Progress report: my path to selfishness

Nine months ago I wrote an essay on my half birthday. I was 49½ and feeling the pull of something I couldn’t quite name — a hunger to live more intentionally, to let my personal curiosity and my creative work feed each other instead of running in separate lanes. I set down some goals. Some landed. Some evaporated quietly, like Ojai, which I wrote down as a fleeting thought, and then apparently forgot entirely.

Since that essay, I’ve wandered through Valle de Guadalupe, celebrated my birthday in Tokyo, returned to Austin to run a marathon, visited Virginia, and started mapping out future trips back to Japan and Morocco. Each place offered something different: a perspective, a conversation, a reminder that the world is infinitely larger than the routines we build around ourselves.

This is the update I promised myself I’d write.

By November, Egya was finishing out his senior year at UT Austin and I was learning, slowly, what it meant to have an empty house. Mark was gone for 10 days at one point and this proved to be challenging but survivable. However, definitely not sustainable.

My younger son Achai was in Blacksburg at Virginia Tech. Between his major (electrical engineering) and the 3 hour time difference, we were lucky to get our regular Sunday FaceTimes much less chat during the week. Additionally, there were no visits, no excuse to fly east. At least with Egya I could disguise a trip to Austin as game day support at his rugby matches. Blacksburg is, logistically, a nightmare. You lose a full day just getting there. So I missed him in that quiet, continuous way that doesn’t announce itself — it just settles into the background.

Mark travels about 40% of the time. I assumed this would change after he retired from the Navy but alas, here we are. Initially, it was business as usual. This was the only married life I really knew — a lot of time apart and me often in the supporting role. Over the years, all the time apart started to wear on me and it was magnified when Achai went to college. I spent a lot of days in solitude over these last nine months. More than I wanted or expected.

But here’s the thing about solitude: it leaves you alone with your thoughts and while it caused me to overthink, spiral and often ruminate, it also produced clarity once I got intentional.

I’ve been thinking about it in terms of simple math. For years I was allocating maybe 30% of myself to each of the boys, 30% to Mark, and leaving about 10% for me. That’s not a complaint — it’s just the arithmetic of a full life. I chose it willingly and wouldn’t hesitate to choose it again. But the boys are launched now. Egya graduated in May; watching him cross that stage, knowing he was stepping into his own life, was one of the most complicated joys I’ve ever felt. My role keeps shifting as he moves further into the world, and I’m learning to shift with it. What I need to give them now is closer to 10% each. Which means 40% of myself just came available. And for the first time in a long time, I’m investing it directly back into me.

That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

On February 15th I ran 26.2 miles in Austin.

My first full marathon with Mark and Egya. This was one of my goals to accomplish before I turned 50 and I truly didn’t know if it was going to happen. Leading up to the race I was dealing with months of what was diagnosed as deep gluteal syndrome/piriformis syndrome. It was a nice cocktail of sciatica causing numbness and shooting pain down my leg, weak glutes that wouldn’t fire when running — imagine trying to run without butt muscles, and super tight hamstrings that prevented a full stride. I couldn’t even step up on the curb properly, y’all. I only got to 18 miles before race day.

I tried chiropractic which helped mildly. Then, a week before the marathon, I went to my acupuncturist who I’d been seeing for my shoulder, elbow and wrist (another post altogether) and after her treating me twice, I felt better than I had in ages. For the first time since starting my training, I felt confident I could finish the race.

Then I started my menstrual cycle the morning of the race. Le sigh.

I feel like my training, the race, and my mental state of mind throughout deserve a dedicated post because there were all sorts of highs and lows. Honestly, my worst fear was getting a DNF because I was too slow. BUT, I am proud to say, I finished the race before they started tearing shit down. I have Mark to thank for that. He has run several marathons including the Tokyo! and instead of running his own race, he ran in-step with me and helped me keep pace. Now that’s love.

Three weeks later, I was in Japan for my birthday.

I was excited to turn it into a bit of a research trip which never really feels like work to me. I do ongoing research on bathhouse culture and Japan’s onsen one of the most fascinating. The spatial intelligence of Japanese retail. How a brand maintains its indexical identity when it crosses into a market with completely different cultural codes—New Balance, Onisuka Tiger, Aēsop, Shiro. How does that not sound like fun?

But it was also my birthday. I turned 50 in Japan, at a hotel on the 21st floor with a view that felt like it belonged to someone else’s life — and I kept waiting for that feeling to pass, for it to feel ordinary, and it never did.

The Japanese concept of service, omotenashi, is something you have to experience to understand. It’s not hospitality in the Western sense. It’s being able to anticipate the needs of those around you. Attentiveness without the transactional feel. I was surrounded by it for eight days, and something in me softened in a way I hadn’t expected. It became very easy, in that environment, to imagine the life I actually wanted. Not just to describe it abstractly, the way you do on half-birthday essays, but to envision it. I felt the texture and weight of it and it felt very real.

Which is when the Visa interview happened.

While I was in Japan I got an email about interviewing for a position with Visa’s Cultural Foresight Lab — a position so precisely calibrated to my frameworks, my background, and the work I’d been quietly building for years that it felt less like a job opportunity and more like confirmation. At 5:30 in the morning Tokyo time, the only time that would work across a 19-hour time difference, I sat in the hotel lobby and made the case for myself at the highest level I ever had. The interview was more of a rhythmic conversation that lasted 45 minutes — which is the best kind. Everything moved quickly. They wanted to move me forward. I had my interview with the hiring manager the day I got back to California from Japan. It’s all sort of a fever dream but I replay the interview often in my head. I’m not sure if more sleep would have made any difference but I definitely don’t think it would have hurt.

It wasn’t necessarily that specific job. It was what the job represented: proof that everything I’d built — the PhD, the decades of fieldwork, the three registered frameworks, the brand I’d grown from a trip to Marrakesh to shelves at Nordstrom and Ulta — could belong in rooms I hadn’t yet walked into. The 21st floor made it easy to believe. The interviews made it feel possible. Together, they gave me the clearest picture I’ve ever had of what I’m capable of and what I’m actually after.

For a 50th birthday gift, I’ll take it.

Two weeks after that, I was in Valle de Guadalupe.

I’d planned a small gathering — friends, family, the valley — to mark the 50th year properly. The wine, the light, the way that place exists slightly outside of time. We ate insanely well, laughed by the bonfire, drank wine while hearing the history of a woman-owned winery, got spa treatments, and just went with the flow. I let the valley take care of me and enjoyed just being in that moment — filled with gratitude.

Here is what I’ve come to understand about marking things: later is a trap. The timing is never right. The moment is either now or it becomes the thing you meant to celebrate, filed under “when things settle” and never retrieved. I almost let this birthday pass unmarked. I’m glad I didn’t.

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What the solitude clarified, what Japan crystallized, what the Visa process confirmed: I’ve spent years building something genuinely rare, and I’ve been describing it too small.

The place where everything that I am actually comes together: a PhD in cultural studies and anthropology, two decades of fieldwork across more than twenty countries, a founder’s instinct for building brand worlds, a lifelong immersion in fashion and retail and beauty, a deep investment in sustainability and community, and a global perspective that was never theoretical. These things don’t compete with each other. They compound. And the work that excites me now is the work that asks for all of them at once — cultural strategy, brand narrative, consumer intelligence, storytelling at scale.

The Visa role was one illustration of how all my skillsets come together in practice. It won’t be the last.

I’m actively pursuing what comes next with more clarity and more appetite than I’ve had in years and that is simply because I know what I’m looking for and there are very few life factors at the present moment that can preventing me from having it. I know what the work feels like when it’s right. I know what room I’m trying to walk into.

The solitude did that. The 21st floor did that. The marathon, the valley, the long second semester — all of it did that. There was a lot of down times, slumps, rejections, doubting myself, feeling alone, and desperate and a little bit hopeless at times but I choose to focus on the positive. There’s been a lot inner work, self-improvement, and personal growth. I’m embarrassed to share I’ve only run 2x since the marathon BUT I have joined a fitness club for more structure and started taking group classes as a way to socialize. I’ll report on that shortly.

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In my original essay I wrote about two currents: a personal one — about experiencing beauty and culture more deeply, and a creative one — about opening up my process. I said they weren’t separate streams. That what I live pours back into what I make.

There’s a third current now. Learning to claim what I’ve built — quietly, without performance, but without apology either. Knowing what the work is worth. Not allowing urgency or exhaustion to make me negotiate against myself.

I’m further along. Not arrived but I don’t think arrival is the point. I’m moving differently than I was nine months ago. More willing to say the thing plainly. More certain that what I’ve built belongs in bigger rooms.

Ojai is still somewhere on the list but I’ve currently got bigger fish to fry. I’ll get there, eventually.

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Mia Chae Reddy, PhD is a Cultural Brand Strategist, Beauty Anthropologist, and founder of DEHIYA Beauty.