I used to believe there were glass ceilings I simply could not break. I did not lack ambition or effort. But somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that the ceiling was fixed. That my reach had a natural limit. That people like me arrived at a certain height … and stopped.

The ceiling felt real. It felt structural. And for a long time, I looked up at it and mistook it for the sky.

What My Mother Gave Me

It was my mom who began to crack that story open.

She handed me a necklace that looks like a piece of shattered glass, and told me what she and my dad see when they look at me. A woman who traveled the world. Who built a meaningful career in education. Who walked away from the familiar and started her own business. The granddaughter of people who came to America on boats, carrying little more than their names and a willingness to begin again.

She said: We don’t know anyone like you. You break glass ceilings.

Of course, I cried. And then I sat with it for a long time.

Because people, I had decidedly not been seeing myself that way. I had been looking up at the glass, not down at the shards.

The Real Ceiling

When I wear that necklace now, I use it as a reminder. The only limits I cannot breach are the ones I tell myself I cannot. That’s it. That’s the whole architecture of limitation.

The glass ceilings we fear most are rarely imposed from the outside. They are narrated from the inside. They live in the sentences we don’t finish, the ideas we don’t pitch, the stories we decide aren’t worth telling before we’ve ever opened our mouths.

Half-volume is a ceiling too. Maybe the most insidious one of all, because it looks like humility. It sounds like wisdom. And it costs us everything.

An Inheritance Worth Claiming

I think about my grandmother often. Rozalia. An orphan from Poland who crossed an ocean for months to arrive at a harbor she had never seen, in a country that did not yet know her name, and catch her first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

She did not have a roadmap. She did not have a safety net. She had herself. And she built a life.

That is the lineage I come from. Women who did not wait for the ceiling to be removed. Women who moved through the world anyway, with everything uncertain and everything at stake, and made something out of nothing.

That is my inheritance. Not just the struggle, but the sovereignty. The willingness to break what needs breaking. The audacity to keep going.

Where Voice Comes In

What I have learned in my own journey, and in the work I do with women, is that reclaiming your voice is not really about speaking up in meetings. It’s not about confidence hacks or learning to project more. It is about tracing the story back to where it got quiet.

For some of us, it got quiet in childhood. For others, in workplaces where the unspoken rule was that you should know your place and smile while you did. In relationships that felt safer when we stayed small. In rooms where our kind of knowing was not treated as knowledge.

Soul Story exists because that tracing matters. Because the lineage of your silence is real, and worth excavating. Because the voice that got turned down is not gone. It has been waiting. Patient. Certain.

It knows your name. It has always known your name.

A Note to Rozalia

I hope she is proud.

Not just of me, but of what it means to carry her forward. To take the audacity she crossed an ocean with and use it, here, in a life she could not have imagined, for a purpose she might not have had words for.

Breaking glass ceilings is in my blood. And I bet it’s in yours too.

The only question is whether you are willing to look down at the shards instead of up at the glass.

P.S. If you are ready to trace the lineage of your own silence, and to find the voice that has been living underneath it, Soul Story is a four-week intimate container starting April 9. I built it for the women who are done living at half-volume. Come find me.