One Year, One Blog, and the Audacity to Give Myself Credit

A year ago today, I hit publish on the first post of The Heeled/Healed Deputy and promptly did what most of us do after a vulnerable act of creation: I refreshed the page eleven times and wondered if anyone, but my mother would read it. (Hi, Mom. Thank you for the eleven views.)

Three hundred and sixty-five days, God-knows-how-many stories, and an unreasonable number of late-night edits later, I'm still here. This isn't a highlight reel I post today. It's not "look how far the blog has come." It's something harder and, frankly, more useful: look how far I've come, and my refusal, for once, to talk myself out of noticing.

Here's the thing about writing publicly on leadership, motherhood, and the particular chaos of doing both in heels and a badge: you become your own case study, whether you meant to or not. Every story I've told this last year about command presence, about de-escalation, about holding a room or holding a toddler mid-meltdown, is a story I lived before I ever wrote it down. The writing doesn't interrogate me. It just makes visible what the last decade already built.

Some of those stories were hard to publish, not because I doubted whether the lesson was true, but because putting your own growth in print, in public, takes a particular kind of nerve. There's a vulnerability in saying "here's what I know now and this is how I learned the hard way" that has nothing to do with uncertainty and everything to do with exposure. I've written plenty of leadership lessons that I'd already earned the hard way, long before this blog existed. The blog just gave them a name and an audience.

That's exactly why today matters. We are extraordinarily well-trained - women, mothers, leaders, deputies, humans generally, to catalogue our faltering with the precision of a forensic accountant, and to wave off our growth like it was luck, timing, or somebody else's doing. We'll remember the phone call we fumbled in 2019 with cinematic clarity. We will not, unprompted, remember the six times since that we handled the exact same scenario without our hands shaking. That's not humility. That's a rigged ledger.

A year ago, I was leading from a place of proving. Every decision had a little asterisk attached - prove you deserve the rank, prove you can do this and be a present mother, prove the doubters wrong. Somewhere in the writing of this blog, in having to articulate, out loud, in public, what good leadership actually looks like, I stopped leading to prove and started leading to serve. That's not a small shift. That's the whole engine changing. I didn't clock it happening in real time. I only noticed the difference in hindsight, which is, I'd argue, how all real growth works. It doesn't announce itself. It just quietly stops being a struggle one day, and you look up months later and realize you've been standing differently.

I've also gotten better, not good, better, at the art of the clean exit from my own bad moods. A year ago, a rough shift or a rough morning with the kids could color an entire day. Now I can name it, contain it, and come back from it in under an hour. That's not a superpower. That's just reps. A year of choosing, on purpose, to be the kind of leader and mother I write about instead of only the kind I aspire to be on my better days.

Here's the part I really want to sit with: I've learned to separate correction from condemnation, in how I lead others and, this is the harder one, in how I talk to myself. A rookie makes a mistake, and I've learned to say, "let's fix that" instead of "what's wrong with you." It took me considerably longer to extend myself the same courtesy. I'm getting there. That sentence, twelve months ago, would have been a confession. Today it's just a status update.

None of this means the falters stopped. They didn't, and they won't, because growth isn't an arrival, it's a direction. I am, however, done letting the falter be the loudest voice in the room while the growth sits quietly in the corner, uninvited to speak. Today, growth gets the microphone.

Here's my actual anniversary gift to you, reader, colleague, fellow tired-but-trying human: pull your own ledger. Not the highlight reel, not the humble-brag version, but the honest accounting. Find the thing you handled this year that you wouldn't have handled the same way last year. Find the moment you didn't spiral, the boundary you actually held, the apology you gave without over-explaining yourself into the ground. Write it down. Say it out loud, even if it's just to your dashboard camera on the way home.

You earned that. Don't you dare talk yourself out of it.

Here's to year two. I hope to bring you more stories, more falters worth learning from, hopefully some humour and a friendly wink, and a great deal more credit given where credits overdue.