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I was struggling with purpose and anchoring joy this week, and I did not know it.
That is the part I want to say first, before anything else, because it is the part that surprised me. I was not walking around feeling lost. I was not sitting still long enough to feel anything at all. I was rolling up my sleeves and getting to work, which is what I do. It is what I have always done. When something feels unclear, I do not stop to name the unclear thing. I go find work.
And there was so much work to find. Half Nester™ is becoming more and more of a movement connecting people, and I mean that plainly, not as a marketing line. I am getting more emails. More DMs. I am connecting with people. I am writing, and I am writing a lot. I am also planning for what this can become for people, which is a whole different kind of work than writing.
I am overwhelmed, honestly, by how many women, and yes some men, have found relief in just saying the words "Half Nester." Not in a program. Not in a framework. In two words that finally described the season they were standing in.
So I was full. Full of purpose shaped activity. And underneath all of it, quietly, I had lost the thread of my own purpose and my own anchoring joy, and I was too busy to notice.
What was standing next to me the whole time
Here is what I did not realize until this week.
The greatest anchoring joy I have was right next to me. It had been next to me the whole time. It was just waiting for me to finally say out loud: I need some help. I do not know the best next step.
That sentence is not hard because it is complicated. It is hard because saying "I do not know" means putting the work down for a minute, and I did not realize I had been holding it alone until the moment I stopped.
And the funny thing, the thing that made me laugh at myself a little, is that I did the same thing 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago I started down that same path of what should I do. And then it became Mike and I. As soon as it became us, it became better. Not easier. Better. There was faith because it was us. There was purpose because it was us. The anchoring joy is us.
And still, here I was, doing the solo version of the same thing all over again.
So I have been asking myself an honest question this week, and I do not have a tidy answer for it: why does it always take me getting to a place of indecision to realize I need Mike?
But that is not quite right either. As soon as I wrote it down, I knew it was not right.
It is not "I need Mike." What we need is that collaborative spark. Mike is where that spark lives for me. That is my particular version of it. The spark itself is the anchor, and it can live in a lot of different places.
The spark came back in the oddest way
Last week, we rediscovered it in the oddest way.
I was getting ready to hire and expand the Half Nester™ team.
That was it. That was the spark that lit 20 years of an amazing business partnership back up. I was not out looking for my anchor. I was looking at what comes next for this work, and the anchor was already there.
Now, I want to be careful and clear here, because I know how this can land.
Working with your partner, and having your partner at home be the same person, is not for everyone. It is genuinely not. I am not prescribing it, and I would not want you to read my story and feel like you are missing something because your marriage is not also your business, or because you do not have a Mike, or because the person beside you is a friend, a sister, a small group, or a faith you carry quietly.
Why the work was never going to solve it
Here is where the lesson caught up with me, and it caught up hard.
I was reaching for the tool I am best at, which is work, to answer a question that work has never once been able to touch. Effort produces output. It does not produce meaning. It cannot tell you what matters most in this particular season, and it will not return you to yourself once you have drifted off your own center.
That is what the anchors are for, and the reason the lesson teaches all three of them together is that not one of them holds on its own.
Purpose without joy feels heavy. You stay useful and you go gray around the edges.
Joy without purpose feels fleeting. Lovely on a Saturday, thin again by Tuesday, because there is nothing underneath it doing any holding.
Faith without joy gets overly serious. All weight, no light.
Held together, they do three different jobs. Faith brings you back to steady. Purpose reminds you what matters. Joy returns you to yourself.
Line my week up against those three sentences and you can see exactly where I was short. Steady was fine. Steady is usually fine, which is part of the problem, because steady is the one people can see. What mattered had gone quiet underneath everything that was merely urgent. And the thing that returns me to myself was sitting an arm's length away the entire time, unasked.
That is also exactly why I put Faith, Purpose and Anchoring Joy into the Half Nester™ course in the first place. I did not expect to need the lesson quite so personally quite so soon.
What I would ask you to do with this
The lesson ends with an Anchors Worksheet. It takes twenty to thirty minutes, and it is not a quiz. It is a few honest questions and one small plan you can actually carry into the week.
Do it honestly rather than impressively. Nobody is grading it, and the version of it that helps you is the unedited one.
And then there is the part I have learned the hard way: keep what you write.
Because the anchors you name now are going to matter months from now, when the season shifts again and you cannot remember what steadied you the last time. Reflection is not the hard part. Keeping it is.
That is why the Course + Workbook plan exists. It is the one where your answers are saved to your account, so what you write today is still there when you need to look back at it. It includes all 18 lessons with guided reflection, a scored quiz and private podcast audio for every lesson, the complete 21 worksheet interactive workbook, and the Half Nester™ community. It is normally $29.99 a month. The first 7 days are free, and after that it is $9.99 a month, and that rate holds for as long as your subscription stays active. Cancel anytime.
If this week's story landed somewhere in you, start the 7 day free trial and fill out your Anchors Worksheet.
I will be here in the messy, beautiful middle with you, still learning to say the sentence out loud.