The Identity Edit
Reinvention is my superpower
Identity Edit — Issue No. 1
Why I renamed this newsletter, and what we’re doing here now.
I’ve been thinking about the words “edit” and “reinvention” a lot lately.
I don’t mean the type of editing that forces you to begin cutting things out, the parts that make you, you. The kind that means looking at what you’ve written, what has been written for us, really looking at it all, and asking: does this still sound like me? Does this still tell the truth? Is this the story I want to keep telling?
Because here’s what I know after years of helping women find their voice and tell their stories:
The hardest edit isn’t the one you make to a page.
It’s the one you make to yourself.
And it’s not the edit itself; it’s the reinvention that comes from it.
I know because I’ve made it more times than I can count.
Nurse. Wife. Divorced woman. Single mom. Coach. Author. Publisher. Podcaster. Entrepreneur. Each one felt like a complete identity at the time. Each one got rewritten. Not because I failed at all of them, quite the opposite for some of them, but because I kept growing past the edges of the story I was telling about myself.
And here’s the biggest lie I had to unlearn along the way:
Your experiences do not become your identity.
The divorce doesn’t define you. The diagnosis doesn’t define you. The marriage that made you small, the career you outgrew, the version of yourself you left behind in a life that no longer fit, none of it is the final word on who you are.
Your experiences are chapters, and you are the author.
That’s what this blog is now. Identity Edit. A space where we do that work together.
I renamed it because I needed it to mean something specific.
The ReWrite is my podcast. That’s where I have conversations out loud with badass souls who are brave enough to tell their stories in public. (Believe me, the guests on Season 1 are going to blow you away!)
This space is different. This is where I tell mine from a more creative lens...
There is one part of my reinvention I have kept mostly to myself. Until now.
For years I lived in a marriage where travel wasn’t an option. Not because we couldn’t. Because the answer was always some version of no. Too busy. Maybe next year. I have to work. That’s busy season. That’s hunting season. I don’t like going to the beach. And somewhere in all those maybes I stopped asking. I made my world smaller. I convinced myself I didn’t need to go anywhere because the life I had was enough.
Turns out it wasn’t enough, I was just making myself small to make it fit.
When I finally left and finally started moving, something unexpected happened. Every new place I went has become a mirror. The ocean showed me things about myself I couldn’t see from my living room. A coffee shop in a city I’d never visited gave me back a version of myself I thought I had lost. A mountain showed me how far I’ve had to climb. A beach at sunrise reminded me that the world was still there, still wide, still full of chapters I hadn’t written yet.
I realized that reinvention is linked to my geographical location.
Sometimes healing happens at a desk with a blank page. Sometimes it happens somewhere you’ve never been before, finally quiet enough to hear yourself think. Sometimes you need to put physical distance between yourself and the life you outgrew before you can see it clearly enough to write something new.
So that’s what this newsletter will hold. Permission for you and me, that we deserve this.
Essays about identity, reinvention, the versions of ourselves we leave behind and the ones we’re still becoming. And postcards, real ones, from the places that changed me, because sometimes the most honest thing I can do is show you where I was standing when I finally heard my own voice again.
Not because travel is the point.
Because freedom is. And for a long time, I didn’t believe I deserved either one.
First postcard drops next week. Until then, don’t ever let anyone interrupt you from the plot of your story.
xoxo,
Dr. Court
