Your Brain Didn’t Retire. It Just Lost Its Wiring.

Okay, can I tell you something nobody told me about retirement?

Because I wish someone had said this to me around week three. You know that week — when the novelty has worn off and the open calendar stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like a question you genuinely cannot answer?

That feeling?

Not a character flaw.

Neuroscience.

I know. Stay with me.

Here’s the thing about our brains after forty, fifty years of working life.

They got organized. Like, really organized. What needs to get done, who needs you, where you need to be, what’s expected of you before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee on a Monday morning.

That repetition — day after day, decade after decade — builds neural pathways. Strong ones. Automatic ones. The kind that fire whether you want them to or not.

Your brain got very, very good at organizing around that structure.

And then one day — the structure just... disappears.

And your brain doesn’t go oh wonderful, we’re free!

It goes: okay but what do I organize around now?

And this is where most of us get it wrong.

We think we feel lost because something is wrong with us. Because we’re not handling this the way we should. Because everyone else seems fine and here we are standing in our kitchen at 10am on a Tuesday genuinely not knowing what to do next.

Honey. No.

Your brain just lost its primary wiring system.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

And now something kicks in that you’ve probably heard before but maybe didn’t realize was literally true:

Use it or lose it.

Not a cute phrase. Not a motivational poster. That is actually how your brain works.

The pathways you stop using? They weaken. The ones you start using? They strengthen. And the ones that got crowded out by decades of obligation and other people’s needs and just surviving?

You now — right now, at this age, in this season — have the chance to build them.

So when I say we don’t retire, we ReWire — this is what I mean.

Not just thinking differently.

Using your brain differently.

Because whether you know it or not, your brain is asking you something right now:

What matters? What should I pay attention to? What do I build around next?

And your job — the real opportunity of this whole season — is to answer that question on purpose. Before your brain answers it by default.

Because it will answer it. One way or another.

If you sit, scroll, drift through the same safe routines every day — your brain organizes around that. And it gets quieter. Less curious. Smaller than it was.

But if you follow even a small curiosity — and I mean embarrassingly small, like I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to try that — your brain starts to reorganize.

Literally.

New input. New pathways. New questions that pull you forward instead of leaving you stuck in the kitchen at 10am.

Now here’s the part that really got me.

The most powerful new input isn’t random.

It’s not “try a new hobby” or “take a different walk” — though those aren’t wrong.

The input that rewires most deeply is the one that reconnects you to something that was already yours.

Because your brain doesn’t just respond to new experiences.

It responds to recognition.

Let me tell you what that looked like for me last weekend.

I was watching a movie. The subject doesn’t matter. What matters is the last scene — a mother rewards her nineteen-year-old son for turning his life around. Not with just any car.

A 1964 Mustang. Completely rebuilt. Inside and out.

And when that car came across my television screen —

I could not sit down.

I started crying. Got goosebumps. Could not be still.

Because when I was sixteen years old, my father gave me a 1964 baby blue Mustang.

I wrecked it six weeks later. But that’s not the point.

The point is — that car was the only time my father ever demonstrably told me he loved me. Set me apart from my siblings. Let me know that he saw me. That I was important. That I mattered to him specifically — not just as one of his children, but as me.

And fifty-some years later, a car on a television screen lit me up like a Christmas tree.

That’s recognition.

That’s a neural pathway that never went away — it just went quiet. Decades of quiet. And then one Saturday night it fired like it was 1970 and I was sixteen and my father was handing me the keys.

And here’s what happened next — because this is the part that matters:

I got energy.

Real energy. The kind that makes you move.

I got curious. Found a book I’d been meaning to read about herbs. Started looking things up. One curiosity led to another. I could not be still.

And now? I occasionally go online and look at pictures of 1964 baby blue Mustangs.

Just because it feels good.

That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

It feels good and I let it.

That’s what recognition does.

When your brain encounters something that was already true about you — something that got set aside, buried, crowded out by decades of obligation and other people’s needs — it fires.

Not gently. Not politely.

Like a Christmas tree.

And here’s what the neuroscience actually says about that moment:

Returning to a dormant passion doesn’t just feel good.

It reactivates pathways that have been quiet — sometimes for decades — and starts rebuilding the neural architecture of a self that got set aside.

That’s not poetry.

That’s biology.

Which means following that lit-up feeling isn’t indulgent.

It isn’t frivolous.

It isn’t something to do after everything important is handled.

It is the most direct route to a brain that stays curious, connected, and fully alive.

So here’s what I want you to do today.

Not ten things. Just one.

Think about what lit you up before you learned to want the right things. Before you got so good at being responsible that you forgot what it felt like to be alive in that particular way.

What was your 1964 baby blue Mustang?

Not the car. The feeling underneath it.

The moment you were seen. The thing that was specifically, unmistakably yours. The want that showed up before anyone had the chance to tell you to be practical.

Do one small thing in that direction today.

It doesn’t have to be significant.

It has to be true.

Notice what happens.

Notice if something in you wakes up even slightly.

That’s a new pathway forming.

That’s the beginning of the rewiring.

You are not done.

Your brain is not done.

And it will become — fully, completely, neurologically — whatever you use it for next.

So let’s use it for something that was always ours.

The dream you set down didn’t disappear.

It went quiet.

And your brain has been waiting — patiently, stubbornly, with the particular persistence of something that belongs to you and knows it — for you to come back and find it.

We don’t retire.

We ReWire.

And your 1964 Mustang?

It’s still out there.

Go look at the pictures.

Just because it feels good.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

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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I Didn’t Have to Wait Forty Years. Neither Do You.

Sand Springs, Oklahoma. 1978.

I was twenty-three years old, five years into my marriage to the preacher-man, mother of a three-year-old, and living a life built entirely out of what I should do, what I might do, what was expected of me.

Wanting was not on the list. Wanting, in that life, would have been unforgivable.

Here’s something I didn’t know about being a minister’s wife in Sand Springs, Oklahoma in 1978:

The local Women’s Club had it written into their charter that all ministers’ wives were automatic members.

Automatic. No application required. No choice in the matter.

So I went. Once.

The one time I chose to attend their gathering — the one and only time — happened to be the day they were all going to the movie theater to see a newly released film.

Same Time Next Year.

Thank God.

Because I knew — knew — I could not sit in someone’s perfectly decorated parlor nibbling petit fours off a china plate with a lace napkin on my lap pretending to belong.

At least I got to see a movie.

Same Time Next Year stars Ellen Burstyn and Alan Alda as two people who meet by chance on the California coast, spend one night together, and make a promise to meet again — same place, same weekend — every year.

What caught me wasn’t the romance.

It was Ellen Burstyn’s character.

When they first meet in the 1950s she’s the perfect picture of a stay-at-home wife. Heels. Pearls. Polite smiles. The whole performance.

But year after year, scene after scene — she grows.

Her clothes change. Her language sharpens. Her energy expands. By 1978 she’s running her own catering business — a woman transformed so completely she’s barely recognizable as the woman who started the story.

And I sat there in that movie theater in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, twenty-three years old with a lace napkin credit and a life that didn’t fit —

and something inside me woke up.

This could change. I don’t have to stay here.

Not “here” as in Sand Springs. Here as in — this version of myself.

That movie planted a question I would carry for the next forty years:

How do I grow? How do I become someone I can actually respect?

The search that followed was long. Winding. Sometimes genuinely painful.

I left Sand Springs. Left the first marriage. Found my way to New York City and a concert pianist and a decade of a completely different kind of life. Found my way back south to another minister and another version of myself.

Along the way I was a music producer, a talent manager, a published writer. I owned a small online newspaper. I had dinner with Gorbachev. With Nixon. With Madeleine Albright.

I would ask them — these larger-than-life people across the table — how they’d built the lives they had. None of their answers were particularly memorable. But they all had one thing in common.

They just knew. Without doubt. They knew they were on a mission.

I was still looking for mine.

That’s when the self-help books started.

By the time my house in Washington D.C. burned down, I had a library of over six hundred of them.

Six hundred.

I’d read every one. Devoured them, convinced the next chapter, the next tool, the next revelation would finally unlock the thing I couldn’t quite name.

I say this with complete affection for the genre and zero regret about the money spent:

The self-help industry was my original codependent relationship.

I had the books, the life coach, the tools, the frameworks, the morning routines. I was committed to growth the way some people are committed to a second job.

And still. It wasn’t quite enough.

Because I was consuming everyone else’s answers to a question only I could answer for myself.

It wasn’t until I lost nearly everything that I finally got quiet enough to hear it.

No house. Depleted resources. No one to lean on. No sense of safety — not physically, not financially.

Just me.

And my cat.

That’s when I stopped.

No announcements. No declarations. No new program or framework or guided meditation series.

I just shuttered the windows — not to block the world, but to soften it — and stayed in.

In the evenings, the moon kept me company.

In the mornings, the birds.

And in that particular quiet — the kind that only arrives when you’ve stopped filling the silence with other people’s wisdom — I finally heard something I hadn’t in years.

My own voice.

Not the preacher’s wife voice. Not the New York voice. Not the voice trained by six hundred books to speak in someone else’s framework.

Mine.

Here’s what it said, when I finally got quiet enough to hear it:

You already know.

You’ve always known.

You’ve just been very, very busy asking everyone else.

Just like Ellen Burstyn’s character — that woman who transformed herself year by year, scene by scene, until she was barely recognizable as the woman who started the story — I realized time wasn’t my enemy.

It was my material.

Every marriage. Every city. Every book. Every dinner with a world leader who turned out to have no better answers than anyone else. Every moment of starting over.

All of it was the painting.

I just hadn’t stepped back far enough to see it.

I’m telling you this today — one year after I first told it — because something has settled in the telling.

I spent forty years searching for what was already inside me.

Forty years of books, coaches, frameworks, programs, conversations, moves, marriages, and one very significant house fire.

And what finally worked?

Getting quiet.

Sitting with myself.

Listening for the voice underneath all the noise I’d been calling guidance.

You don’t have to wait forty years.

That’s not a sales line. That’s the thing I most wish someone had said to me in that movie theater in Sand Springs in 1978, when I was twenty-three and something in me woke up and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Start quieter than you think you need to.

Listen longer than feels comfortable.

And trust that what’s been waiting underneath all the noise —

has been there the whole time.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

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The Storm That Started Everything

In August of 2020 Hurricane Laura came through Lake Charles, Louisiana like it had a personal agenda.

Category 4 officially. I remain convinced it was a 5 and I will die on that hill — which, given what it did to my property, feels appropriate.

It didn’t bring rain. It brought wind — the tornado kind, the kind that doesn’t negotiate. And when it was done with my street, six oak trees that had stood on my property for longer than I’d been alive were lying on the ground like they’d simply given up.

Southern oaks. The sprawling romantic kind. The kind that show up in every novel ever set below the Mason-Dixon line. The kind I’d grown up believing were permanent — guardians, I always thought, of everything that stays.

They weren’t permanent.

Neither, it turned out, was anything else I’d been holding onto.

I stood in my front yard looking at the roots — exposed, reaching up toward the sky they’d been ripped away from — and felt something I wasn’t expecting.

Recognition.

Because I knew exactly how those trees felt.

Uprooted. Everything underneath finally visible. The ground that was supposed to hold you, gone.

My life was in the wreckage too. Not just the property. The whole construction of it — the stability I’d spent decades assembling, the foundation that had always felt slightly borrowed, slightly not-quite-mine.

The storm had taken the trees.

And in doing so had taken the last excuse I had for not moving.

So I moved.

Not metaphorically. I packed what was left, left Lake Charles, and went toward the life I’d been circling for years without ever quite landing.

A vibrant downtown. My art. My writing. My own company on my own terms.

The dream I’d been carrying since I was a girl — not the marriage dream, not the suburban dream, not any of the three times I tried someone else’s version of what my life should look like — but the real one. The stubborn, persistent, quietly-waiting one.

Freedom. Creativity. A life that felt like mine when I woke up in the morning.

I want to be honest about something.

I didn’t arrive here gracefully. There was a pity party. A real one, with justification, because COVID was happening and my resources were depleted and I was 66 years old facing the particular indignity of having to start over when I thought that chapter was behind me.

But the rent didn’t care about my pity party.

So I started.

Here’s what I know now that I couldn’t have told you then:

The storm didn’t take anything that was actually mine.

It took the borrowed stability. The foundation that never fit. The life that looked right from certain angles but never felt true when you were living inside it.

What was actually mine — the dream, the art, the voice, the particular stubborn aliveness that had been waiting for exactly this opening — that was still standing.

It’s still standing. Dreams never die, the simply wait. I wish I had the patience our dreams have.

And that’s what I write about here. Not the loss — though I don’t pretend it wasn’t loss. But what comes after the roots get exposed. What you discover you actually are when everything you were leaning on falls away.

It took a Category 4 hurricane to get me here.

I’m not recommending that method.

But I am telling you the other shore exists.

And it’s worth every uprooted oak tree it took to get there.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle for paid members. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

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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 also made a video about this.

Because apparently one medium wasn’t enough to process a Category 4 hurricane and an existential reckoning about my life choices.

You’re welcome to join me there too.

How I Got Here

Let me tell you something about the woman writing this.

She spent seventeen years married to a Christian minister. Then ran off to New York City and spent a decade married to a concert pianist. Then came back to her hometown and married another Christian minister.

And somewhere in the middle of all that — in the New York years, in the Southern years, in the years of being a minister’s wife and a musician’s wife and a mother and a daughter and the dependable one and the agreeable one — she misplaced something.

Not dramatically. Not all at once.

Just quietly, the way you misplace things when your hands are always full of something else.

Fast forward to 2020.

I’m 66 years old. COVID is doing what COVID did. I’ve lost my investment in our family home. Three months of illness have depleted everything — energy, resources, certainty about what comes next.

And I’m standing in what remains thinking: What the hell. I have to start over. At 66.

I had my pity party. I want to be honest about that. I sat in it for a while because I’d earned the right to be furious and I was.

But the rent didn’t care about my feelings. And I didn’t have the luxury of staying stuck.

So I started walking.

Not because I wanted to. Because sitting still was unbearable. The anxiety needed somewhere to go and my body seemed to know that even when my mind didn’t.

So I walked. And I talked — out loud, to myself, on the street, like a woman who had stopped caring what anyone thought about her at 66 which, it turns out, I had.

I added music. Let my steps find the rhythm of it.

And somewhere in those walks — in the talking and the moving and the music — I started to hear something underneath all the noise.

My own voice.

Not the one trained to be reasonable and agreeable and appropriate.

The other one.

The one that knew what I wanted before I learned to want the right things.

I started sitting in stillness. Not meditating the way the apps tell you to. Just — sitting. Listening to my own mind without running from it. Letting the quiet get loud enough to hear what had been waiting underneath everything.

The dream that surfaced was simple.

Make art. Sell it. On my terms. No art fairs, no festivals, no asking permission from anyone. Just me and the work and the people who connected with it.

Simple. And mine. Completely mine in a way very few things had been before.

I’m living that dream now.

Not the performed version. The real one — paint on my hands, a Substack that somehow landed on a bestseller list, a YouTube channel I’m figuring out in real time, a life in what I can only call full color.

I didn’t get here because I figured it out.

I got here because I finally stopped long enough to hear what I’d been carrying the whole time.

The dream didn’t disappear during those three marriages and two cities and the years of being everything to everyone.

It just waited.

Patiently. Stubbornly. With the particular persistence of something that belongs to you and knows it.

I made a short video about exactly this — about what actually happens to our dreams when life gets in the way. About where they go. About why they’re not as gone as we think.

Because if you’re reading this wondering whether yours is still in there —

it is.

It’s been waiting the whole time.

It just needs you to get quiet enough to hear it again.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle for paid members. It’s a group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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.

We Were Never Told To Dream

Okay, I have to tell you something.

I was sitting here thinking about Lawrence Welk of all things — and before you say anything, yes, I know, but just stay with me —

Saturday nights. Our den. My parents in their chairs, me on the floor probably, and the television on. And there she was. The woman at the piano. Blonde bouffant — and I mean blonde — playing so fast her hands were practically a blur.

And I just... knew.

I knew I could do that.

I got up right in the middle of the show, walked into the living room, sat down at our piano and started playing. Just like that. Because in my nine-year-old mind there was absolutely no reason I couldn’t do exactly what she was doing.

And underneath that — and I don’t think I could have said this at nine but I feel it now clear as anything — underneath that was this: maybe if I could do that, they’d actually pay attention to what I want.

They didn’t ask.

Nobody asked.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to.

We weren’t taught to dream. You know that, right? Like — that was just not part of the curriculum.

We were taught to be responsible. We were taught to be pretty. Mind your manners, come home early, don’t stay out late, be a good girl —

but dream? Want something fiercely and specifically for yourself?

Nobody mentioned that part.

And I don’t think it was malicious. I really don’t. I think the people raising us genuinely believed they were preparing us for life.

They just forgot to ask us what kind of life.

So here we are.

Retirement arrives — or whatever you want to call this season — and the structure falls away and the rules release their grip and we’re just... standing there.

Responsible. Pretty. Well-mannered.

Completely at a loss.

Because someone finally took all the obligations off the calendar and said it’s your time now —

and we look around and think — my time for what, exactly?

That question. Oh, that question.

After a lifetime of knowing exactly what everyone else needed — after decades of being so finely tuned to everyone else’s wants that you could anticipate them before they were spoken —

What do I actually want?

It can feel almost impossible to answer. Not because the want isn’t there. But because we got so good at not asking.

So I’ve been thinking about what dreaming actually means at this point. At our age. In this season.

And I don’t think it’s about building a perfect life.

I think it’s simpler and harder than that.

I think it’s about telling the truth.

About noticing what still calls to you — quietly, persistently, in the background of all the busy — without immediately explaining why it’s impractical or too late or selfish.

Just noticing.

Just saying — yes, that. That’s still there.

The piano is still there.

Or the painting. Or the writing. Or the trip. Or the business. Or the completely inexplicable thing that nine-year-old you leapt out of her chair for before anyone had the chance to tell her to sit back down.

She knew something.

We talked her out of it.

Maybe it’s time to let her back in the room.

It’s about noticing what still calls to you,
without needing to justify it.

It’s about recognizing that dreaming was never something reserved for the young.

It was something postponed.

And postponed is very different than lost.

Now we have something we didn’t have before:

Discernment.
Life experience.
And a much lower tolerance for living a life that doesn’t feel like our own.

So maybe the question isn’t:
“What should I become?”

Maybe the question is:
“What have I quietly wanted all along?”

And what might happen
if you let yourself answer that…
without editing it…
without dismissing it…
without calling it too late.

Because the dream may not need to be achieved
in order to matter.

It may simply need to be acknowledged.

To be felt again.

To be allowed back into the room.

And from there…
everything begins to change.

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The Dream You Stopped Asking About

I was nine years old, sitting in our den on a Saturday night watching Lawrence Welk with my parents, when I saw her.

The woman at the piano.

Blonde bouffant. Hands moving so fast they blurred. Playing like it was the most natural thing in the world, like joy had simply decided to come out through her fingers.

And something in me leapt.

Not metaphorically. I actually got up from the easy chair, walked into the living room, sat down at our piano, and started playing. Because I just knew I could do that. Knew it the way nine-year-olds know things — completely, without evidence, without doubt.

Underneath that knowing was something else I didn’t have words for then.

Maybe if I could do that, they’d pay attention to what I want.

They didn’t ask.

Nobody did.

That’s not a complaint about my parents. It’s an observation about a generation.

We were taught to be responsible. Pretty. Well-mannered. Come home early. Don’t stay out late. Don’t take up too much room.

Dream? Nobody mentioned that part.

And so we didn’t. Or we did and then stopped. Or we kept dreaming quietly, privately, the way you keep something precious that nobody else seems to think is worth keeping.

And then life happened. Career. Family. Caregiving. The thousand obligations that fill the years so completely you forget there was ever anything else.

Until one day the structure ends.

And you’re standing in your own life, responsible and well-mannered and completely at a loss —

Here’s what I’ve learned about that question.

It doesn’t need a plan. It doesn’t need a timeline. It doesn’t need to be practical or profitable or explainable to anyone at a dinner party.

It needs permission.

Just — permission.

Permission to say the thing out loud. Even quietly. Even just to yourself. This is what I wanted before I learned to want the right things.

The piano. The painting. The writing. The thing you leapt toward at nine before anyone told you to sit back down.

What was it for you?

I’ve been thinking about this so much lately that I made a video about it. About the dream I had at seventeen that I set down and then spent decades circling back toward without quite landing.

About what it finally felt like to land.

If you’ve been carrying something similar — a dream that got postponed rather than lost, a want that went quiet but never quite disappeared — I think you’ll recognize yourself in it.

Because postponed is not the same as lost.

And the dream doesn’t need to be achieved in order to matter.

It needs to be acknowledged. Felt again. Allowed back into the room.

That’s where everything begins to change.

Not with a plan.

With a question.

What if I let myself want this again?

Just that.

Just — what if.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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.

Oh My God. I’m Becoming My Mother.

It came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

I caught myself doing something — I won’t tell you what yet — and heard my own voice say out loud:

Oh my God. I’m becoming my mother.

Let me tell you about Rosalie.

My mother was a master gardener. The woman who kept things alive by sheer force of attention and stubbornness. The woman who could look at a struggling plant and know exactly what it needed before anyone else had noticed something was wrong.

And then somewhere in her sixties she decided she was geriatric.

Not because her body required it. Because she believed it.

If the phone rang she would sigh — deeply, elaborately — as if the effort of standing up was being asked of someone who had already given quite enough. If something needed doing there was this quiet resignation that settled over her like a weather pattern. Life had narrowed, her posture said, and she was simply going along with it.

I called her on it once.

“Mom. What are you doing?”

She said — with complete sincerity: “I’m just being reasonable.”

And I said: “No. You’re diminishing yourself.”

She didn’t see it that way. She thought she was behaving appropriately for her age. The way her mother had behaved. The way that generation had behaved.

But here’s what I didn’t say then and have been thinking about ever since:

Those generations were different. They were farmers. They were physically exhausted in ways we are not. They didn’t have the information, the access, the longevity we have. They weren’t making conscious choices about how to age.

They were just tired.

So back to what came out of my mouth.

I was sitting at my desk and I noticed my shoulders had folded forward. My spine had gone soft. I had — without any intention or drama — begun to collapse slowly into myself like a building that’s given up.

And I heard my mother’s sigh in my own body.

Oh my God. I’m becoming my mother.

Not in the good ways — not her laugh, not her hands in the dirt, not her fierce and particular opinions about roses.

The other way.

Here’s what I did.

I imagined a string attached to the top of my head pulling me gently toward the ceiling. Sounds ridiculous. Works immediately. My spine lengthened. My shoulders dropped back where they belong. My chest opened up like a window someone finally remembered to unlatch.

Then I stretched my calves. Right there at the desk, because I knew I’d be sitting for another hour and my legs had opinions about that.

These are not grand gestures.

They are not a brand new life or a dramatic reinvention or a morning routine that requires a spreadsheet.

They are small interruptions.

Of old patterns. Old postures. Old inherited beliefs about what people our age do and don’t do and can and cannot be.

This is what rewiring actually looks like.

Not the declaration. Not the overnight transformation.

Just the moment you catch the sigh before it happens.

The moment you notice the collapse and choose the string instead.

The moment you hear the voice that says this is what people our age do — and say back to it, quietly, without drama:

Not today.

My mother was reasonable.

I’m choosing something else.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

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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.

The Alternate Universe

I ran into an old friend last month.

We were close once — the kind of close where you finish each other’s sentences and order for each other at restaurants without asking. We hadn’t seen each other in a few years and I was genuinely excited.

Within ten minutes she was telling me about the apartment she’d moved into. Smaller. Easier. She’d given away most of her furniture. Sold the car. She was, in her words, simplifying.

And she looked at me — at my paint-stained hands and my phone with seventeen open tabs and my general air of someone who has too many projects and not enough hours — and she said, with complete kindness:

“Monica. Don’t you want to just... rest?”

I thought about it for a full three seconds.

No.

Not even a little.

I’ve been noticing this among my fellow boomers lately and I find it genuinely fascinating rather than troubling.

Many are preparing for a future that looks nothing like mine. Selling homes. Downsizing. Shedding belongings like they’re returning borrowed things. Settling into a pace that is, by design, slower. Quieter. More observational.

And I want to be clear: if that’s the life that fits — if that particular quiet is what someone has been moving toward for sixty years — then that’s exactly right for them.

But.

But.

I am over here doing the opposite and I cannot entirely explain why except to say that something in me appears to have missed the memo about winding down.

I learned social media this year. At 70. Voluntarily.

I write every day. Not because someone is waiting on it — though some of you are, which still surprises me — but because the writing is where I find out what I think. It’s how I make sense of things. It’s become as necessary as coffee and considerably more interesting.

My art is still the heartbeat of everything. I paint in the mornings when the light is right and my brain is quietest and nobody has asked me anything yet. Those hours are not optional.

And somewhere in all of this — the writing, the painting, the learning, the building — I landed on a Substack bestseller list. Which I mention not to brag but because 18 months ago I didn’t know what Substack was and I find the whole thing genuinely hilarious.

My friend who wants to rest would find this exhausting.

She’s not wrong.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with though.

We were handed a story about this season of life. A narrative. The sidelines. The slowdown. The graceful fade.

And some of us — not all of us, but some of us — look at that story and think:

That’s not mine.

Not because we’re better than the women who choose the quiet. But because something in us is still mid-sentence. Still reaching for something we set down years ago. Still curious about what we’re capable of when nobody is telling us what that is.

The dreams we deferred for practicality, for family, for survival, for the thousand quiet obligations that filled the years — they didn’t disappear.

Some of them have been sitting in the basement next to the journals. Waiting.

If you’ve been feeling out of step lately — like everyone around you is preparing for an ending you haven’t arrived at yet — I want you to consider something.

That feeling isn’t restlessness.

That’s the sound of someone who still has something unfinished.

And unfinished isn’t a problem.

It might be the most interesting thing about you.

The sidelines were never the whole story.

Some of us were always going to be the ones still on the field at halftime — paint on our hands, coffee going cold, seventeen tabs open — wondering what we’re going to make next.

I’ll see you out there.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle for paid subscribers. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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.

What If Aging Is a Reclassification?

I want to propose something that took me until 70 to understand.

What if you’re not losing your edge as you age?

What if it’s just changing hands?

I lived for years underneath a quiet assumption I never quite said out loud. That by now — by this age, in this body, in this season — whatever advantages I’d had as a woman were smaller. Softer. Harder to find.

I didn’t announce this belief. I just lived like it was true.

And then something started happening that I didn’t expect.

Small moments where that story didn’t hold.

Not dramatic reversals. Not a late-life renaissance with a soundtrack. Just quiet, inconvenient noticing. The kind where you stop mid-thought and think —

Wait. That’s not what I was told would happen.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I know exactly what I like now.

Not aspirationally. Not approximately.

Specifically.

The chair I want to sit in. The conversation I’m willing to have at 9pm and the one I’m not. The people I actually enjoy being around versus the ones I’ve simply been tolerating with impressive consistency for twenty years.

No guesswork. No second-guessing. No performing preferences I don’t actually have.

I didn’t lose that capacity as I got older.

I earned it. Slowly, expensively, and without a receipt.

There’s a freedom that arrives that nobody prepares you for.

It’s not about losing attention.

It’s about losing the obligation to it.

That constant low-level awareness of how you’re being perceived — how you’re landing, whether you’re too much or not enough — it quiets. Not completely. I’m still human and vain in the specific ways that amuse me.

But enough.

Enough that you realize how much energy it used to take just to exist in a room.

And setting that down feels like setting down something heavy you’d been carrying so long you’d stopped noticing the weight.

You start to recognize patterns.

Not because you read about them. Because you lived them.

You can feel the difference between someone who loves you and someone who needs something from you. You can feel it before they’ve finished the sentence. And you don’t have to debate it the way you used to — running it past three friends, journaling about it, talking yourself into what you already knew.

That kind of clarity is not something you’re given.

It’s something you survive your way into.

And then there’s this.

The part I don’t think we’re talking about enough.

I’m sitting here at 70 years old writing something that anyone, anywhere in the world can read. No one asked for my credentials. No one approved my voice. No one opened a gate or cleared a path or decided I was relevant enough to proceed.

I just showed up.

Women my age didn’t have this before. Not like this. The gatekeepers who spent forty years deciding whose voice got a platform — editors, executives, institutions, networks — are not at this door.

This door has no bouncer.

And the women walking through it, at 60 and 70 and beyond, with sixty years of lived material and nothing left to prove —

we are early.

The mainstream hasn’t caught up yet.

I don’t have to guess how things go anymore.

I’ve seen enough of life to recognize the shape of things. The arc of certain stories. The particular way certain situations resolve. The difference between a problem and a condition — a problem can be solved, a condition has to be lived with, and knowing which is which saves an enormous amount of energy.

That’s not cynicism.

That’s pattern recognition.

And it changes how you move through the world in ways that are quiet and cumulative and — once you have them — impossible to give back.

So here’s the reclassification.

What if aging isn’t a slow erosion of advantage?

What if the things you thought you were losing were simply being replaced by something you didn’t yet have words for?

What if the advantages of 70 are just — different from the advantages of 40?

Not lesser.

Not louder.

Different.

Because when I look at it honestly —

I didn’t lose everything.

I lost what no longer fits.

And what’s left?

It’s more useful than what I had before.

More honest.

More mine.

If you’re somewhere in this stage and you’ve been living under the same quiet assumption I was —

start noticing the moments where it doesn’t hold.

They’re there.

Small. Undeniable.

And once you see them —

you won’t be able to go back to the old story.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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

This one still makes me smile.

At 17, it was just a feeling I couldn’t quite explain. At 70, I finally stopped explaining and lived it.

Watch this—because the advantage isn’t in your past… it’s in what you’re still willing to claim now.

When the Tide Goes Out

It’s Sunday morning and I feel like I have a hangover without ever having had a drink.

Yesterday I woke up to a new paid subscriber. Then I saw I’d landed on the Substack bestseller list again. YouTube numbers climbing. By every external measure it should have been a let’s-go, full-momentum, ride-the-wave kind of day.

And then vertigo hit.

Hard. The kind where you have to grab onto things just to get across the room. My body didn’t negotiate. It just said — we’re done — and I listened, because at a certain point you don’t have a choice. What started as a quick rest turned into a full day horizontal. Nothing created. Nothing written. Just the ceiling and the quiet and the particular indignity of success happening on the outside while your body stages a revolt on the inside.

This morning I’m sitting with coffee, a little foggy, noticing something I’ve been watching for weeks.

A pattern.

For the past month I’ve been riding waves. Not metaphorical ones — actual felt waves in my body.

The surge comes in and it’s extraordinary. Clear, focused, certain. I know exactly what I want to say, what I want to create, what matters. I move fast. I record. I write. I paint. Everything feels aligned

.

And then — not gradually, not politely — the tide goes out.

And I’m standing on what feels like a dry beach wondering where everything went.

Here’s the part that took me a while to understand:

The low energy doesn’t just take my motivation.

It takes my certainty.

And without that certainty, the thoughts get heavy. Maybe I’ve lost it. Maybe I was just on a temporary high. Maybe something is wrong.

But I’ve been watching closely enough now to see what’s actually happening.

When the wave is in — the energy, the clarity, the momentum — it feels like control.

It isn’t.

It’s access.

Access to energy. Access to clarity. Access to momentum.

And when that access goes quiet, I don’t become a different person. I don’t lose what I’ve built or what I know or what I’m capable of.

I just lose the feeling that I know what I’m doing.

That’s a very different thing.

I used to think the goal was to stay in the wave. Manage it, extend it, hold onto it.

I can’t. The tide goes out whether I want it to or not.

So the question isn’t how do I stay in the wave.

It’s what is the low tide for?

Practically — I already know. This is when I handle the things I ignore when I’m in flow. The small tasks, the tidying, the mundane maintenance of a life. None of it requires inspiration and all of it needs doing.

But emotionally — this is where it gets interesting.

Because I’m beginning to suspect that the wave builds something and the low tide settles it. The wave expresses and the low tide integrates. One without the other isn’t a rhythm.

It’s just noise.

I used to trust myself only when I felt good. Only when I felt clear. Only when I was on.

What I’m learning — slowly, on Sunday mornings with foggy heads and cold coffee — is that the real trust isn’t believing in yourself when the wave is in.

I don’t know if you call it: creativity or energy or mood or motivation.

But I have a feeling you’ve felt some version of this.

The days when everything clicks.

And the days when it just... doesn’t. When the thoughts are heavier not because they’re more true — but because you don’t have the same internal lift to counter them.

This morning I’m not in the wave.

I’m sitting here, a little tired, a little slow.

Writing anyway.

Not from urgency. Not from pressure.

From noticing.

And I’m starting to think that’s not the absence of the wave.

That’s a different kind of strength entirely.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle for paid members. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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

.

My identity had been on loan.

Not to a job. I’ve been self-employed my whole life.

Mine was on loan to something older and quieter than any employer. The unwritten rules. The invisible contract a woman signs before she even knows she’s signing it. This is how much space you take. This is how loud you speak. This is what you’re allowed to want.

Here’s what I’m noticing now.

Those rules didn’t leave when I stopped following them. They show up in real time — in how quickly I second-guess a decision that came from my gut. In the half-second before I speak, when something in me still asks is this okay? In how easily I can talk myself out of a want I haven’t cleared with anyone yet.

So now I catch them.

I see them rising. I recognize the handwriting. And I put them down.

Because they were never mine to begin with.

Your institution might have looked different. Corporate ladder. Marriage. Caregiving. Church. Medicine. A family that had opinions about who you were supposed to be.

The name of it doesn’t matter.

What matters is this: the woman who knew what she wanted before she learned to want the right things? She didn’t go anywhere.

The fewer rules you live by, the more she shows up.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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.

There was a time when joy didn’t require anything from me.

Childhood.

You remember this. Backyards. Bikes. Climbing trees. Making plans with nothing more than “Hey — let’s go.” No preparation. No intention-setting. No asking yourself whether you were emotionally available for a good time.

You just went.

And the good time showed up because you did.

Today I felt that familiar tightening in my chest . Not dramatic — just enough to notice. So I stopped, did my breathing, and waited to see what floated in.

What floated in was the backyard.

Not this backyard. The one from fifty years ago. The one where nobody had to try to feel anything because feeling things was just what happened when you showed up and climbed the tree.

And I caught myself thinking — why can’t I have that back?

Here’s what I realized.

I didn’t lose it.

Back then I wasn’t generating joy. I wasn’t working toward it or scheduling it or making sure I’d earned enough rest to be receptive to it.

That’s the whole difference.

Available.

Not unburdened — I had burdens at nine years old too, small and enormous the way childhood burdens are. Not carefree — I cared about plenty of things. Just... present enough that when joy knocked I wasn’t in a meeting with my anxiety.

The door was open. It walked in.

The proof came almost immediately.

The moment I started thinking about what actually brings me joy — painting, a cup of coffee that’s the right temperature for once, a song I haven’t thought about in years — I felt my body shift. The tightening softened. Not gone. Just loosened.

That told me everything.

Joy isn’t absent.

It’s responsive.

Which means the question isn’t why can’t I have that back.

It’s simpler than that.

Where’s the door today?

Not a whole day. Not a whole life. Not a radical restructuring of how you move through the world.

Just the door.

Open it a crack.

See what walks in.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

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

Subscribe now

I stood at my bathroom vanity last week holding a bottle of foundation and trying to remember the last time I’d used it.

Sometime in the fall, I thought. Maybe.

It used to be a daily event. Wake up, put on face, proceed with life. Now it only makes an appearance for special occasions — dinner with a friend, a video where I’d like to look like someone who has things together.

I shook the bottle. Something had separated. That felt significant.

And then, the way the brain does when you give it a quiet minute and a cosmetics question, it took me somewhere else entirely.

I was seventeen. Flower power in full effect. I was part of a youth group that piled onto a rickety school bus and rode all the way to New Orleans — New Orleans, of all places — to walk among the tourists on Bourbon Street and invite them to church.

I wore a leather vest. Jesus sandals. Hip-hugging jeans that did me absolutely no favors.

I wore all of it with complete conviction.

Because I was seventeen and I knew — knew — that love was the answer. I didn’t know how the world worked. Didn’t know how marriages worked. Certainly didn’t know how New Orleans worked. But love? Love I had covered.

Looking back, I realize that girl in the leather vest wasn’t dressed for approval.

She was dressed for purpose.

And she had no idea how long it would take to find her way back to that.

It’s funny, the things a bottle of foundation will make you think about.

I’ve spent a lot of years getting ready for other people’s occasions. Showing up appropriately. Looking the part. Dressing for rooms I wasn’t always sure I belonged in.

And somewhere in all that appropriate showing-up, the girl on the bus — the one with the wild conviction that she was headed somewhere that mattered — got a little quiet.

Not gone. Just quiet.

She was always carrying the dream. Even in those untethered years when life felt expansive and eternal, the want for something meaningfully, stubbornly, specifically mine — it was always there. I just kept getting ready for other things instead.

It takes me longer to get ready now. This is simply true and I’ve made my peace with it.

But here’s what else is true:

In that extra time — foundation bottle in hand, brain wandering back to a rickety school bus and a girl in Jesus sandals who thought she could change New Orleans on a Tuesday — I remember who I was before I learned to want the right things.

And she’s not as far away as I thought.

Not aging.

Just arriving.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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.

The Foundation Bottle

I stood at my bathroom vanity last week holding a bottle of foundation and trying to remember the last time I’d used it.

Sometime in the fall, I thought. Maybe.

It used to be a daily event. Wake up, put on face, proceed with life. Now it only makes an appearance for special occasions — dinner with a friend, a video where I’d like to look like someone who has things together.

I shook the bottle. Something had separated. That felt significant.

And then, the way the brain does when you give it a quiet minute and a cosmetics question, it took me somewhere else entirely.

I was seventeen. Flower power in full effect. I was part of a youth group that piled onto a rickety school bus and rode all the way to New Orleans — New Orleans, of all places — to walk among the tourists on Bourbon Street and invite them to church.

I wore a leather vest. Jesus sandals. Hip-hugging jeans that did me absolutely no favors.

I wore all of it with complete conviction.

Because I was seventeen and I knew — knew — that love was the answer. I didn’t know how the world worked. Didn’t know how marriages worked. Certainly didn’t know how New Orleans worked. But love? Love I had covered.

Looking back, I realize that girl in the leather vest wasn’t dressed for approval.

She was dressed for purpose.

And she had no idea how long it would take to find her way back to that.

It’s funny, the things a bottle of foundation will make you think about.

I’ve spent a lot of years getting ready for other people’s occasions. Showing up appropriately. Looking the part. Dressing for rooms I wasn’t always sure I belonged in.

And somewhere in all that appropriate showing-up, the girl on the bus — the one with the wild conviction that she was headed somewhere that mattered — got a little quiet.

Not gone. Just quiet.

She was always carrying the dream. Even in those untethered years when life felt expansive and eternal, the want for something meaningfully, stubbornly, specifically mine — it was always there. I just kept getting ready for other things instead.

It takes me longer to get ready now. This is simply true and I’ve made my peace with it.

But here’s what else is true:

In that extra time — foundation bottle in hand, brain wandering back to a rickety school bus and a girl in Jesus sandals who thought she could change New Orleans on a Tuesday — I remember who I was before I learned to want the right things.

And she’s not as far away as I thought.

Not aging.

Just arriving.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

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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.

The Waiting Was Part of the Joy

I caught myself getting irritated yesterday waiting for a video to render.

Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.

And I could feel it — that little edge of frustration rising up. Come on. Let’s go.

And then I started laughing.

Because I remembered a time when we took a roll of film to be developed and waited five to seven days to see what we had.

Five to seven days. And we didn’t stand there tapping our foot. We lived our lives in the meantime — and underneath everything was this quiet excitement. You couldn’t wait to pick up those photos. You’d flip through them right there at the counter, then again in the car, then again at home. You’d put them in your purse. Show your friends. Make copies for family.

The waiting wasn’t the problem.

The waiting was part of the joy.

Somewhere along the line we sped everything up, made everything instant — and stripped out something we didn’t know we were losing.

Anticipation.

Here’s what I want you to try.

Think back to the last time you felt genuinely pulled toward something. Not obligated. Not needed. Pulled. That low hum of I can’t wait — not urgent, just present. Just real.

When was that?

For a lot of us, if we’re honest, it takes a moment to answer. Not because life stopped offering things worth wanting. But because we got so practiced at moving toward what was required that the quiet signal of personal desire started coming in faint.

And then retirement arrives.

And you think — you have thought, maybe for years — I can’t wait. When it’s finally my time. When I can finally breathe.

And then it arrives. And instead of the exhale you expected —

I thought I’d love the freedom. It’s terrifying.

Not sad, exactly. Just... unmoored.

That feeling has a name. And it isn’t boredom, and it isn’t ingratitude, and it has nothing to do with how much you love your life.

For thirty, forty years, anticipation was built into the architecture of a working life. The next project. The next review. The next phase. Even the hard things gave us something to move toward. Anticipation was delivered, daily, whether we wanted it or not.

And underneath all of it was something else we didn’t examine too closely:

I built my life around being needed. Now what?

Now the delivery stops. The external machinery that spent decades generating that forward-leaning feeling — gone. And in the silence where it used to be, a lot of women find themselves asking a question they don’t quite know how to say out loud:

Where did she go? The one who used to want things.

She didn’t go anywhere.

She just stopped being asked —— by others!

Here is what I want you to hear — really hear:

The fact that nothing is handing you anticipation anymore is not a loss. It is the first time in your adult life that anticipation is entirely yours to generate. Yours to aim. Yours to design around what actually calls to you — not what’s practical, not what makes sense to anyone else, not the trip everyone expects you to take or the role everyone expects you to fill.

What you want.

And it doesn’t come from the calendar.

It comes from deciding to finally learn the thing you’ve been meaning to learn for twenty years — not to be good at it, just to find out what it’s like to begin. It comes from starting a project with no deadline and no audience and no one waiting on the result. From picking up what you set down somewhere in your thirties because there wasn’t time — the instrument, the canvas, the half-finished manuscript in a drawer, the language you always meant to speak.

It comes from making a promise to yourself small enough to keep — and keeping it.

Not because anyone is watching.

Because you are.

Those photos you couldn’t wait to pick up?

You were excited because something real had been developing in the dark. Something you made. Something that was entirely yours.

You still have that capacity.

The question isn’t what’s on your bucket list.

The question is: what are you ready to put in the developer?

If something in my article stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Here’s how Diane feels about it:

“Vouching for our Soul Circle. My time in our circle has helped keep me from giving up and staying quiet. Love the encouragement and sparks that come from our conversations.”

Come see if it feels like home.

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She Followed Every Rule

Aunt Francis was my rock.

She stood between me and my mother during some of the hardest moments of my childhood. She never judged me. Never scolded. Just quietly loved me, exactly as I was.

She was also my favorite Friday night date.

I’d pick her up and take her to the local A&W drive-in for a root beer float. We’d sit side by side, sipping slowly, letting the world spin without us for a while.

Many years later, I moved back to my hometown to help care for my dad. He had a ten-piece band that played gigs at nearly every nursing home in the area. Well into his 80s, he performed up to ten times a month. I tagged along as his roadie — setting up equipment, running cables, hauling the sound system in and out of places that smelled like cafeteria food and old carpet.

I had a habit of sitting behind the band and watching the audience instead of the musicians. I wanted to see the music land. I wanted to witness the stories tucked behind every set of eyes.

One of their most devoted fans was Aunt Francis. She lived in one of the homes we visited every month. Her whole face would light up when she saw us come through the door.

But there were times I caught something else.

Moments when she didn’t know I was looking. A quiet sadness. A kind of distant ache that had nothing to do with the music.

I’d study her face, trying to understand it.

She had followed every rule. Stayed in line. Made dinner, paid the bills, raised the kid, showed up the way she was told a good woman should. And now she was in a retirement home because that was convenient for the kid — waiting for the next meal, the next sing-along, the next trip to the beauty parlor where, if she was lucky, someone might ask how she was doing and actually mean it.

Francis had things she wanted. She wanted to write. She wanted to dance again. She wanted to travel, laugh too loud, feel beautiful. For years she’d sold Avon the old-fashioned way — knocking on doors in her neighborhood, talking to strangers, building something small and hers.

But somewhere along the way, she’d come to believe it was too late. That her chance had passed. That those things belonged to the young.

She was wrong.

And I sat behind that band, month after month, watching the woman who had loved me without conditions — watching her wait for a life she’d already decided she couldn’t have — and something in me made a decision.

Not her decision. Mine.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about the women I watched in those rooms.

They didn’t disappear because they got old. They disappeared because they kept following rules that had stopped serving them decades ago. Rules about how much space a woman gets to take. How loud she’s allowed to be. What she’s permitted to want at this age, in this body, at this particular point in her story.

The rules didn’t ask permission to move in. They arrived quietly, early, and they stayed.

And the saddest thing isn’t aging.

The saddest thing is a woman sitting in a room full of music, aching for a life she talked herself out of.

I don’t know what institution wrote your rules. Could have been a career. A marriage. Years of caregiving. A church. A family that had opinions about who you were supposed to be and never stopped sharing them.

Doesn’t matter what you call it.

What matters is this: the woman who knew what she wanted — before she learned to want the right things — she didn’t go anywhere.

She got quiet. She got practical. She got good at making herself smaller so everyone else could be comfortable.

But she’s still in there.

And she’s been waiting, not for permission exactly, but for you to stop asking for it.

You don’t have to reclaim everything at once. You don’t need a plan or a program or a breakthrough moment. You need one decision. One want you stop apologizing for. One morning where you do the thing that’s been sitting in the back of your chest for years, quietly asking when.

Aunt Francis never got that morning.

You still have yours.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

Subscribe now

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.

Many years ago, I won an advertising award for Best Ad of the Year from the Oklahoma Newspaper Association.

I beat out all the men.

The supposed professionals.

I want you to picture the room. The Madison Avenue types clustered in their polished little group, presentations full of gimmicks and flair, already deciding among themselves who would win. They laughed at me. I saw it.

Mine was a one-page ad about delicious apples, pasted on a piece of cardboard.

No fancy title. No sales pitch. Just the ad.

When they announced the winner, one particular gentleman — advertising director from one of the largest newspapers in the state — was already halfway to the podium. That’s how certain everyone was.

Then they called my name.

The judges from New York City had determined that the little gal from podunk Oklahoma had the best design in the room.

The silence was absolute.

Nobody moved.

And there I stood — a lone preacher’s wife, scared of her own shadow — suddenly holding an award that was about to redirect the next fifty years of my life.

In a single second I went from wallflower to the most sought-after person in the room. People who hadn’t looked at me twice were asking for my advice, treating me like some kind of advertising oracle.

I was 26 years old.

And that award? It had a life of its own.

It pulled me into a career I never chose. Decades of working like a dog, raising a family, being needed in all the ways women get needed — useful, capable, indispensable to everyone else’s dream.

Mine waited.

No one tapped me on the shoulder and said hey — what about the dream the universe placed in your soul before all this started?

Not one person.

So here I am. Five decades later. On fire about something I couldn’t have named at 26.

I’m the tap on the shoulder now.

I’m the voice that says — you. Yes, you. What happened to your dream?

Not because I figured it all out. Because I know exactly what it costs when you don’t.

And I’m not about to let you pay that bill.

This week I was in my recliner, half-ready for an afternoon nap, scrolling through Substack notifications the way you do when you’re not really looking for anything.

Then one stopped me cold.

I sat straight up.

My heart did something I don’t have a clean word for — somewhere between astonishment and a gratitude so big it had no edges. A woman I’ve never met, telling me that something I wrote had reached into her life and moved something.

I stayed with that for a long time.

At 26, visible meant a silent room full of people turning to look at me.

At 70, it means one woman, somewhere, recognizing herself in my words.

I’ll take this one.

Every single time.

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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’m starting to think a full life has nothing to do with how much is in it.

For years I left the TV on. Not to watch. Just to fill the silence. Voices, chatter, someone else in the room. The noise of a life that still had people in it, even after the people were gone.

Then one day I turned it off.

No music. No screens. Just quiet.

At first it was brutal — that heavy, echoing empty that forces you to face yourself. But then something shifted. My body sighed. Tension I didn’t know I was carrying just lifted, slowly, like a coat sliding off my shoulders. In its place came something I’d been chasing for years through endless doing.

Actual peace.

And with the peace came thoughts. Not the frantic kind. Soft ones. Gentle nudges. The kind that only show up when you stop drowning them out.

I had a quick pity party — alone, no one to share this with — and then I laughed out loud at myself.

Monica. You built this life. On purpose. So live it.

That’s when the momentum started. Not forced. Not planned. Just one quiet whisper: Empty the linen closet.

I found my mother’s pillowcases in there. And her mother’s. Beautiful hand-embroidered pillowcases folded like they were still waiting for a guest to arrive. Those stay. I’m thinking about framing them.

But the king-size sheets from a married life long gone? The duplicates, the “just in case” clutter accumulated for a woman who now sleeps in a single bed? I stood there looking at all of it and thought — why?

One closet snowballed into the next. Shelves cleared. Space breathed. The guest bathroom that had quietly become a storage room. The “artist studio” I’d built to prove something — a whole room constructed around an idea that no longer fit who I actually am. I paint. That’s it. No twenty-foot shrine required.

That room is becoming a bedroom again. Unhurried. A real bed on the horizon, finally retiring the daybed that’s been a couch-bed hybrid for years.

This is what I’ve come to understand about reclaiming your life and dreams in this season: it doesn’t begin with a grand plan. It begins with silence. With space. With being willing to ask — honestly, without flinching — what actually belongs here now? What reflects my inner life?

Not what you accumulated. Not what made sense once. Not the serving dishes for parties you haven’t hosted in half a decade. What belongs to the life you’re actually living.

For me, the answer keeps arriving as a feeling rather than a blueprint. It showed a few months ago as surfing — something I never tried, but the image of it, the balance, the glide, the untethered rush — it woke something electric in me. I didn’t know then that what I was feeling wasn’t really about waves. It was about possibility. About a version of myself that still had room to be surprised.

We don’t lose the dream. We lose what it carried.

And we find it again not by chasing, but by clearing. By turning off the noise long enough to hear what’s still in there, waiting.

A full life might not be about how much is in it.

Maybe it’s just this:

When you get quiet enough to hear yourself…
do you like what you find?

This came through my group this week:

“I didn’t realize how much I was holding in until I said it out loud.
Something shifted for me that night.”

And another woman said:

“It’s not advice.
It’s like I’m finally hearing myself again.”

That’s what this work is about.

I put it into a guidebook called Breakthrough—something you can move through at your own pace, in your own space.

If you want to start there, you can get it here:

BREAKTHROUGH

If you’d rather not do this alone, I also host a small paid circle here where we talk through this work together in real time.

You can become a member here:

Join the Breakthrough Circle

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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Here’s what nobody tells you about your 60s: your nervous system gets louder.

Not physically. But that constant hum underneath everything—the racing thoughts, the reactive snap when someone says the wrong thing, the 3am spiral about decisions you haven’t even made yet—that gets louder.

I didn’t realize I was living in a state of low-grade panic until I found something the Navy SEALs use in actual life-or-death situations.

It’s called tactical breathing. And it’s not spiritual. It’s not woo. It’s physiology.

Here’s what it is:

Breathe in for 4. Hold for 4. Breathe out for 6. Hold for 4.

That’s it. No app. No subscription. No incense.

The Navy trains this into SEALs so they don’t panic when chaos is real. If it works under that kind of pressure, it works when you’re sitting in your living room trying to think straight about whether you actually want to retire next year.

Why your body responds:

That longer exhale? It flips a switch in your nervous system—the vagus nerve, your body’s built-in reset button. Your heart rate drops. The stress hormones quiet. Your thoughts actually become yours again instead of a committee arguing in your head.

This isn’t belief. This is how you’re built.

What actually changed for me:

My thoughts slowed down. My reactions softened. My decisions got cleaner.

But here’s the part I didn’t expect: when you’re breathing like this, you can’t think about anything else. You’re counting. You’re tracking. You’re in the rhythm.

And when that mental noise quiets down, something else becomes noticeable.

A signal. A knowing. Not a thought trying to convince you—a knowing that doesn’t need to explain itself.

The more I practiced, the stronger it got. To the point where I could tell the difference between my ego spinning and something actually true.

That changed everything. Because once you can hear that signal clearly, you stop making decisions from panic. You start making them from clarity.

The test is simple:

Sit down. Try one round. 4 in. 4 hold. 6 out. 4 hold.

Let your body show you what your mind has been arguing with.

You don’t need to believe me. You just need to try it.

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I once sat across from my father with a cup of coffee and asked him a question most people avoid.

“What does it feel like to be almost ninety?”

He didn’t give me something poetic. He gave me something honest.

The hardest part wasn’t his body. It was staying relevant. Finding purpose. Figuring out where meaning lives when the world doesn’t come knocking quite as often.

And this was a man with a full life — children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, a house full of history. But life had shifted. The visits weren’t as frequent. The noise had quieted.

There he was. Still here. Still sharp. Still him.

And he refused to wait for the world to remember that.

My father had a little band called The Goldenaires. He played guitar and sang lead. I was his unofficial roadie — loading equipment, helping set up, running behind him trying to keep up.

We’d finish a gig and I’d still be packing up his gear when he’d look back at me, grinning.

“Come on, Monica. We’re going to go play for the old people.”

He was older than most of them.

He did not care. He showed up without fail, every single time.

And every day — rain, cold, or heat — he walked two miles. Through the shopping mall when the weather was bad, through the neighborhood when it wasn’t. Not for fitness. Not for a step count. Because something in him simply refused to go still.

I’d stay home tending to chores. He’d head out.

And when he came back, without fail, his mind was buzzing.

“I think I’ll plant something along the fence.” “I might paint the shed.” “I’ve got an idea…”

It never stopped. Not because he was chasing youth. Because he was still in motion.

We’ve been sold this idea that peace should look like calm water. No ripples. No disturbance. No discomfort.

But my father taught me something different.

Friction is what keeps you alive.

Not chaos. Not conflict. Friction — the daily, ordinary act of bumping up against something. An idea. A project. A problem. A possibility. That’s how you stay in conversation with your own life.

And here’s the thing about friction that nobody tells you:

It doesn’t glow. It doesn’t announce itself as noble.

It shows up as irritation. As that small internal whisper that says I don’t feel like it. It looks like the laundry basket sitting in the hallway for three days — not because you’re lazy, but because somewhere along the way you quietly stopped believing it matters.

That’s friction. Not the basket. The shift.

It looks like walking past your paints for weeks, feeling that quiet pull. Not urgency. Not guilt. Just a nudge. You could ignore it. Or you could pick up the damn brush.

That’s friction.

It looks like the conversation you’ve been avoiding. The boundary you know you need. The moment you realize you don’t agree anymore — and staying silent would just be easier.

Recently, a member of my Monirose Soul Circle felt she was no longer in alignment with my writing. She canceled her subscription. I felt the friction of that — I won’t pretend I didn’t. But I also recognized she was being soul-led. She felt something, she honored it, she moved.

So did I. I used that friction to slow down, to pay closer attention to the turn of a phrase, to the soft thought that could be louder. I let it make me better.

That tightness in your chest when something shifts? That’s not a problem.

That’s friction. That’s life asking if you’re paying attention.

My father didn’t debate the voice that said stay home today.

He walked.

And because he walked, his life kept talking back. Ideas came. Energy came. Desire came. Movement created more life — not metaphorically, but literally, in real time, on a Tuesday morning in a shopping mall in Louisiana.

Most people think friction is something to solve. Something to smooth out, manage away, make comfortable.

But a life with no friction is a life that’s stopped asking anything of you.

And that is not peace.

That’s maintenance.

Maintenance looks responsible. Tidy. Predictable. Nothing breaks. Nothing surprises. Nothing requires anything of you.

But nothing new enters either. Nothing sparks. Nothing stretches.

You’re no longer in dialogue with your own existence — you’re just keeping it running. And that is where the danger lives. Not in aging. Not in the body slowing down. In the quiet, gradual flattening of a life that has stopped meeting you back.

My father felt that pull toward stillness. He named it. And then he walked anyway. He stayed in the friction. He built his own — his band, his walks, his projects, his endless ideas scribbled on whatever was nearby.

He built a life that kept meeting him back.

And because of that, he stayed alive — really alive — until the very end.

Here’s what I’m learning:

Friction doesn’t mean chaos. It means contact.

It lives in the smallest choices, made daily, mostly unwitnessed:

Do I follow that nudge — or ignore it? Do I move — or stay still? Do I say the thing — or swallow it?

Those are the fault lines where life opens.

Or quietly closes.

The danger isn’t aging.

It’s slipping into a version of life where nothing rubs against you anymore. Where nothing surprises you, rearranges you, or wakes you up. Where the days flatten and meaning drifts and you can’t quite remember when that started happening.

My father felt that. He named it. And then he picked up his guitar and went to play for the old people.

So maybe the question isn’t what should I be doing with my life?

Maybe it’s simpler than that:

Where have I stopped bumping into life?

And what would happen if I invited it back?

If something in you stirred while reading this, don’t rush past it.

That’s not discomfort to fix.

That’s your life — tapping you on the shoulder, asking if you’re still in it.

If something in you recognized what my father knew — you’re already in the right place.

This is what we do here, every single week. We talk about what it actually means to stay alive in the fullest sense of that word. Not managing. Not maintaining. Not waiting to be needed.

Moving. Creating friction. Building a life that keeps meeting you back.

When you become a paid subscriber, you get every full piece, every week — plus my guide BREAKTHROUGH, delivered free. And you’ll receive a standing invitation to our weekly BREAKTHROUGH Zoom gathering, every Tuesday at 7PM EST — a small circle of women who have decided, like my father decided, that they are not done yet.

Not by a long shot.

Come join us.

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