This past week was a lot. Not "a lot to do" a lot. More like someone crammed a month of emotional weather into five days and forgot to warn me.

Every morning I woke up exhausted. Bone deep. That specific tired where even your eye sockets feel heavy. And grumpy in a way I couldn't explain or point to. Nothing had happened. Everything was fine. I just felt like I was carrying something I couldn't name.

My friend Nicole (my astrologer bestie and co-host of the Rails Optional podcast) had a word for it. Mercury retrograde in Pisces had been running directly through the exact spot in my chart where my brain lives. Which, for the non-astrology folx: think of it as someone flipping the circuit breaker on your nervous system repeatedly for three weeks. And apparently the particular arrangement of planets in my own chart this week was rare enough that Nicole flagged it specifically. Old wounds, old patterns, a low hum of "who am I even becoming" underneath everything.

Whether you believe in that or not - something was up. And it wasn't subtle.

By Friday the exhaustion had a new roommate: anger. Not the sharp kind. The simmering kind. Always there. In every interaction, every task, every moment something didn't go the way I needed it to.

And it showed up in my work in the most humbling way possible.

I'd been grinding on my capstone project for a cohort I'm part of all day Friday - it's also this week's freebie, more on that shortly. Something that a week earlier would have taken me maybe 40 minutes took over three hours. Three hours of going in circles. Forgetting context. Re-explaining myself. Getting short-tempered with Claude for not reading my mind when I hadn't actually given it what it needed.

Here's the thing I've been learning - and Friday made it impossible to ignore: the mood you bring to your AI prompting affects your results. AI is a mirror. When you're scattered, the output is scattered. When you're furious and exhausted and can't articulate what you actually want, the AI will dutifully reflect that right back at you. It's not broken. You're just off. And it shows.

But here's what Friday also showed me: the way we talk to AI is often the way we've been taught to talk about ourselves. Under-explaining. Assuming we're asking too much. Forgetting to include the context that would make everything easier - because we were trained, early and repeatedly, that our needs weren't worth that much detail.

I was very, very off. And I wasn't surprised, once I understood why.

By Saturday morning the rage had a name. Or rather, I finally stopped pretending it didn't.

I'd spent years being angry at all the people who minimized me. Who ignored my contributions. Who made me feel invisible while I worked myself into the ground for their egos and their org charts. And some of that anger is legitimate. Still is.

But underneath it was something harder to sit with: I was furious at myself. For following all those rules I never agreed to. The ones from my mother, from the church I was raised in, from every internalized belief I'd swallowed about my own worthiness. All those years of unacknowledged, unpaid labor - not just for companies or bosses, but for a version of myself I'd been told I should be.

Every woman I know is carrying one of these. A rage that lives in the chest. Quiet most of the time. Present always. You might not be calling it rage. You might be calling it tired, or overwhelmed, or fine, actually, I'm fine. But it's there. And it doesn't need a Mercury retrograde to surface. It just needs a crack in the armor.

You don't have to name yours right now. I just want you to know I see it.

There I was, telling people all the time: that which you resist, persists.

And there I was, resisting.

So I stopped. Let it move through me. Ugly-cried long enough to concern Smidge. Sat with the discomfort of having that much feeling in my body with nowhere useful to send it.

It was not cute. It was not productive. It was necessary.

Then I made a choice.

I got up. Showered. Got dressed. Made myself show up to my own birthday dinner like someone who deserved a nice evening - because I do, and so do you, even when the first half of the day was spent wrestling your own interior weather system to the ground.

We went to Fogo de Chao. The cheesy rolls were hot. The creme brulee was - I'm not going to soften this - orgasmic. And for a few hours I was just a person having a really good meal with her husband. Not a woman hauling years of unprocessed anger around in her chest.

That choice - to get up, to go, to be present anyway - that was the work. Not the crying. The deciding to show up after.

Permission slip, if you need one: relief doesn't have to be earned through more processing. Sometimes a hot cheesy roll counts.

Here's what I keep forgetting:

The rules I followed so faithfully weren't handed down from some higher wisdom. They were handed down by people who needed me small.

I followed them so well. For so long. I even defended them. Called it professionalism. Called it being a team player.

It wasn't wisdom. It was conditioning.

The rage isn't the problem. The rage is the receipt. Proof that something in me always knew - and kept score anyway.

Reclamation doesn't require becoming someone new. It requires stopping the performance of someone you never were.

You were never behind. You were never too much. You were never the problem.

You just had rules that weren't yours.

You don't have to keep them.

I don’t remember much of this past week (the gift and curse of having ADHD) but here are some links to things that touched, moved, inspired me, or simply made me laugh entirely too hard.

Women x AI

Friday was my last session of their 5-week training cohort and honestly? I'm taking notes for my own work. Smart, generous, no-nonsense. Check them out on LinkedIn and join the community for free. Highly recommend.

4 Years of Therapy in One Minute

GrowWithGreg condensed 11 life principles into 60 seconds and I've watched it more than once this week. I'm also attempting a LinkedIn carousel about it because I am terrible at carousels and I refuse to let that stop me.

This is Why I Have 3 Cats

A cat video compilation narrated by someone who truly understands the assignment. Yes, I know. Yes, again. No, I'm not sorry.

Partner of the week

Turns out newsletters don't pay for themselves. Who knew?

This week's partner helps keep the lights on (and is genuinely one of the AI newsletters I take time to read):

The AI economy is booming, and smart entrepreneurs are already profiting. Subscribe to Mindstream and get instant access to 200+ proven strategies to monetize AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and more. From content creation to automation services, discover actionable ways to build your AI-powered income. No coding required, just practical strategies that work.

Subscribe to Get Your Free Guide

I built this as my capstone project for the Women x AI cohort. On Friday. While I was a feral witch. It took three hours when it should have taken forty minutes and now you understand why.

Three prompts for when you open AI and your brain goes blank. No tech skills required. No staring at a cursor wondering if you're doing it wrong.

The first one is The Brain Dump - and it's also the first weekly challenge launching this week in Joy Prompt Club and the weekly ROCO tip. You answer questions. AI does the thinking. Something useful comes out in under five minutes.

ROCO stands for Role, Objective, Context, Output.

Every week I give you a prompt built on the ROCO framework - the method I use to get actually useful things out of AI instead of generic word salad. This week's prompt is also in the freebie AND the first weekly challenge in Joy Prompt Club. That's not an accident. When something works, it deserves more than one entrance.

No questions to answer, nothing to prepare. Just copy the prompt, dump everything in your head at the end, and let the AI do the work.

Role:

You're someone who gets executive function struggles, emotional labor, and midlife burnout.

Objective:

I'm going to give you a messy brain dump. I need you to help me see what's actually going on in there.

Context:

My brain is full. I've got too many things competing for space and half of them aren't even mine to carry. I'm stuck. I need clarity, not productivity hacks.

Output:

Then type out (or speak!) everything that's swirling around in your brain right now. Messy is fine.

Works great in any free instance of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.

Wednesday, March 25 | 10:00AM - 12:00PM CDT

Think of it like your favorite local bar. Drop in whenever. Stay for two hours or twenty minutes. Bring your own drink. No need to drive home.

Part coworking, part body-doubling, part "wait, can AI actually help with that?" No slides. No performance. Just humans working alongside other humans.

The catch: you need to join R GENERATION first. It's free, it's full of genuinely cool remote professionals, and I may be slightly biased because I write their newsletter. Worth it either way.

Thursday, March 26 | 9AM-10AM CDT

I'm doing a live stream on LinkedIn. One hour. My actual desktop. Me actually fighting with AI tools in real time so you can see what this stuff really looks like when it doesn't go perfectly on the first try.

No slides. No script. No polished tutorial energy.

Friday, March 27 | 10AM CDT - 30 Minutes
Friday Jam Session with Joy Prompt Club. 30 minutes. No agenda. Just prompts, play, and people who get it. Open to anyone who wants to join in and has questions or a problem they’re trying to solve.

Anxiety to Authority - 12 weeks, 10 senior leaders max, Tuesdays starting April 7. Me and Tiffany Flaming. $2,997. Not for everyone. Maybe for someone you know.

The Executive AI Edge - 90 minutes with me and Kate Sargent. $449. For the executive in your life who's nodding along in AI meetings and understanding none of it.

Joy Prompt Club - My favorite little virtual place in all the interwebz.

This week asked a lot. Of me, probably of you too.

And if you spent any part of it carrying something you couldn't name, feeling behind for reasons you couldn't explain, or just grinding through days that should have been fine but weren't - I see you. That's not weakness. That's what it looks like to be a human in a world that keeps moving whether you're ready or not.

The rage, the exhaustion, the creme brulee - all of it was this week. All of it was real. And I'm still here. So are you.

That counts for more than you're giving yourself credit for.

💜

Take care of yourself, take care of each other,

Deb

P.S. If someone in your life is drowning in AI overwhelm and too proud to ask for help - forward this to them. The freebie is free, no opt-in required, and nothing in it will make them feel behind. That's the whole point.

P.P.S. Hit reply and tell me: what's been sitting in your chest this week that you haven't said out loud yet? I read every single one.