When my husband and I moved from Asheville, North Carolina to Seattle, Washington, I realized this cross-country move was more than a change of scenery — it was another beautiful shift in identity. The East Coast raised me on resilience, grit, tradition, and survival. The West Coast is reminding me of how good it feels to inhabit reinvention, expansiveness, and living in full color. Together, they’ve reminded me that enoughness isn’t found in performance, but in inhabiting both roots and horizon.

In this essay, I reflect on what it means to carry both coasts inside me — the storms and history of the South, the visionary freedom of the Pacific Northwest — and how those landscapes mirror the identity shifts so many of us face. If you’ve ever felt torn between past and future, belonging and becoming, resilience and reinvention, this is for you.

Healing isn’t a performance, and mastery isn’t a checklist. Ashleigh Henry explores what it means to inhabit the work — not just understand it, speak to it, or sell it. It’s for the woman who’s done the trainings, knows the language, but still finds herself over-giving, self-abandoning, or quietly aching for a life that actually feels like hers.

If you’ve ever felt the dissonance between what you teach and how you live, this is a call back to rhythm, presence, and realignment. Less about doing the work perfectly — more about living it honestly.

Ashleigh Henry, founder of The Cheetah Company, shares when there was a time when “more” felt like oxygen — more achievement, more clarity, more healing, more doing it right. But chasing it left her fragmented. This reflection traces the invisible addiction many high-capacity women carry: the compulsion toward betterment that masquerades as growth but quietly erodes our peace.

For anyone who’s felt burned out by their own hunger, this essay offers a pause — a place to name the ache beneath the ambition and ask a more honest question: what if more isn’t the answer? What if you were already enough, long before the reaching?