I’m Nicole Reilly
I’ve always experienced life a little differently.
Not in a dramatic way.
Just in a way that notices more.
For a long time, I thought that came from being adopted at birth, from growing up feeling slightly out of step with the family I loved.
I assumed that was why I was such a deep, reflective child.
Why I listened more than I spoke.
Why I seemed to sense things that others moved past.
But as I grew older, I began to understand that something else was at work.
I was sensing what lived beneath the surface before it was spoken out loud.
Emotional undercurrents.
Unsaid grief.
The quiet truth in a room that hadn’t figured out the language.
I was born and raised in New Orleans, in a culture steeped in ritual, devotion, and the unseen.
Catholicism was part of the air we breathed.
Saints and symbols, mystery and reverence woven into everyday life.
It taught me early that not everything real is visible, and not everything sacred is explainable.
Still, I didn’t have a framework for what I was perceiving.
Only a deep internal sense that seeing clearly carried responsibility
— and sometimes cost.
Joan of Arc, "The Maid of Orléans," is said to have spoken these words, which have stayed with me for years:
“I am not afraid, for God is with me.
I was born for this!"
I didn’t understand it at first. But over time, it began to feel less like a declaration and more like a quiet recognition.
Seeing Clearly Hasn’t Always Been Easy
It has made me direct.
Honest.
Less tolerant of pretense.
It has also asked me to do hard things —the kind of things you don’t prepare for, and never forget.
Before this work had language, I was a Registered Nurse.
My specialty was home health patients with wounds that would not heal.
I spent years at bedsides, nursing people as they healed and some as they died, holding space for their families as life loosened its grip.
I learned how to stay when there was nothing to fix.
How to be steady in rooms filled with grief
How to witness pain without turning away.
That capacity didn’t end when I left nursing.
I have been the one to carry difficult truths,
to make the phone call no one wants to make,
to say the words that change a family forever.
I’ve stood at thresholds where loss arrived suddenly and without mercy,
and I’ve learned how to keep my feet on the ground while everything else fell away.
When my husband lost two brothers within two weeks of one another.
When my daughter’s best friend chose death.
When I lost my closest confidant.
When grief asked more of me than I thought I could give.
These moments shaped me quietly.
They taught me that presence is not something you offer lightly.
It is something you earn by staying.
I learned early that not everyone wants
clarity.
And not everyone is ready to be met so directly.
Some truths arrive before language.
Some moments require steadiness more than comfort.
For a long time, I carried this way of being privately.
But eventually, I understood that this wasn’t something to hide or soften.
It was something to embody with humility, discernment, and care.
Today, this is the foundation of my work.
I listen for what’s real, even when it hasn’t been named yet.
I stay present long enough for truth to emerge.
I’m not interested in spectacle or performance, only in what steadies and clarifies.
This way of being hasn’t made life simpler.
But it has made it honest.
And it has allowed me to meet women in moments when seeing clearly matters more than reassurance.
This is the place I work from.
And it’s a place I know well.
Being this way has shaped my life in very real ways.
It’s meant moving through friendships differently.
It’s meant not participating in gossip or surface-level connections.
It’s meant being misunderstood and at times, seen as serious, too much, a bitch, when what’s actually true is that I care deeply and speak plainly.
I’ve learned that depth isn’t something you perform.
It’s something you live.
And living it asks for honesty, discernment, and a willingness (and bravery) to do the hard things!
I was born for this.