The Year I Needed A Navigator

Six months into asking how can this be easy, I found out where that question actually comes from

In December, I wrote about the phrase I was taking into 2026: How can this be easy? I borrowed it from my business coach Krista Smith, and I loved it immediately. Not because I was looking for simplicity, but because it reframed how I think about friction. It wasn’t about making things soft or simple. It was about removing wasted time, energy, and resources pointed in the wrong direction.

Now six months in, I’m realizing this question has been underneath almost everything I’ve ever done.

I grew up in an unusually functional family. My parents loved us and were engaged and paying attention. There wasn’t conflict, drama, or the kind of dysfunction that shapes most people’s childhoods (I’m sure you know some of the kids who were feral in the 70s). I didn’t realize until much later how rare that actually was. I thought everyone’s life should be relatively simple and straightforward. (Read off-script: a mom’s journey through adoption, a husband’s alcoholism, and special needs parenting for more on THAT topic.)

Then my daughter came into our life, and for nearly two decades — from the time she was adopted from Russia at sixteen months old until her early twenties — I was in the hardest season of my life. First, we learned of the developmental delays and fetal alcohol exposure. Then the reactive attachment disorder, bipolar disorder, and eventually autism. Sometimes the diagnoses contradicted each other or didn’t exist yet. It was a system with no map and no one to say, “Here’s what comes next.” I had to become the navigator myself.

Those years taught me something I’ve never forgotten.

When you’re inside the fog, it helps to have a view from the outside.

Somewhere during that time, I subconsciously decided I would spend my life removing friction for other people. As a public information officer, I asked: How can I make this easy for the community to understand and participate? In my consulting work, which was called Navigator Services in the early 2000s, in my coaching, in my volunteer life, it’s always been the same question. Remove the barriers. Create the clarity. Clear the path.

I didn’t realize I was building an entire life around this principle. It just kept showing up.

This year, the principle got tested again. For more than two years, I’ve been navigating persistent pain that kept revealing itself in new forms. What started as tendon pain in my arm led me through physical therapy, an orthopedic surgeon who recommended surgery I declined, and shockwave therapy that temporarily worked, but then didn’t. Then acupuncture, cupping, a chiropractor, and eventually a pain management specialist. As the arm pain finally resolved, it uncovered what had been underneath all along: disc degeneration in my neck. Not a problem to solve but a condition to manage.

There was no map for any of it. No one I trusted as a definitive authority to say, “Here’s what comes next.” I needed a medical navigator, and I couldn’t find one.

Then in May, I found out I had cataracts. I hadn’t realized how cloudy my vision had gotten. I just assumed it was a casualty of midlife.

Turns out I couldn’t see what I couldn’t see.

Me with my eye patch after surgery — The day of the second surgery

After the surgeries, my vision cleared up, dramatically. For the first time in my life, I can drive without glasses or contacts. The distance I couldn’t see before is now sharp and obvious. The clarity I’d been missing came back.

That’s the work. That’s always been the work. Helping people see what they couldn’t see from where they are standing. Removing the friction that keeps them (and myself) stuck. Creating the clarity that makes the next step visible.

This year I got to experience what it feels like to be inside the fog again. To need exactly the kind of help I spend my days offering to other people. And I got a reminder: the work matters because the friction is real. The fog is real. And someone paying attention, someone who can see the shape from the outside, changes everything.

This was originally posted on Substack.