A few weeks ago, I wrote something true and then texted a friend to ask if I was allowed to say it.

I want to sit with that sentence for a second, because I have run companies and sold one and I still drafted a paragraph about my own life and then held my phone like a teenager asking permission to go to a party. I can’t say this, can I?!?!? Four punctuation marks. That’s how nervous I was.

Here is the paragraph I wrote:

I earned seven figures one year and told almost no one. I traded in my Audi because I didn’t want a luxury car sitting in the parking lot. I didn’t feel I’d earned the right to be seen having it. So I shrank the evidence instead of celebrating the win. For a long time I thought that was humility. It wasn’t. It was shame wearing humility’s clothes.

My friend wrote back almost immediately. Why not? It’s real. You’re real. He said I had zero risk, based on my personality, of coming across — his spelling — deuchey.

Permission granted. From a person I trust. In writing.

And I still flinched.

“I made a million dollars one year” feels like “yuck!” I told him. And he, being a good friend, offered me an exit: maybe the exact number isn’t necessary for the story. Maybe something like I earned 3X my target income one year.

Reader, I almost took it.

The softened version, the math-problem version, the version where the number wears an oversized, lumpy, frumpy coat so nobody has to see its actual shape. I looked at 3X my target income and felt my shoulders come down from my ears, and that relief is exactly what made me stop. Relief was the telltale sign because I had just watched myself file down something sharp because sharp didn’t feel allowed.

And that’s because I have told the story of my Chapter 7 bankruptcy on stages. In interviews. On podcasts, to strangers, with a microphone clipped to my shirt. Twenty-seven years old, engagement called off, seventeen thousand dollars a year, boxed hair dye from CVS, borrowing DVDs from the library after I cut the cable cord, and Two Buck Chuck on repeat. I have that story loaded and ready. I have never once texted anyone to ask if I was allowed to tell it.

The worst financial year of my life: comfortable, practiced. And practically a party trick.

One of the best financial years of my life to date: unspeakable. Requires a permission slip. Needs to be converted into an algebra problem before it can appear in public. (Or anywhere, ever.)

Failure, I’ll hand you at dinner. Success? I’ll bury in the yard and carefully cover my tracks.

And that sentence in my paragraph — I traded in my Audi — is doing some burying of its own. Six words, moving fast, hoping you won’t stop to look. Let me stop and help you look. Come closer:

During the bankruptcy, I had an Audi convertible. I loved that car. Loved the brand, adored driving it, loved what it felt like to be a person who had one. It made me feel zippy and made my personality feel shinier for it being in my life. And then everything came apart, and the bank wanted it back, and the calls started. The repo man called. If you have never received those kinds of calls, I hope you never do. My bankruptcy attorney kept telling a trembling me that it was a scare tactic — that they were trying to frighten me into surrendering the car sooner than they were actually owed it — and she was right, but knowing a thing is a scare tactic doesn’t stop it from actually scaring you. I started riding a bicycle around town so the car could sit untouched, so there would be nothing to see, nothing to take before I was truly obligated to hand it over.

A bike with a basket, all over downtown. To the grocery. To client meetings. Home from dinner with friends. (And this was to protect a car I was going to lose anyway. Sheesh.)

When it was finally gone, I assumed that was that. I figured the bicycle was my transportation now, maybe for good. A car of my own — any car, with my credit — was a distant dream. An Audi was not even a dream. It was a brand that belonged to a previous, younger version of me who had not yet tarnished her right to possess nice things.

Several years later, my husband and I were on our annual Christmas Eve Eve date night — December 23rd, the anniversary of our engagement, a night we protect every year. He blindfolded me for the drive. He led me, still blindfolded, through a set of doors and across a floor, and when the blindfold came off I was standing in the middle of a dealership showroom in front of an Audi with a giant red bow on it. Like the commercials. Like the thing nobody actually does.

He was so excited, and he had chosen an Audi on purpose — not because it was a nice car, but because he knew. He knew it was the brand I had loved and lost and hidden from a repo man while circling the block for the 14th time on a shabby Schwinn. He wasn’t just giving me a car that night, he was giving me back a version of myself the bankruptcy took.

I want to be careful not to make this scene cuter than it was, because what it was, was enormous to me.

And then — this is the part I have to say slowly — about three years later, I traded it in. Voluntarily. Not because I couldn’t afford it: I could completely afford it! The business was working, my income had become something I did not know how to stand next to, and I could not tolerate what the car said about me in the company parking lot.

Here is one detail I’m tempted to leave out, the one that proves what this actually was: trading in the Audi was the worst financial move. I had negative equity in it at the time. I wrote a check — at least three thousand dollars — to get out of the Audi and into an Acura. I paid, in actual money, for the privilege of looking a little less successful. A little more subdued. Maybe somewhat practical?

My husband pushed back. Of course he did — he’s got a rational head on his shoulders, this was not logical at all, and there is no version of him that enjoys writing a check to lose value on a car he once wrapped in a bow. But I was adamant. Truly: adamant. Eventually, he did the thing he does, and he gave me his honest opinion all the way through, then let me have the decision that made me most comfortable. I didn’t drift aimlessly into this shrinking fit, I really fought for it. I argued with a man who loved me for the right to be smaller.

Read that again, because I have to: the me who once rode a bicycle to protect a car she couldn’t afford grew up to pay at least an extra three thousand dollars to get rid of a car she could. WTF?!

It would be tidy to blame one villain here. There was a comment — someone on my team once looked at something I owned and said, “you make too much money.” I will never forget it. I remember where we were standing, who said it, what she was looking at. Because it was a she, and that still sits crooked with me: the dig came from another woman, someone who could have known better than anyone what it took to make that money in the first place.

But she wasn’t the cause. She was the weather, and that comment came in a dozen costumes over those years, from several directions, usually dressed as a joke — the little remark about the vacation (“again?!”), the raised eyebrow at the ability to outsource so many tasks around the house and annoying life admin, the must be nice that arrives smiling. Nobody has to say the whole sentence out loud when everybody has agreed on it in advance: a young woman’s success is fine as long as she keeps it where no one has to look at it.

I’d love to tell you I brushed all that off. I did not, I absorbed it, the way I had been absorbing the temperature of every room I’d ever been in, for years. And so, the car went back.

The bank sent professionals. They called and threatened and pressured, and I rode a bicycle through it and they never got the car until the day the law said it was theirs. Then, years later, my own discomfort walked onto that showroom floor where my husband once led me blindfolded, and drove off with the one he’d wrapped in a bow — no calls or threats, no fight at all. Well…one fight….with my husband, who was on the car’s side. I happily handed over the keys and a check.

And here is what I keep coming back to from the text thread: my friend — a man — needed zero seconds. Not zero seconds to tolerate the paragraph. Zero seconds to be excited about it. Hell yes! he wrote. He met my best year with the enthusiasm I have never once been able to offer it myself. There was no math in his head about how it would land, who it would bother, what it would cost. I had a day’s worth of math exercises behind me. He wouldn’t have had to second-guess a word of it, and that’s not a criticism of him — that’s the whole point. That gap, between his instant hell yes and my I can’t say this, can I, is the gap I’ve been writing around this entire essay.

Somewhere in that thread I finally said the true thing to him: maybe it matters for other women to see it. That someone with all the odds against her — the bankruptcy, the bicycle, the seventeen thousand dollar year — could build a company that pulls seven figures to the bottom line. That it’s possible, and that she doesn’t have to be ashamed of it, and that she can even, eventually, say so in public with her name attached.

I couldn’t quite claim the number for myself. But I could claim it for her, whoever she is, reading this. Funny how the door opens when you hold it for someone else.

I have had years of practice at this. I sit with other founders and tell them, gently and often, that the win is allowed to be real. I believe every word of it. And this week I fell straight into the trap anyway, in real time, with my own damn thumbs.

Knowing better is not the same as being done with it.

I have never had trouble showing you my soft parts here. The bankruptcy, the bicycle, the box hair dye (this is especially and doubly risky for a blonde) — I will hand you the fruit all day. It’s the fang I keep apologizing for. The sharp thing. The capable thing. The thing that built the company and earned the number and deserved the car. I spent years presenting as all fruit, no fang, because fruit is the singular thing a woman is allowed to bring into the room.

But I was never all fruit. And the fang was never the problem.

So, for the record, with no frumpy coat on it: I earned seven figures one year. The business was working. I was not letting myself feel any of it — which means I denied myself both halves. The sharp true sentence, and the sweetness of the win it named.

Not anymore. I refuse to hand over any more keys.

If you have a number you’ve been converting into a softer number: a salary you round down, a win you call “a good year,” a fee you apologize for on the way out of your own mouth, I won’t tell you to announce it tomorrow. I’ll just tell you what my friend told me, which turned out to be the truest thing in the whole thread: It’s real. You’re real.

Say the number.

I did this deliberately, not in a “my legal name is Rebecca but I go by Becca” kind of way. I introduced myself as Rebecca. I signed emails from Rebecca. I had business cards printed that said Rebecca, and I loved them. I had a shorthand email sign off where I just wrote my initials, RKT to end a request. (Sheesh).

Becca, I decided, sounded like a fun girl you’d grab a beer with. Rebecca sounded like a woman you’d put on a board.

I have a lot of compassion for that twenty-four-year-old now. She was doing the math so many women do, which is to say she was scanning the room to figure out what the room wanted. The room, she thought, wanted Rebecca. So she gave them Rebecca.

The sad thing is, that room wasn’t wrong. I was only twenty-four and trying to be taken seriously at serious tables by people two or three times my age with two or three times my experience, and Rebecca bought me a few inches of authority I hadn’t yet earned in any other way. Rebecca got me into some rooms I craved being in. Rebecca got listened to in those rooms. Rebecca was useful.

The thing about going by a name that isn’t quite yours is that you have to remember to answer to it. I would be in a meeting and someone would say “Rebecca?” and there might be a half-second delay before I clicked into character. Oh, right: Me. It’s pretty exhausting to be a person and also be playing a person at the same time. I wish someone had told me this.

“Becca” came back gradually. I don’t remember the exact day I decided to drop the formality, just that at some point I had stopped correcting people who called me Becca, and then I had started introducing myself as Becca, and then one day I noticed I had business cards with Rebecca on them in a box from my old job, and I threw them in the trash. I didn’t save even one. I have old copies of every other business card version.

I think maybe I’d become tired. I was tired of the gap between the woman I was claiming to be and the woman I actually was. Tired of the half-second delay. Tired of trying to be older than I was, when getting older was, as it turns out, happening on its own.

What I didn’t understand in my twenties, and what I think I’m only now beginning to, is that Rebecca was not the fang. She wasn’t a weapon I needed to put down in order to be soft. She was a costume — built by Becca, who was already sharp enough underneath to know she needed one.

I had the fang the whole time. Rebecca was just the part of it the room could see.

The fruit is in me too — the warmth, the laugh, the woman you’d grab a drink with after a hard day — and the room sees her now, because I stopped sorting myself into the parts the room could handle.

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I get called Rebecca occasionally, still. By my aunts when they haven’t seen me in a while. By the eye doctor who used to live next door to us growing up. By people who knew me in the brief Rebecca work era and never updated their files. I don’t correct any of them. She is not wrong. She’s on my driver’s license, signs school forms, shows up on the mortgage. She got me here.

I just don’t need her in those rooms anymore.

If you are using a name that isn’t quite yours — at work, on social media, in the version of yourself you have agreed to be for someone else’s comfort — I have no real advice to offer, I just want to tell you that the version of you doing it is not a fraud. She’s a strategist. And one day you’ll find the business cards stashed in a drawer, and you’ll know she’s done her job. You’ll thank her, finally, for her smarts and her service. And then you’ll let her rest. That’s how you’ll know.

The bonsai was dead when I went to throw it away.

Or I thought it was. I had been neglecting it for months, the way you neglect things you suspect you’ve already lost. It was a gift, a little tree in a little pot, and I had tried. I had tried the way a person in their twenties tries, which is to say intermittently and without a system, even though my family was littered with people who had actual degrees in agriculture and horticulture. This was clearly not my strength. I named it treetree because everything small deserves a name that tells you it's small. The tree died anyway. (Or seemed to.)

I looked at it the day Tiffany and I decided to start a “six-month experiment” and start a business during a time when getting a job had lesser odds of success. I was about to put it in the trash. Then I looked again. There were buds on the branches, small green ones, the size of a pencil eraser. The tree had decided to come back while I wasn’t paying attention. It was a sign! The little tree that could. I hesitantly told Tiffany we should call the agency treetree, half expecting her to think I was crazy. She didn't. She loved the name.

This is the part of the story I have told in interviews and podcasts and essays. This is the clean version. The bonsai as resurrection metaphor, the agency as Phoenix, the founder as someone who recognized a sign and followed it. It’s a story I believe in, mostly. It’s also a story that leaves something important out.

It was 2009. I was twenty-seven. I had lost my job in The Great Recession, called off my wedding, and filed for personal bankruptcy after realizing the two pieces of real estate I had purchased only a couple years prior could not be sold, nor could I afford to keep them. I had no home or car in my name. I was, to put it lightly, a mess. Living on roughly seventeen thousand dollars a year with two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s and drugstore-brand box dye for my hair. I remember strategically inviting myself to dinner at my parent’s house when the grocery budget was too tight. I had nothing to lose because I had already lost it.

Tiffany had a family to support. She had a husband and two very small children and a mortgage and a life that was intact, and she walked away from her job to start something with a twenty-seven-year-old who had nothing in her name. If it failed, I would fail back to zero, which was already where I was. If it failed for her, she would fail down from somewhere, into a hole with other people in it.

I have watched the retelling of this story flatten over the years. Two women at a dining room table, scrappy and determined, making something from nothing. But the two of us did not have the same nothing. My nothing was light even though it felt heavy, while hers had real weight.

Real bravery, I’ve come to think, requires knowing what you would be losing. I didn’t, but tiffany did.

She wasn’t loud about what she had to lose. She didn’t talk about what she was risking in a way that asked for acknowledgement, and for years I didn’t give it to her, because I didn’t really see it. I thought we were doing the same thing. We weren’t, at all.

We spent the next six years, more or less, in each other’s company. I have told people — on a podcast, in a prep document, in private — that I spent more time with Tiffany during that stretch of my life than with any other human being. More than my husband. More than my parents. More than my children, once they came.

You can’t know a person the way you know a co-founder. You know them the way you know a road you drive every day. You stop noticing them because they are the given.

Partnerships end, eventually. Most of them. Not because someone did something wrong but because the weight of a business shifts, or the life a person wanted changes, or two people who made something together are ready to want different next things. Ours ended.

Neither of us write much about the end of it. The public version is that I continued on and she moved on, and both of those sentences are true, and neither of them is the whole thing.

The whole thing I’ve never shared is that I grieved her while she was still alive.

I recently found a Vistage update I wrote one May: there is the grieving and saying goodbye to a friend and colleague I’ve worked with for a decade, and I kept going. It was the most honest I could be in that document. It was also about one percent of what I actually felt.

I still have access to ours. So does she. Neither of us talks about it much. That’s also a kind of holding.

The bonsai, by the way, did not live forever. It died eventually, a second time, for real. I don’t know where it is now. Probably thrown out by someone clearing an office during one of the many moves.

The bonsai came back once. That's what mattered. The question of whether it was really a sign — whether my noticing of the buds was cause or coincidence — has never interested me. What interests me is that I needed a sign and gave myself one. And that Tiffany, who needed more than a sign to walk into that kind of risk, walked in anyway, with me. I’ll always love and admire her for that.

I was not the brave one. I have said this in private for years, and it feels important, now, to say it out loud.

If you are reading this and you were ever the brave one in a partnership where someone else got the loudest part of the story, I see you. That is not nothing.

I printed the directions from MapQuest on the family desktop. I wore something I thought made me look like I worked there. I was going to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the Manolos. I was going to write.

Except — and this is the part nobody tells you at seventeen — magazines don’t actually employ that many writers. They employ ad staff. Editors. Graphic designers. The writers are mostly freelancers, scattered across their own kitchens, waiting for assignments that will half-pay them. I looked around that building and did the math fast. Huh, I thought. I don’t want to be self-employed.

Reader, I was self-employed by twenty-seven. I have been self-employed every year since. At this point I am, I think, the most unemployable human on earth. I am 44.8 years old and I have never had a resume in my life.

I moved on from the magazine dream quickly. I had already landed an internship at an ad agency in my next rotation during my senior year, and never really looked back. I built a career. I built a company. I learned that a spreadsheet is a love letter to a future version of your business, and that bills get paid on time when you stop flinching at numbers.

I wrote plenty during those years. Manifestos. Decks. Emails that began with attached you will find, which is not what I’d promised my bright-eyed seventeen-year-old self I would ever write

And now here I am, with a Substack and the exact wrong font in my browser bar, writing a thing I’m calling a column because I can. The women who were on the mastheads I once coveted are mostly doing what I’m doing now — newsletters, essays, something slightly off the map of what we once thought writer meant.

It turns out you don’t miss the magazine scene. You miss the girl who wanted to write for it. The kindest thing you can do for her is loosen your grip on the life she planned — and sit down at the one you do have and write anyway.

This one’s for her. Seventeen, one hand on the wheel of Sally Saturn, the other smoothing the MapQuest printout on the passenger seat, a handmade mix CD spinning somewhere in the trunk, sunroof cracked, idling at a light on Long Street with a plan she hadn't quite finished forming.. She became a writer, eventually. And sometimes, I think, better.

There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over a house when everyone inside senses you’re in a mood. No one would dare name it. The dishwasher still hums. A cabinet closes more gently than usual. The kids disperse. Someone begins a sentence and then decides not to finish it. Nothing dramatic has happened, and no one’s raised a voice. But the air has tightened, and at the center of it is a woman who would describe herself, accurately, as calm.

She’s not yelling or cruel. She’s just compressed. Very compressed. I know this woman because I am her.

For most of my adult life I’ve thought of myself as two parts:

• There’s the porcupine. Alert and competent, always scanning for risk, always bracing before fully relaxing. She built the company, managed the team, anticipated problems before they bloomed, and kept systems from collapsing. She’s disciplined and sharp and strategic, and she’s kept a lot of things alive that wouldn’t have made it otherwise.

• And then there’s the strawberry center. Sweet, soft, earnest. She wants warmth more than control, and bruises faster than a peach when a tone shifts. She feels the tween’s withdrawal as a small grief. She carries other people’s losses — some from people she’s never even met — in her body. She wants the real conversation, not the efficient one.

Success rewards the porcupine while marriage and motherhood expose the strawberry. Some of us learned early that love was safest when we were useful.

When you’re the person holding most of the responsibility in a room — whether that room is a boardroom or a kitchen island — it’s easy to justify the quills. You call it leadership, or clarity. You might call it standards and suggest smugly that others should find some. And sometimes it’s all of those things. But other times, it’s raw fear dressed up in a blazer and heels with a name tag that says Hello, my name is Competence.

It’s the fear that if you soften, something will absolutely fall apart. (You’re supposed to be punished for softening, remember?) The fear that if you stop anticipating, no one else will step in — no one could possibly. The fear that you’ll slowly become invisible in your own life.

So you grip. I know I do. You might correct someone quickly. Or shorten a conversation. Or solve the problem before they’ve finished explaining it. From the outside it looks like solid strength and high capacity. Inside the room, the oxygen thins.

Your son edits his story before telling it. Your husband abandons his sentence mid-thought based on the size of your pupils. Your team member brings you the polished version instead of the honest one. The structure stays standing. Everything living inside it starts to shrink.

Holding is different. And it’s so much better.

For a long time I believed my vigilance was what made everything work. And it did, for years. But vigilance exhausted me quickly. I got really good at protecting what I’d built, and not nearly as good at enjoying it. That’s one of the hidden costs of success: the very instincts that helped you get here eventually turn on you.

Not long ago, I felt that familiar compression rising at the dinner table. The day had been full of decisions and the kind of small arguments you only have with yourself. By evening I was efficient and distant. One of my kids started telling a long, meandering story at a pace I was struggling to tolerate. It collided with the to-do list running through my head.

I had the instinct to tighten it. To summarize it for her. To improve it so it would move faster, cleaner. We didn’t have all night. There were dishes to finish, messages to answer, and the unfinished day waiting in the next room. I could feel the urge to speed the whole thing up so my brain had less to carry.

Instead, I noticed the drift, and chose not to get pulled toward it. I looked at her freckles. I softened. I let her finish and leaned in.

It took longer than the porcupine-under-pressure would prefer, but nothing collapsed. The dishwasher kept humming. The world didn’t punish us for the extra minutes.

And something shifted in the space I chose not to manage. She kept going, and the story unfolded in ways I’d have missed if I’d tightened it. The room didn’t close around my efficiency. It opened. And in that small opening, she felt safe enough to keep going. She settled. She brightened. By the end, my baby girl was glowing inside her own story — tossing out one-liners, delighting in her own wit, fully at home in the room and in my presence.

I’ve noticed that holding often feels inefficient in the moment. It feels slower, less optimized. It can’t possibly provide the immediate relief of control. It’s not designed to. But it builds something gripping never can: safety.

In business, in marriage, in parenting — real power is rarely about getting sharper. It’s about learning when sharpness isn’t what the moment needs. There are moments that demand an edge, or clarity, or fierce protection. But there are other moments — many more — that demand steadiness without any of those defenses.

The porcupine doesn’t have to disappear. She just learns she doesn’t need to flare up every time. And the strawberry doesn’t have to dissolve into something unrecognizable. She learns that being marked isn’t the same as being ruined. Both live in the same body, the same life. And if you’re willing to let them, they can learn to work together instead of fighting for control.

A lot of us built our lives by bracing. It made us dependable, decisive, competent under pressure. It helped us survive imperfect childhoods, build companies, run households, solve problems before they surfaced. But when the bracing never eases, the people closest to us feel the edges first. They get the authority, the efficiency, the structure — but not always the warmth that made those qualities trustworthy in the first place.

Grip is the strength most of us were taught. Holding is the other one — quieter, harder to recognize, the kind that feels the pressure gathering and chooses to release it before the room has to. Before the strawberry bursts.

— Becca

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They talked about the exhaustion that didn’t make sense on paper. The marriage that felt more operational than intimate. The success that solved one problem and created three new ones. The identity shift they hadn’t prepared for. The life that was *so* great but felt *so* hard. The quiet fear that if they loosened their grip on anything, everything would unravel. I recognized the tone and the facial expressions because I’ve worn them myself.

The public version of success is clean and tidy. The private version is layered and complicated. The Fang & The Fruit is here to examine that private version, together.

For me, that tension has always felt physical. I have a porcupine part — the one that learned early to brace, to perform complete and total competence, to anticipate risk before it arrives. This is the part that protected me while I built a company and grew a family and did my best to keep all systems go! It doesn’t want anyone to know about the soft part it’s protecting.

And then there’s the strawberry center — the part that loves deeply, that wants warmth, that bruises suddenly and without warning when pressure lasts too long.

This Substack lives in the space between those two. It’s the sharp edge and the soft center, the instinct to grip and the discipline to hold. I am committed to sensing the thresholds of growth, reinvention, and identity that no one applauds but everyone experiences.

Writing drops weekly:

• Essays exploring the hidden costs of success

• A recurring column called Holding, about how to carry power, love, ambition, and responsibility without squeezing

• A reflection to help you notice where you may be bracing instead of standing steady

If you’ve ever felt proud and restless at the same time, grateful and strained, strong and quietly tired, you’re not alone.

Let’s tell the whole story, because both sides are true.

— Becca