The thing I’ve been hiding
that was literally making me sick.

This weekend I went through what I can only describe as a spiritual death.

My blood pressure was through the roof. Full hypertension. My body was doing the thing bodies do when they have been carrying something too heavy for too long and they finally decide — enough.

And before anyone comes at me with diet advice — I hear you. Different conversation for a different day. What I need to talk about right now is what was actually underneath it.

That is something my friend and I say to each other. And it has never been more true than it was this weekend.

The last few weeks have held grief. Family loss. Things I have not shared publicly because I was trying to hold it together. And at some point the body stops cooperating with the performance of holding it together.

But here is the thing I realised lying there this weekend.

The hypertension was not just stress. It was friction.

Internal friction from holding back a part of myself that I have never fully shown — not to everyone in my life, not even to all of you.

I love oracle cards. I meditate. I do energy work. I sit in the woo and I find it deeply true and deeply mine. And I have been quietly keeping that part of myself separate — not hiding it exactly, but not fully owning it either. Letting certain people see certain parts. Managing the version of Cindy that each audience got.

And that management? That careful parcelling out of myself?

It was killing me. Literally.

Because you cannot say I love myself and then hide parts of yourself from the world. Those two things cannot coexist. Love does not come with a curation filter.

I sat with that this weekend and I asked myself honestly — Cindy, do you actually love all of you? Every facet? The money mentor and the woman pulling cards at midnight and the grieving daughter and the one who is still figuring it out?

I am telling you this because I think some of you are living the same way.

You have parts of yourself you keep in separate rooms. Parts you show to some people and not others. Parts you have decided are too much, too strange, too outside the box to belong in the version of you that the world gets to see.

And I wonder if some of what you are carrying in your body — the unexplained things, the tension, the exhaustion that sleep does not fix — is the weight of that editing.

We know social media is a highlight reel. But there is something worse than a highlight reel. It is lying by omission. Letting people believe that the women building things online are not also crying in their cars, googling their symptoms at 2am, and quietly wondering if they are the only one who feels like this.

You are not the only one.

I also think there is something about this industry — this coaching, manifesting, online business world — that makes the omission feel necessary. Like if you show the struggle, you lose the authority. Like the mess and the message cannot coexist.

They can. They do. And honestly, the mess is usually where the real message lives.

I am not here to tell you what to do with that. I am just here to say — if you have been editing yourself down, hiding the parts that feel too strange or too much or too hard to explain — your body is keeping the score. It always does.

You cannot hold yourself back and call it protection. At some point it becomes self-abandonment.

I am done abandoning myself to fit a box. This newsletter, this business, this life — it is all me. All of it. And if that does not fit neatly into a marketing framework then good. It was never supposed to.

If any of this is landing for you — if you are carrying something you have not been able to say out loud yet — hit reply. I mean that. I am here. I am listening.

Let’s do this journey together.