A few weeks ago I told you the quiet part out loud.

I told you about the layoff, the health insurance panic, the identity crisis that nobody warns you about, and the very specific terror of being a woman over 50 in tech who suddenly has to prove she still exists. I told you about the oral chemotherapy and the COBRA math and the end-of-June deadline that made every decision feel like defusing a bomb without my glasses on.

And then, almost as an aside, I dropped this:

“I walked into an interview with a space economy startup. Yes, I said space.”

And then I just… left you there.

I know, I know. I’m sorry, kinda….

The truth is, I wasn’t ready to tell the rest of the story. I needed something in writing first. I needed to know it was real before I said it out loud to you, because you’ve trusted me with your time and your attention and I wasn’t about to blow that on a maybe.

Well. It’s real. I signed my contract yesterday morning.

Houston, we no longer have a problem.

What “Yes” Actually Looked Like

When my friend Sally reached out about a possible opportunity with her friend’s company, I didn’t think finally, my moment to enter the space economy has arrived. I thought space? Like… actual space? With rockets and the moon and Marvin the Martian and the whole thing? I’ve spent my entire career in technology, user experience and knowledge management. I know how to make complex information make sense to humans. I know how to build systems that people will actually use. I don’t know anything about lunar mining reconnaissance or asteroid resource data or what it takes to build the optimal data backbone for the space economy.

But I said yes anyway.

Not because I was fearless. I wasn’t. Not because I had some grand strategic vision about where the industry was headed. I definitely didn’t. I said yes because a woman I trust told me there was a table with a vacant seat and because I had spent enough time being laid off, scared, and staring at COBRA paperwork to know that the only move worse than taking a risk, is sitting still.

I said yes because when you’re already in free fall, you might as well aim for something interesting on the way down.

And here’s what happened when I did: they offered me the role on the spot. Not because I pretended to know things I didn’t know or performed with a confidence I hadn’t earned. But, because I walked in with my receipts: the knowledge base that tested at four times the industry standard for AI effectiveness, and the problems nobody else could solve, and I told them the truth. About what I knew, what I didn’t, and about my healthcare timeline and what I actually needed.

They heard all of it and still said yes.

Turns out, the space economy has excellent taste… 😜

Learning on the Fly is a Feature, Not a Bug

I’ve now been inside Luthien Space long enough to have opinions about the space economy, which is a sentence I genuinely couldn’t have predicted writing six months ago. Or six years ago. Or at any point in my life, if I’m being honest.

Here’s what I can tell you: I understand approximately forty percent of what I encounter in any given meeting. The other sixty percent is a spectacular combination of context clues, strategic nodding, and some truly aggressive AI-assisted research the night before a meeting. I’ve learned more in the past several weeks about orbital data, lunar resource mapping, and the very specific business of turning raw space intelligence into actionable human decisions than I learned in the previous five decades of my life combined.

I also asked what felt like a deeply embarrassing number of questions.

I asked them anyway.

This is the part nobody tells you about betting on yourself in a completely new arena: the learning curve isn’t the obstacle. That’s kinda the whole point. I spent years being the expert in the room, the person who knew the answers, who had the institutional knowledge, who people came to because she’d seen this before. And there was real satisfaction in that. But there’s a completely different kind of satisfaction in being the person who doesn’t know; and showing up anyway, asking questions, building understanding, and realizing somewhere around week three that the skills you’ve spent a lifetime developing have absolutely no regard for industry boundaries.

Knowledge is knowledge. Systems are systems. Translating complex ideas for humans is the same challenge, whether your audience consists of financial advisors or space economy founders planning our next great resource grab.

I just didn’t know that until I said yes. The moon, apparently, was always part of the plan.

Betting on Yourself is the Best Investment You’ll Ever Make

The lesson here is simple: the layoff wasn’t the end of my story. It was the plot twist that made the story worth telling.

I know that sounds like the kind of thing someone says from the other side when they’ve conveniently forgotten what the middle felt like. Trust me, I haven’t forgotten. The COBRA math was real. The health insurance panic was real. The end-of-June deadline that made everything feel like a countdown was real. The oral chemotherapy is still ongoing because this isn’t a tidy resolution story, it’s real life. And real life is still very real.

But so’s this: I ordered a blush MacBook Neo before I had a contract, before I had certainty, before I had anything except a conversation with a startup that lit me up and a gut feeling that said lean in, you absolute disaster, lean in. I ordered it as an act of faith in myself. That laptop shipped before the ink was dry on anything official. I needed it to exist as proof that I believed this was going somewhere.

And it did.

The market didn’t forget I existed. The skills I’d spent decades building didn’t become irrelevant the moment someone handed me a severance packet. The connections I’d made, the humans who showed up for me when I let them know I needed it — Sally chief among them — those turned out to be the infrastructure that caught me when I couldn’t quite catch myself.

You have that infrastructure too. You may not be able to see it from where you’re standing right now. But it exists, and it’s waiting for you to let it do its job.

If you’re in the middle of it; the layoff, the uncertainty, the identity crisis that nobody warned you about, I’m not going to tell you it’s secretly fine, because it’s not. It’s genuinely hard, the healthcare cliff is genuinely terrifying and some days you’ll do everything right and still feel invisible.

But I’m going to tell you this:

Say yes to the weird thing. Say yes to the table you weren’t expecting an invitation to. Say yes before you feel ready, because ready is a myth we tell ourselves to avoid the terrifying, exhilarating business of finding out what we’re capable of.

I said yes to space.

I have absolutely no idea what comes next. But I’m showing up to find out and for the first time in a long time, I genuinely can’t wait to see where this lands.

Even if where it lands turns out to be the moon.

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So, are you standing at the edge of something that scares you? A weird opportunity, an unexpected invitation, a table you weren’t sure you deserved a seat at? Tell me about it in the comments. And if you’re still in the middle of the hard part, the part before the yes, I see you. We built this place for exactly that moment. 💙👇