The Stewardship of My Depth

Week 70 – Ending August 23, 2026

The Week I Learned to Govern My Energy

This week, I changed a number.

For years, the folders on my computer reflected an order I understood without thinking much about it:

1 — Purple Gen
2 — Tax Form Gals

This week, I quietly reversed them.

1 — Tax Form Gals.

There was no ceremony. No existential crisis. No declaration about what Purple Gen means or whether I will return to it.

The order simply wasn’t true anymore.

So I changed it.

Something in my gravity has shifted. Tax Form Gals is where my attention belongs right now. It is where my leadership, creativity, care, and stewardship are being called.

Purple Gen can fade into the background without disappearing.

Nothing has to be permanent to be true.

And right now, this is true.

My Depth Lets Me Go Farther

I spent an enormous amount of time this week learning about corporate structures, governance, shareholder agreements, and all of the strange machinery underneath owning and leading a business.

I went deep.

Really fucking deep.

But something important happened between gathering all of that information and sharing it with my partners.

I paused.

I let myself think. I refined. I found the patterns. I separated what was merely interesting from what was actually important.

And when it was time to bring the work back to Sarah and Dawn, they didn’t need the entire mountain.

They needed what I had discovered on it.

My depth lets me go farther.
My discernment tells me what to bring back.

My depth is a superpower.

I don’t need to make myself shallower so that I don’t overwhelm other people. I can travel as far into something as my mind wants to go.

But everything I discover doesn’t need to come back with me.

Discernment is what turns depth into clarity.

And clarity is what allows my light to ripple outward.

Input Is Presence

I discovered something else about my depth this week.

My Input doesn’t always need to become output.

For so long, something interesting enters my awareness and the rest of me immediately comes running.

Strategic wants to understand it.
Maximizer wants to improve it.
Achiever wants to do something with it.

Meanwhile Input is still staring at the fucking blade of grass.

This week I realized:

Input is Presence.

Sometimes noticing is enough.
Sometimes learning is enough.
Sometimes fascination doesn’t need an application.
Sometimes the mystery gets to remain a mystery for a while.

I don’t always have to ask what something can become.

Sometimes I can simply say: Look at this.

And sometimes, apparently, the Sourciverse answers with an owl.

**Hoot.

The Weather Still Changes

The days are moving incredibly fast lately.

The weeks disappear.

And inside those weeks, individual days can contain entire emotional landscapes.

Grief. Leadership. Overwhelm. Confidence. Exhaustion. Joy. Responsibility. Clarity.

Sometimes all before dinner.

But I’ve begun to understand something about overwhelm:

It only lasts one day.

It might come back tomorrow.

But that doesn’t make today’s overwhelm permanent.

I don’t have to solve overwhelm forever while I’m experiencing it. I only have to inhabit the landscape I’m actually standing in.

The weather changes.

So do I.

Overwhelmed Jen is telling the truth.
Capable Jen is telling the truth.
Grieving Jen is telling the truth.
Joyful Jen is telling the truth.

None of them gets to declare herself permanent.

Both are telling the truth.

Sometimes considerably more than two.

JANNE Takes the Wheel

And then, after everything this week contained, I went to Detroit with Anne.

We have been best friends for 35 years.

Years ago, we made essentially the same pilgrimage together: a road trip to Detroit to see Down.

Different car.
Different venue.
Different versions of ourselves.
Same band.
Same friendship.
Same JANNE.

That morning, I asked myself the question I’ve been using to orient my days:

What really matters today? The answer was immediate.

Not work. Not grief. Not responsibility. Not governance. Not overwhelm.

Fun-loving, metalhead Jen.
Anne’s best friend of 35 years.

That was who mattered.

So I gave her the day.

I even asked Anne to drive.

After everything I have been driving lately—the business, decisions, grief, responsibility, my own life—I handed my best friend the literal keys and climbed into the passenger seat.

I didn’t need to be responsible.

I didn’t need to figure anything out.

I didn’t need to evolve.

I didn’t need to heal.

I just needed to be JANNE.

And it was glorious.

There are parts of me I am still discovering.

But there are also beloved parts of me that survived every transformation.

Fun-loving metalhead Jen never disappeared.

Sometimes she just needs someone to turn up the fucking guitars.

Energetic Stewardship

Perhaps this is the Purple Codex Principle speaking most loudly to me now.

Energetic Stewardship.

I am beginning to see much more clearly how much I can give, where it needs to go, and how long I can sustain it.

That is different from simply asking whether I can do something.

I can do a lot.
I’ve proven that.

That’s no longer the interesting question.

The question is: What pace allows me to remain myself while carrying what matters?

The coming week is deliberately quiet.

Peace.

Work.

No extracurricular obligations.

Not because I’ve completely depleted myself and desperately need to recover, but because I can see the terrain ahead.

Joey’s wedding week is coming next.

It will be beautiful and emotional and busy and unpredictable.

So I am allocating capacity before I need it.

I am not waiting for exhaustion to grant myself permission to rest.

I am learning to govern my energy.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about learning corporate governance and personal governance at exactly the same time.

Where does authority reside?
What deserves investment?
What requires protection?
What is sustainable?
What matters enough to receive finite resources?

Apparently those are questions for corporations.

And for Jen.

The Glitter Kiwi in the Onion

Sometimes I feel like I have been peeling the same enormous onion forever.

Layer after layer after layer.

Surely I must eventually reach the tiny central nugget containing the Ultimate Truth of Jen.

Instead:

More onion.
More onion.
More fucking onion.

And every once in a while—
GLITTER KIWI.

A revelation.
A ridiculous metaphor.
A piece of myself I suddenly understand differently.

Maybe the onion isn’t supposed to get smaller.
Maybe I’m discovering how deep I actually am.

And the beautiful thing is that I’m no longer afraid of going down there.

I know I can go deep.
I know I can return.
I know what to bring back.
I know when something needs to pause.
I know when potential needs refrigeration.

And increasingly, I know when to close the refrigerator entirely, hand someone else the keys, turn up the metal, and go live my fucking life.

The Braid

This week wasn’t really five separate revelations.

It was one lesson appearing again and again: I am learning to steward my depth.

Input lets me receive.
Presence lets me remain.
Depth lets me explore.
The Pause gives things room to clarify.
Discernment tells me what matters.
Intention directs my energy.
Stewardship protects my capacity.

And joy reminds me what all of that capacity is ultimately for.

I don’t need to discover the maximum amount I can carry.

I already know I can carry enormous things.

Now I am learning something far more useful:

I know how to handle myself while handling anything.

I cannot burn myself out now.
I’m just getting started.

Symbols

🔥 Flame — My energy is not an infinite resource to consume. It is a living flame to tend.

🔑 Key — Discernment. I can travel deeply without bringing the entire journey back with me.

🌀 Spiral — Detroit. Down. Anne. JANNE. Returning to an old road as different women and discovering what remained.

🌙 Moon — The emotional weather changes. No single landscape gets to declare itself permanent.

🧶 Braid — Depth, Presence, Pause, Discernment, Joy, and Stewardship becoming one coherent practice.

🥝✨ Glitter Kiwi — Sometimes the revelation hidden inside another fucking layer of onion is delight.

Week 70

My depth lets me go farther.
My discernment tells me what to bring back.

What really matters today?

Whatever the answer is, I can give myself to it without giving it all of me.

I can go deep.

I can come back.

I can set it down.

I can have fun.

I can leave space empty before exhaustion fills it for me.

My energy belongs to me.

I choose where it goes.

I choose what I carry.

I choose when I rest.

And I am building a life—and a business—that I intend to be here long enough to inhabit fully.

The Pause preserves potential.

The couch preserves Jen.

And glitter, obviously, is never fucking optional.

💜