Something in my foundation bottle had separated. That felt significant

And then my brain took me to New Orleans. As brains do.

---

The Foundation Bottle

I stood at my bathroom vanity last week holding a bottle of foundation and trying to remember the last time I’d used it.

Sometime in the fall, I thought. Maybe.

It used to be a daily event. Wake up, put on face, proceed with life. Now it only makes an appearance for special occasions — dinner with a friend, a video where I’d like to look like someone who has things together.

I shook the bottle. Something had separated. That felt significant.

---

And then, the way the brain does when you give it a quiet minute and a cosmetics question, it took me somewhere else entirely.

I was seventeen. Flower power in full effect. I was part of a youth group that piled onto a rickety school bus and rode all the way to New Orleans — New Orleans, of all places — to walk among the tourists on Bourbon Street and invite them to church.

I wore a leather vest. Jesus sandals. Hip-hugging jeans that did me absolutely no favors.

I wore all of it with complete conviction.

Because I was seventeen and I knew — knew — that love was the answer. I didn’t know how the world worked. Didn’t know how marriages worked. Certainly didn’t know how New Orleans worked. But love? Love I had covered.

Looking back, I realize that girl in the leather vest wasn’t dressed for approval.

She was dressed for purpose.

And she had no idea how long it would take to find her way back to that.

---

It’s funny, the things a bottle of foundation will make you think about.

I’ve spent a lot of years getting ready for other people’s occasions. Showing up appropriately. Looking the part. Dressing for rooms I wasn’t always sure I belonged in.

And somewhere in all that appropriate showing-up, the girl on the bus — the one with the wild conviction that she was headed somewhere that mattered — got a little quiet.

Not gone. Just quiet.

She was always carrying the dream. Even in those untethered years when life felt expansive and eternal, the want for something meaningfully, stubbornly, specifically mine — it was always there. I just kept getting ready for other things instead.

---

It takes me longer to get ready now. This is simply true and I’ve made my peace with it.

But here’s what else is true:

In that extra time — foundation bottle in hand, brain wandering back to a rickety school bus and a girl in Jesus sandals who thought she could change New Orleans on a Tuesday — I remember who I was before I learned to want the right things.

And she’s not as far away as I thought.

Not aging.

Just arriving.

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. 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.