When I meet new people, they often ask how I found the courage to start over, and I understand why. From the outside, I can see how it might look like I woke up one morning, threw caution to the wind, and just decided that that was the day I’d become someone entirely different. Like it was all one big spontaneous and impossibly brave decision. But the truth is, that’s not how it happened at all.

I confess, I’ve always been a sucker for a reinvention story. I’ve owned up to this before and I will say it here again, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched Under the Tuscan Sun and The Holiday. My copy of Eat, Pray, Love is so dog-eared and weathered that the worn-out spine is barely holding the pages together. I am endlessly fascinated by people who sell everything they own, move to a far-off land, and emerge six months later in a charming cottage with a breezy, linen-filled wardrobe and a kitchen straight out of a Nancy Meyers film. To this day, I still catch myself wondering, “What would it feel like to be that brave?”

For a long time, I just assumed that those stories were the blueprint for reinvention. That one day, I could wake up and make one extraordinary decision that would change my life forever. And maybe that’s how it does happen for some people. But looking back now, I realize I had it completely backwards. For me, those stories may have been the inspiration, but they were never the roadmap.

In my experience, courage doesn’t arrive all at once. And it’s not a personality trait reserved solely for adventurous people. We can all access it, but just like so many things in life, it takes practice. It’s hard-earned. Baby birds don’t launch from the nest in one graceful attempt. They hop and wobble first. They flap awkwardly and land in all the wrong places. Sometimes they even fall. But they always try again, one uncertain attempt at a time. Courage, I would argue, works much the same way.

The version of myself who was eventually able to start over from scratch didn’t appear overnight. Unbeknownst to me, she’d been taking shape for years, one small decision at a time. She was forged through choices that felt so ordinary it never occurred to me that they were preparing me for something much bigger.

And I do mean ordinary.

I recommitted myself to journaling. I gave myself permission to be brutally honest on paper about what I was feeling, what I was afraid of and what I dared to dream my life could become. I dedicated an entire year to learning how to live with the discomfort of being a singleton in a world that celebrates pairs. I challenged myself to do things that made me deeply uncomfortable. Embarrassingly simple things like walking into a restaurant by myself and ordering a glass of wine. Eventually, a glass of wine and an appetizer. And then one day, I was able to tolerate eating an entire meal alone. I still wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, but I could do it. Baby steps…

I devoured books and podcasts that reminded me there were other ways to live and other women who had questioned the stories they’d been handed and wrote new ones for themselves. I paid attention to the voices that made me feel more expansive, more curious and less afraid. I made playlists for the moments when I needed to pump myself up to tackle a tough decision, and others for when I simply needed the catharis of a good old fashioned cry.

None of these things felt courageous. At the time, they simply felt like small attempts to make peace with the life I was living while flapping and wobbling spectacularly the whole time. They certainly didn’t feel life changing. But I realize now that they were.

Every little win was evidence. Proof that I could learn to sit with uncertainty. That I understood there was a difference between being lonely and being alone. That I could trust my own company and choose to listen to my own voice. That I could build a meaningful life for myself and by myself. And most importantly, that I could stop apologizing for wanting it.

I think courage often gets confused with fearlessness in our culture. We have this notion that brave people simply don’t feel afraid. That they’re just wired differently. But I don’t think that’s true. I was terrified the day I moved to Boston. I remember sitting on the floor of my new apartment surrounded by boxes and sobbing. I wondered more than once if I’d made a terrible mistake. I was filled with doubts about whether I could really build a life from scratch in a city where I knew almost no one. I was absolutely afraid.

The difference was that this time, I did it anyway.

Action came first. Courage followed.

That’s the part we rarely acknowledge in other people’s stories. We see them boldly walk away from a career or a relationship, but not the months or even years of self-doubt and agonizing questioning that came before. We see the shiny new life in a shiny new city, but not the years someone spent putting in the reps and making the hard choices that ultimately lead them there.

Maybe that’s why stories of reinvention can feel equal parts intriguing and intimidating. We only ever meet people after they made the leap, stuck the landing and lived to tell the tale. We don’t get to witness the thousands of tiny, almost invisible choices that taught them they were capable of doing hard things in the first place. We know how the story ends, so we skim past the mistakes and failed attempts and delight in the seemingly picture perfect ending.

So, the next time someone asks me how I found the courage to rewrite my own story, I will tell them that courage isn’t something you find. You don’t suddenly become the woman who makes the leap overnight. You become the woman who is willing to take one small step at a time. Until one day, almost without noticing how you got there, you’ll find yourself standing at the edge of the nest, trusting your wings enough to fly.

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While it was the first time that I’d seen a film interpretation of the tale, as an English major, it was hardly my first encounter with Odysseus. I’ve read Homer’s epic multiple times and studied it in classrooms in both high school and college. As an avid reader and writer, I’ve long appreciated The Odyssey as one of the foundational stories of Western literature and the basis of Joseph Campbell’s concept of the “Hero’s Journey.” It’s a narrative whose DNA can be traced through the canon of great literature across centuries. A hero leaves the familiar world, answers a call to adventure, crosses a threshold into the unknown, encounters trials and ordeals, is transformed by them, and ultimately returns home. Once you recognize the pattern, you begin seeing it everywhere from Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter to Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

And apparently, to women in midlife.

As familiar as I was with the story, there was something different about the way I experienced it sitting in a darkened theater as a fifty-three-year-old woman. This time, I wasn’t just thinking about Odysseus. Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking about a woman who wasn’t even on the boat with him. I couldn’t stop thinking about Penelope.

For twenty years, Odysseus gets all of the adventure and glory while Penelope waits. He battles monsters, and she tends to the home. He encounters gods and witches and Sirens and strange lands. She fends off suitors and keeps Ithaca intact, famously weaving a burial shroud by day and secretly unraveling it each night to delay choosing another husband.

Make no mistake about it, Penelope is hardly weak. She is clever, strategic, loyal and resilient. But her heroism is defined largely by endurance. By waiting behind and holding everything together. And it occurred to me that nearly three thousand years later, women of my generation were still trained more for Penelope’s journey than Odysseus’s.

We learned to hold the family together and to keep things running. To remember the birthdays, schedule the appointments, make the holidays magical, care for the children and then, increasingly, to care for aging parents. We learned to be dependable. To be grateful. To just keep weaving no matter the cost. And then one day, somewhere in the middle of our lives, some of us looked up from the loom and thought, “Wait a minute. When do I get to go on a freaking odyssey?”

I don’t necessarily mean the sell-everything-and-move-to-Tuscany kind, although my Substack subscriptions and Instagram algorithm might suggest otherwise. I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve watched Under the Tuscan Sun. Ditto for reading Eat, Pray, Love. I will watch, read or follow just about any woman who sells her belongings, buys a one-way ticket, and begins a new life in a far-off land.

Sure, a woman’s call to adventure might arrive loudly in the form of a divorce, a diagnosis, a death, a child leaving home, or a job ending. But sometimes it’s barely audible. Sometimes it’s just a restlessness or an ache. Or a question that begins appearing with increasing frequency: Could there be more? Or maybe we simply admit something to ourselves that we’ve known for a very long time: I no longer recognize myself.

Long after we’d left the theater, I found myself still noodling this idea of a midlife odyssey and realized that maybe it doesn’t have to be geographic. Instead, maybe this particular adventure is internal. I’ve written a lot about starting over and rewriting our stories. But what if it’s not about reinventing ourselves and becoming someone new? What if it’s about reclaiming someone we’ve slowly lost sight of?

To be fair, I don’t think most women wake up one morning and discover they’ve disappeared. It happens in small increments, slowly over time. We become someone’s partner and someone’s mother. Someone’s employee and someone’s caregiver. Someone’s emergency contact. We build careers and families and homes and communities. We love our people deeply.

And all the while, the Sirens sing their song. They whisper that we shouldn’t rock the boat. That we should be grateful. That other people would kill for the lives we have. That it’s too late to start over. They ask what everyone will think. And perhaps the most seductive Siren song of all is the simplest: Stay where you are. It’s safer here.

Over decades, identities gather around us until sometimes it becomes difficult to distinguish the roles we play from the person playing them. Then midlife comes along and begins removing some of those roles or at least changing them. Children grow up. Parents age. Marriages change or end. Careers that once gave us purpose sometimes begin to feel strangely hollow. Our bodies change. Friendships shift. The structures that told us who we were begin moving beneath our feet.

And suddenly, the question becomes, “Who am I underneath all of this?”

Forget the hero. Maybe that’s the essence of the heroine’s journey. It’s not about conquest. It’s about reclamation and finding our way back to the self who has been there all along.

Make no mistake, I have no desire to go back to the woman I was at twenty-five. God knows she had plenty to learn. Returning to ourselves isn’t about reclaiming our youth or finding the carefree girl we were before mortgages and marriages and children and grief. You cannot sail backward through time. And I wouldn’t want to.

I want just the opposite. I want to bring it all with me. Motherhood and love. Heartbreak and grief. Friendship and failure. The mistakes and the scars and the ridiculous choices. The things I wish I’d known sooner and the things I could only have learned by living through them.

Odysseus doesn’t return to Ithaca as the man who left it. And neither do we.

Home isn’t the person we used to be. Home is the person underneath all those roles, now changed and deepened by everything she has lived through. Not our younger selves. Our truest selves. At fifty-three, I know how easy it is to get lost. I understand the monsters better. I recognize the Siren songs. I know something about storms arriving without warning and shores that look nothing like the ones we expected to reach.

And I understand now that home can mean something other than a place.

I’ve spent the last year writing about starting over. About divorce and heartbreak and moving to Boston and building a new life. I’ve called it all kinds of things: reinvention, rewriting and becoming. But maybe, I’ve just been sailing towards Ithaca, towards the woman who feels most like me, all along.

And that’s what I love most about the idea of a heroine’s journey in midlife. We don’t need to slay the monster. We don’t need to conquer anything. We don’t even need to know exactly where we’re going. We only need to notice when something inside us begins whispering that we’ve drifted too far from home. Are we going to get lost sometimes? Absolutely. Will we occasionally listen to the wrong voices? Without a doubt. And sometimes the seas will be far rougher than we imagined.

And when that happens, as it inevitably will, we will begin course correcting. We will rely on our instincts and curiosity and courage. We will commit ourselves to following whatever North Star feels most true. And eventually, I believe we will find our way home to ourselves.

And when we finally do, we will sit back in the castles we built for ourselves and realize what an epic journey it was.

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Now there’s a blast from the past.

If you were dating in the mid-90s, chances are you remember it. It wasn’t just another dating book. For a brief (and, in hindsight, spectacularly unhealthy) moment in time, it was a dating bible, passed from friend to friend over glasses of cheap wine while we debated whether Ross and Rachel were really on a break. Follow these rules, it promised, and you would find lasting love.

Curious how it might read through my now single fifty-three-year-old eyes, I sat down on the couch and started turning pages.

Here are a few gems:

Don’t talk to a man first.

Let him take the lead.

Don’t call him.

Rarely return his calls.

At first, I laughed. I laughed because it felt so impossibly outdated, like discovering an old etiquette manual warning women not to show their ankles in public. It was hard to imagine that any of us had once taken these rules so seriously. But the I sat with it, the less funny it became.

Because…of course, we did.

Those rules didn’t appear out of thin air. They reflected the culture we were raised in and the messages we’d been absorbing since we were girls. Be accommodating, but never needy. Independent, but never intimidating. Attractive, but not too available. Interesting, but never so opinionated that we risked making someone uncomfortable. Above all, we learned to wait to be chosen.

Looking back now, I don’t think The Rules taught us anything entirely new. They simply gave language to beliefs many of us had already internalized. They reinforced the idea that love wasn’t something we trusted to unfold honestly. It was something we earned by carefully managing how much of ourselves we revealed—and when.

Fast forward three decades, and the girl who grew up absorbing all of those messages suddenly finds herself back in the dating world, trying to make sense of it all over again.

To be fair, this won’t actually be my first venture into online dating after my divorce. A few years ago, I dipped a tentative toe into those waters and found myself in a relationship that lasted nearly two years. Like so many relationships, it began with hope and possibility and ended in heartbreak. It took me a long time to find my footing again. To trust myself again. To believe that opening my heart hadn’t been a mistake, even if it hadn’t lasted.

Now, for the first time in quite a while, I feel ready to give it another go. But if I’m honest, there’s something even scarier about returning after you’ve been hurt. The first time, I didn’t know what to expect. This time, I do. And that’s both the challenge…and, perhaps, the gift.

Apparently, while I was busy healing, dating evolved into something that occasionally feels less like romance and more like being dropped into a full immersion foreign exchange program. No phrasebook. No translator. Just smile politely, do your best, and hope you don’t accidentally agree to something you didn’t mean to. Somewhere along the way, people stopped simply breaking up and started ghosting, breadcrumbing, catfishing, benching, orbiting, and entering situationships. Ethical non-monogamy became a thing. So did polyamory. There are green flags, red flags, beige flags, and enough new terminology that I feel like and enough new terminology that I feel like everyone should receive a glossary the moment they download a dating app.

The technology has changed. The vocabulary has changed. The expectations have changed. We no longer wait by the family phone wondering if he’ll call before seven. Instead, we analyze text messages, debate the appropriate amount of time to wait before responding, wonder why someone viewed our social media posts but never replied, and somehow convince ourselves that all of this is perfectly normal.

But here’s what hit me the hardest. The rules may have changed, but something underneath them feels remarkably familiar. It still feels like a game. And that’s the part I struggle with most.

After everything life has taught me over the past thirty years—after a marriage, motherhood, heartbreak, grief, therapy, reinvention, and more self-reflection than I ever imagined possible—I find myself wondering why dating still seems to require strategy. Why does it still feel as though we’re trying to solve some elaborate puzzle instead of simply getting to know another human being? At what point do we get to stop performing and just be ourselves? Because the woman considering dating today bears very little resemblance to the young woman who first devoured The Rules.

Back then, I was looking for someone to build a life with. I was thinking about marriage and children and buying a house and all of the milestones that seemed to define adulthood.

Today, I already have those things. I’ve built a life I genuinely love. I have friendships that sustain me, work that gives me purpose, a city that feels like home, and a little apartment that represents one of the bravest decisions I’ve ever made. I’m not looking for someone to rescue me from loneliness or complete a picture that feels unfinished.

I’m looking for someone who has put down a few roots of his own. Someone who knows who he is. Someone who has survived a few hard seasons and learned from them. Someone curious enough to keep growing and secure enough to let another person be fully herself.

Maybe that’s why rereading The Rules felt so jarring. Not because the advice was outdated, but because I no longer recognized the woman those rules were written for. The hardest rule to break was never about who calls first or how long to wait before returning a text. It was the one that taught so many of us that love depended on becoming whoever someone else was hoping to find.

I spent years trying to learn the language of being chosen. Midlife taught me the language of becoming. This time, I’m not looking for someone to choose me. I’m looking for someone who recognizes the woman I’ve already chosen to become.

Rules be damned.

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No husband. No partner. Just me, an intimidating stack of paperwork, a set of keys, and the strange realization that, for the first time in my life, I was committing to a future I had chosen entirely for myself. It was empowering. And if I’m being truthful, it was a little lonely, too.

When I moved to Boston three years ago, fresh off the heels of my divorce and my youngest leaving for college, it felt like both an ending and a beginning. I came here knowing almost no one. No built-in community. No familiar routines. No real blueprint for what came next. Just a city I barely knew and the hope that I might somehow find myself inside it.

At first, I rented. Renting was my way of keeping the relationship casual. I was intrigued by Boston. Excited by her. But I wasn’t ready to commit. Renting gave me the freedom to enjoy what was unfolding while still knowing I could leave if it wasn’t right. If the loneliness got too loud, if the city didn’t fit, or if I missed my old life too much, I could simply let the lease expire and walk away. I could go back toward the familiar. Closer to family. Back to the life I understood.

But there was something about Boston that just felt right. So, I kept showing up. Walking her streets. Learning her rhythms. Letting the city reveal herself to me while I figured out who I was (or at least who I could become) here. And somewhere between the long walks, the strangers who became familiar, and the familiar who became friends, I realized I had fallen in love. Not with a man. With the city. And once I admitted that to myself, everything started to change.

But after three years, I found myself aching for something more permanent. Something that was mine. Not borrowed. Not temporary or contingent. I wanted roots.

And so, the search began. Finding the right apartment felt a lot like online dating. There was the endless scrolling through listings, the swiping past the obvious no’s, lingering over the ones that made my pulse quicken. Reading descriptions the way you read dating profiles, looking for clues. Potential. Personality. Red flags. Promise.

Would this be the one?

Then the awkward first meetings, just open houses instead of first dates. Trying to imagine myself there. Looking past the staging and the polished surfaces to ask myself the deeper question: Could I see a life here?

And then, eventually, there it was. The one that, somehow, felt like home.

Making an offer felt suspiciously like modern dating, too. Putting yourself out there. Trying not to seem too eager. Waiting to hear if you’d be chosen back. Constantly refreshing my inbox like I was waiting for a text after a great date. Would it be accepted? Would this thing I wanted want me, too? And when ultimately it did, there was joy. Immediately followed by terror.

For most of my adulthood, buying a home, putting down roots, building a life were things you did with someone. In partnership. As part of the larger architecture of “settling down.”

Doing it alone felt strangely disorienting. There was no one sitting across the kitchen table to talk through every decision. No one to weigh the pros and cons with, reassure me when I started second-guessing myself, or share the thrill of imagining what this place might become. Every decision, every signature, every financial risk rested squarely on my shoulders.

And then there were the practical realities. Coordinating the movers. Packing. Cleaning out a storage shed. Setting up the electricity and internet. Learning how to be the only person responsible when something broke, or leaked, or needed fixing. They were small things, really, but together they underscored a much bigger truth: I wasn’t just buying an apartment. I was becoming the person solely responsible for the life inside it.

There was something undeniably lonely about that. Not because I doubted I could do it, but because for so long I had imagined this kind of milestone unfolding differently. Shared. Celebrated in tandem with someone else’s excitement matching my own.

There was pride in signing those closing papers. But there was grief, too. Because this was never how I had imagined it. I think in the back of my mind, I assumed that I’d rent for a while until I found the right partner, so that when it came time to buy something, I’d be doing it as part of a team. And yet, there was something deeply healing about choosing permanence for myself. About saying: I am worth building a life around.

A year later, I can see that buying this place was never just about square footage or amenities or getting to choose my own finishes. It was about commitment. To this city. To this life. To myself.

And now that a year has passed and I am fully settled into my life here, I find myself thinking about opening my heart to the possibility of finding someone to share it with. But somehow, putting down roots has changed the way I reach for love now. I’m no longer looking for someone to build a life for me, or even with me from scratch. I’ve built one. Brick by brick. Walk by walk. Choice by choice.

What I hope for now is something different. Not someone to rescue me from loneliness or complete the picture, but someone whose life is already full, too. Someone who has put down roots of their own. Someone who knows who they are and where they belong. Two people who have each built a home, choosing not to abandon it for one another, but to invite the other in.

Maybe that’s what midlife changes most about love. It’s no longer about finding someone to build your foundation. It’s about finding someone who recognizes the one you’ve already built and wants to help you make it even richer.

Build the life first. Then, if you’re lucky, invite someone to share it.

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We all have them, of course. A body. A face. The two most ordinary, unavoidable facts of our existence. And yet somehow, they are also the two things so many of us have spent a lifetime at war with. Which may be why there is perhaps no greater existential struggle in midlife than being a woman with a body and a face.

I have spent most of my life trying to discipline my body into acceptability. Shrink it. Tone it. Smooth it. Tighten it. Feed it less. Move it more. The goalpost always moving, always just out of reach. There has always been another few pounds, another wrinkle, another reason to believe I might finally feel at home in myself if I could just fix this one thing. But there is always another thing, isn’t there?

And this is the part that makes me tired: I know better.

I know these lines around my eyes are proof of belly laughs and squinting into sunlight on beaches near and far. I know the sunspots on my skin are souvenirs from summers by pools, crab feasts on newspaper-covered tables, and the long, repetitive miles spent pushing babies in strollers through neighborhoods while trying to soothe both them and myself. My body is riddled with evidence of living. Of loving. Of surviving. Of carrying children and carrying grief and carrying on.

And still, the desire to erase the evidence is there.

That is the contradiction, isn’t it? We are told to live embodied lives. To be present. To inhabit ourselves fully. To listen to our bodies. To honor them. The word embodied literally means to be in the body. To be fully here, inside ourselves. And yet, for so many women, we were taught from the beginning to distrust our bodies.

We are taught to override them. To ignore hunger. To quiet cravings. To push through exhaustion. To treat rest as indulgence instead of necessity. As mothers and caregivers, we learn to put everyone else’s needs ahead of our own, often at the expense of our own physical and emotional well-being. We are taught to be suspicious of desire and of wanting too much. Needing too much. Taking up too much space.

So how do you live an embodied life when so much of your life has been spent trying to escape embodiment? How do you settle into skin and bones that have so often felt less like home and more like a problem to solve?

There have been seasons when my body felt especially unfamiliar to me. Times when it seemed to operate on its own timeline, outside of my control. Puberty was the first. In the beginning, it was the agony of being a late bloomer. Praying for signs of change and wondering if my body was the only one on Earth that had somehow missed the memo. And then, when the changes finally came (period cramps, breakouts, and a whole new level of painful self-consciousness), I remember wondering why I had wished for any of it in the first place.

Then pregnancy, when my body became both miraculous and unrecognizable. The surreal experience of being one body holding two lives and feeling both deeply powerful and strangely displaced inside it.

And now midlife, where hormones shift like tectonic plates, sleep becomes elusive, weight redistributes without permission, and the face staring back at me in the mirror feels like a stranger I almost recognize but can’t quite place.

I went over a year without Botox, wrestling with the same question Alexa posed. Determined to make peace with the lines. To age “naturally.” I am not sure what I was trying to prove exactly? That I was evolved? Enlightened? Immune to the messaging? And then, after watching myself in a television interview I’d done for work, I caved this winter. And honestly? There was relief. When I looked in the mirror after the Botox had settled in, I felt more like myself again. I felt like my face somehow matched how I felt on my insides.

And yet, there was still the guilt. Had I given in? Succumbed to the billion-dollar machine I know full well was designed to keep women dissatisfied? Forfeited my feminist card? Betrayed my own mother who would have given anything just to have a body and be here with us today? Or was I simply making a choice about my own face, my own comfort, and my own relationship to aging?

That’s where the line gets blurry for me. Somewhere at the intersection of agency and conditioning. Between asking myself if I’m erasing the years or just dialing down the noise between self-care and self-correction. Between wanting to feel comfortable in my own skin and wondering whose comfort I’m really chasing.

Truthfully, this feels especially complicated now, as a single woman in her fifties, facing dating again. Because it’s one thing to age in the privacy of a long marriage, alongside someone who watched your body change in real time. It’s another thing entirely to step back into the marketplace of attraction carrying every year on your face and body like visible résumé lines.

In the end, what I keep coming back to is this: maybe the goal was never acceptance in the static sense. Maybe it’s relationship. A lifelong, evolving, imperfect relationship with the body and face that carry us through it all. One built less on punishment and perfection and more on curiosity, compassion, and negotiation.

Not fighting age. Not surrendering to it either. Just learning, over and over again, how to live inside it.

And if I’m honest, there is something a little soul-crushing in admitting that this may not be a battle I ever fully resolve. That even after all these years, after the wisdom, the therapy, the feminism, the motherhood, the heartbreak, and the healing, I may still find myself standing in front of the mirror…negotiating.

But maybe negotiation is softer than war. Maybe it leaves room for grace. For nuance. For taking it as it comes instead of making sweeping declarations about what I will or won’t do. Maybe it means meeting each new wrinkle, each new ache, each new change with curiosity instead of judgment. Asking: Is this just noise? Or is this something that is truly affecting how I feel in my own skin?

And maybe most importantly, it means trusting that every woman has the right to answer that question for herself. To choose what helps her feel most at home in her body and face without shame, without apology, and without judgment from the rest of us who are fighting our own quiet battles in the mirror.

We may all be waging some version of the same war, but each of us gets to decide which battles are worth fighting and when it’s time to lay down our arms.

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I’ve written a lot about my mother here, perhaps because grief demanded it. Losing her to Alzheimer’s was long and brutal and disorienting in ways I am still trying to make sense of. Writing became one of the tools I used to keep her close and to heal the wounds left by her absence.

When I was writing my eulogy for her, I decided to ground my remarks in the idea of an inheritance. Not in the traditional monetary sense, but about the pieces of her I could identify living on in me. It felt like a way of consciously carrying her forward. And while I loved my mother more than anything, and we were incredibly close, the truth is, I’ve always found it easier to recognize the pieces of my father in me.

I’m just not sure I’ve ever actually verbalized that to him.

So today, I want to write about him. Not because he is gone, but because he is here. There is something about midlife, especially when it arrives carrying loss, that sharpens your vision. Losing my mother made me intimately acquainted with absence, but it also made me more aware of presence. Of what remains. Of what still holds. And in this season of reflection, I find myself increasingly aware of what I still have in my father.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my dad may be the single most influential person in my life. He was never the kind of parent who ruled with an iron fist or handed down long lectures. Of course, there were boundaries, and my brother and I did what good teenagers do. We tested them, pushed against them, and created our share of dustups. Especially in those high school years. (One day I’ll share the story of the day I drove our family car through the garage. At age 14.) But my father led mostly by example, not scare tactics or platitudes. Again and again, in a thousand ordinary moments, he showed us what it meant to move through the world with integrity, curiosity, humility, and heart.

My father had a remarkable career as an attorney in Washington, D.C. He was brilliant, respected, and busy in ways I only fully understand now as an adult. But somehow, none of it ever came at the expense of time with me and my brother. He never missed a game. A performance. A parent-teacher conference. Unless he was traveling, he made it home for dinner every night, even if it meant going back to the office afterwards. And he never complained about it.

At the time, it felt normal. It was only later that I realized how extraordinary that kind of showing up really is. How easy it would have been for him to let work become the excuse. How many people do.

Instead, he taught me one of the most important lessons of my life without ever saying it outright: Show up for your people. Be there. Consistently. Fully. Not just when it’s convenient. Not just when it’s easy. When it matters. Especially when it matters.

To this day, he is still my first phone call when something goes wrong. The person I call when I need advice, perspective, or simply to hear a steady voice on the other end of the line when the world goes wobbly. Even when he was working, he instructed his assistant that if my brother or I ever called and said we needed him, she was to put us through immediately. Always. No matter what or who he was with. Just imagine what that teaches a daughter. I never once had to question whether I mattered, or whether I was safe. I learned early that when I reached for him, he would be there.

What I’ve come to understand as I’ve gotten older is that this isn’t something reserved just for me. He has always been that person for my brother, for our family, for friends, for colleagues, for so many people lucky enough to know him. The one who shows up. The one who answers. The one who makes you feel like you matter. And that type of love shapes you. It shaped the way I became a parent, too. I have done everything in my power to be that person for my own children, and for the people I love. To be the steady voice, the safe place, the one who comes when called.

And that kind of safety does something else, too. It makes you brave. Knowing I have him in my corner, steady, unwavering, and ready to catch me if I fall, has given me the freedom to take risks. To leap before I have all the answers. To trust myself, even when the path ahead feels uncertain or when my own self-doubt and insecurities tell me otherwise. It’s what’s enabled me to do everything from say “Yes” to jobs that I felt completely unqualified for or to move to a new city on my own at fifty and build a life from the ground up.

But it isn’t just the safety net of his presence. It’s his outsized belief in me, a belief so constant and unquestioning that it’s become part of my own inner voice. And thank God for that, because like so many of us, I have spent plenty of years wrestling with the mean inner critic in my own head. That nasty narrator always quick to point out the risk, the flaw, the reason not to leap. But somewhere alongside her is my father’s voice, steady and certain, reminding me that I can. If I told my father I wanted to build a toothpick ladder to the moon, he’d be my first investor. That kind of faith (equal parts absurd and unwavering) teaches you to dream bigger, reach farther, and believe that maybe, just maybe, you can do the impossible.

My father also taught me how to be curious. He is endlessly well-read and knows something about nearly everything. (If you’re lucky enough to be in his contacts, you’ll also be on the receiving end of his personal daily clipping service: a steady stream of news articles, thoughtfully curated and tailored to your personal interests.)

He’s not just curious in the academic sense, but curious about people. About the world. He asks sincere questions. He talks to strangers. He reads everything. He notices. He listens. He taught me that every person has a story worth hearing if you’re willing to slow down and ask. That lesson has followed me everywhere. In my writing and in my friendships. In my travels. And in the way I mother my own children. Curiosity keeps life expansive. It keeps us humble. It keeps us growing. And perhaps most importantly, it keeps us connected.

He also taught me something I think the world could use a lot more of right now: treat everyone like they’re the CEO.

My father has this way of making every person feel seen. It doesn’t matter whether he’s speaking to a diplomat, a colleague, the concierge, or a member of the cleaning staff. He offers the same respect and the same genuine interest. He asks about their day. Their family. He listens to the answer. And you can bet your bottom dollar he will follow-up the next time he sees you. A man who came from humble means and once lived in a low-income housing project with my mother when he was just out of law school, my father understands that titles are temporary. Position is fleeting. But dignity belongs to everyone. (Unless, of course, they cut him off in traffic or ignore a stop sign. In that case, all bets are off.)

If I had a dollar for every time a stranger came up to me with a story about how my father changed their life, I would be Oprah-level rich. Without once asking for recognition or praise, he has mentored young associates through career and personal challenges. He purchased a roundtrip plane ticket for a gentleman who works in his apartment building who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to attend his sister’s funeral back home in Africa. A woman chased us down on the streets of Georgetown so that she could thank him for encouraging her to leave the practice of law to pursue her dream of opening a gourmet popsicle cart. And he still visits an elderly man he befriended in my mother’s memory care unit years after she passed.

And then there’s this. My father cries. Openly, easily, and often. He cries during commercials. At movies. At songs. At weddings. At graduations. Happy tears and sad tears. And I love that about him. Long before we were having conversations about emotional intelligence or vulnerability, my father was living it. He never taught me that love should be withheld or rationed. He gives it freely and constantly. I know he loves me because he tells me so. All the time. In fact, my college roommate used to count how many “I love yous” we exchanged before we hung up the phone. It became a running joke. But what a gift that is. To never have to wonder. To never have to guess. To grow up so certain of your father’s love that it becomes part of the bones that hold you upright.

As I get older, I see more and more clearly how much of him lives in me. But his influence didn’t end there. My father has become a living hero to my two sons, shaping them not just through love, but through example, the same way he shaped me. They have watched him move through the world with kindness, curiosity, integrity, and heart. They have seen a man who is strong without hardness, emotional without shame, and generous without expectation. In a world where so much of the conversation around masculinity is about what is broken, he has consistently shown them what is possible.

This is his legacy: not just what he built, but who he has been. And what he has passed down through all of us. A true, living, breathing inheritance. And if inheritance is measured by what is passed down in love, character, and grace, then all of us who know him are rich beyond measure.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. And thank you. For all of it.

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One morning, I found myself sitting in the breakfast room of a castle. An actual castle. Stone walls. Leaded glass windows. Sweeping views of the countryside. The works. A few tables away, an American woman from Texas sat with her husband and two friends they were traveling with. And for the better part of twenty minutes, she conducted a painfully loud and detailed review of all the ways Ireland had disappointed her.

Housekeeping had forgotten to bring an extra washcloth.

The rain had ruined their plans.

Meals took too long.

The roads were too narrow.

The coffee wasn’t hot enough.

The service wasn’t fast enough.

By the time she returned to the missing washcloth for a second time, I was on the verge of doing or saying something that might very well have gone viral on social media. Look, every trip is bound to have its inconveniences. But sitting there, listening to her catalog every perceived shortcoming while eating breakfast in a literal castle, I found myself wondering:

Why leave home if your goal is to recreate it everywhere you go?

The question stayed with me for the rest of the trip. It’s not because every experience needs to be magical. Not because every place gets everything right. But because the opportunity isn’t simply to see a new place, it’s to allow that place to show us another way of living. To give us the space to become curious. To pay attention. And if we’re lucky, to bring a little bit of it home.

One thing that I always do whenever I travel is wander through a local grocery store. I know this might sound a little odd, given one of the benefits of being away from home is to not have to do those sorts of errands. But I’ve always been fascinated by the ordinary details of how people live. What fills their carts. What occupies the aisles in their shops. What people feed their families on a weeknight. A grocery store tells you far more about a culture than a gift shop ever will.

In Ireland, my father and I found ourselves lingering over shelves of brown bread and biscuits. Studying unfamiliar condiments and trying to imagine when and how people would use them. Maybe it sounds silly, but I’ve come to believe that paying attention to the ordinary is where the real magic of travel lives.

Years ago, while traveling in Italy, I met an elderly woman on the beach who invited me back to her apartment to learn how to make gnocchi. Not from a recipe or a cookbook, but from memory. A handful of this. A pinch of that. Always roast the potatoes first. Never boil them. It was the type of cooking that comes from having made the same dish a thousand times. It was intimate. More like she’d invited me to dance with her than cook. I’ve been making her gnocchi ever since, and every time I do, I think about that encounter. That beach. That version of myself.

The trip ended years ago, but the memory lives on.

The same thing happened after Greece, when I came home determined to learn how to make moussaka. And after studying abroad in London, how meat pies and jacket potatoes found their way into my kitchen. And now that we are back from Ireland, I am determined to master the art of Guinness bread that we can slather with rich, golden Irish butter.

The food becomes a way of carrying the experience forward. Of continuing the conversation. And even more importantly, a reminder that the world is larger, richer, and far more interesting than our own familiar routines sometimes allow us to believe.

But the things worth bringing home aren’t limited to recipes. I’m equally interested in the rhythms of a place, and the assumptions people make about how life should be lived. The way the Italians linger over long lunches with friends and family and retire to rest before returning to work in the evening. The tradition of the English Sunday roast that’s about far more than slow-roasted meat and gravy. The relaxed early-evening Apéro tradition in France where friends gather to slowly sip wine or a spritz and enjoy simple bites like cheese, bread, and olives before dinner. There’s a reason these rituals have lasted generations, and therefore, I think a compelling reason to try and add at least a hint of them to my life back home.

Even more importantly, those moments make me think about how much time I spend in the present mentally calculating what comes next. The errands. The emails. The next item on the list. How often I choose the quickest route over the scenic one. Travel has a unique way of exposing those habits and reminding us that there are countless ways to structure a life. Countless ways to spend a Sunday. Countless ways to gather around a table. Countless ways to measure a successful day.

The older I get, the more I think this matters, because one of the subtle dangers of midlife is that our worlds can begin to shrink without us realizing it. We find the routines that work. The restaurants we like. The people we know. The stories we tell ourselves about how things are done. And, sure, there is some comfort in that. But there is also risk.

Because growth requires curiosity. And curiosity requires exposure to things that are unfamiliar. New places. New people. New ideas. New ways of being. Travel reminds us that the life we’ve built is not the only life available to us. That there are always other possibilities. Other rhythms. Other choices.

At this stage of life, I am increasingly aware that time is precious. We’ve all lived enough to know that. We’ve seen how quickly things change. How unexpectedly life can turn. How fast children grow up and parents grow older.

I think that’s why I’m no longer interested in coming home empty-handed. But not with the gift shop trinkets I wanted so badly when I was younger.

I want to bring home ideas.

Perspective.

A recipe.

A ritual.

A slower lunch.

A longer conversation.

A reminder to pay attention.

Because the best souvenirs aren’t the ones that sit on a shelf. They’re the ones that change the way we live once we return home.

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Not the kind measured by calendars and clocks. The kind measured by memories. The kind we spend most of our lives wishing we had more of.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. Maybe that’s inevitable in midlife. Maybe it’s because it was a milestone year, and a child’s graduation (from anything, anywhere) makes it impossible not to acknowledge the passage of time. But whatever the reason, the older I get, the more aware I become of how quickly the years pass. How entire seasons of life seem to disappear in the space of a few breaths. One minute you’re packing lunches and driving carpools. The next, you’re raising a glass in Ireland with your two grown sons who are building lives of their own.

The awareness can be unsettling. But it can also be clarifying. Because once you understand that time is precious, you start paying closer attention to how you spend it. And maybe that’s one of the greatest gifts of travel. It takes us out of autopilot.

At home, life has a tendency to become efficient. We take the route that gets us to work fastest instead of the one with the prettier view. We order the same thing at the restaurant because we already know we’ll like it. We visit the same places. We follow the same routines. We become experts at getting through our days.

Travel disrupts that. Suddenly everything requires our attention. The cobblestone streets beneath our feet. The flower boxes overflowing from windowsills. The musician playing in a pub on a Tuesday afternoon. The unfamiliar road signs. The way people greet one another. The taste of a Guinness poured exactly the way it was meant to be poured. In many ways, travel is at its best when we are inefficient. When we get lost. Take wrong turns. Wander down side streets with no real destination. Somehow, that’s often where the magic happens.

Travel forces us to notice things. And noticing is often where meaning lives.

Maybe that’s why time feels different when we’re away. It’s not that it’s necessarily slower. Just fuller. Because we’re actually inhabiting the moments instead of rushing through them. But the gift isn’t limited to the places themselves. It’s what happens between the people sharing the experience.

There is something about being away from home that changes our relationships too. Perhaps it’s because when we step outside the roles we normally play, the routines disappear. The distractions fade. The endless list of errands and obligations loosens its grip. And that newfound space allows other things to emerge. Conversation. Curiosity. Presence.

I watched it happen throughout the week. My father and my sons learning together. Navigating unfamiliar streets. Trading observations. Sharing meals. Laughing over things that would become inside jokes and make absolutely no sense to anyone else.

Holiday traditions are wonderful. Sunday dinners matter. But there is something uniquely special about seeing three generations experience something entirely new together.

As a woman in midlife, I often find myself occupying a strange and beautiful middle ground. I am still a daughter. Still a mother. Watching the generations on either side of me move through their own transitions. And there were moments on this trip when I found myself stepping back and simply observing. My father telling stories. My son’s asking questions. Everyone discovering something new. The joy of witnessing those relationships deepen felt every bit as meaningful as the places we visited.

And then there were the people we met.

The locals who offered directions. The bartender who shared recommendations. The fellow travelers whose paths crossed ours for a few brief moments. Travel reminds us that despite what headlines often suggest, most people are far more alike than they are different.

We all love.

We all worry.

We all laugh.

We all want our families to be safe and happy.

We all hope for a meaningful life.

The details may differ, but the humanity doesn’t.

Which brings me back to midlife.

I think one of the quiet dangers of this season is the temptation to make our worlds smaller. To stick with what we know. To visit the same places. Talk to the same people. Follow the same routines.

There is comfort in all of that, of course. But there is also risk. Because growth requires exposure to new ideas, new places, new experiences, and new ways of seeing the world. Not necessarily because we need to reinvent ourselves. But because we are, always, still becoming.

At this stage of life, I’ve become increasingly aware that time is both precious and unpredictable. We’ve all lived enough to know that. We’ve lost people. We’ve watched circumstances and relationships change. We’ve learned that tomorrow is never guaranteed. And perhaps that’s exactly why creating new memories feels so important. Because shared experiences become part of the story we tell together.

The older I get, the less interested I am in living smaller. In staying comfortable. In postponing the trip, the conversation, the experience for “someday.” Midlife has taught me that someday is not a promise. So, here’s to saying yes. To going. To paying attention. To collecting moments instead of things. And to making the time we have with the people we love count.

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The Year of the Fire Horse is certainly living up to its name.

Back in January, when I wrote about the transition into the new year, I remember being captivated by the symbolism. The snake had been about shedding. Molting. Quiet transformation. But the Fire Horse? The Fire Horse was movement. Momentum. Energy. Expansion. Wildness. A year that practically begged us not to stand still.

It has delivered on that promise.

The last six months have felt like a blur of movement. Beautiful movement in many ways. Work. Writing. Coaching. Time with friends and family. New connections. Big feelings. Tiny experiments. Moments of courage. Moments of exhaustion. But every once in a while, I stop long enough to look at the calendar and feel a little stunned. How is it possible that we are already here? How does time move this quickly?

June always brings me back to the feeling of bursting through the double doors on the last day of school, with three whole months of freedom waiting on the other side. Summer felt endless then, didn’t it? An entire universe could fit inside of it.

My summers revolved around our neighborhood pool. Swim team in the mornings. Lifeguarding when I was older. Using way too little sunscreen and way too much Sun-In. Riding my bike from one friend’s house to another without needing to tell anyone exactly where I was going as long I was home by the time the streetlights came on. And then eventually, high school summers spent pool hopping after dark or sneaking onto golf courses after hours with friends. Passing around contraband brown bags of beer and talking for hours about everything and nothing.

Back then, time stretched wide with possibility.

But somewhere along the way, the years begin to compress. The days can still feel long, of course, but the decades become startlingly short. And maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking so much lately about slowing down. About being more intentional with my time.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “tiny experiments” and how transformative it can be to give ourselves permission to try small things without needing certainty about where they will lead. That idea still feels important to me. Maybe even more important now. Because when I look back at the moments from this year that have mattered most, they are rarely the big, splashy milestone moments.

They are the tiny ones.

Drinks with a friend that unexpectedly turned into a four-hour conversation. Walking through Boston at sunset simply because. The thrill of a budding new friendship. Reading a book on a rainy Saturday with two cats at my side.

Isn’t that the irony of getting older? The more aware we become of how quickly time moves, the more desperately we want to slow down long enough to actually inhabit our lives while they are happening.

When this essay lands in your inbox, I will be in Ireland with my father and my two sons. We are using my youngest’s graduation from college as an excuse, but really it’s because this trip will give us something that feels increasingly rare and precious these days - uninterrupted time together.

Beautiful new sights. Meals that linger. New, inside jokes and a pint (or two!) in a pub.

No rushing.

No multitasking.

Just time.

Just us.

And honestly, I think that may be what I want more of for the second half of this year: deeper presence. More moments that belong entirely to the people inside them. Because halfway through the year, I’m realizing that I do not want to charge through the remaining months of 2026. I want to become more awake to my actual life. To notice it. To participate in it. And summer feels like the perfect invitation to practice this.

The Fire Horse may still be galloping, but I am the one holding the reins. Maybe the answer is learning to pull back on them just a bit every now and then so that we can hold on tighter to the moments that matter while it carries us forward. Staying outside a little longer and lingering over patio dinners. Saying yes to the spur of the moment boat rides and pausing to take in a sunset.

My hope for the second half of this year isn’t that time slows down. It’s that I do. Long enough to recognize the magic when it arrives. Long enough to soak it all in.

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So, when that moment came and the skies temporarily cleared, I threw on my sneakers and headed out.

Same route. Same shoes. But the shoreline looked completely different at that time of day. Rocks usually hidden beneath the surface sat exposed to the afternoon light. Tangled seaweed clung to dark, wet sand. Tiny tide pools shimmered where the ocean had pulled away, revealing entire little worlds I never notice at high tide.

Low tide changes the shape of everything.

Standing there looking out at it, I couldn’t help but think about how much midlife feels the same way. There comes a point in life when the water starts to recede a little. The constant motion and noise that once kept us busy - raising children, building careers, caretaking, striving, performing, and proving ourselves - begins to quiet. Gradually at first. And then seemingly all at once.

And when it does, things become visible that we simply didn’t have the time or space to see before. Truths we buried beneath busyness. Needs we ignored. Relationships that no longer fit. Dreams we convinced ourselves were impractical or selfish or too late. Maybe that’s why midlife can feel so unsettling at first. Up until this moment, many of us existed in a kind of perpetual high tide. The water was deep enough to keep us moving forward without having to look too closely at what lay beneath the surface. The tide carried us along and lulled us into believing it might always be this way, even though somewhere deep down, we knew it couldn’t.

And then one day the water begins to pull back.

At first glance, it can look like absence. Like loss. The water pulls back and suddenly everything feels more exposed. And midlife can feel that way too.

Children leave home. Marriages change. Friendships evolve. Parents age. Careers plateau or unravel or no longer feel aligned with who we are becoming. The noise quiets just enough for us to finally hear ourselves thinking. And, I don’t know about you, but that can be a little unsettling. If I’m being honest, I had come to rely on the noise a little too much. The chaos of a full house and full life was my drug of choice to numb me. To not look too closely at the nagging truths underneath it all. It was easy to lose myself in carpools, grocery lists, work deadlines, sports schedules, laundry piles, and the endless details of caring for everyone else. Easy to keep that little voice inside me drowned out beneath the constant motion of daily life.

Until, inevitably, life turned the volume down.

And when that happens, you have two choices. You can try to recreate the chaos with different to do lists. Different distractions. Or you can choose, perhaps for the first time in decades, to be still. To sit with it for a moment and allow that exposure to transform itself into revelation. Maybe low tide arrives so we can finally see what has been there all along beneath the surface.

I think that’s what this season of life has been for me. A gradual uncovering. A pulling back of the water from parts of my life I had spent years moving through on autopilot. And while some of what emerged was painful to acknowledge, some of it was unexpectedly beautiful too.

Desire.

Curiosity.

Creativity.

The realization that there were still undiscovered parts of myself waiting beneath all the roles and expectations I had accumulated over the years. Low tide reveals things. But standing there that afternoon, looking out at the shoreline, another thought struck me too.

The water always returns.

That may be the most comforting part of all. Low tide can feel permanent while you’re inside it. Seasons of loneliness. Grief. Reinvention. Exhaustion. The moments when life feels stripped down and uncertain. But the ocean understands rhythm. Ebb and flow. Retreat and return.

And maybe that’s part of what we are meant to learn too. That pulling inward is not failure. That some seasons are meant for revealing, others for rebuilding. And that joy, connection, purpose, creativity, and love are not gone forever simply because they feel farther away right now.

The tide comes back. Maybe not in the same form. Maybe not carrying exactly what it once did. But life keeps moving. Keeps reshaping us. Keeps offering new things to discover if we remain open enough to notice them.

I think that’s what I want to remember as I move through this stage of my life. Not to fear low tide so much. Not to mistake it for an ending. But to trust what it reveals.

And to trust that the water will rise again.

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Everyone was outside. On the beach. On the streets. In the parks. On the water. There wasn’t an inch of space on a restaurant patio or a rooftop bar. After seemingly endless months of gray skies and puffy coats, nobody could bear the thought of wasting a single minute of sunshine.

And neither could I.

After my morning walk, I grabbed a coffee and sat down on a park bench. I couldn’t quite bring myself to go back inside just yet. The air felt lighter somehow. Happier. A collective relief hung over every square inch of the park. Nearby, children ran around a playground while exhausted but grateful parents looked on. After a long New England winter of basement playdates and trying to entertain children indoors without endlessly recycling stomach bugs and runny noses, they finally seemed free again too. I remember those days all too well.

As I sat and sipped, I looked on as a group of little girls around five or six years old were playing together near the jungle gym. One of them noticed another little girl sitting alone on the end of a seesaw.

Without hesitation, she ran over and asked, “Do you want to play?”

Just like that.

No awkwardness. No overthinking. No concern about whether she would be rejected or whether adding another little girl might somehow change the dynamic of the group. Just a simple invitation.

And with one nod and one smile, the little girl hopped off the seesaw and instantly became part of the pigtail posse as though she’d been playing with them all along. No parent had to intervene. No one had to orchestrate inclusion. What a relief to see that to children, connection still seems to exist as natural instinct.

The more the merrier.

Sitting there watching them, I couldn’t help but think how much we adults could learn from that. How is it that somewhere along the way, many of us forget how to ask people to play?

Maybe it’s because I chose the word “connection” as my intention for 2026 that makes me primed to notice these things more than I might otherwise. Or maybe it’s because midlife has made me acutely aware of both the beauty and fragility of relationships. At this age, many of us are carrying the residue of heartbreak, divorce, loneliness, friendship shifts, caregiving, grief, relocation, empty nests, disappointment. We become more cautious. More self-protective. We convince ourselves we are bothering people. That everyone else already has their people. Their plans. Their lives.

And so instead of asking, “Do you want to play?” we retreat inward.

We stay home.
We isolate.
We retreat into our devices and wait to be invited.

As this was all percolating in my mind, the little girls shifted from the jungle gym to a game of hide and seek. I watched as one girl squeezed herself inside a red plastic tunnel while the girl who was “It” covered her eyes and counted to ten. Soon, she was on the hunt. It didn’t take long for her to work her way to the tunnel, and when she peered inside and discovered her friend, both erupted into delighted shrieks and giggles.

I swear I am not usually this dramatic over playground games, but something about that moment hit me too. Why? Because there is no greater thrill, even at this age, than being found. Than being seen.

And if we’re being honest, maybe there is no deeper fear than the possibility that we won’t be.

Is it possible that life is just one big game of hide and seek?

Hoping someone notices.
Hoping someone reaches out.
Hoping someone remembers us even when we’ve gone quiet.
Wanting proof that being out of sight doesn’t mean being out of mind.

And yet, at the very same time, finding endless ways to hide.

We hide behind busyness. Behind independence. Behind “I’m fine.”
We convince ourselves we don’t really need anyone.
We scroll instead of calling. Stay home instead of showing up. Wait for invitations instead of risking the vulnerability of extending one ourselves.

We retreat after heartbreak. After rejection. After disappointment.
We make ourselves smaller. Quieter. Harder to find.

And then we wonder why no one comes looking.

And maybe that’s the thing children understand instinctively that adults forget. Connection requires participation. You cannot be found if you disappear entirely. At some point, we all have to emerge from the plastic tunnel.

We have to leave the house.
Text first.
Say yes to dinner.
Join the class.
Walk into the party.
Tell the truth.
Raise our hands.
Wave from the sidelines.
Invite someone for coffee.
Ask, “Do you want to play?”

Is that vulnerable and scary sometimes? Hell yes. But maybe the real work of midlife is learning that vulnerability and connection are inseparable. Trusting that despite all of the ways life has disappointed or hurt us, there are still people looking for us too.

Maybe that’s what I felt sitting on that park bench this weekend, watching children do what comes naturally before adulthood teaches us to complicate it.

The more the merrier.

That very evening, as I soaked in the tub replaying the day in my mind, I got a text inviting me on a spur-of-the-moment boat ride. And I know, without question, that it was the lesson from that playground earlier in the day that quieted any temptation I might have had to stay right where I was.

Instead, I threw on clothes and headed out the door.

A beautiful night. A picture-perfect evening with someone I care deeply about and a few new friends to boot. Maybe connection really is that simple sometimes.

Do you want to play?

Absolutely.

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At first, I thought it would be a breeze. I’m a word girl after all. I collect them and examine them and cobble them together all the time as a way of fleshing out my thoughts and feelings. But when I sat down to reply to her note, I drew a blank. Further complicating things, I realized that I wasn’t even quite sure what the word “values” meant in relation to the infrastructure of a life.

In my twenties and thirties, I was moving forward, building a life, making decisions, checking boxes. There were things that mattered to me, of course. Family. Love. Achievement. Stability. But if I’m being honest, so much of what guided me then felt inherited. Unexamined. Driven as much by expectation as by intention. I was following a script I didn’t even realize I had been handed.

Do well. Work hard. Be everything to everyone. Keep going.

And in that constant forward motion, there wasn’t space to pause and ask the deeper questions:

Why does this matter to me?
What am I actually building?
Whose life am I living?

It wasn’t until much later, through experience, loss, reinvention, and a fair amount of unraveling, that those questions became impossible to ignore. It wasn’t until I was in my mid 40’s, with the threshold of a new decade rapidly approaching, that something began to shift. Those questions that had once been background noise, started to come into focus.

Maybe it was the jolt of my mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, a stark reminder of how short and precious life and love really are, combined with the realization that my children were growing up and preparing to leave for college. And, of course, the collective wake-up call of the pandemic. All of it conspiring to push me toward a deeper kind of clarity and a much more intentional relationship with what I wanted, what I needed, from this life.

As I sat down to answer Sif’s question with the benefit of almost a decade of perspective, I realized that there were some common themes, some values, underpinning everything that came next and that still drive the decisions I make today. And the world girl in me, who has always loved a little alliteration, was tickled to find that they each just happen to begin with the letter “C.”

So here they are — my Five C’s:

Connection. Curiosity. Courage. Creativity. Community.

Connection — because at the center of everything are the relationships that shape us and sustain us. None of this is meant to be done alone.

And I don’t just mean connection with others, though that has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. My family, whose love and support have never wavered, has been a steady foundation through it all, something I know I am incredibly lucky to have.

My girlfriends. The women who have laughed with me, held me up, and helped me gather the scattered pieces of myself and put them back together again more times than I can count, have been a constant reminder that we are not meant to carry life on our own.

There have also been seasons when I’ve done exactly that. When I’ve retreated inward, convinced that what I was going through was mine to figure out alone, not wanting to burden anyone else with the weight of it. I can see now how much that cost me. How isolating it was. How unnecessary.

Because the truth is, connection is what softens the hard edges of life. It gives language to what feels impossible to name. It reminds us that we are not the only ones asking these questions, feeling these things, finding our way as we go.

And just as importantly, it’s about the relationship we have with ourselves. The willingness to stay present, to listen inward, to not abandon ourselves when things get uncomfortable.

Connection, in all its forms, is what brings us back. To each other. And to ourselves.

Curiosity — because the willingness to ask “What if?” and “What comes next?” is what keeps life from narrowing.

For a long time, I thought change required certainty. A big decision. A clear plan. A leap. But what I’ve come to understand is that curiosity offers a softer way in. It offers us an invitation to explore. Curiosity loosens the grip of fear. It shifts the question from “What if this goes wrong?” to “What might be possible?” In doing so, it creates space for something new to emerge.

Curiosity often shows up in the smallest ways. A different route home. A conversation with someone new. Saying yes to something you’re not entirely sure about. The willingness to follow a thread, just to see where it might lead.

What I’ve learned is that you don’t have to overhaul your entire life to begin again. Sometimes all it takes is a tiny experiment. A moment of permission. A quiet decision to stay open rather than shut things down before they’ve had a chance to unfold.

Courage — the kind that says yes before you feel ready and begins again when things fall apart.

One of the most surprising parts of this exercise was realizing that courage isn’t something I’ve ever given myself much credit for having. And yet, when I look back, I can see it woven through the story of my life, revealing itself over and over again.

In the decisions to change course. In the willingness to step into the unknown without a clear roadmap. In leaving the security of a twenty-three-year marriage. In carrying the people I love through seasons of crisis, even when I didn’t have the answers. In packing up my life and moving to a new city where I knew barely a soul, simply because something in me said I needed to.

It wasn’t always graceful. It didn’t always feel brave. But that’s the thing about courage. Most of the time, it doesn’t announce itself as such. It just looks like showing up. Taking the next step. Trusting that you’ll figure it out along the way.

Only later, when you look back, do you realize what it truly was.

Creativity — not just in what I make, but in how I choose to live. The belief that life itself can be revised, reimagined, rewritten.

For a long time, I thought of creativity as something reserved for artists. People who made things. But over time, I’ve come to understand that creativity is much bigger than that. It’s the way we approach our lives. The willingness to question the script we’ve been handed. To look at what’s in front of us and imagine that it could be different. To take the raw material of our experiences (the good, the hard, the unexpected) and shape it into something new.

Creativity is what allows us to see possibility where there once felt like only one path. It’s what makes reinvention possible. It’s what reminds us that we are not stuck inside a fixed story, but living inside something that can be edited, revised, and, when necessary, completely rewritten.

And perhaps most importantly, it gives us permission to see ourselves not just as participants in our lives, but as the authors of them.

Conviction — the courage to live in alignment with what I know is true, even when it challenges expectations.

This is the one that has taken me the longest to claim. It requires listening for that quiet voice inside. The one that nudges, insists, sometimes refuses to be ignored, even when following it feels inconvenient or uncomfortable or hard to explain.

For so many years, I overrode that voice. I deferred to what was expected. What made sense on paper. What would keep the peace. But something about midlife made that increasingly harder to do. The cost of ignoring what I knew to be true became too high.

Conviction is what asks us to stop outsourcing our decisions. To trust ourselves. To choose differently, even when it disrupts the version of us that others have come to rely on. It’s what gives us the strength to say, “This is who I am now”and to live in a way that reflects that truth.

And it doesn’t stop with us.

Conviction also asks us to stand up for what is right. To use our voices. To create space for others to do the same. Because when one woman chooses to live in alignment with her truth, it has a way of giving others permission to do it too.

Looking at this list now, it feels so clear. But here’s the thing, these weren’t always conscious choices. They were threads I was following in the moment. Pulled slowly, sometimes reluctantly, over time.

If you had asked to define my values in my twenties, I might have said something like success, security, achievement. In my thirties? Maybe balance. Responsibility. Stability. All worthy things. But if I’m being honest, those were all shaped by a desire to get it right. To be enough. To meet expectations I hadn’t fully questioned. Now, the words feel different. Not because I’ve abandoned those earlier versions of myself, but because I understand them better.

But these values, these Five C’s, were there all along. They just needed time, and experience, and a little bit of courage to come into focus. And maybe that’s what midlife offers us. Not a completely new set of values. But the clarity to finally name the ones that have been guiding us all along. And the freedom to choose them, consciously, moving forward.

So, now I pose to you the same question that Sif asked of me, “What are the values that have shaped the life you’ve built?”

(I would also highly recommend following and reading her interview here with the also-fabulous ’s Substack Petal & Hearth.)

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There’s something about the pomp and circumstance of commencement. All of those years of hard work and intense friendships culminating in one final moment of robes and caps and gowns. A sea of young people standing on the edge of everything that’s about to begin, eager for words of hope and encouragement. Something that makes you want to toss your proverbial (or literal!) cap in the air and leap into the unknown.

This year, those speeches feel especially poignant, as my youngest son will be among those graduating. The little Buddha baby whose foot once fit in the palm of my hand is about to graduate from Boston University and step out into the world as a grown man.

Where, oh where, did the time go?

I am filled with pride. And awe. And, if I’m being honest, an undercurrent of something else too. A sense that we are sending these young graduates out into a world that feels heavier and more uncertain than the one we inherited.

This isn’t an easy moment to be launching into adulthood. The job market here in the U.S. feels unforgiving. The pressure to find something that not only pays the bills - let alone something meaningful - can feel overwhelming. And from the outside, it can look like everyone else has it figured out.

That last part is something I know he feels acutely.

I just wish he would believe me when I tell him that, aside from a very select few, most of his peers (even the ones with jobs already lined up) are far from certain about what comes next. I mean, I’m fifty-three and still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

And maybe that’s part of why this moment feels so resonant. Because as much as it belongs to the graduates, standing on the edge of something new, there’s a version of that same edge happening here in midlife. Less ceremonious, perhaps, but no less real. A moment of looking ahead and, once again, asking, “What comes next?”

Which makes me think we could all use a little inspirational commencement address right now, couldn’t we?

So, if I were asked to stand up and look back on the last five decades and share whatever wisdom I’ve gathered with the graduates of 2026, or with anyone at any age still becoming, what would I say?

One: Stay curious

Not just about the world, but about yourself. You are not a finished product. You will change in ways that are impossible to predict. The things that matter most to you at this moment may seem trivial five or ten or twenty years from now. And things you never expected to care about may one day become central to your life. Stay open to exploring the threads of possibility. Tease them out and really examine them. You never know where they will lead or who they might lead you too.

Don’t ever be afraid to ask questions. What should truly terrify all of us is the moment we stop being curious. The moment we stop asking why and what if. Because the moment we settle is the moment we close ourselves off to everything that could be.

Two: Nothing (but death) is final

Not the job you take. Not the path you start down. Not the mistakes you make along the way. You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to begin again. More than once. In fact, hopefully often. Wash, rinse, repeat for the rest of your life, because it is never too late to rewrite your story.

Not at 25.
Not at 45.
Not at 65.

The life you build will not be a straight line. It will twist and double back and surprise you in ways you could never have imagined. But only if you learn to ride the wave, tune out the naysayers and trust the little voice inside of you that’s telling you when it’s time for change. We are never fully formed, nor should we strive to be. We are constantly becoming.

Three: Say yes before you feel ready (EXCEPT to marriage!)

Because most of life is learned in the doing. In the showing up. In the moments when you think, “I don’t know if I can do this,” and then you try anyway. Sometimes you won’t succeed, but I can almost guarantee that you will be the better for having tried.

Confidence rarely comes first. It’s a muscle built when you rise to the occasion and prove to yourself that you are brave enough to try. And the more you step outside your comfort zone, the more familiar that discomfort becomes. What once felt impossible begins to feel doable. You learn that you can handle more than you thought, and in doing so, you open yourself up to opportunities you never would have seen from inside the safety of a smaller life.

Four: Be kind

To others and equally importantly, to yourself. Pay attention to people. Really listen. Offer people grace. The old adage that you never know what someone else is going through is true. It’s a reminder that we are all carrying things we can’t always see, and reason enough to move through the world with a little more softness and understanding. There is already more than enough hate in the world. We don’t need to add to it with more judgement and division. Remember, we are all just humans, doing the best we can humaning in this world. Choose kindness. It’s how we begin to repair what’s been broken and find our way back to one another.

And so, to the graduates, including my own, and to everyone everywhere, I would say:

You don’t need to have it all figured out.

You just need to begin.

And then begin again.

And again after that.

Because the truth is, there is no single moment when everything clicks into place. There is only the steady, imperfect act of showing up for your life. Of paying attention. Of listening for that quiet voice inside of you and having the courage to follow it, even when the path ahead isn’t clear.

So, step forward. Take the job. Change your mind. Fall in love. Fail. Try again. Rewrite the story as many times as you need to.

I’ll be here, cheering you on.

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Within a nine-month period, my 23-year marriage officially ended. My youngest son left for college, making me an empty nester. And I packed up the home where we had raised our children and moved to a new city where I knew fewer people than I could count on one hand.

I’m not sure if it’s a documented side effect of COVID, but I swear something about the pandemic triggered a seismic shift in my relationship to change.

There’s nothing quite like a global, apocalyptic event to remind you how short and fragile life really is. To force you to take a hard, honest look at whether you’re actually living your one wild and precious life — or just moving through the motions of it.

For me, the decision to get divorced was part of that reckoning. At first, it felt like the defining moment. The singular event that would split my life cleanly into before and after. And in many ways, it did.

For six months after it was finalized, I hunkered down. I healed. I began the slow work of getting to know myself again, leaning into the comfort of familiar surroundings and routines and friends. And for a while, that was exactly what I needed. Hadn’t I done the hardest part?

But as my youngest got ready to leave for college, I started to feel something I didn’t expect. A restlessness. At first, it was subtle. Easy to ignore. Just a passing thought here and there – the sense that something still wasn’t quite right.

But it didn’t go away.

What started as a little twinge slowly grew louder until it became something I couldn’t ignore. Change, it turned out, wasn’t done with me yet.

The life I had built - those quiet suburban rhythms that had been perfect for raising a family - suddenly felt too small for the woman I was becoming. And that realization was both disorienting and oddly clarifying. Something in my bones told me that if I was truly going to rebuild, I couldn’t just rearrange the pieces of my old life. I had to create something new.

Like most big decisions in my life, it didn’t arrive with fanfare. It started slowly, and then seemingly all at once. For a month or two, it was a quiet conversation I had with myself. Stolen moments and daydreams about what life might look like somewhere else. Should I move home to D.C. to be close to my parents? Cold New England winters had taken their toll, what if I started over somewhere with sand and palm trees? Or what if…what if I moved abroad? Florence? London?

As exciting as it was to play out those scenarios, I knew that with the boys in college and my mother still battling Alzheimer’s, it wasn’t the right time - especially for a foreign adventure.

Eventually, I worked up the courage to say it all out loud to a friend.

She didn’t hesitate.

“Why don’t you move to Boston?”

Boston?

She might as well have suggested Brussels for all I knew about the city.

Even though we’d lived just an hour and a half away, it had never really been my city. When we needed an urban fix, we went to New York. Or I went home to Washington, D.C.

But the more I sat with it, the more it began to make sense.

My boys would be in college in New England. I could still be close to them. It might not be as convenient, but I could still do my job. My friendships, the ones that had carried me through so much, would still be within reach. And something in me recognized the opportunity hidden inside the uncertainty.

And that was it. Decision made.

But here’s the thing I wasn’t entirely prepared for: When I arrived in Boston, I didn’t arrive to a new life. I arrived to an empty one.

No built-in community.
No routines.
No easy entry points.

No young children to meet other parents through.
No dog to spark sidewalk conversations.
No familiar rhythm to fall back into.

Just me. A stranger in a city that didn’t know me yet.

And if I’m honest, there were moments in those early days where the weight of that reality was overwhelming. It would have been so easy to give into the temptation to retreat. To stay inside.
To scroll. To tell myself I would figure it out later. But instead, I made a commitment to honor the version of myself that had brought me here. The one who wanted more, even if she didn’t yet know what that looked like.

I decided to participate in my own life.

What did that look like?

I walked.

Miles and miles, every day.

Not with a destination, but with the intention to learn the shape of the place that might one day feel like mine. I made a rule for myself: never take the same route twice. To let myself get a little lost.

There was something about the unfamiliarity of it all mirrored exactly how I felt inside. Uncertain. Untethered. But also… open.

I started talking to people.

At the coffee shop. On a park bench. Standing in line at the coffee shop.

I resisted the easy escape hatch of my phone and looked up instead. I made eye contact. I smiled.

I said yes more than I wanted to.

To book talks. To the theater. To live music. To eating dinner on my own at the bar of a restaurant. To anything that put me in a room with other people. Not because I felt brave. Quite the opposite most of the time! But because I understood something important:

No one was coming to build this life for me.

We talk about the courage it takes to leave. And yes, that courage matters. But we don’t talk nearly enough about what comes after. The daily courage it takes to show up in a life that doesn’t feel like yours yet. To choose, again and again, to stay open in the face of uncertainty. Starting over isn’t a single act. It’s a practice.

And if you are somewhere in that in-between right now. If something in your life no longer fits. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to be willing to take the first step.

And then the next.

And then the one after that.

Because a new life doesn’t arrive all at once.

It’s built — slowly and imperfectly — when you decide to keep showing up for yourself.

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For a long while now, romantic love has been the last thing on my mind. Having braved the post-divorce dating scene only to be disillusioned and crushingly disappointed, I have been fully content to focus on family, friends, my health, my work, and building a deeply meaningful, independent life. But lately, I’ve noticed a twinge here and there. A little shift inside that’s left me curious about what it would be like to share this life I’ve worked so hard to build with a partner. With the right partner this time.

And, Substack friends, I have a confession. I kissed a boy. And I liked it. But to all of my girlfriends who are reading this, let’s everyone calm down, because the kissing isn’t really the point. Did I feel like I was twenty again? Absolutely. Was it fun and sparky and unexpected and would I very much like to do it again sometime? Absolutely. But the reason I am mentioning it here, is because of what it represented.

It was proof that my heart is healed and open to the idea of love again.

Those of you who have reached midlife and waded the treacherous waters of divorce, heartbreak, and healing know what a milestone this is. Because that feeling, the willingness to open ourselves up again to the possibility of love and partnership, is hard earned.

There was a time when I thought I might never feel that spark again. Not because I stopped believing in love, but because I had worked so hard to build a life that felt full and steady on my own. And I like that life. I don’t need someone to complete it.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that not needing something isn’t the same as not wanting it.

Dating in midlife requires a different kind of courage. It’s not just the fear of rejection, though that’s still there. It’s the awareness of everything you’ve lived through. The way you’ve stitched yourself back together and learned how to stand on your own. You know what it costs now. And you also know what you won’t tolerate.

There are insecurities too. About your body. About how you show up in a world that often feels like it was designed for younger versions of you. And yet, there is something quietly thrilling about realizing that you are still capable of feeling that spark. That you are still open. That your story in this part of your life is not closed. If anything, I am clearer now than I have ever been.

I know what I need.
I know what I value.
I know what I am no longer willing to compromise.

I know that trust and honesty are paramount. Full stop.

I know that I want passion and fireworks, but I also want someone I can count on. At this stage of life, I need a man who can whisk me away for a romantic weekend and happily drive me to my colonoscopy appointment the following week. That’s just where we are.

I want someone who values and prioritizes his family. Who is generous with his time and his love. Someone who enjoys traveling and will daydream with me about living abroad one day, but who also enjoys cooking dinner at home and curling up on the couch to watch a movie.

Someone who isn’t afraid to share what he’s feeling. Who won’t shy away from commitment. Someone who cares about what’s happening in the world. Someone who embraces my people and wants to introduce me to his.

I’m sure that sounds like a tall order.

I’m okay with that.

I’m willing to wait.

Because love in midlife feels different. It’s not driven by urgency or expectation in the same way. It’s not about building a life from scratch, but about deciding, very intentionally, whether someone fits into the life you’ve already built. There’s less illusion, but more truth. Less striving, but more clarity. And maybe, if we’re lucky, a deeper kind of connection. One rooted not in who we hope to become, but in who we already are.

And maybe that’s what makes this time around different.

Not easier.

But clearer…because I am clearer.

The idea of diving back into dating apps feels exhausting at best. That version of the story still doesn’t appeal to me in the least, so I won’t be going down that particular path again anytime soon.

But I am open. Open to something that feels organic. Real. Aligned with the life I’ve built.

This is a story about being willing to try again. About allowing yourself to feel something, even when you know how vulnerable that makes you. About standing in this season of life, steady on your own two feet, and still choosing to leave the door open.

And maybe, for now, that’s more than enough.

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I lean into words when I’m flailing around at either end of the emotional spectrum. Naming something, giving it a word, is grounding. It is proof that I am not alone. Proof that someone has been here before me and made it through, at least long enough to call it something.

I’ve written before about how, instead of making a long list of resolutions for the new year, I chose a single word. A word to serve as a beacon. Something to guide me and light my way through the months ahead. A word to keep me on course.

And if I had to choose a word to describe how I am feeling right now, looking ahead at the coming week, it would be this:

Disoriented.

This week, my mother would have turned 81. And my oldest son turns 25.

I find myself sitting in the space in between those two numbers, trying to make sense of what it means to be here, in the middle of it all. There is joy and sadness. Awe that my toe-headed firstborn has lived a full quarter of a century. And, yes, still some anger that Alzheimer’s robbed my mother of the chance to celebrate both occasions with us.

There is something about midlife that feels like standing at a crossroads of time. One hand reaching back toward where we came from. The other reaching forward toward the lives we helped create. And somehow, we are expected to stand steady in the middle, holding both.

It is beautiful. And it is disorienting. And sometimes, it is heartbreaking.

My son is now older than I was when I got married. I can’t quite wrap my head around that. At 25, I thought I had it all figured out. I thought I understood who I was and where I was going. I was making decisions that would shape everything that came after, without fully understanding the weight of them.

And now, here he is.

Living his own life. Making his own choices. Becoming his own person.

And I feel something I can’t quite name. Pride, of course. Love, always. But also, a kind of awe at the passage of time. At how quickly we move from being knee-deep in the water with them, steadying, guiding, responding to every need, to standing on the shoreline, watching as they find their own rhythm and make their way forward without us.

And in the same breath, I find myself thinking about my mother. About what 81 would have looked like. About the life she lived and the life she never had a chance to. About the version of her I carry with me now.

When I close my eyes and picture them both, something strange happens. I don’t see my son as the independent 25-year-old he is today. And I don’t try to imagine what my mother might have looked like at 81 had Alzheimer’s not claimed her first. Thankfully, I no longer see her as her sick self. I see her as she was when she was fully herself. Full of life. Present. Whole.

And I see my son, Patrick, as a towheaded little boy, sitting up in her lap with his younger brother by his side. Both boys wearing fake mustaches because they wanted to be just like their grandfather. That is the image that comes to me now. Not who they were at the end or who they are becoming, but who they were in that moment. Together. Safe inside a story that had not yet unfolded.

Neither my mother nor my son could have known what life had in store for them. None of us did. Not the shape it would take. Not the joy. Not the heartbreak. Not how quickly it would all move.

Losing a parent shifts your place in the world. You are no longer someone’s child in the same way. You become the next in line. The one holding the memories. The one telling the stories. The one trying to make sense of it all. And at the very same time, you are watching your own children step fully into their own lives. Moving forward in ways that are both thrilling and, if I am honest, a little bit hard to grasp.

Midlife, I am starting to realize, is not just about reinvention or becoming. It is also about holding.

Holding where we have been.
Holding what we have lost.
Holding what we have built.
Holding who we are still becoming.

It is about learning how to live in the space between grief and gratitude. Between letting go and holding on. Between the past that shaped us and the future we are still trying to imagine.

This week, I will celebrate my son.
And I will mourn my mother.

And I will stand here, in the middle of it all, feeling the full weight and wonder of what it means to be alive at this stage of life.

Not at the beginning.
Not at the end.
But here.

Holding both.
In between.

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One of the things you hear over and over again about midlife, especially from women, is that this is the stage where we finally run out of fucks to give.

I mean, that’s what inspired Melani Sanders to found the “We Do Not Care Club,” right? With over four million members and counting, it spread like wildfire because so many women, myself included, heard that phrase and thought, “Yes! That is exactly how I feel!” Not because we suddenly do not care about anything, but because we are finally tired of caring about everything.

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to feel like something deeper might be happening.

What if it’s not that we have no fucks left?
What if it’s that we have finally learned how to prioritize them?

In my twenties and thirties, I spent a lot of energy trying to be a likable character in everyone else’s story, giving out fucks like free samples at Costco. Generously. Constantly. Often to complete strangers who had absolutely no business influencing how I lived my life.

A random comment from another mother at a PTO meeting about the kind of juice box I packed in my son’s lunch could send me home spiraling, clearing out the pantry and questioning every parenting decision I’d made since he was in diapers. If someone raised an eyebrow at a decision I made at work, I would replay the conversation in my head for days. And a text that came off just a little more curt than usual could send me straight down a rabbit hole, replaying every recent conversation to figure out if I had said something wrong.

I gave a lot of fucks to people who had not earned them.
But those days are over.

It is not that I do not care what people think.
I just care a lot more about which people think them.

Midlife, at least for me, has been a long process of deciding where my time and attention belong. I am no longer investing in people who want me to stay small, agreeable, and convenient. I am no longer staying in relationships because I should. I am choosing much more carefully who I share my time, my life, and my heart with now.

These days, I give a very large fuck about showing up for the people I love. I give a very large fuck about my health, my work, my writing, and building a life that feels honest and meaningful. I give a very large fuck about spending my time in ways that matter to me.

What I no longer give many fucks about are the opinions of people who are not living my life, not paying my bills, not sitting at my kitchen table, and not showing up when things get hard. That shouldn’t be mistaken for apathy. It’s discernment.

Midlife isn’t when we stop caring. It is when we start caring about the right things. The things that actually matter. Our time. Our people. Our peace. Our joy. We have fewer fucks, because we finally understand how valuable they are. And honestly, it is one of the greatest gifts of getting older.

When we are younger, we spend so much time trying to be liked, trying to do things the right way, trying to follow invisible rules we assume everyone else understands better than we do. By the time we reach midlife, we start to realize that many of those rules were made up, and many of the people we were trying to impress weren’t paying nearly as much attention as we thought they were.

The fucks we once gave about being performative for approval start to shift toward fucks about being authentic to ourselves. The fucks we gave about making ourselves smaller to fit someone else’s idea of beauty become fucks about wanting to feel strong and at home in our own bodies.

Maybe our fucks do not disappear in midlife.
Maybe they just get upgraded to ones that finally feel like our own.

Life gets a lot simpler when you stop trying to win approval from the entire world and start focusing on the small group of people who actually matter. And somewhere along the way, you realize that you yourself have earned a place on that list too.

Midlife has been, in many ways, a process of getting reacquainted with the voice inside of me, the one I ignored for years because I was too busy trying to be who everyone else needed me to be. To my delight and surprise, I have discovered that she usually knows what she is talking about.

So no, I have not run out of fucks. I just stopped giving them away for free. These days, I invest them carefully. Maybe midlife is not when we run out of fucks. Maybe it is when we finally start giving the right ones.

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And lately, if I’m being honest, that’s a little bit how life has felt too. Stalled. In between seasons. Stuck.

You know, that strange in-between feeling where nothing seems to be moving very quickly and you’re not entirely sure what the next step is supposed to be. Midlife, in many ways, seems to have a season like this built into it. We spend so many years building and striving and pushing forward, and then suddenly we find ourselves in a stretch of road where the question is no longer “How do I get there?” but “Where am I even trying to go now?”

I’ve been working on a project recently that has me rereading some of my favorite writing craft books. One in particular, dare I say the G.O.A.T. for unlocking your creativity, is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It says right on the inside flap that this book is “the seminal book on the subject of creativity,” and for decades writers and artists and creatives of all types have turned to it when they feel blocked or stuck.

As I was rereading it over the weekend, it occurred to me that what Cameron is writing about isn’t just writer’s block. It’s about stuckness in general. Creative stuckness. Life stuckness. Identity stuckness. That feeling of knowing something needs to shift but not knowing exactly what or how.

More than three decades after its original publication, the book is still regularly referenced, largely thanks to her stream-of-consciousness journaling technique called Morning Pages. Writing those pages is part of my daily routine, and I am so grateful for that practice. But lately, I’ve been thinking more about another concept she introduces: The Artist’s Date.

Cameron describes an Artist’s Date as “a block of time…especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness.” In other words, it’s time you spend, preferably alone, doing something that interests you, delights you, surprises you, or simply makes you curious. It’s not about productivity or efficiency. It’s just about doing something that feeds your brain and your spirit a little bit. Something that delights and inspires you.

As wonderful as it sounds, these dates are often the first to go when life gets crazy, which it does far too often. So lately, I’ve been trying to recommit to this idea, and I have to say, it’s helping even more than I, a true Cameron disciple, expected.

In the past few months, my Artist’s Dates have looked like going to my first non-Nutcracker ballet and actually loving it. They’ve looked like wandering through a transcendent exhibit by the artist Tawny Chatmon at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and standing awe-struck in front of certain pieces because they made me feel something I couldn’t quite put into words. They’ve looked like attending a performance of the musical Suffs and leaving the theater so energized and inspired that I felt like I wanted to march straight out of Boston and all the way to the White House in Washington, D.C.

Sometimes these dates don’t even require me to leave home. Like cooking my way through a new cookbook, trying recipes I’ve never made before, and remembering that creativity doesn’t only live in studios and theaters and museums. Sometimes it lives in your kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with music playing and a sink full of dishes.

None of these things were productive in any traditional sense. They didn’t move a project forward. They didn’t check anything off a to-do list or produce answers to any existential questions about the meaning of life. But every single one of them made me feel a little less…stuck.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that feeling stuck is often less about being trapped and more about being under-stimulated. Under-curious. Under-inspired. We keep trying to think our way out of stuckness, when what we really need to do is move our way out of it. See something new. Try something new. Walk down a different street. Read a different book. Talk to someone new. Sit somewhere we’ve never sat before.

I am starting to think that the opposite of stuck is not change. It is curiosity. Why? Because curiosity leads to movement. Movement leads to energy. Energy leads to change. Not necessarily overnight, but slowly, especially if you make it a regular practice.

By the time we reach midlife, there’s a tendency to lean into efficiency. We get caught up in the same daily routines. We squeeze in a workout here or a girls’ night there, in between work and caring for adult children and aging parents and trying to consume our body’s weight in protein. We know what we like, where we like to go, who we like to go with, and what we like to order when we get there. Our lives become streamlined and predictable. We stop following our curiosity, and before we know it, we start feeling stuck.

Right now, Boston still looks like winter. Bare trees, cold air, people buried inside their coats. But every year, without fail, the buds come. The ground softens. Something that looked completely stuck turns out to have been changing the whole time, just under the surface where we couldn’t see it yet.

Feeling stuck is not always a sign that nothing is happening. Sometimes it is just the season before things start to grow again. The season before the bloom. And maybe the best thing we can do when we feel stuck is not panic and not overhaul our entire lives but simply follow our curiosity for a little while and see where it leads.

So, I am recommitting myself to Artist’s Dates. To wandering a little more. To following curiosity instead of waiting for clarity. If you are feeling stuck too, maybe you do not need a five-year plan or a complete reinvention. Maybe you just need to take yourself somewhere interesting this week and see what happens.

If you do, report back. I’d love to hear where curiosity took you.

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What was I thinking?

It’s so tempting to revisit old decisions with the clarity of hindsight and the arrogance of knowing how the story turned out. To comb through the past looking for the exact moment where, if only I had seen things differently, everything might have unfolded another way.

I shared one of those moments recently in a very personal post about being sexually assaulted by my boss when I was in my mid-twenties. Lord knows, that’s one memory I’ve relived and relitigated in my mind a million times over the years. What was I thinking when I agreed to bring that file up to his room? What warning signs did I miss? What could I have done to prevent it? What if I had only had the courage to hold him accountable publicly?

It strikes me now, as I write this three decades later, that every single one of those questions places the burden for what happened and the aftermath squarely on my young shoulders.

I was talking about all of this in a recent therapy session, running through the all-too-familiar, tearful list of “If I’d only” examples, and I wondered aloud if this was a wound that would ever fully heal. My therapist offered an exercise that she thought might help.

And I’ll be damned. It did.

Knowing that I write to process my feelings, she asked me to try something different. To sit down and write a letter to the woman I used to be. Not to go back and warn her or rewrite the story of what happened, but instead, to thank her. To offer her grace. And maybe even forgiveness.

As I have established here on numerous occasions, I am a rule follower and, by extension, a homework doer. So, I agreed to tackle the assignment, even though it felt hard. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to set down the judgment. To loosen my grip on the idea that I should have known better. To consider the possibility that my younger self wasn’t careless or naive or blind.

There was something that felt healing about the idea of allowing myself to acknowledge that that young woman (in this instance and in countless others) was just doing the best she could with what she had at the time.

I wouldn’t normally share what happens in the privacy of a therapy session, but sometimes seeing what helped someone else opens the door for another person to find healing too.

So that’s what this is. Here goes nothing…

Dear You,

I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.

There’s a lot going on in the world right now that has stirred up old wounds and memories, especially about that fateful trip to New York. But also about other life choices and decisions that, looking back, I sometimes wish I had made differently. But I am not here today to scold you or to school you. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Looking back now, I can see how you moved through the world with a kind of hopeful determination, trusting that if you just loved hard enough, tried hard enough, stayed long enough, things would eventually work out the way you needed them to.

I’ve spent years looking back at some of your choices and wondering how you didn’t see certain things coming. How you missed what now feels so obvious. What you could have done differently. How you might have spared yourself some of the pain.

But sitting here now in midlife, with the wisdom of time and experience, I can see things differently. I can see that you didn’t have the language, the perspective, or the bandwidth that I do at this age. All you had were the tools available to you at the time: your instincts, your resilience, your deep capacity to love, and your belief that things could be worked through if you just stayed and tried.

You didn’t do it all perfectly, but you also never quit.

You didn’t do it without fear, but you mustered all the courage you had to see things through.

You didn’t do it without breaking a little in the process, but when you healed, those broken parts grew back stronger.

And when the big moments came, and when something inside you finally said enough, you listened.

You saved yourself. Sometimes, you even saved people you loved.

And I don’t think I’ve ever said this to you before, but I should have:

Thank you.

Thank you for staying as long as you needed to in order to understand what was happening. Thank you for leaving when you were finally ready, even though it was messy and complicated and uncertain. Thank you for carrying us through terrain you didn’t have a map for.

For a long time, I looked back at you with way too much judgment and not nearly enough compassion. I’m trying to change that now. I promise to do better in the future.

With love and gratitude,
Me

Maybe what midlife offers us, if we’re willing to accept it, is not just perspective, but compassion. Not just clarity about what happened, but a more forgiving understanding of why. Maybe the question isn’t, “What was I thinking?” Maybe the question is, “What if she was doing exactly what she needed to do to get me here?”

I have a feeling I’m not the only one who has been a little too hard on the woman I used to be. Maybe we all have a younger version of ourselves who deserves a little more grace than we’ve given her.

Maybe we all owe her…owe ourselves…a thank-you.

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Something happens that might not have registered at all on another day, but for whatever reason it catches your attention, tugs on a little thread in your mind, and suddenly you find yourself pulling on it for days.

This happened to me last week.

As part of my day job running a nonprofit, I spend a lot of time in and out of elementary schools. One morning, I found myself waiting in the front office with a little girl who was beside herself. Tears welled up in her eyes as she explained that she had forgotten to get her permission slip signed and was now moments away from missing a field trip with her classmates.

And just like that, the school office became a time machine, transporting me back to my own elementary school days.

Remember permission slips?

For any younger readers who might stumble across this post, let me explain. Back in the ancient times - before school administrators could simply email forms directly to parents - teachers would send students home with small slips of actual paper that required a parent’s signature if you wanted a shot at doing anything remotely interesting. Field trips to the museum. After-school events. The occasional class party. Any and all adventures required authorization.

That memory time machine brought me back to one permission-slip incident in particular.

I was in third grade, and our class was planning an after-school Halloween party. The morning the permission slips were due, a girl from my class sat next to me on the bus. We all knew that her family’s religious beliefs didn’t allow her to participate in anything related to Halloween, so I sat quietly, not mentioning anything about the party for fear of making her feel badly. As the bus pulled out of our neighborhood, she pulled a familiar piece of paper from her backpack and smoothed it carefully across the top of her Care Bears lunchbox.

Then she picked up a pen.

I watched in utter amazement as she slowly and deliberately signed her mother’s name on the permission slip, folded the paper back into a neat rectangle, slipped it back into her bag, and went on with her morning as though nothing unusual had happened.

I was horrified.

And secretly awestruck.

Forgery felt like a very grown-up crime to my rule-following eight-year-old brain. I would never have dared to do such a thing. The idea of signing someone else’s name to authorize my own fun was unthinkable. But there she was, demonstrating a kind of audacity I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around. And I remember thinking, even then, that she seemed strangely calm about the whole thing. It was as though she understood something about life that the rest of us, especially me, had yet to learn.

For most of my life, I have been the opposite of that girl.

I was raised to believe that good decisions didn’t just involve careful consideration and responsible behavior, they required the approval of the people around you. Parents. Teachers. Friends. Coaches. Society.

You looked for signals that what you were doing was acceptable. Sensible. Sanctioned.

And so, without even realizing it, I carried the idea of permission slips with me long after childhood ended. The paper forms disappeared, of course. But for decades, the metaphorical ones stayed very much at the forefront of my mind, especially whenever I started to question the status quo.

Should I change jobs? Majors? Boyfriends?
Isn’t it too late to start over?
Isn’t “fine” good enough?
What will people think?

Instead of signing my own permission slip, I found myself scanning the room for someone else who might be willing to do it for me. A boss. A friend. A partner. An expert who’d published a book on the subject. Surely, anyone was better qualified to make that decision than me.

It took me fifty years to realize that the permission slip for my life was always mine, and mine alone, to sign.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps through heartbreak, or loss, or simply the accumulated wisdom of living long enough, something changes in midlife. You begin to notice how many of the rules you’ve been following were never actually written down. You begin to question the roles you’ve been playing and the expectations you inherited. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, you start to understand that no one is coming to sign the form.

If you want to change direction.

If you want to try something new.

If you want to speak more honestly.

Take a risk.

Rewrite the script of your life.

The authorization isn’t out there somewhere waiting to be granted. It’s already sitting in your hands. For me, that realization didn’t arrive all at once. It showed up gradually, in a series of moments.

It looked like acknowledging that a twenty-three-year marriage had reached its end, even while practical, financial, and emotional fears crowded the margins of the page.

It looked like packing up my life and moving to Boston, a city where I hardly knew a soul, simply because something inside me whispered that it was time for a different chapter.

It looked like choosing my own self-worth over the pressure to stay coupled, and walking away from the first real relationship I entered after my divorce when months of betrayal finally came to light.

It looked like finding my voice and beginning to write and speak openly about midlife, despite a lifetime of subtle messages that women were supposed to move through this chapter quietly.

None of those decisions came with a neatly signed form from someone else telling me it was the right thing to do. I’d simply begun to understand that they didn’t need to. Because somewhere along the way, I had finally learned how to sign my own damn name.

And I can’t help but wonder what might change if more of us realized that the permission we’ve been waiting for has been ours all along.

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