What Are My Core Values?

The values that actually run my life now

I used to think core values were something you wrote on a vision board while drinking overpriced chai lattes and pretending you had your shit together. Turns out they’re more like the operating system that only reveals itself after a person crashes and burns hard enough.

When I was young I lived in pure survival mode. I wanted to make a difference in the world — I could feel that pull in my bones — but survival mentality kept cutting the power. Pay the bills. Don’t get sick. Don’t make anyone mad. Don’t be too much. Don’t be too little. Just survive. Making a difference felt like a luxury I hadn’t earned yet.

Then the Marine Corps handed me a front-row seat to how short the whole show actually is.

My first week in, I attended a memorial for 3rd Marines. Twenty-six men gone. That was the unit my husband had just joined. I stood there as a brand-new Marine looking at the cost in real time: families permanently rearranged, friends who would never get the next phone call, brothers who didn’t get to grow old.

Something in me flipped overnight. Life stopped being theoretical. Every ordinary moment suddenly felt expensive.

A few years later a mass-casualty helicopter crash in my unit took friends and brothers — and it was the second one that year. That crash didn’t just change my perspective; it tattooed it on the inside of my ribs. War doesn’t only hurt the people who deploy. It radiates outward to every person who loved them. After that, the idea of wasting even one ordinary day started to feel like a personal crisis.

Then came the three plot twists nobody puts on the brochure: having a child, postpartum psychosis, and surgical menopause.

Three weeks after Zoe was born I lost touch with reality. Postpartum psychosis hit hard and fast. I went into pure protection mode, stopped sleeping so I could stay awake and guard her, convinced she was in danger. I stopped eating because I believed my husband was trying to poison us.

The world I was living in felt completely real while it was happening. That experience taught me something I never forgot: what we call “real” is largely an illusion our brains manufacture. Reality is not a fixed external thing we simply observe. We construct it moment by moment, and under enough stress or hormonal shift the construction can go wildly off-script. Surviving that showed me how fragile the whole system can be — and how precious any clear, grounded moment of aliveness actually is.

Having Zoe didn’t just “change my priorities.” It made every previous version of “I want to make a difference” look incomplete. Suddenly the difference I most needed to make was right in front of me: protecting one small nervous system, teaching her that her feelings are data, not drama, and modeling what it looks like to stay alive on purpose instead of just enduring. Not only that, but to show her that life is a beautiful, sacred gift worth protecting, and that we as women are keepers and bringers of life — not only keepers of the earth. As women we are life givers, and that means kindness and caring without self-erasure. And I learned that children have a way of turning abstract values into daily, sweaty, non-negotiable practice.

Surgical menopause (hysterectomy plus bilateral oophorectomy) was the final system reboot. Overnight the hormonal scaffolding that had been propping up the old personality came down. Energy flattened. Identity went missing. The version of me that had been white-knuckling survival mode for decades no longer had the chemistry to keep the performance going. I had to decide on purpose what was still worth carrying and what could finally be set down.

That’s when the real values showed up. Not the ones I thought I should have. The ones that had been waiting underneath the survival armor the whole time.

My current core values (the ones that actually run the show)

1. Full-spectrum aliveness. Joy is not the only metric. Sadness, grief, rage, quiet, ridiculous laughter — all of it is life expressing itself. I used to treat the hard feelings like system errors. Now I treat them like weather: temporary, informative, and part of the same sky. If it’s alive, it’s allowed.

2. Make the difference that is actually mine to make. I still want to leave the world better than I found it. But the scale is different. Sometimes the difference is a 16-week InnerVerse cohort. Sometimes it’s sitting on the floor with my six-year-old while she processes a big feeling without rushing her. Both count. Neither requires me to be a hero. Both require me to be present.

3. Life is short — act like it. This one was installed by the memorial and the helicopter crash, and reinforced every time I look at my daughter. I no longer negotiate with “someday.” If it matters, we start now. If it doesn’t matter, we stop pretending it does.

4. Protect the nervous system (yours and the people you love). Trauma, menopause, parenting, marriage — all of it runs through the body first. I used to override mine in the name of being strong. Now I treat regulation as a non-negotiable skill, not a soft skill. This is why InnerVerse exists: to support real people with real problems as they discover what is stopping them from truly seeing the beauty and sacredness of their lives.

5. Humor is a form of resilience, not denial. If I can laugh at the absurdity of going from a Marine to “please don’t look at me until the estradiol patch has done its job,” I can keep going. Dark humor and deep reverence can occupy the same body. They always have.

How values actually get discovered

Most people think you “find” your values by journaling harder. In my experience you discover them the same way you discover your actual pain tolerance: by hitting something hard enough that the old story cracks.

War showed me mortality. Motherhood showed me responsibility that can’t be outsourced. Postpartum psychosis showed me the slippery nature of reality. Surgical menopause showed me that the version of me built for survival was never the whole story — and that the next version gets to choose differently.

The process isn’t pretty. It’s iterative. You live, you lose people, your body changes without your permission, you have a child who needs a regulated adult, and one day you realize the old survival code is still running in the background even though the threat environment has changed. Then you rewrite it.

That’s the work. And it’s the work that InnerVerse is built to support — especially for veterans, women navigating menopause and trauma, and anyone who’s ever felt like survival mode stole years they can’t get back.

If any of this lands, you’re already in the right place.

We’re not here to optimize our way out of being human.

We’re here to stay fully alive inside it.

— ARG!