A friend of mine turned around and looked at me from the chair while I was cutting his hair a few weeks ago.

I had been complaining.

Not casual complaining. I was somewhere in the middle of a very convincing argument that I was being personally victimized by the universe.

The last few months had been hard.

I had been underestimated. Targeted. Forced to defend myself in situations I never imagined I’d find myself in.

I had become painfully aware that being a woman in spaces still largely occupied by men sometimes means your competence is questioned before you’ve even been given the opportunity to demonstrate it.

At the same time, I was learning a new airplane. New avionics. New systems. Learning what it actually meant to sit in the left seat without an instructor beside me and understand that every decision was mine.

I was trying to scale a business while learning—in real time—how much of running a business has absolutely nothing to do with the thing you actually sell.

I was overwhelmed.

So naturally, I was telling Karl, my friend, all about it.

He listened to my list of grievances against existence, turned around, looked at me and said:

“You are a titan.”

I laughed.

But I’ve thought about those words a lot since.

Because he wasn’t telling me that what I was going through wasn’t difficult.

He was reminding me who was going through it.

And maybe I had forgotten.

I had become so focused on everything being thrown at me that I had stopped noticing the person catching it.

There was once a version of me who wanted some of the very responsibilities that now overwhelm me.

I wanted to become a pilot.

I wanted to build something that was mine.

I wanted to become the kind of woman who could walk into intimidating rooms and hold her own.

And now that I’m here, I sometimes mistake the weight of those things for evidence that something has gone wrong.

Maybe the weight is part of it.

Maybe being strong doesn’t mean things stop being heavy.

Maybe it just means you’ve learned that you can carry them.

But I don’t want this season to teach me only how to carry more.

I don’t want adversity to make me hard. I don’t want success to make me arrogant. And I don’t want ambition to make my life so small that the only thing left in it is accomplishment.

I want to remain grateful.

Humble.

Teachable.

I want to remember that being underestimated doesn’t require me to spend my life proving myself.

That someone else’s inability to recognize my capability does not diminish it.

And I’m learning that there are other things deserving of my time, too.

My friends.

The people who make me laugh when I’ve spent too much time inside my own head. The nights that accomplish absolutely nothing. The lunches that run too late. The conversations that have no measurable return on investment.

I’ve spent so much time trying to build a life that I’m realizing I also need to make time to live inside of it.

Balance isn’t something I’ll magically earn when the business is successful enough, when I’m comfortable enough in the airplane, when the problems disappear, or when life finally settles down.

Life doesn’t settle down.

You decide what matters while it’s happening.

So I’m making more room for friendship. For joy. For being present. For looking around at the life I already have instead of constantly staring toward the next version of it.

I’m still ambitious.

I still want more for myself.

I still want to become a better pilot, build a successful company, and walk confidently into every room where someone has already decided what I’m capable of before I’ve opened my mouth.

But I want to do it without losing the parts of myself that made any of those things worth pursuing in the first place.

Maybe that’s what Karl saw from the chair that day.

Not someone invincible.

Not someone who had everything figured out.

Just someone standing in the middle of a particularly difficult season, complaining rather dramatically about being personally victimized by the universe, completely unaware of her own strength.

“You are a titan.”

I’m starting to understand what he meant.

And maybe, on the days when everything feels impossibly heavy, that’s the thing worth remembering:

Titans still feel the weight.

They just don’t let it decide how tall they stand.