Hello lovey humans,

A few years ago, Brie found herself at New York Philharmonic concert sitting next to a partner she had worked with for some time. He spent twenty minutes explaining classical music to her. She nodded along. She went home, went to bed, and never mentioned she had been playing violin since she was three years old.

The Armor

Brie didn’t set out to disappear. It happened incrementally, one small compromise at a time. The violin stayed home. The girl who had grown up with music so embedded in her that it hadn’t felt like something she’d even learned. Instead, she became a lawyer. She was good at it. She learned the unspoken rule of every corporate institution she ever entered: bring the competence, the efficiency, the work ethic, and leave the rest at the door. So she left the rest at the door.

"I was running on cortisol and a cascade of anxiety that I had learned to call normal. I routinely cancelled dinner with friends because of deadlines. I was late to family holidays because of conference calls. I missed my own life in installments, each one small enough to rationalize; 'Work is just really busy right now.'"

Brie built the life she thought she wanted. Law school, a job at a big corporate firm, an upper east side Manhattan apartment. Working with high profile clients and sat in rooms with powerful people making big decisions. I was successful on paper. From the outside, her resume, her career, her marriage and her lifestyle all looked good. But on the inside, they didn’t feel good.

Her boss told her she was a victim of her own success. She believed him.

The Side of the Road

Then she got divorced. The future family, the home, and the next chapter she had been building dissolved overnight. And one morning, driving to the office in the early days of that new reality, the emotions hit her all at once. She pulled over. She sobbed over the steering wheel. Shaking, heaving, the way a body does when it has run out of other options.

Then she pulled herself together and went to work.

Brie advises others to sit with that part. Not the breakdown but the recovery. The speed of it. The efficiency with which she assembled herself and continued. She had been doing that for fifteen years. And in that moment, totally gutted, she understood something for the first time: the ability to suppress, contain, and continue was also the thing that had made her life so small.

The Thawing

She left NYC and moved to Florida. She needed space, time, a slower pace. What she didn’t yet know was that what she really needed was to meet herself.

She found yoga. Or, as she tells it, yoga found her. Something began to happen on the mat that she couldn’t fully explain. "I started going every day. And something began to happen on that mat that I didn't expect and couldn't fully explain. A thawing." Emotions that had been frozen for years began to surface. She wept in class. She let her body shake. A few kind strangers offered her a tissue and a hug. Gradually, she started to feel lighter, steadier. And what she saw, eventually, was a younger version of herself. Pure, soft, quiet. The girl who had played violin with pure joy before she ever learned to be strategic about what she revealed. Before she ever learned to put on the armor.

She felt an overwhelming love for her. She had been there the whole time, patiently waiting.

The Insight

"Here is what I understand clearly now: everyone is carrying something," says Brie. "Everyone." The partner who races out of a meeting to visit his dying wife in the hospital. The associate who returns to work but is struggling with postpartum depression. The husband who just learned that his wife wants a divorce. We are all, in our own ways, waiting for a space that is safe enough to stop for a moment and just be human so we can go back to our lives a little lighter, a little clearer.

"That waiting is what I want to end. That space is what building."

What She’s Building Now

Brie didn’t leave her professional world behind. But she left the version of it that required her to be opaque. Today she runs two things, both built from the inside out.

​The Blueprint is her organizational consulting practice, aimed at the workplace cultures she spent fifteen years watching from the inside. She knows what it looks like when employees suppress, managers perform, and companies layer wellness programs on top of structures that have no room for real honesty. The Blueprint is her answer: organizations designed to acknowledge that the people doing the work are whole human beings, navigating whole human lives.

​Liminal is her personal transition community. Built for everyone who has woken up in a life that looks right on paper and feels wrong in the body. Everyone who has pulled over on the side of the road. Everyone who is somewhere in the middle, not who they were and not yet who they’re becoming, and needs a place to be in that space without rushing through it.

She is building both because she believes the most radical act available to us right now is to tell the truth. We need this in our souls. In our workplaces, in our communities, in our own lives. We need to stop performing. We need to create spaces where being seen is safe.

She spent a long time perfecting her disappearing act. She’s done with that now. And possibly, a violin is waiting.

— Richard & Devon

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