She's just in the wrong pond
When I was little, I loved The Ugly Duckling.
Not because it was cute. But because it felt true.
There’s something quiet devastating about that story. The duckling isn’t actually ugly. She isn’t broken. She isn’t less capable.
She’s just in the wrong pond.
But when you’re in the wrong pond long enough, you start to believe the story the pond tells about you.
You’re too much.
Too intense.
Too ambitious.
Too thoughtful.
Too emotional.
Too intellectual.
Too quiet.
Too loud.
For years, I moved through leadership spaces feeling slightly off.
Not failing. Not floundering. In many ways, succeeding.
But always adjusting.
Softening certain edges.
Sharpening others.
Compressing parts of myself to make the room more comfortable.
When I became a mother while working at a tech-backed startup — and then became a founder within a year — that misfit feeling intensified. My ambition didn’t go away. My hunger to build didn’t shrink. But my tolerance for rooms that required me to fragment myself did.
I didn’t need to be fixed.
I needed a different flock.
Most masterminds I encountered were narrowly focused on productivity, profit, or scale — without connecting to the depth and heart of the mission. Without acknowledging feminism, family systems, aging, grief, identity shifts. Without understanding that leadership is not just about output — it’s about becoming.
Few spaces made room for the whole swan.
So I built what I couldn’t find.
The Wise Women’s Council is my answer to that hunger.
It’s a room for women who have outgrown the pond they were handed.
A space that honors your intellect and your intuition.
That values ambition and rest.
That makes room for building wealth and building wisdom.
That understands loneliness in leadership — and refuses to let you carry it alone.
The ugly duckling story was never about transformation.
It was about belonging.
And sometimes leadership isn’t about learning more tactics.
It’s about finally finding the water where you can stretch your wings.
And today, I’m opening the doors again.
Healing didn’t begin when I found the perfect framework. It began when I said, quietly and without justification, This hurts. When I stopped asking whether my pain was impressive enough, dramatic enough, tragic enough to qualify.
HANNAH HOWARD
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What changed everything was kindness.
Not the Instagram kind — the actual, daily, uncomfortable practice of treating myself like someone whose life mattered. Letting myself eat without earning it. Letting myself rest without apologizing. Letting myself feel grief, fear, and longing without ranking them against anyone else’s.
Sarah K. Peck is right: comparative suffering is a lie. But so is comparative healing. There isn’t a more respectable kind of brokenness. There isn’t a purer kind of recovery. There’s just this person, in this body, trying to live.
I think that’s why this resonates so deeply now. So many of us are navigating a world that feels genuinely overwhelming, politically, economically, emotionally. And we’re trying to be “good” about it. We’re trying not to complain. Not to take up too much space. Not to be selfish.
But silencing ourselves isn’t strength. And minimizing our pain doesn’t make us more compassionate.
What actually makes us capable of showing up—for our kids, our work, each other—is letting what’s true be true. Letting joy exist even when the world is burning. Letting grief be named even when others have it worse.
Recovery taught me this:
You don’t heal by disappearing.
You heal by staying.
By being here.
By eating.
By feeling.
By refusing to make your own life smaller in order to seem more acceptable.
There is no prize for suffering quietly.
There is no virtue in not needing.
There is only this moment, this breath, this body—asking, again and again, to be treated with care.
Hannah Howard is the author of the memoirs Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen and Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family. She writes for Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and Bon Appetit. Hannah lives in Chicago with her family and loves stinky cheese. Subscribe to her Substack, Letters from Hannah. She is also a member of The Wise Women’s Council.
