A Choice You Get to Make
There’s this feeling that comes over you when you’ve had enough in your career.
I’m not an anomaly by any means. So many women know what it feels like to wake up one day and realize that their mask no longer fits.
So often we forget how much of our waking lives our jobs take up. We spend more time making money, with our colleagues, or serving clients than we do with the people who love us, the people we do it all for. Most of us find gracious ways to reconcile that. Even through the inconvenience, sometimes through underemployment, and often through the most common human experiences like grief and loss, the work remains, and we come to terms with it. For women, where the barriers, whether obvious or invisible, make achieving these goals so much more challenging, there is no decision to be made between passions and priorities. You simply do what you have to do. And entrepreneurs, even those of us blessed enough to love the work we do, may eventually need to pretend. By fate or by force, you end up at a crossroads where you need to make a real change, really fast.
That’s where I ended up in the last quarter of 2023. More than half a decade into a design partnership that no longer aligned, I woke up one day and pretending simply wasn’t worth the effort anymore. After six amazing years, three businesses, two locations, fifty or so houses, and triple that in memories, it was finally time to stop pretending. In one of the cloudiest seasons of my life, I faced a storm when I walked away from my design firm and partnership. I expected to feel lost, distraught, and destroyed, but even in the uncertainty, I could finally see clearly.
Then, almost like life had been waiting on me, everything shifted drastically. I lived through a series of beautifully fortunate events and some harsh lessons that were the consequences of my own actions. I got to see what it meant to prevail. I watched my family find space to run, grow, and breathe. I found some of the truest friends I’ve ever known. I found expansive career opportunities and new creative endeavors that elevate my mind and my community. And I did all of that before building enough confidence to look at interior design through a different lens and try again. I battled with the expectations of this industry and what it meant to be perceived as different, to have a new point of view that rubbed up against the norm.
No matter how I tried to leave it in the past, I knew there was more for me to experience in an industry I’d admired for so long. With none of the same considerations to weight against my own intuition, just a gift for design and a skill for understanding different personalities, I realized I could simply be myself this time. I could pursue my design through an authentic voice, and I trusted my people would understand the call and find me.
In 2025, I opened my brick and mortar: a full-service design studio, Stokes Kennedy Design. This time there’s no mask to adjust, just my own name, space to grow and my own voice in the work.
This new studio was in some ways a reflection of where I had found myself those months later. The walls were bare, the floors were dusty, and still I had never been more certain of the direction I would take. I got to decide exactly how it looked. I could determine exactly how this new brand presented to the public, what kind of impact we would make. Nothing about this beautiful workshop space (or my life) felt like a costume anymore; and every client, every project, and every space would start from the same authentic home. Me.
What happened next changed everything, like all curve balls do, but honestly that’s a story for another post. I really just wanted to take a beat to honor the feeling that comes before the big leap. The feeling that reminds you there’s danger and that being an adult is hard, but if you focus on being who you say you are you will… well, prevail. There is something major on the other side of the decision to stop pretending and eventually the path gets a little more manageable and the view is a little more beautiful as you ascend and you realize that even the end of the road is a choice that you get to make.