What Alignment Asks of Me

What does it mean to be in alignment?

I have to laugh at myself for beginning the first article on my editorial platform with this question. One of my closest friends often jokes that alignment is my favorite word because I use it so often. Earlier today, she and I found ourselves once again discussing what alignment looks and feels like, particularly related to our careers. That conversation made me realize that, despite how often I use the word, I have yet to reflect on how it became so important to me.

For all the times I have used the word alignment, I have never considered its definition. Of course, once I began writing, I felt compelled to look it up. The researcher in me could not help it. The definitions I found described alignment as the state of being arranged in a line, a ground plan, or the positioning of groups or forces in relation to one another. And, at an earlier point in my life, those understandings would have deeply resonated with me.

For a long time, alignment felt linear. I saw it in my admission to The Ohio State University as a transfer student before I had even formally submitted my application. I saw it in the jobs that seemed to appear exactly when I needed money and were connected to the path I was already pursuing. In my friendships and romantic relationships, alignment carried a similar meaning. When a door opened, I interpreted its arrival as evidence that whatever stood behind it belonged in my life. When a door remained closed, I assumed that whatever stood behind it was not meant for me.

Now, I am not going to be too hard on myself, but where exactly were my critical-thinking skills? There was not much depth to my definition. My understanding of alignment depended almost entirely on external circumstances, what appeared and what worked out. I gave far less consideration to my inner compass, meaning whether an opportunity reflected my values, intuition, and conscience. I mistook access and perhaps ease for alignment.

It was during graduate school that my understanding began to change. Ironically, I learned more about alignment through repeated experiences of misalignment, experiences I had convinced myself were right simply because they looked right on paper. I pursued opportunities that mentors encouraged me, mostly in good faith, to pursue because they seemed beneficial to my career. Yet once I entered those spaces, they did not feel connected to who I was or how I wanted to contribute.

It was not that I had no sense of what I wanted from my life. I knew I wanted to use my skills to make an impact and be part of something greater than myself. What I had not yet determined was what form that contribution should take, or which environments would allow me to make it. I had spent far more time identifying what I was good at than considering how my abilities and sense of purpose needed to work together.

Those experiences taught me that when I am out of alignment, I often find myself repeating the same lessons, encountering the same roadblocks, and sitting with the same frustrations. But, of course, there is nuance in everything. Difficulty is not always evidence of misalignment. Some of the most aligned decisions we make require uncertain beginnings, sacrifice, and sustained effort. What I am suggesting, however, is that persistent friction invites closer examination: Is this difficult because growth is difficult, or because I am forcing myself to remain on a path that is not mine?

Life has a funny way of bringing us face-to-face with what we have been trying to avoid. Sometimes, we sense that something needs to change long before we are willing to act. We feel an internal pull, recognize that something is not right, and still resist because what is familiar feels safer than what is unknown. In my experience, what we refuse to confront internally eventually finds a way to confront us externally. Circumstances continue to apply pressure until we can no longer postpone the choice. Eventually, we face a test of alignment: Do we remain loyal to the identity we have constructed, or do we make room for the person we are becoming? Sometimes, that test arrives in the form of an ego death.

To some degree, ego has become a buzzword. It often carries a negative connotation associated with conceit and selfishness, but I understand it differently. To me, ego is the identity we construct from our labels, achievements, thoughts, and personal narratives. It is the collection of stories we use to explain who we are, sometimes at the expense of discovering our deeper, truer nature. An ego death, then, is not the disappearance of identity altogether. It is the unraveling of the identities and stories that no longer allow us to see ourselves clearly. My ego death began in 2024.

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment it started, but throughout that year, nearly everything I experienced forced me to reconsider how I understood myself. I defended my dissertation and finally earned my doctoral degree, completing a journey that had shaped nearly a decade of my life. Two weeks after my dissertation defense, my grandmother died, and my grandfather entered hospice. My relationship with my mother, my best friend, became strained as we navigated the demands of caregiving, the death of her mother, her father's declining health, and the distance my schooling had created between us. I was also grieving the end of a relationship with someone I had once believed I would marry.

I responded to all that uncertainty in the way I knew best, by making another plan. Years of using achievement to create a sense of control will convince you that another goal is always the answer. I decided the next logical step was to continue my career at the U.S. Department of Education. By the fall of 2024, I was submitting applications and imagining that path as the natural continuation of everything I had worked toward. Then the election happened, and the path I had treated as my remaining source of certainty became uncertain almost instantly. By early 2025, higher education was facing mounting political attacks, and efforts to dismantle the Department of Education were intensifying. Both professional worlds toward which I had worked relentlessly, higher education and federal education policy, were being discredited and destabilized. As those foundations shifted, my personal life brought even more grief. In January, a friend from my doctoral program was shot and killed by police. In March, my grandfather died. By then, my mind and body had absorbed more devastation than I knew how to hold.

My mother could see the toll my life was taking on me. She recognized both the emotional turbulence I carried after our losses and the professional grief I experienced as I watched the Trump administration target policies and institutions central to the communities I care about. Every day seemed to bring another consequence to anticipate, another development to analyze, and another reminder that the professional future I had imagined was disappearing. I also grew increasingly troubled by the media environment surrounding those developments. Information moved so quickly that there was little space to consider what it meant, how it affected us, or what it required of us. The pressure to react often seemed to eclipse the need to reflect. My mother saw what I was not ready to admit and urged me to consider the option I resisted most: leaving my job.

One day, I may write more fully about what that decision meant to me because I am still making sense of it. My mother’s suggestion brought me to the most difficult test of alignment I had faced: Would I remain in a job because it preserved the stability and professional identity I had built, or would I honor what I knew internally and leave without knowing what would come next? As my inner world deteriorated and the events unfolding around me deepened the strain, I could no longer access the focus, discipline, and curiosity I had always relied on to succeed. I was missing details, falling behind on tasks, and, most concerning to me, feeling increasingly disconnected from the impact of my work. In late spring 2025, I finally submitted my resignation just under two weeks after receiving the promotion I had worked toward. To be sure, leaving did not immediately bring clarity. Instead, it placed me in the uncertain space between knowing what no longer fit and not yet knowing what would. It was in that space that The Integrity Line began.

In many ways, I had carried the beginnings of this platform with me throughout my life. They were present when I wrote songs and poetry as a child, when I developed a love of writing in school, and when I imagined one day founding an academic journal. The impulse to create and contribute had always been there. What I lacked was not purpose but permission: permission to bring those parts of myself together rather than continuing to fit them into paths other people had already created. I wanted to build the kind of space I had found missing, one where we could slow down, examine the ideas shaping our lives, and move from reflection to more intentional action. The Integrity Line became a place where my values, experiences, and work could finally exist as parts of one vision.

As I grow, my understanding of alignment continues to deepen. I know now that it begins with truth: who I am, what I value, and what I want. Authenticity allows me to acknowledge that truth, while courage allows me to act on it. Alignment is not a destination or proof that I have chosen the perfect path. It is the ongoing practice of ensuring that my outward choices remain honest to the person I am becoming. 

I began this piece by asking: What does it mean to be in alignment?

I cannot answer this question for anyone else. But if you are struggling to answer it for yourself, perhaps begin with a different one: What truth about who you are becoming are you ready to honor, and what must you release to build a life around it?