The Working Mom Facebook ad: “Read This If You're A High Achiever”

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Fourteen months ago I wrote my resignation letter at my kitchen table at 1:40 in the morning. I'm still the CEO. Nobody has ever read it. Not my board. Not my husband, who was asleep upstairs while I wrote it. It lives on my laptop in a file named "Q3 catering options.docx," so that if it's ever open on my screen when someone walks in — my assistant, my CFO, the IT tech who migrates my laptop — nobody looks twice. I'm going to quote it to you, because I think there are women who will recognize it line by line. First, the facts you need to weigh the rest: I'm 52. I've run the company for ten years and worked inside it for twenty-four. It's the kind of company that shows up on lists, which is why you're not getting my name. I've changed the wording of every quote and a handful of identifying details. The numbers — the tally, the dates, the doses — are real. The letter says: "After considerable reflection, I believe the organization would be best served by a leadership transition." Considerable reflection. I wrote that the night of the worst meeting of my career. A Monday operations review. Eleven people. My head of supply chain was walking us through a delay. Nine years with me. A man who once drove four hours on a Sunday night because a line went down. A real problem, but an ordinary one. The kind I had absorbed without expression a thousand times. I heard myself say: "I don't know why I'm surprised. I stopped expecting better from you two years ago." Out loud. In that voice. In front of his own team. Nobody moved. A director I've known fifteen years looked down and straightened his notebook until it was square with the edge of the table. The room waited for the meeting to become a meeting again. And I sat there with my heart slamming and one sentence going around in my head: I would fire me. The letter also says: "In recent months, on several occasions, my conduct has not met the standard I expect of this organization's leadership." Several occasions. Here is what that line is hiding. The letter doesn't mention the twenty-six-year-old analyst who cried in a stairwell in April over what I said about her model, with her in the room. I found out about the stairwell three weeks later. I still can't think about it directly. The letter doesn't mention my commute. Somewhere in the spring I caught myself screaming — out loud, alone in the car — at a driver doing forty in the fast lane. By September it was most mornings. Some mornings it was crying instead. I couldn't have told you which one was coming. The letter doesn't mention my assistant, Renee, who by summer had stopped bringing me bad news in person. She'd send it by email at 4:55, on her way out. It took me months to see the pattern. She had worked out the safest hour. The letter doesn't mention my daughter, sixteen, texting me from her bedroom in our own house: "are you mad at me?" She wasn't in trouble. She'd heard my voice through the floor while I was on a call. The letter says "standards." I was 51 that spring. I told myself that was a coincidence. None of these people had done anything. That was the part I couldn't get past — the size of what came out of me against the size of what caused it. Matching the response to the problem was my whole career. In twenty-four years I've closed a plant. I've sat across from a union team at two in the morning. And the chairman made the same joke every time: her voice never changes. Then a schedule slip made me humiliate a man I respect, in one sentence, in front of his team. A CEO is watched all day. That's most of the job — people reading your face and calibrating off it. And I no longer trusted my own face. I moved hard conversations to late afternoon, when fewer people would be around. I started leaving rooms — "give me ten minutes" — when I felt the heat come up the back of my neck. And in February I started keeping a tally on my phone, in a note with no title, of every time I had to walk out of a room to keep something in. Eleven, in February. The letter's last line was the one that mattered: "I am stepping away for health reasons." When I typed it, it was a lie. I had no diagnosis. What I had was a year of trying to fix myself quietly, because quietly is the only way a CEO is allowed to fall apart. Six months with an executive coach at $1,100 a month. She taught me box-breathing for meetings. It worked for about ninety seconds at a time. A 114-day streak on Headspace. The streak was real. Ask me what it changed and I can't point to a single meeting that went differently. Magnesium glycinate at night, because a podcast said cortisol. A B-complex in the morning. Ashwagandha gummies from Walgreens for two months, because the bottle said "stress." Nothing. Coffee cut from four cups to one. Two weeks of feeling worse, then back to four. And my GP, in the fall. Full panel. Everything came back normal — she congratulated me on my cholesterol, which is a strange thing to sit through when you're hoping they'll find something fixable. She said burnout, then perimenopause, handed me a printout, and offered me Lexapro. I asked her whether depressed people scream at traffic. She said sometimes we don't know we're depressed. Maybe. It didn't fit. I didn't fill it. The printout was about hormone therapy, so I asked around. Carefully. You'd be surprised how carefully a CEO has to ask about anything medical. My oldest friend from business school has been on the patch for two years and swears by it. Hot flashes gone. Sleeping through. Then, in the same phone call, she told me she'd screamed at her own sister over a parking spot in October. Whatever the patch was fixing, it wasn't fixing the thing I had. So the night I wrote the letter, I didn't send it. I gave myself a deadline instead. End of quarter — March 31. If I couldn't get myself under control by then, the board would get the letter before they had a reason to ask for it. And I booked a physical for eleven days out — a private one, the executive kind — mostly so that "health reasons" would be true enough to type. The doctor's name was Dawes. Early sixties, reading glasses on a chain, took her notes on paper. She ran the usual two hours — treadmill, bloodwork, scan. Then she sat down with my chart and did something no January physical had ever done: she took a history of my calendar, not just my body. How long at this level. How many direct reports. When the sleep changed. Because I finally admitted the 3:40 a.m. wake-ups. Heart going. Jaw sore from clenching. Seven nights out of seven, by then. Then she put the chart down and asked me a question I have thought about every day since. "When something makes you angry — not this year, your whole career — what do you do with it?" I actually laughed. Nothing, I said. That's the job. That's the skill. "Ever? In twenty-four years?" I told her about the chairman's joke. Her voice never changes. She didn't smile. She said, "That's not a temperament. That's work. Do you know what it costs?" What she explained over the next half hour I'll give you the way I heard it, including the places I pushed back. When something hits you in a meeting — a bad number, an insult, a delay — your body runs the full emergency whether you show it or not. The cortisol releases. The heart speeds up. The fuel dumps into your blood. Keeping your face still doesn't cancel any of that. It adds a second job on top: hold it in, keep the voice even, give nothing away. People who slam doors are running the reaction. People like me are running the reaction twice. I told her I'd been doing exactly that since my early thirties and it had never been a problem. Why now? Because it was never free, she said. It was being paid for. Every night, sleep settled the day's account — and that part is not a metaphor. The overnight drop in cortisol is a real, physical reset. But in your late forties, the hormones that run that overnight reset begin to fade. The account stops clearing. The balance carries over. You wake at 3:40 because the system is still firing at a day that's already over. You're exhausted because holding it in is a second job you now work around the clock. And then some ordinary Monday, an ordinary delay walks in, and there is nothing left to hold it with. "You didn't become someone else in that meeting," she said. "You ran out of what being you costs." I went at her the way I'd go at a consultant whose numbers looked too clean. If it's my forties, why didn't the patch fix my friend? The patch replaces the estrogen, she said. That's why the flashes and the night sweats went. But it doesn't bring an already-elevated cortisol baseline back down. Your friend could stay on the patch for ten years and still scream at her sister. Then why didn't fourteen Januaries of bloodwork catch it? Because a standard panel doesn't measure cortisol load. Nothing about you is out of range. You're not sick. You're depleted. On paper those look identical. I took ashwagandha for two months, I told her. Gummies. Nothing happened. She asked what dose. I didn't know. She said: that's the answer. The trials that show ashwagandha lowering cortisol used standardized extracts at specific, studied doses. Most gummies carry a fraction of that, unstandardized. You weren't taking what was studied. You were taking the label. The Lexapro? For depression, the right tool, she said. You don't present as depressed. You present as someone running an emergency system with no off-hours. An antidepressant doesn't lower cortisol either. The magnesium? Nutrition. Fine for what it's for. Same for the B-complex — cofactors. They help the compounds that do the work. On their own they don't lower anything. The breathing, the app? Technique for a spike. You don't have a spike. You have a baseline that never comes down. Then she said the thing I think about as often as the question. She said: you are the fourth senior woman I've had in this room in a year with this exact picture. The wake-ups. The walking out of rooms. The letter, in some form — one of them was carrying a signed offer from a competitor she didn't even want. None of you got weak. You're the ones who held the most for the longest. I asked what she'd prescribe. I wanted a prescription. A prescription would have made it official. "There's nothing on my prescription pad for this," she said. "The drugs that force cortisol down exist — they're for a disease you don't have. For a baseline like yours, what has real trials behind it is a short list of plant compounds. Ashwagandha at the studied dose — which you now know matters. Holy basil, which the trials pair with it. Rhodiola, for the fatigue side. There's reasonable data on saffron and L-theanine for mood and the edge. If you do this, do it the way you'd audit a supplier: pull the label, pull the studies, see whether the numbers match." I asked whether any label had ever passed that audit. She said when patients bring her bottles, the one she sees pass is called Luvuna — the trial doses, printed on the label, no proprietary blend hiding the numbers. "Don't take my word for it. You of all people know how to check." I checked that night, at the kitchen table, in the same chair where I wrote the letter. Every number on the label against the trials. It held, line by line — which is more than I can say for the gummies, which turned out to carry a fraction of the studied dose. I ordered it before I went up to bed. Two capsules with breakfast. She'd told me to give it eight weeks and to keep tracking what I was already tracking. Weeks one and two: nothing. I want that on the record. If your first two weeks feel like nothing, those were mine. Night 13, I woke at 3:40 out of habit — and my heart wasn't pounding. No schedule running on the ceiling. Back asleep by four. That week I still woke seven times, but quiet. The next week, four. The week after that, two. The tally told the same story from the other side. Eleven walk-outs in February. Six in March. One in April — and that meeting deserved it. March 31 came. I opened the catering file and read the whole thing. Three weeks of sleep and a falling tally isn't a recovery, but it was the first number that had moved in a year that I hadn't faked. I gave myself until summer instead, and closed the file. Week four was the real test, and it arrived on its own schedule: a quality issue, a genuinely bad one, walked into my Tuesday. The heat started up the back of my neck. It rose. Then it stopped rising. I asked the three questions I actually needed answered, and the meeting stayed a meeting. Afterward I sat in my office with the door shut for a minute. Nobody in that room will ever know anything happened, which is exactly the point. Week six, I got angry in a negotiation — on purpose, at the right size, for as long as it was useful, the way I used to deploy it maybe once a year. Anger was always a tool in this job. It had stopped being mine. It's mine again. Somewhere in there, my husband stopped being careful with me. I can't give you the date. I just noticed, one dinner, that he was arguing with me about something small and enjoying it, the way we used to — and realized how long he'd been choosing his words first. Week nine, my head of supply chain presented in that same room, about the same production line. I watched him check my face twice in the first five minutes. Twice — then not again. He just presented. I had apologized to him months before, the week after the meeting, in his office with the door open. No capsule did that. Some of this was work only I could do. But I couldn't do that work in the state I was in. I know, because I'd been trying all year. In June I was loud on a call at home, door open — negotiation loud, on purpose. My daughter walked through the middle of it to get to the fridge. No text. Month four, the board and I agreed to a three-year extension. The chairman made his joke. It's still true. And last month our general counsel — who watched the whole year and said nothing, because that's her job — asked me directly what had changed. I told her all of it, the way I've told you. Three weeks later she texted me at 6:40 on a Sunday morning: "Slept through again. My sister wants the name." The honest version of the timeline, so you can hold me to it: sleep moved first, inside two weeks. The fuse took six. The tally took three months to reach zero and doesn't always stay there. July was two, and both meetings deserved it. If you can get to a doctor who will take a history of your calendar and not just your blood, go. That's the visit that found this. Bodies are different. I'd distrust anyone who promised you otherwise. The letter is still on my laptop, still filed under catering. I reread it at quarter-end. Not as a threat to myself — as a record of the year when nobody could tell me what was wrong. If you've read this far, some of this list is yours. The wake-ups at 3-something with your heart going. The anger or the tears — whichever door is open — over things that don't deserve either. The rooms you've started leaving. The bloodwork that keeps coming back normal. The people at work and at home who've gotten careful around you. And a version of my letter in some format — a drafted email, a recruiter's number saved under a fake name, a browser tab of jobs you don't want. It is not your character failing. Holding it in has been costing your body something real the entire time you've been good at it, and in your late forties the overnight reset that used to cover that cost fades out. That's the whole mechanism. It doesn't show on a standard panel, and it doesn't fix itself. I gave it a year and a deadline. It didn't move until I did. What it cost me to find out: $6,600 of executive coaching, a $2,400 physical, and a year of running my company while frightened of my own voice. What it costs to find out if this is you: $66.99 a month, and Luvuna's guarantee runs 60 days with a full refund even on an empty bottle — enough runway to watch the sleep move first and the fuse after it, the same order it moved for me. The label and the trials are public. Ashwagandha at the studied dose, holy basil, rhodiola, L-theanine, vitamin C, saffron, B6 — every dose printed, no blend. Audit it the way I did: luvuna.com/products/peri-meno-stress-support P.S. Dr. Dawes's question is free, and it's the whole diagnosis: what do you do with your anger? If your answer is "nothing — that's the job," your body has been doing something with it every day for twenty years, and lately it's been doing it at 3:40 in the morning. Sixty days, full refund, even on an empty bottle. And start the tally on your phone — you'll want to watch it drop.

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luvuna.com

Read This If You're A High Achiever 👆

A non-hormonal perimenopause supplement with clinical-dose adaptogens to support stress, mood, focus and hormonal transition