"There’s no coherence between what you say and what you do."
That phrase hit me like a punch the day I heard it. Not because I didn’t already know it—but because I had built my entire life around pretending it wasn’t true.
I had just gone through a divorce. I was in a country that still didn’t feel like home. My law degree was useless here, and the future I had imagined was crumbling faster than I could think. Then came the final blow: a clinical depression diagnosis.
It was around that time that a hurricane Irene destroyed my place. Literally. Law was gone. My marriage was gone. My house? Gone.
I ended up with a suitcase and a storage unit, sleeping on friends’ couches—trying to figure out how I went from being “the smart one with a plan” to being the girl who couldn’t figure out where to charge her phone next.
The answer, when it finally came, was simple and humiliating: I was living a completely incoherent life.
I thought one thing, said another, and did the exact opposite. Every day.
I thought I was strong—but I acted like someone who needed to be rescued.
I said I was building something—but I was constantly tearing it down behind the scenes.
The turning point came when I looked in the mirror one night and didn’t recognize the person staring back. That version of me didn’t believe in anything—not even herself.
So I made a decision: I was going to rebuild. But this time, it had to be with coherence.
It sounds easy. It’s not.
To live with coherence, you have to rewire yourself. Your thoughts, your words, your actions—they all have to match. Like a triangle with no missing side. And once you really start doing it, you start seeing how incoherent the world around you is.
Back then, I was trying to break into the fashion world—just like hundreds of others. We were blogging about designers, giving opinions, acting like experts. But most of us had never created a single garment. We were wearing fast fashion and talking about haute couture.
It was like calling yourself a chef because you watched MasterChef.
That realization led to the simplest, most painful truth I’ve ever learned:
You don’t get to live the life you say you want.
You live the life that matches what you actually do.
And that’s when I understood what coherence really means:
If you want to be taken seriously, live seriously. If you want to build something meaningful, speak with meaning. If you want to feel whole—stop living like a broken person.
I didn’t have money. I didn’t have connections. I didn’t have the title anymore. But I had that formula:
Think. Speak. Act. Align them, and something in you unlocks. Something starts working again.
And here’s the part most people miss:
Coherence is not about being perfect. It’s not about impressing anyone. It’s about finally being someone you can trust.
Because if you can’t trust yourself, what exactly are you standing on?
So now I test everything through that lens. Is what I’m doing aligned with what I believe? Is what I say consistent with what I actually do? If the answer’s no, I stop. I correct. I rewire. I’ve lost a lot of people in the process—but I’ve finally found myself.