Welcome to Spark

Earlier this year, I left Amazon after 15 years.

I told myself I'd finally rest. Sleep past 7. Go on vacation. Read the books that had been sitting on my nightstand for two years. Do absolutely nothing for a while. And for a few weeks, I actually did that. I rarely saw a number before 10 a.m. on my bedside clock.

But something kept nagging at me: a curiosity that wouldn’t go away. For months before I left, I'd been in the thick of perimenopause and had no idea. I'd be mid-sentence in a meeting, completely sure of my point, and just lose it. Not distracted — gone. My patience was shorter than I recognized as mine. Some days my brain and my body seemed to be on two different calls entirely.

If you've spent your whole career being the person who's sharp and fast and unbothered, that kind of change doesn't stay contained to how you feel physically. It starts to mess with how you see yourself, period.

So I went looking for answers, mostly by talking to other women. Almost everyone had some version of the same story — they thought they were burned out, chalked it up to aging, and despite their self-doubt, just powered through.

Which got me stuck on one question: how many women are quietly questioning themselves — or getting quietly questioned by everyone around them — at exactly the moment they have the most to offer?

I didn't love the answer. So I built something instead.

Fifteen years at Amazon taught me more than I can fit into a post (maybe that’ll be a book someday), but the short version is: how to build something from nothing, how to push a project forward when no one's telling you how, and how to make something actually scale. I'm using every bit of that now, just pointed somewhere a lot more personal.

Spark is what I'm calling this next thing — it sits at the overlap of perimenopause, career and leadership. The goal is simple to say and harder to do: help women stay confident and visible through this transition instead of quietly shrinking, and help the people managing them recognize what's actually going on instead of mistaking it for something else.

Right now that looks like workshops, 1:1 coaching, and consulting for companies who want to get ahead of this instead of getting caught off guard by it.

If any of this sounds familiar — you're in it, you're managing someone who might be, or you've just been wondering why we don't talk about this at work — I'd love for you to follow along.

We're not losing our spark. We're living through something nobody explained to us, at exactly the moment we needed it explained. I'm trying to fix that.