: Six Months In — I Finally Feel Like Me Again.

Date: Monday, 1st December 2025

Today hit different.Not because anything dramatic happened, but because I finally stopped long enough to see what I built this year.

Six months ago, in June, I started this journey with nothing but a laptop, a belief, and a quiet promise to myself:

“Build the life you were always meant to live.”

I didn’t know it would turn into 55 websites and platforms in total. I didn’t know it would reopen the creative parts of me I’d buried.I didn’t know it would pull me into tech, into AI, into a whole new identity I didn’t even know I was allowed to claim.

I didn’t know I’d become a founder again.I didn’t know I’d become a woman in AI.I didn’t know I’d join global working groups or build digital ecosystems or teach myself everything from scratch.

But here we are.

Six months later…I feel like myself again.Not the version of me that was surviving.The version that’s building.

This year stretched me, sharpened me, cracked me open, and rebuilt me brick by brick.

I learned:

• I work best when I’m trusted to build alone

• My ideas weren’t too big — my environments were too small

• The projects I feared became the projects that saved me

• Healing isn’t soft, sometimes it looks like building empires

• Confidence comes from evidence, not hype

• Sometimes you outgrow your past so quickly it shocks even you

And the biggest lesson?

I am allowed to evolve.Wildly. Rapidly. Fearlessly.

I’m not who I was in January.I’m not who I was in June.I’m not even who I was last month.

I’m stepping into a version of myself that feels aligned on every level:creative, strategic, spiritual, intellectual, and grounded.

This December isn’t a grind month.It’s a flex month.A rest month.A let it land month.

A month to breathe, absorb, process, and settle into who I’ve become.

Because 2026 isn’t just a new year.It’s the beginning of a new era — the AI era, the academic era, the soft power era, the “I finally came home to myself” era.

Six months in…I’m proud.And I’m ready.

— Marie Mills

Founder • Scholar • Architect of CO-101