Welcome to The Fix - There's an Ebb and Flow to Life
Welcome to The Fix — There’s an Ebb and Flow to Life
Growing up in Newport, Rhode Island, you learn early that the water doesn’t care about your schedule. The tides come in whether you’re ready or not. The wind shifts without warning. A harbor that looked calm at dawn can turn serious by afternoon, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll find yourself sideways before you even knew the weather was changing.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s just Tuesday in Newport.
But here’s what else you learn, if you’re paying attention: the water also tells you exactly what it’s doing, if you know how to read it. The chop on the surface. The way the current bends around the point. The lighthouse at Castle Hill sitting steady at the mouth of the bay, the same fixed point it has been for generations, saying: here is where you are. Here is how to get home.
My family has been part of Newport since 1796. I grew up with the water as my first teacher in what it actually means to navigate — not just geographically, but in the way you move through a life. Through a career. Through the moments when everything goes sideways and you need something solid to orient toward.
That lighthouse in the banner isn’t decoration. It’s where I come from. Where I’ve spent summers sailing and learning to navigate — not just the winds, waves, and tides, but my own inner strength, the events that shaped me, the relationships that tested me, and the goals that kept me pointed forward.
For thirty years I worked on the front lines of healthcare — emergency psychiatry, crisis intervention, the kind of work where you learn very quickly what people actually struggle with when everything falls apart. Not the polished, theoretical version of struggle. The real kind. The 3am kind. The kind where someone just needs one clear thought, one honest word, one solid thing to hold onto.
What I found, over and over, was that the people who came through hardest weren’t the ones with the best plan. They were the ones who knew how to read the conditions, make a course correction, and keep moving. They’d learned — sometimes the hard way — that the ebb isn’t a failure. It’s just part of the flow.
That’s what The Fix is about.
Not quick tips. Not listicles. Not the advice that sounds good in a conference room and falls apart in real life. This is where I write about what actually works — for burnout, for communication, for mental health, for the moments in your career when you need to bounce back from something that genuinely knocked you sideways.
Every week I’ll bring you something you can actually use. A perspective shift. A strategy that holds up under pressure. A story from thirty years of watching people navigate the hardest moments of their professional lives — and come out the other side stronger and clearer than when they went in.
If that sounds like something you need right now, I’d love for you to subscribe. It’s free to start, and you can expect writing that respects your time and your intelligence. No fluff, no filler — just the stuff that actually moves the needle.
And if you know someone who’s been running on empty, feeling stuck, or quietly wondering how much longer they can keep going at the pace they’re going — send this their way. The lighthouse is for everyone who needs a fixed point.
Pull up a chair. The tide’s coming in and we’ve got things to talk about.
Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
— Susan