No such thing as the woman you’ve been trying to be. No such thing as the gratitude practice that fixes it, the clean product you could trust without reading the label, the routine that survives a real emergency. I looked. I bought all of it.
Then I got a brain tumor. At first I did the bright side, and I meant it. I was alive. Then it sank in that I was never going to be the same person again, and the bright side had nothing to say about that. Nobody had a plan for the part after gratitude runs out.
So I made one. It started as a journal that didn't ask me to be grateful. It grew into seed balls, because sometimes you need to plant some goddamn hope. And it keeps going.
No Such Thing Club is for the woman who bought every version of the promise, did the work, and is now standing in the wreckage wondering where the last decade went. Not bitter. Just done pretending. Scarred but unbroken.
The wound, then the door. Welcome to the Club.
There's no such thing
Who's behind this
I’m Colleen. I have a degree in psychology, which taught me what everything was called and nothing about what to do when it was happening to me. I became a certified coach after the tumor, when I needed something that worked and went looking for it. The part that does the most here is shadow work: looking at the parts of yourself you've been told to keep quiet. Then CBT, emotional intelligence, boundaries, and self-care. That's the coaching.
I'm the mom of a kid with sensitive skin. I was grinding oatmeal at midnight because no product on the shelf was clean enough, so I made my own.
I'm vice president of the board at a nature center that takes in injured wildlife. It's where my passion for pollinators grew. The seed balls are my way of planting some goddamn hope for them.
And I'm a brain tumor survivor, which is how the rest of it got here. Not the gratitude. The part after. When you run out of casseroles.