Stephanie May Wilson

Stephanie May Wilson is tired of seeing young women constantly pressured to live and be a certain way, whether by well-meaning family and friends or by our culture’s unrealistic standards. That was her experience, too — until she found a way to break through the outside noise and build a life she truly loves. Now, she wants to help other young women do the same.

As a bestselling author, podcaster, speaker and course creator, Stephanie helps women navigate what she refers to as the “Everything Era” (the years between 25 and 35 when most of life gets decided). Her goal is to help women make choices that honor God and uncover true joy. Today, we’re chatting with Stephanie about her favorite forms of self-care, her messy journey to taking charge of her own life and the apps that are helping her stay sane in this busy season.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

Oh my goodness, you’re going to let me start this out by talking about food? I’m in! I’m a total foodie.

I should be clear: I’m a foodie who doesn’t exactly love to cook. But my very favorite life moments happen around food. Truly, I’m at my best when I’m trying a new restaurant with my best friends. It’s my favorite form of self-care.

That being said, “Hi, I’m Stephanie May Wilson.” I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. For the last 10 years, I’ve made my home in Nashville, Tennessee, and in just a few months, my husband and I are packing up our lives and our 3-year-old twins and moving to Granada, Spain. It may be a year; it may be longer. We’ll just have to see!

But wherever I am — Denver, Nashville, Spain or anywhere in between — my go-to meal is pasta. Any kind of Italian food, really. And I love it even more when we all order a bunch of dishes and do it family-style. That way, we get to try everything!

There’s a restaurant near my best friend’s house in Colorado that I worked at for a while just after college. It’s a family-owned Italian place, and every time I go home to Colorado, everybody knows that I want to go to Via Toscana. I want the Toscana pizza and a slice of their chocolate mousse cake, and in this particular instance, I definitely do not want to share.

view our airplane window — Leonardo Yip; Unsplash

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity (or activities) do you love engaging in, which also help you find essential spiritual renewal?

I have travel on the brain these days (okay, okay, I always have travel on the brain), and so I’m going to start with that. There’s nowhere I feel closer to God than when I’m traveling. There’s something about the different sites and smells and being out of my comfort zone that cracks open my heart and opens my eyes wide to be able to see myself and my life and God so much more clearly and with so much more perspective.

The second nonspiritual activity (that’s also totally spiritual) that I love engaging in is time with my friends. I truly am who I am because of the women in my life. Every time I’m with my friends, I laugh until my stomach hurts, but also, I always walk away from our time together having learned so much. Something profound happens when a group of women gets together and tell the truth about their lives. They all walk away better. I know I do.

That’s why I’ve been doing my podcast, “Girls Night,” for so many years. I found myself having profoundly life-giving, life-changing conversations with friends and wishing that someone else could have been there to hear them and benefit from their wisdom, too. So finally, I decided to capture those conversations in a podcast. Seven years later, we’re still going strong!

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?

I’m a total relationships person. In a lot of ways, relationships are how I define my place in the world, and getting along, making people happy, being kind, agreeable, enough but not too much — those are the things I’ve always believed would keep my place at the table secure.

Now, I know that part of this is good — my ability and desire to care for and stay connected to my people are good. The dark side arrives when it comes at the expense of me. This happens the most when it comes to decision-making. In both big life decisions and little daily decisions, it’s so hard for me to quiet outside voices and hear my own.

I want to make the people in my life proud. I want them to feel loved and valued, and I want to be loved and approved of by them, so it’s really hard for me to make a decision when I know someone close to me (or even someone far away from me!) thinks it’s the wrong one.

It’s taken a lot of therapy, a lot of inner work and a lot of practice for me to start to call the shots in my own life, instead of being shuffled along by what everyone around me thinks I should be doing.

The turning point for me came when a friend looked me in the eye and said, “Steph, you get to decide.”

She showed me that this is my life, these are my decisions to make and I need to make them intentionally. Otherwise, I’m going to end up in a life that looks nothing like what I want or need.

It’s been a long journey and, at times, a super messy one, but it’s gotten so much better over time, and my life has gotten so much better, too!

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

I’ve wrestled with so many big decisions over the last 10 years: Is this my person? Do I want to live here or here? What do I want to do for work? Are we ready to have kids? Do I even want to be a mom? I spent so much time feeling like there must be a right way to do all of this and I’m certainly getting it wrong.

But ultimately, through a lot of trial and error and a lot of help from the brilliant people in my corner, I figured it out.

I worked really hard to identify what’s important to me and I’ve tried to build my life accordingly, and I love how it’s turned out!

In the last 10 years, I’ve built a marriage, a family, a career, a home, a community and a life that I truly love — a life that I’m proud of and excited to wake up to each day — a life that looks and feels like me.

And now, knowing how hard that was to figure out, I’m on a mission to help other women do the same … not build a life that looks like mine, but a life that looks like theirs.

That’s what my new book, “Create a Life You Love,” is all about.

“Create a Life You Love” helps women take off the pressure of what they “should” be doing so they can figure out what they truly want and then take steps to get there.

Life — and the decisions that go into making one — can (and should!) be a reflection of what’s most important to the woman who’s actually living it, and this book will help women get there.

I’m so excited for it to be out in the world!

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

You know, when it comes to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, I always find myself asking that exact question, “Holy Spirit, is that you? Or am I just hungry? Was that just a butterfly in my stomach, or are you telling me to do something?” But the thing I’m learning to do more and more these days is to be okay with being wrong — as long as I’m wrong in the right direction.

If you feel the pull to say something kind to someone, or buy something for someone, or spend a little bit of time with someone, or send a text to someone you haven’t talked to in a while, it’s really easy to sit there and think, “Was that a prompting from God? Or am I just making it up?” But really, that’s an unnecessary question.

My friend Hanna (Hanna Seymour) always quotes her dad (Michael Easley) in saying, “Everyone’s under-encouraged.” And so what if it wasn’t a specific prompt from the Holy Spirit? You’re still doing God’s work, loving his people. I’d rather give it a shot and maybe get it wrong, as long as I’m getting it wrong in the right direction — in the direction of love and kindness and goodness and in loving the people God loves — all of them.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you right now?

Okay, I have to be extra real at this moment. I’m in a bit of a hair-on-fire season of life right now. I’m a mom to 3-year-old twins. I’m in the process of releasing a book. And in a few months, I’m going to be moving my family to Spain — all the while running my media company and trying to … you know … wash my hair every so often.

This is more of a coffee-on-the-go season of life (preferably in a cup with a strong lid so it doesn’t spill when it inevitably gets knocked over) instead of a long, relaxed cup of coffee season. There’s not a whole lot of rest in my life right now, not a lot of stillness.

But one of the things I’ve been fighting for relentlessly — even when basically everything else goes out the window — is sleep.

You really learn the value of sleep when you don’t get any for a while (looking at you, new parents!), and so I will do absolutely anything I can to preserve a really good night of sleep.

And every time I do, I marvel at the fact that God created us in a way where we need hours upon hours of time in every single 24-hour period where we’re totally at rest.

None of us are as good at Sabbath as we want to be. None of us have as much stillness in our lives as would be good for us.

But the fact that God made it so that we literally cannot function without hours of stillness and peace in every 24-hour span — that just feels like the greatest kindness. I think about it every single night.

So right now, sleep is really one of my richest spiritual practices.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed the game and changed your heart? What radically altered your life? What changed your reality?

Everything Shauna Niequist has ever written. She is such a gifted communicator and storyteller, and the way she walks through the world and then writes about it is so endlessly inspiring to me. I’ve learned so much about God through her books, so much about myself, so much about friendship, travel, life in hard seasons and how to soak in the beauty of life.

The other two resources that have made all the difference for me are two of my spiritual big sisters. They’re dear friends of mine who also happen to be some of the wisest women on the planet.

Mariko Clark: My favorite thing about Mariko is the fact that she’s not afraid to get a little messy. She doesn’t shy away from big questions, hard seasons or messy emotions. She sits in them with you, and the wisdom she imparts is so truly God-given. I always walk away from my time with her better and closer to God.

Mariko is a fantastic spiritual big sister, and because of the beautiful podcast she hosts and upcoming children’s Bible, I get to share her with you, too!

Hanna Seymour: Hanna’s my other favorite spiritual big sister (and dear friend). Hanna is an author, a podcaster and a truly gifted Bible teacher. With her devotion to the Word of God, her depth of knowledge and insight and experience studying it, and the fact that her teaching of it is equal parts approachable and brilliant, I’ll be learning from her forever. She’s also finishing up seminary right now, and I’ve loved hearing her insights and takeaways on Instagram along the way.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or even thrive) in tough times — times like these! Name one resource you’re savoring and/or finding indispensable in this current season, and tell us what it’s doing for you.

The way I’m surviving times like these is by unplugging. I’ve found that while it’s important for me to know what’s going on in the world, I don’t need the 24-hour, always-at-my-fingertips stream of information in order to do that. And when I do spend too much time watching the news or scrolling on my phone, I can actively feel my mental health deteriorating.

But it’s really hard not to scroll. It’s so hard to look away. And even though I’m a person with a pretty substantial amount of self-discipline, my phone gets the best of me often. (Especially late at night or early in the morning.)

So I finally decided to ask for help. I downloaded an app called Freedom and set up some filters and parameters so that I am locked out of most of my phone between the hours of 9:30 p.m. and 9 a.m.

I can’t scroll social media, I can’t read the news and I can’t even Google something. Anything that becomes a distraction or keeps me up late at night instead of unplugging and falling asleep — I am truly unable to access it until the time expires in the morning. And it has been a game-changer for me.

My favorite part of that app is that when you try to access something that you’ve blocked, or if you’re using Instagram, for example, and the blackout time starts, it shows you a green screen that just says, “You’re free.”

And every time I see it, I take a deep breath, put down my phone and actually feel like I am.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m not dreaming right now, necessarily. I’m actually in the process of walking out the things I’ve been dreaming about for the last several years.

I’m pretty certain that my new book, “Create a Life You Love,” and the idea of the “Everything Era” that I talk about in it, is going to be what I talk about for the next 10 years if not for the rest of my life.

There is so much pressure on women (from all corners, and it’s pushing us in all different directions!) to be a certain way, to live a certain way and to make certain decisions.

But the truth is, there’s not one exact right way to live your life. There couldn’t possibly be!

We’re all different, and we all have different personalities, circumstances, families, backgrounds, struggles, gifts, desires, dreams, needs, responsibilities and more and more and more. And so what’s right and good and best for one of us just won’t work the same for everybody. Really, what’s right and good and best for us in one season might change even for us just a few months later!

And so I want to help women find some space, some quiet and a place to rest and breathe and ask questions and be able to hear themselves enough to find the answers. I want to help women live their lives confidently, creatively and authentically.

I have such big dreams for this work and for this book specifically. As I’m writing this, the book comes out in about six weeks, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen when it does. But I’m praying for big things, because I want to see as many women as possible be set free to live lives they are proud of and excited to wake up to each day — lives that look and feel like them.

A 2022 survey found that 45% of people haven’t felt deep joy in over two years, and 25% have forgotten what it feels like to be truly happy.

Those are sad statistics but not necessarily surprising. We all go through seasons that are harder than others. Seasons when we don’t love the life we’re living (at least not every aspect of it). And that’s okay. But one thing we can do is add something that brings us closer to God and gives us joy.

Take, for example, how Stephanie travels whenever possible because “there’s nowhere I feel closer to God than when I’m traveling.”

What is it for you? Connecting with friends over food or coffee? Hiking difficult trails? Trying new creative outlets even if you’re not good at them yet? If you’re in a hard season right now, I hope you find that thing that brings you joy — and helps you see Jesus in a new light.