Rediscovering the Rhythm of Domesticity
My Season of Slowing Down
Call it eldest daughter syndrome, but I’ve been living in my masculine for as long as I can remember. Saying I’m Type A is an understatement. I’ve been called bossy since I was a little girl.
Place that little girl inside a capitalist, corporate society where drive, ambition, and busyness are so often confused with value, and it becomes a perfect breeding ground for an unhealthy relationship with responsibility and achievement.
Thankfully, the empathy gene has always been strong. I am thoughtful, deeply kind, and I get genuine joy from surprising and delighting the people I love.
Most of my adult life, these two parts of me have coexisted in relative harmony. There have been seasons where my masculine and feminine energies felt balanced. Where momentum and meaning lived side by side.
But there have also been plenty of seasons where my masculine energy completely eclipsed the feminine.
Before going further, it’s worth sharing that when I talk about masculine and feminine energy, I’m not talking about gender. Every person holds both feminine and masculine energy. What matters is how they’re expressed and whether they’re in balance.
At its core, masculine energy is about direction, structure, and exertion.
In its healthy form, it looks like:
Initiating and building momentum
Setting goals and moving toward them decisively
Providing structure, safety, and containment
Measuring progress without tying it to self-worth
Holding responsibility without resentment
Leading with clarity and conviction
When masculine energy becomes overextended, though, it hardens:
Worth becomes tied to productivity
Urgency becomes constant
It feels impossible to rest
Control replaces trust
You’re always “on”
This is what turns into burnout.
Feminine energy, by contrast, is about presence, receptivity, rhythm, and connection.
In its healthy expression, it looks like:
Attuning to cycles, seasons, and intuition
Allowing rather than forcing
Nurturing life, ideas, and relationships
Being in the moment instead of racing through itHolding emotional depth and complexity
Trusting process over immediacy
But feminine energy has a shadow too:
Loss of direction or boundaries
Over-giving without replenishment
Avoidance of conflict or responsibility
Romanticizing surrender at the expense of agency
Identity dissolving into service (something many mothers know intimately)
I built my first business as the antithesis to an unhealthy masculine, corporate way of being.
With the conceptualization of my marketing agency Armature Collective, I was creating a company that believed the best creative work happened outside of the hours of 9-5. That a long walk on the seawall meant a better newspaper ad headline. That the colour of sky at dusk would inspire that gorgeous palette for my client’s new brand. In a time where work-from-office was mandatory, Zoom didn’t exist, and digital nomads were seen as hippies hanging at budget hostels, my vision for Armature was that freelancers could support client accounts not LIKE the traditional agencies, but BETTER than.
And it worked.
My life truly expanded. Flexibility. Freedom. I was immediately profitable. After 6 months or so, we had a healthy-sized team of designers and brand strategists with some pretty great accounts under our belts.
Loba was different.
Although the original vision for Loba was deeply feminine in nature, rooted in wellness, ritual, and care, the reality of building a venture-backed tech company pulled me hard in the opposite direction.
Raising money in a world that valued growth at all costs demanded constant proving, constant pushing, constant urgency.
I could feel myself slipping into survival mode.
There were moments when I noticed it happening. When I tried to re-anchor myself to why I started Loba in the first place. To the simple, connected wellness practices that inspired it.
But the structure I was operating inside didn’t reward slowness or attunement. It rewarded speed and endurance.
Eventually, my body and spirit caught up with the truth I’d been resisting.
This fall, after putting a pause on Loba and stepping away from the startup world as a founder, I made a quiet but intentional decision. Instead of filling the space with another project or another push, I leaned into the rhythm of domestic life:
Into mothering my son during a month without childcare.
Into supporting my partner as he stepped into a demanding new role.
Into hosting friends and family.
Into crafts, baking, and meals that weren’t rushed.
Into days shaped by rhythm rather than optimization.
I tried, as much as I could (because I am human) to treat October without childcare as the maternity leave I never took. Even though I was still working and juggling responsibilities, I wasn’t on the pitch circuit, and I could focus on one business rather than two.
For a little while, I let life slow down enough to really pay attention.
The goals on my whiteboard reflected the shift. Not revenue targets or launch dates, but things like: host Thanksgiving and Christmas. Make apple butter. Hang artwork. Take Ó to the aquarium and the pumpkin patch.
As fall came to an end on the Winter Solstice, what surprised me most was how little urgency I felt to rush anything forward. Moving more slowly on the work front didn’t make me less ambitious. It made me more strategic. More intentional about the projects and clients I want to give my energy to next.
This season of domesticity hasn’t made me smaller. It’s made me steadier. It reminded me that ambition doesn’t disappear when you stop forcing it. Sometimes it just waits until it’s invited back in a healthier form.
For the first time in a long while, I stopped pushing. I didn’t abandon ambition. I just gave up forcing things to happen.
I’m taking these lessons and reflections with me as we move into the new year. I’m excited for what I’ll do here in this space and with Branded Assets. I’m continuing to work on strategic options for giving Loba a new home or direction, and the next evolution of Armature is in the works.
So, here’s to 2026—and building things without burning myself out this time.
