I stood in my destroyed front yard and felt something I wasn't expecting. Recognition.
A Category 4 hurricane took six oak trees and one borrowed life. Here's what was left.
The Storm That Started Everything
In August of 2020 Hurricane Laura came through Lake Charles, Louisiana like it had a personal agenda.
Category 4 officially. I remain convinced it was a 5 and I will die on that hill — which, given what it did to my property, feels appropriate.
It didn’t bring rain. It brought wind — the tornado kind, the kind that doesn’t negotiate. And when it was done with my street, six oak trees that had stood on my property for longer than I’d been alive were lying on the ground like they’d simply given up.
Southern oaks. The sprawling romantic kind. The kind that show up in every novel ever set below the Mason-Dixon line. The kind I’d grown up believing were permanent — guardians, I always thought, of everything that stays.
They weren’t permanent.
Neither, it turned out, was anything else I’d been holding onto.
I stood in my front yard looking at the roots — exposed, reaching up toward the sky they’d been ripped away from — and felt something I wasn’t expecting.
Recognition.
Because I knew exactly how those trees felt.
Uprooted. Everything underneath finally visible. The ground that was supposed to hold you, gone.
My life was in the wreckage too. Not just the property. The whole construction of it — the stability I’d spent decades assembling, the foundation that had always felt slightly borrowed, slightly not-quite-mine.
The storm had taken the trees.
And in doing so had taken the last excuse I had for not moving.
So I moved.
Not metaphorically. I packed what was left, left Lake Charles, and went toward the life I’d been circling for years without ever quite landing.
A vibrant downtown. My art. My writing. My own company on my own terms.
The dream I’d been carrying since I was a girl — not the marriage dream, not the suburban dream, not any of the three times I tried someone else’s version of what my life should look like — but the real one. The stubborn, persistent, quietly-waiting one.
Freedom. Creativity. A life that felt like mine when I woke up in the morning.
I want to be honest about something.
I didn’t arrive here gracefully. There was a pity party. A real one, with justification, because COVID was happening and my resources were depleted and I was 66 years old facing the particular indignity of having to start over when I thought that chapter was behind me.
But the rent didn’t care about my pity party.
And at some point you realize the only thing more exhausting than starting over — is not starting over.
So I started.
Here’s what I know now that I couldn’t have told you then:
The storm didn’t take anything that was actually mine.
It took the borrowed stability. The foundation that never fit. The life that looked right from certain angles but never felt true when you were living inside it.
What was actually mine — the dream, the art, the voice, the particular stubborn aliveness that had been waiting for exactly this opening — that was still standing.
It’s still standing. Dreams never die, the simply wait. I wish I had the patience our dreams have.
And that’s what I write about here. Not the loss — though I don’t pretend it wasn’t loss. But what comes after the roots get exposed. What you discover you actually are when everything you were leaning on falls away.
It took a Category 4 hurricane to get me here.
I’m not recommending that method.
But I am telling you the other shore exists.
And it’s worth every uprooted oak tree it took to get there.
If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.
I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle for paid members. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.
We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.
If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.
You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.
Come see if it feels like home.
And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.
I also made a video about this.
Because apparently one medium wasn’t enough to process a Category 4 hurricane and an existential reckoning about my life choices.
You’re welcome to join me there too.
Catastrophic externals events - catastrophic internal events - I have survived them and give thanks for them.
Monica, you articulate the messy, glorious, craziness of life so well.