I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to friends, family members, clients, and even strangers about the importance of letting go.

Let go of the friendship.Let go of the bad habit.Let go of the guilt.Let go of the old story.Let go of the jeans that haven’t fit since 2014.

We hear it everywhere:

Let go of the past so you can make room for the future.

And honestly, it sounds wise. It sounds healing. It sounds evolved.

But lately I’ve started wondering…

Is letting go really the most important part of the equation?

Or is there another piece we don’t talk about enough?

What if the real shift happens when we stop obsessing over what we need to release and start becoming intentional about what we want to let in?

Today I had a visceral experience of this.

I woke up this morning carrying a little anxiety about the start of another week. Nothing dramatic. Just regular adult anxiety. The kind that could probably be connected to fifty different things happening in life all at once.

But then I walked into my son’s room while he was still sleeping.

Everything got quiet for a moment.

I stood there breathing in the sweetness of that moment, and I heard this thought so clearly inside myself:

Maybe it’s not about letting go. Maybe it’s more about letting in.

That thought stopped me.

Because the truth is, I don’t think I need to fight my anxiety all the time. Anxiety is part of being human. It visits. It moves through. Sometimes it lingers.

Maybe the goal isn’t to wage war against every uncomfortable feeling.

Maybe the practice is simply becoming more intentional about what we allow in alongside it.

Letting in the better feeling.Letting in the empowered version of the story.Letting in gratitude.Letting in playfulness.Letting in energy.Letting in possibility.

After I got the kids off to school, I sat down with my journal and decided to practice this.

At the top of the page I wrote:

Susan, Let In:

Joy.Play.Love.Happiness.Energy.Abundance.Fun.Openness.Aliveness.More me.Surprises.Magic.Laughter.Money.Travel.Connection.New experiences.Today.

And something shifted.

Not because my anxiety magically disappeared.

But because my focus changed.

Instead of spending my energy trying to force something out of me, I started inviting something into me.

My body felt lighter.My chest softened.I felt more open.More present.More loving toward myself.

It was such a simple pivot, but it felt profound.

And honestly, it felt joyful.

So maybe the next time you find yourself thinking, I just need to let this go, pause for a moment and ask yourself:

What do I want to let in?

Because maybe healing is not only about release.

Maybe it is also about receiving.

JOY — Just Open Yourself.

And maybe the practice of letting in is one beautiful, expansive place to begin.

The Joy Jolt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today in dance class the teacher asked us to dance as if we were seven years old again. Everyone around me seemed to naturally move into this playful childlike energy, but something unexpected happened to me today. Instead of imagining myself younger, I suddenly imagined myself older. Much older. I experienced myself as an 80 year old woman dancing.

And honestly, it felt so beautiful.

I could feel that as an 80 year old woman I was even more profoundly tapping into a deep sense of wonder and gratitude moving through my body. Gratitude for my body and that I was moving my body at 80. Enjoying my body at 80. Gratitude for the warmth of the sun on my aged skin and the feeling of the wind moving across my wrinkled arms. There was this awareness of time, aging, and life itself, but it did not feel sad. It felt rich. Full. Deep. Sacred. Alive. I realized that future version of me was not looking backward wishing for youth again. She was fully inside the moment she was living in and deeply enjoying.

It made me think about how often we connect joy to the past. We look backward as if that was as good as life gets. We revisit memories trying to reconnect to feelings we once had, almost treating joy like something that already happened instead of something that still exists ahead of us. But standing there dancing, I realized I want to give what is forward just as much permission to be joyful as what is behind me.

I do not want to spend my life grieving aging while I am still living. I want to envision myself as a joyful older woman. Wise. Experienced. Mature. Still curious. Still alive. Still capable of feeling wonder. Still able to deeply enjoy being here.

I think there is something powerful about allowing ourselves to look ahead with love instead of fear. Aging is not the opposite of living. It is living. It is the continuation of all the moments we have already experienced. I have been growing up my entire life, but now I feel like I am entering a season where I can truly appreciate what it means to be fully alive in the moment while also honoring the depth of time.

I want to keep celebrating this moment and the next one and the next one after that. I want to look back one day and know I actually allowed myself to enjoy my life instead of constantly waiting for some future moment to finally feel good enough, safe enough, or complete enough to relax into joy.

When I was very young, I remember hearing this deep feeling inside of me that said, “This life is going to feel good.” I did not know what happened before I got here and I do not know what happens when I leave, but I remember feeling certain that I was here to experience life fully. To feel it. To enjoy it. To be present for it.

Maybe that is what joy forward means.

Not only appreciating where you have been, but staying open to the possibility that some of the most meaningful, joyful, connected moments of your life may still be ahead of you.

JOY.

Just Open Yourself.

LOVE & JOY - Susan Patrick

The Joy Jolt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Because it’s not just your life that feels heavy right now.It’s everything.

The noise.The pressure.The headlines.The expectations.The constant pull on your attention, your energy, your nervous system.

And somewhere inside all of that…you can feel yourself getting a little lost.

Not gone.Not broken.Just buried under the weight of it all.

This is your way back.

The Joy Jolt exists to help you reconnect to the one part of you the world can’t take away: your joy.

Not the forced, “everything is fine” kind.The real kind.

The part of you that is still there underneath the noise.The part of you that feels open, alive, grounded, and like yourself again.

Because we can’t control what’s happening out there…but we can change how we experience it.

What we believe

The world creates pressure.We create expansion.

You don’t need fixing.You need reconnection.

And joy isn’t something you find out there.It’s something you come back to again and again.

What you’ll experience here

We talk about the real things: the heaviness, the overwhelm, the “why do I feel like this when my life looks good?” moments.

But we don’t leave you there.

Every conversation, every post, every experience is designed to shift something inside you.

To help you:

* Regulate your nervous system

* Feel more empowered in your life

* Reconnect to yourself and other women

* and ultimately transform how you show up in the world

This is The Joy Jolt.

A return to:Regulate • Empower • Connect • Transform

How to step into The Joy Jolt

FreeStart here.Weekly podcast episodes and reflections to help you reset, shift your energy, and reconnect.

Paid $8/month or $80/yearGo deeper.Everything in Free, plus:

* Subscriber-only posts

* Weekly live conversations

* Commenting + community chat access

* Deeper work around regulating, empowering, connecting, and transforming

Community - Founding Premium MembershipThis is where the real shift happens.

Everything in Paid, plus:

* Live group coaching and hot seats

* Monthly women’s circles

* Direct access to us and each other

* A space to be seen, supported, and challenged

* Priority access + preferred pricing for retreats and experiences

This isn’t just content.It’s connection.

The kind that actually changes how you feel and how you live.

Our promise

We’re not here to fix your life.

We’re here to help you feel better inside it.

To remind you of the part of you that’s still there, steady, alive, and untouched by all the noise.

To give you a way to come back to yourself… again and again.

If you’ve been feeling the weight of it all…

This is your jolt.This is your reset.This is your way back.

Join us!

The Joy Jolt is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Sometimes the biggest barrier isn’t other people.It’s the stories we tell ourselves.

* It’s not practical.

* I’m too old.

* It’s too late.

* What will people think?

Natalie shares how those stories kept her from saying yes to love for years, until she finally faced them and stepped back into the dating world… where she met Bert just a few weeks later.

We also talk about something many women quietly experience:how easy it is to put ourselves last.

Life gets busy.Roles take over.And the small things we want for ourselves, time, joy, connection, creativity, slowly fall off the calendar.

One simple shift we explore in this conversation:

Start paying attention to your “yes.”

What do you actually want?

Not what’s practical.Not what’s expected.Not what’s easiest for everyone else.

What is your yes?

Even small ones count.

A walk.Meditation.Dinner with girlfriends.Trying something new.

Those little yeses start to open the door to bigger ones.

Because when we ignore our yes long enough, it often turns into something else:

resentment.

And that’s something none of us want.

So here’s a small experiment for this week:

Notice where you might be saying no on autopilot…and ask yourself if there’s actually a yes waiting underneath it.

Join the Conversation

This podcast is really just the beginning of the conversation.

Natalie and I are building a community of women who want to explore life honestly,the messy parts, the magical parts, and all the “that explains a lot” moments in between.

If this conversation resonated with you, we’d love to have you join us.

✨ Subscribe to our Substack and become an early member of the community.

Come for the conversations.Stay for the insight, laughter, and those beautiful moments when something suddenly clicks and you think…

“Ah… that explains a lot.”

👉 Subscribe and join us here.

Thanks for reading ThatExplainsaLotPodcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This podcast is the beginning of something we’re building together.

A community where women can have real conversations about relationships, growth, identity, and the messy middle of becoming who we are meant to be.

If this conversation resonated with you, we would love for you to join us.

✨ Subscribe to the community and the conversation:

Come sit with us.Bring your questions.Bring your stories.

Because when women start telling the truth together…

everything begins to change.

What truth have you been afraid to say (even to yourself)?

There’s a moment in life that many women experience.A quiet realization. A pause. A whisper inside that says:

“Something isn’t quite right.”

In this episode of That Explains a Lot, Natalie Ledwell and I dive into one of the most powerful, and sometimes uncomfortable, conversations we can have as women:

What is the truth you’ve been afraid to say… even to yourself?

Because the moment when something finally clicks, when you suddenly see something clearly about your life, your relationships, or yourself, that’s the moment when many of us say:

“Oh… that explains a lot.”

And that moment can change everything.

The Truth We Silence

Many women have been taught (directly or indirectly) to suppress their truth.

Not because they are weak.But because historically, it wasn’t always safe to speak it.

For generations, women who spoke too boldly risked losing their homes, their safety, their relationships, or their place in society. Even today, many of us still carry echoes of that conditioning.

So instead of saying what we feel, we adapt.

We stay quiet.We blame others.We numb ourselves.We tell ourselves stories about why we can’t change things.

Natalie shares candidly in this episode about a time in her life when she was deeply unhappy in her marriage, yet she kept telling herself everything was fine.

She blamed her husband for feeling stuck, for feeling held back, for not stepping into the life she wanted.

But eventually she realized something profound:

Blame is a holding pattern.

When we blame someone else for our lives, we give away our power to change them.

The Freedom That Comes From Truth

The irony is that the very thing we fear “the truth” is often the thing that sets us free.

When Natalie’s marriage eventually ended, it was painful and messy. But something unexpected happened.

Her body felt free.

There was a release that came from finally living in alignment with what had been unspoken for years.

And this happens in many areas of life.

Sometimes the truth isn’t about leaving a relationship.Sometimes it’s admitting we need help.Sometimes it’s acknowledging we’re exhausted.Sometimes it’s realizing the story we’ve been telling ourselves simply isn’t true.

I share a personal story in this episode about getting sick during COVID and refusing to admit it…even to myself. Instead of allowing myself to rest or receive support, I kept pushing forward and telling myself other stories.

It wasn’t until a doctor later confirmed the infection that I had to face the truth.

And that moment reminded me of something powerful:

When we deny the truth, we deny ourselves the love and support around us.

The Stories That Shape Our Lives

Another powerful part of this conversation is about the stories we carry.

Many of us are living inside stories that were created when we were children:

“I’m not lovable.”“I’m too old.”“I’m not enough.”“This is just who I am.”

But what if those stories aren’t the truth?

Natalie shares a powerful moment with her coach who told her something that shifted everything:

“You’re telling the story from the perspective of the child who lived it. Tell it from the woman you’ve become.”

That shift can transform how we see our past — and ourselves.

Because ultimately, we are not defined by our stories.

We are defined by how we choose to tell them now.

A Truth That Empowers

One of my dear friends, motivational speaker Sean Stephenson, once shared a piece of wisdom that has stayed with me for years:

“Never believe a story that leaves you disempowered.”

That doesn’t mean we ignore the truth.

It means we look deeper.

The real truth of who we are is not small or broken or unworthy.

The deeper truth is this:

You are a loving being.You are a powerful being.You are allowed to grow, evolve, and rewrite the story.

Why Community Matters

One of the most beautiful realizations Natalie shares in this conversation is how much other women shaped her healing.

After her marriage ended, she began surrounding herself with women who embodied qualities she admired — strength, openness, authenticity.

Little by little, she began to step into those qualities herself.

This is why community matters so deeply.

Women supporting women.Women telling the truth together.Women reminding each other who they really are.

Because life can be messy.

But when we navigate it together, it becomes something else too:

Magical.

A Question for You

As you listen to this episode, we invite you to sit with a few questions:

* What truth have you been avoiding?

* What story about yourself might be ready to change?

* Who do you want to become in the next chapter of your life?

You don’t have to blow up your life to begin telling the truth.

Sometimes the first step is simply asking yourself better questions.

Join the Conversation

This podcast is the beginning of something we’re building together.

A community where women can have real conversations about relationships, growth, identity, and the messy middle of becoming who we are meant to be.

If this conversation resonated with you, we would love for you to join us.

✨ Subscribe to the community and the conversation:

Come sit with us.Bring your questions.Bring your stories.

Because when women start telling the truth together…

everything begins to change.

That Explains a Lot with Natalie Ledwell & Susan Patrick

In this episode, Natalie and Susan unpack the messy middle of personal growth — that in-between season where the old version of you doesn’t quite fit… but the new version isn’t fully formed yet.

It can feel uncomfortable. Irritating. Even a little lonely.You might be setting new boundaries. Reassessing relationships. Questioning what you actually want.

And here’s the reframe: that discomfort may not mean something is wrong. It may mean something is changing.

We talk about:

Why growth can feel destabilizing before it feels empowering

The emotional “hangover” that can come with new awareness

How to navigate irritability and melancholy without making them mean failure

Why your life might be worth getting a little messy for

If you’re in a season where things feel off — but you can sense something important is happening — this conversation is for you.

Tag someone who needs to hear this.

▶️ Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss upcoming conversations💛 Join our Substack community for deeper reflections and behind-the-scenes insights: natandsue.substack.com

We’d love to hear from you:What has the messy middle looked like in your life?

#ThatExplainsALot #PersonalGrowth #EmbraceTheMess #Boundaries #SelfDiscovery

It’s the moment when the old version of you… just stops working.

The motivators that once fueled you feel hollow.The roles you wore so confidently feel tight.The identity you built—sometimes over decades—no longer fits.

And no one is exempt from this process.

In this episode, Natalie and I explored what happens when you can’t “unsee” what you now know. Once you begin any kind of personal growth, you lose the luxury of pretending. You can’t unknow. You can’t go back. And that’s both liberating and unsettling.

When Your Old Motivation Falls Away

Natalie shared a powerful story from her early twenties.

A set of personal development tapes shifted her perspective on her childhood and her relationship with her mother. What had fueled her ambition—proving herself, “sticking it” to someone—suddenly dissolved in the face of empathy and forgiveness.

And with that came a deeper question:

If I’m not driven by resentment anymore… then why am I doing this?

That’s the crux of evolution.

When the fire that once drove you burns out, you’re left standing in the quiet. And in that quiet, you have to rediscover yourself.

Not from pain.Not from proving.But from alignment.

Identity Is Sticky

Letting go of an old version of yourself is disorienting.

When we moved to Mexico nearly 11 years ago, I experienced that physically. Everything felt unfamiliar—sounds, smells, rhythms. I remember sitting in our car, crying, telling my kids:

“This is where mommy is right now. It’s not where mommy will be forever.”

That’s what the in-between feels like.

You’re not who you were.You’re not yet who you’re becoming.And your nervous system would really prefer something predictable.

The same thing can happen in quieter ways:

* When your children don’t need you like they once did.

* When a career you were known for ends.

* When friendships shift.

* When achievement stops validating you.

* When being the “good girl” or the emotional glue becomes exhausting.

You don’t just lose a role.You lose an identity.

And that can feel like grief.

You’re Not Starting From Zero

One of the most important reminders in this conversation:

You are not starting over.

You are bringing decades of wisdom, skills, mistakes, resilience, and self-awareness into whatever is next.

Growth is not demolition.It’s renovation.

But here’s the tension: there’s a real temptation to reinvent too fast. To tidy up the unraveling. To jump into something new just to escape the discomfort.

Resist that.

The in-between is not a mistake.It’s a necessary incubation.

The In-Between Is the Work

We talked about the importance of sitting in the messiness.

Not rushing to define the next identity.Not scrambling for answers.Not forcing clarity.

Instead, asking deeper questions:

* What am I done pretending is working?

* What am I no longer willing to tolerate?

* What am I finished lying to myself about?

* What do I actually desire now?

For me, this season has come with a simple word: alignment.

As I transition more fully into Susan Patrick—not just legally, but energetically—I’ve realized I don’t want to split myself into work and pleasure. I want congruence. I want to live from one integrated identity.

I don’t have all the bullet points mapped out.

But I can say:

I desire to live in greater alignment.

And that declaration alone shifts something internally.

Growth Feels Lonely Sometimes

There’s another layer that’s worth acknowledging: growth can feel lonelier as we get older.

When you’re young, the world expects evolution. When you’re older, reinvention can feel quieter, more self-directed. You may have to become your own motivator. Your own cheerleader.

And you may also need to reevaluate who surrounds you.

As you grow, some relationships deepen. Some dissolve. Some simply can’t come with you.

That’s not cruelty.That’s clarity.

Healthy boundaries are often born during identity shifts. And uncomfortable conversations become part of the process.

You Are Exactly Where You’re Meant to Be

If you’re in the sticky part right now…

If friendships are shifting.If old ambitions don’t light you up.If you feel restless and undefined.If you’re asking, “Who am I now?”

You are not behind.

You are not broken.

You are in evolution.

This messy, magical in-between is part of being human. It’s not something to bypass. It’s something to sit inside of—curious, kind, patient.

You don’t need all the answers yet.

You just need the willingness to stay.

In our next episode, we’ll go even deeper into why growth often feels worse before it feels better.

If this conversation resonated with you, share it with someone who might be in their own unraveling.

And as always:

Stay kind.Stay curious.And allow yourself to grow—even when it’s uncomfortable.

Thanks for reading ThatExplainsaLotPodcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“Why do I feel restless… when my life actually looks great?”

In this week’s episode of That Explains a Lot, Susan and I open up about something deeply personal: that subtle (or not-so-subtle) feeling that something is shifting.

You love your partner.You love your kids.You’ve built a beautiful life.Your career is solid.

And yet…

There’s this sensation. A stirring. A discomfort. A boredom. An irritation. A quiet whisper that says, “There’s something more.”

If that resonates with you, this episode was recorded with you in mind.

Thanks for listening! Subscribe https://natandsue.substack.com/ for more free posts and support my work.

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