the practice | when your word begins
I want to clear something up.
(em)powered words is not a word-of-the-year practice. I want to say that directly, because "word of the year" is everywhere — and what I'm building is something different.
A word belongs to your life, not to a calendar. It starts when you need it. It ends when you've grown through it. Sometimes that takes a year. Sometimes it takes five months, three weeks, and two days. The timeline is yours.
Here's what actually happens after you choose a word.
At first, there's excitement. You write it down, you say it to yourself, you feel it. It becomes a lens for your decisions. You feel the difference it makes almost immediately.
And then life happens.
The word gets quiet. Not because it stopped being true — but because you got busy, distracted, overwhelmed. This is normal. This is actually part of the practice.
What brings you back is an anchor.
Something you can see or touch throughout your day that returns you to your word without effort.
For some women that's a journal ritual — a few minutes in the morning or at the end of the day. For others it's something physical. Something they wear.
In 2018, long before (em)powered words had a name, I chose a word for myself. My husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for years. I felt unheard by my doctor. I felt distance growing between my husband and me because I didn't know how to share what I was carrying. My word was communicate.
I needed to learn how to stop hiding and start speaking — to my doctor, to my husband, to myself.
That word changed things. A new doctor actually listened to me. My husband and I started going through the hard parts together instead of separately. And somewhere in the middle of IVF, when the process felt enormous, and the outcome felt uncertain, I made myself a ring.
It said :
small steps still get you there
That phrase wasn't something I planned. It emerged from living with my word. From all the small, hard, brave things I was doing every day just to keep going. I wore that ring through every IUI, through IVF, through the pregnancy I had hoped for my entire adult life. It lives at the base of my ring stack now — not as a reminder of struggle, but as proof that the small steps worked.
That's the full shape of the practice. The word. The drift and return. The phrase that sharpens it. The physical anchor that holds it. And eventually — the quiet moment when you realize the word has done its work. Not because you finished it. Because you became it.
Your word doesn't begin on January 1st.
It begins when you're ready. Or when you need it. Or when something in you says : not like this anymore.
If you're in that place right now, the word guide is where to begin.
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