Controlled Burn

"Sometimes the only way to prevent a fire is to let another one burn."

One day, the sun didn’t rise over San Francisco and I didn’t even notice.

It was September 2020. Northern California was on fire, and San Francisco woke up under a sky so choked with smoke and fog that the sun was almost completely blotted - like a partial eclipse that never lifted. The streets outside were eerily empty and silent. If you were here, then you remember where you were that morning.

I was deep in deposition prep for a senior Meta executive based in Europe. I’d been at it since 5:00 a.m., pausing just once to land a distracted kiss on my daughter’s forehead as she departed for school. It was already several hours into my day before I looked up long enough to realize something ominous was happening right outside my window.

The fucking sun had disappeared and I didn’t even notice. If that is not a “something’s gotta give” moment, I don’t know what is.

At the time, I thought the problem was the pandemic, or work, or parenting during lockdown. But looking back now, I think the sky simply illuminated conditions that had already existed for years. The fires did not create the smoke. They revealed it.

By 2020, almost every system in my life was overloaded.

My career was prestigious, intellectually rewarding, and slowly eating me alive. I had become trapped in the belief that every problem could be solved if I just gave it my best effort. Why throw a drowning victim a life preserver when you can just shout “SWIM HARDER!”? Sure, the demands kept escalating, but it was my job to rise and meet them. By every external measure I had ever cared about, I was “winning”. Yet my nervous system remained permanently braced for the next threat.

Work wasn’t the only problem. My marriage was functional, but with the nonstop demands of work and parenthood, the only things left to shortchange were ourselves and each other. My family of origin collapsed after my grandfather’s death, no longer perched precariously upon the scaffolding of his end-of-life care. The old structures I’d worked so hard to preserve were falling down around me while I strained to hold them together.

And because nothing had fully collapsed yet, I just kept going.

I felt like the picture of Dorian Gray, crumbling away in the attic while my life continued to shine on the surface. The whole time I was struggling, my life looked great on Instagram. It was only from the inside that I could smell the smoke.

I think about wildfires differently now. Uncontrolled wildfires are catastrophic because forests accumulate so much debris over time—dead branches, dense undergrowth. If nothing clears it, the system combusts. That’s why firefighters conduct controlled burns: intentional, contained fires that clear what is dead so the forest can live.

For most of my life I was preoccupied with survival. I worked frantically, stamping out spot fires, always holding my breath. My life kept spreading —I could barely contain it all—but relinquishing anything felt impossible. To let go would have meant failure and, at an older, deeper level, danger.

Over the past few years, I’ve had to watch parts of my life burn. The old family system gave way to a deeper relationship with my mother. My marriage evolved, creating more space for each of us as individuals. My professional identity expanded beyond self-imposed confines, making way for a more expansive vision of success. The weight I’d been carrying for years—in my body, mind, and spirit—gave way to a new lightness of being.

Standing in the aftermath, I feel strangely calm. Because beneath the sadness is a quieter realization: my life was long overdue for a change. Once I cleared the old structures away, I could see they had been blocking out the sun. The losses I was so certain would diminish me, in fact, made more room for me to grow.

Now I wonder whether many women, especially in midlife, are experiencing something similar - an ecological transition. Perimenopause may be, in part, the moment the psyche stops consenting to dead arrangements. The nervous system resists. The old bargains stop working.

Suddenly, the woman who has spent decades overfunctioning begins asking herself a different set of questions: What if I no longer want this role? What if I stop stabilizing everyone else and focus on myself? What if exhaustion is not weakness but a signal? What if the life I built no longer fits the person I had to become to survive it?

We often talk about boundaries as the antidote —say no more often, protect your peace. But some lives require something more primordial. A good, cleansing fire. A controlled burn. Not destruction or collapse, but a deliberate clearing of dead material so something living has room to grow.

Old identities compost, old roles decay, and old selves break down into whatever grows next.

Sometimes the only way to prevent a fire is to let another one burn.