The Tuesday nobody talks about

Letters From The In-Between: The Tuesday Nobody Talks About.

​Vanessa Santos

There is something quietly devastating about needing an entire month to feel seen.

🎧 Listen to this letter on Spotify / Apple - (This one just hits different when you hear it)

{{ subscriber.first_name }}, March is International Women's Month. Sunday is International Women's Day. And every year the world pauses... corporations post, brands campaign, LinkedIn fills with tributes and then April 1st arrives and we go back to the rooms that were built without us. The tables we were never invited to. The funding that went elsewhere. The promotion that's still on hold. The ideas that never got to see the light.

I am grateful for the celebratory pause.

And, I am done pretending it's enough.

Because the most radical thing we can do is not wait to be celebrated. It's to build. To hold power. To make more money. To create the rooms ourselves.

Women with more resources, more access, more health, more power, they don't just change their own lives. They change everything and everyone around them. Every fed child. Every funded community. Every niece and nephew who grows up with different options because one woman in her life refused to wait.

This is why I write these letters. Not once a year. Every week. Because you deserve a voice in your inbox that treats your ambition as sacred, not as a seasonal campaign. Because the women I write for don't fit inside a month. Because saying the thing out loud, all year long, is the most radical act I know how to offer.

So consider this your reminder, not just in March, but every Tuesday that follows:

You are not waiting to be celebrated. You are building something that will make the celebration irrelevant.

Nobody tells you what choosing yourself actually feels like on a Tuesday.

Not the day you made the decision. Not the moment of clarity that everyone talks about like it arrives clean and certain and lit from within. The Tuesday after. When the vision is still real but the bank account is quieter than you'd like and you're building something so big it occasionally terrifies you and you have to remind yourself, if I knew every step, I'd be on someone else's path.

That's where I am. That's where I've been.

And based on the hundreds of emails that landed in my inbox after my last letter, that's where you are too. 👇🏽

You wrote to me about building a fashion line for six years while working full time, raising children, surviving things that should have broken you. And still. Still. Moving toward the dream you've had since you were nineteen.

You wrote to me about sending two versions of your resume, one with your married name, one without and already knowing which one gets the callback.

You wrote to me about leaving your family's business during the holidays. Alone. With nothing but your own word and a voice memo app full of podcast episodes you haven't published yet.

You wrote to me and said: I don't know what my passion is. But I know it's in there somewhere.

That took more courage than you realize.

Because here's what I know about every single one of you:

You are not stuck. You are mid-becoming. And those two things can feel identical from the inside.

This is what choosing yourself actually looks like.

It looks like showing up to build on a Tuesday when nothing feels ready and the vision feels so grand it scares you. It looks like sending the email anyway. Recording the episode anyway. Moving the sample forward anyway. Setting the boundary anyway.

It looks like tears and anxiety and still showing up.

It looks like a birthday alone that clarifies everything. It looks like realizing that every connection you've been maintaining out of loyalty has been costing you real ones.

It doesn't look like the version they sell you.

It looks like you. Right now. Exactly as you are.

I have been rebuilding my life and my business at the same time. Self-funding. Learning who I am in this new season. Tender in ways I wasn't before. Firmer in ways I needed to be. Opening myself up to an identity I'm still understanding.

Some days the vision feels so clear I can touch it. Some days I have to remind myself, if I knew every step, I'd be on the wrong path. Someone else's path.

And then I come back to this: it is a privilege to have the safety to build, even when it feels impossible. Even when the vision is so big it frightens me. Even when I am doing it alone.

The vision won't leave me alone. Which means I have a responsibility to respect my gifts. To be visible even while I'm becoming. To build even when I'm wobbly.

That's the operating system.

You don't have to have it figured out to begin.

You don't have to be healed to move.

You don't have to be the finished version of yourself to start building the life that version is going to live in.

There will be doubt. There may be shame. There will definitely be confusion.

And on the other side of all of it is a version of you that is unfuckable with.

Not because she has all the answers. Because she stopped waiting for them.

The seed doesn't have to prove itself to the soil. It already knows it will grow.

So do you {{ subscriber.first_name }}.

Until the next letter, written from Colombia, where I'll be celebrating one of my best friends and feeling every moment of it.

Vanessa

P.S. If something in this letter made you feel like it was written just for you, it was. The next Table opens in April. Claim your seat →​

P.P.S. Every letter has an audio version with a reflection at the end, the part that's easier to say than write. 🎧 Listen to this letter on Spotify / Apple.