The Winding Road: Why Your Path Doesn't Have to Look Like Anyone Else's
Why Your Winding Path Is Exactly Where You're Supposed to Be
There's a Moment
There's a moment that happens in almost every counseling office, almost every kitchen table conversation, and almost every quiet 2 a.m. scroll through someone else's highlight reel: a woman looks at the straight line she thinks she was supposed to walk, looks at the winding road she actually walked instead, and feels like she's somehow behind.
I've spent my career sitting across from students—and honestly, from grown women too—who carry a quiet shame about the shape of their journey. The one who took a gap year and felt she had to apologize for it. The one who went to trade school when everyone expected a four-year degree. The one who left a stable job to start over in her late thirties. The one who's still figuring it out at fifty.
We've built a culture that rewards a very specific silhouette of success: linear, early, and certain. And we've quietly taught an entire generation of women that anything else is a detour.
It isn't.
It's the road.
Every Path Is a Real Path
In my work in career and technical education, I often talk about a simple but stubborn idea: postsecondary pathways are not a hierarchy. A four-year degree, a technical certification, an apprenticeship, military service, entrepreneurship, or a winding combination of all of the above—none of these are consolation prizes for the "real" path. They are simply different roads to the same destination: a life of purpose, competence, and contribution.
Yet so many women internalize a ranking system that was never actually true. We defer our own definition of success to someone else's map and then wonder why the compass keeps spinning.
Here's what I want to say plainly to every woman who has ever measured her worth against a straight line: the winding road is not evidence that you're lost. It's evidence that you're alive, paying attention, and willing to adjust when life asks you to.
What the Detours Actually Teach
The women who inspire me most rarely got where they are by following a perfectly planned route. They got there by:
- Changing direction when new information arrived.
- Trying something that didn't work and learning what did.
- Choosing depth over speed.
- Refusing to let someone else's timeline dictate their worth.
None of that is failure.
That's wisdom, forged in real time.
If you zoom out on almost any woman's story worth telling, the interesting part was never the straight stretch of highway. It was the curve she didn't see coming—the one that taught her something the straight line never could have.
The Permission You Didn't Know You Needed
So, if you're standing at a crossroads right now, questioning a career change, wondering if it's "too late" to pivot, or feeling behind because your path doesn't match the one you were handed as a teenager, consider this your permission slip.
You are not behind.
You are not broken.
You are not required to explain or justify a path that got you here, wherever "here" is, as long as it's still moving you toward who you want to become.
Purpose isn't found at the end of the fastest road.
It's found in the willingness to keep walking, even when the road bends in a direction you didn't plan for.
Inspire someone today by simply owning your winding road out loud.
Someone else needs to hear that it's allowed.
Being authentically yourself gives others permission to be authentically themselves without fear.
And that is the ultimate freedom.
Dr. Laranda Phillips Coleman
