What People Call Luck: The Invisible Work Behind an Embodied Entrepreneur

Because of the way I carry myself, people assume ease.

It’s been said to me more than once over the past four years — sometimes by a family member, sometimes by a neighbor, sometimes by a stranger who only knows me through a screen.

“You’re lucky.”

I’ll be honest. It has triggered me.

Not because I don’t understand what they mean. But because it couldn’t be further from the truth.

To me, this journey has never been about luck. It has been a choice. Often, a choice I’ve had to make again and again, sometimes quietly, sometimes painfully, sometimes without knowing what would come next.

A choice to embrace and embody a new identity before there was any external evidence to support it.

There were seasons in the beginning where I would log on to teach online and no one would be there. One student, sometimes none. I would still teach. I would imagine the room was full. I would speak as if someone was listening. I would move as if the space mattered. Because it did.

No one saw those moments.

They didn’t see the years where I was in survival, counting dollars, debt mounting around me like water rising in a room. They didn’t see the consumer proposal. They didn’t see the aftermath of fraud, or the quiet shame that can accompany financial collapse. They didn’t see how disorienting it was to rebuild from that place while still mothering, still working, still becoming.

They didn’t see the losses that came in other forms, too.

Books suddenly removed from Amazon without warning. Discovering my work pirated and sold somewhere else without my consent. Social media accounts I had spent years building disappearing overnight — my YouTube channel at over 17,000 subscribers gone, TikTok accounts lost, Facebook accounts restricted or erased. Entire ecosystems I had grown quietly, gone in a moment.

They didn’t see my name smeared. They didn’t see the hate mail. They didn’t see the relational abuse I was navigating behind closed doors. They didn’t see the therapy sessions, week after week, where I sat and spoke aloud things that had lived silently in my body for years.

They didn’t see me grieving the end of a relationship while still showing up publicly, still teaching, still writing, still holding space for others while learning how to hold space for myself.

From the outside, it can look like continuity.

From the inside, it has often been reconstruction, death and rebirth cycling, rising from the ashes.

The embodied entrepreneur path is not linear. It moves in cycles — expansion, contraction, collapse, integration, emergence. I’ve learned to stop forcing forward motion and instead listen to my nervous system. There have been seasons where the most productive thing I could do was pause. To stop. To recalibrate. To remember why I began in the first place.

Because there is so much noise.

It’s easy to lose yourself in performance. In the early years, I would sometimes catch myself wondering what people wanted from me. What would perform well. What would convert. What image would be most palatable. I can see now how much of that was rooted in survival.

Over time, something shifted.

I stopped chasing outcomes. I stopped writing toward proven topics simply because they were safe. I began writing my memoir instead — personal, raw, emotionally exposing. I began archiving old images, removing versions of myself that no longer felt true. I stopped asking what people wanted to see and began asking what felt honest to show.

This is the quieter work of entrepreneurship. The work that isn’t visible. The work of coherence.

What people call luck is often the visible edge of years of invisible integration.

It is the moment where internal identity and external reality begin to align — not because it happened quickly, but because it was sustained long enough to take root.

Luck suggests randomness. But this has never been random.

It has been nervous-system work. Identity work. Grief work. Truth work.

It has been the slow, often unseen process of becoming someone who can stand inside her own life without abandoning herself.

From the outside, it may look easy.

From the inside, it has been a return.

And I am still returning.