Somewhere around year twenty-five of my corporate career, I started catching myself thinking things I never would have said out loud. Not to my husband. Not to my therapist. Definitely not to anyone at work.
I remember one specifically. It was a Sunday afternoon, right on the edge of the scaries, and I noticed a corner of my brain half-hoping I would get sick enough to have to take medical leave. Not seriously. Not with a plan. Just this quiet corner that had started rooting for my body to break, because my brain had not been able to make the call to leave yet.
I did not recognize that thought as significant at the time. I recognized it as tired. As stressed. As a bad week. What I know now is that it was my body telling me exactly what my mouth could not say yet.
I got out eventually, five days after my cardiologist told me my career was no longer compatible with my health. I have told that story a lot. But there is a version of the leaving-corporate story I had never really told, until this week guest handed me the exact language for it.
She Calls It Being the Other Frog.
Jen Fieldman spent close to twenty years inside ad agencies, research vendors, and corporate marketing in Minneapolis. She is a business strategist now, and a Human Design practitioner, and she works specifically with women who are trying to build businesses while managing brain fog, chronic fatigue, and chronic pain, the kinds of realities most business coaches do not have language for.
We found each other through The Capacity Chronicles, a guide compiled by Tara Reid featuring women entrepreneurs building differently. I read Jen contribution and there was this moment, a specific line about the AI tools she had built for her own brain fog days, where I audibly fist-pumped at my desk. Nobody else was building that. She was. That is Jen.
The Metaphor That Would Not Leave Me Alone
She told me on tape something I have been thinking about ever since.
There was a stretch of years where part of her was actively rooting for the hospital. Not because she wanted to be hurt. Because if her body broke first, the choice would already be made for her. She would not have to be the one to walk away.
That was the frog metaphor. If you throw a frog into boiling water, it jumps out. But if you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it does not notice in time. Jen was the second frog. She sat in the slowly warming water for years, until one ordinary Tuesday her boss put a proposal in front of her, a project that would have taken twenty-plus focus groups across multiple cities on a timeline that would have actually put her in the hospital, and something in her body finally said no.
She gave two weeks notice and left without a plan.
The Part Almost Nobody Tells Honestly
We talked about the math nobody wants to admit. Jen had a tiny nest egg from selling her townhouse. She was the only income. No partner salary catching her. When the pandemic hit, she moved back in with her parents. Not because they were supporting her, but because managing multiple chronic illnesses, an eighteen-month medical crisis of medication reactions, and a fledgling business at the same time meant she needed to make different math work than the version she had pictured.
Then we talked about the eighteen months that killed her brain. Three consecutive Crohn medications, three consecutive reactions, brain fog so severe she could not tell what was hormones and what was ADHD and what was the meds themselves. And underneath all of it, an OB who once told her she could not possibly be in perimenopause because she was on birth control. (Reader: she was, in fact, in perimenopause. And reacting to the birth control.)
Fifty percent of women our age are prescribed antidepressants. Jen is on the record about it: sometimes the real story is hormones. Not always. But often enough that we should be asking. She is on hormone replacement now, sleeping again, brain back online, and she made me promise on the recording to say this part clearly: if you are being dismissed by a doctor about symptoms you know are real, find a different doctor. Find a nurse practitioner if you have to. Do not accept the prescription pad as the whole answer.
The Coming-Back-Online Part
And then, because Jen is Jen, she started building. She built Claude AI Skills for herself first, for the days her brain would not cooperate. She talks about the tipping point where AI goes from helpful to actively making things worse, and how her Skills are engineered to sit on the helpful side of that line. She is the only person I have found so far building AI tools specifically for women dealing with capacity constraints, which is why I reached out to her in the first place.
She also brought Human Design into the conversation, which I would have rolled my eyes at five years ago. She calls it an operations manual for your body and being. She ran my chart on tape and told me I am a 5/2 Emotional Generator, which explains an embarrassing amount of the last thirty years of my life. If you have ever been told to “just decide already” in a corporate meeting and felt your whole nervous system revolt, this is a conversation you will want to hear.
What I Want You to Walk Away With
If you are sitting in the slowly warming water this week, telling yourself it is not that bad, that you can hold on a little longer, that maybe you will get lucky and something will happen so the decision will be made for you, I want you to hear the words Jen left the audience with, verbatim. She said:
It is okay to be your full authentic you. Your full authentic self. F everybody else if they do not like it.
-Jen Fieldman
That is my invitation to you this week. Not to quit anything you are not ready to quit. Just to notice which frog you are being. Because the noticing is the first thing that changes.
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Where to Go Next
Listen to or Watch the Full Episode above or on your favorite podcast platform.
Timestamps
00:00 Toxic Career Teaser
01:04 Meet Jen Fieldman
04:01 Finding Her Niche
05:42 Seen in the Inbox
07:25 Frog in the Pot
08:55 Wishing for a Crisis
12:22 The Last Straw Proposal
15:04 Quitting Without a Plan
17:29 The Real Money Math
21:30 Only Income Pressure
23:34 Who Am I Now
26:51 Healing as an Entrepreneur
27:50 Eighteen Months of Brain Fog
30:06 Perimenopause Reality Check
32:51 Menopause Timing Confusion
33:50 Hormones vs Antidepressants
35:33 Brain Fog Root Causes
36:55 AI Brain Fog Busters
39:45 Human Design Explained
41:49 Reading Your Chart
46:21 Profiles and Lines
49:04 Human Design in Business
51:09 The F You Mission
53:26 Hope for Next Generation
55:45 You Are Not Alone
57:29 Where to Find Jenn
58:23 Final Takeaway and Wrap
Find Jen Fieldman: jenfieldman.com (her new one-on-one Strategy Session is live, and her Brain Fog Busters Claude Skills Pack is free)
If Executive Function Has Been Quietly Running Your Life: take my free Executive Function Self-Assessment. reinventionwithjennfast.com/executive-function-assessment-optin. It is a five-minute check-in that gives you a real picture of where your capacity is going and what to protect first.
And if you are considering starting your own podcast, I edit The Comeback Show entirely in Descript. My affiliate link is here.
If today letter landed, forward it to the friend you thought of while you were reading. That is how comebacks travel.
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