Finding Your Sparkle: Leaving the Stable Life, Rediscovering Yourself, and Learning to Want More
Finding Your Sparkle
Emily McDonald built a life around stability — a long relationship, a teaching career, a family. At 31, she realized that stability and fulfillment aren't the same thing. What followed was one of the most honest, intentional reinventions in this season.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Emily McDonald — host of The Sparkle Project podcast, writer, contributor to the Mom Friends Collective, and a woman in the middle of one of the most intentional reinventions Amanda has come across — for a conversation about what happens when the life you built for security stops being the life you actually want.
Emily had been with her children's father since she was 17. She became a teacher. She became a mother of two. By most measures, the life she was living looked exactly like the life she had imagined as a child. And she kept having moments of quiet, almost alarming realization: is this it?
The Life Built Around Safety
Emily grew up as an oldest daughter with a deep, early-formed need for stability. Not because anything chaotic happened — things were mostly stable and secure in her childhood. Just a temperament, a personality, a thread of anxiety about change that ran through her and shaped the decisions she made from very early on. What's the safe choice? What's the decision that means I won't have to wonder what happens next?
"A lot of decisions were made from a place of: what's the safest decision? What is the decision that's going to get me to a place where I'm not questioning the future? It felt like the safest thing, the best thing to do. I did learn, however, that that doesn't lead to fulfilling decisions."
— Emily McDonaldTeaching was the safe choice. A relationship that had started at 17 was the familiar one. The pieces fit together into a life that looked right. But in the moments that were supposed to be joyful — activities with her kids, experiences that should have felt like fun — she kept hitting the same wall. Not happiness. Not unhappiness. Just a kind of flatness, a capacity issue, like the container for joy had somehow gotten very small.
Good Girl Conditioning
Emily talks extensively about what she calls good girl conditioning — the set of expectations most girls absorb early about how to show up in the world to be considered good. For Emily, this showed up as an instinct to suppress her own opinions, to want everyone to like her, to optimize for external approval over internal authenticity. She was praised for fitting the mold and internalized that praise as identity: being a good girl was who she was.
"It's not a realistic set of expectations. It's not something any of us can actually attain. But it's what we're up against — and it's what we're conditioned to believe about ourselves."
— Emily McDonaldIn adulthood, this conditioning became the perfect mother myth: the same impossible standard, just updated for a new role. In her own life, it meant that even when she knew something wasn't right, she didn't have language for it yet. She wasn't making decisions based on what she thought others would approve of, exactly — but she also wasn't making decisions based on what she truly, authentically needed, because she had never been in the habit of asking herself that question.
Leaving Teaching — and What She Heard
The pandemic accelerated what was already building. Emily had her master's degree in education. She had been genuinely good at the work. But the combination of burnout, an underfunded and undersupporting system, and the experience of seeing what teaching looked like from the inside — all of it made one thing clear: this was the safe choice. It was not the right one.
She expected pushback when she left. What she got from the people who actually knew her was largely: yeah, that makes sense. One teacher colleague told her it was sad she was "giving up on the dream" of teaching. Emily's internal response was clarifying:
"That's not what this was. This wasn't some huge dream I had. This was the safe choice for me. And I thought making the safe choice would be the most comfortable. It would be the most secure. I am now floundering in my life. This clearly isn't really the safest thing for me."
— Emily McDonaldThe choice to leave, and the reaction to it, taught her something she carries forward: a lot of what people pleasers do to try to manage everyone else's approval isn't even necessary. The people who actually matter usually just want you to be okay.
Untangling an Identity Woven With Someone Else's
Around the same time she left teaching, Emily's long relationship — the one she'd been in since she was 17 — ended. She describes this as the crumble: not a dramatic collapse, but the disappearance of the foundation her entire adult life had been built on. She had been doing the work of figuring out who she was, but so much of that work had happened within the context of that relationship, that role, those routines. Without them, she had to start over.
"I had no choice but to look at who I am and figure out how to anchor back into that — and hopefully do it right this time. In a way that was about me. What is actually authentic to who I am. And then what will be fulfilling because it's authentic."
— Emily McDonaldShe and her children's father share 50/50 custody. She is honest about what that time looked like in the beginning: some days it wasn't great. Some days in a row it wasn't great. There were periods of relying on her village — her family, her people — to be present for her kids while she worked on herself. She had to give herself grace. Being hard on herself during the crumble wasn't going to benefit anyone.
What she has now, on the other side: a baseline that is joyful. A capacity for fun that she didn't have before. Kids who, she says with confidence, have a happier mom. And the conviction that the messy, imperfect process of doing the work on herself was the only way to get there.
The Sparkle
About a year post-separation, Emily started noticing something she didn't quite have a name for. She was going to concerts. She was with friends. She was telling her story and feeling good about it. Something had shifted.
"I came to a place of just feeling like I've got my sparkle back. But then really thinking about it: I don't know if I have my sparkle back. I think I've gotten it for the first time."
— Emily McDonaldThe sparkle, as she describes it, is the internal light — the essence that makes someone who they are, the piece connected to authenticity and joy that gets expressed outward when you stop performing a version of yourself for other people's approval. For Emily, it was recognizable because she had never quite felt it before. Not as a consequence of something missing, but as a consequence of having spent so many years making choices based on safety rather than alignment.
She rebranded her podcast from Worthy Mother Podcast to The Sparkle Project to reflect the phase she had moved into — and to make explicit what the work was about.
Who She's Building This For
Emily is clear about the woman she's speaking to: the mom who wants something more but can't name what that means. The woman who is dissatisfied and then guilty about the dissatisfaction, because the life looks like what she thought she wanted. The woman who has built her choices on external validation or on what seemed like the right thing, and finds herself standing in a life that doesn't quite fit.
"If you feel stuck in a life that isn't satisfying you, it's not ingratitude. It's information. You are allowed to want more."
— Amanda Lentz, closing reflectionThe Mom Friends Collective creates community for those conversations — a space where honesty is not only allowed but actively cultivated, because Emily believes that when we can be honest about what's actually happening, we can do something about it. And hearing other people's stories is often what gives someone the permission to finally name their own.
Still in the Middle of It
Emily closes with a reframe she's recently made for herself. She had been describing her life as "in transition" — an in-between phase before something more settled arrived. She noticed that framing was keeping her waiting for a point of arrival that may not exist.
"I don't have to have this point where I've made it. We're not just in careers forever. We're not just in relationships that don't serve us anymore. I get to keep growing up and figuring out as I go what is right for me in this moment."
— Emily McDonaldShe is 31. She is a mom of two. She is building work she cares about. She does not have it all together. She is living inside exactly the kind of intentional becoming this show is built for.
Why This Conversation Matters
The life we built for security and the life we actually want don't have to be the same one. It is never too late to choose alignment over approval. Emily McDonald is in the middle of her own becoming, honest about how hard it is, clear about why it's worth it — and building something for every woman who is still trying to find the courage to begin.
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