Keep that Promise

3 signs that your inner voice is asking you to pay attention.

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Poster of the cover of my book hanging in our home office. My book will publish in about a year on April 15, 2025.

In one year’s time I will keep a promise I made to myself decades ago.

A promise I used to talk about a lot. A promise I’d declared to do “someday.” A promise made in my youth to follow a dream. Yet, over the course of my life—family, health, moving, career—the decades gradually buried it, delaying and covering it over, year after year, under the sediment of messy busy living.

Until finally, unconsciously, the promise simply stopped coming up. I wonder whether I ever would have remembered it had an unexpected event eight years ago not jarred it loose.

Sound familiar? You make yourself a promise. You imagine your life will go a certain way. Of course it doesn’t for all sorts of curveballs show up that you need to respond to. Your naive imagined future gives way to present-day reality that’s likely a mixed bag of good and bad.

But there’s something about a promise to oneself that has a certain vibration different than day-to-day living. Like a calling, it will quiver in the background until gradually neglected into silence. At least that’s what happened to me.

The funny thing is it took a joke about death to bring my promise back to life.

An Epitaph Joke Wakes Me Up

I’m at lunch with work girlfriends. We’re at a Thai food place with speedy service so we can whirl in and out, back in time for 1:00 pm meetings. Work life is a pressure cooker so our quick noontime escapes act as a release valve—idiot mansplaining we just heard, awesome sale at Nordstrom’s, kid news catch-up—when, for no good reason, we start riffing on what our epitaphs would be.

“Here I lie: Filling my last cavity.” We laugh.

“Here I lie. Let me mansplain this to you: I’m dead!” Now we really laugh.

It’s my turn: “Here I lie, I always said I’d write a book and I never did!” Ha! Ha! Ha!

Except that just as I joke, a sharp pain stabs my gut. Like someone’s slugged me. I double over. Then quick, quick, the next thought reverberates: What if I never write my book? I fight a second to catch my breath.

You see, growing up, writing had been my thing as far back as I can remember. I was a book lover and writer, from journaling to AP English classes. I’d been an English major in college. Then the corporate communications career I chose was writing-based. When it morphed into marketing, the move aligned with my communications skills.

But this felt different.

I know now that something was building up that didn’t want to be silenced any more. There was a part of me that longed to be a voice authentic to me. It was a wake-up call. And a choice.

As if to bring the point home, a pragmatic little thought flatly followed: Well, girlfriend, the book’s not going to write itself.

How to Notice the Signs

Yeah. That was the moment of the Wake Up. I’ve recounted it before, and I’ll likely recount it again because it was one of those crystal-clear moments that sear into permanent memory like a tattoo. It felt like a near miss. Looking back, I realized I had ignored some signs. My subconscious had been knocking on my mental door for a while trying to get my attention, Hey! You got unfinished business!

Do you recognize any of these frustrations?

• I’d been feeling a growing malaise at work. The curiosity and passion I’d brought to lots of new problem-solving projects lacked my old energy.

• I’d felt a growing sense of not being valued. What I found was tolerance and hypocrisy and being overlooked. Not from everyone, of course, but it subtly showed up in a gradual disinterest in my work, such as lackluster performance reviews with lots of placating language but no expectations that I’d want to improve. (Was it a preoccupation with youth in our culture as if getting better was all about being young? Or the insidious idea that after a certain age, women can’t compete?)

• Yet, as I struggled with these feelings of unworthiness, in hindsight, I can see how they served to loosen my identity with career and opened up mental space previously preoccupied by work stuff. I clearly remember thinking: This place may no longer find value in me, but I’m not done with me yet.

That’s when I discovered Jo van Gogh’s story.

How My Experience Mirrors Jo’s

I recently wrote about my discovery of Jo in a previous post and how it made me mad.

The short version: In the early twentieth century, Jo—sister-in-law to the famed artist— was thrust out of a secure, happy life by the death of her husband, Theo, after only twenty-two months of marriage. When Theo died, Jo was left alone with their one-year-old son and hundreds of worthless Van Gogh paintings. (Vincent had died six months earlier). Instead of following tradition and returning home to Amsterdam like a dutiful daughter and young widow, she chooses to take on the male-dominated art elite to prove the paintings are world-class in order to ensure her son has an inheritance.

I am confident a “calling” nudged her for it turns out she had a hidden genius for marketing. We know she was successful because Van Gogh is acknowledged today as one of the world’s great artists. Had she obediently slunk back to her parents to move into her childhood bedroom. . .well, there’d be no Starry Night for us.

Jo had to do a bold restart.

I needed a radical rebound too.

At the End of the Day. . . No Regrets

Whether you name it a calling, or a promise or simply being “true to yourself,” there was one last kick that spurred me to toss out a safe life routine and start over. Some time after the epitaph jokes, I came across an article about regret.

The article shared observations compiled by palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, who wrote Regrets of the Dying from her experience in talking with hundreds of people on their deathbeds. It was the first regret that grabbed me.

The No. 1 regret of the dying is “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Mic drop. It was the last push I needed. No regrets.

So, for me, a part of being “true to myself” is writing the book on Jo van Gogh. In one year’s time, on April 15, 2025, my book, Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh will be released (published by She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster). On that day, I’m expecting to give myself one sweet permanent check on my life list.

(And a glass of champagne.)

But there’s one other thing: Life is about impact. Being a part of the change we want to create. Holding the conversations. For being true to ourselves is being true to our purpose and the reason we’re here for others.

Have any of those signs ever tugged a change out of you? Do you feel any now?

Warmly,

For much more on an impactful life, check out my friend Shelby’s website, The Muriel Network or her Instagram. Though targeted to women in wealth management, there’s something there for all of us who want to make a difference.

Book Recommendations on Making Big Changes

Order on Jennie Lee's website

Spark Change

Intuition, acceptance, accountability

My copy of this profound little book on introspection is laced with highlighted sentences. If you are a lifelong learner and are curious about creating change and personal growth —I can vouch for this one. I took it in slowly, sometimes journaling and sitting with a single question for days before moving on. Twelve themes are presented in the order Jennie Lee has seen people make profound change. If you do the work, negative or limiting beliefs can be revealed. Intuition, acceptance, accountability are all means that can shake up the obstacles holding one back. This one’s a keeper for me to return to. 

Order on Carla Harris' website

Expect to Win

Clear and compassionate how-to-win career advice

Funny timing – our women’s ‘investment reading book club’ chose to read Expect to Win over the holidays because we wanted lighter reading versus the usual investment topics. Little did we know that when we all met the majority of us had either just changed jobs or in the midst of looking. Perfect timing! Carla Harris is tough, compassionate and straight forward in her career advice. Among the ah-ha moments: Getting a sponsor in your career is neither magical or random, instead she tells how to ask for one. The 90-day plan and how it works for the first 90 days in a role and how to build a new skill. Choosing the three adjectives you want to be defined by. Noting the “Frequently Wrong, Never in Doubt” people and how to make your mark. This book’s structure of 10 strategies and end-of-chapter summaries makes it quick to digest and act on. Here’s my favorite quote from the book: “When I get up in the morning, I start out with the intention that am going to be triumphant in my day.” Excellent inspirational how-to book.