What Hurricane Laura Destroyed (And What It Set Free)

In 2020, Hurricane Laura tore through my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Officially a Category 4, though anyone who lived through it knows better.

It wasn’t rain that devastated the city. It was wind. Violent, unrelenting, tornado-like wind that ripped things out by the roots.

Including six enormous oak trees on my property.

If you’re from the South, you know the kind.

Ancient. Sprawling. Romantic. The kind that feel permanent. The kind you imagine will outlive you.

They didn’t.

They were thrown across my yard like toys, roots exposed, dignity gone. Two of them were tossed upon my car- bending it in half.

And something in me cracked open watching them lie there.

I’ve always believed trees are more than plants. They’re witnesses. Timekeepers. Guardians.

Seeing them uprooted felt personal. Intimate.

As if the storm had reached into my own life and said, pay attention.

At the time, I was already standing in uncertainty.

Alone. Caring for my elder sister. Wondering whether I had the strength or the desire to rebuild yet again.

And suddenly the question wasn’t just about the house.

It was about me.

Here’s what I’d been carrying:

My dream was never the traditional one.

I tried the marriages. Three of them. I raised my daughters. I did the expected things.

But the dream that lived quietly inside me was about freedom. Creativity. Curiosity.

Living in the center of things. Making art. Letting my soul lead instead of obligation.

I had been rebuilding other people’s versions of my life for decades.

Standing in front of those uprooted trees, the question became undeniable:

Do I stay and rebuild what’s been lost?

Or do I finally pull up my own roots?

I packed what I could fit in a small van and left.

With help from a few locals who hadn’t fled—thousands had—I loaded what mattered.

Paintings I’d saved. A few belongings. Some furniture.

And I said goodbye to my sister.

I knew, standing there, that I would likely never see her again.

I was right. She passed away two years later.

I drove to Virginia where my daughter lived.

No plan. No safety net.

Just the stubborn belief that I couldn’t rebuild someone else’s life one more time.

What followed wasn’t pretty.

Within months, COVID hit. I got sick. Three months in bed. Savings drained. Three months behind on rent facing eviction.

By this time, my daughter and her family had packed up and moved two hours away.

But even then, flat on my back, something was different.

The life I was trying to build—however unstable—was mine.

Not a reconstruction of what had been. Not a version that fit someone else’s expectations.

Mine.

So I kept going.

I started painting daily. Small works. Then larger. I put them online. I sold a few.

I started writing. Not because I had a platform. Because the words needed somewhere to go.

I began sitting with my soul. Two minutes at a time. Learning to listen instead of manage.

Slowly—so slowly it was almost invisible—things started organizing themselves.

Not through hustle. Not through a plan.

Through coherence.

Four years later, here’s what’s true.

I live simply, downtown, surrounded by light and my own paintings.
I write every day, and the work has found its people.
I sell my art. I support myself through what I create.

More than anything, I wake up inside a life that feels natural. Effortless. Aligned.
Whatever “normal” is supposed to mean, this is mine.

The joy I feel now is different from any joy I knew before.

It isn’t conditional. It isn’t borrowed. It isn’t built on anyone else’s approval.

It’s steady. Daily. Mine.

The kind that comes from knowing—finally, at 70—that you’re living the life your soul imagined long before you had language for it.

Hurricane Laura destroyed six ancient oak trees.

But it also destroyed the last excuse I had for not choosing myself.

And for that, I will always be grateful.

Is it possible there is a quiet discontent sitting just below the surface of your life?

It nags at you. It makes you uncomfortable. And ignoring it doesn’t actually make it go away.

I suspect you’ve been ignoring that feeling for a long, long time, mostly because you don’t understand where it’s coming from or what the hell you’re supposed to do about it.

That is exactly why I began repackaging my own life.

And the first thing I had to do was learn how to trust myself, FOR myself.

Building Believable Trust is the 30-page process I created from my own life and my own practice of rebuilding that trust.

It is my gift to anyone who becomes an annual subscriber.

The annual subscription is normally $75. With 20% off, it is now $60.

And yes, that means for only $10 more than the guide alone, you also receive a full year of The Daily RE-Wire.

If you prefer Building Believable Trust by itself, you can purchase it for $50 here:

Building Believable Trust

OR

.

Grab 20% Discount + Building Trust

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.

Let me tell you a story.

Not a tidy one. Not the kind with a neat little bow at the end. The kind that starts in the dark and finds its way to the light — not because someone handed you a flashlight, but because you finally decided to strike your own match.

It starts on an ordinary morning.

I woke up slow. Foggy. That low, quiet disconnection that had become so familiar I’d stopped questioning it. Just shuffled to the bathroom, shuffled back, sat on the edge of the bed and stared at nothing in particular.

And then came that voice. The one most of us have running in the background like an old radio we forgot to turn off.

What is wrong with you.

Not a question. A verdict.

And because I had spent most of my life in a world that rewards sharp starts and early risers and women who have it together before the coffee finishes brewing — I accepted that verdict without a trial. Without a single piece of evidence. Without so much as asking whether it was even true.

I just… agreed.

Here’s what I didn’t know yet.

That voice? The one handing down verdicts before I’d even had breakfast?

It wasn’t mine.

It had been borrowed. Absorbed. Built up over decades from a thousand different sources — expectations I never consciously agreed to, standards I never actually set for myself, roles I stepped into because someone needed filling and I was standing there.

Daughter. Wife. Mother. Caregiver. The one who holds it together. The one who shows up. The one who keeps moving no matter what.

And I had done all of it. Every single bit of it.

But here’s the AHA that cracked something open in me.

Somewhere in all that showing up for everyone else — I had quietly, without ceremony, without even noticing — stopped showing up for myself.

Not dramatically. Not all at once.

Just… gradually. The way a river changes course. Slowly enough that you don’t see it happening until one day you look up and realize you have no idea where you are.

Now I want to talk about something that might sting a little.

Because I think a lot of us — women in this season of life — are carrying something we haven’t fully named yet.

A feeling that somewhere along the way, we got duped.

Not by any one person necessarily. Not by one dramatic betrayal. But by a system. A set of unspoken rules. A culture that handed us a script and told us this was what a good woman looked like — selfless, available, endlessly giving — and we followed it. Because we were good women. Because we loved our families. Because that’s what you did.

And now?

Now the kids are grown. The demands have eased. The noise has quieted.

And we’re standing in the middle of our own lives wondering why it doesn’t feel like ours.

That feeling has a name.

It’s grief. And it’s also anger. And underneath both of those — if you’re willing to go there — is something much more interesting.

It’s power.

That is the second AHA.

Because the moment you stop calling that feeling “bitterness” and start calling it information — everything shifts. That ache you carry for the dreams you set aside, the life you put on hold, the woman you were becoming before everyone needed a piece of you — that is not evidence that it’s too late.

That is your soul pointing at exactly what she wants you to go back and get.

But here’s where most of us get stuck.

We pick up the anger and we carry it right into the next chapter with us.

And honey — I understand that. I have lived that.

But anger is a heavy suitcase. And you cannot reclaim your life and drag that weight at the same time. It will exhaust you before you get anywhere worth going.

So what do you do with it?

You acknowledge it. Fully. Without flinching. You look that feeling dead in the eye and you say — yes. Some of this wasn’t fair. Some of what I gave, I gave at a cost I didn’t fully understand at the time. Some of the dreams I set aside stayed set aside for too long.

You say it. You feel it. You let it be true.

And then — and this is where the personal power lives — you make a decision.

Not to forget. Not to pretend it didn’t happen. Not to perform forgiveness before you actually feel it.

But to stop letting the past be the loudest voice in the room.

Because here’s what I know about women who have lived the way we have lived — who have survived what we have survived, rebuilt what we have rebuilt, loved the way we have loved:

We are not fragile.

We are not finished.

We are, if anything, the most dangerously equipped women on the planet to build something extraordinary — because we have already proven, a thousand times over, that we can do hard things.

So back to that foggy morning.

I sat on the edge of my bed and instead of accepting the verdict — I did something different.

I got quiet. I breathed. I listened.

And what came back wasn’t a to-do list. Wasn’t a plan. Wasn’t a productivity strategy.

It was a feeling.

Something warm and unhurried that said — you have more in you than you’re letting through. Stop measuring yourself by a rhythm that doesn’t belong to this season. Stop apologizing for who you’ve become. She is not less than who you were. She is more.

So I let the morning be what it was.

Coffee without urgency. No pressure. No verdict.

And right around eleven o’clock — something shifted.

My mind cleared. Ideas moved. Energy arrived — not forced, not performed, but real. I took a nap that afternoon without guilt. Came back from it fully present. Recorded a video in one take.

Not because I pushed harder.

Because I finally stopped pushing against myself.

Later that day I was in my studio, covering an old canvas with a fresh coat of gesso.

If you’ve never painted — gesso is a primer. A white base coat. And when you apply it you’re not erasing what’s underneath. Every layer that canvas has ever held is still there. You’re just preparing the surface so something new can come forward.

And standing there with my brush I had a thought that made me laugh out loud.

That’s it. That’s exactly it.

We don’t get to erase what’s been lived. We don’t need to. Every experience — the sacrifice, the grief, the years of giving, even the anger — those are layers. They’re in the canvas. They’re part of what gives it depth.

But they don’t have to be what’s leading anymore.

You get to decide what comes forward now.

Here’s what I want you to walk away with today.

You have a personal power sitting inside you that you have not yet fully tapped.

Not because you’re incapable. Not because it’s too late.

Because you’ve been so busy being everything to everyone else that you haven’t had the space to feel what’s actually there.

That power doesn’t come from anger. It doesn’t come from regret. It doesn’t come from pushing harder or tightening up or trying to outrun the years.

It comes from telling yourself the truth.

About where you feel duped. About what you gave that cost you. About what you set aside that you want back. About who you were becoming before the world interrupted you.

Tell yourself that truth — without the anger, without the performance of having it all together, without apologizing for any of it.

And then ask yourself the only question that matters now:

What does the woman I’ve actually become — the one who survived all of that, who built all of that, who is still here and still standing — what does she want?

Because she has earned the right to want things.

She has earned the right to dream.

She has earned the right to walk into this season of life not with resignation — but with unbridled, unapologetic, arms-wide-open joy.

Not despite everything she’s been through.

Because of it.

That’s what rewiring looks like.

Not going backward. Not pretending the hard years didn’t happen.

Deciding — on your own terms, in your own time — that what comes next belongs entirely to you.

You don’t retire.

You reclaim.

And there’s one more piece of this.

When you’ve spent decades listening to everybody else, trusting yourself again doesn’t necessarily happen because somebody tells you, “Just follow your heart.”

Sometimes you don’t know which voice is your heart.

You’ve heard the rules for so long that they can sound remarkably similar to your own voice.

That is why I wrote Building Believable Trust.

Not to teach you how to become somebody new, but to help you recognize the woman who has been underneath all that conditioning all along. To begin hearing yourself again. To notice what feels true to you. And little by little, to build enough evidence that when your own voice says, I want this, you believe her.

Because reclaiming your life requires something more than knowing you were duped.

You have to trust the woman who gets to decide what happens next.

Building Believable Trust is available on Gumroad for $50.

But there is another option.

Right now, you can become a paid member of The Daily RE-Wire at 20% off, and Building Believable Trust is included at no additional cost, along with all the other perks of paid membership.

So if you’ve been considering joining us anyway, well...

I can do math.

You can buy the guide for $50.

Or you can become part of this community, get the guide, and get everything else that comes with membership too.

I know which one I’d pick.

20% off+ Building Trust

A little introduction to Buildlin Believable Trust:

Subscribe now

The Life You Expect May Not Be the Life You Have to Live

Every evening at 6 o’clock, Elanore set one place at the table. One plate, one fork, one glass, directly across from a chair nobody sat in anymore. When the oven timer went off, she sat down and ate.

She did this for four years after her husband died.

Not because she was hungry. Not because she particularly enjoyed eating at that hour. But because 6 o’clock was when dinner had always been served in that house, and nobody had ever told the house otherwise.

Then one evening, standing at the stove with the timer going off, it occurred to her that she didn’t have to eat at 6 o’clock anymore.

She could eat at 5. She could eat at 8. Hell, she could eat a bowl of cereal in her pajamas at 10 o’clock at night if that’s what she wanted. Nobody was waiting for dinner. Nobody was watching the clock. Nobody was enforcing the rule.

For four years, she had faithfully followed a rule that no longer existed.

When I shared her story on the Notes feed of Substack, women began telling me their own. One said it brought her to tears. Several were struck by how long it took Elanore to see that she had a choice. Another shared a deeply personal story about her childhood and the expectations that followed her into adulthood.

And one woman used a word that stopped me in my tracks.

Subtle.

The conditioning was so subtle that it never occurred to her to question it. She wasn’t struggling against the rules. She didn’t even recognize them as rules. That’s just how things were done.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since, because I recently discovered something about myself that I did not see coming.

The Numbers We Carry

My grandmother on my father’s side died when she was 52.

I don’t remember what caused her death, but I remember something else about her. She loved growing hydrangeas. I have a photograph of her standing on the front porch of her modest home, surrounded by enormous bushes heavy with blooms. She looks happy there, among the flowers she loved.

But as I grew older, it wasn’t her hydrangeas that occupied my thoughts. It was the number 52.

As I approached that birthday, I felt dread. My grandmother had died at 52, and somehow that number had become significant in my expectations about my own life. Nobody told me I would die at 52. Nobody had to. I made that association all by myself.

Then I turned 52, and eventually 53. Life continued. There was no grand revelation and no party celebrating that I’d outlived my grandmother. Those were chaotic years, and I had plenty of other things occupying my attention. I simply stopped thinking about 52.

And then, at 71, I found another number sitting quietly in my thinking.

My mother died at 72.

I am 71 years old, which puts that number close enough to touch.

I’d like to say I noticed it and shrugged it off. What actually happened is that I noticed how long it had been there, how comfortably it had settled into the back of my mind, shaping what I assumed about the years ahead without ever once asking my permission.

The Future Somebody Else Imagined for Us

I was married to a man who believed getting older was going to be hard.

He believed that being alone as you aged was something to fear. He had watched his own parents approach aging with those expectations, and he carried them into his own life as though they were established facts. I remember trying to explain that he had choices, that he didn’t have to repeat his parents’ experience. But he couldn’t seem to imagine another possibility.

What fascinated and frustrated me was that he was perfectly capable of rebelling. He had a rebellious streak a mile wide. The man had a penchant for weed and a couple of glasses of Coke and Jack the minute he clocked out each day, something I KNOW for a fact his parents never did.

So clearly he knew how to do things differently. He could reject his parents’ rules. What he couldn’t do was question their expectations. He could challenge the way they lived while still accepting their prediction of how his own life would end up.

And I began to realize something.

I know a little about conditioning myself. I was raised to be a good girl, and good girls knew what was expected of them. We knew how to behave, what to say, when to stay silent, and how to make ourselves acceptable to the people around us. When I became a preacher’s wife at 18, those expectations found a whole new playground. I knew how to meet the expectations of a congregation. I knew how to be the woman everybody expected me to be.

What I didn’t know was how to stop and ask whether any of it was what I wanted. For a long time, I didn’t even recognize that as a question I was allowed to ask.

That’s the part of conditioning that fascinates me now. It doesn’t always feel like someone is controlling us. Sometimes it feels like we’re simply doing what comes naturally.

But is it natural? Or is it familiar?

There’s a difference.

And here is what I finally understood about those two numbers. Being conditioned to behave a certain way is one thing. Being conditioned to expect a certain kind of life runs deeper.

How many of us grew up watching our parents and grandparents approach old age believing that life would only become harder? That getting older meant slowing down, becoming less capable, having fewer choices, and eventually needing someone to take care of us? We watched. We listened. We learned. And somewhere along the way, somebody else’s experience became our expectation.

So here is what I’m telling myself now. My grandmother’s life ended at 52. My mother’s ended at 72. Neither of those numbers belongs to me. Their lives are part of my history. They are not a schedule for my future.

What Have We Been Taught to Expect?

That difference becomes enormously important when we reach retirement.

Suddenly, many of the circumstances that shaped our daily lives have changed. We no longer report to a job. Our children have their own lives. Some of us are single again, through divorce, widowhood, or choice. The old structures have shifted, but our expectations haven’t necessarily shifted with them.

We still feel guilty when we’re not being productive. We still wonder whether we’re too old to begin something new. UGH! Who made that damn arbitrary rule??

And perhaps most troubling of all, many of us have accepted the idea that the most interesting part of our lives is already behind us. Who decided that? And why have we been so willing to believe it?

Even the way we talk about aging reinforces it. We’re constantly reminded of what might go wrong, what we’re at risk of developing, and what abilities we might lose.

Now, I’m not dismissing medical science. Understanding our biology is enormously valuable, and a family history can tell us something important about our health. But there’s a difference between understanding a risk and accepting a prediction as destiny.

I have a life to live, and I’d much rather spend my time living it than rehearsing everything that might go wrong.

I don’t believe every woman has to remake herself in retirement. I don’t believe we all need another purpose, another project, or another list of things to accomplish before we die.

BUT! I do believe we have an enormous opportunity to RE-PACKAGE our lives around our OWN beliefs, desires, and expectations. Not the ones we inherited from our parents. Not the rules society handed us about getting older. And certainly not somebody else’s idea of what a retired woman ought to be doing with her time.

We don’t have to become different women. We get to live differently as the women we already are.

That begins with something we haven’t always been encouraged to do: question what we’ve been taught to expect. Not because everything we learned is wrong, and not because growing older comes without genuine challenges. But because somebody else’s experience is not a prophecy about our own lives.

A Different Kind of Expectation

This morning, I sat at my window watching a tree I’ve been observing for several weeks.

Every morning, its leaves are a little different. The green has gradually given way to orange, and today that orange is deeper and richer than it was yesterday. I find myself looking forward to seeing what it will look like tomorrow.

I’ve watched autumn arrive for more than 70 years. I know the leaves will eventually fall and winter will come. But knowing that doesn’t make me dread the change. Quite the opposite. I anticipate it.

And sitting there, I realized that nature has conditioned me to expect change, but not to fear it. What a remarkable difference that makes.

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught to approach the autumn of our own lives very differently. We were taught to expect decline, prepare for disappointment, and accept that our possibilities would shrink with every passing year.

But what if we questioned that? What if we approached this season of our lives with the same curiosity we bring to watching the leaves turn? What if, instead of assuming tomorrow will offer less than yesterday, we allowed ourselves to wonder what might be waiting?

I’m not suggesting that positive thinking will prevent illness or guarantee a wonderful future. I’m suggesting something much simpler. We can stop treating the expectations we inherited as instructions for how we must live.

I spent years dreading 52 because of my grandmother, and now I find I’ve been carrying my mother’s 72 around in my imagination. How many other expectations have I accepted without ever realizing they were optional?

How many have you?

I wonder how many of us are sitting at our own proverbial dinner tables right now, faithfully following expectations we never consciously chose, waiting for a permission we no longer need.

Which brings me back to Elanore, and to the evening after she figured it out.

Same table. Same plate. The same clock on the wall, ticking away the same minutes, and the chair across from her still empty. Nothing in that kitchen had changed.

What changed was Elanore. She was no longer following the clock. She was simply looking at it. Six o’clock had stopped being a rule and become a time on the clock, one of twenty-four hours she got to arrange however she damn well pleased. And whether she sat down at 5, or at 8, or at 10 with a bowl of cereal in her pajamas, it wouldn’t just be a meal anymore.

It would be a choice.

She didn’t need a new kitchen, a new husband, or a new life. She needed to see that the life she already had belonged to her.

Recognizing that you have a choice is the beginning. You also need to trust yourself enough to make it. And for a woman who has spent years following expectations she never questioned, trusting her own judgment can feel unfamiliar.

You can begin changing that today.

When you become an annual paid subscriber to The Daily RE-Wire, you’ll receive 20% off your subscription and my complimentary guidebook, Building Believable Trust, designed to help you begin listening to yourself, recognizing what you want, and building confidence in your own decisions.

Subscribe at 20% off + guide

You don’t have to figure out your entire future today. You don’t even have to know what you want that future to look like.

You can begin by learning to trust the woman who gets to choose it.

PS- Be sure to send me an email to request your copy of Building Beleivable Trust

Fall afternoons are simply gorgeous here in Central Virginia. The temperatures are nearly perfect, the skies are bright blue, the tips of the trees are beginning to turn orange, and there’s just enough of a breeze to make sitting outside an absolute pleasure.

I found myself enjoying one of those afternoons with my pal Greg. He had asked me to help him with a marketing plan, knowing my background in advertising and marketing, so we settled into our usual spot outside the building to do a little work.

Now, you have to understand something about our patio. It isn’t really a patio at all. It’s an extra-wide sidewalk that runs along the entire block of our building, so people going about their business downtown walk right past where we’re sitting

.

And on this particular afternoon, they kept stopping.

One after another, people would come walking down the sidewalk, recognize Greg, and stop to visit. Most of these were people he’d known for 20, 30, even 40 years. Old friends, acquaintances, people he’d done business with over the years. I knew only one of them, but that didn’t seem to matter one bit.

Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about getting somewhere else. They just wanted to stop, say hello, catch up, and enjoy a little conversation.

And something about the whole experience struck me as rather extraordinary.

Thirty years ago, I doubt I would have given an afternoon like this a second thought. People stopped to visit with one another all the time. It was just part of everyday life, and certainly nothing worth writing an article about.

But lately I’ve been noticing something. I see articles and videos about how bland life has become, how people aren’t enjoying themselves anymore, how everything feels uncertain and a little overwhelming. And goodness knows, if you spend much time watching the news, you’d think there wasn’t a single pleasant thing left to look forward to.

Yet here I was, sitting on a sidewalk in downtown Lynchburg, surrounded by people who apparently hadn’t gotten that memo.

Nobody talked about the economy. Nobody talked about elections. Nobody talked about wars or the latest terrible thing happening somewhere in the world.

Instead, they talked about things they were looking forward to doing in the coming weeks and months. They laughed, they reminisced, they shared little bits of news about their lives, and then they went on their way.

One gentleman in particular made quite an impression on me. He was a lifelong friend of Greg’s, and I swear, goodwill just radiated from this man. You know how you occasionally meet someone whose genuine kindness is almost something you can feel? He was one of those people.

We were introduced, had a delightful little conversation, and I found myself thinking how refreshing it was to spend time with someone who seemed genuinely happy to be standing there talking with us.

Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t had a great deal of social interaction lately, so perhaps that made the afternoon even more special. But I think there was something else going on, too.

For a few hours, I wasn’t worrying about anything.

And yes, I worry.

I even worry about you ladies. Y’all didn’t know that, did you?

Well, I do.

Some of you have names and faces I know well. Others I’ve never met, but I read your comments and your emails, and I know that some of you are struggling to figure out what comes next in your lives.

I care about that. Probably more than I should sometimes, because the truth is, I can’t figure out anybody else’s life for them, no matter how much I’d like to help.

And lately, I’ve been carrying more of that concern around with me than I realized.

But sitting outside that afternoon, watching people greet one another and listening to their conversations, something shifted.

I wasn’t thinking about my newsletter, my work, my responsibilities, or what I needed to accomplish before the day was over.

I was simply enjoying being there.

I’ve talked before about something I call a pattern interrupt. It’s just a fancy way of saying that sometimes we need to do something different to get ourselves out of whatever rut we’ve fallen into.

And the funny thing is, I didn’t set out to interrupt anything that afternoon.

I wasn’t looking for a breakthrough. I wasn’t trying to improve my attitude or change my thinking. I was sitting outside helping Greg with a marketing plan, and a perfectly ordinary afternoon turned into something wonderful.

The blue sky, the changing leaves, the comfortable breeze, the laughter, the friendly faces. All those little things came together and reminded me how much pleasure there is in simply being alive.

And perhaps the best part was that none of it was particularly important.

We weren’t solving the world’s problems. We weren’t accomplishing anything remarkable. Nobody was trying to teach anybody a lesson or convince anybody to change their life.

We were just people enjoying one another’s company on a beautiful fall afternoon.

And I came home feeling better than I had in quite some time.

So here’s what I want to share with you today.

If life has been feeling a little dull lately, or you’ve been carrying around more worry than you’d like, consider interrupting your usual routine.

Go sit outside for a while. Take a walk somewhere you haven’t been lately. Call an old friend just to hear her voice. Strike up a conversation with someone. Or simply find a comfortable place to sit and watch the world go by. ( my fav)

You don’t have to make an event out of it, and you certainly don’t have to accomplish anything.

In fact, I think that’s what I enjoyed most about my afternoon.

For a few hours, nothing needed fixing, nobody needed changing, and there wasn’t a single thing I had to prove.

I just got to enjoy my life.

And you know what?

That’s a pretty damn good way to spend an afternoon.

And aren’t we as retired ladies deserving of such an afternoon?

Subscribe now

It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. There’s a basket of laundry sitting in the bedroom, a few dishes in the sink, and the bed hasn’t been made. You’re sitting in your favorite chair, thinking how wonderful it would feel to crawl under the covers and take a nice long nap.

But there’s that little voice in your head reminding you of all the things you haven’t done today.

And here’s the ridiculous part. You’re retired. Nobody’s coming home expecting dinner. Nobody’s checking whether you’ve vacuumed. There’s not a damn thing wrong with taking a nap, but somehow you still feel like you ought to earn it.

Well, sit tight, I have news for you.

There are some mighty fine advantages to being an old lady, and I intend to enjoy every last one of them.

A few months ago, somebody referred to me as an “ol lady,” and I was downright offended. I didn’t say much at the time, but later that day I found myself thinking about those two little words.

An old lady? ME?

I’ll have you know there’s still a young woman living inside this 71-year-old body, and she isn’t particularly interested in going quietly into the sunset.

But after I finished being indignant, a rather delicious question occurred to me.

What can I do today that I wouldn’t have dared do when I was 30?

Oh, Lord. Where do I begin?

For starters, I can take the entire damn day off whenever I want.

I don’t need a vacation request, a doctor’s excuse, or a legitimate reason. I can wake up on a perfectly beautiful Wednesday morning, look at everything I had planned, and decide I’d rather spend the day watching television in my pajamas.

And that’s exactly what I did yesterday.

I had writing to do. I had things I wanted to accomplish. I even considered getting dressed and going outside to enjoy the beautiful weather.

Instead, I found a television show I liked, settled into my chair, and decided the rest of the world could get along without me for a few hours.

Imagine that!

Then there are my afternoon naps. Oh, how I love my naps.

Not those pitiful little 20-minute power naps the productivity experts recommend so you can get up and accomplish another 27 things before dinner.

I’m talking about long, luxurious, shameless naps, surrounded by pillows, with absolutely no intention of setting an alarm.

The kind where you wake up, look at the clock, and think, “Well, wasn’t that lovely?”

But my favorite newfound freedom might be my relationship with the laundry.

For most of my adult life, a basket of dirty clothes represented a responsibility. Something that needed attention. Something that good wives, good mothers, and respectable women were supposed to take care of.

Now?

That basket can sit there until I’m damn good and ready to deal with it.

The laundry doesn’t have feelings. It isn’t disappointed in me. It won’t call my mother and complain that I’ve become a disgrace to the family.

It’s laundry, for heaven’s sake.

And yet, I wonder how many of us still walk around our homes feeling guilty about things that nobody is asking us to do.

We spent decades keeping schedules, meeting expectations, cooking meals, cleaning houses, showing up on time, and making sure everybody else had what they needed. Even when we were exhausted, there was usually somebody or something that required our attention.

And we got awfully good at it.

So good, in fact, that when we finally have the freedom to do as we please, we sometimes don’t know what the hell to do with ourselves.

We look for something that needs doing. Then we proceed to make lists.( this is one habit I stopped and hold no regrets). Then those pesky obligations begin to play peek a boo with us, causing us to vaguely uncomfortable when the afternoon stretches out in front of us with absolutely nothing demanding our attention.

It’s not your fault, it’s simply how a whole generations was trained: good day is a productive day.

Now in retirment we get to choose how we define a good day, the ol rules be damned!

For instance, a good day can also be one in which I accomplish absolutely nothing and enjoy every minute of it.

And that’s only the beginning.

I can wear my silver hair all the way down my back, regardless of what anyone thinks a woman my age ought to look like. I can stay up half the night because I’m enjoying myself. I can change my mind about something without preparing a defense worthy of a courtroom attorney.

I can eat breakfast for dinner, wear the same comfortable clothes two days in a row, and decline an invitation simply because I’d rather stay home.

And I certainly don’t have to spend my remaining years trying to convince the world that I’m still useful.

Good grief. Haven’t we been useful long enough?

Now, I’m not suggesting that getting older is one long glorious vacation. Bodies change, circumstances change, and some women are still carrying responsibilities they never expected to have at this stage of life.

But I do think we’ve been so thoroughly bombarded with everything we’re supposedly losing as we age that we haven’t spent nearly enough time celebrating what we’re gaining.

And one of those things is the opportunity to finally get acquainted with the woman we’ve been putting off for decades.

Remember her?

The girl who wanted to have adventures. The young woman who had opinions she didn’t always dare express. The one who wanted to try things, go places, make a little mischief, and sometimes do absolutely nothing without having to explain herself.

She’s still in there.

And I suspect she’d be delighted to discover that the woman you’ve become finally has a little more say in how she spends her days.

Perhaps she wants to paint, travel or dance around the kitchen in her underwear while singing along to a song she hasn’t heard in 40 years.Or sitting in the sunshine with a cup of coffee and watch the clouds.

The beauty of it is that she gets to choose.

So I’ve reconsidered my reaction to being called an old lady.

If being an old lady means I can finally stop living according to everybody else’s expectations, perhaps the joke really is on them.

And if you’ll excuse me, I believe there’s a perfectly good afternoon waiting to be enjoyed.

The laundry can wait.

Now I want to hear from you. What’s something you absolutely LOVE being able to do at your age that you wouldn’t have dared do when you were younger?

I have a feeling we’re going to have a wonderful time with these answers.

A Little Invitation

If you enjoyed this conversation, there’s a whole lot more where it came from at The Daily RE-Wire.

I write for women over 60 who have spent much of their lives taking care of everyone else and are finally asking themselves what THEY want.

Every Tuesday evening, my paid subscribers and I get together for the BreakthroughCircle , where we talk about the real-life questions that come with having the freedom to choose for ourselves, especially when we’re still learning how to trust those choices.

You don’t have to have anything figured out before you join us. That’s part of the fun of discovering it together.

Come join us as a paid member of The Daily RE-Wire. We’re not done yet!

Psst…. Right now the annual subscription is 20% off! + The dynamic Building Trust with Yourself- a practical guide for retired women

20% Off! + Guide for retired ladies

With love,

Monica

Dear friend,

You know this feeling.

You walk out of the bedroom wearing something you love. You caught yourself in the mirror before you came out and thought, Damn. I look good.

Then somebody looks at you and says, “You’re wearing that?”

And there it is. You go back to the mirror, and suddenly everything you thought feels upside down. Like the photo of me above, everything is upside down.

Nothing about the dress changed. Nothing about your body changed. Nothing about what you liked changed. One person handed you an opinion, and somehow it became more important than the one you had thirty seconds earlier.

Women are so practiced at this.

We spend years checking the room. Is everybody comfortable? Does everybody approve? Am I being selfish? Am I too loud? Too old? Too much? Should I cut my hair? Should I volunteer more? Should I be more useful? Should retirement look like something else entirely?

After enough years of it, the strangest thing can happen. You stop knowing where everybody else’s opinion ends and your own begins.

That is what interests me.

Not whether you wear your hair long or short. Not whether you dye it purple or let it go gray. Not whether you spend Tuesday afternoon volunteering, painting, watching old movies in your pajamas, or doing absolutely nothing because you damn well feel like it.

I want to know whether you can hear yourself underneath all that noise.

Can you like what you like without collecting votes? Calling a sister or a girlfriend?

Can you want something without building a case for why you’re allowed to want it?

Can you make a decision and stay with yourself even when somebody you love would have chosen differently?

Many of us were raised with a subtle conditioning that left without the clairty to realize that we actually do have choices.

I don’t think women arrive at 60, 70 or 80 magically knowing how to do that. Many of us spent fifty years practicing the opposite. Many of us were raised with a subtle conditioning that left without the clairty to realize that we actually do have choices. We learned to listen to husbands, children, bosses, churches, culture, experts, and all those invisible rules about what a good woman is supposed to do.

Then one day the house gets quieter. The obligations change. And for the first time in a very long time, there is room to hear a voice that has been there all along.

Yours.

That’s why I write The Daily RE-Wire Newsletter.

Not to hand you another set of rules. God knows you’ve had enough of those. I write for women who are starting to wonder what their lives might look like if they stopped looking outside themselves for permission.

I like to tell people I graduated from the retirement school of hard knocks. A brutal divorce took everything I’d built, including my real estate investments, and I began retirement with nothing and nobody. I had to learn, fast, how to find my way without all the conditioning so many of us were raised with.

If you’ve spent so many years checking with everyone else that you’re not always sure what you think anymore, I’d love to have you with me.

Twice a week, I send a free letter meant to encourage you, with insights and real-life examples you can use in your own life. I’m here to help you hear your own voice again, trust what you hear, and grow more confident living from that place.

And you don’t have to pull away from the people you love to become more fully yourself. You can live alongside them, love them, enjoy them, and still create retirement years that genuinely belong to you.

You don't have to take my word for it

Let’s find your way back to yourself.

Subscribe now

With love,
Monica

Conditioning is a sneaky little bastard. It doesn’t always arrive wearing an apron and telling you to be a good girl. Sometimes it comes through the mouth of a man you respect, wrapped in a compliment. And after 71 years on this planet, I can still fall for it.

Not long ago, I was sitting outside in the cool of the evening, drinking a cup of tea with my friend Greg. Greg owns businesses. He knows what building something substantial looks like. We were talking about my Substack when he said, “Monica, you are building an empire.”

Well, good golly Miss Molly. An empire. I was VERY PROUD that he saw that possibility in me.

Within minutes my imagination had slipped into a pencil skirt and started carrying a clipboard. I could see the book publisher, the podcast, the interviews, a small staff, meetings, projects, expansion. Busy, busy, busy. Ridiculously busy. Seems the retirement portion of my retirement had been canceled due to unforeseen empire-building.

There was another piece of it I didn’t want to admit. I have experienced business failures in my life, and one of my daughters has been keen to remind me of them. Some tiny part of me thought, Finally. I’ll show her what I can do.

Oh honey. There were enough warning signs in that sentence alone to light up Times Square. But I missed every single one of them.

Instead, I went into high gear, which is what I tend to do when somebody hands me a shiny new possibility. I bypassed the slower gears completely. And my body started complaining.

For weeks I had pain through the upper part of my back, shoulder and left arm. I tried changing positions, I used ice, I used heat, I propped myself against pillows, and I kept going back to the desk. Because, you know, EMPIRE.

Then one Monday morning the pain became so uncomfortable that I threw up my hands and said out loud, “Not today.”

I went into my living room, piled a ridiculous number of pillows around myself on the daybed, poured a Coke, put ice on my arm and announced that I was taking the day off. Naturally, I immediately started “working” from my phone. We women are nothing if not committed to misunderstanding our own instructions.

The phone limited me, though. I can answer messages on a phone. I can fiddle around. But I cannot create the magic I want to create for my readers from that little rectangle. So for 7 days I more or less made do.

Then I wandered right back to the desk for another 14. The pain had eased enough for me to convince myself everything was fine. And besides, I had an empire to build.

Mercy. That grand idea was something I never would have thought of myself. Read that sentence again, because I didn’t see it at the time either: I NEVER WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF IT MYSELF.

Still, I went back to writing articles, publishing articles, reading advice, studying growth strategies, trying to learn everything I supposedly needed to learn to become the successful little empress I had suddenly decided I was supposed to become

.

And something very strange happened. My writing stopped connecting. I knew it, and my readers knew it. My words were technically there, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t write something that connected with you because I had disconnected from myself.

Then came the moment that finally slammed on the brakes. I was trying to repurpose an article I had published before, and something about it felt wrong. It felt like I was feeding the machine. And I heard it inside myself as clearly as if St. Peter had shoved a trumpet into my ear: THIS IS NOT WHY YOU ARE WRITING. THIS IS NOT WHY YOU WERE CALLED TO WRITE.

I shut off the computer, went back to my cloud of pillows, and cried.

The next day two members of the Breakthrough Circle shared significant breakthroughs in their own lives that they believe came directly from meeting with me each week. I went to bed weeping with satisfaction and appreciation.

Here is what I thought this story was about when I began writing it. I thought it was about working too much, about getting caught up in Substack gurus and growth strategies, and about listening to my body. All of that is true. But it is not the story.

The real story hit me several days later with all the subtlety of a frying pan to the forehead. A man had described a future he could see for me, and I went running toward it without once asking myself: Do I want this?

Holy Mother of God. THAT was the story.

Greg did nothing wrong. That matters. He wasn’t telling me how to live, he wasn’t controlling me, and he wasn’t trying to turn me into something I didn’t want to be. He was complimenting me. He saw potential.

The conditioning happened inside ME. A man I respected saw a possibility for my life, and before checking with myself, I turned his observation into an assignment.

How many times have women done exactly that? It sounds like “You’d be so good at this,” or “You have such a gift,” or “Your family needs you,” or “You could make something big out of this,” and off we go.

Our generation of women became Olympic athletes at accepting assignments. We learned how to be good daughters, good wives, good mothers, good church women, good employees, good volunteers, good caretakers. We learned how to be useful, dependable, needed. And then some of us retire and keep right on accepting assignments. Different uniform. Same conditioning. Nobody even has to tell us what to do anymore. We can do it to ourselves.

That realization brought me straight back to something I have been teaching women for quite a while now.

Trust.

Not trust as a nice word on a coffee mug, but trust when it costs you something, when there is no evidence yet that you are right, and when everything outside of you starts hollering that you had better get back in line.

Because right about the time I decided to stop grinding and return to my own way of doing things, something happened that scared the daylights out of me. I lost 16 paid subscribers. And nobody replaced them.

In subscription businesses, people leave. That is churn. Usually, while somebody is heading out one door, somebody else wanders in through another. Not this time. The number dropped, and dropped, and nobody new came in.

That is when all my lovely talk about trusting my soul and intuition suddenly had to report for duty. I was scared. Really scared. This publication matters to me emotionally, but it also produces income.

I could hear that old business voice whispering: See? You pulled back, you stopped pushing, you stopped following all the advice, and now look at what’s happening. Get back to work. Post more, do more. FIX IT.

And more than once I said out loud, “Rosie girl, it’s time to step up or shut up.” Because either I believe all this stuff I have been talking about, or I don’t. Either I trust the relationship I have built with my intuition, my soul and my faith, or I only trust it when the numbers agree with me.

That was the test. Not whether I could sit peacefully in my pink robe and listen to my intuition when everything was going beautifully. Anybody can trust herself when the universe is handing out cookies. Could I trust myself when 16 people walked out the door, keep choosing what felt right when there was no immediate reward for choosing it, and resist running back to the empire simply because fear told me an empire might be safer?

THAT is trust.

I had to really wrestle with it. I had to sit down and listen. It was uncomfortable.

It was a wake up call and I knew I had to pay attention.

The days before the wake up call my mornings looked very different. I would wake up, grab the coffee I had programmed the night before, put on my pink fluffy robe and my clunky sheepskin-lined house shoes, shuffle straight into my office, collapse into the desk chair and announce, “Well. Here I am again.” UGH. There’s an inspiring way to greet another day of being alive.

Now the coffee is still there. Coffee has survived the metamorphosis. But I stay in the living room, sitting in my favorite chair in the pink robe and ridiculous house shoes. Sometimes I do breathwork, sometimes I sit quietly, sometimes I watch television, and sometimes an idea floats into my awareness. And I stay there until I feel myself. Only then do I get dressed and wander toward my desk. It usually delays my arrival there by about 2 hours. The empire has somehow survived without me for those 2 hours. Imagine that.

And the strangest thing has happened. I want to write again. I want to talk to you again. Not because my content calendar says I should, and not because some guru has informed me that Thursday at 9:42 a.m. is the optimal time to monetize my vulnerability, but because something inside me has something to say.

That is why you came here in the first place. You didn’t find me because I had perfected life in retirment. You found something I wrote. It connected with something inside you. And you stayed.

So perhaps this story isn’t only about me at all.

The more I think about it, the more I realize it is likely that somewhere in your life there is an empire you are busily constructing that you never actually asked for. It may not look like a business. It might look like being the family problem solver, the dependable grandmother, the church volunteer, the caretaker, or the woman who hosts every holiday because everyone says, “But you’re so good at it.” It might be the retirement everybody told you you’d love. It might even be a dream somebody praised you into having.

So before you put one more ounce of your life into making something happen, sit still long enough to ask yourself a question we women were not encouraged to ask nearly often enough: Do I actually want this? Not “Am I capable of it?” or “Would I be good at it?” or “Would everybody be impressed?” and not even “Could I make money doing it?”

Do. I. Want. It.

And if you don’t know the answer yet, good. Don’t manufacture one. Pour the coffee, stay in the bathrobe, and park yourself somewhere comfortable and give yourself enough quiet to hear the woman who has spent decades underneath everybody else’s expectations. She’s still there.

You don’t need to blow up your life tomorrow, you don’t need another 14-step program, and you don’t need to know exactly what comes next. But sooner or later you are going to come face to face with the question I had to answer: do you trust yourself only when everything is going according to plan? Or do you trust yourself enough to keep listening when the numbers drop, the old conditioning starts screaming, and you have absolutely no proof yet that you are making the right choice?

That is where trust stops being an idea. That is where it becomes yours.

And when that moment comes, here is what I heard when I finally sat still and listened:

Things always work out for you. Why would you stop trusting that now?

And this time, I believed me.

You know that feeling when something happens and you know something is off, but you still don’t quite trust yourself enough to act on what you know?

So you question it. Analyze it. Ask other people. Wait for more proof.

That is exactly why I created Building Believable Trust.

It is about learning to hear yourself clearly, trust what you know, and stop needing somebody else to confirm your own damn life for you.

Become an annual paid member and Building Believable Trust is included.

And because I know money is tight for some women right now, I’m offering 20% off this annual membership.

Join The Daily RE-Wire with an annual membership and I’ll give you the Building Believable Trust guidebook as part of your membership.

Because knowing what you want is one thing. Trusting yourself enough to follow it when old conditioning, fear, or somebody else’s expectations start shouting is where everything changes.

Become an annual member and get Building Believable Trust included.

I know some of you are struggling right now, so I’ve taken 20% off this particular annual membership. I want this work to be within reach for the women who need it.

20% Discount + Guidebook

It All Begins with a Long Forgotten Dream

Once upon a time, a little girl in had a dream.

Her dream was so urgent, so important to her, that every day she made sure her chores and homework were finished in time to run into the backyard, lie flat on her back, and watch an airplane fly overhead.

She felt free in those moments. She felt excitement, awe, and wonder. Her imagination carried her into that airplane, gliding through the sky, rushing through the sky, roaring through the sky with every restriction left somewhere below her.

And every time she watched it, she made a promise to herself.

She was going to become a pilot.

That little girl was me. I was 11 years old.

This was the early sixties. The odds of a little girl in Louisiana growing up to become a pilot weren’t particularly strong. But I wasn’t lying in the backyard considering the odds. I was watching an airplane and imagining myself flying it.

I never told anybody about that dream during my childhood. It belonged to me, and I carried it quietly until I was twenty, when I actually took flying lessons.

Turns out my eyes wouldn’t pass the test.

The flying lessons ended, but I never forgot the feeling. I never forgot what happened inside me when I watched that airplane and imagined the freedom of moving through the sky.

I got married at eighteen, and life moved fast. I didn’t think about that airplane dream for decades.

Then, during a live video stream on Substack, ( link to that video can be found at the end of this article) another woman mentioned offhandedly that she never remembers her dreams. So many people say that—that their past or their nocturnal dreams are just a blur, long forgotten. But as she spoke, that very memory resurfaced for me with startling clarity: the backyard, the airplane, the promise, and above all, the feeling.

It made me realize that catching those quiet nudges requires us to build believable trust in ourselves. When we learn to listen, we can recognize when our intuition—or our soul—is offering a clear sign, waiting for us to pay attention.

Last night, at almost eleven-thirty, I was in bed, all tucked in, when that little girl came back to me. The backyard. The airplane. The promise. And the feeling, as recognizable as if I had just come inside from watching it fly over.

Then I understood something.

I had to wait until my late sixties, but I now live the essence of that dream.

I know that freedom now. I know the excitement of imagining something and allowing myself to move toward it. I know the awe and wonder of discovering that my life can still open in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

There’s a familiarity to it that I hadn’t recognized until last night. This is the feeling I used to reach for while lying on my back in Louisiana.

For much of my life, there were responsibilities, relationships, expectations, and ideas about who I was supposed to be. I became very accomplished at doing what needed to be done. There were people to consider and obligations to meet, and I knew how to get on with it.

But that little girl had known something about herself before she had the language to explain it. She wanted room. She wanted movement. She wanted to experience the exhilaration of going somewhere she had imagined.

Now I can lie on my cloud of pillows and let my mind wander into an idea without demanding that it justify itself. I can follow the excitement of a painting, a story, a book I once insisted I would never write. I can choose how I want my life to feel and begin making choices that support it.

I trust myself to do that.

That trust gives me a freedom I spent a very long time wanting.

I find it extraordinary that a memory I hadn’t been thinking about could return so clearly and show me something about the life I’m living. All these years, I could have told you the facts: I wanted to become a pilot, I took lessons, my eyesight prevented it.

Last night, I could finally tell you the rest of the story.

The feeling I imagined as a child is here.

It makes me wonder how many women are carrying dreams they’ve filed away as things that never happened. Dreams they rarely mention because there seems to be no reason to bring them up now. A girl wanted something, life happened, and the woman she became learned to live with the unfinished story.

I’m interested in what that girl remembers.

What did she feel when she imagined her future? What was so exciting that she hurried through everything else just to spend time with it? Before she learned to consider everybody’s opinions, what did she want?

There is something deeply personal in those answers. Something worth hearing at this age, when we have the opportunity to make more of our own choices.

A woman who dreamed of dancing can still want to feel that freedom in her body. A woman who imagined seeing the world can still feel the pull of discovery. The particulars matter, and some of them can still be pursued. So does the feeling that made the dream hers in the first place.

I wouldn’t tell another woman what her childhood dream meant. I’m just now understanding my own.

I wanted to fly. I wanted it enough to arrange my afternoons around an airplane and, years later, take the lessons. I remember that desire with tenderness and respect.

And now, at seventy-one, I recognize the freedom, excitement, awe, and wonder of that dream in my everyday life. And THAT information informs how I make choices, descions and create expectations for myself.

For many retirees, this kind of exploration goes far beyond standard post-career pursuits or traditional volunteering. It provides an avenue to reconnect with what genuinely ignited intrinsic joy and aliveness earlier in life, opening up a deeply personal and authentic sense of purpose.

That little girl and I have something to talk about.

I think she would be thrilled to hear how her story is unfolding.

If that little girl you used to be is still trying to get your attention, don’t brush her off.

Most of us spent a lifetime being taught that our worth is measured by our productivity, our service to others, and our ability to keep everyone else’s expectations met. So when a quiet nudge or a childhood memory from age 10, 11, or 12 whispers about a dream we set aside, our default is to shrug it off. We tell ourselves it’s too late, it’s useless, or we simply don’t have time for such things.

But that nudge isn’t random. It’s information. It’s your inner guidance trying to lead you back to a part of yourself you left behind.

If you are ready to stop waiting for permission and start believing your own intuition again, I want to help you take that next step.

When you become a paid subscriber to this Substack, I’m gifting you my complete resource guide, Building Believable Trust in Yourself. It’s designed to help you quiet the doubt, dismantle the lie that your worth depends solely on what you produce, and finally take your own inner voice seriously.

Upgrade to Paid and Get Your Guide

Subscribe now

Be sure to send me a message that you’ve subscribed so that I can give you the link to Building Believable Trust in Yourself.

Who are you when nobody needs you anymore:

There comes a peculiar moment in a woman’s life when some of the jobs she has spent decades performing begin to disappear.

The children grow up. The career ends. The marriage changes, or ends, or settles into something entirely different. Nobody needs you to organize the bake sale, drive somebody to practice, remember everybody’s birthday, solve the crisis, make the casserole, keep the peace or hold the whole damn thing together.

And sometimes, instead of feeling liberated, you stand there thinking:

Well, who the hell am I now?

That was the question at the center of the conversation Lisa Garvey and I had last night.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I had spent much of my own life living scripts that had been handed to me.

At eighteen, I didn’t even know I had the right to want something for myself.

I knew what I was supposed to do. I knew how a wife behaved, how a mother behaved, how a preacher’s wife behaved, how a good woman behaved. I knew how to fulfill a role.

Wanting was another matter entirely.

Eventually life dismantled enough of those roles for me that I had no choice but to meet myself.

A hurricane took my house in Louisiana. My marriage ended. I moved to Lynchburg because my daughter and her family lived here, and nine months later they moved away.

There I was.

No house. No husband. No children who needed raising.

No familiar identity to hide behind.

It was as if life had stripped me naked, stood me in front of a full-length mirror and said:

Okay, Monica. Now who are you?

That question changed everything.

You may not need a purpose. You may need an intention.

Retirement advice loves the word purpose.

Find your purpose.

Volunteer.

Stay useful.

Give back.

For heaven’s sake, apparently we’re not allowed to simply finish one enormously demanding chapter of life without immediately getting another assignment.

I don’t think purpose is where we begin.

I think we begin with how we want to feel.

During the conversation, I asked Lisa what had made her smile that day. Then I asked what had recently put a sparkle in her eye.

Out of that little conversation came three words:

Love. Excitement. Future.

There was her intention.

Not a job description.

Not another obligation.

Not something she could add to her calendar and perform correctly.

A direction.

What if you did the same thing?

Instead of asking, What should I do with the rest of my life?, what if you asked:

How do I want the rest of my life to feel?

That is an entirely different question.

And frankly, I think it’s a much better one.

The problem may not be that you don’t know what you want.

Women tell me all the time, “I don’t know what I want anymore.”

I’m not convinced that’s true.

I think many of us have simply spent so many years listening to everybody else that we stopped recognizing our own voice.

Call it intuition. Call it spirit. Call it your soul. Call it a hunch if all the spiritual language makes you itchy.

I don’t care what you call it.

But there is something inside us that notices.

It notices what feels expansive and what feels constricting. It notices the person we want to call, the place we want to visit, the idea that keeps returning, the thing that makes us unexpectedly happy.

The trouble is that those little whispers are often buried beneath forty years of:

I should.

I really ought to.

People will expect me to.

What will they think?

I can’t possibly.

We have shoulded ourselves nearly to death.

So perhaps the work now isn’t inventing a new woman.

Perhaps it is excavating the woman who has been underneath all that obligation the entire time.

Go back before everybody started telling you who to be.

If you truly have no idea what you want, I’d like you to remember yourself at ten, eleven or twelve years old.

What fascinated you?

What did you imagine?

What did you pretend to be?

Before you learned what was sensible, appropriate, ladylike, realistic or marketable, what made you feel alive?

When I was eleven years old, I wanted to fly airplanes.

I would lie in the grass near the airport, watch the planes cross the sky and think, I want to do that.

I actually did go to pilot school when I was twenty. It didn’t last very long because, at four-foot-eleven, I had a rather important problem involving my feet and the pedals.

But becoming a pilot isn’t the point.

The feeling was.

Adventure.

Wonder.

Possibility.

The audacity of looking into the sky and imagining myself up there.

Lisa told me she wanted to be Cher.

Now THAT is a childhood dream I can get behind.

But when we dug beneath Cher’s hair and gowns and fabulousness, Lisa realized what she had really been responding to.

Power.

Presence.

A woman who seemed to move through the world as if nobody got to tell her who she was.

There was the message hiding inside the childhood dream.

Your old dreams may contain information for the woman you are today.

You do not necessarily need to resurrect the dream literally.

You reclaim the feeling inside it.

And then you begin noticing.

If I could give a woman one exercise after watching this conversation, it would be ridiculously simple.

Tomorrow, take a route you travel all the time.

The grocery store. Your daughter’s house. The pharmacy. Wherever.

And notice three things you have never noticed before.

That’s it.

Three.

Because most of us spend huge portions of our lives on autopilot.

Same road. Same thoughts. Same errands. Same complaints. Same internal conversations.

Noticing interrupts that.

And once you start noticing the world around you, you may also begin noticing yourself.

I’d love to do that.

I miss that.

That looks fun.

I wonder what would happen if...

Do not immediately kill the thought.

Do not drag out the committee of practicality and ask them to review it.

Just notice.

Collect those moments.

I call something similar a joy ledger.

Not a gratitude list you perform every morning because somebody told you successful spiritual people write five things before breakfast.

I mean actual joy.

The weed pushing triumphantly through a crack in the sidewalk.

A song that makes you dance in your kitchen.

A little boy playing football.

The light hitting a tree in a way that makes you stop.

Those tiny sparks matter because joy compounds.

You are allowed to say no without submitting a legal brief.

Another thing we talked about was the exhausting habit women have of making everybody comfortable with our choices.

Someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do, and instead of saying no, we begin producing evidence.

Well, I would, but Tuesday I have this appointment and then my daughter might need me and Wednesday I have...

Stop.

“No, that doesn’t work for me.”

Whole sentence.

“Nope, can’t do that.”

Another whole sentence.

I spent years explaining myself.

These days, if something does not fit my life, I do not believe I owe anyone a dissertation defending the decision.

That is part of reclaiming yourself too.

Put yourself on your own calendar.

We make appointments with dentists, hairdressers, grandchildren, accountants and everybody else who requires a chunk of our existence.

How often do we make an appointment with ourselves?

Not to accomplish something.

Not to improve ourselves.

Not to fix anything.

Simply to listen.

I have a reminder on my phone that goes off every hour. It says:

Bring your attention home.

Home means me.

My mind. My body. My spirit. My attention.

Even sixty seconds of coming back to yourself can change the direction of a day.

Because your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess.

And you are allowed to give some of it to yourself.

Maybe this stage of life isn’t about becoming someone new at all.

Perhaps we have spent enough years performing versions of ourselves that made everyone else comfortable.

Maybe now we get to become genuine.

I like that word better than authentic.

Genuine.

There is something almost innocent about it.

Unmanufactured.

Unperformed.

Undiluted.

At the end of our conversation, that was what I kept coming back to.

The women I meet are not necessarily looking for a bigger life.

They are looking for a life that finally feels like theirs.

So if something inside you has been itching lately, if there is a nudge saying this doesn’t quite fit anymore, do not dismiss it.

You do not have to blow up your life tomorrow.

You do not have to know your purpose.

You do not need a five-year plan.

Start smaller.

Notice what makes you smile.

Notice what gives you a spark.

Remember what once made you dream.

Spend a little time alone with yourself.

And for God’s sake, stop assuming everybody else gets a vote.

There is still a woman in there.

She may have been buried beneath roles, obligations, manners, responsibilities and an astonishing pile of shoulds.

But she is still there.

And I have a sneaking suspicion she is one pretty nifty old broad.

Want to keep this conversation going?

This is exactly the kind of conversation we have every Tuesday night in Breakthrough, my private gathering for paid subscribers.

There are no recordings, no performances, no experts handing you another list of things you should be doing with your life. We talk honestly about the conditioning we’ve carried, the roles we’re ready to put down, the dreams we may have forgotten and the woman who is beginning to emerge underneath all of it.

And increasingly, I find myself sitting back while these remarkable women begin helping one another see what they couldn’t quite see alone.

If something in this article made you think, Oh. There’s something here I need to explore, become a paid subscriber and come join us in Breakthrough.

You don’t need to arrive knowing what comes next.

That’s part of what we’re there to discover.

Subscribe now

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.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! 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

Those famous little memories Facebook brings to our attention can often trigger unhappy memories. Apparently, nobody told Facebook that some things don’t deserve an encore.

The reminder brought up a situation that remains unresolved, one I can’t change. For about thirty seconds, I was right back in the feelings that came with it.

Then I caught myself.

I recognized where my thoughts were taking me.

It’s easy to feel powerless at that moment and simply follow whatever thoughts the memory triggers. A few minutes can turn into an entire afternoon, depending on the emotional wound it opens. I know how easily I can get pulled into replaying something without ever deciding to spend my day there.

BUT! We do have a choice.

We can make A HARD PIVOT: deliberately choosing, in that moment, where we give our attention.

That’s what I did.

I turned toward her: the woman I am becoming.

In my mind’s eye, I chose to see her. Me, with the same soul at the center, taking deliberate steps toward a life that looks and feels more like my own.

I’ve been holding a beautiful image of her, and I chose to give her my attention.

She isn’t some entirely different woman waiting for me in the future. She is still me. But she is me with fewer old instructions running the show.

And more to the point, I really like her.

It feels good to think about her. To wonder how she thinks. What she chooses. What she no longer explains. What she gives her attention to and what she simply refuses to carry another mile.

She is who I see in my mind when my brain is triggered by a bad memory I don’t want to spend the afternoon rehearsing.

My mood changed almost immediately.

The situation hadn’t gone away.

I had simply stopped rehearsing it. More interesting is that there is science about this

A neurosurgeon whose video I watched recently put language to something I have been noticing: the brain gets better at what we repeatedly practice, including the thoughts and emotional patterns we return to. Hence whatever BAD thoughts or memories we repeast we will - in the future - create more reasons to feel those sad or miserable thoughts. Conversley the more we choose to recall or imagine something that we like, we will create more reasons to expiernce those in the future.

That landed with me today because I could feel the difference between replaying the old scene and turning toward the next one.

We often speak of retirement as an ending.

Yes, a particular chapter ends.

But the woman at the center of it is still here, still becoming.

And this is where I want you to picture yourself on the other side of this.

Imagine a memory, an old disappointment, an old obligation or somebody else’s voice beginning its familiar little speech in your head.

But this time, you recognize it.

You don’t follow it for the next four hours.

You don’t let it decide what kind of afternoon you are going to have.

Instead, you turn toward the woman you have decided to be.

Perhaps she is sipping morning coffee by the window or taking a walk through her favorite gardne.

Perhaps she is boarding a plane.

Perhaps she is drinking coffee at eleven o’clock in the morning without feeling remotely guilty that she hasn’t accomplished anything yet.

Perhaps she has stopped saying yes automatically.

Perhaps she is learning something simply because it fascinates her.

Perhaps she is wearing red shoes.

Perhaps the most radical thing about her is that she finally trusts herself to decide what belongs in her own life.

The details will be different for every one of us.

That’s the point.

You are not required to become anybody else’s version of a successful retired woman.

But it is worth spending a few minutes considering who you are becoming and developing an image that reflects your own expectations and desires.

I get to practice seeing her because I deliberately choose to.

And so do you.

Tomorrow during BREAKTHROUGH, I’ll share how I created my own image so you can have some fun imagining yours.

BREAKTHROUGH is our weekly gathering for paid members of The Daily RE-Wire. Along with a dependable place to gather each week, paid members have access to the downloads and resources on our Perks page.

If you’re considering WHO YOU ARE BECOMING now that retirement is here, come spend some time with us. There’s something lovely about being among women who are asking themselves that same question.

And this may very well be your lucky day! I am offering 20% off an annual subscription plus The Re-Foundation Guide, created as a tool to help you choose your own becoming.

20% Off + Re-Foundation

20% Off+ Re-Foundation

.

The Conditioning We Did Not Notice

I finally have the freedom I waited decades for—so why am I still waiting for permission to use it? (And no, asking my inner critic doesn’t count.)

I think a lot of women reach retirement expecting standard-issue total freedom and are promptly hit with a bizarre sense of lingering obligation. The kids are grown, the career is wrapped up, the alarm clock no longer aggressively screams at 6:00 AM, and there is finally time to paint, travel, read, sit in pajamas until noon, spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing remotely productive, or simply wake up and stare at the ceiling.

And yet, under all that luxurious empty space, something still feels suspiciously tight. As if your inner critic want to drag you back in time

That “something” has a voice. Most of us know her intimately by now, even if we haven’t officially introduced ourselves. She’s the self-appointed hall monitor who pops up the exact moment you lay down for an afternoon nap to whisper, “Really? A nap? You have all this shiny new freedom and you’re going to spend it horizontal? Get up and be useful.”

I call her the inner critic, mostly because calling her “The Buzzkill” lacks professional polish. She doesn’t need to shout. She just helpfully reminds us that we really should be doing more—volunteering, optimizing our schedule, hunting for our grand life purpose, or at the very least doing squats while reading a book on self-improvement.

Her voice becomes so familiar that eventually we stop recognizing it as an unwanted houseguest. We assume it’s just our own personality—a charming realization that hit me when I started looking into where she actually came from.

Once I started tracking her commentary, I realized she’s been running the background software for decades. One of her earliest installations, naturally, was in body image.

A few days ago, I wrote about Charo. If you were conscious during the Johnny Carson era, you remember: the hair, the accent, the tiny waist, and the bustline that defied physics. She once demonstrated a specific exercise designed to help women “develop” their bust, and the memory threw me right back to my teenage bedroom.

There I was, standing in front of a mirror, dutifully doing chest squeezes in the faint hope of conjuring an extra cup size out of thin air. Looking back, I was less startled by the silliness of the exercise than by how utterly natural it felt to assume my body needed immediate fixing. I posted a Note about it, and the responses confirmed my suspicions.

You can read it here:

Turns out, an alarming number of us were in our bedrooms doing the exact same ridiculous exercises.

We can laugh now, because picturing teenagers doing bust-building routines on television advice is genuinely hilarious. But underneath the comedy was a solid lesson: we absorbed the instruction manual without ever asking who wrote it.

That was the part that stopped me.

Seriously, who decided that was on the syllabus?

Nobody sat me down at the kitchen table and said, “Monica, your developing female body is inadequate and needs improvement so that one day men will find you more desirable.”

No one handed us a formal memo saying, “Your teenage body is flawed and requires continuous maintenance to remain competitive.” They didn’t need to.

And body image was just the warm-up act. As we grew up, that same critical energy migrated right into how we managed our time and lives, setting up shop in her absolute favorite domain: The Land of Shoulds.

I spent seventeen years as a preacher’s wife. At one church, when they officially hired my husband, they thoughtfully handed me a list of duties they expected me to perform.

Just to clarify: I was not on the payroll. I hadn’t even applied for the job.

Now we have corporate buzzwords for that, like “unpaid labor.” Back then, my inner critic didn’t even raise an eyebrow. She just handed me an apron and reminded me that a good, supportive wife gets to work without complaining.

That’s the genius of the inner critic: once she’s fully installed, external enforcers are redundant. You police yourself. And when we gather in groups, our inner critics form a union and start policing each other.

I got a front-row seat to this committee in action when I dared to question the standard script for retired women.

A piece I wrote challenged the sacred rule that retired women must immediately find a brand-new grand purpose or sign up for every volunteer committee in a ten-mile radius. I wasn’t anti-volunteering or anti-kindness. I was anti-mandatory.

I wrote a Note about that too, and it gathered some very interesting responses. You can read it here:

Why is it that after decades of raising humans, managing careers, keeping households running, caring for aging parents, and serving every board under the sun, a woman steps into retirement only to find someone waiting at the door with another clipboard? “Congrats on finishing those forty years! Here is your new assignment list.”

Give me a break.

The reaction was hilarious and telling. Many women cheered in relief. Others rushed in to defend volunteering as if I’d suggested outlawing joy. A few seemed genuinely shocked—almost scandalized—by the radical notion that a retired woman might simply want to own her own schedule.

It wasn’t a debate about community service; it was a room full of inner critics cross-examining one another to make sure nobody was slacking off.

I wasn’t arguing against generosity; I was arguing against guilt. Chosen generosity feels fantastic. Mandatory virtue feels like an extension of the job you just retired from.

Which brings us back to that weird, unmoored feeling in retirement.

You have the time, the freedom, the quiet—and yet you feel restless, vaguely guilty, and oddly unsatisfied. Why? Because the voice in your head is still keeping score using rules from 1970s.

Maybe retirement isn’t broken. Maybe we just forgot to hand our inner critic her pink slip.

That is the rub.

She’s still standing there with her whistle and clipboard. You can have a completely blank calendar and still feel like you’re running late. You can have total autonomy and still hear a background voice demanding a full progress report before dinner.

Those rules have simply been around so long that they feel like your own good sense instead of hers.

And don’t think she limits herself to work ethic—she has plenty of snarky opinions about simple pleasure, too.

I read about a woman who thoroughly enjoys burning dried sage bundles in her living room. It makes her happy. Naturally, her inner critic immediately piped up to warn her not to turn into one of those weird, “woo-woo” people.

Her inner response? A swift, glorious “fuck off.”

I practically applauded. But it’s wild, isn’t it? Even basic, harmless pleasure has to apply for a permit.

“Is this respectable? Is it useful? Will the neighbors think you’ve lost your mind? Are you wasting daylight?”

Who invited her to the sage burning, anyway?

Mine speaks fluent Shouldian. She constantly nudges me to do something productive, clean something, fix something, or justify my existence. Half the time, I don’t even realize it’s her—I just feel a sudden, unexplainable urge to reorganize a closet I don’t care about.

And feeding her more tasks isn’t going to fix it. Taking on another project just hands the manager a fresh set of clipboards.

The actual fix? Subtraction.

We start tossing out rules we never opted into: the need to justify rest, the idea that fun must be earned, and the bizarre belief that our schedules still need to make sense to anyone else.

By the time we hit our sixties and seventies, those old rules don’t feel like conditioning anymore. They disguise themselves as “character” or “common sense.”

Now, look—I like being kind, reliable, and decent. I’m not suggesting we become professional line-cutters or stop caring about people. I’m not firing my internal conscience entirely.

But being kind is not the same as being a pushover. Being generous doesn’t require infinite availability. And being a good human being is not the same thing as being a perpetually useful tool.

Her original job was to keep us functional and polite. It was never her job to define who we are.

The beauty of this age is perspective. We finally have enough distance to inspect an old rule, hold it up to the light, and say, “Is this actually mine, or did I adopt this from a magazine in 1974?”

That’s the real prize of getting older. We don’t know everything, but we’ve lived long enough to recognize when we’re being played by our own brain—and we get to decide if she still gets a vote.

The goal is not to put the inner critic on trial or blame the mothers, churches, husbands, teachers, advertisers or cultures that helped create her. Most of them were listening to their own version of that voice.

The goal isn’t to launch a dramatic tribunal against our past or blame our mothers, teachers, or 1960s commercials. They were all wrestling with their own nagging inner bossestrick is simply catching her in the act.

✅Notice when the word should rears its head.

✅Notice when you feel guilty for sitting in a chair doing nothing.

✅Notice when you feel compelled to justify taking a nap or buying something purely because it brings you joy.

Then ask: Is that actual wisdom, or is that just the hall monitor talking?

If it’s wisdom? Great, keep it.

If it’s the hall monitor repeating an echo from fifty years ago? Thank her for her long service and invite her to take a permanent break.

Rewiring retirement isn’t about inventing a brand-new persona. It’s about reclaiming the steering wheel. It’s deciding how we spend our time, how we feel about our bodies, and what this season actually gets to look like without needing an approving nod from an old voice.

The girl doing exercises in her bedroom was just trying to follow the rules. The woman hesitation-free burning sage almost fell for them again decades later.

They are the same woman, decades apart, still asking the same voice for permission.

We are done asking that voice for permission.

We finally have the freedom we waited decades for. Now comes the more interesting question:

What would you do today if your inner critic wasn’t allowed in the room?

What is one “should” your inner critic is currently nagging you about, and what would you do if you completely ignored her?

That’s the work we do in REFOUNDATION. It helps you uncover the old rules, expectations and beliefs that may still be making decisions for you, so you can begin choosing your days from a much clearer place: your own.

The goal isn’t to become somebody new. It’s to feel the relief of no longer needing permission to be who you already are. I suspect many of you are unaware this inner critic it navigating your life, quietly in the back ground.

REFOUNDATION is complimentary for paid subscribers. And right now, you can become a paid subscriber at 20% off and receive the workbook as part of your subscription.

Subscibe with 20% OFF

Be sure to send me a message that you’ve join so that I am able to send you the link for your FREE copy of ReFoundation!

Here’s a short little video I recorded about intention BEFORE Purpose arrives

That’s where this conversation with Ilona went.

We talked about the conditioning women carry into retirement, our obsession with finding a “purpose,” learning to trust our own intuition again, creativity, aging, gray hair, bad decisions, good instincts, and why listening to that little inner nudge may matter more now than ever.

We also wandered into Substack, Breakthrough, my rather colorful history, and why I believe women at this stage of life have an extraordinary opportunity to stop living by rules they never consciously chose.

Ilona called me her mentor, which still makes me grin.

Mostly, though, this is two women talking about the enormous, largely unwritten territory ahead of us.

We have a future.

And perhaps the most interesting question now is: What do we want to do with it?

If this conversation stirred something in you, Breakthrough is where we keep talking about it.

Every week, women gather with me to talk honestly about what comes after the old roles, the old expectations, and the old instructions about what retirement is supposed to look like. There is no course to complete and no commitment to attend every week. Come when you want. Step away when you need to. Come back when you’re ready.

It is simply a place to be with other women who are breaking through the noise and figuring out what makes life feel satisfying now.

Breakthrough is included with a paid subscription to The Daily RE-Wire.

And through September 30, an annual membership is 20% off.

If you’ve been wondering what comes next, you don’t have to figure it out alone.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Join today for 20% discount

Get more from Monica Hebert in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

brings more than 20 years of professional copywriting experience. I bring the receipts from building from zero to nearly 7,500 subscribers inside Substack, including $4,305.93 in annual recurring revenue attributed to Notes in just two months.

But this wasn’t a presentation. It became a real conversation about what actually works: spontaneous Notes, personality, photographs, storytelling, annual subscriptions, CTAs, segmentation, direct emails, open rates, and learning to pay attention to what your own readers are telling you.

We also talked about something I believe strongly: you cannot create a formula for being a human being on Substack.

The live audience kept peppering us with questions, which made the whole thing even better.

If you’re building here, there’s plenty in this hour worth stealing.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! 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

The day after I found my second husband in bed with another woman, I put my two dogs in the car, packed a couple of changes of clothes, and drove from New York City to my daughter’s house in D.C. I had a few hundred dollars in cash and no plan beyond leaving. I didn’t know where I would live or what I would do next. I knew only that I could no longer live with him.

The woman was 20 years older than he was. The irony has not escaped me that I am now the age she was then. At the time, her age was one more bewildering detail in a day that had already turned my life upside down. I believed he was interested in her money. She had been a Ford model and had done well for herself. Whatever drew him to her, I was done trying to build a life with a man I could no longer trust.

I wish I could sit beside the woman I was on that drive and tell her she didn’t have to know her next purpose. She needed a place to land. Then, when she could breathe again, she could begin asking what kind of life she intended to have.

That is a question I have learned to take seriously. You can write an intention without knowing how you will fulfill it. You can name how you want to feel and who you want to become, then pay attention as you move through your days. Notice the conversation that stays with you, the place you want to return to, the work that makes you lose track of time. Those small sparks give you something real to follow. I believe the universe meets us in that attention, often through people and circumstances we could never have planned.

It took me almost 20 years to understand this well enough to live it. Writing on Substack was never a purpose I set out to find. I began paying attention to what felt alive in me, and writing found its way into my life. Now it is part of what gives my days meaning.

I would give anything to sit down with a roomful of women facing a divorce, a retirement, a loss, or any change that has left them wondering what comes next. I would tell them what I wish someone had told me: when you are ready, write down your intention. Let it describe a life you would recognize as your own. Then keep your eyes open for what draws you toward it.

I can’t go back and tell the woman in that car. So I’m telling you.

Tomorrow, I’m sending my full article, Intention Before Purpose, to my five-star subscribers. If you’re standing at a crossroads and have no idea what comes next, I hope you’ll read it. You don’t have to figure out your purpose before you take the next step.

Yesterday morning, I saw a woman announce on Threads that she was officially retired. She had barely stepped across the threshold before the questions came tumbling out: Now what am I supposed to do with myself? What will my purpose be? How do I find it?

The responses were predictable. Volunteer. Take a class. Go hiking. Join a group. Travel. Find a hobby. Get involved in your community.

In other words, she retired from one assignment sheet and everybody rushed to hand her another one.

I found myself wondering why we are in such a hurry to find purpose in retirement. For most of our adult lives, somebody needed something from us. Employers, children, husbands, households, aging parents. We knew where to be, what needed doing and what would happen if we failed to handle it.

Usefulness became so tangled up with identity that when all that needing suddenly quiets down, freedom can feel remarkably like disorientation.

So we fill the space.

There is nothing wrong with volunteering or traveling or taking a class. Any of those things can make a life richer. But activity is not automatically purpose, and a full calendar is not proof that a life matters.

I think we may be starting with the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “What is my purpose now?” I am far more interested in asking, “How do I intend to live?”

How do I want my life to feel? Peaceful? Curious? Creative? Adventurous? Unhurried? Satisfying? What kind of relationship do I want with my time? What do I want more of now that so much of my life no longer belongs to somebody else?

I believe purpose follows intention.

I know that because it happened to me.

Substack was not anywhere on my bingo card. I didn’t know anything about it. I wasn’t planning to become a writer, build a publication or gather thousands of women around something called The Daily RE-Wire.

What I had decided was how I wanted to live.

I wanted a life that felt satisfying, and I wanted curiosity to have a large place in it.

So for a few weeks, that was what I thought about. Satisfaction. Curiosity. Not what I should accomplish with them. Not how I could monetize them. Not what impressive new identity I could construct around

So for a few weeks, that was what I thought about. Satisfaction. Curiosity. Not what I should accomplish with them. Not how I could monetize them. Not what impressive new identity I could construct around them.

I simply paid attention.

And I began noticing what I was curious about.

I started writing little 100- and 200-word missives on Facebook about the things I was thinking about. There was no strategy behind them. I was following my own interest.

Then one of those little pieces caught the attention of a woman who would eventually become one of the strongest supporters of my work and buy a large painting from me. She told me why the painting mattered so much to her, and in the process she told me about a dream of her own, a book she wanted to publish but could not seem to bring into reality.

Her story stayed with me.

And there came curiosity again.

I wondered how many other women were sitting on dreams they had postponed while raising families, building careers, taking care of everybody else and doing all the things responsible women were supposed to do.

I wondered what might happen if somebody encouraged those women to go back and take another look.

About two days later, The Daily RE-Wire was born.

I began writing about retirement without the usual prescriptions about what women our age ought to be doing. I wanted to talk about the freedom to reconsider our lives, reclaim abandoned dreams and decide for ourselves what would make these years satisfying.

That was January 2024.

Today, September 22, 2026, there are 7,500 subscribers here, and I am still somewhat astonished by the whole thing.

Helping women discover how to create a satisfying life in retirement has become a purpose in my life.

But I could never have gone looking for that purpose because I did not know it existed.

It appeared after I decided how I wanted to live.

That is the distinction I think we have missed.

Purpose does not always need to be hunted down like a missing set of car keys. Sometimes we establish an intention, become quiet enough to notice what interests us, and begin following the breadcrumbs.

Curiosity leads somewhere. Creativity leads somewhere. Peace leads somewhere. Connection leads somewhere.

And the somewhere does not have to become a business, a movement, a nonprofit or a second career. Purpose does not have to impress anybody. It may simply become the organizing principle that makes your life feel like your own.

We spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at doing.

Retirement may be our chance to become equally interested in being.

So I am not terribly interested in telling a newly retired woman to hurry up and find her purpose.

I want to know something else first.

How does she intend to feel while she is living the rest of her life?

Start there.

Purpose has a rather remarkable way of catching up.

I’ve created a little two-page worksheet to help you do this for yourself.

It will walk you through what you no longer want your life to feel like, the moments when you have felt most like yourself, and the three words that might begin to define how you intend to live now. From there, you’ll shape those words into an intention you can actually use.

You do not have to have the answers before you begin. That is the whole point of the worksheet.

Paid subscribers are eligible to get the worksheet as a download on the PERKS page.Just click the PDF download it, and give yourself a little quiet time with it.

And please do not rush it. This is not homework. It is a conversation with yourself.

Get the Intention Worksheet

The Morning I Went Looking for a Fight and Couldn’t Find One

A while back, I caught myself sitting at my desk searching my own mind for something to be annoyed about.

I mean actually searching.

Surely somebody had irritated me. Surely there was an old slight lying around that could be dusted off and taken for another spin. A problem would have worked. An injustice. A crisis. Something that needed fixing immediately.

Anything to get the engine turning over.

Nothing.

The grievance shelf was bare.

And as ridiculous as that sounds, it made me wonder how many of us have spent so much of our adult lives being powered by necessity that we don’t quite know what to do with ourselves when necessity finally shuts up.

For decades, most women I know did not wake up in the morning wondering what they wanted to do with the day. The day had already made its demands.

Children needed breakfast. Somebody had to get to school. Somebody else needed clean clothes. There were jobs, deadlines, husbands, aging parents, groceries, bills, doctors, broken appliances, family crises and all the ordinary machinery of a life that depended upon us showing up whether we felt inspired or not.

Life handed us the clipboard.

And we got very good at carrying it.

Some of us became astonishingly competent under pressure. Give us a problem and we’d start solving it before everybody else had finished explaining it. Give us something to rebuild, protect, overcome or hold together and somehow the energy appeared.

Urgency was its own fuel.

I know it was for me.

For most of my life, my energy arrived like a fire truck, with sirens. I could claw my way back from damn near anything, and I did. Again and again.

What I was considerably less practiced at was standing in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody needed saving and nothing was on fire, and asking myself, “What would I like to do?”

That is a very different question.

And I suspect this later season of life confronts many of us with it in ways we never anticipated.

The children are grown. The office isn’t calling. The deadlines have changed. Some of the people we spent years caring for are gone. The routines that organized whole decades of our lives loosen their grip.

The clipboard gets lighter.

Sometimes it disappears altogether.

You would think that would feel like freedom from the first glorious minute.

Instead, it can feel strangely uncomfortable.

There used to be a fire in the belly every day because there was something that required our attention. Now, even when life is good, there can be mornings when nothing is particularly urgent.

And nobody tells you that the absence of urgency can feel a little like the absence of yourself.

That is the part I have been noticing.

This morning, for instance, I made an executive decision.

I have promoted myself to Chief Executive Officer of My Own Damn Energy, and the first order of business was deciding what constituted a reasonable agenda for the day.

The answer was: unload the dishwasher.

Not unload the dishwasher, take a shower, change the sheets, sweep the floor, answer emails, write an article, paint for 2 hours and figure out what I’m doing with the rest of my life before lunch.

Just unload the dishwasher.

I might even load it again afterward if the spirit moves me, but I am making no promises.

There was a time when unloading the dishwasher would not have earned a place on the list. It was something I did on the way to doing 6 other things. Showering wasn’t an event. Changing the sheets wasn’t an event. Going downstairs wasn’t an event.

Now I notice those things.

My energy has changed. So has the way I want to spend it.

And I think many of us are learning an entirely different way of generating a life.

For decades, life told us what mattered next. We responded.

Now the question becomes less about what is required and more about what is desired.

And that is not necessarily easier.

What do I want to do today when nobody urgently needs me to do anything? What interests me when there is no gold star for finishing it? What feels meaningful when nobody is depending on the outcome? What kind of life do I build when I am no longer constructing it around obligation?

Silence can feel suspicious when you’ve spent decades listening for sirens.

At first, I kept expecting something to arrive and pull me forward the way life always had before. Some enormous project. Some ambition. Some righteous irritation. Something big enough to light the old fire again.

I thought perhaps I needed another reinvention.

Surely retirement was supposed to produce some fabulous new version of me. A woman with a mission statement, an exciting next chapter and possibly a notebook filled with goals.

Instead, some mornings the biggest thing on my agenda is groceries.

Today it’s the dishwasher.

And increasingly, I am beginning to think nothing has gone wrong.

What if we don’t need that frantic fire anymore?

What if the woman who knew how to function beautifully in a crisis has simply finished that assignment?

And what if she does not need to be replaced by another equally busy woman who immediately fills retirement with a new collection of obligations simply because an empty calendar makes her nervous?

The issue isn’t whether we volunteer, travel, work, garden, paint, walk 10,000 steps or spend the afternoon reading on the sofa.

That distinction matters to me.

Because a woman can become so accustomed to proving she can survive that she doesn’t immediately recognize the moment when survival is no longer the assignment.

Then what?

Now that is an interesting question.

I don’t have a tidy answer, and I am increasingly suspicious of anyone who claims to have one for all of us.

I do know I am no longer interested in measuring today’s life against the woman I was 20 or 30 years ago.

She had different responsibilities, different energy and an entirely different set of reasons for getting out of bed every morning.

She did her job.

She did it damn well.

She can retire.

What interests me now is the woman who appears when nobody sounds the alarm.

Those are the questions we keep circling around here at The Daily RE-Wire.

Not how to become younger. Not how to become busier. Not how to prove that we still matter.

I’m interested in something much more basic than that.

Once nobody else is writing the agenda, how do we figure out what actually belongs on it?

Today, for me, that begins with unloading the dishwasher.

Eventually.

And perhaps that is enough.

Because I no longer think the goal is to get the old engine roaring again.

I think some of us are finally quiet enough to notice that we get to decide where we want to go.

If you’re asking the same question

ReFoundation is the work I created for exactly this part of life: separating what you actually want now from everything you have spent a lifetime believing you should want.

It is included at no additional cost with an annual paid subscription to The Daily RE-Wire. A 20% discount on annual subscription is availbe through September 30.

After a lifetime of answering everybody else’s demands, perhaps the most interesting question left is the simplest one:

What do I want to do with the life that is finally mine?

Re-Foundation + Subscription

Once you have become a member with your subscription you can mosey over to the PERKS page to download RE-FOUNDATION. Also you are included int the weekly Breakthrough zoom group, hosted by me. A weekly conversation for women over 60 who want more of themsevles at this stage of life.

Subscribe now

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. Please help me find her.

Have You Ever Taken Yourself on a Blind Date?

A blind date is dinner with someone you know absolutely nothing about while privately hoping he has all his teeth, chews with his mouth closed, and does not spend forty-five minutes explaining his gallbladder surgery.

Person A asks Person B questions. Person B answers and asks questions of Person A. This continues until they discover something they have in common, fall madly in love, or one of them begins calculating whether she can pay the check and escape before dessert.

It recently occurred to me that I need to take myself on a blind date.

Apparently, I have been ghosting myself for years.

I know I am not the woman I was five years ago, much less ten. Yet I have been so busy surviving, adapting, solving problems, and handling whatever fresh foolishness arrived at my door that I never stopped to meet the woman all that living created.

I assume I know her because we live together. We share a bathroom. I know how she takes her coffee, which chair she prefers, and exactly how long she can tolerate people before wanting to go home.

Do I know what she believes now? What delights her? What bores the hell out of her?

So I think I shall take this woman somewhere pleasant. I’ll wear something that makes me feel fabulous, order exactly what I want, put my phone away, and try not to interrupt her with answers pulled from an old file.

Do you still believe that?

Do you still want that?

Is that still your dream, or have you been faithfully dragging around the dream of a woman who packed up and left years ago?

That may be one of the strangest parts of growing older. We change so gradually that we fail to notice a new woman has moved in.

And if I am going to spend the rest of my life with her, it seems only polite to buy her dinner and find out who the hell she is.

That is exactly why I created ReFoundation. . It is a way of becoming reacquainted with the woman you are now, beneath all the roles, obligations, assumptions, and old decisions that may no longer fit. If your blind date with yourself leaves you wanting a second date, ReFoundation will help you continue the conversation.

If you choose to become a paid subscriber today, ReFoundation is included at no additional cost and will be waiting for you to download from the Perks page.

And one small side note: all annual subscriptions are 10% off through September 30.

10% off + Refoundation

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.

How do you feel when a decision is being made about your home and everyone simply assumes you will go along with it?

Nobody exactly asks what you want. The conversation just moves forward. Maybe the children have decided what should happen with the house. Maybe your husband has already figured out which car makes the most sense. Maybe somebody starts planning the family trip and you discover that your preferences have somehow become the least important part of the itinerary.

And somewhere inside you, something bristles.

How do you feel when you are tired at two in the afternoon and would love nothing more than to lie down for an hour, but the minute your head hits the pillow the internal prosecution begins?

You haven’t finished that. You should really do this. It’s the middle of the day. Good girls don’t take naps.

So you get back up.

Or suppose you see something in a shop window that you absolutely love. You have wanted something like it for years. You can afford it. Buying it would harm no one.

But wanting it isn’t enough.

Immediately, your mind starts preparing the closing argument. Is it practical? Will you use it enough? Is there something more responsible you should do with the money? Can you justify the purchase?

These things can look completely unrelated.

They aren’t.

They all grow from the same collection of invisible rules many women my age have been obeying for so long that we no longer recognize them as rules.

A few years ago, mine involved a bathtub.

I live in an apartment with only a shower, and I decided I wanted a tub. Not a yacht. Not a new wing added to the building. A bathtub.

My first instinct wasn’t to measure the space or investigate what kind of tub would work there. I called the management company and asked permission.

Think about that.

I was a grown woman who had owned homes, raised children, run businesses, moved across the country and made decisions that changed the entire direction of my life. And I was waiting for another adult to tell me whether I was allowed to take a bath in my own home.

Eventually, I read my lease. Nothing prohibited a bathtub.

There was no Keeper of the Tub. I had invented one.

That realization stayed with me because I began wondering how many other Keepers I had installed in my own life without knowing it. For much of my life, I carried the assumption that somebody else probably knew better. Authority lived somewhere outside me.

Before I did something significant, I should run it by someone. Before I spent money simply because something delighted me, I should have a respectable reason. Before I rested, I should earn it.

None of those rules had to be spoken anymore. I had been enforcing them myself.

That is what makes inherited beliefs so difficult to see. Eventually they stop sounding like beliefs and start sounding like facts.

• Of course you finish your work before you rest.

• Of course everybody else’s needs come first.

• Of course you don’t waste money on something merely because it makes you happy.

• Of course you ask before making a decision that might inconvenience someone.

• Of course a responsible woman behaves this way.

Who said so?

That is the question I find myself asking more and more at 71. Who said so?

The Architecture of the Mind

Recently, in my Tuesday night women’s group, I asked the women to identify an inherited belief they were still living by. It was much harder than I expected. Not because they didn’t have any, but because when you have lived according to a rule for sixty years, it doesn’t feel inherited anymore. It feels like common sense. It feels like good manners. It feels like responsibility.

Sometimes it simply feels like being a good woman.

And this is where retirement becomes much more interesting to me than having enough money or figuring out what to do with all our free time.

The children can grow up. The job can end. The marriage can change or disappear altogether. The house can be sold.

And still, when we want something, choose something, refuse something or simply decide to lie down at two o’clock in the afternoon, the old voices can start talking. That is why changing one of these beliefs can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

Our brains love what they already know.

Think of your brain like a dense forest. For fifty years, you have walked down the exact same path. Because you’ve walked it thousands of times, it has become a wide, paved sidewalk. It takes zero effort to walk down it.

But when you choose a new behavior, you are stepping off the pavement and trying to clear a path through thick bushes and fallen trees. It takes real physical effort. Scientists call this effort friction.

Suppose you have spent fifty years believing that rest must be earned. You are tired. Nothing is on fire. Nobody needs you. You lie down. Within minutes, the old rule arrives: Get up. You should be doing something.

And suddenly lying on that sofa feels almost physically uncomfortable. We often assume this discomfort means the new choice is wrong.

Maybe I really am lazy. Maybe I should get up. Maybe this isn’t who I am.

But that discomfort isn’t a warning to retreat.

Sometimes it is evidence that we have finally stopped doing what we always do.

The old pattern said get up. This time, I stayed down.

The old pattern said ask someone first. This time, I made the decision myself.

The old pattern said justify what you want. This time, I said, I want it. That is my reason.

And every time we stay with the new choice instead of racing back toward the familiar one, we give ourselves another experience of living differently.

That matters.

Naming the Cost

Because I don’t think most women arrive at this stage of life needing to become entirely different people. I think we finally have enough distance from the noise to examine the foundation underneath the women we already are.

What did I actually choose? VERSUS What did I inherit?

What did I absorb from my mother, my church, my marriage, my school, my generation or simply from being born female when I was?

And perhaps most important: What is this belief costing me now?

• Is it costing me rest?

• Is it costing me money I could be enjoying?

• Is it costing me experiences because I keep waiting for someone else’s approval?

• Is it costing me a voice in decisions about my own life?

• Is it costing me things I have quietly wanted for years?

Because an inherited belief isn’t merely an interesting idea buried somewhere in our childhood. It can still be sitting beside us at 71, quietly deciding what we buy, where we go, how much we rest, what we tolerate, what we ask permission for and how much room we believe we are entitled to occupy in our own lives.

And until we recognize the rule, we cannot decide whether we still want to obey it.

That, to me, is ReFoundation.

It is not tearing down the woman I became. It is not trying to manufacture some shiny new version of myself for retirement. It is looking underneath the life I built and asking whether every piece of the foundation still belongs there.

Some of it will. Some of it served me beautifully.

And some of it was handed to a girl who was far too young to decide whether it was true. She accepted it because that was what girls did.

But I am not that girl anymore.

I get another vote now. Actually, I get the deciding vote.

Which brings me back to my bathtub. I eventually got one.

And sometimes when I am lying in that hot water, perfectly content in the tub I once thought another adult needed to authorize, I have to laugh.

Because it was never really about the bathtub.

It was about discovering how many parts of my life were still waiting for permission.

And wondering what else I might choose if I finally stopped asking.Ready to Claim Your Deciding Vote?

If this article made something inside you bristle—if you are ready to look beneath the foundation of your own life and stop asking for permission—I want to invite you to take a beautiful next step with me.

When you upgrade to a paid subscription today, you will be able to access a free digital download of my premier guidebook, ReFoundation, on the Perks Page

I wrote this resource straight from my own lived experience and the deep work I’ve done right alongside women just like you. It is a practical, step-by-step roadmap designed to help you spot those sneaky inherited beliefs, navigate the uncomfortable friction of change, and confidently claim your deciding vote.

Let’s clear the new trail together. Click below to upgrade your subscription, ( 10% OFF right now) unlock ReFoundation, and discover what else is waiting for you on the other side of permission.

Upgrade 2 paid Free Refoundation Guide