Wait, Who Am I Now? Hot Moms Build Brands · Episode 02

There is a specific kind of identity crisis that nobody puts in the business plan.

It happens somewhere between your third client call of the week and your kid's school pickup, when someone asks you to describe yourself in three words for a networking bio and you stare at the screen for eleven minutes and type "mom, photographer, human" and then delete it because HUMAN is not a personality and you know that but you also kind of mean it.

Who are you now?

Not who you were before kids. Not who you are in the job. Not the version of you that existed before you blew up your own plan and started building something under your actual name with your actual face on it.

Who are you right now, in this weird middle place, where you're more yourself than you've ever been and also less sure of who that is than at any other point in your life?

That's what we're getting into today. Grab a shovel. It gets messy before it gets clear.

The dissolving

When you become a mom, half of you disappears.

Not in a dramatic, tragic way. Just quietly. Gradually. The things you used to say about yourself stop fitting. The hobbies feel like someone else's. The personality traits you thought were fixed turn out to be pretty flexible when you're running on four hours of sleep and someone needs you literally constantly.

You used to be the person who read novels. Now you read the backs of cereal boxes and call it enough.

You used to have opinions about music. Now you can recite every word of whatever is on the kids' playlist and you don't know how it happened.

You used to know — with some confidence — who you were and what you wanted and what you stood for.

And then motherhood came in and did its whole thing and now you're standing in the kitchen at 7am, making breakfast for people who are actively ungrateful about it, wondering who the woman is that used to have a full interior life.

She's still in there. That's the thing. She didn't go anywhere.

She's just been very, very quiet.

The catching fire

And then you started a business.

And something happened.

It wasn't immediate. It wasn't a lightning bolt moment where you suddenly knew exactly who you were and what you wanted and how to build it. It was more like... something woke up. Something that had been quietly waiting for you to give it permission.

You started making decisions that were entirely yours. What to charge. Who to work with. What the brand looks and sounds and feels like. What you're willing to do and what you're not.

And every single one of those decisions — even the terrifying ones, especially the terrifying ones — was a data point. A little piece of information about who you actually are when you're not performing someone else's version of you.

That's the part nobody tells you about starting a business. It's not just a revenue strategy. It's an excavation.

You are digging yourself out from under everything that accumulated on top of you — the roles, the expectations, the decade of doing things the responsible way — and finding out what's still there underneath all of it.

It’s a lot, actually.

The lie we need to put down

Here is the story a lot of us are carrying: motherhood erased me.

I became a mom and I lost myself and now I'm just existing in the aftermath, trying to find my way back to whoever I was before.

I want to offer you a different story.

Motherhood didn't erase you. It turned up the volume on everything that was already true about you — the parts that were always there, that refused to disappear no matter how tired you got, no matter how much the role demanded that you shrink.

The drive that makes you build a business when it would be easier not to? That was always in you.

The stubbornness that keeps you going when a launch is quiet and the numbers aren't moving and your brain is trying to talk you into quitting? Always in you.

The need to create something real, to connect with people genuinely, to do work that actually means something? Always. In. You.

Motherhood didn't take those things away. If anything, it pressure-tested them. It put them through the most demanding possible circumstances and the ones that survived? Those are the real ones. Those are the core.

Your business isn't built on who you were before kids. It's built on what remained after.

And what remained is more solid than you think.

Because after having kids, there’s no time for bullshit.

Your brand is the excavation

Here's the thing nobody says out loud about building a brand:

You cannot build an authentic one without knowing who you are.

And you cannot know who you are without doing the work of figuring it out.

Which means the brand-building IS the self-discovery. They're not separate processes that happen in sequence — first figure yourself out, THEN build the brand. They happen at the same time, in conversation with each other, each one informing the other in ways that are messy and nonlinear and occasionally completely maddening.

Every time you write a caption and think "that doesn't sound like me" — that's information.

Every time you show up on camera and something feels off — that's information.

Every time you work with a client and walk away feeling either lit up or completely drained — that's information.

Every time you price your work and feel either grounded or faintly sick — that's information.

Your brand is constantly giving you feedback about who you are and who you're becoming. Most people are too busy trying to get the brand right to notice that the brand is trying to tell them something.

Pay attention to what feels like you. Pay attention to what doesn't. That distinction is doing more work than any brand strategy document ever could.

The crisis is the process

I want to say something directly to the person who is in the middle of the identity crisis right now. Who is building a business and also not sure who is building it. Who has a website with a bio that she rewrites every three months because it never quite sounds right. Who sometimes wonders if she is doing this wrong because she doesn't feel certain and certain people seem so certain.

The uncertainty is not a sign that you're doing it wrong.

It's a sign that you're doing it for real. Just because someone else doesn’t get it, doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

The people who feel completely certain about who they are and what their brand is and what they stand for from day one? Two options: either they've done a tremendous amount of work to get there, or they haven't looked closely enough yet.

The identity crisis — the real one, the one that makes you sit with uncomfortable questions about what you actually want and who you actually are and what you're actually building — that is the work. Not a detour from it.

You don't figure yourself out and then build the brand.

You build the brand and figure yourself out at the same time.

It's uncomfortable. It's inconvenient. It happens at 2am sometimes when you were supposed to be sleeping.

And it is the most important work you will do in this business. Bar none.

Who you are right now

So who are you now?

You are a woman who had something in her that refused to disappear.

You are someone who looked at the options — the safe one, the expected one, the one that would have been easier to explain at Christmas dinner — and chose the one that felt most like the truth of who she was, even when she wasn't entirely sure what that truth was yet.

You are building something real under your real name and that takes more courage than most people will ever understand because most people will never try.

You are in the middle of one of the most disorienting, exhilarating, identity-clarifying experiences available to a person — building a business from scratch, as a mother, on your own terms.

And you don't have to have it figured out to keep going.

You just have to keep digging.

Grab the shovel. She's in there.