We Didn’t Lose Our Dreams. We Just Group-Chatted Them to Death.

I was poking around my Gumroad account this morning ( a simple way to host all the resource guides I write ) —curious about what actually is working when I stumbled across a statistic that made me choke on my coffee.

Out of every digital resource, guide, and PDF I have ever thrown into the internet void, my absolute number-one bestseller is a little guide called

Building Trust with Yourself

More than 400 people have downloaded it.

That stopped me cold. Because let’s be honest: 400 women didn’t download a PDF because they suddenly forgot how to be confident. They downloaded it because after six or seven decades on this planet, they realized they’ve been running an absolute masterclass in ignoring their own intuition.

For most of our lives, we became Olympic-level athletes at responding to what everyone else needed. Family, careers, husbands, aging parents, kids, grandkids, and the endless crushing void of “domestic responsibility” trained us to keep our eyes glued outward. We were the ultimate project managers of everyone else’s existence. We noticed who needed feeding, who needed therapy, and what bill was due next. We did it so automatically that we didn’t even realize we hadn’t consulted ourselves on a single decision since the Clinton administration.

Our internal voice didn’t pack up and leave. We just started treating it like a telemarketer.

I know this because I used to be the CEO of that exact lifestyle. I used to wake up, and before my feet even hit the floor, my brain was already compiling a to-do list based entirely on other people’s issues. My attention belonged to my obligations before I even had a chance to put the kettle on. Heck, even into my early retirement years, that rusty machinery was still humming along in the background. I had spent fifty years living in “reaction mode” that I genuinely forgot there was another option on the menu.

These days? My mornings look a little less like a fire drill and a lot more like a luxury.

I wake up and actually ask myself what I want to do. Sometimes I want to paint. Sometimes I want to go for a walk, write, or just sit outside with my coffee and judge the neighbors’ landscaping choices. But underneath all of that is the one question that flipped the script on my entire existence:

How can I be of service to my soul today?

I know, I know—it sounds a little woo-woo. But contrast that with “Who is going to be inconvenienced if I don’t do this thing today?” and it’s a total paradigm shift.

This is exactly why retirement can feel like a psychological horror movie for women of our generation. We spent decades being aggressively needed. Then, suddenly, the universe rolls out the red carpet, throws its hands up, and says, “Yay! Now it’s your turn!”

And we just stand there, blinking in the sunlight, terrified.

Our dreams are still in there, but they’ve been buried under a mountain of outside opinions, demands, and casserole dishes. When the sudden urge to paint bubbles up, or that old book idea resurfaces, or we randomly decide we want to pack a bag and travel solo to Italy, we freeze. Not because we don’t want it, but because we’ve spent a lifetime treating our own desires as “indulgent,” “selfish,” or highly suspicious. We’ve forgotten how to trust a thought simply because it came out of our own heads.

Which brings me back to those 400 downloads.

Those women aren’t looking for a guru to tell them who to become next. They’re sixty-something years old; they don’t need a lecture. They’re just trying to remember how to stop gaslighting themselves. They are trying to hear that quiet, internal voice that has been drowned out by decades of PTA meetings, corporate nonsense, and family logistics, and finally give it some damn authority.

Reclaiming your life at this stage doesn’t require a massive manifestation board or a 10-step courage routine. It starts way earlier.

It starts the moment you hear yourself want something, drop the guilt, and decide that your own voice gets a casting vote in what happens next.

That has been the absolute best part of my retirement. I am officially out of the business of asking what the world requires of me before breakfast. I’m asking what my soul wants. And after a lifetime of listening to everyone else’s noise, turning the volume up on my own voice feels less like an indulgence and a lot more like finally coming home.

Ready to stop asking for permission?

If you’re tired of treating your own intuition like a spam caller, it’s time to change the settings. Grab your copy of Building Trust with Yourself today, and let’s start giving your own voice the casting vote it deserves. (Don’t worry, it’s a PDF, not a 10-step lecture).

Building Trust with Yourself

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An uncomfortable, caffeinated realization came over me this morning while sitting on the patio:

I have entered the Olympic trials for a sport I never wanted to play.

I was comparing myself.

Not casually noticing what other writers were doing. Not gathering inspiration. No, I was doing the full-blown, toxic, “scroll through social media until your chest tightens” kind of comparing.

I looked at writers I admired and immediately decided their success was a direct indictment of my character.

Maybe I’m not thoughtful enough. Maybe I’m a fraud. Maybe they’ll find out I’ve just been winging it since 1985.

Once that old, dusty script got stirred up, I did what many of us do when we don’t feel like enough:

I tried to out-work the insecurity.

I built color-coded systems. I analyzed metrics. I hunted for strategies, formulas, and schedules.

There was just one glaring problem:

I was miserable.

I wasn’t having fun, and I wasn’t inspired.

Eventually, the women in my Breakthrough group staged a gentle intervention.

“What happened to you, Monica?”

Well, I’ll tell you what happened.

I took my eyes off my own plate and started looking sideways.

Human beings are wired to compare. We measure, we look around, we snoop. But if we are going to insist on using a measuring stick, we desperately need to change who we are measuring ourselves against.

Ask:

• Is this actually satisfying to me?

• Do I like the person I am while I am doing it?

• Would I still choose this if nobody else on Facebook knew I was doing it?

• Does this life actually feel like mine, or am I just wearing it like an ill-fitting coat?

These are not the questions we were trained to ask.

In fact, women of our generation are practically Olympic-level experts at looking outside ourselves for the rulebook.

We spent decades being told exactly what each stage of life was supposed to look like.

There were rigid, unspoken rules about being a good wife, a selfless mother, a competent professional, and a pleasant neighbor.

Be devoted at home, indispensable at work, attractive without appearing vain, and pleasant through the whole damn thing.

We learned precisely how much we should give and exactly how little inconvenience we should cause everyone else while doing it.

We were told to look young, act mature, work like we didn’t have kids, and parent like we didn’t have careers.

And then retirement arrives.

Finally, freedom!

Right?

Wrong.

For many women, we just swap the old rulebook for a shiny new one.

We immediately start worrying about whether we are doing retirement “correctly.”

The inner monologue shifts to a new brand of panic:

It’s the exact same measuring stick.

We just changed the decade.

We are still standing at the pearly gates of our own lives, asking total strangers to tell us if we qualify to enter.

It is time to change the questions.

And it is time for them to become gloriously, unapologetically self-serving.

Yes, I said self-serving.

I know we were raised to hear that word as a character flaw, but at this stage of life, it ought to be the finish line.

After serving families, marriages, corporate ladders, churches, communities, and everybody else’s expectations, the self finally deserves a vote.

And not a polite, advisory vote.

The absolute, tie-breaking, deciding vote.

What dream did you put on a high shelf thirty years ago because life required you to be practical?

What have you been tolerating simply because you thought a good woman doesn’t make a fuss?

What happens if you stop asking whether your life looks right to the neighbors and start asking whether it feels right to you?

That is where the third act of life actually gets interesting.

Retirement is not a performance.

There is no gold medal for “Best Retired Woman.”

There is no panel of judges waiting to score your leisure activities, your downsizing choices, or the number of graphite paddles in your closet.

There are eight billion people on this planet, but there is only one you.

Which means there is literally no one else to compare yourself to.

So let me ask you:

Does the life you are living right now feel like the life you actually want to be living?

If the answer is no, that isn’t failure.

It is information.

And this time, you get to decide what to do with it.

f the answer is no, I don’t want you to turn that answer into another reason to judge yourself.

Because a life that no longer fits is not a ruined life.

It may simply be a life that was built for an earlier version of you.

A woman who had different responsibilities.

Different priorities.

Different people depending on her.

Different ideas about what she was allowed to want.

And now she has changed.

That matters.

You do not have to blow up your life, move to Portugal, buy a red convertible, or suddenly discover a burning desire to learn pottery.

Sometimes changing your life begins much more quietly.

You notice what feels heavy.

You notice what feels alive.

You begin remembering what you once wanted before practicality became the loudest voice in the room.

You start separating what you genuinely value from what you have simply been carrying because nobody ever told you that you were allowed to put it down.

That process has been such a significant part of my own life that I eventually wrote something I call Refoundation.

Not reinvention.

Not starting over.

Refoundation. Because I learned that I had to rebuild the foundation of my own life for me to move forward. Once I recognize none of the old rules were good for me, I did not hesitate, I took this as a opportunity to rebuild my own foundation that suites my life.

Because I don’t believe women reach this age as blank slates who need to manufacture entirely new versions of themselves.

We already contain decades of evidence about who we are.

What survived.

What mattered.

What disappeared because life demanded our attention somewhere else.

What still lights something up inside us.

Sometimes the work is not becoming someone new at all.

Sometimes it is digging beneath everything we accumulated and remembering the woman who was there before everybody else got a vote.

And then letting her have one again.

That is the possibility sitting in front of us now.

Not creating the perfect retirement.

Not finally becoming impressive enough.

Not winning the comparison game.

Simply building a life that fits the woman who is actually living it.

REFOUNDATION

The conversations inside my Breakthrough Circle are useful, helpful and most importantly impactful. Anyway if this sounds to you like something you’d like to join, then the next step is to become a paid subscriber and become a member of Breakthrough. No attendence requirements. The circle meets every Tuesday evening at 7pm. Come and go as your schedule allows.

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If one more well-meaning person suggests I take up pickleball, I might lose my mind. The standard cultural script assumes that the second your paycheck stops, your highest spiritual calling is swinging a plastic racket at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. They offer you a hobby list because they don't want to talk about the real stuff—like the fact that two months ago, you had a title and a calendar, and today, you’re watching your old life evaporate over a lukewarm latte.

My friends coffee date with a former colleague died right around the twenty-minute mark.

Two months ago, they knew each other’s schedules down to the minute. They shared the same deadlines, the same office gossip, and a mutual hatred for the terrible printer on the third floor. But sitting there in the cafe, without the office walls holding them together, the silence was deafening. Just two lattes going lukewarm and a lot of aggressive nodding.

Neither of them had done anything wrong. The structural glue of their lives had simply quit. My friend relayed this story to me with a sense of quandry and mourning.

And now it had me curious. What actually happens to a life—and to the people supposedly in it—once the paychecks stop and the calendar goes suspiciously, embarrassingly blank?

Thus the search began. Found the first clue on the Threads app.

A reader described his transition into retirement as a series of distinct stages. Interestingly, the first stage wasn’t “finding purpose” or booking a bucket-list trip to Tuscany.

It was sorting.

He had to figure out who was actually staying in his life, and who had only ever been renting space in it courtesy of a shared breakroom.

That comment opened a door most retirement advice walks straight past. The standard cultural script goes from “Congratulations on your gold watch!” to “Find your purpose, take up pottery, join a community garden!” so fast it practically gives you whiplash. It completely skips the messy middle—the part where you quietly discover that half your social circle just evaporated and nobody sent a memo.

Research actually backs this up. A massive study followed over two thousand people through retirement and found that our “outer-circle” relationships—the work friends, the casual acquaintances, the people tied to daily proximity—tend to drop off a cliff. Meanwhile, close, intimate relationships hold steady.

Retirement doesn’t necessarily take your friends. It takes attendance. It reveals which ones were never really yours, just borrowed from a company structure, and returns them, unceremoniously, to the front desk.

Decades ago, a sociologist named Robert Atchley mapped out the broad phases of retirement: the honeymoon, the letdown, the reorientation, the stability. Very official. Very tidy.

But nobody hits these phases on a perfect clock, and nobody hands you a map. The textbook theory is nice scaffolding, but the lived version is messier, funnier, and considerably more likely to involve crying in a Target parking lot for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with Target.

Stripped of the academic jargon, here is how it actually goes:

• The Collapse: This is the permission to sleep, wander, and do absolutely nothing productive without apologizing. After forty years on the clock, your body needs a minute before it needs a mission.

• The Sorting: The phase where the people who only liked you because of the quarterly budget meetings quietly stop calling. Turns out, those shared salads were never about soul connection.

• The Identity Ache: You don’t miss the job itself, but you miss being needed. You miss being consulted, useful, and reflected back through a role that came with a title (and occasionally, a decent parking spot).

• The Flat Middle: The calendar is wide open, yet freedom somehow feels less like fireworks and more like a void.

Let’s be honest: a woman standing in the middle of the Identity Ache does not need a fucking pickleball paddle. She needs someone to admit that the quiet is profoundly disorienting, not a laminated list of hobbies.

Eventually, the fog does clear.. You start building a life by choosing how you intend to feel. Arriving at this intention comes with some re-wiring of how you think about yourself and your retirement years. ( I know this from first hand experience- my own)

None of this unfolds in a straight line. It cannot be flattened into a tidy five-step worksheet with checkboxes. Because retirement isn’t one big transition—it is a relentless string of rewiring moments.

The real question you need to ask yourself isn’t “What should I be doing now?” It’s “What season am I actually standing in—and can I stop pretending it’s a different one?”

The advice you need depends entirely on the honest answer:

• If you are still collapsing into the chair, you don’t need a purpose lecture. You need a nap and a witness.

• If you are in the sorting stage, you don’t need a hobby. You need room to quietly grieve an entire social structure that disappeared overnight.

• If you are feeling the identity ache, you don’t need to “stay busy.” You need space to find out who you are without the title, minus the pickleball paddle, thank you very much.

• And if you are sitting in the flat, restless middle, wondering if this is all there is—the flatness isn’t proof you failed at retirement. It’s proof you are mid-transition, not mid-crisis, even though those two feel identical at 2 p.m. of any day with nowhere to be.

This is the start of a series, not a one-and-done essay. Over the coming weeks, we are going to break down each of these seasons—the collapse, the sorting, the identity ache, the flat middle, and the rebuilding. One at a time. We’re going to actually sit in them instead of rushing through them like a to-do list with an expiration date.

So, here is your only homework for today. You don’t need an answer yet, just the nerve to ask these two questions:

No answers that sounds most admirable at a dinner party. Not the one that belongs on a vision board next to a photo of a beach. Which one is actually, currently, true for you?

That answers are our starting line. I’ll see you there next week—no laminated lists included.

Anyway, if you like the idea of finally knowing which season of retirement you’re actually standing in instead of guessing in the dark

And you don’t want to spend the next six months pretending you’re “fine” while secretly googling “is boredom a sign of depression” at midnight

You might want to stick around for the rest of this series — or better yet, join the Breakthrough Circle, where the pickleball paddle stays optional. Breakth circle meets every Tuesday night at 7PM via zoom. You’ll see a screen full of ladies who are navigating their retirement years, just like you. Breakthrough is a perk of being a paid subscriber. Don’t ya think you deserve a perk?

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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.

Refer a friend

The phone rang.

Not buzzed. Not pinged. Not the polite, ambient hum of a device begging for a fraction of your fractured attention. It rang. A sharp, metallic, mid-century alarm that ripped through the quiet room like a physical blow.

For a second, I froze.

We don’t hear phones ring anymore. They chirp. They flash. They vibrate against wooden tabletops like trapped insects. Half the time, we muzzle them entirely, reducing our connection to the world to a silent, glowing anxiety. But this was a real, unapologetic telephone ring. And for one disorienting second, it felt as if the ghost of the past had reached through the screen, grabbed me by the collar, and shaken me awake.

It made me realize how quickly we adapt to our own numbness.

Tragedy doesn’t just happen in the major chords of life; it happens in the slow, silent erasure of the ordinary. Things that once anchored us disappear so quietly we don’t even notice the void they leave behind. Until, suddenly, a phantom returns. A specific perfume in a crowded hallway. A forgotten song bleeding through a grocery store speaker. The sharp slap of a screen door slamming on a hot summer afternoon.

And just like that, the anesthesia wears off. You are violently yanked back into the room.

It’s terrifying how much effort we spend avoiding the floor beneath our feet. In this current chapter of life, the temptation to escape the present is overwhelming. We wander through the wreckage of what already happened—replaying old careers, rewriting family dramas, or mourning versions of ourselves that no longer exist. Or, we lean so far forward into the anxiety of what might happen next that we are perpetually off-balance. We build elaborate prisons out of tomorrow’s hypothetical health scares or financial worries, all while the actual, physical reality of our lives unfolds completely unnoticed.

This room. This breath. This ridiculous, screaming telephone.

We have commercialized “being present.” We’ve turned mindfulness into another chore on the to-do list, convinced we need a paid app, a silent room, twenty minutes of perfect posture, and a clear mind. It’s a lie.

Sometimes, you don’t need a meditation practice. You just need an interruption.

You need something sharp enough to shatter the glass cage of your own thoughts. Because the present isn’t a peaceful sanctuary you have to earn—it is a battlefield. And for women rewriting their rules in retirement, it is the only square inch of reality where you actually possess any power.

You cannot rewire yesterday. You cannot control tomorrow. Every single thing you want to believe, choose, notice, refuse, begin, or become can only happen right here. You are not done changing. You are not finished becoming. But it has to happen now.

Sometimes we forget that. We drift into the background. We go cold.

And apparently, it takes a piece of plastic having the absolute audacity to scream at us to remind us we are still alive.

Anyway, if you like the idea of claiming your power in the present, rewriting the rules of your retirement, and actively becoming the next best version of yourself

And you don’t want to spend this hard-earned chapter drifting into the background, paralyzed by anxiety over tomorrow or mourning versions of the past that no longer exist

You might want to join our community as a paid subscriber today, unlocking the weekly toolkits, deep-dive strategies, and private discussions designed explicitly to help women over 60 rewire their minds and thrive.

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I married my third husband so I could keep my art studio.

There. That’s the answer.

It wasn’t romance. I wasn’t swept off my feet. I wasn’t dreaming about growing old beside him. I wasn’t standing around hoping some man would come along and complete my life.

It was a business arrangement.

My father had died nine months earlier. I had been living with him in his house, but when he died, the house did not simply become mine. The proceeds from selling it belonged to the four surviving adult children.

Which meant I was going to have to leave.

And I desperately did not want to leave. Not because of the house itself. Because of what I had created there.

Attached to that house was my art studio. Thirty feet long, fifteen feet wide, glass and windows everywhere. Heaven on earth for an artist. Open the door from the studio and you stepped straight into the backyard sanctuary I had built.

That studio and that garden were not simply property to me. They were my life.

And the realistic housing options available to me at the time were not options I wanted. I had spent ten years caregiving. I did not have a conventional job or enough income to qualify for a mortgage on my own. I was selling my art and receiving a small pension, but this was before I qualified for Social Security. I did, however, have money for a down payment from a separate cash inheritance.

Enter Terry.

I was keeping company with him at the time. I say “keeping company” instead of dating because that’s closer to the truth. We liked each other. He had a swimming pool, and God knows I loved to swim. We grilled hamburgers and steaks around the pool. We laughed. We had fun together.

So I told him about the situation with the house. And eventually we worked out a solution. I could provide the down payment. He could qualify for the mortgage. My name would be on the deed, though not on the mortgage. Terry would move in.

Problem solved.

We weren’t setting up some romantic newlywed nest. He had his bedroom. I had mine. We each had our own space. As far as I was concerned, the arrangement was working just fine.

And then came the marriage.

Terry was 58 years old. And apparently this 58-year-old grown man could not look his father in the face and admit he was living in a house with a woman he wasn’t married to.

We went around and around about it. Finally one day I said essentially: I am tired of having this conversation. I told you I never wanted to get married again, but fine. We’ll go get married and satisfy your daddy.

Yes. I got married so a 58-year-old man’s daddy would feel better. You cannot make this shit up.

The funny thing is, I didn’t expect marriage to change anything. Terry still had his rooms. I still had mine. I still had my studio. I was still Monica.

Except apparently nobody had given me the employee handbook.

Anyway, if you like the idea of finally living by an agreement you actually signed — not the unspoken one somebody else wrote for you —

And you don’t want to spend the next twenty years quietly performing a version of “wife,” “mother,” or “good woman” that was never yours to begin with —

You might want to join the Breakthrough Circle, where we do the work of figuring out whose life you’re actually living, and start writing the terms yourself.

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I have not washed my hair in a week.

There. I said it.

And the funny thing is, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my hair. It does not smell. It is not oily. Small woodland creatures have not taken up residence behind my ears. It simply has not told me that it needs washing.

But some old voice in my head still thinks I have confessed to something.

Who remembers getting your hair rolled into those little pink curlers?

When I was a little girl, Saturday night was hair-washing night. My mother or one of my older sisters washed my hair, then it was set in those pink curlers so it would be perfect for church on Sunday morning. That was the routine. Once a week.

I carried the same habit through most of high school. I have no memory of wondering whether I ought to wash my hair more often. Nobody acted as though once a week was dirty, careless, or socially unacceptable. It was simply how we took care of our hair.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

Women began washing their hair every other day. Some began washing it every day. Bottles multiplied in the shower. Shampoo, conditioner, clarifying shampoo, moisturizing shampoo, volumizing shampoo, scalp treatment, leave-in treatment, and something apparently required to repair the damage caused by all the other things we had just put on our heads.

I do not remember voting for any of this.

I do not remember science arriving at the door to announce that the women of my childhood had been walking around with dangerously unwashed heads.

I remember advertising.

I remember shiny hair swinging in slow motion. I remember women looking horrified at the possibility that their hair might appear flat, oily, dull, or less than freshly washed. I remember beautiful women in shampoo commercials suggesting, without ever saying it plainly, that cleanliness, desirability, and femininity could all be poured from the same bottle.

And I absorbed it.

My second husband, Bob, accidentally wandered out of the whole arrangement.

He spent one summer on Nantucket swimming in the Atlantic every day. Afterward, he would go home and shower. At some point, he stopped putting shampoo on his hair. He still rinsed it thoroughly, but he stopped covering it with soap and products.

His hair became thicker. It became shinier. It looked healthier. After an adjustment period, it also stopped being oily.

As far as I know, he never used shampoo again. I have not seen him in twenty years, but that summer was more than thirty years ago, and from then on he simply wet and rinsed his hair.

I thought that was courageous.

Think about that for a moment. The man stopped buying shampoo, and I regarded him as brave. That tells us something about how thoroughly I had already been trained.

So I went looking for the rule. I wanted to know whether there is actual scientific proof that people should wash their hair every day or every other day.

Anyway, if you like the idea of questioning the old rules you’ve been carrying around for decades

And you don’t want to keep living by instructions that may not fit your life anymore

You might want to become a paid subscriber and keep reading The Daily RE-Wire.

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As I was painting this morning I listened to a conversation about artificial intelligence.

A group of young people were talking with a senator about what AI is doing to their futures. tTheir fear was not theoretical.

These young adults did what we told them to do. They went to school, got educated, prepared themselves for careers, accumulated debt in some cases, because we promised them education was the path to security. Now they’re watching artificial intelligence begin doing the jobs they trained for — drivers watching driverless cars pick up passengers, office workers watching software handle tasks that once required entire departments, manufacturing lines that have been automating for years with AI accelerating the conversation far beyond the factory floor.

I understand why they’re scared. I would be too.

But while I was listening, I was standing in front of my easel, and I stepped back from the painting and thought: what if we’re looking at this from the wrong direction? What if artificial intelligence doesn’t ultimately make us less creative?

I know. That’s not exactly the fashionable position right now. Everybody is asking what happens when AI can write something, design something, answer something, schedule something, or drive somebody across town faster and cheaper than a person can.

Those are legitimate questions, and there’s a gigantic economic one sitting in the middle of them that can’t be ignored: if technology eliminates someone’s livelihood without replacing the income that livelihood provided, we haven’t given that person freedom. We’ve given them unemployment. You can’t hand a frightened man a box of carving tools after he loses his job and cheerfully announce that he finally has time to whittle. He has a mortgage, groceries, maybe children to support. The transition matters. Who benefits from the productivity AI creates matters. Whether ordinary people share in that abundance matters.

However underneath the economic question, I think there’s another one coming toward us. And retirement already taught me something about it.

For most of our lives, we’ve organized identity around occupation. We meet somebody and ask what they do — not what fascinates them, what they create, what makes them forget what time it is, what they’d build if nobody graded it.

We mean their job title: teacher, executive, mechanic, nurse, accountant, salesperson, factory worker. For decades that title became shorthand for the whole person.

I’ve spent a lot of time with that question, which is why I wonder whether women in retirement are standing at the leading edge of something bigger. We may be the dress rehearsal.

Technology is becoming very good at repetition. Machines don’t get bored dropping the ten-thousandth engine into the ten-thousandth car. Software doesn’t mind sorting another thousand records. AI doesn’t complain about another spreadsheet or another summarized meeting. Fine — let the machines become spectacular at being machines. But what happens to us?

This morning I looked at the painting in front of me and knew something with absolute certainty. Artificial intelligence can generate an image that looks like a painting. It can suggest a composition, show me possibilities, help me research, even become part of my process. But it cannot stand where I’m standing. It cannot put my life into that canvas. It didn’t live through the years that formed my eye. It doesn’t know why a particular shade makes me stop, or carry the memories attached to a certain kind of light. It didn’t lose my father, love my grandmother, survive my marriages, or stand in the Blue Ridge Mountains and feel something shift. It didn’t spend forty years learning what my hand does with a brush.

The painting exists because I existed first. And I think that distinction is about to become more valuable, not less.

We’re entering an age of nearly unlimited manufactured pictures, words, music, and design. Whenever something becomes unlimited, something else becomes scarce, and I think one of those scarce things will be human provenance — who made this, whose hands touched it, why she made it. There may come a time when people don’t just ask whether a table is beautiful; they want to know who built it, and an imperfect physical object carrying evidence of a human hand becomes more precious for its imperfection, not less.

That makes me wonder whether AI could create more customers for my paintings rather than fewer. Not immediately, not magically, and certainly not without enormous disruption along the way. But I can imagine a culture so saturated with perfectly generated images that one imperfect painting made by one particular woman becomes more precious — because you can see where she changed her mind, see the stroke that didn’t behave, see evidence that somebody stood in front of that canvas and wrestled something into existence. There’s a human being in the room with you, even when she isn’t there. That can’t be mass-produced.

And this doesn’t belong only to artists. A man who spent thirty years building cars on an assembly line may discover he loves building furniture instead. A woman who spent forty years in an office may discover clay. Someone plants gardens, repairs old clocks, makes quilts, writes plays, restores houses, cooks extraordinary food, teaches a child chess, composes music, breeds roses, builds boats, tells stories. Nobody needs to monetize a hobby — God help us if capitalism gets ahold of every peaceful thing we enjoy and demands we turn it into a side hustle. The point is that human beings are creators. Long before résumés and job titles and productivity reports, we made things: we painted cave walls, carved figures, told stories around fires, made music, built, decorated, imagined — created beauty for no practical reason except that something inside us wanted expression. Then somewhere along the way we got terribly busy, efficient, scheduled, measured, optimized.

Technology may be about to confront us with a strange possibility. If machines carry more of civilization’s repetitive burden, human beings could regain something we surrendered in exchange for industrial productivity: time. But only if we’re wise enough to make that time livable — that’s the part we can’t skip. The benefits of technological progress can’t belong exclusively to the people who own the technology while everybody else is told to enjoy their newfound unemployment.

If AI creates abundance, humans need access to that abundance, or this becomes another story about wealth concentrating upward while everyone underneath scrambles harder. None of what I’m describing pays anyone’s mortgage by itself. Meaning and money are not the same problem, and I don’t want to pretend a canvas or a bowl of clay solves the second one.

You already know how unsettling that question can be if you’ve spent decades being useful, responsible, needed, productive, and then watched the calendar suddenly open up. At first that freedom can feel suspiciously like emptiness. I’ve come to believe the emptiness isn’t empty at all. It’s space — space for the person underneath all those roles to return.

That’s what I see happening with artificial intelligence too. I don’t believe the human story ends because a machine can produce words or pictures or drive a car. I think the machine may force us to finally decide what being human was supposed to mean in the first place.

This morning, standing in front of a wet oil painting while a group of frightened young people talked about their future, I found myself strangely hopeful. Let the machines calculate, sort, automate, do what machines do beautifully. And then let’s see what happens when human beings are given back enough time to remember what we do beautifully.

We create. We always have. I don’t think AI is going to end that.

I think it may remind us.

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Something happened to me this morning that showed me just how useful the practice of noticing can become.

Dr. Ellen Langer often suggests a wonderfully simple mindfulness exercise: look at something familiar and deliberately notice three things you’ve never noticed before.

I’ve been practicing that.

And this morning I noticed something less charming than a tree, a building or the neighbor walking her dog.

I noticed I hadn’t gained a new subscriber in 48 hours.

Immediately, the old urgency appeared.

Write something. Publish something. Do something before people forget you’re here.

Then I noticed that.

And I realized something important: if I rushed off and wrote an article simply because I was uncomfortable, the article wouldn’t necessarily serve my readers.

It would serve my urgency.

That’s a very different thing.

So instead of obeying it, I asked myself what I actually wanted to do today.

Paint.

There’s a commission waiting on my easel, and that’s where I’m headed.

Maybe that’s one of the real gifts of practicing mindfulness. We begin noticing not only the world around us, but our own automatic reactions.

And once we notice them, we have a choice.

Urgency does not automatically deserve obedience.

Try this for seven days. Find something you see all the time and notice three things about it you’ve never noticed before.

Then start noticing yourself.

That’s where things get interesting.

Anyway, if you like the idea of moving through your days with more trust and less urgency,

And you don’t want every anxious thought deciding what you do next,

You might want to subscribe to The Daily RE-Wire. That’s exactly the kind of encouragement I’m here to give you.

Subscribe now

Notice the Urgency Before You Obey It

Something happened to me this morning that showed me just how useful the practice of noticing can become.

Dr. Ellen Langer often suggests a wonderfully simple mindfulness exercise: look at something familiar and deliberately notice three things you’ve never noticed before.

I’ve been practicing that.

And this morning I noticed something less charming than a tree, a building or the neighbor walking her dog.

I noticed I hadn’t gained a new subscriber in 48 hours.

Immediately, the old urgency appeared.

Write something. Publish something. Do something before people forget you’re here.

Then I noticed that.

And I realized something important: if I rushed off and wrote an article simply because I was uncomfortable, the article wouldn’t necessarily serve my readers.

It would serve my urgency.

That’s a very different thing.

So instead of obeying it, I asked myself what I actually wanted to do today.

Paint.

There’s a commission waiting on my easel, and that’s where I’m headed.

Maybe that’s one of the real gifts of practicing mindfulness. We begin noticing not only the world around us, but our own automatic reactions.

And once we notice them, we have a choice.

Urgency does not automatically deserve obedience.

Try this for seven days. Find something you see all the time and notice three things about it you’ve never noticed before.

Then start noticing yourself.

That’s where things get interesting.

Anyway, if you like the idea of moving through your days with more trust and less urgency,

And you don’t want every anxious thought deciding what you do next,

You might want to subscribe to The Daily RE-Wire. That’s exactly the kind of encouragement I’m here to give you.

Subscribe now

This morning I caught myself saying something in my own head. I wasn’t talking to anybody, wasn’t making some grand declaration about my life — I was just scrolling past videos and articles that ordinarily might have caught my attention, and I realized what I was thinking.

Not to watch anything. Not to listen to anybody. Not, if I’m telling the complete truth, to give a shit about much of anything.

Then curiosity kicks in: What exactly do we mean when we say that? Because we say it like the matter’s been settled. I’m not in the mood to go out. To work. To paint. To talk. And that little sentence can become a closed door.

This morning there were reasonable explanations for mine. I hadn’t slept well. We’re having a heat wave, and my air conditioner is losing the argument — I have it set at 68, and my thermostat is cheerfully informing me the apartment is 75. So the blinds are staying closed. No heroic sunbeams, no performance of cheerfulness at the expense of turning my living room into a greenhouse. I’m tired, and being tired changes things. Rested, curiosity comes easily — I want to read something, paint something, wander down some rabbit hole and come back three hours later wondering how I got there. Exhausted, even somebody talking enthusiastically in a video feels like an unreasonable demand. Please stop talking. I don’t care what your five tips are.

Following the trail of breadcrumbs curiosity left, I began thinking about encouragement, which is the word I’ve been sitting with lately. What does it mean to encourage yourself on a day you don’t feel like participating in your own life?

I don’t think the answer is barking orders at yourself. Get up. Get moving. Be productive. Don’t waste the day. Come on. That’s not encouragement — that’s an unpleasant supervisor living inside your head.

A mood is a state. It’s information about what’s happening inside me right now — it doesn’t automatically get to decide what happens next. “I’m not in the mood this morning” isn’t the same sentence as “I’m disengaging from the entire day,” even though I notice how easily one turns into the other. Not in the mood, so I don’t do anything. Then I decide the day is shot. Then I’m irritated with myself for doing nothing, and the irritation becomes evidence something is wrong with me — all because at 7:30 I happened to be tired. That’s an awful lot of authority to give a mood.

Maybe the better question isn’t how do I make myself be productive when I don’t feel like it. Maybe it’s just: what am I willing to do anyway? Not what I should do, or what would make this an impressive day, or what would justify my existence. Just what I’m willing to do. Write one paragraph. Stand in front of the canvas for fifteen minutes. Make breakfast and sit quietly. Leave the blinds closed, accept the apartment is hot, admit I’m tired, and stop demanding this morning feel like other mornings.

Because moods change. The way I feel at 7:30 isn’t necessarily the way I’ll feel at noon. And maybe that’s where self-encouragement starts — not forcing myself, not indulging myself, but staying in relationship with myself.

That idea’s been on my mind since a note I wrote yesterday about self-abandonment — the quiet kind, not the dramatic kind. Saying “I’m fine” because it’s easier for everyone else, even when we know we’re not. I think there’s a version of that in “I don’t feel like it” too, when it’s not a state I’m noticing but a door I’m using to walk away from myself.

Encouragement might live somewhere between those two extremes. Something like: I hear you, you’re tired, you don’t feel interested, you don’t have to pretend otherwise — but I’m not leaving you here. Let’s see what’s still possible today.

That’s different from productivity. I’m increasingly suspicious of our obsession with it, especially in retirement — I don’t have to prove a Wednesday was worthwhile because I got twelve things done before lunch. That’s not the life I’m building.

There’s a difference between resting and withdrawing. Between honoring a mood and surrendering to it. Between “I need less from myself today” and “nothing matters today.”

Maybe that’s one of the things we have to figure out once our lives finally belong to us. Nobody’s organizing the day. Nobody’s handing us a syllabus. Nobody’s waiting on a report by five o’clock.

We have to build a different relationship with ourselves — one based less on obligation and more on attention.

What am I feeling, what do I need, what could I do today that keeps me connected to myself? Some mornings the answer’s ambitious. Other mornings it’s small. But small isn’t the same as nothing.

So this morning, I’m not particularly in the mood.

Fine. I can start there.

I just don’t have to end there.

What about you — where’s the line, for you, between honoring a mood and just disappearing into it?

Leave a comment

Anyway, if you like the idea of caring about your own life

And you don’t want to sleepwalk through the years you still have

You might want to become a paid subscriber. I’m here to encourage you to keep choosing yourself.

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I chose to tell this story that I’ve kept to myself for 6 years because I want you to know of the invisible power living within you, now.

The woman I am today was built on the shoulders of a woman who once stood in her own art studio, locked out of her own house by her husband, desperately needing to use the bathroom and refusing to be humiliated into submission.

At the time, I had no idea that was what was happening. I wasn’t thinking, this is a defining moment, this is a woman I’ll spend years becoming. I was simply furious, astonished, and trying to get back into my own damn house. But I can see her clearly now, and I want to tell you how she became me because it lays out clearly why I know people can re-imagine their lives in the years of retirement.

It all began, 6 years ago in the home of my parents.

The kitchen door that had once led to the ‘ backyard now opened into my art studio — thirty-two feet long, fifteen feet wide, windows on three sides. It was heaven on earth to me. Light poured through that room all day. Canvases leaned against the walls, brushes lived in jars and coffee cans, and every surface held some half-finished idea. It was an artist’s dream space. By that point in my marriage, it had also become a refuge.

I’d retreated there after yet another all-out fight with my husband. The fights had become so common they’d taken on the quality of weather — you woke up wondering when the storm would roll through, how hard it would hit, what would be left when it moved on. I don’t remember what started that particular one. I remember his anger changed the temperature of the room, the way real fury does.

At some point while I was in the studio, he locked me out of the house. I wasn’t alarmed at first — there were two other doors in. He’d locked those too.

Now it had moved from ridiculous to urgent, because I needed my bathroom. Not eventually. Now.

The door between the kitchen and my studio was old, half wood and half glass. I could see him through it. I kicked the wooden part and told him to let me in.

He stood on the other side, looking amused. Pleased with himself. “Good. Go pee in the backyard, for all I care.”

For a moment, underneath the anger, I was simply astonished. Here was a man I was married to, standing comfortably on the other side of a locked door, enjoying the fact that I couldn’t get back into my own house to use my own bathroom. And this was my parents’ house — the audacity of a man deciding, inside a home that had belonged to my mother and father, whether I was allowed through the door was breathtaking.

I was fully in fight mode by then. I banged on the glass harder, telling him to open it. He refused. I banged harder still. Then, without warning, my hand went straight through.

I stared at it in disbelief. I hadn’t planned any of it — no dramatic gesture, no thought that this seemed like an excellent moment to put a fist through a window. I’d simply been trying to get into my own house, and now there was broken glass everywhere and my husband, realizing the game had changed, was making a dash for his own private room.

I put my hand carefully through the opening, found the lock, and let myself in. I made it to my bathroom. And once the physical emergency had passed, I stood there trying to understand what had just happened.

Then I picked up the phone and called the police. On myself.

They came. Before they’d even reached the house, my husband went charging out to the driveway to make sure his version got there first — “She called the police, I didn’t call the police, she broke the window, I didn’t break the window.” I stayed inside and started cleaning up glass, partly because someone had to and partly because I needed something ordinary to do with my hands while two officers walked toward my door.

They separated us. One took me back into the studio and asked what happened. I told him — the fight, the locked doors, the bathroom, Terry through the glass telling me to go pee in the yard, my hand going through the window.

He told me they weren’t going to arrest me.

“I didn’t really think you would,” I said. That wasn’t why I’d called. “I wanted this on record. I wanted somebody to know the hell I’m living in.”

Meanwhile my husband was telling the other officer I was bipolar, unstable, whatever he thought might make the woman with the broken hand look like the problem.

I said, quite calmly, “I suggest you go look in his medicine cabinet.” He was the one with the diagnosis. He was the one on the medication. If they wanted the fuller picture, the bottles were right there in his bathroom.

They went and looked.

I don’t know exactly what was said to him after that. What I remember is the officer coming back to me, his face entirely changed — no suspicion in it anymore, no judgment about the glass. Just something sad. “I’m so sorry you’re living with this,” he said.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Well, this is about to end.”

I didn’t know how yet. I had no exit plan folded up in a drawer. I just knew.

Three days later, as if one catastrophe weren’t enough for a single week, my husband totaled his car, driving too fast and misjudging the distance to a row of columns on the highway. We were both driving for Lyft at the time, and between his car and mine we’d built a system that worked. Now we were down to one — mine — which meant I drove it during the day and he took it at night. Two days after that, he wrecked mine too.

Both cars, gone, inside a week. Then he left. That was the actual end of the marriage — not the night of the broken glass, but the week after it, when I was sitting in my parents’ house with no car, a few hundred dollars, and the sudden understanding that whatever happened next was entirely up to me.

The first thing I did was move what money we had out of the joint account before he could get to it. Then I started on the rest — how to get another car, how to make money, how to fix the door, how to put the house and myself back together, one piece at a time, with no manual and no rescue team coming.

It’s been six years, and I finally understand something I couldn’t have seen standing in that kitchen with glass at my feet. I used to think the woman I am now arrived later — after the divorce, after things settled, once I’d had time to become confident and clear and unafraid.

I don’t believe that anymore. The woman I am today was built on the shoulders of that woman standing in her own art studio, locked out of her own house, desperately needing to use the bathroom, refusing to be humiliated into submission. She didn’t know yet what it would cost her — both cars, the marriage, nearly every dollar she had. She didn’t know what it would build, either. But she was already the one carrying me. She just got there first.

I didn’t need six years and a broken window to become her. I needed to stop waiting for permission I was never going to get.

So here’s what I actually want to ask you, not as a nice thought to close on, but as a real question with your name on it.

Somewhere in your life right now, today, there may be a door you’re still standing in front of. A decision you’ve already made in every way except saying it out loud. A thing you want that you keep explaining instead of doing. A plan you keep postponing while waiting for somebody else to agree that it makes sense.

But nobody is standing on the other side of that door anymore, amused, deciding whether you get to come through.

That part of the story is over.

So what is your actual door?

Name it.

And then ask yourself what you are still waiting to hear before you open it, because there is a very good chance nobody is ever going to say the magic words that make you suddenly feel certain.

You may have to choose it anyway.

And to be very clear, I am not suggesting that you up and leave your marriage, your partner, your family, or blow up your perfectly good life because Monica broke a window six years ago.

I am talking about something much closer to home.

The dreams you had when you were younger. The things that fascinated you. The life you imagined before practicality and responsibility started editing the hell out of it. The part of you that once knew what she wanted before she became so practiced at explaining why she couldn’t have it.

She is still there.

I know because mine was.

Cars gone. Marriage gone. A few hundred dollars to my name. No grand plan waiting in the wings. And still, somewhere inside all that wreckage was the woman who would eventually build the life I have now.

I didn’t create her six years later.

I discovered that she had been there all along.

And whatever your door happens to be, I suspect the woman capable of opening it is already there too.

You may simply have forgotten what she knows.

.

PS Many have reached out asking why I would marry such a man. That story will be published Thursday of this week. Make sure you are a subscriber as I will send this via direct email. Becoming a paid subscriber today will get you a 20% discount, all of the PERKS for paid members such as the Re-Foundation Guide and conversation with others who are opening the door to the own possibilities.

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PSS I hope this story will help you see more for yourself and your own possibilites. If it has I would love to hear from you.

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.

I can still see the room.

I was standing in the den of our house in Roanoke, near the patio doors. I think I had a cigarette in my hand. I was married to my first husband, the preacher at this time. I was trying to explain why I did not want to do something.

I do not remember the exact argument anymore.

I remember the sentence.

He looked at me and said, “Your feelings are wrong.”

I can still remember the way I stared at him.

Wrong?

My feelings were wrong?

Not my reasoning. Not my conclusion. Not my behavior.

My feelings.

He proceeded to explain why I was not feeling the proper way about whatever situation he wanted me to participate in.

And something in me changed.

There was no screaming. No suitcase by the door. No dramatic exit.

I simply knew.

I have to get out of here.

I did not leave that day. I do not even remember how long it took me to act on that knowing. Six months? A year? Memory is funny that way.

But I remember the moment the decision was made inside me.

Because feelings are not right or wrong.

They are information.

They are the body saying, this hurts.

This frightens me.

I do not want this.

I feel trapped.

I feel angry.

I feel diminished.

You can disagree with what another person concludes from those feelings. You can disagree with what they choose to do next.

But you do not get to tell another human being that what they feel is incorrect.

And I think that is why I have such a visceral reaction now when someone tries to correct my lived experience simply because it does not match theirs.

I have no problem with disagreement.

A woman can say to me, “But what about those of us with health problems?” after reading one of my posts about using retirement to expand instead of shrink.

Fine.

That is a conversation.

She is bringing another reality into the room.

I lived too many years inside that kind of arrangement.

As the preacher’s wife I was expected to support the job, support the image, support the church, support the man.

I was very good window dressing.

What I was not always permitted to be was a fully separate human being with thoughts, desires, resistance, anger, preferences, and feelings of my own.

That day in the den, I understood something I would spend years learning how to live.

No one gets final editorial approval over my inner life. Not a husband. Not a church. Not a family member telling me I’m too sensitive, or a stranger on the internet telling me I’m too much.

I am the authority on what it feels like to be me.

And I suspect a great many women do not leave the moment they first know something is wrong.

You may have had your own version of that room. Your own version of the sentence. Maybe no one said the words out loud — maybe it was just a look, a silence, a “you’re overreacting” that landed the same way.

Sometimes the leaving begins quietly.

Sometimes it begins standing beside a patio door with a cigarette in your hand while somebody tells you that your feelings are wrong.

Sometimes the revolution happens long before anybody else can see it.

If you know, I know you know.

Monica

A living exploration of mindfulness, consciousness, wholeness, and what becomes possible when we stop agreeing with limitation.

WHAT TO EXPECT I'm making my own life the experiment. Through intentional mindfulness, meditation, visualization, and close attention to my body and inner knowing, I'll document what I practice, what changes, what surprises me, and what I learn about the power already living within us.

This is not a finished system or another promise of magical thinking. It is an honest record of what happens when I deliberately change the way I see.

That was me at the beginning of retirement.

My days were pleasant. My calendar was full. I was content.

And somewhere inside, I kept hearing that old Peggy Lee song: Is That All There Is?

It was not unhappiness. That would have been easier to recognize. Nothing was terribly wrong. I had people I loved, things to do, and the freedom to arrange my days without a boss telling me where to be.

But there was a quiet gnawing underneath all that pleasant activity.

Something in me knew I had not come this far merely to fill the rest of my years with agreeable ways to pass the time.

I was content.

But I was not complete.

On a personal note — of all the posts I’ve written, this one is close to my heart.

I know this subject can make women defensive. Mention that retirement might hold more than grandchildren, gardening, lunch with friends, and an occasional trip, and someone will be along shortly to protect the afternoon nap as if I have arrived with a warrant to confiscate her pillow.

Relax. The nap is safe.

I am not saying those things are meaningless. They can be wonderful parts of a life. Some women retire, tend a beautiful garden, care for their grandchildren, exercise, travel when they can, and feel deeply satisfied. They have chosen a life that reflects what matters most to them, and it is enough.

If you can look at your life today, imagine living some version of it for another ten or twenty years, and feel your whole heart say, Yes, this is the life I want, then good for you.

Enjoy every damn minute of it.

This is not an attempt to drag a satisfied woman away from a life she loves. It is for the woman who loves much of her life and still feels something stirring beneath it.

She may be happy. She may be grateful. She may be surrounded by people she loves. Her days may be so full that her calendar needs its own blood pressure medication.

And still, in the occasional quiet moment, something inside her asks, Is this all there is for me?

That question is not ingratitude.

I know because I had to have that conversation with myself.

The retirement that frightens me

I watched my brother-in-law choose a version of retirement that meant he had earned the right to do nothing. Every morning followed the same script: coffee, bacon and eggs, the enormous recliner, and television for the rest of the day. Occasionally he visited family. Then he returned to his chair.

He defended that life. This was retirement, he insisted. This was what he was supposed to do.

When he retired, he weighed around 200 pounds. By the time he died, diabetic, he weighed around 300.

I cannot say that contentment killed him. I can say that watching his world become smaller, more repetitive, and more sedentary left an impression on me I have never forgotten.

He had retired from his job. Somewhere along the way, he also retired from curiosity.

That is the retirement that frightens me.

So here is the question underneath everything I am about to say: is it safe to want more than a comfortable life — or does wanting more, at this age, make a woman ungrateful, greedy, or foolish?

I do not think it does. I think it makes her honest.

Retirement is more than leaving a job

We talk about retirement as though it happens when a company stops paying us to show up. You turn in your keys, clear out your desk, collect your little sheet cake, and walk into freedom.

But many women retire from employment without ever retiring from the expectations that have governed their lives. This holds true for the ladies who don’t have any family obligations, too — the tug at her soul is there the same as it is for the ones whose family tugs at her to be useful to them.

We remain available. We remain useful. We remain the emergency contact, the dependable grandmother, the family chauffeur, the keeper of appointments, and the woman who can always squeeze in one more thing because, after all, she is retired now.

Sometimes that is exactly what we want.

Taking your grandson to school can be a choice made from love. It can also become the latest role you accepted before you had a chance to discover who you were without a role to perform.

Only you know which one is true.

Real retirement is not merely freedom from paid employment. It is freedom from automatically allowing other people’s expectations to determine the shape of your days, and freedom from the expectations of the generations before us.

It is finally having the right to ask, What do I want from the years ahead?

The math behind the question

According to the Social Security Administration’s current actuarial table, the average 65-year-old woman has another 20.66 years ahead of her. At 70, she still has an average of 16.76 years.

Many of us will live well into our 80s. Some will live into our 90s. A few will reach 100. The United States counted more than 80,000 centenarians in 2020, and nearly 79 percent of them were women.

That is not a little stretch of time to fill until the lights go out.

That is a future — the same length, give or take, as raising a child from birth to adulthood. Nobody would call that stretch of years a season to simply get through.

Not one lovely Tuesday with the grandson. Not one peaceful afternoon in the garden. Imagine thousands of Tuesdays. Imagine yourself five years from now, ten years from now, fifteen years from now.

Are you curious about who that woman might be?

What might fascinate her at 75 that she cannot imagine at 65? What might she create, question, learn, or become? What parts of her have never had enough room to emerge?

Or does she want the life she has today to remain essentially unchanged?

There is no universally correct answer. But after decades of answering to employers, husbands, children, parents, churches, communities, and everybody carrying an opinion about what a good woman should do, surely we owe ourselves an honest one.

Contentment isn’t the opposite of what I was afraid of. It’s the doorway to it.

I used to think the opposite of contentment was dissatisfaction. That if I wasn’t restless, I must be finished.

Here is what I understand now: contentment did not replace the gnawing. It is what let me finally hear it.

I could not hear a whisper while I was still striving, still proving something, still surviving one obligation at a time. Contentment was the quiet I needed before curiosity could get a word in.

Contentment says, I appreciate what I have.

Completion says, There is nothing left in me to discover.

Those are not the same declaration. One is a resting place. The other is a locked door. For years, I mistook the first for the second.

What the whisper sounds like

Purpose rarely crashes through the ceiling carrying written instructions. It begins much more quietly. A flicker of interest. A question you keep returning to. Something you want to learn for no sensible reason. A tiny impulse that says, Look over here.

My bestie, Greg, is proof of this. At 68, he got curious about growing food without land. He lives in a condo, in the same building as me. He couldn’t find the system he wanted, so he built one. Now he’s seeking a patent.

He didn’t sit around trying to discover his purpose.

He followed what fascinated him.

My own contentment has movement in it too. At 70, I am writing for thousands of women, building something that did not exist before I imagined it. I’ve expanded my oil painting practice to include subjects I am genuinely interested in, not what I think will sell. The level of satisfaction is enormous! I am asking better questions, discovering what interests me now, not what interested the woman I was at 40, and not what other people think should interest a woman my age.

And! I am conducting a little experiment for myself using a visualization technique combined with 4/4/6 breathwork. I’ll post about the results in about a week. I am fascinated by the power of our minds, so I am putting it to the test. I’ve nothing to lose, nobody will be harmed, and the fascination alone has generated a different level of energy in my body. So cool!

None of it arrived as a thunderbolt. All of it started as a whisper I finally had the quiet to hear.

What I know now that I didn’t know then

I used to believe contentment was the reward for a life well lived — the place you finally got to rest once everything else was handled.

I no longer believe that.

My brother-in-law found a kind of contentment too, in that recliner, in that routine. His mistake was not that he stopped working. It was that he mistook the doorway for the destination and never walked through it.

If contentment is enough for you, wonderful. This is not a summons to trade a peaceful retirement for another exhausting program of achievement. I am not handing women a fresh list of obligations and calling it liberation. We have had quite enough of that nonsense.

But if something inside you still whispers, Is that all there is? — do not bury the question beneath errands, lunches, grandchildren, travel plans, or another television program.

You do not need more things to do.

You need enough quiet to hear what’s still asking to be lived.

Listen.

Your future may be trying to get your attention.

The key takeouts

To recap, if you feel that tug in your spirit for something more, this is what I learned to do and what I urge you to try:

1. Notice what repeatedly catches your attention.

2. Remember what you once loved.

3. Give one curiosity some room.

4. Protect time that belongs to you.

5. Ask who you are curious to become.

You do not need more things to do.

You may need enough quiet to hear yourself and enough curiosity to follow what you hear.

Listen.

Your future may be trying to get your attention.

If You Feel the Tug, Follow It

If something inside you has been whispering that contentment is not the end of your story, I created a guide to help you listen.

REFOUNDATION: Rebuilding a Life That Can Hold You Now is a 21-page guided exploration of what still lights you up, what you left behind, and who you may still become.

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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.

I Didn’t Realize I Was Mourning Her

The other day I saw a group of people floating down the river in inner tubes.

Three years ago, I would have smiled and thought: that looks like fun.

This time I smiled for a different reason.

I realized I had absolutely no interest in going.

Not because I couldn’t. Because I didn’t want to.

For a moment, I wondered what was wrong with me. Then it hit me.

I wasn’t mourning my physical ability to float down a river.

I was mourning the woman who would have wanted to.

That’s a very different kind of grief.

Nobody prepares us for this part. We’re warned about losing our careers, our routines, our income. Nobody tells us that our interests might quietly evolve. That one day you’ll look at something you used to love and simply feel — nothing. Not resentment. Not sadness. Just the quiet realization that you’ve become someone else.

I suspect I’m not the only woman who has stood in that moment and wondered what was wrong with her.

Nothing is wrong. The self simply moved on before we noticed.

Let me tell you what I’ve lost interest in. Not because I want to catalogue my losses, but because I think you might recognize yourself in this list — and if you do, I want you to know you are not alone and you are not broken.

I’ve lost interest in the rules I was raised with. The ones about folding towels a particular way and tucking them neatly into a linen closet behind a closed door. I still fold towels. But the elaborate ceremony of it? Gone. Who decided that mattered? I have no idea. But I followed that rule for sixty-something years without once questioning it.

I’ve lost interest in lunch with the girls. People still invite me and I find a way to say I’m not available. I think they’re finally getting the message. One woman declared publicly on Facebook that I’m antisocial. I don’t think I’m antisocial. I think I’ve become very intentional about where my energy goes. And I don’t want to leak it into conversations that leave me feeling emptier than before I sat down.

I’ve lost interest in keeping up with anyone. I couldn’t care less what anyone else is doing or what they have or what their life looks like compared to mine. That measuring stick I used to carry everywhere? I set it down somewhere and I haven’t gone back for it.

I’ve lost interest in the Civil War battlefields that used to fascinate me. I live in Central Virginia, surrounded by history. Appomattox Courthouse is just a few miles away. Three years ago I would have driven there on a Sunday afternoon and walked the grounds and felt something. Now I drive past the signs and feel nothing. Just a quiet acknowledgment that she used to love that. She’s not here anymore.

And then there’s the one that took me longest to admit.

I’ve lost interest in finding a man.

Not because I gave up or because something happened. Because somewhere in the last few years I simply stopped wanting it. And that realization arrived with its own particular grief — because it quietly sealed something. It closed a door I had been leaving open without quite knowing I was doing it.

The irony is that once I sat with that grief honestly, I realized: I don’t even want to go play anymore. The things I would have done with a partner — the road trips, the museum afternoons, the walks through historic parks — I don’t want those things either. It wasn’t about the man. It was about a whole way of moving through the world that I’ve quietly outgrown.

She used to organize people and pull them together for experiences. She used to be a social butterfly who showed up and made things happen.

I miss her a little. I won’t pretend I don’t.

But here’s what I’ve noticed in the space where all of that used to live.

I’ve become a student of myself.

Not in the way the wellness industry means it — not journaling prompts and gratitude lists and morning routines. I mean something quieter and more honest than that. I pay close attention to what I’m thinking and feeling, almost minute by minute. I notice when something drains me and when something feeds me. I’ve become genuinely curious about my own interior life in a way I never had time to be when I was busy living everyone else’s.

That practice of observing is actually what allowed me to notice this grief in the first place. You can’t mourn something you haven’t noticed losing.

And in the space where the river floats and the lunch dates and the battlefield tours used to be, some other things quietly arrived.

A bathtub. I know that sounds small. But I was without one for five years — shower only — and when I finally had one installed it changed something. Not just physically. The hot soak in the evening has become one of the anchors of my day. Something that is entirely, unambiguously mine. No agenda. No performance. Just warmth and quiet and the particular luxury of taking up space without justifying it.

Intentional relationships. I stopped collecting people and started choosing them. The relationships that give me genuine energy now are with people who live in my building or next door or operate a business nearby. Close. Real. Mutual. Not transactional. Not performative. Just a genuine love and appreciation that goes both directions.

And something unexpected — I stopped resisting help.

I am fiercely independent. Always have been. But recently, when a young man offered to help me load groceries into my cart, I let him. And instead of feeling diminished by it, I felt something I didn’t expect.

Grace.

A small, quiet moment of grace. The kind that only arrives when you stop fighting everything.

But here’s what I’ve discovered underneath the grief, and I want to say this carefully because I think it matters.

While I was mourning the woman who used to float rivers and organize gatherings and drive to Civil War battlefields on Sunday afternoons, I started noticing something else.

There were older dreams. Quieter ones. Dreams that never got their chance because life arrived first — the marriage, the children, the career, the obligations, the decades of being useful and available and responsible.

Those dreams didn’t disappear. They went underground. They waited.

And now, in the space where all the old activities used to live, they’re surfacing.

Not in their original form necessarily. A dream rarely returns wearing the same dress it wore when you first had it. But the essence of it — the feeling underneath the specific ambition — that’s still entirely intact.

Maybe you dreamed of being an artist. You don’t have to move to Paris and starve beautifully. But you could pick up a brush. You could find out what it feels like to make something with your hands that didn’t exist before you touched it.

Maybe you dreamed of writing. Not necessarily a novel. But the dream underneath the dream — to hear yourself think, to put your truth into words, to be witnessed — that’s available right now.

Maybe you always wanted to understand something deeply. History. Music. The night sky. The way plants grow. The dream wasn’t the subject. The dream was the aliveness of genuine curiosity, fully followed.

I think this is one of the most extraordinary and underacknowledged gifts of this season of life. For the first time, possibly ever, we have the freedom and the space to go back and retrieve what we left behind. Not to recreate the past. To bring the essence of it forward into who we are right now.

The woman I am today couldn’t have received those dreams when she was thirty-five. She was too busy. Too obligated. Too hemmed in by what was expected of her.

But this woman — the one who soaks in a hot bath and folds towels however she wants and doesn’t go to lunch if she doesn’t want to — she has room.

She has time.

She has the particular wisdom of someone who has already survived everything that tried to stop her.

And maybe that’s the real invitation underneath the grief.

Not just to mourn the woman who floated rivers.

But to ask: what did she never get to do? What dream did she set down so long ago she forgot it was hers?

Because it’s still there.

And she finally has time to go find it.

Maybe that’s what this season is actually teaching us.

Not how to stay the same.

Not how to reclaim the old life.

How to grieve the woman we were with honesty and tenderness — and then turn around and meet the woman we’re becoming with genuine curiosity.

She’s different from who you expected.

She folds towels however she wants.

She doesn’t go to lunch if she doesn’t want to go.

She lets people help her sometimes.

She soaks in a hot bath on a Tuesday afternoon and calls it enough.

She is not less than the woman who floated rivers and organized gatherings and left no battlefield unvisited.

She is not a diminished version.

She is what happens when a woman finally stops performing her life and starts actually living it.

Honor the one who came before.

She brought you this far.

And then turn around.

Because the one taking her place?

She’s just getting started.

If this piece resonated with you — if you recognized yourself in the changing interests, the quiet grief, or the dream that never got its chance — this is exactly the kind of conversation we continue every Tuesday inside The Daily RE-Wire.

The Breakthrough Circle is where women bring exactly this. The losses they haven’t named. The dreams they haven’t dared to retrieve. The new version of themselves they’re just beginning to meet.

When you become a paid member I’ll send you a personal copy of Building Trust With Yourself — the booklet I wrote from my own experience about how to become a genuine student of your own life. How to notice what’s true. How to follow what calls to you. How to trust the woman you’re becoming as much as you trusted the one you used to be.

Send your email to monica@monirosesoul.com or DM me here on Substack and I’ll send it back to you personally.

One more thing — the 20% discount on annual membership ends August 31. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the moment.

Not because of the discount.

Because she’s been waiting long enough.

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“What on earth am I going to do with my days?”

This question is plastered across all social media platforms right now. Oddly, retirement is the one stage of life many find elusive because there is absolutely zero preparation for it. We get handbooks for careers, marriage, and parenting. But for this? You just get handed a gold watch or a cake, and the door slams shut behind you.

Let’s be honest about why that question causes so much chest-tightening panic. When you’ve spent sixty years being the woman everyone counts on, a blank calendar doesn’t look like freedom. It looks like a trap. It feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, terrified that if you aren’t actively accomplishing something, you might just disappear entirely.

So when I say “relax,” I know your nervous system wants to fight me.

We act like retirement is a pop quiz and some stern administrator is standing nearby with a red Sharpie, ready to fail us if we don’t have a color-coded Excel spreadsheet of our golden years by sundown. Newsflash: You do not need to discover your grand new life purpose by Thursday.

Can we stop trying to monetize, optimize, and weaponize our peace?

You don’t need a massive master plan. Some days, just doing what genuinely excites you—even if it’s just taking a long shower and listening to the birds—is more than enough. You only need to get reacquainted with your own curiosity. You need to find the part of you that hasn’t had breathing room since 1995.

Check Your Baggage at the Door

• Drop the Red Pen: Stop grading yourself on how “productive” your retirement is.

• Resist the Urge to Overachieve: Lord knows women can turn a passing whim into a soul-crushing obligation before breakfast.

• Cancel the Five-Year Plan: Just because you can organize a neighborhood volunteering cartel doesn’t mean you have to.

What to Do Instead

Ask yourself what actually catches your eye when no one is looking. What did you love before “practicality” took over your entire personality? What have you secretly wondered about, only to dismiss it because it wasn’t “useful”?

Follow one small flicker. Spend twenty minutes on something that interests you for absolutely zero defensible reason.

• No side hustles.

• No certificates of completion.

• No guilt.

Just notice what makes you lean forward. You aren’t frantically searching for a new life. You’re just finally giving the woman inside you enough quiet to get a word in edgewise.

What’s one delightfully useless thing you’ve been dying to spend twenty minutes on today?

Not from work.

From the constant internal measuring. From the voice that asked: shouldn’t you be more social, shouldn’t you go out more, shouldn’t you be doing retirement the way other people do it?

I stopped asking what I should want and started asking what I actually wanted.

That sounds simple. It was enormous.

I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it. Not the concept. The actual thing I did, one small morning at a time, that finally made it real.

But first — where the voices came from.

Before I tell you where my voices came from, I want to ask you something.

Close your eyes for just a moment and ask yourself: whose voice do I hear when I’m about to do something that feels like too much? Too bold? Too different? Too much for a woman my age?

Name it. Even if it’s just one name.

Because what I’m about to tell you is my version of that list. Yours will be different. But I suspect the weight of it will feel familiar.

The first voice was my mother’s. Then my sisters — Ruthie and Melba Jean. Then, when I became a preacher’s wife, a whole congregation of well-meaning church ladies who had very clear ideas about what a woman in my position should want, should do, should be, should say, should wear, should feel, and should certainly never admit out loud.

I am not angry at any of them. They were doing what women do — passing down the measuring stick they themselves had been handed.

But somewhere in the process of absorbing all of those voices, my own got very quiet.

Not gone. Just quiet.

And I stopped knowing how to listen to it.

For most of my adult life — and I mean most, as in decades — I navigated almost entirely by other people’s compasses. Mom’s voice. Ruthie and Melba Jean’s voice. The church ladies’ voices. Later, other voices I collected along the way, each one adding another layer of should and shouldn’t and who do you think you are.

I did not experience this as oppression. I experienced it as normal.

That is the particular insidiousness of inherited obligation. It doesn’t feel like a cage. It feels like the air.

Then, about two years ago, something began shifting. I started noticing the measuring. Started hearing the tick of the internal scorecard. Started catching myself asking what should I want — and something in me, quietly, finally, said:

Wait. Whose question is that?

The first time I genuinely chose what I actually wanted over what the voices said I should want, it didn’t feel like liberation.

It felt disorienting.

Mildly so, at first. A tenuous resistance. A reluctance I couldn’t quite name. Like reaching for something in a dark room and not being sure your hand will find anything solid.

I didn’t know how to trust myself.

And you cannot retire from obligation until you have somewhere else to stand.

Can you feel that? That particular vertigo of reaching for your own opinion and not being sure it’s there?

If you’ve spent decades navigating by other people’s compasses, your own may feel faint at first. Not broken. Just unpracticed. Just waiting for someone to finally ask it a question and mean it.

So I built somewhere else to stand. One small kernel at a time.

I started keeping notes. Not a journal exactly. More like a running record of small choices and decisions I had made — just me, consulting only myself — that turned out well. A conversation I had handled with more grace than I expected. A decision I made about my work that paid off. A morning I spent exactly the way I wanted to and felt better for it. Small things. Quiet things. Things nobody else would have thought to write down.

I read them back to myself every day.

I was building a case. Not to present to anyone else. To present to myself. Evidence that my own perception was reliable. That my own knowing was worth something. That the woman underneath all those inherited voices actually had good instincts — had always had good instincts — and could be trusted to lead.

Slowly, the case got stronger.

The trust got stronger.

And one day I realized I had stopped consulting the committee entirely. Not in a dramatic moment. Just — the habit had quietly changed

.

I was living, as I came to think of it, out loud.

Retiring from obligation is not the same as becoming selfish. I want to say that clearly.

I still care about the people I love. I still show up. I still give. I still consider how my choices affect others.

But I consult myself first now. I ask what I actually want before I ask what I should want. I run decisions through my own knowing before I run them through anyone else’s.

That sequence matters. It changes everything.

Because when you know what you actually want, what you choose to give becomes a gift. When you don’t know what you want, what you give becomes a drain. One comes from fullness. The other comes from a ledger you can never balance.

Retiring from obligation doesn’t empty you.

It fills you back up.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you have your own Ruthie and Melba Jean, your own congregation of well-meaning voices that moved in and never quite moved out — I want to ask you something.

When was the last time you consulted yourself first?

Not last. First.

Because the voice that went quiet under all those years of should and shouldn’t is still there.

It just needs a little evidence that it’s worth listening to.

Start keeping notes. Small ones. The decisions that turned out well. The mornings that felt right. The moments you trusted yourself and it worked.

Read them back to yourself.

Build the case.

One kernel at a time.

Before you go, I want to tell you about something I put together specifically for this moment in the conversation.

It’s a small booklet called Building Trust With Yourself.

Not a course. Not a program. Not a ten-step system with a workbook and a Facebook group. Just an honest, practical guide built from everything I learned — one kernel at a time — about how to stop outsourcing your decisions and start trusting the woman who has been right there all along.

It’s my gift to every woman who becomes a paid member of The Daily RE-WIRE.

Grab your download of Building Trust with Yourself by going to the Perks Page, that presents all the free goodies for paid subscribers.

Because the shift we talked about today — retiring from obligation, building the case for yourself, learning to consult yourself first — none of it is possible without one foundation underneath everything else.

Trust.

That’s where it begins.

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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.

A woman said something to me recently that I hear from retired women all the time.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She didn’t want to travel. She didn’t want another job. She wasn’t interested in filling her calendar just for the sake of being busy.

She simply did not know what came next.

And I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since.

Because what if “I don’t know what to do” does not mean there is nothing left for you?

That is a very different problem.

For most of our lives, we knew what mattered because somebody else kept handing us the list. Go to work. Raise the children. Pay the bills. Meet the deadline. Take care of the house. Help everybody else. Be useful. Be responsible.

Then retirement arrives and removes a lot of those instructions.

Suddenly there is all this space.

And instead of feeling free, a lot of women feel lost.We start asking, “What am I supposed to do now?”

That sounds like a reasonable question.

I’m beginning to think it may be the wrong one.

A few weeks ago, I asked the women in my Breakthrough group to try a simple experiment.

Look for red cars.

That was it.

Nobody had to manifest one into the driveway. Nobody needed a candle, a vision board, or a private hotline to the universe.

Just picture a red car for a little while.

Then notice

.

And, of course, the red cars started showing up everywhere. At stoplights. In parking lots. On side streets. Outside stores.The cars had not suddenly appeared.

They had been there all along.

What changed was the instruction.

Look for red cars.

One woman in the group told me something I loved.

She said the experiment showed her that she could influence what her mind noticed.

Exactly.

That is the part I care about.

You can tell yourself what matters to YOU.

And once you do, you begin to notice more of it.

Then I came across another experiment that made the red-car exercise even more interesting.

In what is usually called the door study, a researcher stopped someone on the street and asked for directions. While they were talking, two people carrying a large door walked between them. For only a moment, the person giving directions could not see the researcher.

During that tiny interruption, the researcher was replaced by somebody else.

Different person,different clothes, different appearance and different voice.

The person giving directions did not notice.

Think about that.An entire human being changed right in front of them and they missed it.

Psychologists call that change blindness.

I call it one hell of a reminder that we do not notice nearly as much as we think we do.

Now put those two experiments together.

The red-car experiment says you can tell yourself what to notice.

The door study says you can completely miss something important when you are not looking for it.

And suddenly the question is not just interesting.

It becomes personal.

What might already be happening in your life that you are not noticing?

What if you are not stuck?

That little flicker of curiosity.

That sudden urge to return to discover what used to matter to you.

The book you keep thinking about.

The thought that maybe you would like your mornings to feel different.

The strange relief you felt when you said no.

The idea that keeps coming back.

The thing you want to try but keep dismissing because it seems silly.

What if those are not random little thoughts?

What if they are clues?

We are very good at looking for evidence that confirms what we already believe.

Tired today? See. I’m getting old.Nobody called?See. Nobody needs me anymore. Nothing planned for Tuesday?See. Retirement is boring.Tried something and it didn’t work? See. Too late.

We can build an entire case against our own lives without realizing we are doing it.

We are excellent lawyers for a case we never agreed to argue, usually while standing in the kitchen in yesterday’s clothes eating cereal out of the box like a raccoon who pays property taxes.

But if your mind can look for proof that life is shrinking, it can also look for something else.

That is the part I want women to understand. You have more influence here than you may think.

You may not know what you want to do with the rest of your life yet.

Fine.

You do not have to know. Start with something easier.

How do you want your life to feel?

That question is much more useful.

Do you want to feel peaceful, interested, creative? Do you want to feel useful without being used?

Do you want to feel free and alive?

Do you want to wake up curious about the day instead of wondering how you are supposed to fill it?

Start there.

Then give yourself an instruction.

Show me where I already feel that.

Show me what makes me feel more alive.

Show me what gives me peace.

Show me what makes me curious.

Show me what feels like mine.

Then notice.

That is it.

You are not asking yourself to solve the rest of your life by Friday.

You are teaching yourself what to look for.

And once you begin noticing what gives you energy, what interests you, what makes you feel more like yourself, you have something you did not have before.

A direction,not a map or a five-year plan.

A direction.

And sometimes that is enough to get a woman who feels like she has been walking through mud to take the next step.

I’ve been doing some of this myself without realizing it.

There is a photograph of me that I look at often.

I love the woman in that picture.

She looks peaceful. Confident. Settled. This women doesn’t stop to ask permission. And yes, I would very much like to look like her. That’s besides the point. I am starting to think the more important thing is how I feel when I look at her.

I feel calmer, happier. Something in me recognizes her.

So every time I look at that photograph, I am telling myself something very simple.

This matters to me! Look for this.

And then I start noticing the moments when I already feel more like her.

When I choose painting over obligation or stop rushing.

When I wake up after six straight hours of sleep and think, well damn, maybe something really is changing.

Those moments matter because I have decided they matter.

And that is what I want for the woman who says, “I don’t know what to do.”

I do not want to hand her another list of things retired women are supposed to do.

That is how we got into this mess.

I want her to understand that she can begin somewhere much more personal.

She can choose how she wants her life to feel.Then she can start looking for the places where that feeling already exists.And from there, she can follow the clues.

Because there may already be a wonderful life on the other side of the door.

Not some fantasy life or somebody else’s retirement.

Yours.

But if you keep asking, “What am I supposed to do?” you may keep getting answers built from the old life.

Try a different question.

How do I want to feel now?

Then tell yourself what to look for.

That is not nothing.

That is power.

You do not need to know exactly where you are going before you begin.

You only need to teach yourself what to notice.

And once you do, you might be surprised by how much of your next life has been standing right in front of you all along.

If this piece stirred something in you, and you’re tired of trying to figure out this part of life alone, come sit at the table with us.

Paid subscribers get 20% off their subscription and a seat at every Breakthrough Zoom, Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. Eastern, where we have the conversations that don’t fit neatly into an article. We pull these questions apart together, talk about what is actually happening in our lives, and figure out what we want to notice next.

You don’t need to have retirement figured out before you join us.

That’s rather the point.

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I don't want to do this alone

We are sold a massive, glossy load of garbage about life after sixty. The marketing brochures practically promise that the second you clear out the careers and the decades of caretaking, a ready-made, vibrant world will magically open its arms to us. They tell you that you will spend your days painting, laughing, and sitting outside glowing cafes at night like some romantic character in a Van Gogh canvas, trading brilliant, soul-stirring ideas with a new squad of artistic kindred spirits.

That is the pitch. And honestly? I bought it hook, line, and sinker when I moved to Lynchburg. I let them take me on tours of everything “artsy” in this town, and my imagination did the rest. I unpacked my bags, sat back, and waited for the creative awakening to start.

Spoiler alert: It never did.

Today, I am completely, utterly disconnected from the local art community. I have absolutely nothing to do with any of it. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed delights in serving up an alternate reality of Virginia summer perfection—picture-perfect country dinner parties and smiling faces posing at the hot new downtown spots. My entire participation in that elite world consists of exactly one breakfast invitation from a friend of a friend who ran an Airbnb. She happened to make a killer breakfast, so we went. That is my grand social calendar. That’s it.

For a long time, that silence stung. Let’s face it—when retirement doesn’t match the marketing, it feels like a personal rejection. You look at your empty calendar and think, Am I invisible now? Is this where they put me out to pasture?

For sixty years, our worth was tied to high-alert urgency and people constantly needing us. When that noise stops and the phone doesn’t ring, we panic. We look through the digital window at everyone else’s perfect life and turn ordinary loneliness into a full-blown emergency. We try to force our way into scenes that don’t even fit us, just to prove we still exist.

But realizing the retirement fantasy is a lie is the best thing that could ever happen to you.

The absolute most important part of my entire journey didn’t come from joining a club. It came from the discovery of who I really am because I didn’t have a full calendar. When the world stopped calling, I suddenly had plenty of time to sit with myself. I had to learn about myself all over again. I had to look my own life square in the eye.

Let me tell you something: self-examination at this stage of the game is a profoundly worthy activity. It is the absolute best use of your damn time. Why? Because when you finally sit still, you start digging up the pieces of yourself that you left behind decades ago—the wild, creative, untamed parts of you that you actually loved before duty took over. And once you find them, you get to drag them right into your retirement years with you.

So where did that quiet room and that brutal self-examination lead me? Right here.

While the local scene was busy taking photos of their dinner parties, I was busy building my own world. Today, I run a thriving Substack that reaches over 7,000 bold, incredible women who are completely rewriting what this stage of life looks like. My art business isn’t just surviving; it is absolutely thriving on my own terms. I currently have three major art commissions sitting in the wings, waiting for me to step up to the easel and get to work.

I didn’t need their glowing cafe or their country invitations to be seen. I built my own table, and turns out, the view from here is spectacular.

If you are sick of scrolling past the glossy, fake versions of retirement and you are ready to start the radical, messy work of figuring out who you actually are—welcome home. We don’t do boring here. We don’t do invisible.

Join a community of over 7,000 bold, sassy, and unapologetic women over 60 who are actively rewriting the rules of this stage of life. When you upgrade to a paid membership today, you get instant access to the raw truth, the unfiltered community chats, and the actual tools I use to build my own world on my own terms.

The mailbox might be empty, but the real party is happening right here, plus paid subscriptions are offered at 20% off!

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No More Terrorizing Myself Into Getting There

Three weeks ago, I received a standard $175 deposit for a new painting. But the real story is my total lack of a reaction. The old version of me would have immediately spun out into a manic frenzy to prove I was on the ball. This time, I just sat there. For women who have been running on high-alert caretaking mode for sixty years, realizing you don’t have to rush anymore isn’t just a relief—it is a radical rebellion.

The money sat right there for three weeks. Not too long ago, urgency would have had me moving swiftly to get those funds into my checking account because there is always a need. Many of you may not know this, but a few years ago, I had to move with panicked urgency just to make ends meet. Yes, I am on Social Security, and heck, we all know that doesn’t even pay the rent. Yet here I am, experiencing a shift so crystal clear I cannot deny it—and it’s exactly the transformation I want you to claim for yourself.

PayPal needed updated banking information before the transfer could happen—a new card, entered information, a connected account, money moved. None of that was difficult, it simply wasn’t convenient at the time. So it didn’t happen. The money was safe, the transfer would happen eventually, and three weeks later, when it was convenient, it did.

There was a time when that kind of patience wouldn’t have been possible. There was a time when that $175 mattered so desperately that everything would have been dropped, the card hunted down, the information entered, and the money moved immediately. But it wasn’t only financial need driving that urgency; urgency was how everything got done. Fear did the driving—self-inflicted pressure, constant reminders of what could go wrong, and imagined disasters if something wasn’t handled immediately. Ordinary responsibilities turned into emergencies, with anxiety standing in as the project manager. A lot got done that way. Actually, some of my best paintings were created inside the container of urgent, terrorized fear. It also meant getting terrorized just to get there.

These days, a new project is underway—a book bringing together fifteen articles, fifteen paintings, and Cartoon Rosie ( me ), who talks to the reader between each piece. There are quite a few moving parts. The articles need rereading, with every call to subscribe stripped out. Decisions are piling up: what stays, what gets trimmed, and what no longer belongs. Somewhere out there is a printer capable of the kind of book imagined here—beautiful paper and art reproductions that can be removed and framed. A limited first edition is on the table, as are pre-sales, deposits, printing costs, packaging, photography, and new photographs for some of the T-shirts.

Christmas has crossed my mind more than once. So has the possibility of pricing the book at $150, because this isn't meant to be simply a collection of essays. The goal is a beautiful art object—a high-quality coffee table book of real value. I want it to be the kind of treasure someone opens and immediately thinks, oh my God, I have to have this. Something beautiful that you’ll want to leave out, flip through, and eagerly share with your friends and family.

The old version of this project would already be an emergency by now—a schedule made, deadlines invented, twelve printers researched, and money worried over, with my mind fully convinced the whole idea would vanish without immediate action. It would be something thrilling, turned terrifying.

Not this time. This project matters, and that is reason enough to trust it will get done. That is not procrastination, laziness, or blind faith. It isn’t sitting around hoping the universe finds a printer and mails over a box of finished books. It is steadfastness—staying connected to what matters without attacking anything into motion.

There’s evidence now. Everything that has genuinely mattered has eventually gotten the attention it needed. The painting gets finished. The article gets written. The money gets transferred. The decision becomes clear. The next step presents itself, and gets taken. Not always immediately. But steadfastly. A kind of certainty exists now that wasn’t there before—not a certainty that everything unfolds exactly as first imagined, but a certainty that the right move will be clear when it’s time to make it.

For most of a lifetime, urgency masqueraded as responsibility. Pressure felt like caring. Anxiety felt like productivity. Frightening consequences into existence felt like the tax we had to pay for being women who could be counted on. How many of us have lived that exact way?

We return the phone call within the hour, because waiting a single day feels like negligence. The guilt shows up before the dishes are even dirty. We experience a total inability to sit down and rest until every last thing on the list has been crossed off—as though relaxing a second too soon might cause the whole house to collapse.

What would happen if fear stopped being the thing dragging you toward the life you want? Money still matters. Finishing what gets started still matters. This book will still get produced, and the finished copy will end up in these hands. But there is no longer a whip standing behind any of it. What matters gets done—walked toward steadily, not chased down in a panic. Whatever you’re trying to get to will still get there. Terrorizing yourself was never actually required.

You might be wondering how a woman who ran on high-alert panic for sixty years suddenly found this kind of stillness. It came down to a radical daily habit. Multiple times a day, I sit with myself for just one or two minutes and breathe. I inhale for four counts, hold for four, and let out a long, slow exhale for six counts through my diaphragm.

This simple practice manually reset my body and marvelously removed all the anxiety I ever had. In those tiny moments of quiet, my inner guide finally had a chance to speak. I learned how to actually listen to my spirit, and I developed a deep trust in my own intuition. And that is exactly why I built my new guidebook, Building Believable Trust With Yourself. ( Paid subscribers can download a copy from the PERKS page )

You Spent a Lifetime Being Needed. Now What?

For decades, somebody needed something from you.

Children. Parents. Husbands. Jobs. Families. Responsibilities. Expectations.

Then one day, much of it gets quiet.

And instead of feeling free, you may find yourself standing in the middle of your own life thinking:

What the hell do I want now?

That fog is real.

So is the strange discomfort of having freedom after spending most of your life answering to everybody else.

This is the work we do here.

Not becoming a better version of the woman you were.

Remembering the woman underneath all that responsibility.

If you are ready to stop asking for permission, hear your own voice again, and begin building a life that actually belongs to you, join us as a paid subscriber.

For this chapter of The Daily RE-Wire, I’m offering 20% off paid membership.

Your membership includes the guidebook Building Believable Trust With Yourself, behind-the-scenes access to the art book I’m creating, and our private community of women over 60 who are figuring out what comes next.

You are not done. You may simply be done living according to everybody else’s instructions.

Claim Your 20% Discount

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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