Care Deeply. Grip Lightly

On empty spaces, open hands, and the quiet courage of continuing

Some weeks don’t need answers.

They need a song.

This week mine was Mary Gauthier’s Empty Spaces.

I played it over and over, not because my week looked exactly like hers, but because she named something I couldn’t quite find words for.

Empty spaces.

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to fill them.

Sometimes they’ve been left behind by the loss of someone I loved. Sometimes by selling a business that had become part of my identity. Sometimes by watching a dream literally wash ashore—our sailboat ending up broken on the shores of the Belle Haven peninsula after Hurricane Ernesto swept through Greenwich Harbor. Sometimes by the future I thought I’d have by now.

This week, I had more than one empty space.

Tuesday, I gave one of the hardest speeches I’ve ever given.

I stood in front of my Toastmasters club and shared the bravest sentence I’ve ever spoken out loud. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t my best delivery. Someone else’s speech was voted the favorite that night.

Earlier this year, I’d invested time helping a prospective client. This week he didn’t reply to my first email. Or my second. Or the last one where I quietly withdrew the offer.

Another client thanked me for my help before deciding to stay with the agency that hadn’t delivered in the first place.

A founder I admire couldn’t justify paying for my strategic branding advice, even after I’d worked hard to package it into something I thought was valuable, practical, and within budget.

And then there was the gut-wrenching silence from someone I once imagined growing old with.

Sometimes silence tells you everything you need to know.

By Thursday, I could feel my nervous system trying to weave all of those moments into a single story.

Not four unrelated disappointments.

One story.

Maybe I’m simply not the one people choose.

The remarkable thing about our minds is how quickly they stop seeing individual events and start constructing an identity.

That’s when I remembered a lesson life seems determined to keep teaching me.

I had closed my hand tightly around things I couldn’t control.

Love.

Other people’s choices.

Clients.

Validation.

Timing.

I kept believing that if I cared enough, worked hard enough, and loved well enough, life would eventually give me the outcome I wanted.

But life doesn’t bargain that way.

Longing isn’t the problem.

Gripping is.

We check for the text.

We wait for the email.

We organize our day around someone else’s attention.

We postpone joy until the answer comes.

We put our lives on hold while we wait to be chosen.

We make one unanswered question the center of an otherwise beautiful life.

Friday morning, no one called with a project.

No miracle appeared in my inbox.

So I did what I’ve learned to do when life hurts.

I tried to be useful.

One of the greatest gifts recovery has given me is this simple truth: when I start feeling sorry for myself, help someone else.

It doesn’t erase the pain.

It simply reminds me that pain isn’t the only thing that’s true.

So I opened my laptop and finished something I’d been quietly building for months.

It’s a digital product called Take Your Business Pulse.

I didn’t build it because the world needs another assessment.

I built it because I remember what it feels like to be a founder.

To have your business become so intertwined with your identity that every slow month feels personal.

To lie awake at three in the morning wondering whether you’re making the right decisions.

To carry the weight of employees, payroll, customers, and your family’s future while trying to convince everyone—including yourself—that everything is fine.

When you’re that deep inside your own company, perspective becomes almost impossible.

You stop seeing the business objectively because you can’t separate what’s happening in the business from what you begin believing about yourself.

I know that feeling.

So I took everything I’d learned from building and selling a company, everything I’d been learning about AI over the past year, and poured it into something that might help another founder feel a little less alone inside their business.

As I clicked through the final screens, I couldn’t help but smile.

I knew I was going to help someone.

And for the first time all week, that felt like enough.

I still wanted the phone to ring.

I still hoped love would find its way back to me.

But I was done organizing my life around waiting.

Nothing outside me had changed.

But something inside me had.

I still hope for love.

I still hope for clients who value what I bring.

I still hope someone walks beside me through the second half of this life.

Hope isn’t what I’m letting go of.

Waiting is.

Every morning we get to choose.

We can stare at the empty space...

Or we can begin building inside it.

Because I don’t think life asks us to stop caring.

I think it asks something much harder.

To keep our hearts open without closing our fists.

To care deeply.

And grip lightly.

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I’d love to hear from you.

Have you ever made one unanswered question the center of an otherwise beautiful life?

Leave a comment. I read every one.

If this essay resonated with you, I’d love for you to subscribe and share it with someone who might need it.

Life has a way of leaving all of us with empty spaces.

My hope is that, together, we learn to build inside them instead of waiting for them to disappear.

Love,

Susan