HI! I’m Monica.
I am a 70-year-old writer, oil painter, soul-led chaos coordinator, and retired woman who built an entire second life after asking the highly inconvenient question: “What now?”
I write for women over 60 who were handed a script, a casserole dish, a sensible pair of shoes, and a long list of things they were “supposed to” become, then woke up one day thinking, “Absolutely not. There is still fire in this old furnace.”
You will read articles about reinvention, retirement, aging, soul connection, nervous system rewiring, making peace with quiet, making trouble with truth, and refusing to fade politely into the wallpaper. My work is part personal essay, part spiritual field note, part kitchen-table sermon, and part “somebody finally said the damn thing.”
Before I began writing for Substack, I enjoyed a 40 year career as a fine art oil painter who believes color is not decoration but evidence of aliveness. My art, like my writing, is built from instinct, beauty, bruises, resurrection, and the occasional holy refusal to behave.
I do not teach women how to become better versions of who they were. She invites them to stop dragging around the old version altogether.
I know probability is not prophecy, retirement is not a waiting room, and “supposed to” is a trap wearing church shoes.
Welcome to the rewire. Bring coffee. Bring questions. Leave the shrinking at the door.
