An Open Letter to My Community

By Sheila Phicil, Social Change Futurist™

Hello, friends. It's Sheila, writing to you from Bend, Oregon. This past month I've been walking trails, sitting in forests, standing near waterfalls. And the food that's been holding me up this season: mango sticky rice. It has been a beautiful time.

You might be wondering why I'm in Bend. I have been a full-time nomad since April, house-sitting my way across the country after I could no longer secure safe, affordable housing in Massachusetts. It has become a freer, more beautiful way to live than I expected. More about that in future conversations.

I have a lot to say. And honestly, I haven't always known that people have the time to listen, which is why I've struggled to share more. But I'll start by saying this.

If you had asked me how I was doing over these last two months, my answer would have been: I'm not okay. I'm not okay emotionally, psychologically, physically, spiritually, and financially. It was everything: all systems down. And I'm not okay with where we are as a society. I don't think I was alone in that. A lot of us are not okay right now.

These past months have held some of the hardest days of my life. In August I slowed down the pace I was working at, and by the end of the month nearly everything I had been building toward, the plans, the opportunities, the whole next season I thought was coming, had disappeared. September came in heavy with depression, and that depression gave way to grief. At the end of September I had to tell my team we were in cash preservation mode. I laid people off. Resignations followed. And October brought a severe anxiety that felt like stepping onto a ledge and looking over the edge.

And in that space, I let myself rest. I let myself fall apart, all the way down into little tiny pieces.

I think I'm okay now. What's emerging on the other side is a different version of me. I'm still getting to know her. And I'd like you to join me on this journey.

Let me be plain about the money.

I ran out of the funding to keep building my companies. And when I say I'm on my last dollar, I mean the last bit of money to my name is what I'm living on right now. The credit cards are maxed. I know that for a lot of people, a sentence like that sets off fight-or-flight. It did for me too.

How did I get here? In two years of building, I paid myself a total of five hundred dollars. Every dollar the companies earned went back into them. Some would call that foolish, and I've heard the advice to pay yourself first. When you're trying to build and scale, it's a real trade-off: the money in your own account, or paying other people so you have the time to do what the business needs from you. Those were the decisions I made, the ones that landed me here. And I'm not ashamed of them.

To be frank, I've been here before. Completely broke, that is. So many of us are, and still it stings. It stings when people reach for words like "your business has ceased to exist" or "your business is closed," because that isn't what happened. The companies still exist. The passion is still there. What ran out is the money, and a clear path to keep bringing in the resources to keep building. When I say I'm not ashamed, I mean this has become my reality and I'm learning to accept it. And it still hurts. Both are true.

I'm also more fortunate than most. I had savings, and with the help of my financial advisor, Michelle, I've been able to stretch them. It isn't a lot, and it won't last forever, but it has bought me a little space: room to not worry about making money in the short term while I figure out what comes next. I do have to figure something out in the next couple of months. I know that.

What's made this season of pausing easier is the nomadic life I'm living now. My sister and I house-sit. We travel to people's homes and care for their pets and their spaces while they're away, and in exchange we have a place to stay. It's an experiment in reciprocity, and it has been one of the most surprising gifts of this season. Kind people welcoming us in, trusting us with what they love most. Living this way also means I travel light. I carry a checked bag, a carry-on, and a personal item. I no longer have an apartment or a permanent place of my own. That has changed my relationship to things. I've become less of a consumer, less attached, and it's opened up space to examine how and why I lived the way I did before.

This is the hardest part to tell, and I want to tell it honestly. The steadiness I'm describing was hard-won. I reached it by going all the way through the darkest season of my life.

There were days I asked myself, why am I even here? These were questions I had only ever whispered to the people closest to me. I'm choosing to say them out loud now, because there is something important in letting people see how heavy it got, not only the version of me that looks like I have it all together.

My body carried what my mind couldn't hold. The stress and the anxiety built until they turned physical. I ended up in urgent care, my chest burning, my heart pounding like it might give out. That was my body telling me a truth I kept trying to outrun: this pace, this weight, this way of living was costing me more than I could afford.

What held me through it was simple, and it was everything. Nature. Long walks. The forests and the water. The people who love me, who checked on me, who let me fall apart and stayed. I am still here because I am loved. And because underneath all of it, I still know my life matters.

In that stripped-down place, something became clear to me.

For most of my life, I measured success the way I was taught to: more. More money, more status, more reach, more. I chased it, and I was good at it. And somewhere in this season I saw that the chase itself, the endless wanting of more, is part of what is breaking us. Breaking the earth, breaking our bodies, breaking the ties between us. And I'm not here to point fingers. I was in it too.

What I keep coming back to is simple. Life is the most valuable thing we have, and we have reduced it down to dollar signs. We are asked to trade our health, our time, our values, our peace, just to keep surviving inside systems that were never built to hold life in the first place. I don't want to keep making that trade.

I would rather be financially bankrupt than spiritually bankrupt. I mean that. I am not willing to sell out what I believe, or abandon myself again, to look successful by a measure I no longer trust.

I said I will not abandon myself again. That word, again, carries a history, and I want to tell you where it comes from.

I am a survivor of domestic violence. I spent seventeen years in an abusive relationship, and when I finally left it, I made myself a promise: I would never abandon myself again. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and naming this now reminds me that I am not the only one. I am not alone.

Before that relationship, I grew up in a violent home. The violence came from my parents. For a long time I believed the pain was normal, that it was love, that I was the problem. What finally got me to leave was not my safety. It was not my unhappiness. It was not even everything I was enduring. It was a single thought: oh my God, this is not normal. The day I understood that, I understood I was not the problem, and that I did not have to stay.

Leaving felt like strapping a bomb to my chest. It felt like jumping off a cliff with no idea where I would land. I had no real friendships. I had family, but I wasn't connected to them. I had no map. I had a job that paid well, and that was it. I left anyway. I paid a high price for that freedom, and this past June marked four years of it.

Here's what's interesting. I feel like I'm going through that same process all over again, and it has crystallized over these last two months.

THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL! The way we exist is not normal.

I'm not only reacting to my plans falling apart or the money running out. My body is rejecting a whole way of living and being in the world, and I want to be free of it. I want to know what real liberation feels like.

Look at what we are made to call normal. We are expected to work through our own sickness. We lose time with our children and the people we love, just to keep making a living. Meanwhile the cost of living climbs, and we pay more and more for the very things meant to keep us alive. Even the food, especially here in America, is making our bodies sick. We are worn thin and pushed to overwork, with no room left for our bodies, for rest, for nature. We are told there is no other way: reach for the next rung of more, or fall behind.

I am not minimizing anyone's abuse when I say this. But here is how it feels in my body. I left a violence that was close to me, and now I am facing a violence that lives all around me. This is not a metaphor to me. It is the truth my body keeps telling me.

And I am not alone in this. These are conversations I'm having with family and friends at many different levels of the economic ladder, from people living entirely on government assistance to people making well over six figures a year. I am not the only one.

So the promise comes back around. I will not abandon myself again. Right now, keeping it means listening to what my body and my soul have been trying to tell me.

In the last few months, I could have done what I always do: hustle, find another way, pivot, bring in more money. I could have gotten on the hamster wheel and chased the next opportunity. But my body said no. It was tired in a way that sleep could not fix, and for once, I listened. I chose not to override it.

That choice was really put to the test a few weeks ago. I had said yes, two months earlier, to speak at a retreat with an organization I deeply admire, one I would love to build a relationship with. I was not well. I had a cold settling into my chest. The night before, I packed and prepared anyway, the way I always had. Then, fifteen minutes before my ride was supposed to come, I canceled. I sent the email in the middle of the night and said I could not be there. It did not feel good. I felt like I was letting people down. But choosing my body over the commitment was one of the most radical acts of self-care I have ever done.

This feels like rebellion. For a long time, I thought it was, like I was acting out against the way things are supposed to be. But maybe it isn't rebellion. What if it is alignment? What if alignment is choosing care, and care starts with caring for myself? It looks like a slower pace, a life built on relationships instead of transactions, and a definition of success that includes being well enough to enjoy it. I am learning what enough means.

Underneath all of this, I have been sitting with a line from Octavia Butler, from Parable of the Sower: God is change.

I have always seen change as a good thing. I have been a champion of it. I named one of my companies Phicil-itate Change. But change is a different animal when it comes for the things I am most attached to, like my plans, my financial security, the place I live, and the identities I carry. That kind of change, I am still learning how to meet.

People say the path is not linear. I have heard that a lot. What I am living now is different. The path itself has disappeared. I am sitting in so much uncertainty that I am not even sure I know what I am doing. And still, I am trying to believe that what is happening to me is also happening for me. That my soul came here to evolve. That change is the thing that keeps teaching me how.

So here is the question I am living now: How do I remain human, sovereign, and connected while building a life and work in a time of accelerating change? That question holds everything I am, the writer, the founder, the human being learning how to live. It is the thread that ties all of it together, and it is the thing I most want to figure out, with community.

I have not done any of this alone, and I would not want you to think I had.

To my friends, who listened to me. To the people who made space for me to fall apart, who checked on me, who wrote me letters, who brought me food. To everyone who let me process my feelings out loud and stayed on the line. Thank you. You held me up when I could not hold myself.

And to my sister, who travels this nomadic life with me: thank you for being home when I had no address.

I carry all of you with me.

So here is my invitation.

I am not looking for a big audience. I am looking for a smaller circle of people who want to go deep. If any part of this letter resonated with you, I want to hear it. Reply and tell me what landed. I read every one, and I really do want to listen.

There are three things I am giving my energy to now, and you are welcome into any of them.

The first is a book I have been trying to write for more than a year, Remembering How to Care. It comes out of nearly two decades of work inside healthcare and out of my own story, and it asks how we hold on to care, for ourselves and for one another, in a time when AI is reshaping everything. It also introduces SEEDS of Innovation™, my shared decision standard for AI in systems of care, built on something I keep coming back to: the failures we blame on technology are usually decision problems. For a long time I did not have the space to give it what it needed. Now I do. The first four chapters are ready to read, and I will be sharing new chapters in the weeks ahead.

The second is work that found me almost by accident, and I have come to love it. Over the last couple of years, building my companies and running my whole life with AI, I learned how to do it on my own terms: keeping sovereignty over my data, always knowing what is happening to it, and staying in control of it. Now I get to teach that. I help people build their own sovereign AI system, one that runs on their own documents, under rules they write, so their data, their knowledge, and their judgment stay theirs even as the tools keep changing. If that is something you want to learn, you can start here.

The third is Listen Phirst, the company at the heart of my mission, and the research we are doing right now. Listen Phirst builds ethical voice AI that gathers people's real stories and lived experience, so that the people whose voices are collected keep ownership of their data and are paid fairly for it. The work centers the people our systems most often overlook. Right now we are running a paid research study with people from vulnerable communities. There are two ways to stand with it. You can help spread the word and share the study. To take part or learn more, email me at hello@phicil-itatechange.com. Or, if you are able, you can help keep the work alive through our GoFundMe. It is an invitation to back a technology I believe we genuinely need.

More than anything, I want this next chapter to be relational. Less performance, more connection. Fewer transactions, more trust. As long as there is breath in my lungs, there is a way forward, and I am going to walk it one step at a time. If you are hungry for that too, come with me.

With an open heart,
Sheila