Suddenly I was ten years old again.

The dream I set down so long ago, forgotten for 5 decades

Last night I was watching hit Netflix series, “ The Crown” when a line of dialogue stopped me cold.

Young Prince Charles was describing his life as Prince of Wales. He said it felt like “not so much an existence as it is a predicament.”

A predicament.

Not a tragedy. Not a blessing. Not a burden. A predicament — something you didn’t choose and can’t entirely escape, that is simultaneously confining and full of possibility.

Then he described feeling both free and imprisoned. Superfluous and indispensable at the same time.

I sat there staring at the television because I suddenly recognized something I hadn’t been able to name before.

Charles had spent his entire life preparing for a role. The role gave him structure, identity, purpose, and status. It also mapped his life before he was old enough to understand what a map was. Everything important about who he was supposed to be had already been decided.

And I thought: isn’t that exactly what we hand people called retirement?

For decades, most of us are given a script. Build something. Raise someone. Be responsible. Be productive. Be useful. Show up. Whether we loved every minute of it or quietly endured it or simply adapted to it, the script gave shape to our days. There was always somewhere to be tomorrow morning. Someone who needed something. Some role waiting to be performed.

Then one day the script ends.

And nobody tells us what comes next.

We’ve misunderstood retirement, I think. We talk about it as though it’s a destination — the finish line of adulthood, the place where all the questions finally get answered. But what if retirement isn’t a destination at all?

What if it’s a predicament?

What if that’s why so many intelligent, capable people find themselves feeling restless and uncertain and bored and exhilarated and terrified and lonely and liberated — sometimes all in the same afternoon?

What if nothing has gone wrong? What if they’re simply standing somewhere nobody prepared them for?

I hear it in the comments constantly. People rarely say directly: I no longer know who I am. Instead they tell stories. About feeling invisible. About waking up on Monday morning with nowhere they have to be. About wondering why they aren’t happier now that they’re finally free.

Free.

That word keeps catching my attention. Because freedom sounds like the answer — until it arrives. Then we discover something nobody mentioned.

Responsibility is exhausting. But it provides structure. Freedom removes the structure. And suddenly we’re facing a question that most of us have managed to avoid for decades:

Who am I when nobody needs me to be anything in particular?

Not who was I. Not who should I be. Who am I — right now, on this ordinary Tuesday afternoon, with nothing waiting and no one asking?

That’s a frightening question. Not because something has gone wrong. Because there are no instructions. No annual review. No culturally approved checklist. No promotion waiting at the end.

Just your own thoughts. And all the time in the world to have them.( ack! )

Charles described feeling both superfluous and indispensable. And isn’t that retirement exactly?

The company moves on without you. The meetings continue. The role you occupied for years is handed to someone else. You discover, quietly and a little painfully, that you were not as indispensable as you thought.

And yet your life remains entirely indispensable to you. Your curiosity is still alive. Your capacity for joy is still intact. The dreams that got postponed didn’t disappear — they just went quiet, waiting for exactly this moment.

The culture may no longer have a role waiting for you. But it has done something it never quite managed before.

It has handed the authorship back.

I know this territory from the inside right now. A few weeks ago I reduced my publishing schedule from seven days a week to three. It was the right decision. It was also disorienting in ways I didn’t fully anticipate — because suddenly I was standing in the exact predicament I just described. The calendar opened up. Nobody was asking anything. And the question arrived quietly and sat down across from me:

Who are you now?

What showed up wasn’t an answer. It was something I hadn’t felt in years.

Curiosity.

Not curiosity about a topic or a project or something useful. Just — curiosity. Alive and slightly unruly, the way it used to feel before life got serious and relentless and full of things that required my attention. It had gone dormant somewhere in the years of tending to everything that needed tending. And then, in the space that opened up, it came back.

One night it brought me out to my balcony with all the lights off. I sat down in the dark and looked up. The midnight sky was vast and crowded with stars, and one of them — one particular star — seemed to be winking right at me. I sat with that for a few minutes, not thinking about anything useful, not producing anything, not performing anything.

And then I heard myself say out loud, to nobody: I should get a telescope.

Suddenly I was ten years old again, lying on flat ground at summer camp while a counselor pointed out the Big Dipper, feeling the particular wonder of realizing the sky goes on forever. A dream I had forgotten I ever had came back to me in the dark on a balcony in Virginia.

I slept particularly well that night.

That is what curiosity looks like when it returns. Not a plan. Not a purpose. A star winking at you in the dark and a memory you didn’t know you’d kept.

Maybe that’s the real predicament. Not figuring out how to retire. Figuring out how to live when the script finally runs out — when you are standing beyond the edge of the map, in unnamed territory, being asked for the first time to decide for yourself what makes a life worth living.

Nobody prepared us for that question.

And maybe that’s exactly why it feels so enormous.

Not because you’re failing. Not because you’re doing this wrong. But because you are being asked something genuinely hard, genuinely important, and genuinely yours to answer.

For the first time.

So here is what I want to ask you — and I mean this as a real question, not a rhetorical one:

What dream did you set down so long ago you forgot it was yours?

Because I have a feeling it’s still there. Quiet. Patient. Waiting for you to turn the lights off and look up.

If this piece landed somewhere real for you — if you recognized yourself in the predicament, in the empty calendar, in the question nobody prepared you for — I’d love for you to bring it to Tuesday.

Every week a small group of us gather on Zoom. No script, no whiteboard, no tidy answers. Just women standing in the same unnamed territory, being honest with each other about what it actually feels like to be here.

And occasionally someone remembers a dream they’d forgotten was theirs.

The BREAKTHROUGH guide is waiting when you arrive. But so is the room.

If this piece gave you something worth keeping — a word for what you’ve been feeling, a star to look up at, a dream you’d half forgotten — and you’d like to say thank you in the simplest possible way, you’re welcome to buy me a coffee.

No obligation. Just one woman, a balcony, and a telescope she hasn’t bought yet.

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.

Have you ever forgotten to do something?

Here’s a funny video about that:

https://youtube.com/shorts/sJ4bSa6_c0I?feature=share