2.7.26 | 💛 I’m coming back to where I longed to be all along

Welcome to The Weekend Edit, a Saturday ritual from The Good Trade featuring our top 10 reads of the week and a note from one of our editors.

Happy weekend!

I’m a fairly disciplined person. I don’t think this quality is much to my own fault or credit. It’s a core feature of my personhood — innate. I see it in my daughter, too. It emerged early: her love of routine, her unwavering focus, her follow-through. By the time she was two, I realized someone else must have given us this gift a long time ago.

Discipline has often driven me toward a better life. Perhaps it’s ambition that sets the direction, but discipline is the engine. It’s the fuel for aligned action, the currency of my mobility.

Early on in my life, this focus was directed toward my studies and sports (debate was my “sport,” of choice, pls don’t judge 😜), and eventually toward my career and entrepreneurial pursuits. In recent years, it’s shown up most intensely in a more personal place: my health and sense of wellbeing.

After a postpartum depression diagnosis nearly five years ago, I applied discipline to reclaiming my energy and enjoyment of life.

Eldest daughter, eldest child, married young, a startup and a full staff by my mid-twenties — I had struggled most of my life with codependency, enmeshment, over-performing, and people-pleasing. Motherhood broke me (and freed me) because there was suddenly no more self left to sacrifice.

So I built a strict routine: morning sunlight; daily movement and meditation; a CGM to understand my blood sugar; cycle-syncing; gradually eliminating sugar, gluten, dairy, and alcohol; early, consistent bedtimes; and a rotation of tools — from cold plunges and red light to the more idiosyncratic experiments.

To my sweet husband’s distress, I listened to a lot of “bro podcasts” — you know the ones.

This is the part of the story where it’s trendy to say none of this made me happier. That, with all that structure, I became more rigid, controlling, un-spontaneous...