Three marriages. Two cities. One dream I kept misplacing.

This is how I got here — and why your dream is less gone than you think.

How I Got Here

Let me tell you something about the woman writing this.

She spent seventeen years married to a Christian minister. Then ran off to New York City and spent a decade married to a concert pianist. Then came back to her hometown and married another Christian minister.

And somewhere in the middle of all that — in the New York years, in the Southern years, in the years of being a minister’s wife and a musician’s wife and a mother and a daughter and the dependable one and the agreeable one — she misplaced something.

Not dramatically. Not all at once.

Just quietly, the way you misplace things when your hands are always full of something else.

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Fast forward to 2020.

I’m 66 years old. COVID is doing what COVID did. I’ve lost my investment in our family home. Three months of illness have depleted everything — energy, resources, certainty about what comes next.

And I’m standing in what remains thinking: What the hell. I have to start over. At 66.

I had my pity party. I want to be honest about that. I sat in it for a while because I’d earned the right to be furious and I was.

But the rent didn’t care about my feelings. And I didn’t have the luxury of staying stuck.

So I started walking.

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Not because I wanted to. Because sitting still was unbearable. The anxiety needed somewhere to go and my body seemed to know that even when my mind didn’t.

So I walked. And I talked — out loud, to myself, on the street, like a woman who had stopped caring what anyone thought about her at 66 which, it turns out, I had.

I added music. Let my steps find the rhythm of it.

And somewhere in those walks — in the talking and the moving and the music — I started to hear something underneath all the noise.

My own voice.

Not the one trained to be reasonable and agreeable and appropriate.

The other one.

The one that knew what I wanted before I learned to want the right things.

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I started sitting in stillness. Not meditating the way the apps tell you to. Just — sitting. Listening to my own mind without running from it. Letting the quiet get loud enough to hear what had been waiting underneath everything.

The dream that surfaced was simple.

Make art. Sell it. On my terms. No art fairs, no festivals, no asking permission from anyone. Just me and the work and the people who connected with it.

Simple. And mine. Completely mine in a way very few things had been before.

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I’m living that dream now.

Not the performed version. The real one — paint on my hands, a Substack that somehow landed on a bestseller list, a YouTube channel I’m figuring out in real time, a life in what I can only call full color.

I didn’t get here because I figured it out.

I got here because I finally stopped long enough to hear what I’d been carrying the whole time.

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The dream didn’t disappear during those three marriages and two cities and the years of being everything to everyone.

It just waited.

Patiently. Stubbornly. With the particular persistence of something that belongs to you and knows it.

I made a short video about exactly this — about what actually happens to our dreams when life gets in the way. About where they go. About why they’re not as gone as we think.

Because if you’re reading this wondering whether yours is still in there —

it is.

It’s been waiting the whole time.

It just needs you to get quiet enough to hear it again.

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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 for paid members. It’s a 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.