I can still see the room.

I was standing in the den of our house in Roanoke, near the patio doors. I think I had a cigarette in my hand. I was married to my first husband, the preacher at this time. I was trying to explain why I did not want to do something.

I do not remember the exact argument anymore.

I remember the sentence.

He looked at me and said, “Your feelings are wrong.”

I can still remember the way I stared at him.

Wrong?

My feelings were wrong?

Not my reasoning. Not my conclusion. Not my behavior.

My feelings.

He proceeded to explain why I was not feeling the proper way about whatever situation he wanted me to participate in.

And something in me changed.

There was no screaming. No suitcase by the door. No dramatic exit.

I simply knew.

I have to get out of here.

I did not leave that day. I do not even remember how long it took me to act on that knowing. Six months? A year? Memory is funny that way.

But I remember the moment the decision was made inside me.

Because feelings are not right or wrong.

They are information.

They are the body saying, this hurts.

This frightens me.

I do not want this.

I feel trapped.

I feel angry.

I feel diminished.

You can disagree with what another person concludes from those feelings. You can disagree with what they choose to do next.

But you do not get to tell another human being that what they feel is incorrect.

And I think that is why I have such a visceral reaction now when someone tries to correct my lived experience simply because it does not match theirs.

I have no problem with disagreement.

A woman can say to me, “But what about those of us with health problems?” after reading one of my posts about using retirement to expand instead of shrink.

Fine.

That is a conversation.

She is bringing another reality into the room.

I lived too many years inside that kind of arrangement.

As the preacher’s wife I was expected to support the job, support the image, support the church, support the man.

I was very good window dressing.

What I was not always permitted to be was a fully separate human being with thoughts, desires, resistance, anger, preferences, and feelings of my own.

That day in the den, I understood something I would spend years learning how to live.

No one gets final editorial approval over my inner life. Not a husband. Not a church. Not a family member telling me I’m too sensitive, or a stranger on the internet telling me I’m too much.

I am the authority on what it feels like to be me.

And I suspect a great many women do not leave the moment they first know something is wrong.

You may have had your own version of that room. Your own version of the sentence. Maybe no one said the words out loud — maybe it was just a look, a silence, a “you’re overreacting” that landed the same way.

Sometimes the leaving begins quietly.

Sometimes it begins standing beside a patio door with a cigarette in your hand while somebody tells you that your feelings are wrong.

Sometimes the revolution happens long before anybody else can see it.

If you know, I know you know.

Monica

A living exploration of mindfulness, consciousness, wholeness, and what becomes possible when we stop agreeing with limitation.

WHAT TO EXPECT I'm making my own life the experiment. Through intentional mindfulness, meditation, visualization, and close attention to my body and inner knowing, I'll document what I practice, what changes, what surprises me, and what I learn about the power already living within us.

This is not a finished system or another promise of magical thinking. It is an honest record of what happens when I deliberately change the way I see.

That was me at the beginning of retirement.

My days were pleasant. My calendar was full. I was content.

And somewhere inside, I kept hearing that old Peggy Lee song: Is That All There Is?

It was not unhappiness. That would have been easier to recognize. Nothing was terribly wrong. I had people I loved, things to do, and the freedom to arrange my days without a boss telling me where to be.

But there was a quiet gnawing underneath all that pleasant activity.

Something in me knew I had not come this far merely to fill the rest of my years with agreeable ways to pass the time.

I was content.

But I was not complete.

On a personal note — of all the posts I’ve written, this one is close to my heart.

I know this subject can make women defensive. Mention that retirement might hold more than grandchildren, gardening, lunch with friends, and an occasional trip, and someone will be along shortly to protect the afternoon nap as if I have arrived with a warrant to confiscate her pillow.

Relax. The nap is safe.

I am not saying those things are meaningless. They can be wonderful parts of a life. Some women retire, tend a beautiful garden, care for their grandchildren, exercise, travel when they can, and feel deeply satisfied. They have chosen a life that reflects what matters most to them, and it is enough.

If you can look at your life today, imagine living some version of it for another ten or twenty years, and feel your whole heart say, Yes, this is the life I want, then good for you.

Enjoy every damn minute of it.

This is not an attempt to drag a satisfied woman away from a life she loves. It is for the woman who loves much of her life and still feels something stirring beneath it.

She may be happy. She may be grateful. She may be surrounded by people she loves. Her days may be so full that her calendar needs its own blood pressure medication.

And still, in the occasional quiet moment, something inside her asks, Is this all there is for me?

That question is not ingratitude.

I know because I had to have that conversation with myself.

The retirement that frightens me

I watched my brother-in-law choose a version of retirement that meant he had earned the right to do nothing. Every morning followed the same script: coffee, bacon and eggs, the enormous recliner, and television for the rest of the day. Occasionally he visited family. Then he returned to his chair.

He defended that life. This was retirement, he insisted. This was what he was supposed to do.

When he retired, he weighed around 200 pounds. By the time he died, diabetic, he weighed around 300.

I cannot say that contentment killed him. I can say that watching his world become smaller, more repetitive, and more sedentary left an impression on me I have never forgotten.

He had retired from his job. Somewhere along the way, he also retired from curiosity.

That is the retirement that frightens me.

So here is the question underneath everything I am about to say: is it safe to want more than a comfortable life — or does wanting more, at this age, make a woman ungrateful, greedy, or foolish?

I do not think it does. I think it makes her honest.

Retirement is more than leaving a job

We talk about retirement as though it happens when a company stops paying us to show up. You turn in your keys, clear out your desk, collect your little sheet cake, and walk into freedom.

But many women retire from employment without ever retiring from the expectations that have governed their lives. This holds true for the ladies who don’t have any family obligations, too — the tug at her soul is there the same as it is for the ones whose family tugs at her to be useful to them.

We remain available. We remain useful. We remain the emergency contact, the dependable grandmother, the family chauffeur, the keeper of appointments, and the woman who can always squeeze in one more thing because, after all, she is retired now.

Sometimes that is exactly what we want.

Taking your grandson to school can be a choice made from love. It can also become the latest role you accepted before you had a chance to discover who you were without a role to perform.

Only you know which one is true.

Real retirement is not merely freedom from paid employment. It is freedom from automatically allowing other people’s expectations to determine the shape of your days, and freedom from the expectations of the generations before us.

It is finally having the right to ask, What do I want from the years ahead?

The math behind the question

According to the Social Security Administration’s current actuarial table, the average 65-year-old woman has another 20.66 years ahead of her. At 70, she still has an average of 16.76 years.

Many of us will live well into our 80s. Some will live into our 90s. A few will reach 100. The United States counted more than 80,000 centenarians in 2020, and nearly 79 percent of them were women.

That is not a little stretch of time to fill until the lights go out.

That is a future — the same length, give or take, as raising a child from birth to adulthood. Nobody would call that stretch of years a season to simply get through.

Not one lovely Tuesday with the grandson. Not one peaceful afternoon in the garden. Imagine thousands of Tuesdays. Imagine yourself five years from now, ten years from now, fifteen years from now.

Are you curious about who that woman might be?

What might fascinate her at 75 that she cannot imagine at 65? What might she create, question, learn, or become? What parts of her have never had enough room to emerge?

Or does she want the life she has today to remain essentially unchanged?

There is no universally correct answer. But after decades of answering to employers, husbands, children, parents, churches, communities, and everybody carrying an opinion about what a good woman should do, surely we owe ourselves an honest one.

Contentment isn’t the opposite of what I was afraid of. It’s the doorway to it.

I used to think the opposite of contentment was dissatisfaction. That if I wasn’t restless, I must be finished.

Here is what I understand now: contentment did not replace the gnawing. It is what let me finally hear it.

I could not hear a whisper while I was still striving, still proving something, still surviving one obligation at a time. Contentment was the quiet I needed before curiosity could get a word in.

Contentment says, I appreciate what I have.

Completion says, There is nothing left in me to discover.

Those are not the same declaration. One is a resting place. The other is a locked door. For years, I mistook the first for the second.

What the whisper sounds like

Purpose rarely crashes through the ceiling carrying written instructions. It begins much more quietly. A flicker of interest. A question you keep returning to. Something you want to learn for no sensible reason. A tiny impulse that says, Look over here.

My bestie, Greg, is proof of this. At 68, he got curious about growing food without land. He lives in a condo, in the same building as me. He couldn’t find the system he wanted, so he built one. Now he’s seeking a patent.

He didn’t sit around trying to discover his purpose.

He followed what fascinated him.

My own contentment has movement in it too. At 70, I am writing for thousands of women, building something that did not exist before I imagined it. I’ve expanded my oil painting practice to include subjects I am genuinely interested in, not what I think will sell. The level of satisfaction is enormous! I am asking better questions, discovering what interests me now, not what interested the woman I was at 40, and not what other people think should interest a woman my age.

And! I am conducting a little experiment for myself using a visualization technique combined with 4/4/6 breathwork. I’ll post about the results in about a week. I am fascinated by the power of our minds, so I am putting it to the test. I’ve nothing to lose, nobody will be harmed, and the fascination alone has generated a different level of energy in my body. So cool!

None of it arrived as a thunderbolt. All of it started as a whisper I finally had the quiet to hear.

What I know now that I didn’t know then

I used to believe contentment was the reward for a life well lived — the place you finally got to rest once everything else was handled.

I no longer believe that.

My brother-in-law found a kind of contentment too, in that recliner, in that routine. His mistake was not that he stopped working. It was that he mistook the doorway for the destination and never walked through it.

If contentment is enough for you, wonderful. This is not a summons to trade a peaceful retirement for another exhausting program of achievement. I am not handing women a fresh list of obligations and calling it liberation. We have had quite enough of that nonsense.

But if something inside you still whispers, Is that all there is? — do not bury the question beneath errands, lunches, grandchildren, travel plans, or another television program.

You do not need more things to do.

You need enough quiet to hear what’s still asking to be lived.

Listen.

Your future may be trying to get your attention.

The key takeouts

To recap, if you feel that tug in your spirit for something more, this is what I learned to do and what I urge you to try:

1. Notice what repeatedly catches your attention.

2. Remember what you once loved.

3. Give one curiosity some room.

4. Protect time that belongs to you.

5. Ask who you are curious to become.

You do not need more things to do.

You may need enough quiet to hear yourself and enough curiosity to follow what you hear.

Listen.

Your future may be trying to get your attention.

If You Feel the Tug, Follow It

If something inside you has been whispering that contentment is not the end of your story, I created a guide to help you listen.

REFOUNDATION: Rebuilding a Life That Can Hold You Now is a 21-page guided exploration of what still lights you up, what you left behind, and who you may still become.

You can purchase the guide for $17 on Gumroad, or become a paid member and receive it at no additional cost along with full access to The Daily RE-Wire. Bonus: Paid Subscriptions are currently 20% discounted

20% discount paid subscription

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.

I Didn’t Realize I Was Mourning Her

The other day I saw a group of people floating down the river in inner tubes.

Three years ago, I would have smiled and thought: that looks like fun.

This time I smiled for a different reason.

I realized I had absolutely no interest in going.

Not because I couldn’t. Because I didn’t want to.

For a moment, I wondered what was wrong with me. Then it hit me.

I wasn’t mourning my physical ability to float down a river.

I was mourning the woman who would have wanted to.

That’s a very different kind of grief.

Nobody prepares us for this part. We’re warned about losing our careers, our routines, our income. Nobody tells us that our interests might quietly evolve. That one day you’ll look at something you used to love and simply feel — nothing. Not resentment. Not sadness. Just the quiet realization that you’ve become someone else.

I suspect I’m not the only woman who has stood in that moment and wondered what was wrong with her.

Nothing is wrong. The self simply moved on before we noticed.

Let me tell you what I’ve lost interest in. Not because I want to catalogue my losses, but because I think you might recognize yourself in this list — and if you do, I want you to know you are not alone and you are not broken.

I’ve lost interest in the rules I was raised with. The ones about folding towels a particular way and tucking them neatly into a linen closet behind a closed door. I still fold towels. But the elaborate ceremony of it? Gone. Who decided that mattered? I have no idea. But I followed that rule for sixty-something years without once questioning it.

I’ve lost interest in lunch with the girls. People still invite me and I find a way to say I’m not available. I think they’re finally getting the message. One woman declared publicly on Facebook that I’m antisocial. I don’t think I’m antisocial. I think I’ve become very intentional about where my energy goes. And I don’t want to leak it into conversations that leave me feeling emptier than before I sat down.

I’ve lost interest in keeping up with anyone. I couldn’t care less what anyone else is doing or what they have or what their life looks like compared to mine. That measuring stick I used to carry everywhere? I set it down somewhere and I haven’t gone back for it.

I’ve lost interest in the Civil War battlefields that used to fascinate me. I live in Central Virginia, surrounded by history. Appomattox Courthouse is just a few miles away. Three years ago I would have driven there on a Sunday afternoon and walked the grounds and felt something. Now I drive past the signs and feel nothing. Just a quiet acknowledgment that she used to love that. She’s not here anymore.

And then there’s the one that took me longest to admit.

I’ve lost interest in finding a man.

Not because I gave up or because something happened. Because somewhere in the last few years I simply stopped wanting it. And that realization arrived with its own particular grief — because it quietly sealed something. It closed a door I had been leaving open without quite knowing I was doing it.

The irony is that once I sat with that grief honestly, I realized: I don’t even want to go play anymore. The things I would have done with a partner — the road trips, the museum afternoons, the walks through historic parks — I don’t want those things either. It wasn’t about the man. It was about a whole way of moving through the world that I’ve quietly outgrown.

She used to organize people and pull them together for experiences. She used to be a social butterfly who showed up and made things happen.

I miss her a little. I won’t pretend I don’t.

But here’s what I’ve noticed in the space where all of that used to live.

I’ve become a student of myself.

Not in the way the wellness industry means it — not journaling prompts and gratitude lists and morning routines. I mean something quieter and more honest than that. I pay close attention to what I’m thinking and feeling, almost minute by minute. I notice when something drains me and when something feeds me. I’ve become genuinely curious about my own interior life in a way I never had time to be when I was busy living everyone else’s.

That practice of observing is actually what allowed me to notice this grief in the first place. You can’t mourn something you haven’t noticed losing.

And in the space where the river floats and the lunch dates and the battlefield tours used to be, some other things quietly arrived.

A bathtub. I know that sounds small. But I was without one for five years — shower only — and when I finally had one installed it changed something. Not just physically. The hot soak in the evening has become one of the anchors of my day. Something that is entirely, unambiguously mine. No agenda. No performance. Just warmth and quiet and the particular luxury of taking up space without justifying it.

Intentional relationships. I stopped collecting people and started choosing them. The relationships that give me genuine energy now are with people who live in my building or next door or operate a business nearby. Close. Real. Mutual. Not transactional. Not performative. Just a genuine love and appreciation that goes both directions.

And something unexpected — I stopped resisting help.

I am fiercely independent. Always have been. But recently, when a young man offered to help me load groceries into my cart, I let him. And instead of feeling diminished by it, I felt something I didn’t expect.

Grace.

A small, quiet moment of grace. The kind that only arrives when you stop fighting everything.

But here’s what I’ve discovered underneath the grief, and I want to say this carefully because I think it matters.

While I was mourning the woman who used to float rivers and organize gatherings and drive to Civil War battlefields on Sunday afternoons, I started noticing something else.

There were older dreams. Quieter ones. Dreams that never got their chance because life arrived first — the marriage, the children, the career, the obligations, the decades of being useful and available and responsible.

Those dreams didn’t disappear. They went underground. They waited.

And now, in the space where all the old activities used to live, they’re surfacing.

Not in their original form necessarily. A dream rarely returns wearing the same dress it wore when you first had it. But the essence of it — the feeling underneath the specific ambition — that’s still entirely intact.

Maybe you dreamed of being an artist. You don’t have to move to Paris and starve beautifully. But you could pick up a brush. You could find out what it feels like to make something with your hands that didn’t exist before you touched it.

Maybe you dreamed of writing. Not necessarily a novel. But the dream underneath the dream — to hear yourself think, to put your truth into words, to be witnessed — that’s available right now.

Maybe you always wanted to understand something deeply. History. Music. The night sky. The way plants grow. The dream wasn’t the subject. The dream was the aliveness of genuine curiosity, fully followed.

I think this is one of the most extraordinary and underacknowledged gifts of this season of life. For the first time, possibly ever, we have the freedom and the space to go back and retrieve what we left behind. Not to recreate the past. To bring the essence of it forward into who we are right now.

The woman I am today couldn’t have received those dreams when she was thirty-five. She was too busy. Too obligated. Too hemmed in by what was expected of her.

But this woman — the one who soaks in a hot bath and folds towels however she wants and doesn’t go to lunch if she doesn’t want to — she has room.

She has time.

She has the particular wisdom of someone who has already survived everything that tried to stop her.

And maybe that’s the real invitation underneath the grief.

Not just to mourn the woman who floated rivers.

But to ask: what did she never get to do? What dream did she set down so long ago she forgot it was hers?

Because it’s still there.

And she finally has time to go find it.

Maybe that’s what this season is actually teaching us.

Not how to stay the same.

Not how to reclaim the old life.

How to grieve the woman we were with honesty and tenderness — and then turn around and meet the woman we’re becoming with genuine curiosity.

She’s different from who you expected.

She folds towels however she wants.

She doesn’t go to lunch if she doesn’t want to go.

She lets people help her sometimes.

She soaks in a hot bath on a Tuesday afternoon and calls it enough.

She is not less than the woman who floated rivers and organized gatherings and left no battlefield unvisited.

She is not a diminished version.

She is what happens when a woman finally stops performing her life and starts actually living it.

Honor the one who came before.

She brought you this far.

And then turn around.

Because the one taking her place?

She’s just getting started.

If this piece resonated with you — if you recognized yourself in the changing interests, the quiet grief, or the dream that never got its chance — this is exactly the kind of conversation we continue every Tuesday inside The Daily RE-Wire.

The Breakthrough Circle is where women bring exactly this. The losses they haven’t named. The dreams they haven’t dared to retrieve. The new version of themselves they’re just beginning to meet.

When you become a paid member I’ll send you a personal copy of Building Trust With Yourself — the booklet I wrote from my own experience about how to become a genuine student of your own life. How to notice what’s true. How to follow what calls to you. How to trust the woman you’re becoming as much as you trusted the one you used to be.

Send your email to monica@monirosesoul.com or DM me here on Substack and I’ll send it back to you personally.

One more thing — the 20% discount on annual membership ends August 31. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the moment.

Not because of the discount.

Because she’s been waiting long enough.

Become a paid member

Share The Daily RE-Wire

“What on earth am I going to do with my days?”

This question is plastered across all social media platforms right now. Oddly, retirement is the one stage of life many find elusive because there is absolutely zero preparation for it. We get handbooks for careers, marriage, and parenting. But for this? You just get handed a gold watch or a cake, and the door slams shut behind you.

Let’s be honest about why that question causes so much chest-tightening panic. When you’ve spent sixty years being the woman everyone counts on, a blank calendar doesn’t look like freedom. It looks like a trap. It feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, terrified that if you aren’t actively accomplishing something, you might just disappear entirely.

So when I say “relax,” I know your nervous system wants to fight me.

We act like retirement is a pop quiz and some stern administrator is standing nearby with a red Sharpie, ready to fail us if we don’t have a color-coded Excel spreadsheet of our golden years by sundown. Newsflash: You do not need to discover your grand new life purpose by Thursday.

Can we stop trying to monetize, optimize, and weaponize our peace?

You don’t need a massive master plan. Some days, just doing what genuinely excites you—even if it’s just taking a long shower and listening to the birds—is more than enough. You only need to get reacquainted with your own curiosity. You need to find the part of you that hasn’t had breathing room since 1995.

Check Your Baggage at the Door

• Drop the Red Pen: Stop grading yourself on how “productive” your retirement is.

• Resist the Urge to Overachieve: Lord knows women can turn a passing whim into a soul-crushing obligation before breakfast.

• Cancel the Five-Year Plan: Just because you can organize a neighborhood volunteering cartel doesn’t mean you have to.

What to Do Instead

Ask yourself what actually catches your eye when no one is looking. What did you love before “practicality” took over your entire personality? What have you secretly wondered about, only to dismiss it because it wasn’t “useful”?

Follow one small flicker. Spend twenty minutes on something that interests you for absolutely zero defensible reason.

• No side hustles.

• No certificates of completion.

• No guilt.

Just notice what makes you lean forward. You aren’t frantically searching for a new life. You’re just finally giving the woman inside you enough quiet to get a word in edgewise.

What’s one delightfully useless thing you’ve been dying to spend twenty minutes on today?

Not from work.

From the constant internal measuring. From the voice that asked: shouldn’t you be more social, shouldn’t you go out more, shouldn’t you be doing retirement the way other people do it?

I stopped asking what I should want and started asking what I actually wanted.

That sounds simple. It was enormous.

I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it. Not the concept. The actual thing I did, one small morning at a time, that finally made it real.

But first — where the voices came from.

Before I tell you where my voices came from, I want to ask you something.

Close your eyes for just a moment and ask yourself: whose voice do I hear when I’m about to do something that feels like too much? Too bold? Too different? Too much for a woman my age?

Name it. Even if it’s just one name.

Because what I’m about to tell you is my version of that list. Yours will be different. But I suspect the weight of it will feel familiar.

The first voice was my mother’s. Then my sisters — Ruthie and Melba Jean. Then, when I became a preacher’s wife, a whole congregation of well-meaning church ladies who had very clear ideas about what a woman in my position should want, should do, should be, should say, should wear, should feel, and should certainly never admit out loud.

I am not angry at any of them. They were doing what women do — passing down the measuring stick they themselves had been handed.

But somewhere in the process of absorbing all of those voices, my own got very quiet.

Not gone. Just quiet.

And I stopped knowing how to listen to it.

For most of my adult life — and I mean most, as in decades — I navigated almost entirely by other people’s compasses. Mom’s voice. Ruthie and Melba Jean’s voice. The church ladies’ voices. Later, other voices I collected along the way, each one adding another layer of should and shouldn’t and who do you think you are.

I did not experience this as oppression. I experienced it as normal.

That is the particular insidiousness of inherited obligation. It doesn’t feel like a cage. It feels like the air.

Then, about two years ago, something began shifting. I started noticing the measuring. Started hearing the tick of the internal scorecard. Started catching myself asking what should I want — and something in me, quietly, finally, said:

Wait. Whose question is that?

The first time I genuinely chose what I actually wanted over what the voices said I should want, it didn’t feel like liberation.

It felt disorienting.

Mildly so, at first. A tenuous resistance. A reluctance I couldn’t quite name. Like reaching for something in a dark room and not being sure your hand will find anything solid.

I didn’t know how to trust myself.

And you cannot retire from obligation until you have somewhere else to stand.

Can you feel that? That particular vertigo of reaching for your own opinion and not being sure it’s there?

If you’ve spent decades navigating by other people’s compasses, your own may feel faint at first. Not broken. Just unpracticed. Just waiting for someone to finally ask it a question and mean it.

So I built somewhere else to stand. One small kernel at a time.

I started keeping notes. Not a journal exactly. More like a running record of small choices and decisions I had made — just me, consulting only myself — that turned out well. A conversation I had handled with more grace than I expected. A decision I made about my work that paid off. A morning I spent exactly the way I wanted to and felt better for it. Small things. Quiet things. Things nobody else would have thought to write down.

I read them back to myself every day.

I was building a case. Not to present to anyone else. To present to myself. Evidence that my own perception was reliable. That my own knowing was worth something. That the woman underneath all those inherited voices actually had good instincts — had always had good instincts — and could be trusted to lead.

Slowly, the case got stronger.

The trust got stronger.

And one day I realized I had stopped consulting the committee entirely. Not in a dramatic moment. Just — the habit had quietly changed

.

I was living, as I came to think of it, out loud.

Retiring from obligation is not the same as becoming selfish. I want to say that clearly.

I still care about the people I love. I still show up. I still give. I still consider how my choices affect others.

But I consult myself first now. I ask what I actually want before I ask what I should want. I run decisions through my own knowing before I run them through anyone else’s.

That sequence matters. It changes everything.

Because when you know what you actually want, what you choose to give becomes a gift. When you don’t know what you want, what you give becomes a drain. One comes from fullness. The other comes from a ledger you can never balance.

Retiring from obligation doesn’t empty you.

It fills you back up.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you have your own Ruthie and Melba Jean, your own congregation of well-meaning voices that moved in and never quite moved out — I want to ask you something.

When was the last time you consulted yourself first?

Not last. First.

Because the voice that went quiet under all those years of should and shouldn’t is still there.

It just needs a little evidence that it’s worth listening to.

Start keeping notes. Small ones. The decisions that turned out well. The mornings that felt right. The moments you trusted yourself and it worked.

Read them back to yourself.

Build the case.

One kernel at a time.

Before you go, I want to tell you about something I put together specifically for this moment in the conversation.

It’s a small booklet called Building Trust With Yourself.

Not a course. Not a program. Not a ten-step system with a workbook and a Facebook group. Just an honest, practical guide built from everything I learned — one kernel at a time — about how to stop outsourcing your decisions and start trusting the woman who has been right there all along.

It’s my gift to every woman who becomes a paid member of The Daily RE-WIRE.

Grab your download of Building Trust with Yourself by going to the Perks Page, that presents all the free goodies for paid subscribers.

Because the shift we talked about today — retiring from obligation, building the case for yourself, learning to consult yourself first — none of it is possible without one foundation underneath everything else.

Trust.

That’s where it begins.

Become a paid member at 20% off

paid member at 20% off

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.

A woman said something to me recently that I hear from retired women all the time.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She didn’t want to travel. She didn’t want another job. She wasn’t interested in filling her calendar just for the sake of being busy.

She simply did not know what came next.

And I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since.

Because what if “I don’t know what to do” does not mean there is nothing left for you?

That is a very different problem.

For most of our lives, we knew what mattered because somebody else kept handing us the list. Go to work. Raise the children. Pay the bills. Meet the deadline. Take care of the house. Help everybody else. Be useful. Be responsible.

Then retirement arrives and removes a lot of those instructions.

Suddenly there is all this space.

And instead of feeling free, a lot of women feel lost.We start asking, “What am I supposed to do now?”

That sounds like a reasonable question.

I’m beginning to think it may be the wrong one.

A few weeks ago, I asked the women in my Breakthrough group to try a simple experiment.

Look for red cars.

That was it.

Nobody had to manifest one into the driveway. Nobody needed a candle, a vision board, or a private hotline to the universe.

Just picture a red car for a little while.

Then notice

.

And, of course, the red cars started showing up everywhere. At stoplights. In parking lots. On side streets. Outside stores.The cars had not suddenly appeared.

They had been there all along.

What changed was the instruction.

Look for red cars.

One woman in the group told me something I loved.

She said the experiment showed her that she could influence what her mind noticed.

Exactly.

That is the part I care about.

You can tell yourself what matters to YOU.

And once you do, you begin to notice more of it.

Then I came across another experiment that made the red-car exercise even more interesting.

In what is usually called the door study, a researcher stopped someone on the street and asked for directions. While they were talking, two people carrying a large door walked between them. For only a moment, the person giving directions could not see the researcher.

During that tiny interruption, the researcher was replaced by somebody else.

Different person,different clothes, different appearance and different voice.

The person giving directions did not notice.

Think about that.An entire human being changed right in front of them and they missed it.

Psychologists call that change blindness.

I call it one hell of a reminder that we do not notice nearly as much as we think we do.

Now put those two experiments together.

The red-car experiment says you can tell yourself what to notice.

The door study says you can completely miss something important when you are not looking for it.

And suddenly the question is not just interesting.

It becomes personal.

What might already be happening in your life that you are not noticing?

What if you are not stuck?

That little flicker of curiosity.

That sudden urge to return to discover what used to matter to you.

The book you keep thinking about.

The thought that maybe you would like your mornings to feel different.

The strange relief you felt when you said no.

The idea that keeps coming back.

The thing you want to try but keep dismissing because it seems silly.

What if those are not random little thoughts?

What if they are clues?

We are very good at looking for evidence that confirms what we already believe.

Tired today? See. I’m getting old.Nobody called?See. Nobody needs me anymore. Nothing planned for Tuesday?See. Retirement is boring.Tried something and it didn’t work? See. Too late.

We can build an entire case against our own lives without realizing we are doing it.

We are excellent lawyers for a case we never agreed to argue, usually while standing in the kitchen in yesterday’s clothes eating cereal out of the box like a raccoon who pays property taxes.

But if your mind can look for proof that life is shrinking, it can also look for something else.

That is the part I want women to understand. You have more influence here than you may think.

You may not know what you want to do with the rest of your life yet.

Fine.

You do not have to know. Start with something easier.

How do you want your life to feel?

That question is much more useful.

Do you want to feel peaceful, interested, creative? Do you want to feel useful without being used?

Do you want to feel free and alive?

Do you want to wake up curious about the day instead of wondering how you are supposed to fill it?

Start there.

Then give yourself an instruction.

Show me where I already feel that.

Show me what makes me feel more alive.

Show me what gives me peace.

Show me what makes me curious.

Show me what feels like mine.

Then notice.

That is it.

You are not asking yourself to solve the rest of your life by Friday.

You are teaching yourself what to look for.

And once you begin noticing what gives you energy, what interests you, what makes you feel more like yourself, you have something you did not have before.

A direction,not a map or a five-year plan.

A direction.

And sometimes that is enough to get a woman who feels like she has been walking through mud to take the next step.

I’ve been doing some of this myself without realizing it.

There is a photograph of me that I look at often.

I love the woman in that picture.

She looks peaceful. Confident. Settled. This women doesn’t stop to ask permission. And yes, I would very much like to look like her. That’s besides the point. I am starting to think the more important thing is how I feel when I look at her.

I feel calmer, happier. Something in me recognizes her.

So every time I look at that photograph, I am telling myself something very simple.

This matters to me! Look for this.

And then I start noticing the moments when I already feel more like her.

When I choose painting over obligation or stop rushing.

When I wake up after six straight hours of sleep and think, well damn, maybe something really is changing.

Those moments matter because I have decided they matter.

And that is what I want for the woman who says, “I don’t know what to do.”

I do not want to hand her another list of things retired women are supposed to do.

That is how we got into this mess.

I want her to understand that she can begin somewhere much more personal.

She can choose how she wants her life to feel.Then she can start looking for the places where that feeling already exists.And from there, she can follow the clues.

Because there may already be a wonderful life on the other side of the door.

Not some fantasy life or somebody else’s retirement.

Yours.

But if you keep asking, “What am I supposed to do?” you may keep getting answers built from the old life.

Try a different question.

How do I want to feel now?

Then tell yourself what to look for.

That is not nothing.

That is power.

You do not need to know exactly where you are going before you begin.

You only need to teach yourself what to notice.

And once you do, you might be surprised by how much of your next life has been standing right in front of you all along.

If this piece stirred something in you, and you’re tired of trying to figure out this part of life alone, come sit at the table with us.

Paid subscribers get 20% off their subscription and a seat at every Breakthrough Zoom, Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. Eastern, where we have the conversations that don’t fit neatly into an article. We pull these questions apart together, talk about what is actually happening in our lives, and figure out what we want to notice next.

You don’t need to have retirement figured out before you join us.

That’s rather the point.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DISCOUNT

I don't want to do this alone

We are sold a massive, glossy load of garbage about life after sixty. The marketing brochures practically promise that the second you clear out the careers and the decades of caretaking, a ready-made, vibrant world will magically open its arms to us. They tell you that you will spend your days painting, laughing, and sitting outside glowing cafes at night like some romantic character in a Van Gogh canvas, trading brilliant, soul-stirring ideas with a new squad of artistic kindred spirits.

That is the pitch. And honestly? I bought it hook, line, and sinker when I moved to Lynchburg. I let them take me on tours of everything “artsy” in this town, and my imagination did the rest. I unpacked my bags, sat back, and waited for the creative awakening to start.

Spoiler alert: It never did.

Today, I am completely, utterly disconnected from the local art community. I have absolutely nothing to do with any of it. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed delights in serving up an alternate reality of Virginia summer perfection—picture-perfect country dinner parties and smiling faces posing at the hot new downtown spots. My entire participation in that elite world consists of exactly one breakfast invitation from a friend of a friend who ran an Airbnb. She happened to make a killer breakfast, so we went. That is my grand social calendar. That’s it.

For a long time, that silence stung. Let’s face it—when retirement doesn’t match the marketing, it feels like a personal rejection. You look at your empty calendar and think, Am I invisible now? Is this where they put me out to pasture?

For sixty years, our worth was tied to high-alert urgency and people constantly needing us. When that noise stops and the phone doesn’t ring, we panic. We look through the digital window at everyone else’s perfect life and turn ordinary loneliness into a full-blown emergency. We try to force our way into scenes that don’t even fit us, just to prove we still exist.

But realizing the retirement fantasy is a lie is the best thing that could ever happen to you.

The absolute most important part of my entire journey didn’t come from joining a club. It came from the discovery of who I really am because I didn’t have a full calendar. When the world stopped calling, I suddenly had plenty of time to sit with myself. I had to learn about myself all over again. I had to look my own life square in the eye.

Let me tell you something: self-examination at this stage of the game is a profoundly worthy activity. It is the absolute best use of your damn time. Why? Because when you finally sit still, you start digging up the pieces of yourself that you left behind decades ago—the wild, creative, untamed parts of you that you actually loved before duty took over. And once you find them, you get to drag them right into your retirement years with you.

So where did that quiet room and that brutal self-examination lead me? Right here.

While the local scene was busy taking photos of their dinner parties, I was busy building my own world. Today, I run a thriving Substack that reaches over 7,000 bold, incredible women who are completely rewriting what this stage of life looks like. My art business isn’t just surviving; it is absolutely thriving on my own terms. I currently have three major art commissions sitting in the wings, waiting for me to step up to the easel and get to work.

I didn’t need their glowing cafe or their country invitations to be seen. I built my own table, and turns out, the view from here is spectacular.

If you are sick of scrolling past the glossy, fake versions of retirement and you are ready to start the radical, messy work of figuring out who you actually are—welcome home. We don’t do boring here. We don’t do invisible.

Join a community of over 7,000 bold, sassy, and unapologetic women over 60 who are actively rewriting the rules of this stage of life. When you upgrade to a paid membership today, you get instant access to the raw truth, the unfiltered community chats, and the actual tools I use to build my own world on my own terms.

The mailbox might be empty, but the real party is happening right here, plus paid subscriptions are offered at 20% off!

20% off Paid Subscription

No More Terrorizing Myself Into Getting There

Three weeks ago, I received a standard $175 deposit for a new painting. But the real story is my total lack of a reaction. The old version of me would have immediately spun out into a manic frenzy to prove I was on the ball. This time, I just sat there. For women who have been running on high-alert caretaking mode for sixty years, realizing you don’t have to rush anymore isn’t just a relief—it is a radical rebellion.

The money sat right there for three weeks. Not too long ago, urgency would have had me moving swiftly to get those funds into my checking account because there is always a need. Many of you may not know this, but a few years ago, I had to move with panicked urgency just to make ends meet. Yes, I am on Social Security, and heck, we all know that doesn’t even pay the rent. Yet here I am, experiencing a shift so crystal clear I cannot deny it—and it’s exactly the transformation I want you to claim for yourself.

PayPal needed updated banking information before the transfer could happen—a new card, entered information, a connected account, money moved. None of that was difficult, it simply wasn’t convenient at the time. So it didn’t happen. The money was safe, the transfer would happen eventually, and three weeks later, when it was convenient, it did.

There was a time when that kind of patience wouldn’t have been possible. There was a time when that $175 mattered so desperately that everything would have been dropped, the card hunted down, the information entered, and the money moved immediately. But it wasn’t only financial need driving that urgency; urgency was how everything got done. Fear did the driving—self-inflicted pressure, constant reminders of what could go wrong, and imagined disasters if something wasn’t handled immediately. Ordinary responsibilities turned into emergencies, with anxiety standing in as the project manager. A lot got done that way. Actually, some of my best paintings were created inside the container of urgent, terrorized fear. It also meant getting terrorized just to get there.

These days, a new project is underway—a book bringing together fifteen articles, fifteen paintings, and Cartoon Rosie ( me ), who talks to the reader between each piece. There are quite a few moving parts. The articles need rereading, with every call to subscribe stripped out. Decisions are piling up: what stays, what gets trimmed, and what no longer belongs. Somewhere out there is a printer capable of the kind of book imagined here—beautiful paper and art reproductions that can be removed and framed. A limited first edition is on the table, as are pre-sales, deposits, printing costs, packaging, photography, and new photographs for some of the T-shirts.

Christmas has crossed my mind more than once. So has the possibility of pricing the book at $150, because this isn't meant to be simply a collection of essays. The goal is a beautiful art object—a high-quality coffee table book of real value. I want it to be the kind of treasure someone opens and immediately thinks, oh my God, I have to have this. Something beautiful that you’ll want to leave out, flip through, and eagerly share with your friends and family.

The old version of this project would already be an emergency by now—a schedule made, deadlines invented, twelve printers researched, and money worried over, with my mind fully convinced the whole idea would vanish without immediate action. It would be something thrilling, turned terrifying.

Not this time. This project matters, and that is reason enough to trust it will get done. That is not procrastination, laziness, or blind faith. It isn’t sitting around hoping the universe finds a printer and mails over a box of finished books. It is steadfastness—staying connected to what matters without attacking anything into motion.

There’s evidence now. Everything that has genuinely mattered has eventually gotten the attention it needed. The painting gets finished. The article gets written. The money gets transferred. The decision becomes clear. The next step presents itself, and gets taken. Not always immediately. But steadfastly. A kind of certainty exists now that wasn’t there before—not a certainty that everything unfolds exactly as first imagined, but a certainty that the right move will be clear when it’s time to make it.

For most of a lifetime, urgency masqueraded as responsibility. Pressure felt like caring. Anxiety felt like productivity. Frightening consequences into existence felt like the tax we had to pay for being women who could be counted on. How many of us have lived that exact way?

We return the phone call within the hour, because waiting a single day feels like negligence. The guilt shows up before the dishes are even dirty. We experience a total inability to sit down and rest until every last thing on the list has been crossed off—as though relaxing a second too soon might cause the whole house to collapse.

What would happen if fear stopped being the thing dragging you toward the life you want? Money still matters. Finishing what gets started still matters. This book will still get produced, and the finished copy will end up in these hands. But there is no longer a whip standing behind any of it. What matters gets done—walked toward steadily, not chased down in a panic. Whatever you’re trying to get to will still get there. Terrorizing yourself was never actually required.

You might be wondering how a woman who ran on high-alert panic for sixty years suddenly found this kind of stillness. It came down to a radical daily habit. Multiple times a day, I sit with myself for just one or two minutes and breathe. I inhale for four counts, hold for four, and let out a long, slow exhale for six counts through my diaphragm.

This simple practice manually reset my body and marvelously removed all the anxiety I ever had. In those tiny moments of quiet, my inner guide finally had a chance to speak. I learned how to actually listen to my spirit, and I developed a deep trust in my own intuition. And that is exactly why I built my new guidebook, Building Believable Trust With Yourself. ( Paid subscribers can download a copy from the PERKS page )

You Spent a Lifetime Being Needed. Now What?

For decades, somebody needed something from you.

Children. Parents. Husbands. Jobs. Families. Responsibilities. Expectations.

Then one day, much of it gets quiet.

And instead of feeling free, you may find yourself standing in the middle of your own life thinking:

What the hell do I want now?

That fog is real.

So is the strange discomfort of having freedom after spending most of your life answering to everybody else.

This is the work we do here.

Not becoming a better version of the woman you were.

Remembering the woman underneath all that responsibility.

If you are ready to stop asking for permission, hear your own voice again, and begin building a life that actually belongs to you, join us as a paid subscriber.

For this chapter of The Daily RE-Wire, I’m offering 20% off paid membership.

Your membership includes the guidebook Building Believable Trust With Yourself, behind-the-scenes access to the art book I’m creating, and our private community of women over 60 who are figuring out what comes next.

You are not done. You may simply be done living according to everybody else’s instructions.

Claim Your 20% Discount

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.

Share The Daily RE-Wire

Last spring, I pulled a box down from my closet.

It contained twenty years of journals. Leather-bound journals, spiral notebooks, fancy little gilt-edged journals I had bought myself because apparently my anguish deserved quality stationery.

For twenty years, I believed I was being a good spiritual student. I was processing, reflecting, looking for patterns, doing the inner work.

I opened one journal. Then another. Then another.

The dates changed. The circumstances changed. The names changed. My handwriting got shakier.

But underneath all those beautifully examined experiences was the same ache:

I wanted to be acknowledged, wanted to be wanted, wanted to be loved.

For twenty years, I had been writing to be heard by someone who wasn’t there.

That was the day I recognized that a practice can begin as liberation and quietly become a loop.

I wasn’t writing my way toward freedom anymore. I was circling the same emotional block in increasingly attractive notebooks.

So I stopped journaling.

I stopped trying to process every feeling, decode every experience, and drag every unanswered question under the bright interrogation lamp of my mind.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is stop performing your own growth.

That box of journals taught me something I am only now beginning to understand fully.

I have two distinctly different ways of using my mind.

One directs, the other receives.

And reclaiming our lives in retirement, after years of obligation, may depend upon knowing which one needs to be in charge.

Most women my age have spent decades exercising the directed mind.

Get the children ready, show up at the job, pay the bills, make the appointment, plan the meal, remember the birthdays, take care of the parents, solve the problem, meet the deadline, keep everybody and everything moving.

The directed mind is magnificent. It chooses an outcome, gathers its resources, and gets its ass in gear.

I used mine this week to host Breakthrough. Tuesday at seven was not a vague spiritual inclination. Women were expecting me. I prepared, showed up, opened the room, and led the conversation.

I also used it to build an MCP that can examine my Substack analytics.

I am seventy years old, and I spent much of this week staring at technical language that might as well have been written by Martians with advanced degrees. But I wanted actual information about my publication, not vague numbers scattered across several screens. I wanted a deeper understanding of my readers and what they actually need. This process showed me, in black and white, what matters most to you.

So I gave my mind a directive:

Figure this damn thing out.

And we did.

It moved smoothly. Hosting Breakthrough moved smoothly too. Directed does not necessarily mean difficult, forced, or unpleasant. It simply means I selected the direction and deliberately moved toward it.And honestly, it felt a little bland.

But that is not the only way my mind works.

When I began working on an art commission, I did not approach the canvas with a list of instructions and threaten it into becoming a painting.

I began, I looked, I listened.

A painting has its own intelligence. One color changes what the color beside it needs to become. A shape feels wrong before I can explain why it is wrong. Something in me responds to what is appearing.

That is my receptive mind.

It does not issue orders — it notices.

Then I experienced the marriage of the two distinct mindsets: I used both minds when I decided to walk 500 steps.

The directed mind got me out of the chair and started my feet moving. Then I turned on my favorite music from the seventies. Somewhere around the dining room, my respectable little exercise program was hijacked by a dance party.

I did not plan to dance. I felt the impulse and followed it.

One mind created the movement; the other recognized the joy that arrived inside it.

This week, my receptive mind has also been saying something much less entertaining:

Don’t go to the grocery store yet.

For five days, I have supposedly been going to the grocery store. For five days, something in me has said, nope, not yet.

I cannot give you a logical explanation. I am not starving. There is food in the house. Nothing terrible will happen if I wait.

So I am waiting.

Maybe that quiet no is protecting me from something. Maybe my body needs rest. Maybe the timing is simply wrong. Maybe there is no grand mystical explanation at all.

I don’t have to know.

For most of my life, “I don’t want to” was not considered sufficient information. There were responsibilities to meet and people depending on me. Like many women, I became very skilled at overriding myself.

We call that discipline.

Often, it is discipline. Sometimes it is also the slow practice of abandoning our own signals.

No philosophy gets permanent authority over my mind anymore. Not a coach deciding whether today’s resistance is fear or wisdom. Not a morning routine dictating what kind of energy I’m allowed to have. Not a productivity expert turning rest into a character flaw. Not a spiritual teacher turning uncertainty into a mystical message requiring interpretation. I fired all of them. Nobody outside of me gets to be the authority on what’s happening inside me — not anymore.

Then retirement arrives and many of the outside instructions disappear.

Nobody tells us where to be every morning. Nobody hands us the next assignment. Nobody grades our performance.

We finally have freedom, but freedom presents us with a problem:

How do we know when to give ourselves a push and when to leave ourselves the hell alone, whether we are resisting because we are afraid or hesitating because something is not right for us, whether this dream needs discipline or room to reveal itself, whether we are procrastinating or listening?

There is no universal answer. This is why reclaiming a dream requires more than positive thinking, a vision board, or a color-coded plan.

The directed mind can build a life. It can choose, focus, organize, and act. But left in charge of everything, it can turn retirement into another job. It can take a beautiful desire and squeeze it into goals, deadlines, measurements, and obligations until the dream starts looking suspiciously like unpaid employment.

The receptive mind can hear what still feels alive. It notices curiosity, energy, resistance, timing, desire, and the quiet no that makes no logical sense.

But reception without direction can become endless waiting. We can spend years hoping clarity will arrive before we take the first step.

We need both.

The receptive mind discovers what is calling us; the directed mind gives it somewhere to live.

Sometimes I hear the desire first and then create the structure. Sometimes I create the structure, begin moving, and discover the desire along the way.

I did not know I wanted to dance. I only knew I needed to walk.

The dance met me in motion.

I wonder if that is how some of our lost dreams return. Not as fully formed plans or dramatic revelations, but as something that meets us after we take one deliberate step.

A week ago, one of the women in my weekly Breakthrough group had an announcement. Her own joy compelled her to share the very real breakthrough she had experienced as the result of one simple mind exercise I had asked everyone to try.

I wrote about the exercise last week.

Focus on a red car. Any red car.

Describe it in detail. See the exact shade of red, the shape of the car, the seats, the dashboard. Feel yourself sitting behind the wheel and driving it. Then, as you go about your everyday life, notice how many red cars you see.

To her surprise, she began seeing red vehicles everywhere.

Of course, the red cars had always been there. The exercise did not cause them to materialize in traffic. What changed was her awareness.

She had deliberately directed her mind toward something, and her mind responded by raising her awareness so she could see what had previously gone unnoticed.

But seeing red cars was the smallest part of her breakthrough.

She now had evidence that she could direct her own mind with intention. If she could train it to notice red cars, she could also train it to stop searching constantly for danger.

That realization allowed her shoulders to drop. She no longer needed to live in the perpetual fight-or-flight anxiety that had followed her through so much of her life. She knew she could choose what she wanted her mind to look for.

And subtly, almost without fanfare, that old practiced way of moving through life began to slide away.

She took one deliberate step.

That was all it took to discover that she possessed more authority over her inner life than she had ever realized.

And that authority matters enormously at this stage of life.

For decades, many of us directed our minds toward whatever required our attention. We looked for the next problem, the next responsibility, the next person who needed us. Our minds became remarkably good at finding exactly what we had trained them to find.

Then we retire, supposedly ready for unlimited freedom.

Except we don’t know how to live without the invisible instructions that have acted as the silent partner in our lives.

For decades, those instructions told us where to be, what needed our attention, who needed us, and what had to happen next. Then one day, they go quiet.

We finally have the freedom to decide what we want our minds to notice now, but freedom is not much use if we continue obeying instructions that no longer exist. We can keep scanning for danger, decline, and everything we might lose, or we can deliberately turn our attention toward curiosity, possibility, pleasure, and the parts of ourselves that have been waiting to be seen.

But reclaiming that authority does not mean replacing one relentless set of instructions with another. It also means learning when to stop directing, become quiet, and listen for what wants to emerge.

Retirement did not merely release me from a job. It released me from living entirely by instruction.

I can choose to direct my life when direction is needed, and I can choose to respond when something inside me stirs.

Declaring ourselves lazy because we have chosen to enter the listening, receptive mode is no longer useful or necessary.

Once you realize you have the authority to choose which mindset the moment requires, you no longer need to beat yourself up for not doing anything. Instead, you can intentionally allow yourself to feel good about being still until you hear the next move.

That can be difficult to trust at first. I know.

We have been trained to believe that if we are not producing, planning, fixing, or accomplishing something, we are wasting time. But listening is not wasting time. Receptivity is not laziness. Sometimes appearing to do nothing is the most deliberate choice we can make.

At the end of this article, I will share a small resource you can use to begin developing this kind of trust in yourself.

I can follow an unexplained yes, honor an unexplained no, and change my mind when the mind I am using is no longer the one the moment requires.

The question is not whether you are disciplined enough to reclaim your dream.

The question may be whether you can recognize which part of you needs to lead next.

Do you need to choose a direction and move, or do you need to become quiet enough to hear the direction already rising within you?

Stop asking permission to find out. Pick one today and see what happens if you actually trust yourself enough to be wrong.

Your sovereignty begins with trusting yourself.

If this article stirred something in you, I created a guidebook to help you begin building the self-trust required to know when to direct your mind, when to listen, and when to stop declaring yourself lazy for honoring what you hear.

Become an annual member today and you’ll receive the guidebook at no additional cost, along with access to our weekly Breakthrough gathering and everything else included with your membership.

You’ll also receive 20% off for as long as you remain a member. Not merely for the first twelve months. If you choose to renew next year, your discount renews with you.

This is not another set of instructions for fixing yourself.

It is support for reclaiming your sovereignty and trusting the woman you already are.

20% off Membership

For paid members the rescource, Building Trust with Yourself is available on the PERKS list page.

PERKS

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.

Thirty days from today, I turn 71.

This idea hit me while I was standing at my easel with paint on my hands, so naturally I did the sensible thing and went live on Substack with almost no warning.

And somewhere in those few minutes, I felt myself come back to myself.

That may be what these next 30 days are really about.

Not proving anything about age. Not performing youth. Not pretending I’m fearless.

Just paying attention to what makes me feel fully alive, and following it when it appears.

Today, it was paint on my hands, a camera pointed at my face, and the decision not to overthink a damn thing.

Day 1.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Monica Hebert in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Sometimes the Dream Was a Feeling

My two-foot-long platinum blond ponytail swung back and forth as I asked my mother for dance lessons.

Her immediate response was no. She was busy making chicken gumbo, and anyone from a Cajun household knows that making a roux is serious business. Apparently, this was not the moment for a lengthy discussion about her young daughter’s desire to dance.

I decided to try Dad.

His answer was also no.

I was not particularly good at accepting defeat, so later that night, when we were all sitting around the dinner table and I knew the gumbo had put everyone in a reasonably good mood, I tried again. I begged the way children do when they can already see themselves inside the thing they want. I danced around the dining room, that long ponytail adorned with a very tight plastic headband,

( I pretended it was my crown) swooshing behind me as I spun in circles and acting like I knew what I was doing.

It didn’t work.

Meanwhile my cousin, who was a couple of years younger than I was, got ballet and tap lessons. Her mother enrolled her without much fuss.Me? I got piano lessons instead, mostly because a woman in our neighborhood taught piano close enough to our house that I could ride my bicycle there by myself.

It was convenient.

At the time, I didn’t have the language to understand what I felt about that. I don’t think anyone in my family was deliberately trying to tell me that what I wanted did not matter. I think they were simply making the choice that worked most easily for them. Still, something in me registered it. Something quietly closed, and I would not understand what had closed for another twenty-five or thirty years.

My desire to dance had begun with Shirley MacLaine. I would sit on the floor with a coloring book and watch her dance across the television screen, and every time she did, something in me lit up. She seemed so expressive and excited, so completely alive in her own body. There was an exuberance about her that made me smile.

I remember thinking, “I want to do that.”

For years, I thought the dream had been dancing.

Now I understand that it wasn’t.

I didn’t necessarily want to become a dancer. I wanted to feel the way she looked when she danced. I wanted that freedom, that energy, that sense of being fully inside a moment without worrying about whether anybody approved of what I was doing.

The dancing was simply the form exuberance took when it first introduced itself to me.

That realization has changed the way I think about dreams, especially the dreams we had when we were young. We tend to imagine that a dream has to be something concrete. We think we should be able to name the occupation, the destination, the accomplishment, the life we once wanted. We search our memories for some forgotten ambition and assume that if we cannot find one, there must not be anything there worth reclaiming.

I don’t believe that anymore.

More often than not, the dream was to experience a particular feeling.

Sometimes what called to us was not the thing itself but what we imagined the thing would allow us to experience. The child who dreamed of being onstage may have been drawn to expression. The girl who wanted to travel may have been longing for freedom. The one who wanted to live in some beautiful faraway place may have been reaching toward adventure or beauty or possibility. We may have been much less interested in the actual form than we realized.

That matters enormously now, because it means we do not have to drag an old plan out of the past and try to make it fit the women we are today.

I do not need to become Shirley MacLaine. I do not need to take dance lessons to prove that little girl finally got what she wanted.

I need to give my desire to feel exuberance somewhere to live, now.

These days, I feel it when I stand in front of a four-foot canvas and move a paintbrush with my whole body. I feel it when something I am writing makes me laugh out loud. I feel it when I go live and say exactly what I think, or when I post something outrageous enough to make a few people cheer and a few others clutch their pearls.

The form changed. The feeling did not.

That is why, when I talk about reclaiming dreams, I am not asking women to remember some perfectly preserved ambition from fifty or sixty years ago.

That memory may be surprisingly ordinary. It may be sitting on the floor with a coloring book while somebody dances across a television screen. It may be an afternoon spent outside, a place you once visited, a song you played over and over, a person you admired, a room you loved being in, or something you used to do before you began deciding whether it was practical.

The important question is not necessarily, “What did I want to become?”

The better question may be, “How did I want to feel?”

When we begin remembering from that perspective, the past becomes useful in a completely different way. We are no longer mourning the life we didn’t have. We are gathering information about what still belongs to us.

That is especially valuable in retirement, when so many of the structures that defined our lives have fallen away and being bombarded with fear of loss messages in all areas of life. We can suddenly find ourselves with more freedom and fewer instructions, which sounds wonderful until we realize that nobody ever taught us what to do with a life that no longer revolves around being useful to everyone else.

This is where memory can become something more than nostalgia. It can be useful to our present day.

We can revisit the moments that still make us smile and pay attention to what was happening inside us. We can stay with those memories long enough to notice what quality of life was present there, and then ask ourselves where that same quality might live now.

Not the old activity. Not the old version of ourselves. The feeling.

For me, it was exuberance.

I wanted to feel fully alive, expressive, delighted, free enough to take up some space and enjoy myself while doing it.

Apparently, that little girl knew something important long before I did.

I don’t need to recreate her dream.

I only need to listen to what the dream was trying to tell me.

And you don’t have to remember exactly what you dreamed of doing either.

Sometimes the dream was a feeling.

That may be all you need to remember.

The best part is that I have discovered I can sit quietly with the intention of recalling moments from my childhood and begin mining those memories for the feelings they still carry. I do not have to analyze them or figure out what they mean. I can simply remember what it felt like to be there and allow myself to enjoy that feeling again for a few minutes.

And that is useful now because a feeling recalled vividly enough can become present again. My soul certainly does not seem terribly interested in calendars, and memory has a wonderful way of collapsing time. When I deliberately return to a feeling of exuberance, freedom, delight, curiosity, or whatever happens to surface, I am reminding myself, Oh yes. This. I want more of this.

Then I begin noticing possibilities I might have walked straight past before. An idea occurs to me. Something catches my attention. I suddenly want to try something, go somewhere, paint something, change something, or simply follow a curiosity that would have gone unnoticed a week earlier.

And what is the value of that?

A woman who begins deliberately choosing the feelings she wants more of becomes a woman with greater clarity about what she wants. She becomes a woman with ideas. She becomes more familiar with herself again, and from that familiarity comes the willingness to explore whatever begins percolating to the surface.

That is where discovery begins.

Not with some enormous plan for the rest of your life.

Sometimes it begins by remembering how good it once felt to be you.

, if this stirred something in you, I’d love to invite you to come a little closer.

Breakthrough is where we gather every Tuesday night, a room full of women who are no longer willing to accept the usual script for retirement. We are questioning the assumptions, remembering what made us feel alive, and making room for lives that feel like our own again.

This is not about fixing yourself. It is about breaking through the old barriers that told us what women our age are supposed to want, how small we are supposed to become, or how quietly we are supposed to disappear.

Breakthrough is included with your paid membership. There is no extra cost, and you can come when you want, skip when you want, and return when you need it.

And right now, memberships are 20% off for as long as you remain a member. Not for twelve months. Not as a temporary teaser. Forever.

If you have been feeling that little pull toward something more, come join us. This is exactly the kind of room we are creating.

Become A Member

Before you go, take a minute to explore the Subscriber Perks. You’ll find to rescource guides, the first chapter of my book, and special pricing for NOT DONE YET t-shirts. I add to the perks ever so often, so be sure to check on it now then because these perks are there for you as a paid member.

PERKS

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.

BREAKTHROUGH

Breakthrough is a weekly gathering for women, primarily women over 60, who are ready to see retirement as something far bigger than an ending.

For many women, retirement arrives with a strange kind of fog. The old schedules disappear. The roles that once defined us begin to loosen. The children are grown. Careers change or end. Responsibilities shift. And suddenly there is this enormous question sitting in the middle of the room:

Now what?

Breakthrough is where we talk about that.

Each week, we gather to look at a different aspect of what it means to create a life after 60 that actually feels like yours. We talk about the beliefs we inherited about aging, the expectations we have absorbed about retirement, the dreams we tucked away, the identities we outgrew, the freedom we may not quite know what to do with yet, and the possibilities that begin to appear when we stop assuming this chapter is supposed to be smaller than the ones that came before it.

This is not a class where I stand at the front and tell you how to retire correctly. God forbid.

It is a conversation and there is a resrouce guide of the same name that is autmatically available to all paid members. It is one of the PERKS of becoming a paid subscriber/ member.

PERKS

Women come together and talk about what retirement looks like for them right now. What is changing. What they are discovering. What they are questioning. What they want more of. What they are finally willing to let go of. And what they may be ready to begin.

There is enormous value in hearing another woman say something you have quietly been thinking yourself. Sometimes one sentence from someone else opens a door you did not even realize was there. Sometimes you leave with a completely different way of looking at your own life. Sometimes you simply leave knowing you are not the only woman wondering what the hell comes next.

Breakthrough is included with every paid subscription to The Daily RE-Wire, whether you are a monthly or annual subscriber. There is no additional charge.

We meet every Tuesday at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.

Come in your pajamas. Come dressed to the nines. Come with your hair wet. Come with a cup of tea, a glass of wine, or absolutely nothing except yourself.

You are not committing to perfect attendance. This is not school. Some women come every week. Some disappear for a couple of weeks and wander back in when they feel like it. That is exactly how it should be.

The point is simply that Breakthrough is there.

A room you can count on.

A place to sit with other women who are asking bigger questions about this stage of life and who are actively shaping what comes next instead of simply accepting whatever version of aging has been handed to them.

Retirement can be the first time in decades when your life finally belongs almost entirely to you.

Breakthrough is about discovering what you want to do with that.

BREAKTHROUGH is offered to all paid subscribers. Join today, by clicking on this litle button:

Join Breakthrough

PS Emails are sent out every Tuesday for the zoom link and topic.

I have been known to say that I don’t like assumptions. I find them dangerous.

And lately I’ve been thinking about one of the biggest assumptions we make without even realizing we’re making it: what old age is supposed to look like.

I saw two photographs this morning that startled me.

One was of four women I know, all in their late seventies, some approaching eighty or already there, standing on a beach in bathing suits, laughing, sun on their faces, looking very much alive in their own lives.

The other was a photograph from a retirement community, welcoming new residents.

I don’t know the people in that second photograph. I don’t know their health, their circumstances, their choices, or whether they are perfectly happy to be there. This is not about judging them.

What caught me was the contrast between the two pictures.

And I started thinking about how much of what we expect from aging comes to us through osmosis.

We see the brochures and the commercials, and we hear the conversations about downsizing, assisted living, managing decline, preparing for the day when we can no longer do this or that. Somewhere along the way, without ever consciously choosing it, a picture of old age begins to form in our minds.

And then we start preparing for that picture.

That is the part that interests me.

What if prevention was not simply about avoiding disease later, but about protecting the quality of our lives now?

Moving our bodies now, staying curious now, keeping our strength now, continuing to make plans now, continuing to want things now, refusing to hand over pieces of our lives simply because a certain birthday has passed.

I believe deeply in prevention because prevention is not only about some future version of me. It makes my life better today.

I have also thought very seriously about how I want to live as I get older. I intend to remain exactly where I am for as long as life allows me to do so. That is not denial. It is a choice.

And maybe that is the larger question.

We are constantly told to prepare for old age.

But almost nobody asks us:

Which old age are you preparing for?

Maybe preparing for our later years should not begin with assuming decline.

Maybe it begins with refusing to let decline become the only future we can imagine.

This is a short missive of my thoughts on a Monday Morning. If exploring life as a retired person, considering thoughts and ideas that encourage, motive and create curiosity for you about your own life, consider becomeing a paid member. There are PERKS and extras send directly to your inbox. We are all doing thing retirment ageing thing - might as well do it together and with some pizazz!

Take advantage of my SUMMERTIME offer of 20% off all memberships

Become a Member of The Daily RE-Wire

Last night, I woke up several times because the air conditioning wasn’t working properly and my bedroom was too damn hot.

It had nothing to do with aging and everything to do with an air conditioner that apparently had other plans for the night.

But every time I rolled over, a question moved through my mind:

What do I have to gain?

The question had come to me earlier during meditation. There was a little crack in my thinking where there was no resistance, no argument, and no lifetime of conditioning standing guard.

Into that crack came a simple thought:

Think in terms of what you are gaining.

I swear to God, it changed everything.

We have been taught to think about aging almost entirely through the language of loss. We expect to lose our strength, our health, our beauty, our mobility, our memory, our independence, our relevance, and eventually our lives.

Even the supposedly encouraging messages about aging are usually instructions for slowing down the losses. Do this so you don’t lose your mobility. Eat this so you don’t lose your mind. Take this so you don’t lose your health. Hurry up and do that thing before you die.

The entire aging conversation is built around loss, prevention, and fear.

What if we stopped approaching every new year wondering what might be taken from us and began asking what we expect to gain?

The age itself is irrelevant. This question belongs to the woman who is 61, the woman who is 71, the woman who is 86, and the woman who woke up this morning still treating her life as though its most expansive years are behind her.

Age is not just a number. We have heard that old trope so many times it has become almost meaningless.

I have a new one:

Age is an attitude coupled with expectation.

And expectation is the gatekeeper.

Expectation stands at the entrance of our lives deciding what evidence will be allowed through. If we expect decline, then every stiff morning becomes proof. Every forgotten name becomes proof. Every tired afternoon becomes proof. We begin watching our bodies for evidence that all the terrible things we have been told about aging are finally happening to us.

We treat our bodies like crime scenes and spend our lives looking for evidence of what might be going wrong.

What happens when we expect to gain?

Now we begin looking for strength. We notice healing. We expect our bodies to respond to the care we give them. We look for greater vitality, pleasure, emotional health, creativity, confidence, freedom, and self-trust.

We stop treating our bodies as though they are slowly abandoning us.

I am not denying that bodies change. I am questioning the expectations we attach to those changes.

Our culture has taught us that youth is the season of gaining and old age is the season of losing. What the hell? Who crfeated this damn rule, I want to me them and kick the ever lasting blazes out of' ‘em!

When we are young, we gain knowledge, experience, relationships, skills, confidence, and opportunities. Then, at some mysterious and completely arbitrary age, the direction is supposed to reverse. From that point forward, we are expected to measure our lives by what remains.

I no longer accept that. and I have proof or as the youngins like to say I have receipts.

Like these: I know myself better than I ever have. I hear my soul more clearly. I recover more quickly from the opinions of other people. I recognize what belongs to me and what never did. I understand that I am allowed to change my mind, change direction, begin again, and want something new.

I did not possess those things when I was younger.

I gained them by aging.

My purpose for living is not to cheat death. I am not interested in spending my life frantically trying to accomplish everything “before I die.” I have no authority over the date of my death, and avoiding death is not my purpose for being alive.

My purpose is to expand, grow, know, learn, create, and enjoy.

None of those possibilities has an expiration date.

The ultimate dream is not to outrun death. It is to live a happy life, no matter our age.

But it is damned difficult to live happily when we are surrounded by people telling us what to watch for, what might go wrong, what may already be deteriorating, and what terrible fate we must begin preventing immediately.

Recently, I found myself in a conversation with my eldest daughter and her dad, both urging me to start planning a move into a retirement community.

I stood there incredulous.

Why in God’s name were they having this conversation with me? I am living independently, writing, painting, running my own business, and creating an entirely new chapter of my life. Yet somehow we had skipped over the life I am actually living and gone straight to planning for my presumed decline.

A few hours later, it hit me.

Part of what makes a retirement community attractive to adult children is the promise that somebody else will be responsible for Mom. Her future needs can be anticipated, contained, and made less inconvenient before they ever exist.

Well, that is not happening. The move to a retirement community, I mean. Thank you very much.

But I began to understand where the conversation came from. My daughter has been exposed to the same brochures, commercials, social media warnings, and cultural expectations that surround all of us. She has been taught what growing old supposedly looks like. From a place of love mixed with fear, she is trying to prevent that predicted future before it arrives.

There is just one problem.

It is not her future to predict.

And it is not her life to arrange around expectations I do not share.

If we do not claim sovereignty and agency over our own lives, we become vulnerable to every assertion society makes about what growing older is supposed to mean.

We also need to understand something that nobody seems eager to say out loud:

Each one of us is a revenue stream.

There is money to be made from convincing us that we are losing. There is money to be made from our fear of becoming unattractive, unhealthy, irrelevant, dependent, or invisible.

The more frightened we become about aging, the more willing we are to buy whatever promises to delay it, disguise it, prevent it, or rescue us from it.

The loss narrative creates a customer.

That is why I have begun asking a question every time another warning arrives to tell me what age may eventually take from me:

Who benefits from my believing this?

Who benefits when I stop trusting my body?

Who benefits when I expect illness, weakness, and decline?

Who benefits when I surrender my judgment and accept that someone outside of me knows more about the possibilities of my life than I do?

Fear is profitable. Discontent is profitable. A population disconnected from its own judgment is profitable.

A woman who expects to gain is much harder to frighten.

And a woman who cannot be frightened into surrendering her authority is much harder to sell a diminished life.

This does not require me to declare that science is bad. Science can give me information. It does not get sovereignty over my consciousness.

I decide what information I need. I decide when I need it. I decide whether allowing it into my mind will support the life I am living or fill that life with fear about something that has not happened.

Just recently, I saw a video about all the things we should watch for to prevent dementia.

I refused to watch it.

I do not want the concept of dementia prevention occupying my thought pattern. I am not willing to spend a perfectly good day looking for signs of a disease I do not have. I will not rehearse a catastrophe in my mind and call it responsible living.

I am no longer willing to sacrifice my peace today in an attempt to control every possible version of tomorrow.

For more than 30 years, I have refused to watch movies filled with killing, war, horrific car wrecks, and human suffering. I know what emotionally charged images do inside my mind. The mind remembers the horror. It may not recreate the actual event, but it can continue recreating the emotion.

My mind does not need more horror to process.

It does not need another warning to store.

It does not need to be trained to search my body and my life for approaching disaster.

Fear does not always arrive looking like fear. Sometimes it arrives as helpful advice. Sometimes it calls itself prevention. Sometimes it arrives wearing a lab coat and carrying a list of everything that could go wrong.

I am allowed to say no.

That is what sovereignty looks like in my life. It means I decide what gets through the gate.

For the past week, I have been conducting a quiet experiment. I printed my favorite photograph of myself, the one in which I am standing on the sidewalk holding my dog’s leash. I placed it where I see it directly, or catch it in my peripheral vision, 10 or 12 times a day.

Every time I see that woman, I smile.

I am not looking at her and longing to go backward. I do not want to become the age I was when that photograph was taken. I am reconnecting with how alive I felt in that body and bringing that vitality forward into the body I have now.

I am giving my mind an image of gain.

That photograph reminds me that vitality is not trapped in the past. Strength is not reserved for the young. Pleasure has not packed its bags and left. My body is not my enemy, and time is not a thief standing outside my door.

Something is still being added to me.

Something is still becoming available.

Something within me is still ripening that could not have ripened sooner.

This is the unraveling and rewiring we must do. We must recognize how thoroughly we have been conditioned to experience aging as subtraction. Then we must stop granting every warning, prediction, advertisement, and cultural assumption unrestricted access to our minds.

The new question is not, “What must I hurry up and do before I die?”

It is not, “What will I lose next?”

It is not even, “How much of my younger self can I preserve?”

The question is:

What do I expect to gain?

I decide what enters my mind.

I decide what I expect from my body.

I decide whether growing older will be narrated to me as loss or lived by me as gain.

I guard the gate.

If you are tired of being warned, corrected, managed, and told what growing older is supposed to look like, become a paid subscriber.

This is where we question the conditioning, reclaim authority over our own lives, and expect far more than the world has taught women our age to expect.

We are not here to manage our decline.

We are here to live.

Subscribe at 20% off forever

Before you go, take a minute to explore the Subscriber Perks. The first chapter, paired with my art and a favorite article, is already waiting for you, and I’ll be adding several more very soon. Plus additional rescources to use as you begin to choose the how , they why and the when of your own retirement years.

PERKS

A friend of mine called last week to tell me she and her husband had finally listed the house.

Four bedrooms, a yard he’d babied for thirty years, gone in a weekend to the first offer. They’re moving into a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony “just big enough for two chairs,” she said, and she sounded relieved in a way that surprised me. Lighter. Like she’d been carrying something heavy so long she’d forgotten it had weight.

“We’re done accumulating,” she told me. “We just want to watch things now instead of managing them.”

I understood exactly what she meant. After decades of tending a house, caring for a yard, storing belongings, and maintaining everything that had gathered around their lives, she was ready to be released from it. She did not sound sad. She sounded relieved.

But after we hung up, I kept thinking about that sentence.

We’re done accumulating.

At first, I thought that was where my friend and I parted ways, because I am not done accumulating at all. My apartment is filling with canvases, paint, unfinished ideas, and evidence of a life that still feels very much in motion. I do not want a smaller life. I want more room for the life I am finally allowing myself to live.

Then I realized I may have misunderstood what she was doing.

Perhaps she is not making her life smaller. Perhaps she is clearing away everything that belongs to a life she has already finished living. Once the rooms are emptied, the yard belongs to someone else, and the accumulated weight of decades has been removed, what can finally arrive?

That is the question, isn’t it?

What becomes possible when a woman is no longer spending her time preserving everything she once needed, once valued, or once believed she was supposed to keep? Who might she become when her surroundings no longer constantly remind her of every role she has played and every obligation she has carried?

Her freedom may come through emptying. Mine may come through filling my home with paint, work, beauty, and whatever new idea has just barged through the door. But perhaps we are doing the same thing. We are both making room for a life that could not fully arrive while the old one was still taking up all the space.

She is clearing hers by letting go.

I am clearing mine by refusing to deny myself any longer.

And both of us may be standing at the entrance to an entirely new life.

I am not done accumulating.

This may be one of the great surprises of growing older. We do not all want the same freedom.

Some women want fewer rooms, fewer obligations, fewer things asking to be managed. They want a small balcony, two comfortable chairs, and a life that can be locked behind one door.

I understand the appeal. Truly, I do.

But my version of freedom currently has paint on the floor.

I am accumulating canvases. Ideas. Half-written essays. Tubes of paint. New desires. New ways of seeing myself. I am accumulating evidence that my life is not finished expanding simply because the calendar says I am seventy.

I said that sounded wonderful, and I meant it. I also hung up the phone and sat there for a minute wondering what was wrong with me, because the thought of watching anything from a folding chair made my skin itch.

This was not really about which of us had more energy. It was about what we wanted our energy for.

She wanted to stop maintaining a life that no longer suited her. I wanted enough room to keep creating the life that does.

That’s when I noticed the pattern. Not just her — half the people I grew up with are doing some version of the same thing. Selling the house, shedding the belongings, settling in to observe the rest of it from a comfortable distance. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If a smaller life and a quieter view brings someone peace, that is exactly what they should be doing.

But over here, I’m doing the opposite, and it feels less like a choice than a compulsion. I’m learning platforms I don’t understand at an hour of the morning I used to reserve for coffee and silence. I write daily now, which is its own kind of stubbornness. And the painting hasn’t slowed down even slightly — if anything, it’s the one thing getting louder as everything else gets quieter.

I’ve been turning over what actually accounts for the difference, and the honest answer isn’t ambition. It’s my body.

I wake up most mornings and there’s energy in my limbs before I’ve even decided to use it. My mind is clear in a way I don’t take for granted, not after watching people I love lose that clarity years before their bodies gave out. That’s a gift with an expiration date nobody gets to see in advance, and I am not interested in spending it in a folding chair, however comfortable the balcony.

If you’ve ever felt out of step with the people around you at this age, I don’t think that’s a warning sign. I think it might be the surest evidence you’re actually living your own life instead of the one that was handed to you along with your birth year.

My friend’s balcony really does sound lovely. I hope she loves those two chairs.

Her new balcony will hold two chairs, and I sincerely hope she spends many peaceful mornings in one of them.

As for me, I need walls for paintings, tables for unfinished ideas, and enough space to leave something in progress overnight.

She is making room in her life by letting things go.

I am making room in mine for everything still trying to arrive,still making a mess of things on purpose.

A BRIEF STUDIO NOTE

I’ve started a new painting- a commission. I’ll be showing progress in notes on Substack. Have you scrolled the notes feed on Substgack, yet? Give it a go, there are some nifty writers posting notes that you may find clever, useful and profound.

Also If you’d like to discuss a commission for a Christmas or Holiday present

NOW is the time. Sooner the better, as it does take time for an oil painting to “ cure” before it can be shipped. Process takes about two months. I have opening for one or two small commissions.

PS - 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 BREAKTHROUHG. 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.

Become a paid member

A few years ago, I lost my real estate investment — the thing I had counted on to secure my retirement. Then COVID hit, and within months I was down to a small Social Security check and nothing else.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s what was in the account.

I felt trapped. But here’s the thing about having your back against the wall: for me, it’s actually a good place to be. That’s when the fighter shows up.

At the time, I’d been selling a few paintings a year and slowly growing a following. It seemed obvious to me that I should go all in on art. It seemed considerably less obvious to the people who loved me.

Fine. Game on.

So I took the courses. Did the workshops. Followed every business strategy anyone handed me.

It worked, for a while.

But somewhere in there, I realized I’d traded joy for dollars. Painting — the thing I loved most in the world — had quietly turned into a transaction. And that wasn’t enough. Not even close.

So I shifted. I started mentoring other artists — helping them navigate the art world, build confidence, believe in their own work. And in those conversations, I kept hearing the same three sentences, in different voices, over and over: my dream feels impossible, nobody believes in me, who am I to do this.

Eventually I saw the actual pattern. The dream was never the problem. The belief was.

Without belief, desire fades. Without desire, nothing ever happens.

And here’s what else I noticed: most of the people I was mentoring were women. Women who had spent decades putting themselves last, convinced their own dreams didn’t matter enough to defend.

That one landed hard. Because how dare we — as a society, as individuals, as fellow dreamers — let that happen to anyone’s deepest desire.

I believe dreams are the soul’s way of connecting us to something larger than ourselves. Call it purpose, call it God, call it source, call it spirit, call it whatever you please. The name doesn’t matter. The connection does.

For the better part of a year, I kept asking myself the same question: how do I help other women believe in their dreams, in themselves, and in the value of holding both at once?

Then it hit me: I love to write, especially short and pointed rather than long-winded. I love a good story. And I love proving, over and over, that it is never too late.

So I started what would eventually become The Daily RE-Wire.

If you’re reading this, you’re already part of it. You’re not too old, you’re not too late, and your dream still matters. We’re going to prove it, together.

There’s a painting I made called Come Play With Me. It hangs in the waiting room of a women’s hospital in Louisiana, a small offering to children waiting while their mother brings new life into the world

.

A tree. A swing. An invitation.

At first glance, it’s for the children — a moment of lightness while they wait. But I’ve come to think it was always for the rest of us too.

The tree stands strong and deeply rooted, the way your history and your experience are rooted in you. The swing is possibility — freedom, movement, the dream waiting for you to step onto it. And the sunset behind it all is the sunset of every doubt, every fear, every voice that ever told you you can’t.

Reclaiming a dream is serious business. That doesn’t mean it has to feel heavy, impossible, or like a struggle.

What if it felt like play instead — approached with curiosity instead of fear, wonder instead of hesitation, the same lighthearted trust you once had leaning back on a swing and letting the momentum carry you?

I don’t just write about reclaiming dreams. I’m inviting you to step into yours — with joy, with possibility, with a little bit of rebellion against the idea that it’s too late.

This is real work. It’s also play.

And like that swing in the painting, it’s just waiting for you to take the first step.

Come play with me.

Sometime ago I put together a little guide based upon my own lived experiences. Maybe it’s the next step for you at this stage in life.

Re-Claiming Dreams Roadmap is a series of prompts to help you navigate your move forward into the essence of the deams of your younger years to be lived in living color in these now strange years of retirment.

You are welcome to become a paid member which entitles you to a seat at our weekly gathering of ladies who’ve chosen to live in retirment with a new view on life.

Subscribe now

I know not everyone wants another monthly or annual subscription hanging around like a houseguest who won’t leave. Sometimes an article simply hits home, rattles something loose, or says exactly what you needed to hear. If that happens, you can buy me a coffee as a one-time way of saying, “That one got me.” I appreciate you, and I’m delighted that my peculiar arrangement of words found its way to you.

Buy Me A Coffee

December, 1973 - Two weeks before my wedding, I told my father I did not want to get married.

I was 18. The man I was supposed to marry was nine years older than I was and studying to become a preacher. My parents were thrilled about the marriage. Having a preacher in the family would elevate our standing in the social circles we occupied.

That was a lot of weight to place on an 18-year-old young lady.

I went to my father and told him plainly, “I really don’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this.”

My father flew the groom from seminary at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, to Lake Charles, Louisiana, so the three of us could sit down and settle the matter.

Once again, I said I did not want to get married.

My father slammed his hand on the coffee table, proclaiming “You will not embarrass this family.”

And that settled it.

I did not have the confidence or courage to stand up to him. I had tremendous respect for my father. There may have been fear mixed into that respect, but mostly I understood that good girls did what their fathers told them to do.

So I got married.

Later, I overheard my father explaining my resistance to other members of the family.

“She’s just too young,” he said. “She doesn’t know better.”

Let that sink in for a minute.

I was supposedly too young to know that I should not marry this man, but old enough to marry him anyway.

I had not been confused. I knew exactly what I wanted. More importantly, I knew what I did not want.

I said it clearly.

But my knowledge of my own life was given less authority than the rule that said a good daughter must not embarrass her family. That rule altered the course of my life.

After two failed attempts at asking for a divorce, the third attempt finally was accepted — only because I felt so hemmed in that I fled to NYC the moment the opportunity presented itself, and I grabbed it with all the gusto I could summon. I became a professional classical music producer, publicist, and manager.

And here is where my initiation into breaking rules began — though I feel certain the idea of questioning everything had always been within me, dormant until the actual breaking of the rules occurred. Through the process of writing/ composing music, recording the music and photo shoots for the CD cover, the very idea of breaking rules came alive. It did require a beautiful set of feet and a willing classical pianist. And of course the Steinway Piano.

In collaboration with a pianist named Bob Dawson, who also happened to be my husband, we created and produced an album called Breaking the Rules

.It broke the most basic rule of music production and sales: stick to one genre. We refused, and there it was — a rule broken.

We included classical, pop, and the kicker: bluegrass on piano, which is basically combining Chopin with Mozart with a little Liberace pizzazz for good measure.

Everyone in the music business warned me that putting three distinctly different musical styles on one solo piano album was unwise, to say the least.

I did it anyway.

Why not?

We took the program on tour with some success. Billboard magazine even wrote an article about me and what we were doing.

The project eventually culminated in a photograph of Bob sitting barefoot on the keys of his Steinway piano.

If you know anything about classical pianists, you know that putting your bare feet on a Steinway is practically an indictable offense.

The photograph broke the rules before anyone heard a single note.

It also received more attention than the album did. Bob got attention from it, I got attention because I created it, and the photographer got attention — the album itself did not generate much revenue for anybody.

Breaking the rules does not always produce the outcome you imagined.

Sometimes you break the rules, create something completely original, have a hell of a good time, and still do not make much money.

Instead an opportunity presented itself via PBS. This was before 9/11, when the world and our lives looked very different.

To protect the intellectual property, we trademarked the phrase Breaking the Rules.

For reasons I still do not understand, the trademark had to be classified as children’s education.

Talk about a rule that needed to be broken.

I believe Bob still owns the trademark. I gave up my rights to everything in the divorce, so legally, the phrase no longer belongs to me.

But I kept the instinct behind it.

Before I follow a rule, I want to know who made it, why it exists, and whether it deserves any authority over my life.

That little girl inside me will not stop asking why.

I am grateful for her.

The Rules We Carry With Us

At 70, the rules I find myself questioning are not usually imposed by the classical music industry or enforced by trademark law.

They are smaller now.

What time am I supposed to take my vitamins, how long are dishes allowed to remain in the sink, what time should I get dressed, how much must I accomplish before I am permitted to spend the afternoon painting, and if I did something yesterday, am I required to do it again today?

Why? Who made that rule? And who the hell cares if I do not follow it?

The problem with making rules for myself is that every rule eventually becomes another opportunity to judge myself.

If I follow it today, I have been good — and if I do not follow it tomorrow, I have failed.

Suddenly, I have turned my life into one endless performance review, complete with a disapproving supervisor who lives inside my own head.

I have spent enough of my life being told what a good woman does. I have no intention of becoming my own parole officer now.

Some things still need to be done. Bills must be paid. The dog must be fed. We need clean clothes occasionally, and leaving food stuck to the dishes indefinitely will eventually produce consequences.

Those are practical realities.

They are not measures of a woman’s goodness.

Doing the dishes does not make me virtuous. Leaving them until tomorrow does not make me defective.

What Does a Good Woman Do?

Women have inherited an enormous collection of rules about what makes a good woman.

A good woman does not embarrass her family, puts everyone else first, finishes her responsibilities before she plays, does not waste money on foolish dreams, is grateful for what she has and does not keep wanting more, acts her age, does not draw too much attention to herself, is practical, and does not become consumed by some new ambition after retirement.

My God, who wrote these rules?

More importantly, what have they cost us?

How many women gave up painting because art supplies seemed like an indulgence, stopped writing because nobody had given them permission to call themselves a writer, abandoned music, travel, business ideas, education, love, pleasure, or adventure because pursuing those things would have inconvenienced someone else, were told they were too old, too inexperienced, too impractical, too selfish, or simply too late, or learned to call obedience contentment?

Then we reach 60 or 70 and wonder why we cannot remember what we are passionate about.

It is likely our passion did not disappear.

It is probable we became so practiced at overriding it that we can no longer hear it.

Every time passion spoke, somebody called it selfishness, foolishness, irresponsibility, or disobedience.

Passion Does Not Follow a Timetable. Consider Grandma Moses. She began painting seriously at 78. At 80, she had her first solo exhibition in New York City.At 93, she appeared on the cover of TIME magazine.

The accepted timetable for becoming a famous artist had already expired decades earlier. According to the rules, she should have been quietly winding down.

Instead, she painted.

Why isn’t passion the baseline for living a good life?

Why do we ask one another, “How are you doing?” instead of asking, “What are you passionate about today?”

Imagine asking a woman that question and waiting long enough for the real answer — not what she needs to finish, not who needs something from her, not how she is feeling physically, but what is stirring inside her, what she can hardly wait to begin, and what she once wanted that she was persuaded to put away.

Question the Rule

I am not suggesting that every rule should be broken.

I am suggesting that every rule is eligible for questioning.

Who made this rule? What is it supposed to protect? Who benefits when I obey it? What has obeying it cost me? And what might come alive if I stopped?

The purpose of questioning the rules is not to create chaos. It is to find out whether your passion has been buried underneath them.

Breaking the rules does not guarantee success. That album taught me that.

It does not guarantee money, applause, approval, or a feature on PBS.

It guarantees something else.

It gives you the chance to discover what you would choose if obedience were no longer the highest measure of your goodness.

I once owned the legal rights to the phrase Breaking the Rules.

I do not own them anymore.

But perhaps the phrase has been mine in a much deeper sense for most of my life.

At 18, I knew what I wanted, but I followed the rule.

At 70, I am far more interested in following what makes me feel alive.

Before you decide that you have lost your passion for life, ask yourself one question:

Which rule required me to abandon it?

And if someone ever figures out how to bottle passion, I want a case of it.

Until then, I suppose we will have to make our own fresh, every morning.

You don't need a Steinway, or a wedding you didn't want, or an album nobody thought would sell. You just need one rule you've never actually questioned. Find it. Ask who made it, and what it's cost you. That's the whole assignment — the answer is yours to keep.

Recognizing the old rule is one thing. Refusing to obey it any longer is where the fun begins.

Paid membership includes the Breakthrough Group, where we talk honestly about the beliefs we inherited and decide which ones deserve to be thrown straight into the rubbish. Loads of emotionally support is available to all the women.

You’ll also receive my member perks, a growing collection of original art, writings, and exercises created for women over 60 who are ready to want, choose, create, change, begin, and become.

👉 Join us. You are not done yet.

Subscribe now

PERKS!

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.

PS: Many of you have seen the collection of NOT DONE YET shirts via my notes feed on Substack. Here’s the link to grab one :

https://i-am-not-done-yet.printify.me/

I know not everyone wants another monthly or annual subscription hanging around like a houseguest who won’t leave. Sometimes an article simply hits home, rattles something loose, or says exactly what you needed to hear. If that happens, you can buy me a coffee as a one-time way of saying, “That one got me.” I appreciate you, and I’m delighted that my peculiar arrangement of words found its way to you.

Buy Me A Coffee

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Monica Hebert in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Too often we look to outside sources to define our own place in the world, and until we find that place for ourselves, drifting is exactly how it feels.

Returning to postponed projects or ideas you set aside is an opportunity to define your place in the world at this stage in life.

Sometimes a project gets set aside, and you couldn’t really tell you why. Not abandoned, exactly — just set down. And then, days or weeks or even months later, you find yourself pulled back to it, wanting to finish what you started, with an enthusiasm that surprises you as much as anyone.

That pull is the same mechanism behind reclaiming a personal dream.

Reclaiming a dream does not require a plan, a full overhaul of your life, or a demand that the dream come back exactly as it once was. It asks something much smaller: pause, remember what the dream once felt like, and let yourself actually feel it again — the freedom, the excitement, the aliveness of it, whatever it was for you.

Then carry that feeling forward.

My favorite way to do this is to write love letters to myself, reminding me of the time I dreamt of being a bohemian in NYC. I recall all the feelings by doing so, and that exercise allows me to choose to revel in them as often as I want. Love letters to our younger selves work wonders for recalling the essence of a dream that had been set aside.

Let it move into whatever project you’re circling back to. Let it move into your everyday life, quietly, the way one new color can shift an entire painting without anyone being able to point to exactly where the change happened.

Taking the time and effort to recall the dreams that were once yours, and bringing their essence into your present life, is worth every bit of the effort it takes. The payoff is clarity — your soul begins recognizing the memories you’re bringing forward, and in due course, produces new ideas of its own. This does not happen overnight. But it happens with a subtlety so strong you will find yourself reaching for, and thinking about, something you had not given a thought to in many, many years.

What you gain is not a finished project or a fully rebuilt dream. What you gain is clarity — clarity about the choices in front of you, and clarity about how you want to think of yourself at this stage of your life.

I painted this little red boat years ago, but now I see it differently. It is still afloat, surrounded by beauty, but it is not choosing a direction. It is drifting.

I think many women reach this stage of life and mistake staying afloat for living. Reclaiming our dreams is how we put our hands back on the boat and begin choosing where we go next.

Maybe you’d like to be part of our exciting BREAKTHROUGH weekly gathering of women who are choosing to stop drifting by reclaiming part of their lives they thought they’d lost. We meet every Tuesday via zoom. This is for my paid subscribers. Perhpas you’d like to invest in yourself?

Subscribe now