.
Someone whose own life didn't match what she was teaching. Someone who was, in the most uncomfortable possible way, a fraud.
So I gave you the cleaned-up version. The "not feeling my best" version. The version that was technically true and also completely insufficient.
And it has eaten away at me. Because for me, being able to talk about something — really talk about it, in public, out loud, with specificity — is a core part of how I heal from it. It's how I process. It's how I integrate. And I have been trying to heal from something I wasn't letting myself talk about.
I don't fault myself for not being ready sooner. I believe in sitting with things until you're actually ready to say them, not forcing vulnerability before it's real. The performed version helps no one.
But I kept coming back to this. Over and over. Driving in the rain, crying to Jason Isbell, I finally heard myself say: that's how you know.
So here I am.
Not with the clean version. Not with the resolved story. Not with the "here's what I went through and here's how I came out the other side" narrative that would feel safer to tell.
Just this. The thing I kept walking past. The door I kept my hand on. Finally open.
And when I finally stopped fighting it — stopped waiting for the cleaner version, stopped protecting myself from your judgment, stopped holding this particular tender thing at arm's length —
It felt soft. Like the anxiety and the worry and the weight of it just melted. Like the best part of me came up and wrapped around all of it.
It felt like coming home.
I'll see you in the next one.
With love and becoming,
Kasey
P.S. I've thought about writing something like this for years — just my journey, unpolished, in real time. I even tried it on Substack for a while. It was too much then. I wasn't ready. I'm ready now.
I don't know how often Becoming will land in your inbox, and I'm not going to promise a cadence I can't keep. But I want to ask you directly: is this something you'd want to keep reading? Hit reply and tell me. Yes or no. Or tell me what landed, what didn't, what you needed to hear. I read every single reply. That's not a thing I say — it's a thing I actually do.