The map your life has been leaving for you

Toward a future that feels undeniably yours.

IN MY DREAMS

I woke up at 5 a.m. this morning with four hours of sleep in my bones and a thought pacing around the room like it owned the place.

I tried to go back to sleep. I really did.

I lay there. I turned over. I negotiated. I made every bargain a woman can make with her pillow. Nothing.

Then I got hungry. Then I ate. Then I finally said, well, fine. If we’re awake, we’re awake.

So here I am.

And the thought that would not let me sleep was this:

Maybe the dreams of our youth do not disappear.

Maybe they change clothes.

Maybe they go underground for a while.

Maybe they wait until we are old enough, tired enough, honest enough, and free enough to recognize what they were really trying to say.

Yesterday, something happened that made me laugh out loud.

I sent a query letter to Lyft about sponsoring this publication.

I looked at the numbers for The Daily RE-WIRE and realized I had something real to say. Nearly 7,000 subscribers. More than 4,300 readers marked by Substack as highly engaged. A recent direct email with a 37% open rate. Paid subscribers joining. Readers talking in the chat. Women going back into year-old archives reading pieces I wrote before some of them ever found me.

And there I was, sitting in my retirement years, writing to a company about sponsorship and advertising.

Then it hit me.

I started my business life selling advertising.

Years ago, I was the advertising director for a small-town newspaper in Oklahoma. That was one of my first real awakenings to business. I understood the relationship between a publication, its readers, and the businesses that wanted to reach them.

I never had a problem with advertising. Some people clutch their pearls at the word, but I have always understood something very simple: somebody has to pay for the lights. Readers can pay. Sponsors can pay. Some combination of all of the above can pay. The question is not whether advertising is evil. The question is whether the advertising respects the reader.

That part matters to me. A lot.

Because I do not want to build a publication that treats women over 60 like a demographic carcass for corporations to pick over. God help us.

I want to build a living room. A warm room. A room where women read, recognize themselves, talk back, upgrade, participate, laugh, cry, remember, and begin again. And if a sponsor belongs in that room, then I have no problem opening the door.

FULL CIRCLE MOMENT: That is when the full-circle feeling came over me.

After that small-town newspaper job, I tried to open my own ad agency. That failed.

Later, when the internet began to open up — back when Twitter and Facebook were still young and everybody was trying to figure out what this online world was going to become — I tried to start an online newspaper in Blacksburg, Virginia. That one almost worked. The month it was about to turn a profit, I had to go home to help take care of my dad. So I shut it down.

Your version of this may look nothing like mine. The dream underneath yours may have nothing to do with business or publishing or anything I ever tried. But I suspect the shape of it will feel familiar — the thing you kept reaching for, the thing life kept interrupting, the thing you set down so many times you eventually stopped calling it a dream and started calling it a regret.

Later, I tried again in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I wanted to build an online publication there too, but the tools were clunky, the layout options were limited, and the audience was not quite ready for what online publishing would eventually become.

At the time, I thought those things were failures.

I tried and failed. Tried and failed. Tried and failed.

How many women carry that exact sentence around in their bodies?

I had a dream, but I had children. I had a gift, but I had a marriage. I had a longing, but I had bills. I had an idea, but I had parents to care for. I had a self, but I had a role to perform.

So we fold the dream up and put it in a drawer.

Then one day, decades later, something stirs.

And we think, where did that come from?

But maybe it did not come from nowhere. Maybe it was there all along.

When I look back now, I can see that the dream underneath all those attempts was not simply advertising. It was not even publishing. Those were the forms. The deeper dream was older than that. Much older.

I can remember being a teenager, sitting at the little white French provincial desk in my bedroom. My mother had bought me French provincial furniture, and I loved that desk. I remember reading some magazine article about women who worked from home. Even then, I was trying to figure out how I could make a life that did not require me to leave home every day to go work inside someone else’s structure.

I did not have language for it then. I was a girl. What did I know?

But I knew something.

I knew I did not like the feeling of being required to leave my own world in order to earn my place in the larger one.

Of course, I did leave. Most of us did. I worked jobs. I built careers. I raised children. I performed roles. I walked into buildings I did not own and did what needed to be done. That is what women do. We do what needs to be done.

But underneath it, there was always a bristling in me. A resistance. Not to work — I have never been afraid of work. Lord knows, I can wear out a mule when I get going. The resistance was to surrendering my sovereignty.

That is the word I would use now. Sovereignty. My own rhythm. My own space. My own imagination. My own authority. My own relationship with my work, my home, my body, my time, my thoughts, my money, my voice, and my God.

I did not want to live as a woman permanently organized around someone else’s structure.

I did it, of course. Most of us did. We adapted. We became useful. We became dependable. We became the woman who could handle it. We became the woman everyone knew would show up.

RETIRMENT ENTERS THE ROOM

Then retirement comes along and everybody acts as though the question is: what will you do with your time?

As if time is the problem.

Time is not the problem. The problem is that after decades of living inside other people’s structures, many women no longer know what their own internal structure feels like. They do not know what they want. They do not know what they miss. They do not know which dream was theirs and which dream was handed to them by a culture that needed them compliant, productive, attractive, polite, and available.

This is why I keep coming back to dreams. Not the cute kind. The deeper dream. The one that has been leaving breadcrumbs through your life. The one that may have shown up in different costumes.

Maybe when you were young, you wanted to be an artist. Maybe what you really wanted was permission to see the world through your own eyes.

Maybe you wanted to be a teacher. Maybe what you really wanted was to gather people around meaning.

Maybe you wanted to travel. Maybe what you really wanted was expansion — a life that didn’t stop at the edges of what was expected of you.

Maybe you wanted to write. Maybe what you really wanted was to hear yourself think.

The dream may not be literal. The form it took was just the costume. Underneath it was something true.

NO REVIEW MIRROR!

I do not need to go back and become the teenage girl at the white French provincial desk. I do not need to recreate every old ambition in its original form. I do not need to prove that the failed ad agency should have worked.

I do not need to go backward.

But I do need to notice the thread.

Because the thread was telling the truth. The thread kept saying: make your own place. Build from your own center. Do not abandon your interior world. Create something useful. Gather people. Respect the reader. Serve the room. Let the work come from home, from soul, from truth, from the place where your own life finally belongs to you.

And now, at 70, I am writing about retirement in my retirement years, running a publication from my apartment, talking to women all over the world, selling subscriptions, sending sponsor queries, painting in oils, making videos in bathrobes, and laughing because apparently the dream was not done with me.

Apparently it had patience.

Apparently it knew more than I did.

NOW, FOR YOU.

That is the part I want you to consider.

What if the thing you think you failed at was not failure? What if it was practice? What if the interruption was not the end of the story? What if the dream had to wait for you to become the woman who could hold it?

What if retirement is not the place where dreams go to die?

What if retirement is where the deeper dream finally becomes visible?

Take a look at your own life. Not with judgment. Not with a clipboard. Not with that self-improvement stink we are all tired of. Just look.

What kept showing up? What did you keep reaching for? What did you keep bristling against? What kind of room did you always want to live in? What part of you kept returning, even after marriage, motherhood, jobs, caregiving, grief, money, fear, duty, and everybody else’s expectations had their say?

There may be a thread there. It may not look like what you expected.

PRIME EXAMPLE

A woman I know spent her career as a deputy sheriff. When she retired, she figured she would do what made sense — travel with her husband, spend time with the grandchildren, take care of herself. And she did. She signed up for Pilates. She took some trips.

It still wasn’t enough.

Then one afternoon she stopped in front of a hardware store window. There was a piece of furniture in the display that had been refinished with a particular kind of paint. She stood there longer than she expected to.

She didn’t know why she stopped. She just noticed that something in her had gone very quiet and very still.

She went back the next day. Then she started asking questions. Then she started experimenting. Then, one small step at a time, somebody found out she could refinish furniture. Then somebody else found out. Then it became a thing — a small cottage business she runs entirely on her own terms. She takes a job or she doesn’t. She leaves for three weeks to travel and comes home to a waiting list. She works on a piece alone in her garage at her own pace on her own schedule and answers to nobody.

She’s 70 years old.

When she told me about it recently, she used a word I wasn’t expecting.

I feel like I actually have a future. I’m not just maintaining. I’m not just treading water.

Not because the business is large. Because it opened a door into a whole new community of people she never would have met. New friendships. New conversations. A world that didn’t exist for her eighteen months ago.

All of it started with a hardware store window.

All of it started with one moment of noticing.

That was her breadcrumb. It looked like nothing.

It was everything.

So here is the only thing I will ask of you.

PUT YOURSELF ON NOTICE

Not as a project. Not as a practice you have to maintain or a journal you have to keep or a method you have to master. Just notice. How you feel when you walk into a room. What catches your eye when nothing is required of you. What you find yourself thinking about at 5 a.m. when sleep will not come back.

Those moments are not random. They are information. They are the breadcrumbs your own life has been leaving for you — possibly for decades — waiting for you to have enough quiet to finally see them.

Follow even one. See where it leads.

In my experience, it leads somewhere you didn’t know you were allowed to go. Toward a future that feels undeniably yours. Toward a satisfaction you didn’t know was still available to you.

It was always available to you.

You just needed enough space to find it.

And maybe the dream that would not leave you alone was never trying to torment you.

Maybe it was trying to bring you home.

If something in this piece stirred something you’d set down a long time ago — a thread you’d stopped pulling, a dream you’d stopped calling a dream — I want to offer you something.

When you become a paid member of The Daily RE-WIRE, I’ll send you a complimentary copy of Building Trust in Yourself.

Because following a breadcrumb requires one thing underneath everything else. Trust that what catches your attention is worth following. Trust that the thread is real. Trust that the woman noticing is worth listening to.

That’s what the guide is about.

The Breakthrough Circle meets every Tuesday on Zoom. No performance required. Just women following their own threads and comparing notes about where they lead.

The guide is waiting. So is the room.

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.