The Fleas Came First

Original article posted on Substack 3/10/2026

The fleas came first.

We were mid-cycle on the treatment for our two dogs. Every pet owner knows the drill: specific timing, a protocol you have to follow or it doesn’t work but this time it did not work! So I scrubbed. The dogs, the floors, the furniture, the baseboards. All of it. Twice! The kind of task that arrives with no interest in your schedule.

 Eight months ago this would have undone me. Not the work itself but the interruption of it. I would have been furious, powered through grinding my teeth, and collapsed somewhere on the other side. This time it just felt like an unexpected chore.

 
We were also dog-sitting. A neighbor’s dog, five days, so three dogs total. We had him over before. Cute pup, easy to navigate but for some reason this time it felt harder. But then when his owner came to pick him up on the fifth day, he walked over, looked at her, and went straight back to his bed not wanting to leave. I actually laughed.

He’d found rhythm in our place. Apparently he liked it.

I’ve never seen that before. A dog choosing to stay. I stood there looking at him for a moment and didn’t entirely know what to make of it.   

To add to the pile, my husband and I, we started going to the gym regularly about 3 weeks ago. First time ever. Which comes with its own chaos. A new food regiment, a new schedule, and a body that has opinions about all of it. Loud ones. The kind you feel in places you forgot existed. This week it felt overwhelming and harder then before - I guess, the honeymoon period is over.

 
On top of this the things started moving on the job front.

The recruiter calls were good this week. Several of them, which hasn’t happened all at once like this before. Something felt different. I kept finding myself talking about Anthilles. Not just me, my background, the resume version of who I am. The company. What it does, who it’s for, what it’s built for. That shift is recent and it matters.

But after the day of calls my brain would hit some invisible wall and just stop. I could feel it arriving. That particular exhaustion that isn’t about sleep, it’s about bandwidth. And instead of filing it away and plowing forward like I used to, I took the dogs out. Stood in the sun. Once I lay down on the couch in the middle of the afternoon and slept for forty minutes.

The version of me from two years ago would have found that unacceptable.

I’ve also been thinking about LinkedIn. I post carousels, an organized, educational content, built to demonstrate expertise. They haven’t been getting much traction. But when I write about what’s actually hard, what I don’t have figured out yet, people show up. I’m genuinely not sure what to do with that information. Whether it’s the algorithm or something more true about how we actually reach each other.

Maybe both.

 
And then, somewhere in the middle of all of it, I had a conversation with a colleague. An executive coach I’d connected with on LinkedIn. One of those conversations you don’t plan for and can’t quite explain afterward except to say that something shifted.

He reflected back what he saw. The way I was holding this transition, staying open to what was coming in without abandoning what I’m building. He didn’t tell me what to do. He just named what was actually happening. And something in me that had started to chase, started to rush toward the next thing, just... stopped.

A few days later another recruiter reached out who works specifically with PE-backed companies, organizations in transition, exactly the environments where this kind of work creates the most impact. It felt like an echo of that conversation. Like the patience had already started returning something.

I don’t know what the path looks like yet. I’m not sure I’m supposed to yet.

 
So that’s the week. Fleas. A gym. Three dogs and one who didn’t want to go home. Recruiter calls where I finally talked about the company, not just myself. A couch nap I didn’t feel guilty about. And one conversation that quietly put me back on the ground.

I know this piece has no real arms and legs. It’s a hodgepodge of things that just happened. No reflections, no lessons.

So I’m letting it all go. What was hard and tiring, I release. What was unexpected and wonderful, the teachers who showed up without warning, I hold with gratitude.

And this weekend, when the sun shines and warms the earth, I will simply ground myself and trim the azalea bushes in the morning.

And maybe buy myself a bike.