When I said yes to climbing Kilimanjaro, I had no idea if I’d actually make the summit. Nine days, 19,341 feet, and more doubt than I’d like to admit, but that mountain taught me something about faith and persistence. I still wasn’t sure on summit night as we suited up at midnight, fueled only by popcorn and sheer willpower. But off we went. One step and then another. For nine and a half hours we climbed, slowly, steadily, in the dark. And then, finally, the summit came into view.

A friend once joked, “I want to see your resume of actual things you’ve done.” It made me laugh at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized they were onto something. A polished LinkedIn profile only tells part of the story. The real picture of who we are often shows up in the scrappy, messy, and sometimes unexpected experiences that shape us along the way.

I don’t want my tombstone to read “She Worked.”

For nearly two decades, I was a workaholic. And I was damn good at it. I prided myself on being the first one in the office in the morning and the last one to leave at night. The first thing I did when I opened my eyes was check my email; the last thing I did before bed was the same.

There’s a children’s book by Joanna Gaines titled The World Needs Who You Were Made to Be. I’ve given it more than once as a baby gift, a small blessing for a brand new life coming into the world. But if I’m honest, it’s a message we all need to hear, no matter our age.

I submitted my passport renewal the other day. (The fact that this can be done completely online now is both amazing and a little scary.) As one does, I flipped through the pages of my old passport book.

There it was. Ten years of my life pressed between stamps and smudges of ink.