Interior Alchemy by Natalie Kirkpatrick

Strategically Unpinned
A state of deliberate unfastening

Visceral clarity. This is the pulse.

We talk about letting go like it's a collapse.
But some of us don't fall—we unpin.
We let go consciously.
Quietly.
Like loosening the thread of a story we've outlived.
Not because we're drifting.
Because we're choosing not to reattach too soon.

Strategically unpinned is a state where nothing is holding you in place—
and you don't panic.
You listen.
You wait.
You recalibrate.

To be strategically unpinned is to release the architecture of your former clarity—
the job title, the coping strategy, the schedule, the person.
Not because it's no longer true.

It's not a breakdown.
It's the nervous system making room for a signal
that hasn't fully arrived.

There's a stretch of time between collapse and 
clarity—
and most people run from it.
They want to be reattached.
Rebranded.
Relabeled.

But you—
you're holding the pause.
You're letting the rhythm speak before you
assign it a name.

This isn't a spiritual laziness.
This is sovereign restraint—
the kind that refuses to seduce certainty just to 
feel safe.

Unpinning is a leadership act.
It's a refusal to sell out your signal.
Just to give someone else the illusion that you're 
stable.

To lead unpinned is to say:
I trust what's forming more than I trust
performance.
I won't secure myself to what I've outgrown—
even it leaves me temporarily unmoored.

This is where clarity gestates.
Where presence replaces performance.
Where the signal gets cleaner because you
stopped forcing it to arrive on time.

Not everything that's undone is broken. Some things are just in the pause between truths.

We're trained to re-pin.
To secure.
To move forward even if it hurts.

But you've learned to sit with the loose thread.
To let your rhythm reintroduce itself.
To name what is no longer yours
before you reach for what is.

Strategic unpinning is not a void.
It's a recalibration.
It's where you become less available to your past—
and more faithful to your future self's nervous
system.

You're not untethered.
You're in the hinge.
The wobble isn't a problem—it's the place
your clarity starts to breathe.

Let one pin go. See what breathes again.