Last night, Mike messaged me at 8 o’clock.
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.
