In this candid, solo monologue, Shawna Lynne reflects on the discomfort of taking risks and re‑branding her identity after a decade of pain, divorce, and grief. She acknowledges that decisions often feel uncertain, yet she chooses to act anyway, building courage day by day. Shawna describes a holistic self‑check that moves from the brain (intuition vs. rational thought) through the voice, heart, sacral/gut area, and finally the feet, using these bodily anchors to assess health, gratitude, and accountability. She confronts lingering grief, heartbreak, and the inner critic, while emphasizing the need for self‑validation and supportive community, especially people who appreciate neurodivergent thinking. Throughout, she outlines a slow, steady routine of building mental, emotional, and physical muscle, committing to daily reflection, gratitude, and the pursuit of a healthier, more authentic self.
Chapters
Hey, Shawna Lynne, step in. When do you take a risk? When do you know that it's the time to actually pull the trigger, step in, take the next step, commit to a thought, a branding? When do you do that? It's never the right time. It always feels uncomfortable. Right back to that feeling of uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable to make decisions when you don't know if they're the right ones. And how would you know? You wouldn't know. You can do all the research, you can trust your intuition, you can ask people, but you just don't know. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, right? Just don't know. I'm taking a risk. Change my branding again, once more. Who am I? I don't know. Where's my identity? All over the place. I'm trying to unravel it and capture it. It is scary. And yet I have courage, as they say. I'm feeling it more and more each day, this courage. Here we are taking the risk. Take a risk with me. I'm going on this journey. It's been building and cultivating and creating itself, and I've been standing still and letting it swirl around me because the last decade from divorce till now, 10 years, I was in pain and grief, and a lot of the decisions I made were from The intuition that was negative or harmed, not the smart place of my brain. It's from the pain, not the brain. I knew this going along. I also knew I was healing. Every time I made a decision, it was better and better than the last one, and the pain was dissipating slowly. But we know through science and mental health and psychology that Those pain points, they just go around and around and they pop up whenever they want, especially when you take risk. That is the reality. And the fear of stepping into change boldly with intention, it's scary. That is just true. Here I am, terrified, fear. Inside of me, you would never know. The outside of me does not hold the fear. It's the inside that holds that. The outside knows it's going to be okay. Now we just align it. We go through the brain of, can I do it? Of course I can. I've tried things before. I'll try it again until I find what I like. Am I talking about it and is it feeling better in my throat? Do the words come out with ease? Do I sound smarter than I did before when I was trying to be something I wasn't? I think so. I feel a lot better with my voice and I laugh with more ease and I smile a little more gently with this voice and this head aligned. And then I look at my heart, which has not belonged to me for a decade. I have put it out Hoping that someone would grab it and take care of it, but most important, it's me. I have to take care of it. That is just true. Take care of yourself first and then invite people in. If you invite them in first, they're going to take more of you than you can give, and you're left empty. Not on purpose, no intention, it just is the way it is. Let's change that. Then we go down to the sacral, and the Sacral and the— I can never remember those 2. Oh, bad, that ADHD. I had a poster, I'm going to get it back. Anyways, we go down to our gut, to our sacral, to our abdomen, and we think about what's going on in there. Is it healthy or is it hurting? Is it coming out well or is it just not working with us? In releasing everything we need to release often? And are we being intentionally intimate with the good things going through us? So it's balanced in the middle where your whole body lives. And this is all the stuff that brings us forward and backwards in our day. This is how we feel every day. It is aligned with everything. And then we look down to the feet where we're grounded. Do you know what you did today? Are you proud of what you did today? Did you do something that you're not proud of? Can you own it? Can you apologize for it, change it, correct it, redo it, or just give it a reflection, put it away, and never do it again? Hopefully, whatever you're gonna do with it, it's a reflection every day of gratitude. Of beauty. What is love? What is me? What is identity, personality, intimacy, sexuality? Then there's all the motivation, cooperation, interaction, procrastination, intention. It's all of those words. We just have to be harder than you ever imagined. It's harder than ever to do that, to be. But you can do it. I did it. I did. I sat still and waited and waited and waited. And right now I'm waiting, but there's some risk I'm taking, and it's slow and steady, one little step at a time. Gently, gently, slowly building routine, building muscle in my arms, in my brain, in my body, in my back. I am building A better me. The one in the last decade was not the best version. Tried, I did, gave it my best. Stepping back, resetting, checking in with the identity, finding me again, jumping back into my sensuality, my personality, my freedom, my irresponsibility or responsibility to me. Imagine that I can breathe through that whole thought without any guilt or shame, without feeling like I missed something, I made a mistake, I did something that I regret. Those feelings are not there. There are feelings of friendships that are gone that are sad. Grief. There are feelings of people who have died who should have been alive. Grief. There are feelings of men who I loved who didn't work out the way we thought. Heartbreak, grief. And then there's everything else to step in. There's the opportunity to be as brave as I want to be, to try and be success— Nope. To reach the success that I know is my destiny. Independently, with some help from other people with neurodiversity who really do appreciate outside-the-box thinking I bring to the table. I need that interaction of being free with my brain and stepping into big thoughts that are usually uncomfortable and weird until someone's like, oh yeah! And when that happens— It's so fun to see that transform itself and unravel, but that first take that I do, that bravery, that step in into those uncomfortable conversations, they still don't feel good. It is my calling, my mission to make those happen, to propel, to push, to step in, to invite Change. I love it. So here we go, all vulnerable, all organic, not even changing a thing, not caring, knowing that I am freaking awesome. I've done the work and I've checked in with very smart people and they validate that. So even if I can't believe my own opinion because my inner critic is still a bitch Even though I love her dearly and I've given her lots of opportunity to be positive, she still comes in with negativity. I need to validate myself by others, and I do. And that's exactly what I will do. If I can't believe myself, I will make sure I have a team that believe in me and feed it back to me. There's no way I'm not allowing this to be the best it can be.
