When the Script Runs Out
Nobody warned us the real story begins when the audience goes home and the lights go out.
Today is Day 9 of our 30-Day Reclamation Project.
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Does this ring true for you?
You honored the script you were handed for a good life — grow up, get married, raise kids — but nobody gave you a map for what comes after.
That’s the single reason I send out the Daily Re-Wire: we’re the first generation with the chance to flip the script.
There was never any doubt that I’d marry. The only question was who and when.
My mother solved that one for me. She lovingly arranged my life into a tidy little fairytale by pointing me toward the local minister.
She knew where he was, what he was doing, and how I could conveniently cross his path.
In June of 1973 — just one month after I graduated high school — I was being “guided” toward him.
By August, I had a ring.
My parents were giddy.
Not once — not a single time — did anyone ask how I felt about it.
“Little Monica’s marrying the preacher!” they said, like it was a Disney ending.
Through those years with the preacher, I learned a lot — mostly about silence.
My job was to nod politely, make nice conversation, and keep the congregation happy.
But sitting among them, Sunday after Sunday, I heard the truth slip out when no one “important” was listening.
Those church ladies weren’t happy. Not one of them.
They were exhausted, frustrated, unseen — performing their roles like pros.
My heavens, what a troupe of actors they were.
Many deserved an Emmy for daytime drama. It took me a while to see it — their misery came from never being themselves.
They weren’t living. They were playacting the expectations that had been foisted upon them.
And here we are — decades later — many of us in our so-called retirement years, aching to reclaim who we really are.
No more razzle-dazzle dinner parties or perfectly folded napkins to prove our worth.
We’re done performing.
We just want to sit at a humble table of our own design, guided not by duty, but by intuition — by soul.
They told us how to be daughters, wives, mothers, workers.
They handed us roles, rules, and reasons.
Then one day, the lights dimmed, the audience went home, and the stage was still ours — only now, there was no script.
They call it a midlife crisis.
I call it creative chaos — the sound of your soul rifling through old pages, hunting for a plot that no longer fits.
The map ends, but your story doesn’t.
The truth is, nobody warned us we’d have to become our own authors — that we’d have to pick up the pen again at sixty, seventy, or beyond and decide who we want to be next.
Nobody told us we’d need the courage to disappoint people who liked the old version of us better.
Nobody told us reinvention would be this intimate — or this exhilarating.
But here we are. Pen in hand. Blank page ahead.
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If you’re standing at that edge — unsure what your second act looks like — this next part is for you.
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