I told you I was going to publish the big essay on conditioning today. Well. Life had other plans. Yesterday threw me a curveball, I didn’t sleep worth a damn, and this morning I looked at that article and thought, Nope. I’m not forcing this one just because Thursday showed up. This piece is too important to me for that. So I’m giving it another day or so. In the meantime, I went digging through something I wrote last December and thought, Well hell, this needs to come back out. So here it is.
What Hurricane Laura Destroyed (And What It Set Free)
In 2020, Hurricane Laura tore through my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Officially a Category 4, though anyone who lived through it knows better.
It wasn’t rain that devastated the city. It was wind. Violent, unrelenting, tornado-like wind that ripped things out by the roots.
Including six enormous oak trees on my property.
If you’re from the South, you know the kind.
Ancient. Sprawling. Romantic. The kind that feel permanent. The kind you imagine will outlive you.
They didn’t.
They were thrown across my yard like toys, roots exposed, dignity gone. Two of them were tossed upon my car- bending it in half.
And something in me cracked open watching them lie there.
I’ve always believed trees are more than plants. They’re witnesses. Timekeepers. Guardians.
Seeing them uprooted felt personal. Intimate.
As if the storm had reached into my own life and said, pay attention.
At the time, I was already standing in uncertainty.
Alone. Caring for my elder sister. Wondering whether I had the strength or the desire to rebuild yet again.
And suddenly the question wasn’t just about the house.
It was about me.
Here’s what I’d been carrying:
My dream was never the traditional one.
I tried the marriages. Three of them. I raised my daughters. I did the expected things.
But the dream that lived quietly inside me was about freedom. Creativity. Curiosity.
Living in the center of things. Making art. Letting my soul lead instead of obligation.
I had been rebuilding other people’s versions of my life for decades.
Standing in front of those uprooted trees, the question became undeniable:
Do I stay and rebuild what’s been lost?
Or do I finally pull up my own roots?
I packed what I could fit in a small van and left.
With help from a few locals who hadn’t fled—thousands had—I loaded what mattered.
Paintings I’d saved. A few belongings. Some furniture.
And I said goodbye to my sister.
I knew, standing there, that I would likely never see her again.
I was right. She passed away two years later.
I drove to Virginia where my daughter lived.
No plan. No safety net.
Just the stubborn belief that I couldn’t rebuild someone else’s life one more time.
What followed wasn’t pretty.
Within months, COVID hit. I got sick. Three months in bed. Savings drained. Three months behind on rent facing eviction.
By this time, my daughter and her family had packed up and moved two hours away.
But even then, flat on my back, something was different.
The life I was trying to build—however unstable—was mine.
Not a reconstruction of what had been. Not a version that fit someone else’s expectations.
Mine.
So I kept going.
I started painting daily. Small works. Then larger. I put them online. I sold a few.
I started writing. Not because I had a platform. Because the words needed somewhere to go.
I began sitting with my soul. Two minutes at a time. Learning to listen instead of manage.
Slowly—so slowly it was almost invisible—things started organizing themselves.
Not through hustle. Not through a plan.
Through coherence.
Four years later, here’s what’s true.
I live simply, downtown, surrounded by light and my own paintings.
I write every day, and the work has found its people.
I sell my art. I support myself through what I create.
More than anything, I wake up inside a life that feels natural. Effortless. Aligned.
Whatever “normal” is supposed to mean, this is mine.
The joy I feel now is different from any joy I knew before.
It isn’t conditional. It isn’t borrowed. It isn’t built on anyone else’s approval.
It’s steady. Daily. Mine.
The kind that comes from knowing—finally, at 70—that you’re living the life your soul imagined long before you had language for it.
Hurricane Laura destroyed six ancient oak trees.
But it also destroyed the last excuse I had for not choosing myself.
And for that, I will always be grateful.
Is it possible there is a quiet discontent sitting just below the surface of your life?
It nags at you. It makes you uncomfortable. And ignoring it doesn’t actually make it go away.
I suspect you’ve been ignoring that feeling for a long, long time, mostly because you don’t understand where it’s coming from or what the hell you’re supposed to do about it.
That is exactly why I began repackaging my own life.
And the first thing I had to do was learn how to trust myself, FOR myself.
Building Believable Trust is the 30-page process I created from my own life and my own practice of rebuilding that trust.
It is my gift to anyone who becomes an annual subscriber.
The annual subscription is normally $75. With 20% off, it is now $60.
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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.
Congratulations on creating a life that feels like yours. So many people never figure out what that would look like or how to go about doing it.
Definitely a piece to make you pause. A story of courage and wisdom. Not mainstream conventional, which I hope inspires others because life is too short for conventional