Who Even Am I Now?

“Who even am I now?”

Ah,  yes. The million dollar question I’ve been asking myself on a near-daily basis over the past 15 months. 

Because the woman I used to be ceased to exist on June 1, 2024 when I ended a lifetime of living in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles to start a new chapter. 

Dead. Gone. Buried. 

It hasn’t been that long a period in the grand scheme of my life, and yet it feels like a lifetime ago - a feeling I usually reserve for time periods long enough for at least two presidential terms to have passed. 

But that’s how fast I’ve quantum leaped in a year. 

Moving across the country and saying goodbye to my longtime, beloved Gold Coast highrise apartment, leaving my corporate job when we handed my program off to another bank at the end of 2024 as planned for years, and finally launching my business full time - all at the same time - was the biggest pattern disruptor of my entire life. 

I guarantee any Nervous System Regulation 101 course around would have recommended introducing one of these changes at a time, not all of them, but like…what’s a girl to do when they all coincide at the same time and she’s faced with the choice of either continuing to delay taking action or going all in on things she knows will move the needle in her life faster than the fastest fast track? 

My ego was scared AF to make the changes, but my soul was begging me to do it. 

“Come on, Laura,” she whispered to me. “If you keep living the same life, you’re going to keep having the same experiences.” 

She wasn’t wrong. As much as I loved my life as the Carrie Bradshaw of Chicago, complete with journalism degree and a cute apartment building I’d snagged at 23 with a view stunning enough that the actual Carrie miiiight have mentioned it in her column more frequently than Mr. Big, something was missing. 

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Chicago is an amazing, walkable city full of culture, architecture, seasons, incredible food and nightlife scenes, friendly people, and, for me, longtime friends and family. Why would I ever leave? 

Seriously, though, why? I couldn’t explain it, but the pull I’d felt toward California my entire life kept growing stronger. It  drew me in, closer and closer, until I could no longer ignore the fact that some mysterious element of magic was summoning me there for a serious dose of life medicine.

My astrocartography chart held some clues. While my sun and Saturn lines cross through Chicago, creating an environment rich in deep, karmic healing and hard work rewarded by success, magic just felt a tad too inaccessible in between all those karmic lessons. 

But California and the West Coast? Well, now we’re talking. My Venus, Jupiter and moon lines all converge near Los Angeles, which on pretty stationery paper means a glow up in relationships, self worth, money, business, opportunities, luck, intuition, emotional support…all the things that make life juicy. 

Awesome. I was sold. Sign me upppp….even with a kicking and screaming ego that wanted to stay safe in Chicago forever. 

Because everything was gonna be a fabulous, smooth new start, right? Riiiiight? 

Well…not quite. Not with all those planetary lines just waiting, itching for me to arrive so they could work a deep healing on every single one of my remaining shadows the second I landed in California.

It was like I had entered the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s 1408, only instead of a New York City luxury hotel driving hotel guests to harm after facing their own dark psychology, it was my Venice apartment…and I knew I had actively invited the Universe in not to harm me, but to work her medicine on me. 

The ego death of saying goodbye to my old life was so jarring, I probably should have held a funeral to process the intensity of my emotions.

 I cried every day for weeks in grief, wondering if I had made a mistake leaving my old, comfortable, predictable life. 

I realize now it was the exact moment where the Universe laid down my final karmic challenge: 

OK. You’re finally  here in the presence of all that magic you wanted. What are you gonna do with it? And more importantly, who are you going to become so you can hold all of that magic? 

It was an unconscious question that took this entire year for me to fully hear and process…and,in typical healing crisis fashion, things got almost comically worse before they got better. 

But without realizing it, I unconsciously answered her by gradually dismantling everything that made up the old Laura who couldn’t hold the magic she craved. 

Life accelerated in March when I started working with quantum medicine…which is gonna have to be its own blog post at some point because I have lotssss to say about that process alone.

One by one, the shadows began dissolving, falling over on each other like dominos, until I began asking myself, “Who even am I right now?” every time I surprised myself by not falling into an old pattern. 

My business was the first thing to move. Almost overnight, I exited the deep freeze state my nervous system had a death grip on for years, formally launched my services two weeks later, and started working on it full time while I figured out how I wanted it to look…and what I super extra definitely didn’t want more of. 

Then I did some deep identity work around myself as a business owner in late June and July, immediately before and after an amazing trip home to Chicago, where I came thisclose to blowing up my dream and returning to my old, familiar life.  

I realized where I was still playing small and, duh, no wonder I wasn’t where I wanted to be…I was trying to build from the wrong identity. No wonder my soul put the smack down and said, nope, absolutely not. You are not going to build your business this specific way, even though you think you want to. Because if you do, you are going to hate it and eventually blow it all up. 

But when I rewrote my identity into one that stopped apologizing for what I wanted and the kind of success I wanted to call in? Byeeeeee old business model. I finally became clear on what I really wanted to pursue, how I would do it, and who I needed to become to get it. 

Since then, my business focus rapidly evolved from an individual coaching focus to corporate consulting blended with my signature energetic business Vibe Management framework. 

While that evolution has come with the inevitable twists and turns that come with both entrepreneurship and rapid spiritual growth (where the intersection of both is really more circle than Venn diagram), I’ve created some incredibly valuable tools and intellectual property, and I’m busy working on something really exciting I haven’t fully shared yet until it develops further. 

That’s not all I’ve worked on. 

I let go of the orthorexic, fear-based obsession with detox and “healthy” eating that had begun to seriously backfire on my body due to my strict mental (and actual) diet and unforgivingly distorted body image. When several of my old, pre-detox symptoms returned from stress, I eventually let go of the idea that I would never heal and instead got serious about healing my nervous system and subconscious mind so my body could feel safe enough to heal permanently. 

I released the old trauma, behavioral, and attachment style patterns that kept me stuck focusing on how much I needed to fix about myself, how my dreams were impossible, the belief that it was always 100% my fault if something went wrong, and that I needed to punish myself for it. I got over lots of my own bullshit.

I ditched my perfectionistic fear of failure and started seeing it as an opportunity to get closer to my desires, rather than a commentary on how I’m not enough or something is impossible. Every wrong turn gets me closer to the right path because I become clearer about where to go, what to do, and what doesn’t work. Why wouldn’t I make disappointment my bitch? 

And, most importantly, I started focusing on what I deserve, how worthy I am of my own and others’ love, and who I need to become to call more of it in. Every day, I ask myself, am I being the person who has xyz or the person who doesn’t have it? 

The answer is not always yes, I’m that person today. Sometimes, the question comes up when I catch myself repeating an old pattern or thought that no longer serves me, or when something I thought was healed resurfaces…and I realize I’m being challenged to choose between clinging to an old narrative or trusting a new one. 

It’s always a choice between stale familiarity or uncharted, is-this-even-real territory,  albeit sometimes with more resistance than the first Zegar family golden retriever, Jake, who used to unapologetically lock his feet into the ground whenever we tried to walk him somewhere when he absolutely did not want to move. 

The more resistance to the new identity, the more magic there is waiting behind it. So I’ve learned to get curious when that happens: Why am I so insistent on the old identity? What am I afraid of losing? What do I think will no longer be available to me if I drop my shadow and assume the new identity? What bullshit do I need to call myself out on? And why the hell am I holding on so tightly to a version of myself that clearly no longer works for me?

The answer is always there, even if I have to kick and scream a little to get there sometimes. It’s not my job to be perfect at healing. It’s simply to hold compassionate space for myself, recognize when I’m out of alignment, and bring myself back into balance by reflecting on who I’m being and if that’s in integrity with who I want to be. 

That’s it. 

We make life soooo much harder than necessary by thinking we need to do a zillion things to get what we want…when we really just need to focus on being the version of ourselves who already has it. 

Am I done transmuting all the things I’d like to heal yet? No. 

Does it matter? Also no. 

I might still be on the path, but that doesn’t mean I’m not the person who has my dream. It’s just a matter of allowing it to catch up to me energetically, and vice versa. 

An older version of me wouldn’t have admitted half of the things I just did in a blog post, let alone whipped it up in a couple of hours in between meetings without massive overthinking and hesitation about posting it. 

So…on that note, I’m off to ask myself the same question for the zillionth time: 

“Who even am I now?” 

I’ll be back to tell you about whoever she is soon enough.