When I was a little girl growing up in the bayous of southwest Louisiana, I used to sit and watch the Today Show with my mother.

I was fascinated by Barbara Walters.

She was one of the first women on television who seemed to take up exactly the space she deserved. Confident, curious, completely herself — and the room always shifted when she spoke.

Not because I wanted to become Barbara Walters. Not because I had some grand career plan. I was simply captivated. She seemed so poised. So intelligent. So comfortable talking to people. She asked questions that made people reveal themselves. As a little girl, I didn’t have the language for any of that. I only knew that whenever she appeared on the screen, I paid attention.

There was something about her that drew me in.

At the same time, I was fascinated by another world that seemed impossibly far away from the one I lived in. New York City. The artists. The musicians. The writers. The bohemians. The creative people who seemed to gather in little coffee shops and apartments and somehow make a life out of ideas. From the bayou, it felt like another planet.

I didn’t sit around dreaming about becoming a publicist. I didn’t have a vision board. I didn’t have a five-year plan. I certainly didn’t know that one day I would leave Louisiana and move to New York City. I simply felt drawn to something. Something about that life fascinated me.

And then life happened. Marriage happened. Children happened. Jobs happened. Responsibilities happened. Like most women, I got busy building a life.

The fascinating thing is that those early fascinations never completely disappeared. They went underground. They waited.

Thirty years later, I found myself living in New York City. Not as a tourist. Not as a visitor. I was there. I built a career in the classical music industry. I worked with artists. I spent time in creative circles. I lived in the very world that had captured my imagination as a child.

I remember standing backstage at Carnegie Hall once, watching a conductor prepare to walk out to the podium, and thinking: how did a girl from the Louisiana bayou end up here?

I didn’t realize it at the time. I was too busy living it.

Then yesterday, while editing a video from a recent conversation about retirement and the future, something struck me.

I spent five hours editing that video. Five hours. Learning how to trim clips, rearrange conversations, build a thumbnail, and figure out what would make someone want to click.

And suddenly I thought: good grief.

I’m doing it again. I’m talking to people. I’m interviewing people. I’m telling stories. I’m helping people discover something about themselves.

That little girl watching Barbara Walters would recognize this.

Not because I’ve become Barbara Walters.

I sat with that recognition for a long time. And then I thought about the women I write for — the ones who read that and feel a small ache because they can’t point to a Barbara Walters moment. Can’t identify the childhood fascination. Don’t have a thread they can trace back.

Not everyone had a childhood dream. Not everyone wanted to be something specific. Some people genuinely don’t have a dream they can point back to. And that’s okay.

I think we sometimes put too much emphasis on dreams and not enough emphasis on fascination.

Dreams can be very specific. Fascination is much more subtle.

Maybe you didn’t dream about painting. But you were always drawn to color and beauty.

Maybe you didn’t dream about writing. But you always carried a notebook.

The breadcrumb isn’t always a dream. Sometimes it’s simply what keeps catching your attention. What keeps pulling you forward. What keeps making you curious.

And perhaps that’s one of the great gifts of this stage of life. We finally have enough space to notice. To look back and ask: what has fascinated me all along? What have I always been drawn toward? What keeps showing up in my life?

The answer may not lead you exactly where you imagined. It certainly didn’t for me. But it may lead you somewhere surprisingly familiar. A place where you suddenly realize that what you thought was a random interest, a passing fascination, or a childhood curiosity was actually leaving breadcrumbs all along.

That question — what has fascinated you all along — is exactly what Mike and I spent an hour exploring together. The video is right below. In it, we talk about how to recognize your own breadcrumbs, how to begin following them, and what happens when you finally give yourself permission to do that.

I think you’ll find yourself in it somewhere.

A future is not a carefully constructed plan.

It’s a willingness to follow what continues to call your name.

If this piece stirred something in you — a fascination you’d forgotten, a thread you’d stopped pulling, a breadcrumb you almost walked past — I’d love for you to bring it into the room.

Every Tuesday, a small group of us gather on Zoom inside The Daily RE-WIRE. Not as a class. Not as a workshop. Just as women who are done waiting for permission to follow what continues to call their names.

When you become a paid member, I’ll send you a complimentary copy of Building Believable Trust in Yourself — because following a breadcrumb requires one thing above everything else. Trust that what catches your attention is worth following. Be sure to send me a direct message with your email address to recieve the free booklet.

The guide is waiting. The room is waiting.

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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.

What if it’s the belief that you don’t have a future at all?

In this conversation, Mike and I explore why so many people reach retirement and unconsciously stop imagining new possibilities for themselves. We talk about how decades of responsibility, routine, and obligation can narrow our view of what is still possible, and why developing a relationship with curiosity may be one of the most important things we can do in this season of life.

Rather than focusing on goals, plans, or self-improvement strategies, we explore simple ways to begin seeing ourselves differently.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Pattern interruption and how to break out of habitual thinking

• Becoming a student of yourself and learning to notice where your attention naturally goes

• Why curiosity often reveals more than planning

• The difference between living from obligation and living from possibility

• How small daily practices can open the door to a larger future

Throughout the conversation, both of us share personal stories and examples from our own lives. Mike talks about intentionally walking through his backyard and paying attention to what captures his interest in the moment. I share how sitting quietly on my balcony beneath the stars has become one of the ways I reconnect with myself and remain open to what wants to emerge next.

This is not a conversation about creating a five-year plan.

It’s a conversation about remembering that you still have choices.

That you are still becoming.

And that your future may be far more expansive than you’ve allowed yourself to imagine.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering, “What’s next for me?” this conversation is for you.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Subscribe if you’re ready to stop thinking about retirement as an ending and start exploring what might still be possible.

Around here, we talk about self-trust, curiosity, reinvention, and creating a future that belongs to you.

You are not finished.

And neither is your story.

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I’ve been noticing something on Notes lately — short posts that don’t give much sense of the person writing them. So I talked a bit about how we can use even a few lines to reveal more of ourselves. Not by performing. By letting people see what we notice, what we’re questioning, what we’re paying attention to.

That led us into something bigger.

What matters now? How do we begin to discover what’s next? How do we stop waiting for a map that isn’t coming?

I talked about breadcrumbs — those small clues life leaves for us. The memory that keeps returning. The sentence that won’t leave you alone. The odd little curiosity. The thing you notice before you know why it matters.

Sometimes the next part of life doesn’t arrive as a plan. Sometimes it arrives as a breadcrumb. The practice is learning to follow what you notice. To become, as I’ve been saying lately, a student of your own life.

The recording is above if you want to watch.

And we’re continuing this conversation tonight in Breakthrough at 7 PM Eastern. Paid members should have the invitation in your inbox already — if you didn’t receive it, let me know and I’ll get it to you.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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I woke up at 5 a.m. this morning with four hours of sleep in my bones and a thought pacing around the room like it owned the place.

I tried to go back to sleep. I really did.

I lay there. I turned over. I negotiated. I made every bargain a woman can make with her pillow. Nothing.

Then I got hungry. Then I ate. Then I finally said, well, fine. If we’re awake, we’re awake.

So here I am.

And the thought that would not let me sleep was this:

Maybe the dreams of our youth do not disappear.

Maybe they change clothes.

Maybe they go underground for a while.

Maybe they wait until we are old enough, tired enough, honest enough, and free enough to recognize what they were really trying to say.

Yesterday, something happened that made me laugh out loud.

I sent a query letter to Lyft about sponsoring this publication.

I looked at the numbers for The Daily RE-WIRE and realized I had something real to say. Nearly 7,000 subscribers. More than 4,300 readers marked by Substack as highly engaged. A recent direct email with a 37% open rate. Paid subscribers joining. Readers talking in the chat. Women going back into year-old archives reading pieces I wrote before some of them ever found me.

And there I was, sitting in my retirement years, writing to a company about sponsorship and advertising.

Then it hit me.

I started my business life selling advertising.

Years ago, I was the advertising director for a small-town newspaper in Oklahoma. That was one of my first real awakenings to business. I understood the relationship between a publication, its readers, and the businesses that wanted to reach them.

I never had a problem with advertising. Some people clutch their pearls at the word, but I have always understood something very simple: somebody has to pay for the lights. Readers can pay. Sponsors can pay. Some combination of all of the above can pay. The question is not whether advertising is evil. The question is whether the advertising respects the reader.

That part matters to me. A lot.

Because I do not want to build a publication that treats women over 60 like a demographic carcass for corporations to pick over. God help us.

I want to build a living room. A warm room. A room where women read, recognize themselves, talk back, upgrade, participate, laugh, cry, remember, and begin again. And if a sponsor belongs in that room, then I have no problem opening the door.

FULL CIRCLE MOMENT: That is when the full-circle feeling came over me.

After that small-town newspaper job, I tried to open my own ad agency. That failed.

Later, when the internet began to open up — back when Twitter and Facebook were still young and everybody was trying to figure out what this online world was going to become — I tried to start an online newspaper in Blacksburg, Virginia. That one almost worked. The month it was about to turn a profit, I had to go home to help take care of my dad. So I shut it down.

Your version of this may look nothing like mine. The dream underneath yours may have nothing to do with business or publishing or anything I ever tried. But I suspect the shape of it will feel familiar — the thing you kept reaching for, the thing life kept interrupting, the thing you set down so many times you eventually stopped calling it a dream and started calling it a regret.

Later, I tried again in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I wanted to build an online publication there too, but the tools were clunky, the layout options were limited, and the audience was not quite ready for what online publishing would eventually become.

At the time, I thought those things were failures.

I tried and failed. Tried and failed. Tried and failed.

How many women carry that exact sentence around in their bodies?

I had a dream, but I had children. I had a gift, but I had a marriage. I had a longing, but I had bills. I had an idea, but I had parents to care for. I had a self, but I had a role to perform.

So we fold the dream up and put it in a drawer.

Then one day, decades later, something stirs.

And we think, where did that come from?

But maybe it did not come from nowhere. Maybe it was there all along.

When I look back now, I can see that the dream underneath all those attempts was not simply advertising. It was not even publishing. Those were the forms. The deeper dream was older than that. Much older.

I can remember being a teenager, sitting at the little white French provincial desk in my bedroom. My mother had bought me French provincial furniture, and I loved that desk. I remember reading some magazine article about women who worked from home. Even then, I was trying to figure out how I could make a life that did not require me to leave home every day to go work inside someone else’s structure.

I did not have language for it then. I was a girl. What did I know?

But I knew something.

I knew I did not like the feeling of being required to leave my own world in order to earn my place in the larger one.

Of course, I did leave. Most of us did. I worked jobs. I built careers. I raised children. I performed roles. I walked into buildings I did not own and did what needed to be done. That is what women do. We do what needs to be done.

But underneath it, there was always a bristling in me. A resistance. Not to work — I have never been afraid of work. Lord knows, I can wear out a mule when I get going. The resistance was to surrendering my sovereignty.

That is the word I would use now. Sovereignty. My own rhythm. My own space. My own imagination. My own authority. My own relationship with my work, my home, my body, my time, my thoughts, my money, my voice, and my God.

I did not want to live as a woman permanently organized around someone else’s structure.

I did it, of course. Most of us did. We adapted. We became useful. We became dependable. We became the woman who could handle it. We became the woman everyone knew would show up.

RETIRMENT ENTERS THE ROOM

Then retirement comes along and everybody acts as though the question is: what will you do with your time?

As if time is the problem.

Time is not the problem. The problem is that after decades of living inside other people’s structures, many women no longer know what their own internal structure feels like. They do not know what they want. They do not know what they miss. They do not know which dream was theirs and which dream was handed to them by a culture that needed them compliant, productive, attractive, polite, and available.

This is why I keep coming back to dreams. Not the cute kind. The deeper dream. The one that has been leaving breadcrumbs through your life. The one that may have shown up in different costumes.

Maybe when you were young, you wanted to be an artist. Maybe what you really wanted was permission to see the world through your own eyes.

Maybe you wanted to be a teacher. Maybe what you really wanted was to gather people around meaning.

Maybe you wanted to travel. Maybe what you really wanted was expansion — a life that didn’t stop at the edges of what was expected of you.

Maybe you wanted to write. Maybe what you really wanted was to hear yourself think.

The dream may not be literal. The form it took was just the costume. Underneath it was something true.

NO REVIEW MIRROR!

I do not need to go back and become the teenage girl at the white French provincial desk. I do not need to recreate every old ambition in its original form. I do not need to prove that the failed ad agency should have worked.

I do not need to go backward.

But I do need to notice the thread.

Because the thread was telling the truth. The thread kept saying: make your own place. Build from your own center. Do not abandon your interior world. Create something useful. Gather people. Respect the reader. Serve the room. Let the work come from home, from soul, from truth, from the place where your own life finally belongs to you.

And now, at 70, I am writing about retirement in my retirement years, running a publication from my apartment, talking to women all over the world, selling subscriptions, sending sponsor queries, painting in oils, making videos in bathrobes, and laughing because apparently the dream was not done with me.

Apparently it had patience.

Apparently it knew more than I did.

NOW, FOR YOU.

That is the part I want you to consider.

What if the thing you think you failed at was not failure? What if it was practice? What if the interruption was not the end of the story? What if the dream had to wait for you to become the woman who could hold it?

What if retirement is not the place where dreams go to die?

What if retirement is where the deeper dream finally becomes visible?

Take a look at your own life. Not with judgment. Not with a clipboard. Not with that self-improvement stink we are all tired of. Just look.

What kept showing up? What did you keep reaching for? What did you keep bristling against? What kind of room did you always want to live in? What part of you kept returning, even after marriage, motherhood, jobs, caregiving, grief, money, fear, duty, and everybody else’s expectations had their say?

There may be a thread there. It may not look like what you expected.

PRIME EXAMPLE

A woman I know spent her career as a deputy sheriff. When she retired, she figured she would do what made sense — travel with her husband, spend time with the grandchildren, take care of herself. And she did. She signed up for Pilates. She took some trips.

It still wasn’t enough.

Then one afternoon she stopped in front of a hardware store window. There was a piece of furniture in the display that had been refinished with a particular kind of paint. She stood there longer than she expected to.

She didn’t know why she stopped. She just noticed that something in her had gone very quiet and very still.

She went back the next day. Then she started asking questions. Then she started experimenting. Then, one small step at a time, somebody found out she could refinish furniture. Then somebody else found out. Then it became a thing — a small cottage business she runs entirely on her own terms. She takes a job or she doesn’t. She leaves for three weeks to travel and comes home to a waiting list. She works on a piece alone in her garage at her own pace on her own schedule and answers to nobody.

She’s 70 years old.

When she told me about it recently, she used a word I wasn’t expecting.

I feel like I actually have a future. I’m not just maintaining. I’m not just treading water.

Not because the business is large. Because it opened a door into a whole new community of people she never would have met. New friendships. New conversations. A world that didn’t exist for her eighteen months ago.

All of it started with a hardware store window.

All of it started with one moment of noticing.

That was her breadcrumb. It looked like nothing.

It was everything.

So here is the only thing I will ask of you.

PUT YOURSELF ON NOTICE

Not as a project. Not as a practice you have to maintain or a journal you have to keep or a method you have to master. Just notice. How you feel when you walk into a room. What catches your eye when nothing is required of you. What you find yourself thinking about at 5 a.m. when sleep will not come back.

Those moments are not random. They are information. They are the breadcrumbs your own life has been leaving for you — possibly for decades — waiting for you to have enough quiet to finally see them.

Follow even one. See where it leads.

In my experience, it leads somewhere you didn’t know you were allowed to go. Toward a future that feels undeniably yours. Toward a satisfaction you didn’t know was still available to you.

It was always available to you.

You just needed enough space to find it.

And maybe the dream that would not leave you alone was never trying to torment you.

Maybe it was trying to bring you home.

If something in this piece stirred something you’d set down a long time ago — a thread you’d stopped pulling, a dream you’d stopped calling a dream — I want to offer you something.

When you become a paid member of The Daily RE-WIRE, I’ll send you a complimentary copy of Building Trust in Yourself.

Because following a breadcrumb requires one thing underneath everything else. Trust that what catches your attention is worth following. Trust that the thread is real. Trust that the woman noticing is worth listening to.

That’s what the guide is about.

The Breakthrough Circle meets every Tuesday on Zoom. No performance required. Just women following their own threads and comparing notes about where they lead.

The guide is waiting. So is the room.

Become a paid member

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.

If you have found yourself vaguely irritable lately without knowing why, or quietly guilty that retirement doesn’t feel the way you thought it would, or unable to explain to the people who love you what exactly feels off — this piece is for you.

Nothing is wrong with you. The feeling has a name. It just took me a while to find it.

A woman left a comment on one of my notes I wrote about my apartment.

She wrote: “I wish I could come back home. I don’t know how this could happen with me”.

I have not stopped thinking about that sentence.

Because she was not really talking about my apartment. She was not asking about the daybed or the lamps or the way I finally allowed my home to look like the inside of my own nervous system instead of a furniture showroom designed for imaginary guests.

She was talking about herself.

She was saying: I lost connection with myself somewhere. I can imagine what home feels like, but I no longer know the way back.

And if that is not the quiet heartbreak of so many women at this stage of life, I don’t know what is.

We were trained to build homes for everybody else.

For husbands. For children. For guests. For appearances. For the idea of who we were supposed to be. Many women became the infrastructure for everybody else’s comfort and called it love. We arranged the living room for people who rarely came over. We kept the good dishes for occasions that never arrived. We made decisions through the filter of whether someone else would be pleased, soothed, impressed, or inconvenienced.

And then one day, often somewhere around retirement, the noise gets quiet enough for a woman to look around and think:

Wait a minute. Whose life is this?

That question can feel like grief. Not because she failed. Because she adapted so well to the old map that she forgot it was not the territory.

Retirement has a way of doing that — removing the structure, the title, the ladder, the daily proof that you are useful. And suddenly a woman who spent decades being competent, responsible, organized, productive, and dependable finds herself standing in the middle of her own life with no external assignment.

Nobody tells you how strange that can feel.

The culture talks about retirement as if it is all cruises and grandchildren and sunset photos. Lovely. But underneath all that pastel nonsense, something much deeper is happening.

The map ends.

And the skills that built the old life do not automatically create meaning in the new one. You cannot spreadsheet your way into aliveness. That is rude, but true.

There is a difference. A very large one.

Most women know how to take care of others. Most women know how to work, organize, manage crisis, make things stretch, smooth over tension, remember birthdays, anticipate needs, and keep the machine running. But ask a woman what genuinely interests her now — what keeps catching her attention, what she would do if nobody needed to understand it — and suddenly the room gets quiet.

Not because she is empty.

Because no one taught her to listen there.

We have spent decades treating aliveness as if it only exists in extremes. Great achievement. Great romance. Great transformation. Great hustle. Great visibility.

Meanwhile, actual life is happening in apartments. In rearranged rooms. In quiet mornings. In choosing the daybed. In deciding not to marry again. In sitting by a window. In painting flowers. In making soup. In breathing. In allowing your home to become a place where your body unclenches.

And people are starving for permission to believe that counts.

That is what keeps startling me — the response to ordinary things. The apartment. The balcony. The painting. The quiet morning. The robe. The soup. The fact that I am not racing around trying to prove I am still useful to civilization. I am not presenting a ten-step plan to become a better version of myself by Thursday. I am not standing on a mountaintop with a shawl and a wind machine.

I am living.

Apparently, that has become radical.

One of my friends once referred to the things I write about as mundane. I let that slide at the time. Later I thought: who decided ordinary life was mundane? Who decided the sacred had to be dramatic? Most people are not suffering on mountaintops. They are suffering in kitchens. In bedrooms where they no longer sleep well. In living rooms arranged for a version of themselves they no longer recognize. In schedules full of obligations they never chose. In silence, because nothing is technically wrong and yet everything feels slightly off.

That is where the fracture is.

Not with a vision board. Not with a five-week reinvention boot camp led by someone thirty-seven years old who thinks aging is a branding problem.

Return begins when a woman notices.

A woman I know spent twenty years eating lunch at her desk. Efficient. Practical. Not even a thought. Six months into retirement she made herself a bowl of soup, carried it to the window, sat down, and watched the street below for forty minutes.

She told me later she hadn’t realized she was a person who liked watching streets. She thought she was just killing time.

She was not killing time. She was finding out who she was when nobody was asking anything from her.

That was a breadcrumb.

I like sitting here. I do not like that chair. I want yellow flowers. I miss painting. I love eating soup from a mug. I want quiet in the morning. I want to stop apologizing for the life that fits me.

These sound small. They are not small. They are breadcrumbs.

Attention leaves breadcrumbs. And breadcrumbs, followed honestly, become a trail. A trail becomes a life that actually fits.

Most people ask: what should I do with the rest of my life? That question arrives wearing boots and carrying a clipboard. It is too large and too loud for what is actually needed.

A better question is softer: what keeps catching my attention?

My mother did not retire into a grand plan. She retired into curiosity. She became fascinated with gardening. The garden was not the point. The curiosity was the point. The garden was simply where the curiosity lived that season.

That is how a life begins to rearrange itself. Not through force. Through attention.

At first, there is often recreation — the vacation stage, the body exhaling after decades of responsibility. Then restoration. Then, for many people, a stretch of quiet disorientation. The old identity is gone. The old structure is gone. The old map no longer tells you where to go. This is where many women live longer than they need to, convinced they are lost.

But they are not lost.

They are standing exactly where the old map ends. And that is not failure. That is the beginning of discovery.

What comes next is curiosity. Not certainty. Not a new master plan. Just the willingness to ask: what do I notice? What do I keep returning to? What gives me a small flicker of energy? What makes the day feel more like mine?

Then comes cultivation — growing something because it matters. A garden. A painting practice. A Substack. A morning ritual. A friendship. A room arranged for your own peace.

And eventually, if you stay with it long enough, the outer life starts to resemble the actual person. Not the role. Not the performance. Not the well-behaved woman who knew how to keep everybody comfortable.

The person.

This is why I no longer think retirement is primarily about reinvention. That word still sounds like a project — as if the old self were defective and now we must hustle up a better one.

No, thank you. I am not interested in becoming a self-improvement appliance with lipstick.

I am interested in return.

Return to self. Return to the body. Return to the room. Return to the tiny honest preferences that were buried under decades of usefulness. Return to the woman underneath all the plans.

This is why recognition matters more to me than instruction. I do not want to hand women another system. Most women have had enough systems. What they need first is to read a sentence and feel their own life breathe back at them. To hear:

You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not failing retirement. You are standing in a strange and holy place. You are standing where the old map ends.

And yes, it feels uncomfortable. Of course it does. You spent decades being rewarded for certainty, usefulness, control, and productivity. Now life is asking for something else entirely.

Attention. Curiosity. Honesty. Responsiveness.

People sometimes think I never planned. That is not quite right. The difference is not that other people planned and I did not. The difference is that many people were taught to trust the plan. I learned to trust my ability to respond to what happened. Life moved and I listened. Something ended and I adjusted. Something called and I followed.

That is not passivity. That is a different kind of intelligence — the intelligence of noticing, of the body saying this feels right and this does not and go there and buy the damn flowers.

This is how a woman comes back into relationship with herself. And once that begins, the whole life can change. Not always dramatically. Not always publicly. Not always in ways that can be photographed and monetized.

Sometimes the great transformation is that a woman finally sits in a room arranged for her own peace and realizes she is allowed to belong to herself.

That counts.

The apartment counts. The soup counts. The window counts. The flowers count. The quiet morning counts. The decision not to explain yourself counts. The moment you notice what you actually want counts. The life you build from those small honest recognitions counts.

Because retirement is not asking you to become impressive. It is asking you to become intimate with your own life.

And for many of us, that is the real work now. Not to go back to youth. Not to prove we are still valuable. Not to become a shiny new brand called Older Woman Living Her Best Life.

Please. Let us all be spared.

The work is simpler. And harder.

Come home.

Come home to the woman underneath the roles. Come home to the room that feels like you. Come home to the day that does not require performance. Come home to the curiosity that still lives beneath the exhaustion. Come home to the soul that kept leaving breadcrumbs even when you were too busy to follow them.

That is what retirement is. Not an ending and not a project. An invitation to pick up tools you have always carried but rarely used for yourself.

Your soul. Your awareness. Your intuition.

They were never gone. They were simply aimed outward — at the children, the job, the household, the endless needs of other people’s lives. You became extraordinarily skilled at using them in service of everyone else.

Now comes something new. The same tools. A different direction.

Inward. Intentionally. For yourself, on yourself, with yourself.

That is not selfishness. That is the work this season is actually asking for.

Not the end of the road. Not a problem to solve. Not the reward for surviving the productive years.

Retirement is the place where the old map ends.

And maybe what feels like being lost is actually the first honest moment of discovery.

If this landed somewhere real for you — if you recognized yourself in even one sentence — I want to offer you something.

When you become a paid member of The Daily RE-WIRE, I’ll send you a complimentary copy of Building Believable Trust in Yourself.

Not as a bonus. As a beginning.

That’s what the guide is about.

The Breakthrough Circle meets every Tuesday on Zoom. No performance required. No one is going to fix you or hand you a system. Just women standing in the same territory, being honest with each other about what it actually feels like to be here. We listen to each other and help when asked. No judgement.

The guide is waiting. So is the room.

Become A Paid Member

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 morning my Notes feed filled up with restacks of an article complaining about what Substack has become.

The author’s argument was simple: too many Notes, too much video, too many social features, too much noise. He came here for essays. He wants essays. Why can’t Substack just be essays?

What fascinated me wasn’t the complaint. It was how many people agreed.

Because while they were lamenting everything Substack has added, I was sitting here grateful for most of it. The Notes feature introduced me to writers I never would have discovered. Video helped me find my voice in a new way. Lives allowed me to have real conversations with readers instead of talking at them. The social side of the platform connected me with thousands of women who otherwise would never have crossed my path.

Many of the very things being criticized are the same things that helped my work grow.

So who’s right? Probably both. Some people found Substack because it felt slower than the rest of the internet — a quiet place to read thoughtful writing over morning coffee. That’s a reasonable thing to want. I understand the grief of watching a thing you loved change into something different.

But I think something larger is happening beneath this particular discussion.

When something changes, there are essentially two questions available to us.

The first: how do we preserve what was?

The second: what new possibilities does this create?

Neither is wrong. But they lead to very different experiences of the same moment. One person sees a threat. Another sees an invitation. One sees loss. Another sees expansion. And both are standing in exactly the same place, looking at exactly the same thing.

At seventy, I’ve become increasingly interested in the second question. Not because every change is good or every new feature deserves applause. But because curiosity has served me far better than resistance ever did.

This is how I ended up writing online. How I found video. How I found many of the women who now gather around this publication. None of that existed in my life five years ago. None of it was on any map I had drawn for myself. And yet here we are.

Which brings me to retirement. Because I think this is the same conversation wearing different clothes.

Many people spend decades following a roadmap — career, marriage, children, obligations, schedules, goals. The map gives them structure and identity and a clear sense of where they’re headed. And then one day the map runs out. The career ends. The children leave. The schedule dissolves.

The people who struggle most in that moment aren’t necessarily the ones who lost the map.

They’re the ones who never learned to travel without one.

Because nobody taught them to ask the second question. Nobody prepared them for the moment when the world changes and the only available response is curiosity about what comes next.

Maybe that’s why this Substack debate caught my attention. Underneath the conversation about Notes and videos and essays, I hear a much older and more personal question:

When the world changes, do we close the door?

Or do we walk through it?

These days, I’m choosing the door.

One more thing before you go.

I know times are feeling uncertain right now. A lot of us are watching our budgets more carefully than we’d like to. So for the next few days I’m offering 20% off an annual subscription — not as a sales tactic, but because I genuinely want the women who need this room to be able to get into it.

Consider it permission to do something good for yourself.

The Breakthrough Circle. The Tuesday conversations. The writing that shows up in your inbox three times a week asking the questions most people are too polite to ask out loud.

All of it. 20% off. For a few more days

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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.

Why Stillness Isn’t Laziness — It’s Recovery

This past weekend, for the first time in my life, I spent two full days being still without fighting it.

No guilt. No bargaining. No voice in my head saying you should be doing something productive right now.

I simply rested.

And when I came out the other side, I understood something I’ve been circling for years.

Stillness is not laziness. It’s recovery.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Cabin: When I Stumbled Into Soul Stillness

Almost three years ago, my daughter and her family took me to a cabin in the mountains of West Virginia while they went skiing.

No Wi-Fi. No distractions. Just a kitchen, walking paths through the woods, a hot tub, and hours of silence.

Every day, they left to ski. Every day, I stayed behind.

At first, I occupied myself the way I always did. I walked the paths. Studied the trees. As a landscape painter, my mind went to color and brushstroke, to the way light hit bark. I carried a sketchpad and pencils.

But one day, I simply sat.

I didn’t plan to. I just ran out of things to do.

I sat in that cabin for nearly two hours with nothing demanding my attention.

No phone. No noise. No agenda.

At first, it felt awkward. Exposed. Like time was pressing in on me.

And then, about forty-five minutes in, something shifted.

It became easy.

Calming.

I wasn’t meditating. I wasn’t seeking insight. I wasn’t doing anything I would have labeled as spiritual.

I was just there, listening.

To the quiet. To the world outside. To something inside me that didn’t need words.

At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of that moment.

I didn’t know how to repeat it intentionally. I didn’t know how to bring it home with me.

All I knew was that, for the first time, sitting with myself didn’t feel like a problem to solve.

That was soul stillness.

Not the kind where your body is still but your mind is planning dinner.

The kind where time dissolves and you forget you have a body at all.

The Search: Trying to Find It Again

When I came home, I tried to recreate it.

I would sit. Try to quiet my mind. Wait for that feeling to return.

It didn’t work.

My body could be still, but internally I stayed braced. Scanning. Managing. Thinking.

I had tasted something real in that cabin, but I didn’t have a practice to access it.

I just had a memory of what it felt like when it happened by accident.

The Practice: Learning to Recreate What I’d Found

About twelve months ago, I discovered a simple breathing pattern.

Inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for six.

I committed to sitting for two minutes at a time. That was it. Two minutes.

Not to achieve calm. Not to receive insight.

Just to sit and breathe.

At first, two minutes felt long.

But I stayed with it.

Over time, something remarkable happened.

The noise softened. Thoughts slowed.

And eventually, there were moments when there were no thoughts at all.

I had found my way back to what I’d stumbled into in that cabin.

Now, sometimes I can sit for thirty minutes like that. Breath moving. Mind quiet. No effort.

And here’s what surprised me:

The inspiration didn’t come during the stillness. It came afterward.

In the hours and days that followed, ideas would surface fully formed. Clear. Unforced. Creative. Alive.

Stillness became fertile instead of frightening.

The Real Work: Learning to Allow It

And yet, even with all of that, I struggled.

This is the part people don’t talk about.

Even after learning how to BE still, I still argued with the NEED to be still.

I would say things like: I’ll take a day off. I’m tired today. I just don’t have the gas.

And then I’d judge myself for it.

I treated stillness like something I had to justify. Like a temporary indulgence. Like something I was allowed only if I’d earned it.

For the past year, that has been my real work.

Not learning how to be still.

Learning how to allow it without guilt.

This Weekend: The Shift

Which brings me back to this past weekend.

For the first time, I spent two full days being still without struggling against it.

No internal bargaining. No story about falling behind.

I didn’t need to explain it to myself.

I simply rested.

And that’s when I understood what this season has really been teaching me.

Stillness is not laziness. It’s recovery.

Recovery after decades of hustle. Recovery after a life spent proving. Recovery after believing rest had to be earned.

Stillness isn’t the absence of life. It’s where life quietly reorganizes itself.

I’m not afraid of it anymore.

I know now that when stillness shows up, it’s not asking me to stop living.

It’s asking me to let my nervous system catch up to the life I’m building.

Movement always returns.

But when it does now, it comes without urgency. Without panic. Without the need to prove anything.

It comes from coherence.

And that’s how I know the stillness is doing exactly what it came to do.

It’s not teaching me to stop. It’s teaching me to trust.

If You Need This

If you’re exhausted right now—truly exhausted—try this:

Two minutes. Just breath.

Inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for six.

Don’t expect insight. Don’t expect calm. Don’t expect anything.

Just sit.

Your nervous system will thank you.

And if two minutes feels too long, start with one.

That’s enough.

Something I want you to know.

A lot of women have told me they want to be part of our Tuesday gatherings, BREAKTHROUGH, but the annual subscription feels like a stretch right now. I hear that. At this stage of life, having a room full of women who get it — without judgment, without performance, without anyone trying to fix you — isn’t a luxury. It’s necessary.

So I’ve opened the Breakthrough Circle to monthly subscribers.

Come as you are. Stay as long as it serves you. The door is open.

Join us — monthly or annual, you choose

Join Breakthrough

P.S. Loved this? Hit the heart. It tells Substack to show this to more women who need it. And it makes me ridiculously happy

A little something extra: This is a prime example of life lived after sitting most days for one minute at a time, a few days a time for the past year. What I am living now was not planned by me, but it was created by me with the guidence of my intution, aka soul, aka gut feelings. All of it came to me because I pracitced sitting with my soul.

A young woman sat in front of a computer, considering whether to enroll in an online university. The music swelled. The narrator talked about possibilities and opportunities and building a bright future.

Future.

That word caught my attention. Not because of the young woman. Because of the people I write for.

Have you ever noticed that the word future is almost exclusively attached to young people? Future students, future professionals, future leaders — as if the rest of us somehow used ours up. As if the word itself has an age limit nobody bothered to post.

A healthy 70-year-old woman may have twenty or thirty years ahead of her. Twenty years is not a footnote. It’s not the closing credits or the little bit left over at the end. Twenty years is enough time to start something, build something, discover something, become something entirely unexpected. And yet we almost never talk about those years as a future.

Young people are sold possibility. Older people are sold preservation. The cultural conversation aimed at younger generations says build something, expand, go further — while the conversation aimed at people over 60 quietly shifts to protect what you have, manage the risks, don’t lose ground. The adventure narrative gets replaced by a caution narrative so gradually that most people don’t notice the switch until they’re already living inside it.

The message becomes smaller. Safer. Less alive.

It’s as if society collectively exhales and says: thank you for your contribution. Now try not to break anything.

I don’t think most people consciously believe that about the people they love who are over 60. But I think many of us absorb it anyway — and then enforce it on ourselves. We stop asking big questions. We stop imagining what’s possible. Not because we’re incapable, but because nobody is speaking to that part of us anymore. The culture stopped inviting us into the conversation about what comes next, and somewhere along the way we stopped inviting ourselves.

And yet every day I hear from people who are hungry for exactly that invitation.

Not because they want another career or another accomplishment or another item on the list. Because they want to feel genuinely alive. Curious. Awake to the sense that something meaningful still lies ahead — not behind, not managed, not preserved. Ahead.

I’ve come to believe that retirement doesn’t create a crisis of purpose. It exposes one that was always there, waiting for enough quiet to be heard. The moment the job ends or the children leave or the schedule disappears, a question surfaces that was submerged for decades:

Now that nobody is telling me who to be — who do I actually want to become?

That’s not a retirement question. That’s a human question. And perhaps that’s why so many people feel disoriented when they arrive here — not because something has gone wrong, but because nobody prepared them for a stage of life where freedom itself becomes the assignment.

I keep writing what I write because I refuse to accept the idea that future belongs exclusively to the young.

It doesn’t. A future is not something you age out of. It’s something you continue creating for as long as you’re willing to keep asking what comes next — not with the urgency of someone who has everything to prove, but with the particular authority of someone who has already survived everything that tried to stop her.

That’s not a small thing. That’s not maintenance.

That’s a future.

So here’s what I want us to sit with today — and I mean this as a genuine question, not a rhetorical one:

If this landed somewhere real for you — if you recognized yourself in the conversation that quietly stopped inviting you in — come be in the room on Tuesday.

A small group of us gather every week on Zoom. No caution narrative. No preservation agenda. Just women who have decided that future is not a word that belongs to someone else.

It’s called BR3EAKTHROUHG, because we are - toghether- collectively breaking through the noise within ourselves that says we don’t have a future, but a maintence program of our lives.

But so is the conversation.

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One more thing.

After I wrote this piece, I sat down with Mike Searles and we ended up having a fascinating conversation about this very question.

Why do we assume that younger people have a future filled with possibility while older people are expected to focus on preservation?

We talked about retirement, identity, choice, and what happens when people stop imagining a future for themselves simply because they’ve reached a certain age.

The conversation surprised me in a few places and challenged me in others.

If this article resonated with you, you might enjoy listening to the discussion.

You can watch it here:

Subscribe now

This morning I was sitting on my balcony with a cup of coffee when a friend walked by below.

I could have gotten dressed, gone downstairs, joined him. A year ago I probably would have — out of habit, out of politeness, out of the quiet anxiety of not wanting to miss something.

Instead I noticed something: I didn’t want to.

Not because anything was wrong. Not because I was being antisocial. I simply wanted to stay exactly where I was, in the morning quiet, with my coffee and my thoughts and the particular quality of light that only exists before the day gets loud.

So I stayed.

That may sound like a small thing. I’ve been thinking about it all day.

Tonight Mike and I sat down to talk about a question that has been rattling around in my head for months: do people over 60 actually have a future?

Not a retirement plan. Not a medical plan. Not a carefully managed financial strategy.

A future.

The conversation almost didn’t happen. Technology had other ideas — one device wouldn’t connect, another froze, the Wi-Fi developed strong opinions about the whole enterprise. At one point I was convinced the entire thing was going to collapse before we got started.

Which, now that I think about it, was the perfect way to begin a conversation about life after 60. Because nothing about this stage of life is as neat and orderly as we were promised. We were told: work hard, retire, relax, stay comfortable, enjoy the grandchildren, stay safe. And many of us arrived here to find something far messier and more interesting than that.

People who still have questions. People who still have dreams. People who are wondering whether the most interesting chapter might still be ahead of them.

I’m one of them.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Baby Boomers collectively control more wealth than any generation in history. Many of us have the time. Many of us have the freedom. And yet culturally we’re often treated as though we’re fading gracefully into the background — as if the word future has an age limit nobody bothered to post.

I don’t buy it.

The future isn’t always found in dramatic reinventions. Sometimes it’s found in smaller recognitions — knowing yourself well enough to hear what brings you alive and what quietly deadens you. Knowing when to go downstairs and when to stay on the balcony. Knowing which questions still have the power to genuinely excite you.

At 70 I find myself curious about YouTube and storytelling and sculpting and whatever catches my attention next. That doesn’t sound like an ending to me. It sounds exactly like a beginning.

Mike and I didn’t just sit around agreeing that a future is possible. We talked about how to actually start finding yours.

It begins with becoming an observer of your own life. Not a critic. Not a judge. An observer.

Pay attention to the tingles.

That’s the word I kept coming back to tonight — tingles. That small physical signal when something catches your attention in a way that feels different from ordinary interest. A topic you can’t stop reading about. A skill you keep meaning to learn. A conversation that leaves you more energized than when it started. A YouTube video you watched at midnight and then watched again.

Those aren’t random. They’re information.

Every time you notice a tingle, write it down. Describe it. What were you doing? What specifically caught you? How did it feel in your body? Over time those notes become breadcrumbs — and breadcrumbs, followed carefully, become a trail. And a trail, if you’re willing to walk it, becomes a roadmap to the kind of future that actually fits who you are right now.

Not who you were at 40. Not who someone else thinks you should be at 70.

Who you actually are. Today. With everything you’ve survived and everything you’ve learned and everything you’re still quietly curious about.

That’s where your future lives.

Maybe that’s the real question. Not whether people over 60 have a future. But whether we’re willing to stop waiting for permission to imagine one.

The balcony this morning. The coffee going cold while I sat with my own thoughts. The friend who walked by while I chose, for the first time in a long time, exactly what I wanted.

That was a future too.

What does yours look like?

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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If the tingle concept caught your attention — if something in you went yes, that — that’s your first breadcrumb.

Bring it to Tuesday.

Every week a small group of us gather on Zoom to do exactly this kind of work together — not as a class, not as a workshop, but as women who are done waiting for permission to want something. We follow the breadcrumbs. We compare notes. We remind each other that the trail is real.

The BREAKTHROUGH guide is waiting when you arrive. But so is the conversation.

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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.

Twenty years ago, I stood ankle-deep in the Gulf of Mexico staring at a beach that wasn’t supposed to be beautiful.

A hurricane had come through years before and destroyed much of the coastline. By the time I arrived, the cleanup was finished. The sand stretched for miles. The water was calm. The clouds looked like they had been painted by someone showing off.

I took a photograph. Later that day I returned to my art studio and began turning it into a painting. I called it Waiting for You.

At the time, I thought the beach was waiting for tourists.

Now I’m I know differntly.

Yesterday, Google Photos served that painting back to me — one of those little “Remember this?” reminders that arrives uninvited and usually annoying. Not this time. It triggered a memory- -nay a feeling.

I remembered more than the painting.

I remembered the day. My friend David and I had no agenda, no destination, no reason to be there. We drove around. We fished. We wandered. We followed curiosity wherever it pointed. It was one of the best days of my life.

What surprised me wasn’t the memory.

It was the realization that I haven’t had many days like that in twenty years.

Somewhere along the way I became very good at building a life — at surviving, creating, working, producing, keeping everything moving forward. All necessary. All real. But play quietly slipped out the back door while I wasn’t looking. And I didn’t notice it was gone until a twenty-year-old photograph appeared on my phone on an late Tuesday evening.

A few hours before google photos triggered my memory, a woman in our Tuesday gathering shared her expeirence from walking two miles in a forest.

After overcoming a couple of health conditions that depleted her energy as well as her imagination for her own life she chose - life on a whim - to drive to a local state park- and walked a trail she hadn’t been on in years. Two miles at most. Nothing difficult.

But somewhere on that trail something happened that she hadn’t expected and couldn’t entirely explain. The majesty of it, she said. The quiet. The way the woods just — held her. She came back feeling soothed in a way she hadn’t felt in years. And curious. Genuinely, actively curious — two things that had quietly gone missing somewhere in the business of surviving her own life.

She didn’t go looking for a revelation. She went for a walk.

And something that had been waiting a long time finally got the chance to come back.

Notice the utility poles in the painting. The hurricane stripped them bare and I left them there — because the beach didn’t erase what had happened. It just kept being beautiful anyway. The damage stayed. The beauty returned.

Maybe that’s what waiting looks like. Not the absence of what was lost. Just life, continuing quietly, holding space for the moment we’re ready to step back into it.

A beach after a storm.

A trail through the woods on a Tuesday afternoon.

A painting that reappears twenty years later and asks: what did you forget that is still waiting for you?

I don’t think possibility disappears. I think it waits — patient and unhurried — for the day we stop being reluctant about observing our own lives in retirement and remember there might be something interesting around the next corner.

The beach was waiting the day I stood ankle-deep in the Gulf with a camera and no agenda.

I think it’s still waiting now.

The question is whether we’re ready to wander back toward it.

What has been waiting for you?

If something in this piece stirred something quiet in you — a memory, a longing, a thing you set down so long ago you almost forgot it was yours — I’d love for you to bring it to our next Tuesday Zoom gathering.

Every week a small group of us gather on Zoom. No agenda. No efficiency. Just women wandering back toward the parts of themselves that have been patiently waiting. It’s often declared as “ my most favorite part of the week” by particpatns who know they have a place to anticipate, to enjoy and to explore all without judgement nor a guru teaching with a white board.

Subscribe to The Daily Re-Wire

PS - Remember tonight (June 3) Mike and I will go live on Substack with our new podcast talking about the variety of issues, concerns and possibilities of retirement.

Also I whipped up a little short video about the predictament of the word future as it apply to retirement life. See it on Youtube:

This morning I was half asleep when a commercial came on television.

A young woman sat in front of a computer, considering whether to enroll in an online university. The music swelled. The narrator talked about possibilities and opportunities and building a bright future.

Future.

That word caught my attention. Not because of the young woman. Because of the people I write for.

Have you ever noticed that the word future is almost exclusively attached to young people? Future students, future professionals, future leaders — as if the rest of us somehow used ours up. As if the word itself has an age limit nobody bothered to post.

A healthy 70-year-old woman may have twenty or thirty years ahead of her. Twenty years is not a footnote. It’s not the closing credits or the little bit left over at the end. Twenty years is enough time to start something, build something, discover something, become something entirely unexpected. And yet we almost never talk about those years as a future.

Young people are sold possibility. Older people are sold preservation. The cultural conversation aimed at younger generations says build something, expand, go further — while the conversation aimed at people over 60 quietly shifts to protect what you have, manage the risks, don’t lose ground. The adventure narrative gets replaced by a caution narrative so gradually that most people don’t notice the switch until they’re already living inside it.

The message becomes smaller. Safer. Less alive.

It’s as if society collectively exhales and says: thank you for your contribution. Now try not to break anything.

I don’t think most people consciously believe that about the people they love who are over 60. But I think many of us absorb it anyway — and then enforce it on ourselves. We stop asking big questions. We stop imagining what’s possible. Not because we’re incapable, but because nobody is speaking to that part of us anymore. The culture stopped inviting us into the conversation about what comes next, and somewhere along the way we stopped inviting ourselves.

And yet every day I hear from people who are hungry for exactly that invitation.

Not because they want another career or another accomplishment or another item on the list. Because they want to feel genuinely alive. Curious. Awake to the sense that something meaningful still lies ahead — not behind, not managed, not preserved. Ahead.

I’ve come to believe that retirement doesn’t create a crisis of purpose. It exposes one that was always there, waiting for enough quiet to be heard. The moment the job ends or the children leave or the schedule disappears, a question surfaces that was submerged for decades:

Now that nobody is telling me who to be — who do I actually want to become?

That’s not a retirement question. That’s a human question. And perhaps that’s why so many people feel disoriented when they arrive here — not because something has gone wrong, but because nobody prepared them for a stage of life where freedom itself becomes the assignment.

I keep writing what I write because I refuse to accept the idea that future belongs exclusively to the young.

It doesn’t. A future is not something you age out of. It’s something you continue creating for as long as you’re willing to keep asking what comes next — not with the urgency of someone who has everything to prove, but with the particular authority of someone who has already survived everything that tried to stop her.

That’s not a small thing. That’s not maintenance.

That’s a future.

So here’s what I want to sit with today — and I mean this as a genuine question, not a rhetorical one:

What would you attempt if you fully believed the next chapter was as real and as open as any chapter that came before it?

If this landed somewhere real for you — if you recognized yourself in the conversation that quietly stopped inviting you in — come be in the room on Tuesday.

A small group of us gather every week on Zoom. No caution narrative. No preservation agenda. Just women who have decided that future is not a word that belongs to someone else.

It’s called BR3EAKTHROUHG, because we are - toghether- collectively breaking through the noise within ourselves that says we don’t have a future, but a maintence program of our lives.

But so is the conversation.

Become a paid subscriber

Subscribe now

The joy of my retirment has been the ideas, thoughts and possibilities that keep my mind occupied. So much so, I forgot to put shampoo in my wet hair!

Last night I was watching hit Netflix series, “ The Crown” when a line of dialogue stopped me cold.

Young Prince Charles was describing his life as Prince of Wales. He said it felt like “not so much an existence as it is a predicament.”

A predicament.

Not a tragedy. Not a blessing. Not a burden. A predicament — something you didn’t choose and can’t entirely escape, that is simultaneously confining and full of possibility.

Then he described feeling both free and imprisoned. Superfluous and indispensable at the same time.

I sat there staring at the television because I suddenly recognized something I hadn’t been able to name before.

Charles had spent his entire life preparing for a role. The role gave him structure, identity, purpose, and status. It also mapped his life before he was old enough to understand what a map was. Everything important about who he was supposed to be had already been decided.

And I thought: isn’t that exactly what we hand people called retirement?

For decades, most of us are given a script. Build something. Raise someone. Be responsible. Be productive. Be useful. Show up. Whether we loved every minute of it or quietly endured it or simply adapted to it, the script gave shape to our days. There was always somewhere to be tomorrow morning. Someone who needed something. Some role waiting to be performed.

Then one day the script ends.

And nobody tells us what comes next.

We’ve misunderstood retirement, I think. We talk about it as though it’s a destination — the finish line of adulthood, the place where all the questions finally get answered. But what if retirement isn’t a destination at all?

What if it’s a predicament?

What if that’s why so many intelligent, capable people find themselves feeling restless and uncertain and bored and exhilarated and terrified and lonely and liberated — sometimes all in the same afternoon?

What if nothing has gone wrong? What if they’re simply standing somewhere nobody prepared them for?

I hear it in the comments constantly. People rarely say directly: I no longer know who I am. Instead they tell stories. About feeling invisible. About waking up on Monday morning with nowhere they have to be. About wondering why they aren’t happier now that they’re finally free.

Free.

That word keeps catching my attention. Because freedom sounds like the answer — until it arrives. Then we discover something nobody mentioned.

Responsibility is exhausting. But it provides structure. Freedom removes the structure. And suddenly we’re facing a question that most of us have managed to avoid for decades:

Not who was I. Not who should I be. Who am I — right now, on this ordinary Tuesday afternoon, with nothing waiting and no one asking?

That’s a frightening question. Not because something has gone wrong. Because there are no instructions. No annual review. No culturally approved checklist. No promotion waiting at the end.

Just your own thoughts. And all the time in the world to have them.( ack! )

Charles described feeling both superfluous and indispensable. And isn’t that retirement exactly?

The company moves on without you. The meetings continue. The role you occupied for years is handed to someone else. You discover, quietly and a little painfully, that you were not as indispensable as you thought.

And yet your life remains entirely indispensable to you. Your curiosity is still alive. Your capacity for joy is still intact. The dreams that got postponed didn’t disappear — they just went quiet, waiting for exactly this moment.

The culture may no longer have a role waiting for you. But it has done something it never quite managed before.

I know this territory from the inside right now. A few weeks ago I reduced my publishing schedule from seven days a week to three. It was the right decision. It was also disorienting in ways I didn’t fully anticipate — because suddenly I was standing in the exact predicament I just described. The calendar opened up. Nobody was asking anything. And the question arrived quietly and sat down across from me:

Who are you now?

What showed up wasn’t an answer. It was something I hadn’t felt in years.

Curiosity.

Not curiosity about a topic or a project or something useful. Just — curiosity. Alive and slightly unruly, the way it used to feel before life got serious and relentless and full of things that required my attention. It had gone dormant somewhere in the years of tending to everything that needed tending. And then, in the space that opened up, it came back.

One night it brought me out to my balcony with all the lights off. I sat down in the dark and looked up. The midnight sky was vast and crowded with stars, and one of them — one particular star — seemed to be winking right at me. I sat with that for a few minutes, not thinking about anything useful, not producing anything, not performing anything.

And then I heard myself say out loud, to nobody: I should get a telescope.

Suddenly I was ten years old again, lying on flat ground at summer camp while a counselor pointed out the Big Dipper, feeling the particular wonder of realizing the sky goes on forever. A dream I had forgotten I ever had came back to me in the dark on a balcony in Virginia.

I slept particularly well that night.

That is what curiosity looks like when it returns. Not a plan. Not a purpose. A star winking at you in the dark and a memory you didn’t know you’d kept.

Maybe that’s the real predicament. Not figuring out how to retire. Figuring out how to live when the script finally runs out — when you are standing beyond the edge of the map, in unnamed territory, being asked for the first time to decide for yourself what makes a life worth living.

Nobody prepared us for that question.

And maybe that’s exactly why it feels so enormous.

Not because you’re failing. Not because you’re doing this wrong. But because you are being asked something genuinely hard, genuinely important, and genuinely yours to answer.

For the first time.

So here is what I want to ask you — and I mean this as a real question, not a rhetorical one:

What dream did you set down so long ago you forgot it was yours?

Because I have a feeling it’s still there. Quiet. Patient. Waiting for you to turn the lights off and look up.

If this piece landed somewhere real for you — if you recognized yourself in the predicament, in the empty calendar, in the question nobody prepared you for — I’d love for you to bring it to Tuesday.

Every week a small group of us gather on Zoom. No script, no whiteboard, no tidy answers. Just women standing in the same unnamed territory, being honest with each other about what it actually feels like to be here.

And occasionally someone remembers a dream they’d forgotten was theirs.

The BREAKTHROUGH guide is waiting when you arrive. But so is the room.

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If this piece gave you something worth keeping — a word for what you’ve been feeling, a star to look up at, a dream you’d half forgotten — and you’d like to say thank you in the simplest possible way, you’re welcome to buy me a coffee.

No obligation. Just one woman, a balcony, and a telescope she hasn’t bought yet.

Buy Me A Coffee

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.

Have you ever forgotten to do something?

Here’s a funny video about that:

https://youtube.com/shorts/sJ4bSa6_c0I?feature=share

A lighthearted video I made earlier unexpectedly taught me a deeper lesson about audience, assumptions, and the fears many of us carry about aging.

What I intended as an Erma Bombeck-style story about getting wrapped up in a project became a reminder that words, stories, and experiences are filtered through the concerns people already have.

For many retirees, memory isn’t just memory. It’s independence, identity, and the fear of losing oneself.

This short reflection is less about hair and more about what I learned from the reaction.

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Monica Hebert in the Substack app

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Greetings and Salutations this Sunday, May 31, 2026

One question kept showing up everywhere this week — in the articles, in the comments, in my own living room on a quiet Sunday morning:

Who am I when the thing I’ve been measuring myself against is gone?

That question is what the comparison series is really about, underneath all the photographs and floor plans and measuring sticks. Not comparison itself — but the identity vacuum it reveals when you finally stop. When the career ends, the children leave, the role you played for decades quietly retires itself — and you’re standing there wondering what’s left.

In case you missed those two “ comparison” articles, here are the links:

Your responses this week told me we’re touching something real. The note about being tired of treating ourselves like projects that need fixing has now reached fifteen thousand people. Thousands. I don’t take that lightly. That’s not a number — that’s a collective exhale.

Mike and I also went began a podcast via live on Substack.. Pink bathrobe, no script, fourteen time zones between us. We’re still finding our rhythm, but I think that’s exactly the point. The goal was never to perform expertise. It was to have an honest conversation and see who recognized themselves in it.

Next week I have a feeling we’re going deeper into identity — what happens to a person when the old labels stop making sense and nothing new has arrived yet to replace them. I think it might be some of the most important writing I’ve done here.

One more thing. This week I started something small and unscripted that I’m calling Stories from Monica’s Kitchen — short video moments, nothing polished, just me and whatever is on my mind that day. The first one — 20 YEARS AGO THIS WOULD HAVE MORTIFIED ME — found its people immediately. I’ve tucked it in below if you missed it.

More of those coming. Consider it a standing invitation to pull up a stool.

Enjoy your Sunday. I mean that simply and completely.

Monica

If something here gave you a moment of recognition this week — a pause, a laugh, a thought you’re still sitting with — and you’d like to say thank you in the simplest possible way, you’re welcome to buy me a coffee.

No obligation. No upsell. Just one woman grateful for another few hours at the keyboard.

buymeacoffee.com/DPXLblxfF2

Buy Me A Coffee

Do you want to go live?

I was sitting in my pink bathrobe. I said: okay.

And honestly, that may be the most fitting way possible to begin what we’re building together. Because what we’re building has nothing to do with polish.

The retirement industry will talk to you endlessly about money, travel, fitness, and grandparenting. What it almost never talks about is what actually sneaks up on people after the retirement party is over and the balloons deflate and the calendar opens up and nobody is asking anything from you anymore.

No meetings. No deadlines. No role you automatically step into every morning.

And suddenly the question becomes: who am I now?

That question can feel thrilling. Or terrifying. Or both in the same afternoon.

Mike has a word for what retirement did to him. He calls it becoming an IAN — I Am Not. Not needed. Not important. Not relevant anymore. He said it casually, almost as a joke, and I watched the chat light up with people who recognized themselves in it immediately.

Because that’s what happens when someone finally says the quiet part out loud.

I know that feeling from the inside. After losing everything I thought would carry me safely into this season of life, I found myself sitting in the middle of a life I no longer recognized. No handbook. No roadmap. No neat cultural script for what came next.

What I slowly learned — and what I’m still learning — is that retirement doesn’t just change your schedule. It changes your relationship with time, with purpose, with your own body, with creativity, with usefulness, with the dreams you set aside so long ago you almost forgot they were yours.

That’s not a scheduling problem. That’s an identity earthquake.

That’s why we created RE-wire Podcast!

Not to teach. Not to lecture. Not to become experts on your life. But to have honest conversations about what actually happens when life changes shape after sixty — the grief of it, the freedom of it, the humor of it, and the strange, stubborn aliveness that shows up when you finally stop performing the old script and start listening for what actually fits you now.

We are not kicking back.

We’re kicking in.

The first official episode of RE-wire with Monica and Mike premieres Wednesday night - JUNE 3 at 8 p.m. Eastern, 10AM Austrailia ( where Mike lives) on Substack.

Pull up a chair. We’re finally saying the quiet part out loud.

If any part of that landed — the IAN feeling, the identity earthquake, the question of who you are now — this is exactly the conversation we’re continuing every Tuesday inside The Daily RE-WIRE.

A small group of us gather on Zoom. No whiteboard. No script. No performance required. Just women who are done pretending the transition out of their old lives was simple, and are ready to start building honest ones.

The BREAKTHROUGH guide is waiting when you arrive. But so is the room.

Subscribe now

click here to Subscribe to Star Marker Stack:

Mike's Substack

The entire comparison series began with a photograph on Facebook that triggered an entire series for Substack. If you missed the first one of this three part series, begin here:

Not a tragic photograph. Not even an upsetting one. Actually, quite the opposite.

It was a beautiful Memorial Day backyard gathering. The grandmother, roughly my age, stood smiling among perfectly decorated picnic tables while grandchildren ran through the yard. Balloons. Matching tablecloths. Plates of food. Family everywhere. The kind of photograph that gets posted with captions about gratitude and blessings and family being everything.

I stared at it longer than I expected to.

My first thought was: I will never have that.

But the feeling underneath wasn’t simple sadness. It was something quieter and stranger than sadness.

It was recognition.

Not recognition that I had failed. Recognition that my soul had never actually chosen that script.

That single distinction cracked this whole series open.

Because here’s what comparison does that we rarely talk about: it doesn’t just measure us against other people. It measures us against images — cultural photographs of what a life well-lived is supposed to look like. The tireless grandmother. The productive retiree. The socially active couple. The fit woman. The still-thriving, still-contributing, still-visible person who is aging correctly according to modern standards.

And slowly, almost without noticing, we stop perceiving ourselves directly.

Instead of asking what feels meaningful, what gives us energy, what kind of life actually fits who we are now — we ask: how do I measure up?

I looked longer at that photograph.

The woman was lovely. Put together. Clearly loved. But I could also see something in her eyes that I recognized from the inside out. Not devastation. Not unhappiness. Just fatigue. The particular fatigue of decades spent making everything happen for everyone else. The fatigue of maintenance, of orchestration, of inherited expectation cheerfully carried for so long it stopped feeling like a choice.

And I realized: the comparison wasn’t revealing what I wanted.

It was revealing what I had been trained to believe I should want.

Those are completely different things. And at 60, 65, 70 — learning to tell them apart may be one of the most important things we can do.

A few days ago I asked this community a direct question: does comparison show up in your life, and if so, where? Seventy-five of you wrote back.

I want you to know I sat with every single response.

What came back covered almost every corner of a woman’s life — energy, appearance, creativity, purpose, productivity, body changes, retirement readiness, social life, accomplishment, motivation. The list was long and honest and, in places, a little heartbreaking.

But underneath almost every response was the same deeper ache: I no longer fully know what I actually want.

Which, when you think about it, makes complete sense. Many of us spent decades responding to everyone else’s needs, schedules, expectations, emergencies, and emotional weather. We became so skilled at adaptation that direct self-recognition got blurry. We lost the thread back to our own preferences, our own rhythms, our own definition of a life that feels alive.

You told me that. And I believed you.

THE OPPOSITE GAME — A POSSIBLE ANTIDOTE

So I’ve been sitting with something I’m calling the opposite game. Not positive thinking. Not manifestation. Not pretending anything is fine when it isn’t. Just a question worth asking:

What is the opposite of the thing that is draining life from me right now? When I compare myself to others, what is the opposit of that refelction?

The opposite of invisibility might not be public attention. It might be finally becoming visible to yourself.

The opposite of exhaustion might not be rest. It might be doing less of what was never yours to carry.

The opposite of comparison might not be confidence. It might be self-recognition — the quiet, radical act of seeing yourself directly, without measuring at all.

Here’s what I want you to sit with, because I don’t think I’m the only one who has stood in front of someone else’s photograph and felt that particular sting:

Whose script have you been measuring yourself against? And when did you last ask whether you ever actually chose it?

You don’t have to have the answer today. But the question itself is a place to start.

Seventy-five of you showed up in that comment thread and told me the truth about your lives.

That’s exactly what happens every Tuesday inside The BREAKTHROUGH GATHERING

A small group of paid subscribers gather on Zoom — not as a class, not as a workshop, but as women who are done measuring themselves against scripts they never actually chose. We talk. We recognize each other. We ask the questions that don’t have tidy answers yet.

The BREAKTHROUGH guide is waiting when you arrive. But honestly — so is the room.

Become a paid subscriber

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. Or share it directly with her.

Share

Coming Wednesday night:

RE-wire
Because retirement changes more than your schedule.

Mike and I are starting a new live conversation series on Substack about the things nobody talks honestly about after sixty.

Not financial planning.
Not “aging gracefully.”
Not motivational fluff.

Real conversations about identity, grief, reinvention, freedom, relationships, purpose, and what actually happens when the life you built changes shape.

First live show: Wednesday, June 3rd at 8 p.m. Eastern
Thursday at 10 a.m. in Australia ( Mike lives in Australia )

Pull up a chair. We’re finally saying the quiet part out loud.

I caught myself doing it - - - AGAIN!

Not comparing myself to another woman. Not my body to someone younger, or my bank account to someone luckier, or my marriage to someone else’s highlight reel.

I was comparing myself to me.

To the version of myself from five days ago.

Five days ago, my daughter called for a FaceTime catch-up. An hour of real conversation — the good kind, the kind that leaves you warmer than you started. And near the end she said something that made me sit straight up.

Mom, it is so nice not to see you living your life as a performance. It’s like we have our mom back.

She doesn’t know everything I’ve been working through. She just felt the shift — from hundreds of miles away, through a phone screen — and she named it. I carried that with me for days. I felt seen. I felt real. I felt electric.

And now as I am writing this, it’s Six o’clock at night. Still in my pajamas. Multiple naps. Snack-eating my way through the day with no real hunger and no real plan. I stared at my easel and felt absolutely nothing. I stared at the blinking cursor and thought: I have nothing to say.

And then the quieter thought moved in underneath: What happened to her? Where did she go?

That’s comparison too. I just hadn’t recognized it dressed up that way.

* * *

And before you go where I know some of you might go — this isn’t about mood swings. It isn’t about bipolarity or instability or anything that needs a diagnosis. It’s about the nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do after days of intense creative output, unexpected exposure, and the kind of emotional aliveness that lights you up from the inside. It needs time to put itself back together. That’s not a malfunction. That’s biology.

What I’ve learned — and what I kept reminding myself of as the day wore on — is that my energy moves like the tide. It comes in full, strong and electric, and then it goes back out. And then it comes in again. At 70, I still catch myself comparing the woman at low tide to the woman when the water is high. The comparison doesn’t disappear. But when I remembered what was actually happening in my body, it got quieter. Less dark. Less convincing. By evening it had loosened its grip almost entirely.

The tide going out isn’t failure. It’s just the tide.

We know the other kind of comparison. We’ve all felt the specific sting of scrolling through somebody’s vacation photos while sitting in our own ordinary kitchen. The shiny marriage. The thriving family. The grandchildren piled in someone’s lap like warm laundry. We recognize that pain. We’ve named it, written about it, tried to talk ourselves out of it.

But I’m beginning to think the deeper wound is the one we quietly inflict on ourselves — the running war between the woman we are today and every more impressive version we’ve been before. The younger self. The more energized self. The self who had momentum, had a plan, had it together. The self who wasn’t tired at noon or unmotivated at six. The self from five days ago who felt electric and alive.

Not because the world erased her.

Because we did.

I wonder sometimes if this is the real reason so many of us feel exhausted — not from life’s difficulty alone, but from the relentless internal audit. Am I healing enough? Producing enough? Moving enough, thriving enough, grateful enough? The soul gets tired of being evaluated. It starts going quiet in self-defense.

Here’s what I know about where this started. Not in us. It was handed to us.

I have a memory of my mother looking at me and saying, “Why can’t you be more like your cousin Kay? She likes fashion.” I didn’t want to go shopping. That was the whole of my crime. But the message arrived anyway, neat and clean: there is a preferred version of you, and you are not it.

That was my introduction to the measuring stick. And I carried it, the way we carry things we didn’t choose, until it felt like my own hand holding it.

Parenting did it. School did it. Society did it. And — I say this as someone who spent thirty years inside it — the mental - emotional - spiritual wellness world did it most relentlessly of all. Take stock. Monitor your progress. Track your growth. Are you healing? Are you thriving? Are you enough yet?

I remember the moment this piece was born. I was walking down my hallway, literally pulling at my hair, saying out loud to no one: I am so tired of monitoring myself. What happened to just the joy of living the day?

That’s where this started. Not from wisdom. From exhaustion.

Comparison is not going to release its grip after one article, or one morning of insight, or one good day when the tide is in. It runs too deep, comes from too many directions — other women, other teachers, other timelines, other versions of ourselves. We are going to have to look at it from every angle before we can begin to set it down.

So this is the first of several conversations. I’m glad you’re here for it.

But for now — here’s what I want to ask you, because I suspect I’m not the only one who does this:

Who is the version of yourself you keep holding today up against? The you from a year ago, a decade ago, some golden season when everything felt like it was working? When did that become the standard you’re failing to meet?

You’re still here. She’s still here — the one in the pajamas, the one who’s tired, the one who hasn’t figured it all out yet. She’s not a lesser version of you. She’s you, right now, in this moment, doing the actual living.

And she deserves to be seen.

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.

Hi everybody,

First of all, welcome.

Second of all — what just happened? One thousand new subscribers in 72 hours. Two thousand comments spread across various notes over the past five days.

Y’all are thorough.

I tried to keep up as best I could, but somewhere around the point where my notifications started reproducing like rabbits, I realized there was no humanly possible way to respond to everybody. But please know this: I saw you. I read far more than I was able to answer. And I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

A lot of people found me through the note where I said I was tired of treating myself like a never-ending self-improvement project. Apparently that struck a nerve. Judging from the responses, many of us are exhausted from feeling like every moment of life is supposed to become an optimization strategy.

And then this morning I spent an hour laughing so hard at comedians impersonating other comedians that I had tears running down my face and nearly snorted coffee through my nose.

Honestly? That may have been the healthiest thing I’ve done all week.

For those of you who are new here, let me explain the spirit of this place.

This is not a perfection contest. Not a fix-yourself factory. Not a space where we pretend we’ve transcended being human.

Most of the conversations here revolve around what life actually looks like after 60 — identity shifts, creativity, solitude, reinvention, meaning, and learning how to actually live instead of endlessly preparing to live.

For paid subscribers, we gather every Tuesday evening for Breakthrough — our live Zoom conversation. We meet for about an hour and forty-five minutes and talk honestly about what all of this looks like in real life. No performance. No pretending. Just real people figuring out how they want to live this next chapter.

For those who missed a few things this week, here are three pieces that generated a lot of conversation:

It Arrived at 4 AM At four in the morning, a thought arrived that I hadn’t been able to shake: what if I’m exhausted not from life itself, but from carrying myself around like a problem that never gets solved? This is the piece that started everything this week.

We Are Not Done Yet Not all of us are living the same version of this chapter. Some are rediscovering creativity. Some are grieving marriages. Some are rebuilding from scratch. But somewhere underneath all of it, many of us are arriving at the same quiet realization: there is still more.

The Day I Realized Invisibility Wasn’t Happening To Me I used to think the world had stopped seeing me. Then I realized I had stopped seeing myself first. This piece explores how that happens — and this week we’re going deeper into the two quiet culprits behind it: comparison and guilt.

Coming up this week: comparison and guilt. Why we do it. Why it becomes habitual. And why so many of us spend decades measuring ourselves against standards we never consciously chose. And how at this stage of life we can give ourselves permission to let those two go!

I’m glad you’re here.

Monica