Twirling my long golden hair, sitting on my mother’s dull, brown Naugahyde couch, in the den of our home deep in Cajun country, when Barbara Walters ruined me for an ordinary life. My young mind was cracked open in that moment. It wasn’t anything spectacular that she did — it was who she was with that caught my attention.

She was interviewing some bohemian types on a New York City street, and I could not look away.

Wait. Do people actually live like that?

That question, asked by an eight-year-old on a couch every reader my age will recognize on sight, is where a dream I still carry was born — a dream, as it turns out, to live in the West Village of Manhattan. Not Brooklyn. Not the Upper East Side. The West Village, thank you very much.

To say I was enthralled would be an understatement — I could hardly contain my excitement, but I did. ‘Cause, well, the family would never understand such a betrayal. After all, being Cajun and being family were the only two things that actually counted according to Mom.

At the time, I didn’t know I wanted to make art. I just knew the people on my TV screen seemed fun, interesting, and, as we said back then, “outta sight!” It was 1968—a year of upheaval, Vietnam protests, flower power, and hippies. While the adults around me were consumed by unrest, those bohemian folks on TV seemed to have the whole joyous-life thing figured out, unrest be damned.

Even as a little girl, I knew this would be part of my future. I was only 8 or 9, but the spark was lit.

As the youngest in a large family, born much later than my siblings, I was often relegated to watching and not speaking. So I watched, silently judging, as the youngest children do. And what I saw didn’t impress me.

The rhythm seemed to be: go to the job, go to church, go to the family gathering, repeat — a real greatest-hits album of obligation. Our family gatherings, filled with dozens of relatives, were our equivalent of the country club. But none of the adults around me seemed truly happy or joyous — not one, not even the ones with good hair.

To my little girl’s spirit, this seemed… off. I never spoke about it to anyone. Instead, I let my inner knowing agree with what I felt: there has to be more than this.

I’d retreat to my favorite closet in my big sister’s bedroom with my crayons and coloring books, doing my best impression of a beatnik from inside a closet in Cajun country, and I’d try to feel the energy of those bohemian creators I saw on TV. I did this for years. No one questioned it. Possibly because no one noticed.

Fast forward to my mid-30s. After two failed attempts to ask for a divorce from the preacher — third time’s the charm, apparently — I finally got my wish. Free of the ridiculous expectations placed on the wife of a man of the cloth, it was my turn.

I was going to NYC.

I landed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, eventually married a classical pianist. I threw myself into his career. Together, we accomplished some pretty incredible projects. But I wasn’t living like a bohemian, making art, or hanging out in street cafes. That was the dream. I was still living like a “good wife”, not a women living her dream.

But I was close — geographically, if nothing else.

My time in Manhattan left me with priceless memories and connections. It wasn’t the exact dream, but it taught me something: the essence of a dream can transcend the details.

Now, I live in a small high-rise in the heart of a mid-sized city nestled among the Blue Ridge Mountains. And guess what? Turns out you don’t actually need a Manhattan zip code to feel like yourself.

The essence of that dream is the framework of my life, now.

To live each day in bold, living color, to make art, to create communities of like-minded people for the sheer joy of connection and conversation.

No, I’m not in NYC, but I’m living my dream, and golly, it feels terrific — turns out the West Village was never really the point.

More dream stories to come, no doubt. It’s been a wild roller coaster ride these past 40 years — more upside down than I’d like to admit, but I lived to tell about it, and I’m thrilled to share it with you. My hope is that these words uplift, inspire, and encourage you to pause and consider your own dreams.

Warmly,

Monica

PS - For a limited time, new paid subscribers get 20% off, plus my Breakthrough guide — for women ready to point their attention at their own dreams again, on purpose, the way you’d point it at a red car you decided to want. It is available on the PERKS PAGE Also! You will recieve a weekly invitation to join the free of charge, the BREAKTHROUGH gathering via zoom, where ladies gather to support one another as we navigate this thing called retirement.

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And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.

Often I’m asked why I’m so adamant about what I do — guiding women back to their passions, their dreams, and most of all, their relationship with their own soul. This true story — about me and a movie called Same Time, Next Year — will shed some light on how I came to this mission.

It all begins in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, a little town seven miles northwest of Tulsa. It was 1978. I had a three year old daughter at the time.

I was all of twenty-three years old, already five years into my marriage to the preacher-man. My life was nothing but a daily to-do list of what I should do, what I might do — never, ever what I wanted to do. Wanting would have been unforgivable.

The Sand Springs Women’s Club — a very proper local ladies’ group — had it written right into their charter that all ministers’ wives were automatic members, no forms, no way out, no say in the matter.

So, I went. Once. The one time I chose to attend their gathering happened to be the day they were all going to see a newly released movie at the theater: Same Time, Next Year.

Thank goodness — at least I got to see a movie, because I knew — knew — I could not sit in someone’s perfectly decorated parlor, nibbling petit fours off a china plate with a lace napkin on my lap, pretending to belong. I have never once successfully pretended to belong anywhere, and that day was not about to be the exception.

As it turns out, that movie launched the beginning of my thirst to understand life. And that’s not nothing. After all — I was a preacher’s wife, wasn’t I?

According to everyone else, we preacher’s wives were supposed to have it all together and know about life.

Not hardly — not at all, especially not at twenty-three.

All I can say is — thank goodness for that movie, because it cracked open everything for me.

Same Time, Next Year, starring Ellen Burstyn and Alan Alda, is the story of a couple who meet by chance at a retreat on the California coast.

After spending one night together, they make a promise to meet again at the same place, the same weekend, every year.

But what really caught my attention — and stayed with me — wasn’t the romance.

It was the breathtaking evolution of Ellen Burstyn’s character.

When they first meet in the 1950s, she’s the perfect picture of a stay-at-home wife — heels, pearls, polite smiles. But year after year, scene after scene, she grows.

Her clothes change, her language sharpens, her energy expands.

By 1978, she’s running her own dynamic catering business — a woman who’d completely remade herself.

Even back then, something inside me knew: this life I was living could change. I wasn’t stuck!

That movie marked me.

It set a yearning inside me that never left — a question I would carry for decades: how do I grow? How do I become someone I can respect?

That fortunate night was the beginning of my quest — my thirst to understand more, to live more, to experience more.

I had a taste, and I wanted more, although it would be many years before my search became serious.

It wasn’t until my mid-thirties, when I met the man who became my second husband — who introduced me to new thought and new age teachings — that my world cracked open again, this time even deeper.

The search was long, winding, sometimes painful.

But from the time I saw Same Time, Next Year until now, my life has been an unfolding.

I’ve been a music producer, a talent manager, a published writer in music magazines, and the owner of a small online newspaper at one time.

I’ve had dinner with Gorbachev, Richard Nixon, Madeleine Albright, and a whole slew of others.

I was exposed to a buffet of life — choices and paths laid out right in front of me.

I would question these “bigger-than-life” people, asking them how they came to build the lives they had. None of their answers were particularly memorable, but they had one thing in common: they just knew, without a doubt, that they were on a mission.

Each conversation confirmed something I already sensed: there was far more to a happy, successful life than what I was shown growing up in the bayous of South Louisiana.

This was when my obsession with self-help began.

At one point, before my house in D.C. burned down, I had a library of over 600 self-help books — enough, in hindsight, that the fire marshal probably should have asked a few questions.

I devoured every one of them, convinced the next chapter, the next tool, the next revelation would unlock the thing I couldn’t quite name.

And somewhere along the way, it did.

But — let’s be honest — it didn’t have to take as long as it did.

Looking back, I can see it clearly now: I wasn’t just committed to growth. I was addicted to it.

That’s why I often call the self-help industry the original codependent relationship.

I had it all — the books, the life coach, the tools.

But it still wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t until life forced me into brutal honesty that everything began to change.

At that point, I had lost nearly everything — no one to lean on, no sense of safety, not physically and certainly not financially.

All I had was myself, and my cat, who offered no advice whatsoever and judged me the entire time anyway.

That’s when I sequestered myself — shut out every outside voice and surrendered to the power of simply sitting with me.

No announcements, no declarations.

I just decided: I’m staying in.

I shuttered the windows — not to block the world, but to soften it.

And in that hush, I finally heard something I hadn’t in years: my own soul, whispering back.

In the evenings, I sat by the window and let the moon keep me company; in the mornings, it was the birds, singing just for me, it seemed.

With each quiet day, the shroud I had worn — stitched from years of expectations and obligations — began to fall away.

Just like Ellen Burstyn’s character in Same Time, Next Year, I realized that time wasn’t my enemy — it was my teacher.

She didn’t let age or circumstance define her. She grew, changed, and broke the rules that were never really hers to follow.

By the end, she wasn’t the same woman she’d been at the start — she was fuller, wiser, more alive.

But we can open them, too, at any moment.

Peace had finally replaced the need to understand.

And in that peace, something new was born — a desire to carry a torch for others.

Especially for women with stories like mine — women who spent too many years living by shoulds instead of desires.

I want to share what I’ve learned, to show other women how to create lives they’re proud of, to help them recover the dreams they thought were lost, and the power they were never taught they had.

And now, after all this time, I can tell you the truth it took me half a lifetime to find: honesty with yourself, and the willingness to actually know your soul.

That’s why I offer the resources I offer today.

Not because it’s trendy, not because it’s easy.

But because I don’t want you — or anyone — to spend your retirement searching for what’s already inside, waiting.

You do have to be hungry for it.

No one can do that part for you.

But when you are ready, the path can be so much shorter than mine was.

That’s why I’m here, and why I create.

If you’re ready to meet yourself — not the version the world trained you to be, but the one who’s been waiting underneath all along — the BREAKTHROUGH guide is here for you.

It’s not just a guidebook — it’s a mirror, a map, a key, all at once.

It’s the starting point I wish someone had handed me the day I first woke up starving for more.

You don’t have to wait forty years. You can start today.

👉 I invite you to join this movement, now 7K strong of ladies who are breaking the noise of “ should be, or ought to do” handed to them on a silver plate. It is my delight to make my BREAKTHROUGH guide a gift to each new subscriber. It is available on the PERKS page.

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And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.

This morning, sitting here drinking my coffee and still thinking about the latest AI argument, something occurred to me.

Painting is the other thing I do. Yup, I am an artist. Have been a career artist for 30 years.

People sometimes ask what inspired a painting. They want to know where the idea came from, what I was feeling, what I was trying to express, or why I chose a particular subject.

They do not ask what tools I used. Nor do they do not stand in front of one of my paintings and demand to know the brand of brushes, whether I used a palette knife, whether I projected a reference image, or whether anyone helped me stretch the canvas.

The tools are not the first thing they see. The ART is seen is experienced before respond and only then, if they are interested, do they become curious about the process.

Why is writing suddenly being treated differently?

For the past nineteen months, readers have responded to my work with lines like “that was a brilliant phrase,” “I have never heard it put that way,” “you said exactly what I have been feeling,” and “this made me see my life differently.”

Not once did those readers stop and ask whether I used AI.

It did not occur to them because they were busy responding to the idea. Isn’t that what we want, as writers, to illicit a response within the reader

?

They were encountering the work the way people have always encountered art, writing, music, and every other form of human expression.

They were asking themselves:

Did this move me, did it make me think, did I recognize myself in it, did this writer give language to something I could not name?

Now we are teaching readers to ask a different question first.

Did she cheat?

That is what the AI detector changes.

It does not merely provide information; it introduces suspicion.

It redirects the reader’s attention away from the meaning of the work and toward an investigation of how it was produced.

That is not neutral.

It changes the relationship between the writer and the reader.

Before the reader has even had time to consider the thought, the platform has planted another thought in its place:

Should I trust this?

And that is the part I find deeply troubling. And why I have chosen to not allow my articles, nor my notes be filtered through an AI Detector.

We have allowed other people’s fear of AI to change the way we look at writers.

Instead of asking where an idea came from, we are being trained to question whether the writer is legitimate; instead of talking about the work, we are talking about the tools; instead of wondering whether something is true, useful, beautiful, funny, provocative, or meaningful, we are asking whether a machine helped polish a sentence.

In painting, the brush does not get credit for the vision, the paint does not invent the subject, and the palette knife does not decide what the artist is trying to say.

A tool is a tool. It can assist the process, but it cannot live the life, supply the memories, or create the convictions. It cannot know what it felt like to be five years old watching Captain Kangaroo, or seventy years old wondering what dreams are still waiting to be reclaimed. It cannot be me.

The same is true of writing.

The idea, the story, the point of view — those come from me: seventy years of living, observing, surviving, laughing, losing, painting, questioning, and paying attention. The voice is mine, too.

Using a tool to help shape, organize, or polish those thoughts does not erase the mind that created them.

That does not strike me as valuable.

That strikes me as especially damaging in the faith and spirituality space, where people come seeking meaning, connection, insight, comfort, possibility, and truth.

A detector cannot measure any of those things.

It cannot tell you whether the writer believes what she wrote, whether a sentence came from lived experience, or whether the work helped someone through a lonely afternoon, changed a decision, reopened a dream, or reminded a woman that her life is not over.

It can only encourage the reader to inspect the machinery.

Last night, someone came into my space and asked why I had turned off the AI detector.

He asked what I was worried about.

But he was not engaging with my work — he was investigating my compliance. He was not curious about the idea; he was curious about whether I had passed the test.

That is exactly the culture this tool creates.

It does not create better readers so much as inspectors; it does not encourage discernment so much as suspicion; it does not deepen the conversation so much as replace it.

Curiosity about a writer’s process can be fascinating.

But curiosity comes after appreciation.

Suspicion arrives before the work has even been allowed to speak.

That is not a culture worth participating in.

My readers should get to encounter the thought first — deciding for themselves whether it resonates, challenges them, makes them laugh, irritates them, or opens something inside them, and responding to the work itself before anything else.

The same courtesy we give every other artist.

Because we are teaching readers to interrogate the tools before they have even encountered the thought.

And that is a loss for writers, a loss for readers, and a loss for anyone who still believes words are supposed to connect human beings, not provide fresh evidence for the internet police.

Hi, I’m Monica,

I successfully retired from abandoning myself to keep everyone else comfortable. I publish articles for women over 60 who want to reclaim their dreams and desires that they put on hold while caring for everybody else. One article reached 75,000 readerssharing.

Come join the party of irrevrant yet sometimes sobering thoughts, ideas and motivations center around the core idea: WE ARE NOT DONE YET!

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Get in the Red Car

Let’s have a little fun.

Stop for a moment and imagine a red car.

Not just any red car. Your red car.

Maybe it is a convertible with the top down, and maybe you are wearing a yellow scarf that has absolutely no practical business being around your neck while you drive, but it looks fabulous flying behind you.

You are on a winding mountain road, your best girlfriend beside you, both of you laughing so hard you can barely remember what started it.

The sun is warm, the air is rushing past you, and for once, nobody needs anything. In your scene you are driving a red car.

Can you see it? Are you able to feel it?

Good.

That is all I wanted you to do.

Now watch what happens.

You may notice a red car later today. Perhaps one will pass beneath your window, appear on television, or pull up beside you at a traffic light.

Red cars have not suddenly multiplied because you imagined one. They were already there.

What changed was your attention.

You gave the red car a little life inside your imagination, and now your mind knows it matters.

So let’s play again.

When you were a girl, what did you dream of doing?

Perhaps you wanted to fly an airplane.

Do not immediately start thinking about flight school, your eyesight, the cost of lessons, or whether a seventy-year-old woman has any business in a cockpit.

Good lawd a-mercy. We have been practical long enough.

Just imagine flying.

See your hands on the controls, look down at the earth beneath you, and feel the plane rising as the ground gets smaller and the horizon gets larger.

Did you want to become a singer, a teacher or a nurse?

Do not concern yourself with whether you can carry a tune. Imagine yourself onstage beneath a pool of light. Hear the music begin, and feel the moment just before you open your mouth and your voice fills the room.

Maybe you wanted to paint, write books, travel the world, dance, train horses, build furniture, design clothes, live by the ocean, or become the first woman on the moon.

Do not ask whether the dream is reasonable — we are not being reasonable right now. If we were together in person, I’d likely pull out a rule to slap you- it’s that important to cease being reasonable. ( just kidding but wanted to make the point vivid)

We are playing.

Reclaiming forgotten dreams may be one of retirement’s greatest missed opportunities, and we do not speak about them nearly enough.

We talk about retirement planning, downsizing, investments, healthcare, staying active, and finding something useful to do with all that time.

But when do we ask a woman what she once dreamed of before life began handing out assignments, before practicality took command, before she became responsible for everybody and everything?

Those dreams may be difficult to recall at first, and they may not return as complete sentences — they may return instead as a sound, a smell, a texture, or a sudden little flicker of delight.

That happened recently when Captain Kangaroo began floating across my mind.

He and Mr. Green Jeans would bring out construction paper, crayons, paste, and scissors to make something, and this little girl’s mouth practically watered. Whatever Captain Kangaroo was making, I wanted to make it too.

A woman commenting beneath my Substack note wrote:

“I can perennially hear him cutting construction paper.”

The instant I read that, I heard it too.

That thick, scratchy sound of scissors working their way through construction paper.

Sixty years later, the sound is still stored somewhere inside us and it is likely it is not the only the sound we remember. We remember the promise the sound carried.

Something was about to be created. Brightly colored paper would be cut, folded, pasted, and turned into something that had not existed moments before.

Creativity was not a word I had for what I was feeling. Sitting there, I certainly was not predicting that I would one day become a fine artist.

All I knew was that when Captain Kangaroo reached for the construction paper, something inside me leaned closer.

Something came alive.

That little girl was paying attention.

She did not ask whether making things was productive, wonder whether she was talented enough, or concern herself with establishing a brand, finding her niche, or creating an additional income stream.

She wanted the paper, the crayons, and to make something.

A very important question for you to consider: What made you lean closer when you were a girl?

Was it the ivory coolness of piano keys beneath your fingers, the smell of library books, the click of tap shoes against a wooden floor, or the sweep of a full skirt as you turned in front of a mirror?

Perhaps it was the smell of sawdust, bread baking, wet earth, grease in your father’s garage, or oil paint. Maybe it was the sight of an airplane crossing the sky.

We tend to dismiss these memories as nostalgia — sweet little scraps from childhood that float through our minds and then disappear again.

I want you to consider that they are breadcrumbs instead. Following the breadcrumbs can actually awaken a dream from your childhood providing you with a delicious experience of emotional depth and fun, in the now. Our goal here is to capture that essence, not to necesairly re-create the dream.

A forgotten dream does not always return waving a flag and carrying a detailed plan.

Sometimes it whispers, “Remember this?”

For forty or fifty years, most women directed their attention toward what needed to be done for someone else. We monitored moods, remembered appointments, anticipated problems, kept the peace, and carried details no one else seemed to notice.

Then retirement arrives, and all that well-trained attention is still looking outward.

No wonder a woman says, “I don’t know what I want.”

She has not lost the ability to want.

She may have simply stopped noticing the evidence.

That is where the red car practice comes in.

Choose one dream, desire, or childhood delight and let yourself play with it.

Do not make it defend its practicality, or demand that it become a business, a goal, or a complete renovation of your life.

Give it a little room in your imagination.

If you dreamed of living by the ocean, feel the cool water around your ankles, smell the salt in the air, and hear the waves arriving and retreating.

If you wanted to write, picture the notebook in your lap and feel the pleasure of a sentence arriving exactly as you hoped it would.

If you wanted to dance, turn on the music and let yourself imagine the dress, the movement, and the delicious drama of it all.

Then notice what begins appearing.

A class, a book, a conversation, an old photograph, an art supply store you have passed a hundred times without seeing.

The original dream may not return in the form you imagined at ten or twenty — reclaiming the freedom you felt watching an airplane cross the sky does not require becoming a commercial pilot, singing does not require Broadway, and painting does not require a gallery.

First, find the part that made you come alive, and let that part breathe.

You are not required to know what you want to do with the rest of your life.

For now, you can put the top down, tie on the yellow scarf, and take the red car around the bend.

See what you notice.

That is the whole opportunity for now. Not a plan. Not a decision. Just noticing — what a room smells like when you walk past it, what song makes you stop what you are doing, what you find yourself doing without deciding to do it.

Reclaiming a dream requires something many women have forgotten how to give themselves: trust. Trust that the memory returning repeatedly is worth noticing. Trust that the tiny flicker of excitement means something. Trust that a desire does not have to be practical, profitable, or approved by anyone else before we are allowed to follow it.

Self-trust does not always begin with a life-altering decision. Sometimes it begins by believing yourself when something inside you says, “I still want that.”

Now, then. Tell me. What sound, smell, or texture still carries you back? I read every comment.

Your dream may have been waiting there all along.

Leave a comment

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And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.

JULY 21, 2026

Oh Look. Another Purity Test.
Today, Substack announced a new tool that will allow readers to scan writing and receive an estimate of how much of it may have been written with AI assistance.

MY immediate response: oh look. Another purity test.

Because that is what this becomes: the moment a machine gets trusted to determine whether a human being is authentically present in her own work.

A purity test is judgment. Full stop. Someone else creates a moral standard, and the rest of us get to prove we’re clean enough, authentic enough, human enough, progressive enough, traditional enough — whatever flavor of purity happens to be required that day.

Did you write every word yourself? Did you use AI? How much? Did AI make the sentence too polished? Did you suffer sufficiently and alone over the blank page? At what precise percentage does the writing stop belonging to you?

Get “da fuck” outta here……….

A detection tool might estimate whether AI was involved in producing a piece of text. What it cannot tell you is who had the original thought. Who lived the experience. Who spoke the story aloud, rejected the first version, changed the argument, removed the bad language, restored the humor, moved the paragraphs, rewrote the ending, and edited the entire thing again on the Substack page.

It cannot tell you who supplied the life.

Seventy years old, and using AI. There. Said it.

ChatGPT, Claude, bouncing between both — speaking thoughts into one, carrying the result to the other, arguing, revising, combining, rejecting, reshaping, moving the piece into a document, rewriting it again. Often more changes happen after it’s pasted into Substack, changes that exist nowhere except on that blank publishing page and inside one particular mind.

Never once has the process been “write something about fatigue” followed by publishing whatever comes back. It begins with something lived, noticed, questioned, resisted, remembered, or finally understood.

The thought is mine. The story is mine. The judgment is mine. The humor is mine. The decision to publish is mine.

AI helps take something nebulous and press against it until what I actually think becomes visible. It doesn’t replace the thinking. It refines it, challenges it. Sometimes it hands back language too smooth, too obedient, too generic, and that language goes straight into the trash where it belongs. Sometimes it names the beating heart of something circled for an hour. Sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes I’m wrong. Then the work continues until the piece says what it means.

That’s not the absence of authorship. That’s an editorial process.

Writers have always used tools — editors, researchers, transcriptionists, dictionaries, thesauruses, writing groups, workshops, dictation, spell-check, and the opinions of every friend unfortunate enough to answer the phone mid-sentence-wrestling-match. Now some of us also use AI.

The tool changed. Human responsibility didn’t.

Yesterday, an article went through several rounds of conversation and editing with both ChatGPT and Claude before one more revision, by hand. Today, a reader sent flowers because of the emotion and connection she felt reading it

.

A machine did not live that story. A machine did not receive those flowers.

For eighteen months, this exact evolving process has been the process. Not one reader has ever accused any of it of being soulless AI slop. Not one reader has said there was no human being behind the writing. Readers seem perfectly capable of recognizing when a real woman is present — because authenticity was never a sentence construction, a punctuation pattern, or a score. It’s the presence of a human consciousness willing to stand behind what she’s said.

And now there’s a tool to help determine whether someone is authentic.

Think about the absurdity of that. Outsourcing discernment about human authenticity to an algorithm, rather than reading the work, observing the writer over time, noticing whether the ideas are coherent, whether the stories feel lived, whether the voice stays consistent. Rather than staying curious. Just pressing a button and receiving a percentage.

How wonderfully efficient. How completely devoid of context.

We used to say don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in her shoes. Now apparently we scan the shoes and ask software whether she really walked in them.

Judging without the facts has always provoked a visceral reaction here. It’s why pile-ons get resisted. It’s why joining the public stoning of someone because a crowd has decided it possesses the whole truth has never once felt right. Discernment gets built through effort — through learning to trust one’s own gut, knowing when something resonates with truth and when something feels false.

That discernment isn’t getting handed over to a scanner. Nor is there any interest in jumping through another purity hoop to satisfy someone else’s moral criteria.

Purity tests are everywhere now. Politics. Social movements. Art. Language. How enthusiastically the correct position gets embraced, how forcefully the correct person gets condemned. And now, apparently, how much mechanical assistance is permitted before humanity itself becomes questionable.

Being judged for what I am is exhausting. Being judged for what I’m not, more exhausting still. Being asked to prove innocence to people who haven’t bothered learning the facts, most exhausting of all.

Particularly amusing: embracing new tools with curiosity at seventy, while some younger people stand at the gate shouting “She used AI!”

Yes, darling. Guilty. Also used a computer. Dictated rather than typing. Wrote in Google Docs. Published through Substack. Used electricity.

None of those things authored this life.

Transparency is one thing. Turning authorship into a purity test is another.

The presence of AI does not prove the absence of a human.

And no algorithm on Earth can measure the flowers sitting in this apartment today.

Irreverently, always.

Monica

If sassy, irreverent articles from a seventy-year-old woman embracing every bit of what life still has to offer — and redefining retirement while she's at it — sound like good company, by all means, come join us.

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PS If you are like me, you don’t like PURITY tests, then please consider hitting the like button and then re-stacking so that others can be part of the fun. Thanks!

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Before You Give Up, Go Lie Down

What the last 48 hours taught me about fatigue, desire, and the dangerous decisions we make when our internal battery is dead.

This weekend, I considered giving up my Substack.

Not taking a little break. Not publishing less frequently. Giving it up.

I also questioned whether I wanted to paint anymore.

My daughter sent me a care package containing bright-colored markers with matching pens for doodling. There was a time when a box of color would have delighted me. I looked at them, felt absolutely nothing, and put them away in my studio.

Later, I stood in front of my easel and thought about the woman I used to be. The woman who could not wait to get her hands into the paint and play with color.

Where had she gone?

I wasn’t interested in reading. I wasn’t interested in painting. I wasn’t interested in developing an idea. I wasn’t even interested in taking a nap.

I was just done.

I began wondering whether the things that had animated my life had finally run their course.

That is what fatigue does when it becomes deep enough.

Fatigue is a sneaky little bastard.

It does not always announce itself with yawning and heavy eyelids. Sometimes it disguises itself as disillusionment. It tells you that you no longer care.It whispers that the thing you built has reached its natural conclusion.

And if we believe it, we can begin making permanent decisions from temporary depletion.

I Had Not Done “Nothing”

When I looked back at the previous week, the defense decided to present its evidence.

Two Breakthrough gatherings held. Articles written and published. New T-shirts created and launched. Ideas generated, people answered, decisions made, numbers watched, and the countless little details required to keep a publication alive, tended to, one after another.

I had also spent a couple of hours sitting on the patio with my friend Greg.

That was delightful. It was also an enormous expenditure of energy.

For me, two hours of social interaction can be Niagara Falls. It does not matter that I enjoy the person. Enjoyment does not make social energy free.

Love does not make it free either.

I had been counting only the things that looked like exertion and completely ignoring the cost of everything else.

Because I had not run a marathon or dug a ditch, some part of me decided I had no legitimate reason to be exhausted.

Apparently, running a Substack publication, holding two gatherings, launching merchandise, carrying on conversations, generating ideas, and being socially available did not count.

Mercy.

I keep expecting my body to produce the energy I had years ago. I particularly noticed after COVID that I could no longer do as much in one day. Now I am approaching seventy-one, still trying to tend to my health and live a creative life, while quietly expecting myself to operate as though my energy supply has never changed.

I like to think I am Superwoman.

I am not.

I Finally Stopped Trying to Rescue the Day

Over the weekend, I did something that remains surprisingly difficult for me.

I stopped.

I did not force myself to write an article. I did not try to generate enthusiasm. I did not turn my lack of interest into another problem to solve.

I allowed the day to be quiet.

Every now and then, a thought came to me and I posted it. I enjoyed doing that because the thought had arrived naturally. I had not chased it down, wrestled it to the ground, and demanded that it earn its keep.

Late Sunday afternoon, I felt an impulse to move my body. I did some deep squats, side twists, arm lifts, and knee exercises.

It took nearly the entire day for my body to come online, but eventually it did.

The important thing is that I did not take that flicker of returning energy as proof that I needed to squeeze more productivity out of the day.

I told myself:

I refuse to spend tomorrow’s energy today.

Then I slept.

First for two hours. Then for five hours. Then for another two hours.

On Monday morning, I woke up rested.

Not rested enough to run a marathon. Let’s not get carried away.

But I woke up with something I had not possessed all weekend.

Clarity.

I was not suddenly one hundred percent charged. I would estimate about eighty percent. But the questions that had felt so enormous and final over the weekend no longer felt final.

Maybe I had not stopped loving my Substack.

Maybe I was tired.

Maybe I had not stopped being a painter.

Maybe I was tired.

Maybe my curiosity had not abandoned me.

Maybe I was too depleted to feel it.

What Are You About to Give Up Because You Need to Rest?

I wonder how often women make enormous decisions while completely depleted.

Maybe you think you no longer enjoy gardening, but you have been caring for everyone else all week.

Maybe you want to quit the class you were excited to take, but you scheduled it in the middle of six other obligations.

Maybe the trip you dreamed about suddenly feels dreadful because you planned every detail and left yourself no room to breathe.

Maybe you think you have lost your ambition when your body is simply asking you to stop spending energy you do not possess.

Maybe you have not lost the dream.

Maybe you are too tired to feel it.

We are quick to interpret a loss of enthusiasm as a message about the thing itself.

Perhaps this friendship has run its course.

Perhaps I do not want to write anymore.

Perhaps I have outgrown painting.

Perhaps I need an entirely new direction.

Sometimes that may be true.

But sometimes the truth is much less dramatic.

Sometimes you need to go lie down.

Not for twenty minutes while mentally reviewing everything you should be doing.

Not while scrolling through your phone and filling your mind with other people’s noise.

Not while using rest as a waiting room before the next round of productivity.

There Is a Difference Between Being Adrift and Being Depleted

When we cannot begin something, we often assume we need discipline, structure, motivation, or a better plan.

Sometimes we do.

An enormous project can become easier when we reduce it to the smallest possible action. Don’t paint the picture. Put one tube of paint on the table. Don’t clean the entire room. Pick up one thing.

There’s an old line about how you eat an elephant — one bite at a time.In other words, don’t let the ginormity of the task at hand overcome you. This is where you take the wheel, this is the moment you regain control of your own life.

But there are other times when even one bite is too much because we are not directionless. We are depleted.

Those are not the same condition.

One may need a tiny beginning.

The other may need a goddamn chair.

The challenge is learning to tell the difference before we start prescribing ourselves another routine, system, checklist, or improvement project.

If curiosity is present but the project feels overwhelming, take one tiny step.

If curiosity itself has disappeared, perhaps the first step is no step at all.

Perhaps the answer is rest.

I Am Not Returning to the Same Pace

It would be easy to take Monday morning’s returning clarity as permission to go right back to doing everything that exhausted me.

That would be a spectacular way to waste the lesson.

So I am changing the shape of my publication.

I will publish articles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

That is enough.

If I create something between those days, it will be because I genuinely want to, not because I am frightened that everything will disappear if I stop feeding it for twelve minutes.

The podcast I record with my friend Mike can wait until August. I am finished recording for July.

Until I can create a larger buffer that allows me to take a proper extended break, I am going to protect my weekends as time to power down.

I am also going to begin counting social interaction as an expenditure of energy, even when it is wonderful. I cannot keep pretending that only unpleasant things cost me something.

I am going to stop waiting until my brain and body stage a full-scale rebellion before I grant myself permission to rest.

Before I Believe the Fatigue

I do not know yet whether I want to paint.

I am not going to demand an answer from myself today.

The paint will still be there when my energy returns. So will the markers. So will the books I have not read and the ideas I have not written.

Anything that truly belongs to me will survive my resting.

I am not Superwoman, although I have rather enjoyed believing otherwise.

I am a seventy-year-old woman with a full, creative, meaningful life and a finite supply of energy.

I can use that energy beautifully.

I cannot pretend it is endless.

Rest should not have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

So before I give up something I love, I am going to rest.

Before I decide the dream is dead, I am going to rest.

Before I confuse exhaustion with truth, I am going to rest.

Forty-two cents an article. That’s what an annual membership works out to this month, discount included — 20% off $65, still less than a candy bar buys three times a week.

Here’s the honest part: we pay more attention to what costs us something than to what arrives free. I didn’t write that rule. That’s just how we’re built.

So if this is worth 42 cents to you, join while the discount holds.

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Guilty of Nothing. Convicted Anyway.

Most of us don’t wake up expecting to go to court.

But we do.

Not the kind with a judge in a black robe. The one inside our own heads.

Something’s been noticed lately: a case against myself can get built faster than Perry Mason ever built one against anybody else.

No evidence required. No witnesses. Certainly no need for another person’s opinion.

Self-prosecution, fully underway before breakfast.

The prosecutor starts talking the minute the eyes open.

“You shouldn’t have said that yesterday.” “People probably think you’re full of yourself.” “That article wasn’t as good as you thought it was.” “Who do you think you are?”

Relentless, this one.

Then the jury gets called.

None of the jurors are actually in the room. They’re imaginary. A few old teachers. An ex-husband. Someone on Facebook. A stranger who might disagree. A mother. Society. Anyone ever given authority over this life, without ever quite realizing they’d been handed a seat in the box.

Then something stranger happens: their case gets argued for them. Assumptions about what they’re thinking. Predictions about how they’ll judge. Evidence, presented against myself, on their behalf, free of charge.

...By lunchtime, the verdict’s already in.

Guilty.

The sentence: second-guess yourself. Stay quiet. Play it safe. Don’t write that. Don’t wear that. Don’t ask for that. Don’t become too much.

Here’s what nobody mentions about that sentence: it doesn’t get served all at once. It gets served daily, in small installments, until one day retirement itself starts to feel smaller than expected. Not because retirement is small. Because a verdict has been quietly shrinking it, one “don’t” at a time, for years.

The problem was never retirement.

The problem was a life sentenced to shrink, disguised as a season simply winding down.

Here’s the part that stops everything cold.

Where is the defense attorney?

Who’s standing up, saying, “Objection. Your Honor, the prosecution is making assumptions not supported by the evidence. My client has the right to change. My client has the right to disappoint people. My client has the right to be misunderstood. My client has the right to outgrow the version of herself everyone else preferred.”

Why does nobody make that argument?

Maybe it was backwards the whole time.

Here’s what tends to get missed: the courtroom itself is only half the story. The prosecutor didn’t invent herself out of nothing. She was trained.

Decades spent trying to be a good wife, a good mother, a good employee, a good Christian, a good daughter, a good neighbor — somewhere in all that good, one particular voice got promoted to judge and jury both.

Obedience got mistaken for wisdom.

Guilt got mistaken for conscience.

Other people’s expectations got mistaken for an inner compass.

Those were never the same thing.

The compass got confused for years with a very different voice — the one that says should.

Should stay. Should forgive. Should volunteer. Should keep the peace. Shouldn’t disappoint anyone.

Should. Should. Should.

That word gets more suspicious with age, not less.

That’s a very different conversation than the one the prosecutor’s been running.

Maybe the inner compass was never the prosecutor at all.

Maybe it’s been the defense attorney the whole time. Not defending excuses. Defending humanity. Defending the right to make mistakes, to be misunderstood, to outgrow the version of herself everyone else preferred. Defending the life the soul is trying to live instead of the life fear is trying to preserve.

Maybe the question isn’t what will the jury think.

Maybe it’s why is the jury still being asked.

Retirement offers something no other season quite manages: silence. Not just quiet in the house — silence inside, enough space to finally notice how many voices have been living in that head all along. One belongs to parents. One belongs to religion. One belongs to culture. One belongs to fear. One belongs to the woman spent decades trying to be built.

And underneath all of them, almost whispering, is the woman who was always there.

To help you navigate this dynamic and to use the methods I’ve implemented to remove these uncomfortable thoughts, I have prepared a video that explains my own personal process that has allowed me to being the day with thoughts that edify my life instead adding to the burden.

The people whose opinions got rehearsed all these years were never living this life.

This is the one life being lived here.

And perhaps that’s what retirement actually offers, more than any of the rest of it.

The court, finally, can adjourn.

If the verdict’s been running your life smaller than it should be, the weekly Breakthrough gathering is where the appeal happens — a room full of women cross-examining the same old assumptions, together instead of alone in the courtroom.

New paid members get 20% off this week, plus the full perks library — including everything mentioned in this piece and more.

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Becoming a Student of Yourself

3 a.m. Wide awake. Not because of anxiety, drama, or a troubled soul. Because of a bladder with its own agenda.

Back to bed, usually. Sometimes a snack first. Always a scroll through Substack, checking on subscribers scattered clear around the other side of the world — 3 a.m. here, lunchtime somewhere else, which feels like a perfectly good reason to wonder about them. Then the television, tuned to old West Wing reruns, not for the plot, just for the sound of people talking calmly to each other until sleep comes back around.

For months, this whole routine felt like evidence of something wrong.

Then a stranger on the internet fixed it with one sentence: turns out, sleep patterns change with age, and 4 a.m. might just be when the night’s business is done. Not a malfunction. A schedule.

Well.

That’s one crisis solved by absolutely nobody trying. Yay!

Solitude took longer, because a nastier internal voice ran that show — the one insisting the neighbors think there’s something wrong with a woman who prefers her own company to a crowd. That voice shows up loudest exactly when things are going well. Sitting on the balcony at dusk, deep in a painting, thoroughly delighted — right on cue, in walks the imaginary jury to ask what the neighbors must think.

Here’s what silenced the jury: permission. Actual permission, not just tolerance. Solitude isn’t a symptom. It’s a preference, same as some people prefer aisle seats and others prefer the window.

A daughter still worries, bless her — she’s read the articles about lonely retirees and now treats solitude like a smoke alarm going off. Those articles were never written with introverts or artists in mind. Some of us need the quiet the way a soufflé needs an unopened oven door.

And there’s a good chance ten-years-ago-self would be horrified by all of it. That woman was out chasing belonging — the art club, the local political party committee, every group with an opening, proving usefulness like it was a full-time application process. She never once dreamed of becoming a creative hermit by choice. She’d take one look at these West Wing reruns and two-hour naps and tell this version to get a grip and call somebody.

Turns out normal was never actually the assignment.

Even the shoes got the permission treatment. Slippers used to be automatic every morning — shuffling around half-asleep, same as always, no questions asked. Then a pair of slip-on walking shoes showed up, and swapping them in for the slippers turned into a tiny experiment. Would anything really change?

Everything did.

Posture straightened right up. Energy showed up before the coffee even finished brewing. A thirty nine -dollar pair of shoes, and the whole morning felt different.

That’s the real discovery in all of this — not the sleep, not the solitude, not even the shoes. The discovery is what happens the moment “how should I be” gets traded for “what do I actually notice.” One good, true noticing — this life works, this life is loved — and both shoulders dropped an entire inch, no invitation required. The jury went home.

Not a project anymore.

A student. Taking notes on an experiment nobody assigned, and enjoying every page of it.

Here’s the smallest possible way to try this on: next time hands end up under warm, soapy water at the sink, actually notice it. The warmth. The lather moving between fingers. Thirty seconds of a completely mundane task, paid real attention for once instead of running on autopilot toward whatever’s next.

Do that enough times with enough mundane moments, and something starts to surface: what actually gets felt, underneath the doing. Sometimes that’s a small jolt of awe over something as plain as soap and water. Sometimes it’s a quieter realization — that a particular task could be done differently, or dropped altogether, because autopilot had been running the whole operation without ever asking.

Either way, that’s the whole practice. Not fixing. Not improving. Just noticing, on purpose, one mundane moment at a time — hands in the sink, shoes on the feet, an evening on the patio — until the noticing itself starts telling the truth about what’s actually being lived.

So here’s a question, not advice: what’s the jury in your head been convicting you of lately? Sleeping wrong. Wanting too much quiet. Loving a life nobody else would recognize as a life. Whatever it is, it’s got a name, and it’s been running longer than you’ve noticed.

Nobody’s grading this. Not you. Not the jury. Not the daughter with the AARP article. Not the version of you from ten years ago who’d be scandalized by all of it.

Go find out what you actually notice, once nobody’s watching for the wrong answer.

A recent video walks through exactly this, using something as small as washing your hands to invite a little awe and wonder into an otherwise ordinary moment: Invoke a Feeling of Awe and Wonder

Nobody’s grading this — but if the jury in your own head could use some backup, join the weekly Breakthrough gathering. A room full of women taking a different look at retirement, kicking down assumptions one at a time, together instead of alone.

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She Doesn’t Remember Her Dreams. And That Made Me Furious.

Something happened during a live conversation on Substack that stopped everything cold.

A woman said she doesn’t remember her dreams.

Not that she gave them up. Not that life got in the way. Not that they changed shape over time or quietly evolved into something else.

She doesn’t remember them at all.

As if they never existed.

That’s fury, plain and simple.

Not at her. Never at her.

At the system that buried them so completely she forgot they were ever there.

Here’s what gets believed, wholly and holy, without hesitation or apology.

It does not have to be impressive. It does not have to make money. It does not have to be visible or marketable or worthy of applause. It does not have to save the world or justify its existence to anyone.

It could be inventing something. Writing. Teaching. Gardening. Driving a school bus. Fixing engines. Holding steady when other people fall apart. Making broken things work again.

It does not matter what the thing is.

What matters is that it exists.

And for women especially, life has been remarkably efficient at covering it up.

Here’s how it happens.

Dreams show up young. Maybe sketched out on napkins or scribbled in notebooks. Maybe told to a best friend. Maybe kept secret, tucked away like a private promise.

Then life starts asking for things.

A career. A partner. Children. A house. Aging parents. Someone else’s emergency. Someone else’s needs. Someone else’s timeline that somehow becomes yours.

And competence sets in. Spectacular competence.

Middle management of other people’s lives becomes the job. Children, homes, schedules, emotions, logistics, relationships, all of it running so smoothly nobody even notices it’s a machine.

The plan is always to come back to yourself later. When things settle down. When the kids are older. When there’s time.

But time is a liar.

Because one day, it stops.

The kids are grown. The marriage may or may not still be there. Travel doesn’t light things up the way expected. Shopping feels hollow. Even volunteering feels like more management.

And in the quiet, the question finally arrives.

Now what?

Let’s be very clear about something.

Now what is not “find a hobby.”

Now what is not “stay busy.”

Now what is not “be grateful for what you have and stop wanting more.”

Now what is this.

Where did you go?

Because that dream did not disappear.

It was buried.

Time does not close the door to our dreams. We do that ourselves. Under obligation. Under expectation. Under decades of being told, explicitly or implicitly, that our desires were selfish, our ambitions impractical, our hunger for something of our own somehow wrong.

So the feeding stopped.

And eventually, remembering it was ever there stopped too.

But here’s what else gets believed.

It can be found again.

Not by forcing. Not by manifesting. Not by turning into someone shiny and unrecognizable.

But by remembering.

By listening.

By allowing enough stillness for what was always there to tap you on the shoulder again.

Here’s what that looked like firsthand.

Sixty-six years old. Flat on the back. Three months of COVID. Savings gone. Life stripped down to nothing.

And in that stillness — not the peaceful kind, the desperate kind — something started getting heard that hadn’t been heard in decades.

A soul.

Not with words. With nudges.

Paint. Write. Stop managing this life like it’s someone else’s emergency.

No way to know if any of it would earn a living. No way to know if anyone would care. No way to know if it was too late.

Just the growing certainty that ignoring it wasn’t possible anymore.

So it started small. Two minutes sitting in a chair. No agenda. Just sitting.

Then painting. Then writing. Then offering it all without apology.

7,000 subscribers — not because of a plan.

Because the thing that was always mine stopped getting buried.

We are living longer than our mothers and grandmothers ever did. Which means this chapter, this second half, this now-what season, is not an afterthought.

It’s a reckoning.

A chance to reclaim what was buried. To remember what got forgotten. To give yourself permission to want something again.

And yes, talking about how to find a dream you don’t remember having matters.

Because the idea that a woman could live an entire life managing everyone else’s needs and never reclaim her own is enough to make anyone furious.

That conversation isn’t finished.

So here’s where it starts.

For the woman who doesn’t remember her dreams: sit for two minutes this week. Alone. Quiet.

Don’t meditate. Don’t journal. Don’t do anything.

Just sit.

Notice what whispers show up when productivity, management, or guilt aren’t drowning them out.

Conditioning runs deep on that one — the what will they think reflex gets trained into most of us early, and it doesn’t serve anyone well.

Here’s an image that helps, at least in quiet moments like these: picture the queen of a castle, watching an enemy approach in the distance. The guards pull up the drawbridge. The enemy can’t cross the moat.

That’s the move. Whatever the enemy is this week — judgment, comparison, the internal committee of everyone else’s opinions — the drawbridge goes up before it gets anywhere near the moment.

Feel free to build a different image entirely. This one just happens to work, every single time.

Then proceed to sit with yourself.

Maybe it’s something loved at twelve. Maybe it’s a career walked away from. Maybe it’s something never said out loud.

Whatever it is, don’t judge it. Don’t dismiss it. Don’t ask if it’s practical.

Just say hello.

That’s step one.

And there’s company for the rest of the steps, right here.

Seventy years old. Living proof it’s not too late.

It never was.

If any of this stirred something loose — anger, relief, recognition, or that quiet maybe I’m not done feeling — there’s a next step waiting, not a program, not a performance.

Two resources live on the perks page for exactly this moment: Building Trust With Yourself, for learning to sit with what gets whispered once the drawbridge goes up. And Reclaiming Your Dreams, for the woman ready to go looking for what got buried. No urgency drama here, just an open door.

Perks are offered to all paid members. If you haven’t snagged your copies yet, they are they for you. If you decided you want to join today, you’ll get at 20% disount on your annual subscription as well as acess to the perks.

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“Oh my God, I just want to be.”

And then I had to ask myself a harder question.

Have I accidentally added to the noise?

That’s what this little impromptu video is about.

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Who put me on trial for waking up rested?

Nobody. That’s the unsettling part.

It was Tuesday, which is usually one of the days I publish. Normally, that would have meant needing an idea. A plan. A point. Something useful to say.

But this morning, there was nothing.

ENTER THE PROSECUTOR: Why don’t you have an idea? Why aren’t you already producing something? Why are you wasting a perfectly good morning? What kind of woman wakes up rested and does not immediately turn that energy into production?

What the hell? Where did that set of prosecutorial thoughts come from?

More importantly, how many women over 60 are still doing this to themselves every day? Not because anyone is standing over us with a clipboard.

Because the clipboard has moved inside ourselves.

Retirement did not come with a handbook. Just like our babies didn’t come with a handbook back when parenting felt like one messy moment figured out at a time: “Nobody handed me a handbook when they gave me you. Figuring this out as I go.” I recall saying this to one of kids during those aggrivating “ teen” years.

This is not our mothers’ retirement.Many of our mothers had a script. It may not have been fair. It may not have been expansive. But it was recognizable.

Mostly, it was the same script from before retirement, just turned up louder. Whatever got expected of her at forty got expected of her at seventy, only more of it, with more free time now available to deliver it.

Be helpful. Be pleasant. Keep the house. Watch the grandchildren. Join the committee. Go to church. Do not make too much noise. Do not want too much. Do not become inconvenient.

But what happens when a woman reaches this stage of life and realizes she is not done?

What happens when she does not want her life reduced to appointments, errands, casseroles, and being available?

What happens when she wants wonder?

This is why the Invoke Awe and Wonder video is sitting at the bottom of this piece.

Because wonder may be one of the first permissions we lose.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. Nobody walks into the room and says, “Hand over your wonder, ma’am. You are too old for that now.”

It happens more quietly.

We get busy. We get practical. We get needed. We get praised for being dependable. We get rewarded for being useful. We get very good at tending to everyone else’s life.

Here’s what got rediscovered by accident: Shannon ( my daughter) send me a bouquet of pink roses.( pictured above ) A single petal fell down to the table. I picked it up and began thoroughly exampining it.

Something made the moment slow down enough to actually look — really look — at one petal. Then at the veins running through it, branching and thinning toward the edge like something had planned it on purpose.

The body relaxed first. Shoulders dropped an inch without permission being asked.

Then something wilder happened.

Ideas started arriving. Not the tidy kind, the kind that show up on a to-do list. Strange ones. Curious ones. Thoughts that would never have surfaced on purpose, slipping in sideways through one small, useless act of noticing a petal.

Turns out the soul knows a trick worth learning: hand it one unguarded moment of wonder, and it sneaks in through the opening with an idea nobody sat down and planned. A curiosity worth chasing. A thread worth pulling. A whole new direction, offered up like a gift, simply because attention finally slowed down enough to receive it. All of a sudden my mind was filled with thoughts of more wonder “ what if…” became a mantra for that day. ( it was fun!)

That’s the part worth getting excited about. Wonder isn’t just a nice feeling to have.

It’s a launch pad. Look closely enough at one small, ordinary thing, and an entirely new runway opens up — full of ideas about what to bring into this next chapter, ideas that were always there, just waiting for a still enough moment to be noticed.

And somewhere along the way, stopping to be amazed by light on a wall, rain on a window, a dandelion, a bar of soap, a bird, a color, a memory, or the sheer absurd miracle of still being here can start to feel childish, in the best possible way.

Or indulgent.

Or unproductive.

There it is again.

The prosecution.

Here’s a question worth sitting with before reading any further: what’s the clipboard checking on this week? Name it. Not the metaphor — the actual thing. A garden left too wild. A closet not organized. A Tuesday spent doing nothing worth reporting to anyone.

Now ask the follow-up: who’s actually holding that clipboard? Because it isn’t a person anymore. Nobody’s grading this.

Maybe this new frontier of retirement is not about withdrawing from life.

Maybe we are not here to age gracefully.

Maybe we are here to age truthfully.

Curiously.

Loudly when needed.

Quietly when desired.

With lipstick or without it. With a paintbrush, a passport, a garden trowel, a microphone, a nap, a new business, a new love, a new boundary, or a Tuesday morning where we do absolutely nothing useful and refuse to apologize for it.

Nobody gave us a handbook.

Fine.

We will write one with our lives.

And chapter one might be very simple:

Permission granted.

Court adjourned.

Now go look for wonder.

Court’s not fully adjourned, though — not for the paid subscribers who show up for what doesn’t make the free docket. The essays that go further into the clipboard, the wonder, the whole case for a life that doesn’t need to justify itself. This week, new paid members get 20% off. before the discount closes the case.

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And since wonder’s the whole subject today — here’s where it started.

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And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.

Community of ladies on Substack and mutual support!

This was one of those weeks that kept surprising me. Grab a cup, I’d like to tell you about it.

Nothing dramatic happened, yet several conversations kept circling the same idea. And I know that you know it’s in conversations between girlfriends where the good stuff is!

Not until this morning, sitting here with coffee in hand, did all the pieces suddenly fit together.

This week started with a live video recorded on a whim after watching a YouTube video declaring that isolation is devastating for older adults. That statement bothered me because it was so absolute. Some people suffer terribly from isolation. Others discover themselves there.

The Live button got hit fifteen minutes later.

No idea existed that the conversation would become one of the most watched videos this month. At the time of this writing, over 8k have viewed that video. Color me astonished, amazed, and humbled.

What surprised me even more was one woman’s comment.

She admitted she had been ready to buy one of those “special soaps” being promoted on Facebook for older people telling older women they probably smelled bad and didn’t know it.

She thanked me for providing proof she did not need that soap!

That one comment is a reminder of why these conversations matter.

It struck me that fear is being marketed to women my age everywhere I look.

Fear that we’re lonely.

Fear that we’re declining.

Fear that we’re becoming irrelevant.

Fear that we’re somehow no longer capable of making good decisions.

What’s happening together here is different.

We’re not trying to become fearless.

We’re learning to trust ourselves a more than we trust the fear.

The Community

This was probably my favorite part of the week.

Several conversations kept happening in the comments of my Notes, entirely without another word from me.

Women were talking to each other.

Encouraging each other.

Telling the truth to each other.

That’s the community I’ve been hoping would grow.

Not one built around me.

One built around us.

Here’s to my favorite note of the week: About Anti- Ageing cream:

Here’s Where the Conversation Expanded On-Line

If any of these conversations speak to where you are today, I’d love for you to read them.

• Is Isolation Really Devastating for Older Adults? Why I pushed back against one of the biggest myths about aging.

• They Started Preparing for My Old Age Before I Did. A funny story that turned into a much bigger conversation about identity

• Is Everyone Burned Out... or Are We Asking the Wrong Question? Why I think we may be asking the wrong question.

Remember to check the Notes feature on Substack — there are some really juicy conversations occurring there.

As always, thank you for walking through these conversations with me.

This little corner of the internet keeps reminding me that we’re not trying to fix ourselves.

We’re simply remembering who we were before fear, obligation, and everyone else’s expectations got so loud.

Glad you’re here.

Have a beautiful week.

Monica

PS: An agreement is now official with a truly wonderful Medicare specialist. Stay tuned — more details are coming soon. She’ll be available to any of you wanting to talk through Medicare, supplementals, and all the fine print that comes with it.

Also on the horizon: a handful of special little “flip books” are about to make their debut. Stay tuned on that one too.

Send me a message if you want first notice when either of these go live

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Is Everyone Burned Out... or Are We Asking the Wrong Question?

Lately, my Substack feed has been filled with women promising to help me escape burnout.

Or overwhelm.

Or exhaustion.

At first, a little sarcasm crept in.

Really?

Because comparison was inevitable.

My house burned down. Everything I owned got packed into boxes, and starting over began. Then came the call that my daddy needed me, so packing up happened again.

There were years when the luxury of asking whether I was overwhelmed simply didn’t exist. Every morning simply arrived, and what had to be done next got figured out, one day at a time. Most of it happened alone.

Nobody was talking about emotional labor.

Nobody was telling me to regulate my nervous system.

Nobody was reminding me to protect my energy.

Life simply showed up every morning, and dealing with it was the only option on the table.

So, an admission: that first reaction was probably a little unfair.

A thought crept in: Have we become this fragile?

Then something important came back into focus.

Turns out, the comparison wasn’t fair to begin with. Two different lives, not one.

When my daughters were young, there were no smartphones demanding attention every few minutes. The job stayed at the office once the day ended. The evening news came on once a day, and when it was over, it was over. Nobody expected an answer to a text before the dinner dishes were even finished.

The entire world didn’t live in a pocket back then.

The women writing about burnout today carry theirs in exactly that pocket, every hour of every day.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re weaker.

It may simply mean they’re carrying a different kind of weight.

Heavy things got carried, back then.

They carry endless things.

Those are not the same burden.

Still, something keeps nagging with every new newsletter promising relief from overwhelm.

Almost all of them are trying to answer the same question.

How do I escape this?

It’s a fair question. If your life feels like it’s swallowing you whole, of course that’s the question you’re asking.

But somewhere along the way, the question changed.

The house was rebuilt.

The moves were behind.

My daughters grew up and built lives of their own.

Retirement arrived.

One morning, looking around a quiet apartment, it became clear there wasn’t a crisis waiting anymore.

There was just me.

And that’s when surviving turned out to have never really been the finish line.

The harder question wasn’t, How do I get through today?

The harder question was, Who am I now that today isn’t trying to kill me?

Nobody had prepared me for that conversation.

Decades got spent learning how to survive.

Simply becoming was the one skill nobody had taught.

That’s the conversation worth having now.

Not because burnout isn’t real.

It is.

Not because people aren’t overwhelmed.

They are.

But eventually, if we’re fortunate, life changes.

The children grow up.

The emergencies pass.

Retirement arrives.

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One day the calendar that used to tell you exactly who you were suddenly goes quiet.

That’s when something else begins.

Not more surviving.

The slower business of remembering yourself.

Maybe that’s why burnout isn’t the subject that keeps pulling focus.

What comes after it is the real interest — the woman who has finally come up for air, looking around and wondering, Now what?

She’s no longer trying to escape her life.

She’s trying to reclaim it.

That’s a completely different conversation.

And maybe that’s why The Daily RE-Wire feels a little different.

Helping women survive the fire was never the goal.

The real interest is sitting with the women standing in the ashes, looking at the open space ahead of them, and realizing they get to decide what they build next.

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How I learned to stop outsourcing my life.

They Started Preparing for My Old Age Before I Did

Yesterday, a little joke I shared in the notes feed of Substack made a lot of women laugh.

It was meant to be funny, and apparently it was.

But after it published, something bigger came into focus.

Adult children start preparing for our old age long before we ever think about getting old ourselves.

The first time this was noticed, fifty was the age.

My daughters had planned a day floating down a river in Blacksburg, Virginia. We piled into inner tubes and spent the afternoon drifting downstream, climbing over rocks, laughing, and trying not to lose our shoes in the current.

Somewhere along the way, hands started reaching toward me.

“Here, Mom.”

“We’ve got you.”

They wanted to help me get into my tube. They wanted to steady me getting back out.

The thought hit fast: What are y’all doing? Getting into an inner tube has never required backup.

It honestly caught me off guard.

In my mind, I was simply another adult enjoying a day on the river.

Apparently, in theirs, I had quietly become “Mom.” Respectfully.

A few years later we visited a beautiful house with a craft room tucked away in the attic. The room itself was stunning, but the staircase leading up to it was steep.

Climbing up, someone said from behind, “Get behind Mama in case she falls.”

I turned around and gave them that “ Momma stern look” . They backed off.

At that point in life, swimming happened almost every day. Bicycle rides covered the neighborhood. Miles got walked, regularly.

The only reason stairs got taken carefully was because bifocals and staircases have never been close friends.

Fragile wasn’t the word.

Careful was.

Looking back, my daughters probably weren’t trying to make me feel old.

They loved me.

They were doing what loving daughters do.

Somewhere along the way, they had started seeing me as someone worth protecting while I was still seeing myself as perfectly capable.

That realization stayed with me. And it brough up a strong memory from my childhood. You know the one, a desire so strong that it bubbles up every now and then, to this day.

As a little girl, all that mattered was belonging with the grown-ups. My brothers and sisters were seventeen years older than I was. Years were spent watching them, wishing for a seat at their world. The grown-up table couldn’t come fast enough.

Eventually, that seat arrived.

Then came motherhood, my own career and of course the second job wihout a paycheck- the preacher’s wife.

For years, family life happened because someone made it happen. That someone was me. Birthdays got remembered before anyone else remembered them. Christmas dinner came with worry attached, every year. Traditions got made, gatherings got planned, and somehow the invisible responsibility of making everyone feel at home settled on one set of shoulders. “ Mom”

None of it got a second thought.

It was simply my role.

One day, without anyone announcing it, that role changed.

Now my daughters host the birthdays.

They decide where Christmas will be.

They create the family gatherings.

An invitation shows up now, every time.

Welcomed, every time.

Loved, every time.

But no longer the one making it all happen.

That took a little getting used to.

Not because control was the goal.

Because the shift in identity hadn’t been noticed yet by me.

Plenty gets said about parents adjusting to children growing up. Almost nothing gets said about children adjusting to their parents growing older.

Maybe that’s why these moments feel so awkward.

Our children begin rehearsing for a future we haven’t even imagined yet. Meanwhile, we’re still thinking of ourselves as the people who can carry the groceries, climb the stairs, and wrestle an inner tube into the river without anyone’s help.

The identities don’t change at the same speed.

Theirs changes first.

Ours catches up later.

Or maybe it never completely does. In my life, I refuse to be erased, even if I am on the sidelines watching them conduct the family rituals.

Something got traded in that handoff, though, quietly, without an announcement of its own.

The invisible responsibility that came with running every gathering finally moved to someone else’s shoulders. Hours that used to belong to menus, guest lists, and worry turned into open sky instead.

That has a familiar shape.

As a little girl, watching from the edge of the grown-up table, most of the responsibility for family life belonged to somebody else. There was room then for a child’s whole attention to go toward reading under a quilt, imagining things, chasing whatever curiosity wandered by that week.

Decades of running everything filled that space back up.

Now the space has opened again.

Not because of being tended to the way a child gets tended to — nobody’s cutting up dinner or checking homework here. Just less busy work occupying the mind, which turns out to leave room for something else: whatever got set aside thirty or forty years ago to raise a family, build a career, or simply keep a household running.

That’s the real reason this Substack exists: to encourage others to revist the dreams of their youth. Maybe not for the exact dream, but glean from the memory the essence of the dream and that essence can be life giving. It can become the fodder for new dreams to create in retirement.

This stage life was never meant to be a slow fade. It was meant to be the second half of that same childhood curiosity, picked back up exactly where it got left off.

So here’s a question worth sitting with: what got set aside back then that’s still waiting?

Maybe it’s a language never learned. A book never finished. A dream quietly folded up and put in a drawer somewhere around the time the first baby arrived, or the first promotion, or the first mortgage.

Wherever it’s been sitting, it’s still there. Still yours. Still waiting for the same open space that just opened back up.

These days, a hand offered doesn’t get pulled away from the way it probably would have twenty years ago.

Accepting kindness, it turns out, isn’t the same thing as surrendering independence.

Those are two very different things.

A hand on a steep staircase might even get appreciated, someday. Might even get taken.

But don’t confuse that with believing the becoming has stopped.

Because it hasn’t.

Growing older, it turns out, isn’t just about how the mirror gets read. It’s also about learning to live with the version of you that the people you love have already begun to imagine.

And maybe that’s one of the quietest, strangest transitions of all.

Not wrinkles.

Not gray hair.

Not aching knees.

Just the moment you realize your children have been practicing for your old age... long before you ever thought you were old.

If the dream that got set aside back then still feels wrapped in fog — if the “what” is there but the first step isn’t — Breakthrough was written to walk through exactly that fog, step by step.

BREAKTHROUGH

Breakthrough has become paramount in the lives of hundreds of ladies who read The Daily Re-Wire and is also the name of our weekly meet up on zoom.

Both are available to you as a gift when you become a paid subscriber to The Daily Re-Wire. Currently offering 20% off annual subscriptions.

Breakthrough Membership

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.

ICYMI ( in cased you missed it)

A couple of weeks ago the internet recieved a rant from me via video! I got hot under the collar about preconceived notions about folks in retirement.

Is Isolation Really Devastating for Older People?

Thanks for sharing a portion of your day with me! - Monica

Somebody Stole My Voice for Six Days. This Week I Filed the Report.

Two people talked. Neither one of them was in the room past a few minutes. Both of them stayed for six days.

For most of the week, blame landed in the wrong place. Not one thought made it all the way through. Not on the page, not out loud, not even to myself. The screen stared back. So did the wall. So did my own coffee cup.

Dangerous questions started creeping in. Have I wandered off? Am I doing something wrong? Have I lost my mojo?

Wrong questions. Every one of them.

A man I care about said something that cut deeper than I expected. Then a situation with one of my daughters stirred up an old fear I know all too well. Neither moment lasted very long.

But their voices did.

For six days, uninvited, old conversations set up camp and refused to leave. Replayed. Edited. Defended. Reimagined with a better ending, over and over, like rehearsing for a trial that was already over and already lost.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It was a hijacking. A quiet one — the kind nobody sends flowers for, because nobody else even knows it happened.

Here’s the part that took six days to see: those two voices had gotten louder than mine, inside my own head, without my permission and without a lease.

My creativity didn’t disappear. It got locked out. Every quiet moment normally spent wondering got converted into a courtroom, arguing a case nobody asked me to try.

My own life wasn’t the one being lived that week.

Somebody else’s was. Two of them, actually, splitting the rent on space that was never theirs to begin with.

No wonder everything felt flat. There wasn’t room left for curiosity when two unpaying tenants had taken the whole floor.

This morning, eviction started. Sat down in front of the window, looked out at the blue sky, and asked one simple question.

Monica Rose — what are you thinking?

Not HIM

Not HER

You.

At first there wasn’t much. The room had been rented out too long to answer right away.

Then upon implementing my go-to breath practice, something extraordinairy happened.

My own voice started answering.

It wasn’t loud. It didn’t arrive with fireworks. It simply said,

“This is YOUR life.” “Not his, not hers “

And with that one sentence, the locks got changed.

Not confidence.

Not certainty.

Ownership. Which, it turns out, is the only deed that actually matters.

Freedom isn’t only about retirement. It isn’t only about having more time. Freedom is holding the only key to your own head, and using it.

This probably isn’t happening to only one woman. So here’s the real question.

Whose voice has been renting space in yours this week?

An ex-husband? An adult child? A sister? A boss who retired ten years ago but somehow still has a key?

Or maybe it’s someone who’s been gone for years, still paying no rent, still redecorating. Maybe it’s one sentence, said thirty years ago by someone who probably doesn’t remember saying it, still running the whole building. Still setting the thermostat. Still deciding which rooms get used and which ones stay locked.

Here’s what’s known now. The week wasn’t spent wandering in the desert. It was spent letting squatters run the place.

Those are not the same thing. One means being lost. The other means being robbed.

Today, the locks are mine again. Useless wondering of my mind, usually rooted in fear are locked out.

Turns out, I’d forgotten how much I like the woman who lives here.

Paid subscribers get the articles that don't make it to the free list — the ones that go further into rooms like this one. This week, new paid members get 20% off. Join before the offer expires.

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How do you know you can trust yourself?

It took some wrestling with all the preconceived or inherited practices in my life to unearth my own true voice.

Relief doesn’t begin to cover it.

Even with the week I just lived, there’s comfort in knowing my own voice can be trusted.

Last week, twenty women asked for a copy of my booklet, Building Trust With Yourself. That’s confirmation this isn’t only happening in my own life.

So for all new paid members this week: a copy of Building Trust With Yourself is yours. Send a request to monica@monirosesoul.com and it’ll come straight to you.

Become A Member

In case you missed it, and I recorded another podcast this week. It’s now on our Youtube channel:

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She’s out there. Help me find her.

Most people think women over 60 need a plan.

I don’t.

I think we’ve spent sixty years+ following everyone else’s plans.

The Daily RE-Wire isn’t about becoming a better version of yourself.

It’s about remembering the woman who was there before the world told her who she had to be

RELIEF

There is a particular kind of relief that happens when a woman reads something and thinks, finally, somebody said it.

Not fixed it. Not explained it away. Not turned it into a lesson, a checklist, or another damn self-improvement project.

Just named it.

I write for women who have lived enough life to know the official stories do not always hold. Women who have raised children, loved people, lost people, survived marriages, careers, disappointments, and all the quiet little erasures nobody gave them a ceremony for.

And somewhere along the way, many of us stopped expecting to be recognized.

Then a sentence finds us.

A story opens something.

A comment turns into three paragraphs because a woman realizes she has not been invisible after all. She has only been waiting for language big enough, honest enough, and human enough to hold what she knows.

That is what happens here.

This is not a place where I hand you a formula for becoming a better version of yourself. I am not interested in treating women as unfinished renovation projects. You are not here to be polished into someone more acceptable.

You are here to remember yourself.

Your own way. Your own pace. Your own odd, holy, rebellious rhythm.

Some women come here and laugh because they recognize the absurdity. Some cry because something long buried finally gets touched without being shamed. Some get angry in the cleanest possible way, the kind of anger that says, Wait a minute. I was never the problem. Some quietly begin trusting themselves again.

Whatever happens for you here, let it be yours.

You do not have to perform your awakening. You do not have to explain your life to earn your place. You do not have to become louder, softer, wiser, nicer, more spiritual, more productive, or more palatable.

You only have to begin listening for the part of you that still knows.

That is the invitation.

Come in. Read around. Take what stirs something. Leave what does not. Argue with me if you need to. Laugh with me if you can. Cry if the dam breaks.

This is a place for women who are not done.

Not because we need to prove anything.

Because some part of us is still alive, still curious, still reaching for the life that actually belongs to us.

So let me tell you plainly what this is, in case you want the shorter version too.

The Daily RE-Wire is a daily storytelling letter for women over 60 who are done performing, done apologizing, done outsourcing their inner authority. Women ready to reclaim the life that still belongs to them.

We are not rewiring your productivity. We are not chasing your youth. We are not fixing you.

Where to Begin

You don’t have to read everything. You just have to walk through the door you’re already standing closest to.

Door One: I’m Not a Project
For the woman tired of fixing herself.
→ “Apparently We Were All Tired of Being Self-Improvement Projects”

Door Two: Trust Yourself Again
For the woman who was trained to ask everybody else first.
→ “She Stopped Wanting the Things She Used to Want”

Door Three: Reclaim the Dream
For the woman who thinks it may be too late. Spoiler: it damn well is not.
→ “I Found My Husband in Bed With Another Woman. Here’s What I Did.”

Door Four: Come Sit With Us
For lives, paid community, notes, conversations, and the living-room feeling you’ve built.
→ “Is Isolation Really Devastating for Older People?”

Subscribe. Read. Watch. Join paid when you’re ready. Pull up a chair.

Begin again.

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Nobody Taught Us How to Be Free

There is a particular kind of quiet that happens in my studio around ten in the morning. The coffee’s gone lukewarm in the mug I forgot I set down. The brush is loaded with a color I’m not sure about yet. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a very old part of me is waiting for someone to walk in and ask what I’m doing with my time.

Nobody comes.

There is no bell. No committee needing brownies by Thursday. No one standing in the doorway with a clipboard, checking whether I made good use of my morning.

There is just me, a canvas, and the astonishing realization that my day no longer comes pre-labeled with everyone else’s needs.

At first this sounds like freedom.

Then freedom pulls up a chair, crosses her legs, and says, “So. What do you actually want?”

Rude.

Because some of us waited decades for this. And when it finally arrived, we did what any well-trained woman would do — we looked around for the adult in charge. Surely someone had a form for this. A checklist. A brochure titled:

How to Be a Fulfilled Retired Woman Without Accidentally Becoming a Houseplant.

There wasn’t one.

I’ve come to think that’s not a problem. I think it’s the invitation.

The scanning never fully turns off

For most of my adult life, I knew exactly what needed doing, because there was always something needing doing. I spent years walking into rooms full of people — church fellowship halls, mostly, as a minister’s wife moving from one congregation to the next — and before I’d even taken my coat off, I’d have already clocked who looked upset, who needed introducing to whom, whose name I’d better not forget twice.

That’s not a skill you retire from. I still do it. I’ll walk into Greg’s kitchen for coffee and, without meaning to, I’ve already noted his mood, refilled something, and mentally rearranged his day for him — before he’s said a word. Old muscle. It fires whether or not anyone asked it to.

That kind of alertness isn’t freedom. It’s surveillance with lipstick on. And a lot of us got very good at it — capable, reliable, the one who remembered, the one who showed up, the one who knew where the scissors were and whether the casserole needed ten more minutes.

Then retirement shows up and says, “Here. This time is yours.”

And we just stand there blinking, because mine was never really a language anyone taught us to speak. We know obligation fluently. Wanting, we barely know at all. Wanting feels like something we ought to apologize for before we’re allowed to touch it.

So we do the obvious thing. We go looking for a new assignment. And the wellness industry is only too happy to hand us one — walk more, sit less, eat protein, drink water, declutter, downsize, volunteer, find your purpose, and for the love of all that is holy, don’t become invisible.

Honestly, by noon I need a nap from being so successfully retired.

None of that is bad, mind you. Magnesium and I are currently in a committed relationship. But there’s a difference between caring for yourself and turning the rest of your life into a performance review. There’s a difference between being alive and managing your optics.

What retirement actually is

I don’t think retirement is the end of usefulness, or the beginning of decline, or one of those glossy brochures with a suspiciously cheerful couple in white pants walking a beach with matching dental work.

I think retirement is the first time in a very long while that some of us get quiet enough to hear ourselves. Which is beautiful. And also, frankly, inconvenient as hell — because once the noise settles and nobody’s asking for brownies or emotional triage, we’re left alone with questions we’ve been dodging for years. What do I actually like? What’s habit, and what’s genuine? What did I quietly abandon because life got too loud to hear it?

This is where retirement turns into something more interesting than free time. It becomes self-study — not the navel-gazing kind, the honestly curious kind. Getting to know the woman who’s been living underneath all those roles. Not who I was at thirty. Not who the fellowship hall needed me to be. Who I am now, on an ordinary day, when nobody’s watching and nothing needs handling.

Gathering the evidence

Here’s what mine has taught me, some days: my body actually relaxes when the house goes quiet — not lonely-quiet, just quiet. I love painting in the two hours of afternoon light that hit the west window a certain way, and I will rearrange almost anything to protect that window. I do not love book club, particularly, but I love one woman in it, and coffee with her alone would be plenty. I have zero desire to see the Eiffel Tower, despite what every retirement magazine implies about my moral obligation to travel.

None of that is dramatic. It’s just evidence — the kind that quietly overturns an old verdict about who I’m supposed to be. And this is the whole case for self-trust: you tell yourself the truth about one small thing, and you don’t argue back. I don’t want to go. I do want to try that. I’m tired. I’m curious. I’m not done.

That last one matters most. Because the world tends to look at women our age and assume we’ve reached the epilogue. Wrap it up, dear. Be sweet, be grateful, be smaller. They hand us the cultural rocking chair and expect us to sit in it quietly while everyone else discusses the future.

No, thank you.

I’m not interested in a retirement built around shrinking politely. I’m also not interested in turning this season into a frantic audition for relevance — proving I’m still impressive, still useful, still worth the room. Those are the only two options the culture seems to offer: disappear, or perform. I want a third thing. A life that’s actually mine — awake on the inside, useful when I choose, quiet when I need it, unavailable without issuing a press release.

That’s not a bucket list. It’s not a productivity plan. It’s a relationship — with myself, and with the stubborn, slightly unruly woman who survived every one of those old roles and is still standing here at the easel asking, what now?

The language nobody taught us

Maybe the real surprise of retirement isn’t that we finally have time. It’s that time asks something back. Not more productivity — more honesty. Not a bucket list — the nerve to listen to ourselves before polling the whole room for permission.

Freedom isn’t just the absence of obligation. It’s the practice of learning to belong to yourself. And that practice can feel strange at first — even a little rude, the way any new language does before your mouth gets used to the shape of it. You may sit down with an empty afternoon and feel guilty for not filling it. You may catch yourself inventing chores just to dodge the terrifying luxury of choice. That doesn’t mean you’re failing at retirement. It means you’re learning a language that was withheld from you — the language of enough, of no, of because I want to.

That last one might be the most radical sentence a woman our age can say without following it with an apology.

So here’s my honest question for you, this week: what’s one small, undramatic piece of evidence your own life has handed you lately? Not a revelation — just a fact. A thing you noticed you wanted, or didn’t, and didn’t argue with.

Start collecting those. That’s the whole case.

Nobody’s waiting for your productivity report anymore. Wonderful. Let them wait. You have a life to get curious about.

We had a conversation about this, live on Substack

Mike and I sat down last night and talked through exactly this — what it actually takes to trust yourself again after a lifetime of trusting the checklist instead. Watch it here:

If you’re a paid subscriber, this is where Building Trust With Yourself comes in — it’s yours already, simply send me an eamil to request your copy. (monica@monirosesoul.com) . It walks through the same evidence-gathering practice this article talks about, just slower, with room to write your own answers down.

Not a paid subscriber yet? This is the kind of thing paid membership unlocks — the booklet, the weekly Breakthrough Circle, conversations like the one above before they go anywhere else. [Upgrade here →]

Upgrade Here

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.

Subscribe now

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that wisdom always lived somewhere outside ourselves.

Ask your parents. Ask your pastor. Ask the doctor. Ask the expert. Buy another book. Listen to another podcast. Find someone who has the answer.

There is nothing wrong with learning from other people. I’ve spent a lifetime doing exactly that. But there comes a point when collecting more advice quietly becomes a substitute for living your own life.

I’ve reached that point.

Years ago, when my house burned down, I lost an entire library. Hundreds of books. Around a hundred of them were self-help books. I never replaced them.

At first it was practical. I didn’t want to start collecting books again.

Looking back, I think something deeper happened.

Without realizing it, I stopped looking for someone else to tell me how to live.

That didn’t mean I stopped learning.

It meant I started listening somewhere else.

The biggest shift in my life didn’t come from another book.

It came from learning to regulate my own nervous system.

Not because someone told me to. Because I discovered that a calm mind hears things an anxious mind never can.

When we’re constantly activated, we confuse noise for guidance. We mistake urgency for truth. We believe the loudest voice must be the wisest one.

But once the nervous system settles, something remarkable happens.

Space appears.

And in that space, we begin hearing ourselves again.

Recently, I spent several nights waking up over and over again. Everyone had a solution.

Drink apple cider vinegar. Try melatonin. Eat dill pickles.

Every suggestion came from someone who genuinely wanted to help. None of them solved the problem.

Finally, I stopped asking.

I got quiet.

The answer appeared almost immediately.

Nothing was wrong with my body.

I was waking myself up every time I checked my phone in the middle of the night. My brain saw Substack, comments, notifications, and instantly believed the workday had begun.

The problem wasn’t physical.

It was self-created.

Which meant the solution was mine, too.

That experience reminded me of something I’ve been discovering for years.

We spend an incredible amount of energy trying to convince ourselves that we can’t be trusted. And somewhere along the way, most of us built a case against ourselves. Every mistake became evidence. Every wrong turn became exhibit A. We prosecuted ourselves for decades and never once questioned whether the case was fair.

Maybe it’s time to reopen it.

Instead of keeping a journal filled with everything that’s wrong, begin noticing the moments when your own instincts quietly led you somewhere good.

The decision you made without polling five friends. The opportunity you almost ignored but didn’t. The tiny nudge you followed simply because it was there.

Collect those. Build a case for your own wisdom, the way you once built one against it.

Trust isn’t built through positive thinking. Trust is built through evidence.

Every one of us has moments when life unfolded better than we could have planned. Notice them. Write them down. Read them again.

Over time, you’ll begin discovering that your relationship with your own inner knowing is much stronger than you’ve been led to believe.

Maybe that’s the real work.

Not becoming another version of yourself. Not fixing yourself. Not chasing one more expert.

Simply becoming a student of your own life.

Because the greatest expert on your life has been walking beside you all along.

You’ve just spent years asking everyone else what she thinks.

This is exactly what we walked through in tonight’s video — the first exercise from Building Trust With Yourself*. If you haven’t watched it yet, start there. And if you’re ready to begin collecting your own evidence, that’s where the real work begins.*

Join as a paid subscriber tonight and get 10% off, plus my gift to you: Building Trust With Yourself.

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Memories have a way of ambushing you. Sometimes it can be inspiring for the future!

I’ll be doing something ordinary and one will surface out of nowhere, and before I know it, I’m in tears. Other times a memory comes up and I feel something closer to warmth — a little glow, almost pride, like running into an old friend I’d forgotten I had. One of my favorites is from my years as the advertising manager of a small daily newspaper in a small Oklahoma town.

I suspect you have a storage bin somewhere. A chest of drawers, a shoebox, a closet shelf you haven’t cleared out. Not just of objects — of memories. Years of them, packed away, some you revisit often and some you haven’t opened in decades.

As I was reviewing photos from my life in my early 20’s I discovered a memory about a situation that actually shed light as to who am ,how I manage my life now and to a greater degree how I manage my writing.

It all begins with the owner of the small newspaper where I was employed as the advertising sales director.

He used to walk the sales floor all day, checking on everyone. Former stockbroker, cashed out of New York, moved to Oklahoma with his wife for a quiet life. No kids. Just the two of them, and now, a newspaper.

He could not stand watching me sit and stare.

I was the director of the advertising department. My desk had paper on it, and a pen, and most days, an ad half-drawn. But some days I’d just sit there. Not writing. Not sketching. Staring at nothing in particular, somewhere past the wall.

To him, that was the one thing he couldn’t track. Sales calls, he could count. Client meetings, he could see on a calendar. But a woman sitting still with her eyes unfocused — there was no number for that. No column to put it in. It took him a long time to leave me alone when I did it.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

I accepted the award the way you accept a compliment you don’t quite believe — politely, and then you put it away. It’s packed in a chest somewhere in my storage building right now. I couldn’t tell you which one without looking.

Here’s what else was true that year. I was twenty-four, twenty-five. I had a two-year-old and a three-year-old at home. I was a minister’s wife, full time, which is its own unpaid job with its own hours. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I had just started to discover what I was capable of — except I didn’t have language for it yet. It just felt like happenstance. A lucky ad. A good day.

I didn’t pat myself on the back. I didn’t think: that’s how I work best. That’s evidence. I thought: huh, that worked out. And then I went back to my desk.

I’ve been thinking about why that story surfaced now, decades later, and I think it’s this: we collect proof of ourselves our whole lives, and most of it never gets filed as proof. It gets filed as luck. As a fluke. As one of those things that just happened to work out, so we don’t examine it too closely in case it doesn’t hold up.

But some of it holds up. Some of it is sitting in a chest, gathering dust, still true.

I think that’s part of what it actually takes to trust yourself — not some sudden decision to believe in yourself more, but the much slower work of going back through your own life and correctly crediting yourself for things you undersold the first time around. Not because you need the trophy.

Because you need the evidence.

So here’s what I’d ask you: what have you already done — a decision, a project, a moment you handled entirely your own way — that you filed away under lucky or happened to work out, instead of filing it away under this is how I operate best?

You probably have one. Most of us do. It’s probably not framed on a wall. It’s probably in a drawer, or a box, or a chest you haven’t opened in years.

Might be worth going and finding it.

It is likely that some of what’s in there is exactly what you’d need to build a retirement life that actually suits you, instead of the one built out of woulda-coulda-shouldas handed to you by what I’ll call the retirement marketing complex — all those glossy images of a life you’re supposed to want, that may have nothing to do with who you actually are.

That’s really what Building Trust With Yourself is for: just a simple way to start noticing the evidence that’s already sitting in your own storage bin, and collecting more of it on purpose instead of by accident.

Because that evidence is the foundation for the whole rest of your life — what you want it to look like, feel like, and be, from here on out. A retirement built on what you actually know about yourself, instead of whatever’s left over once the retirement marketing complex has had its say.

Become a paid member this month, and I’ll send you the booklet as my gift to you.

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In this video clip I show how to collect evidence from your past to build your own foundation for the retire life you actually want.

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.

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