She stopped wanting the things she used to want.

Here's what she found instead.

I Didn’t Realize I Was Mourning Her

The other day I saw a group of people floating down the river in inner tubes.

Three years ago, I would have smiled and thought: that looks like fun.

This time I smiled for a different reason.

I realized I had absolutely no interest in going.

Not because I couldn’t. Because I didn’t want to.

For a moment, I wondered what was wrong with me. Then it hit me.

I wasn’t mourning my physical ability to float down a river.

I was mourning the woman who would have wanted to.

That’s a very different kind of grief.

Louisiana Countryside

Nobody prepares us for this part. We’re warned about losing our careers, our routines, our income. Nobody tells us that our interests might quietly evolve. That one day you’ll look at something you used to love and simply feel — nothing. Not resentment. Not sadness. Just the quiet realization that you’ve become someone else.

I suspect I’m not the only woman who has stood in that moment and wondered what was wrong with her.

Nothing is wrong. The self simply moved on before we noticed.

Let me tell you what I’ve lost interest in. Not because I want to catalogue my losses, but because I think you might recognize yourself in this list — and if you do, I want you to know you are not alone and you are not broken.

I’ve lost interest in the rules I was raised with. The ones about folding towels a particular way and tucking them neatly into a linen closet behind a closed door. I still fold towels. But the elaborate ceremony of it? Gone. Who decided that mattered? I have no idea. But I followed that rule for sixty-something years without once questioning it.

I’ve lost interest in lunch with the girls. People still invite me and I find a way to say I’m not available. I think they’re finally getting the message. One woman declared publicly on Facebook that I’m antisocial. I don’t think I’m antisocial. I think I’ve become very intentional about where my energy goes. And I don’t want to leak it into conversations that leave me feeling emptier than before I sat down.

I’ve lost interest in keeping up with anyone. I couldn’t care less what anyone else is doing or what they have or what their life looks like compared to mine. That measuring stick I used to carry everywhere? I set it down somewhere and I haven’t gone back for it.

I’ve lost interest in the Civil War battlefields that used to fascinate me. I live in Central Virginia, surrounded by history. Appomattox Courthouse is just a few miles away. Three years ago I would have driven there on a Sunday afternoon and walked the grounds and felt something. Now I drive past the signs and feel nothing. Just a quiet acknowledgment that she used to love that. She’s not here anymore.

And then there’s the one that took me longest to admit.

I’ve lost interest in finding a man.

Not because I gave up or because something happened. Because somewhere in the last few years I simply stopped wanting it. And that realization arrived with its own particular grief — because it quietly sealed something. It closed a door I had been leaving open without quite knowing I was doing it.

The irony is that once I sat with that grief honestly, I realized: I don’t even want to go play anymore. The things I would have done with a partner — the road trips, the museum afternoons, the walks through historic parks — I don’t want those things either. It wasn’t about the man. It was about a whole way of moving through the world that I’ve quietly outgrown.

She used to organize people and pull them together for experiences. She used to be a social butterfly who showed up and made things happen.

I miss her a little. I won’t pretend I don’t.

But here’s what I’ve noticed in the space where all of that used to live.

I’ve become a student of myself.

Not in the way the wellness industry means it — not journaling prompts and gratitude lists and morning routines. I mean something quieter and more honest than that. I pay close attention to what I’m thinking and feeling, almost minute by minute. I notice when something drains me and when something feeds me. I’ve become genuinely curious about my own interior life in a way I never had time to be when I was busy living everyone else’s.

That practice of observing is actually what allowed me to notice this grief in the first place. You can’t mourn something you haven’t noticed losing.

And in the space where the river floats and the lunch dates and the battlefield tours used to be, some other things quietly arrived.

A bathtub. I know that sounds small. But I was without one for five years — shower only — and when I finally had one installed it changed something. Not just physically. The hot soak in the evening has become one of the anchors of my day. Something that is entirely, unambiguously mine. No agenda. No performance. Just warmth and quiet and the particular luxury of taking up space without justifying it.

Intentional relationships. I stopped collecting people and started choosing them. The relationships that give me genuine energy now are with people who live in my building or next door or operate a business nearby. Close. Real. Mutual. Not transactional. Not performative. Just a genuine love and appreciation that goes both directions.

And something unexpected — I stopped resisting help.

I am fiercely independent. Always have been. But recently, when a young man offered to help me load groceries into my cart, I let him. And instead of feeling diminished by it, I felt something I didn’t expect.

Grace.

A small, quiet moment of grace. The kind that only arrives when you stop fighting everything.

But here’s what I’ve discovered underneath the grief, and I want to say this carefully because I think it matters.

While I was mourning the woman who used to float rivers and organize gatherings and drive to Civil War battlefields on Sunday afternoons, I started noticing something else.

There were older dreams. Quieter ones. Dreams that never got their chance because life arrived first — the marriage, the children, the career, the obligations, the decades of being useful and available and responsible.

Those dreams didn’t disappear. They went underground. They waited.

And now, in the space where all the old activities used to live, they’re surfacing.

Not in their original form necessarily. A dream rarely returns wearing the same dress it wore when you first had it. But the essence of it — the feeling underneath the specific ambition — that’s still entirely intact.

Maybe you dreamed of being an artist. You don’t have to move to Paris and starve beautifully. But you could pick up a brush. You could find out what it feels like to make something with your hands that didn’t exist before you touched it.

Maybe you dreamed of writing. Not necessarily a novel. But the dream underneath the dream — to hear yourself think, to put your truth into words, to be witnessed — that’s available right now.

Maybe you always wanted to understand something deeply. History. Music. The night sky. The way plants grow. The dream wasn’t the subject. The dream was the aliveness of genuine curiosity, fully followed.

I think this is one of the most extraordinary and underacknowledged gifts of this season of life. For the first time, possibly ever, we have the freedom and the space to go back and retrieve what we left behind. Not to recreate the past. To bring the essence of it forward into who we are right now.

The woman I am today couldn’t have received those dreams when she was thirty-five. She was too busy. Too obligated. Too hemmed in by what was expected of her.

But this woman — the one who soaks in a hot bath and folds towels however she wants and doesn’t go to lunch if she doesn’t want to — she has room.

She has time.

She has the particular wisdom of someone who has already survived everything that tried to stop her.

And maybe that’s the real invitation underneath the grief.

Not just to mourn the woman who floated rivers.

But to ask: what did she never get to do? What dream did she set down so long ago she forgot it was hers?

Because it’s still there.

And she finally has time to go find it.

Maybe that’s what this season is actually teaching us.

Not how to stay the same.

Not how to reclaim the old life.

How to grieve the woman we were with honesty and tenderness — and then turn around and meet the woman we’re becoming with genuine curiosity.

She’s different from who you expected.

She folds towels however she wants.

She doesn’t go to lunch if she doesn’t want to go.

She lets people help her sometimes.

She soaks in a hot bath on a Tuesday afternoon and calls it enough.

She is not less than the woman who floated rivers and organized gatherings and left no battlefield unvisited.

She is not a diminished version.

She is what happens when a woman finally stops performing her life and starts actually living it.

Honor the one who came before.

She brought you this far.

And then turn around.

Because the one taking her place?

She’s just getting started.

If this piece resonated with you — if you recognized yourself in the changing interests, the quiet grief, or the dream that never got its chance — this is exactly the kind of conversation we continue every Tuesday inside The Daily RE-Wire.

The Breakthrough Circle is where women bring exactly this. The losses they haven’t named. The dreams they haven’t dared to retrieve. The new version of themselves they’re just beginning to meet.

When you become a paid member I’ll send you a personal copy of Building Trust With Yourself — the booklet I wrote from my own experience about how to become a genuine student of your own life. How to notice what’s true. How to follow what calls to you. How to trust the woman you’re becoming as much as you trusted the one you used to be.

Send your email to monica@monirosesoul.com or DM me here on Substack and I’ll send it back to you personally.

One more thing — the 20% discount on annual membership ends August 31. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the moment.

Not because of the discount.

Because she’s been waiting long enough.