Let people surprise you.

A little over a year ago, I left my last role to fight for my middle child's right to the educational supports and placement he needed.

By then, I had spent more than a year carrying a demanding career through a season that had asked everything of our family. There is no clean way to describe what holding both at once actually felt like. I did it, the way a lot of people in this country do versions of it every day, in pieces and at cost. But the work in front of me, the slow institutional fights and school meetings and long preparation for them, the kind that does not happen in the margins of a calendar, was a different kind of work. It needed my full attention, and a fundamentally different rhythm to my days.

I am the sole breadwinner of my family. The day I made the decision, I also asked myself, with no particular eloquence, what did I just do?

I could not keep doing both. Not at the level the next stretch was going to need.

The stories in my head started immediately. As a woman who has spent a career climbing, innovating, coaching, and building, the loudest stories were the ones about how a sabbatical would be read. Would people question the gap? Would they wonder if I really wanted my career back? Would I be read as a woman who could not handle the pressure?

I spent twelve months learning to set those stories down. Quietly. Not all at once.

In that time, I finished writing my memoir. My youngest child also became seriously ill. In hindsight, there was a reason I did not get the two roles I was final round for last August. Someone else needed me first. I do not think you have to share my faith to believe what I believe now. The right things had to happen in the right order, and that ordering was not mine to set.

What I did not expect, alongside the hard parts of this year, was the parade of people who would surprise me along the way.

I want to name two of them this week.

Earlier this week, Joe DePinto gave me an hour and a half of his time over coffee when he was in Boston for ASGCT. Joe and I have known each other since 1999, when we were both starting our careers at Johnson & Johnson. We took different paths after that, lost touch for stretches the way people do when life moves fast in different directions, and over the past year we have circled back into each other's orbit. Joe is also one of the steadiest professional sponsors of one of my closest friends, which is its own quiet evidence of who he is in a room. He now leads a business unit at McKesson. His time is not a small thing, and he did not have to give me ninety minutes of it. The grace he has shown me, consistently, since December has changed the shape of this year in ways I have not yet had language for.

And last night, at my first cell and gene therapy reception in months, I walked into a room where I knew almost no one. I will not pretend I was not a little nervous. I was, mostly because of how new the room was. I went up to a stand-up table and started a conversation with one woman I had never met. We talked, easily and openly, about work and family and the strange and tender ways those two are always shaping each other. Other women kept joining the conversation. By the time I noticed, a small circle of us had found each other at the table. I got to share, as a woman, a mother, and a leader, the decision I made, the book I wrote, and the chapter I am walking into next.

I told them some version of: I have been on a deliberate sabbatical wrapping up a memoir on mental health and LGBTQIA+ advocacy that comes out June 16, and I am ready for what is next.

I said it steadily. I did not have to find the words in the moment. I had been earning them for twelve months.

The doors did not close. They opened.

Most of what I am taking from this week sounds a lot like the lessons that live inside the book itself.

Let people surprise you. Take the help when it is offered, and ask for it when it is not. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first, even when the people you love are gasping. Make the hard decision that is right for your family, even when the noise in your head is loud and you are sure you can hear what other people will think. And then, when you are ready, put yourself back out there. With your whole story, not the edited version you have been carrying into rooms for years.

The version of you that you have been afraid to lead with is, I am increasingly convinced, the version the right rooms are waiting for.

With gratitude to InspiroGene by McKesson and Lumanity for hosting last night's reception.

This is part of the Notes for the Caregivers series, published throughout May for Mental Health Awareness Month. If you want these essays in your inbox, subscribe below.

Fighting for Their Lives publishes June 16.

💚 Jenn