It was eleven at night when I opened Substack and started typing.
There was no audience waiting for me. No one had asked me to write anything. I did not know where it would go, who would read it, or whether it would ever become a single thing. I just opened a blank page and started putting down words. That was it. That was the first move.
It did not look like the beginning of anything. It looked like a woman alone at her kitchen island at eleven at night, typing into a box on the internet that no one was reading.
The first move rarely looks like momentum. Mine looked like two views.
Not two thousand. Two. One of those early pieces went out into the world and two people saw it, and one of them was probably me checking to see if it had loaded. There was no evidence any of this was going anywhere. MOMumental Moments® had been living in notebooks since 2017. I had written on WordPress. I had changed the whole tech stack three times. I questioned, constantly, whether anyone wanted to hear from me at all. It would be four years on Substack before the writing crossed into six figures.
But none of that existed at eleven o’clock that night. There was just me, a blank page, and the decision to start typing anyway.
I used to believe I had to have proof it would work before I was allowed to begin. That the certainty came first and the action came second. I had it exactly backwards.
And here is the contradiction that took me years to understand. I was not a person with no evidence she could build things. I had built companies. I had led teams, closed deals, sold businesses. If you had asked me whether I could take something from nothing to real, I had a resume full of proof. What I did not have was any evidence that my voice, on its own, was enough. There was no title that could make someone care about an essay. No company standing behind the words. No audience guaranteed to show up. I had to hit publish without knowing whether there was a single person on the other side. That is a specific kind of naked that building a company never once asked of me.
Here is what the first move has actually looked like for me, and none of it is inspiring. I made the appointment. I opened the account. I told one person out loud, which made it real in a way that thinking never did. I moved a little money. I wrote it down where I would have to see it. I put one date on the calendar. That is the whole heroic beginning. Not a vision board. A phone call I did not want to make.
Every single time, I was missing the thing I was sure I needed first. Money. A plan. Usually certainty, that settled feeling that it was going to work out. I kept waiting for it to arrive so I could begin. It never came first. It came after. You do not think your way into knowing. You move, and the knowing catches up.
And this is not a divorce essay, even though leaving was one of the moves. Watch the same first step repeat across completely different lives. The work started when I sent one email I was not ready to send. The marriage ended when I said one true sentence out loud and could not take it back. The body started the morning I picked up weights that had been sitting untouched for months and used them badly for ten minutes. Different lives, same move. Not one of them began with courage, which I did not feel. They began with making one thing real. A sentence said. A door opened. Something that existed at nine that had not existed at eight.
If you texted me tonight and said I know I need to change this, I am terrified, I do not know what happens after, I would not send you a framework. I would send you this. You do not have to know the whole plan. You just have to make one thing real.
So do that before you go to bed tomorrow. Not reinvent your life. One real thing. Open the blank page. Send the email in your drafts. Book the consult. Say the sentence to one person. Put one date on the calendar. It does not have to be brave and it does not have to work. It has to be real. Then reply to this and tell me the first move you made. I read every one.
The woman waiting to feel ready is not lazy and she is not weak. She is waiting for proof that only arrives after she moves. We keep looking for evidence the move is working before we are willing to make it, and it does not exist yet, because we have not made it yet. That is the whole trap. Ready is not the thing that lets you start. Ready is what you get for starting.
I missed a week. This is the first thing landing in your inbox since I went quiet, and I almost let the silence stretch another week, because starting again always feels harder than starting felt the first time. The season took more than I wanted to give, and the newsletter was one of the things that slipped. And here I am anyway, doing the exact thing I am telling you to do. Making the move before I feel caught up. Done and late beats perfect and never. It always did.
Your first move will not look like momentum either. It will look small. It will look like two views, a blank page, a phone call you did not want to make, a newsletter sent after a silent week by a woman who almost did not send it at all.
Make it anyway.
You are not stuck. You are one small, unglamorous, eleven-at-night action away from the life you can already feel yourself wanting.
You are becoming MOMumental.
MOMumentally,
Erika
Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia
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