Do you feel out of step with everyone around you right now?

That's not restlessness. That's the sound of someone who still has something unfinished.

Apr 22, 2026

The Alternate Universe

I ran into an old friend last month.

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

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

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

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

I thought about it for a full three seconds.

No.

Not even a little.

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

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

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

But.

But.

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

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

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

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

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

My friend who wants to rest would find this exhausting.

She’s not wrong.

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

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

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

That’s not mine.

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

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

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

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

That feeling isn’t restlessness.

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

And unfinished isn’t a problem.

It might be the most interesting thing about you.

The sidelines were never the whole story.

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

I’ll see you out there.

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

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

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

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

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

Come see if it feels like home.

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.