Huge earrings shaped like bright, yellow sunflowers, accompanied by a pink nightgown with an open kimono casually draped on top, act as her Instagram stage wear. With a seemingly scattered mind, she reads tarot cards for her followers. It’s an understatement to call us “different types.”

That doesn’t mean that the control-freak, Nordic minimalist puritan inside of me isn’t a little jealous — and doesn’t admire the heck out of this free-spirited woman, who seems to live in a world where she couldn’t care less what us mortals think of her.

Her predictions about the future and advice from other realms has pulled me in, because I need all the help I can get to crack this code. I’ve booked 30 minutes of her magical time to let her cards give me a piece of their mind.

I give her the same spiel that rolls off my tongue by now, well-rehearsed as a theater monologue: I feel stuck. I want to change everything. I want to live part-time abroad, a simple life in tune with nature. I want to live off being a writer. I want a base here in Denmark for my kids too.

“Yeah,” she replies, shuffling her cards carelessly, “a few years back I also wanted to do the whole Eat, Pray, Love thing. But I had small kids.”

There it is. The reply implies what it always implies: I could never be so selfish as to go find myself in some far-away place — not as a mother.

If you’re a father, you can do it and nobody raises an eyebrow. For women there is no middle ground.

You’re either the woman who gives up everything for her own “growth” — the Eat, Pray, Love woman — or you’re the woman who sacrifices her deep desires to stay put and be the base everyone requires, the Bridges of Madison County woman, watching her great love drive away in the rain because she chose her family. I’ve heard this exact reply enough times to know it by heart. And I’m done accepting it.

When Eat, Pray, Love came out, it became a symbol of women’s quest to discover their true selves. Childless women, that is.

In 2013, when my daughter was barely one, I’d just read it, and I was also a newly certified yoga teacher — so naturally, I insisted the whole family go to Bali. To my surprise, my husband gave in.

What stands out isn’t the retreat centers or the rice terraces. It’s Ubud — the cultural heart of the island, and the town where the “love” chapter of the book takes place. Even then, wearing my own yoga-teacher certificate like a badge, I got the ick watching a town overflowing with middle-aged women in “Eat, Pray, Love” t-shirts, smiling the serene smile of the newly enlightened. The worshippers had gone from fans to something closer to a cult.

I understand it now. The book offered a glimpse of a life where you could throw caution to the wind, uproot everything, reinvent yourself, and find love. The women I saw in Ubud were on borrowed time — a forbidden taste of a fruit they knew they’d never actually get to eat, before returning to the responsibilities they’d signed up for. So they made the most of the little they were allotted.

I have compassion for the women I judged from afar in 2013, because now they are — me.

But I want to pull my hair out every time I say my dream to move abroad out loud and it gets compared, knee-jerk, to a childless character in a novel who went all the way. Divorced mothers who admit to craving an alternative life are treated as women at risk of abandoning everyone they love. They’re told, gently or not, that this isn’t the way to go.

My ex-husband traveled 150 to 250 days a year — for work, for mountain climbing — his essential “me-time”. Nobody ever told him he was doing an Eat, Pray, Love. Nobody ever called him an irresponsible parent.

I’ve come to need two spiels now: the this-is-my-dream spiel, and the there-is-a-middle-ground spiel — just as rehearsed as the first, for whenever I’m handed the Eat, Pray, Love comparison.

There is a middle ground.

I’m in the middle of an unscientific experiment: jumping timelines, trying to live inside a version of my life I can only now see clearly, with the clarity that comes with age. The consensus that divorced mothers can’t possibly live abroad part-time, in a country where life is simpler, doesn’t make this easy. I’m not just fighting money and logistics. I’m fighting an army of you are a bad and crazy mother voices, outside and increasingly inside my own head — for a fraction of what fathers are handed without a second thought.

What kind of mother am I? A practical, tarot-card-consulting, Nordic puritan with rebellious tendencies who refuses to choose between being good and being free. I am not the Eat, Pray, Love woman. I am not the Bridges of Madison County woman.

I am the third option nobody wrote a novel about yet.

Getting a divorce as a midlife woman can make you feel like a character in a time travel movie. You wake up years later after being frozen or put to sleep in some long-forgotten military experiment, and suddenly you are faced with a society with new gadgets, new rules, and new people.

When I tried to re-enter the world of “meeting someone,” I too was typecast into this Hollywood movie trope after being “out of it” for far too many years to make this new world of dating make any sense to me.

Now, I guess, we meet through an application where we assess, swipe, and reject based on a few photos and some taglines. This truly has made me feel like I have indeed been put on ice in the Stone Age and thawed in a distant future where flying cars and trips to Mars are an everyday thing.

After the initial horror of realizing that we are now comfortable auditioning potential lifetime companions with a literal one-dimensional assessment, I decided that it’s actually a pleasure to explore the apps.

I don’t mean that in an ironic or cynical way.

Somewhere along the way, I just stopped looking for dates and found myself conducting what can only be described as a highly questionable, subjective anthropological study of men and what seems to be the norm in this futuristic timeline.

If you have even a fraction of a sense of humor, a desire to understand a certain culture, or a half-twisted curiosity about what goes on in a man’s mind, then please… go to the apps.

Heaven, Limbo or Hell

I often hear the term “the apps” used as something you want to get off, and I get it! It’s kind of the equivalent of what Catholics call “Limbo.” It’s not really Heaven, nor Hell. It’s a pointless state of stuckness you have to stay in while waiting for something else to happen.

I am not naïve. I know a great many people are there to find someone temporary to bump and grind with in order to take the edge off life and dilute the kind of empty feeling you suppress when you are too scared, wounded, sad, or detached to go for the real love that all humans (and I am convinced it’s all humans, unless you have a severe psychological disorder) crave at their core.

But I am also pretty certain that a fair share are on the dreaded apps in the hope of finding a partner in crime to go through life with, and that was indeed what also popped into my head as a possibility when I first signed up.

When I dipped my toes into the pond for the first time, I went straight to Hell without stopping in Limbo, and my thoughts and feelings immediately went to a very dark place:

“Is this it?” (“It” meaning the selection a midlife woman has to choose from once she puts her age at 48. I mean, come on. All the women I know take pretty good care of themselves. They eat healthy, stay fit, put on some mascara once in a while, and see a hairdresser when need be. Based on what I have seen, a great number of men in the same age range do not apply the same level of effort to their physical health and appearance. This will most likely get me in trouble for writing it, but given how much women have been subjected to comments from male strangers about their looks for centuries, I don’t really care.)

“I am a sad loser.” (I am basically broadcasting to everyone who logs on that I am unchosen, even though, gasp, at this age I am supposed to be locked in.)

“This physically and emotionally exhausts me.”

“Well, that’s it. I will die alone.” (That thought only gets reinforced by confirming over and over again that, “Nope,” there really is no one for me.)

If you, like me, have felt a deep sadness for yourself and for the human race as a whole after endless and addictive scrolling, I will tell you what transformed the experience for me. It seems like I have hacked the system in a way that, I guess, it was never intended to be hacked.

I feel like a hoodie-clad, Mountain Dew-drinking, basement-dwelling hacker who has managed to subvert the entire intricate network. Because it turns out that rather than being this pit of despair and hopelessness, the apps are, in fact, the most interesting study of what drives men in my age range, what they look like, and what their interests are across the world.

As an avid traveller and now a lifelong avoider of Danish men (somehow, the last one I spent sixteen years with managed to put me off completely), I have explored the varied buffets of men that the apps have to offer in different countries.

Men in Scotland, England, Costa Rica, various parts of the US, and Sweden have been under the microscope so far. By accident, I did stumble upon the menu of Danish men due to the default login setting when I first entered the restaurant.

The process has moved me from desperate and frustrated to intrigued and fascinated, and if you don’t feel like doing the work yourself, I will now let you in on some of my research findings.

Men in Denmark

A British guy once asked me, in a genuinely surprised tone:

“Why are you dating British men? Tired of handsome Scandinavian guys?”

I guess that’s a fair assumption based on the cliché stereotype that people from the far North are generally healthy, blue-eyed, tall lookers whom anyone would be thrilled to reproduce with.

That might also be the case if you set the filter toward the younger crowd, but once you creep over the age of 45, I have not found the stereotype to be anywhere near accurate.

According to my subjective research parameters, this has been the bottom of the field.

Denmark is a country of beer and sausages, and men above a certain age seem hell-bent on showcasing the belly that is a testament to the fact that they have indeed been able to afford ample amounts of both pork and pilsner.

The eye bags, reddish skin tone, and thinning hair are a great way to evaluate how well the body can function and run on this particular type of sustained fuel.

Sorry, Danish men, but that’s all I have to say about that.

Quick.

Change the setting to Scotland…

Scottish Lords

After completely losing it over the show Outlander back in 2016, I have had in the back of my mind the idea that I should become the wife and lover of a tartan-wearing Scottish lord with red hair like myself.

A man who speaks like he wants to get into a sword fight with vowels and drumrolls the R’s.

A man who, with one hand, could swing me onto the back of a horse and maybe even let me in on the well-guarded secret of what’s underneath the kilt.

But alas.

No Gothic Scottish castle for me.

Maybe I had set the bar way too high, but let’s just say that the hopeful fantasy I nourished when changing my location settings was not even close to being matched.

Maybe because it was, indeed, a silly fantasy that no one would have been able to live up to.

Costa Rican Surfers

When I changed the location to Costa Rica, it was rooted in a very real plan to establish a second base in the country of jungle, salty sea, and red macaws within the near future. Having a partner to share that with would be more than nice.

Ever since I took my life goal of becoming a surfer who actually knows how to surf seriously, I have more than entertained the thought of being with a man who can ride the waves.

I guess people go to Costa Rica to meet people in real life because not many had found their way onto the apps.

One guy was very nice and asked me out for coffee.

I would have loved that.

Both because Costa Rican coffee is amazing and because it would have provided me with the opportunity to actually take this project seriously.

“Wanna meet tomorrow?” he asked.

I looked out of my window and saw snow falling from a grey Danish sky, took a deep sigh, and replied:

“It might be hard for me to make it tomorrow.”

I don’t know why I thought the US would make more sense.

L.A. Gym Bros

I set my location to L.A., and this is where it got really interesting because the data collected so far, compared with this new geographical variation, allowed me to start making some generalizations about men on dating apps that span the globe.

This insight has allowed me to perfect a quick “nope” when spotting what seems to be a rather international male assumption about what women like, which, for me, does the exact opposite.

Based on my scientific experience, you will find one or several of these examples in 99 percent of male 45+ profiles:

Mirror selfies from the gym.

Pictures with their dog… or just a photo of the dog.

Pictures with them and other women. (I keep thinking about the thought process behind this. Could it be: “These gorgeous women hang out with me, so that means I am popular with the ladies?”)

Selfies in a car taken from a questionable angle.

Photos of them in some type of uniform. Any uniform, really.

Photos of them DJ’ing.

And finally, photos with kids.

To me, that’s a little much. Do the children know they are posing as little wingpeople for their dad on a dating app? I understand that you want to convey that your children play an important role in your life, but that can be stated in the written prompts.

I am sure that women have equivalent dating profile archetypes, but since I date men, I haven’t seen those and therefore cannot write about them.

Being on the apps has been an interesting experiment, and it has, in many ways, been an entertaining pleasure.

Especially when you decide not to remain in Limbo or Hell and simply hover above, observing.

I am unsure what cuisine to sample next, but I am leaning more and more toward going to an actual restaurant, even though I have been defrosted in a timeline where this is rarer.

Also, maybe I don’t need a buffet.

I tend to overeat anyway.

But are the questions really over? How much can I toss up in the air again without ruining the lives of all the people suddenly depending on me, including myself?

You know that moment when you finally tell your self-discipline to go fuck itself and you just give in—your hard fingernails rubbing up against that itchy spot that’s been begging for momentary relief.

That’s sort of how a broken heart can feel to me. Sort of a painful relief.

This is the story of trying to heal heartbreak in India and about finding out something unexpected.

She had just spilled nail polish remover on the floor, and it completely wrecked the varnish. I screamed at her like a medieval power-crazy ruler would scream at a peasant.

I regretted it as soon as the unhinged words left my mouth. She is only 13, and she didn’t plan on ruining the floor and making me lose my deposit on our Copenhagen rental. It’s not her fault that the needle for my emotional setting has become stuck on “fragile and moody.”

My two daughters are squeezed, like passengers in coach, between the accusing texts, crossed arms, and tight lips of two adults that once liked each other enough to create them. I need them to have leg room again, so therefore I must change. Everything.

It starts with these two things: figuring out how to sprout a coconut and how to be a bad mom.

There is a movie called “Bad Moms”. Even when I had just seen the title I loved it, because it spills the long-hidden secret that moms can be imperfect. The movie is about three women who, in order to become better moms, break free of the tight reins of politically correct school bake sales and selfish husbands while they go on benders and refuse to cook dinner.

Eventually, being bad moms makes them better moms.

If these small acts are considered rebellious enough to make an entire storyline for a movie, then I must be a bad, bad, bad mom. For me, slight rebellion is not enough to make big changes. I have to change my geographical world, my every routine and yes, even the flora and fauna of my surroundings. Surroundings where the climate goes easy on the nervous system and where I, my children, and delicious plants can grow.

When I got divorced, I didn’t get bangs or begin wearing really short skirts. Although those things can work wonders, my rebellious act was to buy a ticket to Costa Rica and learn how to surf the waves. This was a matter-of-fact challenge, but also a super corny metaphor for my life’s circumstances.

Ever since my first encounter, when I emerged from the belly of the airport into a dark and rainy parking lot after a 16-hour journey, I have been sold on this place. This land has reached into my heart, poked around, and made the blood flow again to places that have been dormant for my entire adult life. I dare to propose that it would be impossible for most human beings to leave Costa Rica unfazed by the musical sound it makes when the wind dances unapologetically in the crowns of the palm trees. Unimpressed by the tall ceiba tree, the giant of the rainforest, that stands still and steady with its vein-like trunk no matter what the weather gods throw at it. Indifferent to the thunder of the ocean waves and the abundance of exotic animals that make you believe you are on the set of a ridiculous, exaggerated Disney movie.

The land pulls me back, and I have left my offspring in an attempt to create a new reality for me and them. And I am told I must figure out how to sprout a coconut.

Costa Rica has red macaws flying around like city pigeons back home. I stop and wait for a sloth to cross the road. It doesn’t give a shit about my surf session that starts in 10 minutes. The howler monkeys wake me from my afternoon nap, and I look at galloping horses with their riders on the beach.

It’s possible I am exaggerating a little here …but not much. I am not exaggerating about the life force that flows from the earth and enters the body from the feet up, making me move through this new timeline like a wind-up doll that has just had its key turned. I am not exaggerating about the magical air particles I breathe in that enable me to speak to the ripe mango I pick and the surfboard I am learning to navigate on the waves. The magic of this place gives me the ability to grab my soul and infuse it with the love I will pass on to my two daughters at home.

And one day the woo-woo embedded everywhere in this enchanted place, hits a crescendo when the rowdy howler monkeys making the crown of the trees rustle frenetically, yells at me to plant a coconut in my very own Costa Rican garden. When it sprouts and grows, so will love. That’s what they tell me, swear to God.

There’s one problem though. I don’t have the money to buy a garden … or a house for that matter, in Costa Rica. Planting a coconut seems like something to worry about AFTER you have bought a house.

You cannot argue with magic though, and it’s telling me to plant the coconut and the rest will follow.

The whole coconut conundrum has taken root in my mind. For the last couple of days, I have forgotten to be bitter and angry, disappointed and frustrated, sad and anxious. That is an Olympic gold medal accomplishment, because for the last year and a half, I have been the exact stereotypical type of post-divorce woman my ex-husband just has to hint at to make his pals nod in a silent I-get-it type of way. The female bitter stereotype people are just waiting for after a divorce. I have been the perfect cartoonish character with anger steaming out of my ears, waiting in vain for karma to do its job. Bitter and angry, two adjectives sticking far better to women than to any man.

Even the irregular texts that contain sentences describing my personality, despicable, miserable, stingy, horrible, unlovable — words he knows will make me jump and squirm in pain and generate the energy he needs to thrive … they can’t really get in there anymore. The coconut has pushed out the will to fight back in a battle that has no end, but includes at least two innocent casualties. I add a heart emoji to the text he sends me about how he pities me. I am above it!

Ok, ok, I will be honest. I am not always above it. When I found out it drives him nuts and seemingly confused him, it gave me more pleasure than all the orgasms he ever gave me.

After three flights, a drive on a dust road, and a successful quest to find an ATM before I reach the absolute Costa Rican outback, I am finally here again.

I walk around, the best kind of aimless, completely naked in the midday heat, listening to the rain that names this season. I write in the nude by the clunky wooden table overlooking the garden, moist butt cheeks pressed against the plastic chair, hoping my landlord will never find out. The earth smells like overripe fruit and total freedom.

Out of the blue, I am gifted a coconut. My surf instructor, Laura, gives it to me from her wild Costa Rican garden.

Garden might be a totally inappropriate word for it, actually. To me, a garden is something neat, intended, structured. This is more a borrowed piece of nature.

“Just ask the owner if you can plant it first,” she instructs. “They get really big.” The coconut is already sprouted! I have been so fixated on this whole phase, that I forgot to think about the next steps.

“How do I plant it?” I ask.

“You just put it on the ground and let nature do its job.” She is very casual about the whole thing. How could she know that this is essential to my whole future?

In the waves, Laura doses me with a mixture of the technicalities of pop-ups, reading waves, and maybe unintentionally, some surf metaphors for life.

“You can’t let the fear of the waves get to your head,” she says after I take a nosedive in a wave that I freak out over before I even stand.

Sure, I don’t currently have enough money to buy a house and a piece of semi-controlled nature here, but if I just for once switch off the sensible person, the mom that tries to do the right things, maybe this magic place will rub off and grant me my wish. My wish for freedom, peace, and love. Do we need more?

Maybe a place will magically fall into my lap. If it could happen anywhere in the world, it would be here.

A place where I can first be a bad mom, then a better mom, maybe even a good mom. And a place where I can plant my very own coconut tree.

Or wait, I don’t even have to plant it. It does it all by itself.

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They are not saying, “I don’t like it.”

It’s more like a pervasive “No” to what emerged when the beautiful wooden floors, expensive curtains and wine invitations on a Friday night were substituted with an inconsistent lover in Costa Rica, the audacity to dream of building a business by the beach and becoming a writer.

And, in spite of my awe for many women, I have come to find that these are in fact the ones who do not give a shit about how many times you try to quote the suburban version of the Shahada to be released from their judgment on your efforts to reinvent. They will, without mercy, end the version you are striving to become in a few sentences—or just with a look and a hushed giggle.

At uni I cut out the now well-known photo of the then President Clinton standing between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat from a magazine. His arms spread out like angel wings blessing the handshake of the former enemies. This was a powerful symbol of peace that made me feel warm in my stomach.

We know now that it only got worse after that. Both the conflict in the Middle East and the feeling in my stomach.

But for a while, when I looked at the A4 page hung up with tape on the bathroom door, edges uneven from the dull scissors used to liberate the page from the magazine, I believed. I believed in the power of the UN, I believed in diplomacy; I believed that people are essentially good and that peace was what we all wanted at the core.

I was in a timeline I liked. One that I loved, actually.

After life outside the protected spaces of higher education, where you are allowed to seek out theories that support how you wish to see a world you haven’t fully lived in, I lost a lot of that belief. I’ve often felt trapped in a timeline that gives me a bellyache.

Five years after I put up that cut-out, I was about to go to war in Iraq with the same self-satisfied smile that Clinton had in the picture. It was the worst possible place at the time, and I was now strategizing for survival instead of thriving and believing in peace.

I had heard about a journalist who had been kidnapped by al-Qaeda, but instead of having his head chopped off (a practice that seemed to happen a lot at the time) he was released because he kept repeating the original Shahada — the Islamic declaration of faith. I practiced like crazy: “Ash-hadu an lā ilāha illā-llāh, wa ash-hadu anna Muḥammadan rasūlu-llāh,” and I thought I was pretty clever.

When I got there there was a lot of shelling — intense, continuous bombardment — but I never got kidnapped. I witnessed mercenaries from the notorious Blackwater Group hanging recklessly from their thumping helicopters when they came back to the concrete landing strip in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

I was completely submerged in war, often stuck in stale-smelling bomb shelters. Living recklessly as I, without an afterthought, went for recreational runs around the Green Zone as if it were my god-given right to do so. All so far from my days when a page in a magazine steered my views of the world in a peaceful and loving direction.

Baghdad is in the rearview mirror now, but I am still surrounded by war, conflict, and reckless behavior. My own for sure, but the people around me seem reckless, too. They will chop parts off your heart, your dreams, your efforts and your over-the-top ideas with the firm belief that they are within their rights because you are steering away from the path.

I have had this crazy idea that I want to jump timelines, move into a parallel universe, and change my life radically. After my divorce, I felt doing just that was the only option available. In the process, I have done some things that the people who mirrored my previous life in a perfect apartment with herringbone flooring and a happy marriage do not like.

Fresh from a trip to Costa Rica, filled with dreams of being married in the jungle and living on a hilltop overlooking the ocean, I get thrown back into my old life; it feels like trying to fit into a dress that is at least two sizes too small. I am at a big dinner party with friends from my life as a wife. Two of the still-married wives and I are doing the thing you do at grown-up parties where you dance, just a little bit, while having a semi-serious conversation all while holding glasses of lukewarm cava in our hands. I tell them about this curly-haired boy I cannot get out of my head. Maybe I still have one more baby in me. Maybe my eggs are still up for it. There are only two of them, they somehow surround me.

“You! Having more babies?!” one of them says while looking down at me, even though we are almost the same height. “Your babies are the ones who should be next in line for babies,” she continues like a university professor explaining the theory of generational reproduction to a half-witted student.

“They are only 7 and 13 years old,” I say, a vague argument that I know is completely useless with these women who are set on bringing me back to their reality. The music is throbbing heavily in the background, but my dance moves are slowing down.

“Well, maybe I’ll just adopt,” I blurt out desperately as a way to meet them halfway.

“Are you going to adopt a 20-year-old, because in that case I would be onboard,” the first one continues, number two joining her in a high-pitched laugh that underlines the undertone of her joke. Apparently, I am old and delusional.

Like when I was playing fast and loose with “nice runs” in the Green Zone, they are reckless with their words and their attitude. Intent on crushing the hopes and dreams of a soul desperately seeking a place to belong that is no longer this party venue where people are dressed in appropriately low-cut dresses and expensive shoes, holding champagne flutes while pooh-poohing people who want to step out of the life they know to be correct.

I leave defeated, walking through the midnight-lit streets, not a bomb shelter in sight.

A month later the curly-haired surfer in Costa Rica dumps me, but only after I paid a lawyer’s hourly fees to help set up a company for us. After spending hours behind the blue light of the computer — sometimes with a kid on my lap — making business plans, budgets and amendments that no one will read except me.

He has been reckless with my heart. He doesn’t know that a single mom of two, whose sexy years are slipping through her fingers like water in a cupped hand, is not meant to be a brief adventure. It’s not a let’s-just-have-fun-and-enjoy-the-moment or a situationship. It’s a full-on I-go-into-this-with-the-intention-to-see-if-this-could-turn-into-something-real kind of thing. He was reckless when he suggested a business together — as opposed to him, I do mean business.

But the most reckless one, I guess, is me. I pushed and applied my Scandinavian work ethics and “lets-role-up-our-sleeves attitude into the land of pure “pura vida” living the simple life.

A life that I long for, but still haven’t learned to handle.

This was supposed to jump me into this new timeline, and now I can only look forward to running through the Green Zone of my own life again, drinking half-chilled cava at receptions where we talk about jobs and the housing market.

I am recklessly sharing my hopes and dreams with other reckless people, and that’s mistake number one. I still lean into the fighting and hide from the shelling, instead of seeking the peace that I want to believe is still available to me in this other universe.

I want to hang out with the people we once were. When we would read about a theory we liked and chose to believe in. I mean, we even believed in peace in the Middle East even though the years since then have proven it unobtainable again and again. But wouldn’t it be nice to believe in that possibility again?

I want to be reckless, but only when it comes to believing in all the amazing and outrageous things out there that would make the people reckless with your heart and your dreams so nervous that they will laugh in a high-pitched voice telling you that you are being ridiculous.

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That’s how old I am.

A few months later, my dorm-mates and I all received an individual letter informing us “they” were going to increase the rent by 50 bucks because they were going to install some type of who-gives-a-shit device called “broadband.” I tried to make a case for making it optional, because that money was, in my opinion, far better spent on cheap beer at the uni cafés. But, to my frustration, they were very set on providing everyone with internet. Even those of us who would never use that type of… what did it do again?

That’s how old I am!

As I later discovered, and as my children now take for granted, the internet has lulled us into the blanket assumption that any type of information is readily at hand. That applies equally to information about the lives of mid-century Native Americans and how to deal with matters of the heart—especially when the heart takes a hit.

Contrary to the peer-reviewed books from the university library, information on the internet is immediately distributed, readily absorbed, and forgiving in the author’s ability to fact-check.

But ever since they raised my rent by the equivalent of at least four beers in 1998, I feel entitled to all the answers and secrets of the universe when I type a prompt onto a screen.

And I want the life-altering answers immediately.

Immediately, I said!

That’s why, during a lazy day filled with intrusive thoughts about being forever unlovable and stuck in lifelong loneliness, I reach for my phone and immediately claim my right to be all-knowing, like Marjory the Trash Heap from the show Fraggle Rock I used to watch as a kid.

A heart can break an infinite number of times. It is capable of healing and enduring new pain, emotional or psychological distress. While some studies suggest people experience roughly three major heartbreaks in a lifetime, others indicate the heart continues to break until it is hardened, or until the person decides to stop.

Stop?!

Stop what?

Tell me… Please …

I don’t care what the artificial, all-knowing AI-version of Mrs. Trash Heap spits out.

I cannot take more heartbreak.

The solution is simple, and you don’t need even need wifi or roaming to figure it out:

Stop. Chasing. Men.

At this point my mind drifts, and suddenly I am sitting in a doctor’s office.

Doctor, How many times can you break a heart before it’s lethal?” I ask her.

I am sitting on the pleather examination table in a white gown tied with a few strings in the back. I have never done that at the doctor’s in my life, but that’s how my mind concocts this fantasy, so I guess we will go with that.

“Is there some kind of preventative shot or maybe pills I can take to prevent this ever happening again?”

“Unfortunately not,” the doctor shrugs. “But you can wean yourself off what causes the reaction, and even substitute it with something that causes less irritation.”

“You could try women. They seem to cause a lesser reaction,” she explains with a serious look.

She pulls out a prescription pad.

“It’s an easier digestible alternative.”

“I have heard about that. I have even considered it, but I am afraid it’s not something I lean towards. I wish I did.”

I say this with regret, holding up my empty hands in front of me as a peace offering for refusing her treatment.

“Then there is nothing I can do for you,” the doctor replies.

And I am left to my own devices once more.

God damn you, imaginary doctor.

“Oh, wait,” the doctor yells as I am leaving the fantasy. “Be aware of your age.”

She holds up an index finger that dances ominously in the air.

“When you were younger you could absorb the toxins better. But as you get older, your body will have severe reactions to things like gaslighting, controlling behavior, and broken promises. They can prove lethal, even in small amounts.”

Should I spare my heart from more grief?

Should I start dating women?

Would that help?

Does it just come down to a decision?

Ever since my divorce, I have been praying, manifesting, vision-board workshopping, trying to summon my perfect man. But so far, it’s “only” the most amazing women who have entered my life, both before and after the divorce.

Lily, who got banned from Tinder because men reported her for being rude.

Clair, who has an open relationship with her husband and the father of her kids.

Celeste, who dates with no fear and, in spite of all the grief the apps have to dish out, still has her feet firmly on the ground.

Meghan, who lives in her tin-sized house by the beach in Costa Rica.

And Katarina, who has been my soulmate, or to cringe it up even more, my twin flame, for almost 25 years.

Katarina and I once discussed the sigh of relief it would be if our mutual love for each other had translated into some kind of physical attraction.

We laughed about the thought of being released from the effort of trying to understand men. The freedom of not trying too much but also not too little. The way we already understood each other without the thousand afterthoughts about how a rendezvous had landed.

But alas…

Even then, at the height of experimenting, feeling free, and not taking anything—not even social anthropology—too seriously, it was not a choice we could simply decide to make.

The pendulum just didn’t swing that way.

“Should I risk having my heart broken again?”

I am afraid there are no pills, no shots, and sadly for me, no easier digestible alternative.

And sadly there is no right answer.

Not in the library…or on the internet.

Have you had your heart broken?

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At one point in history, I was a woman who ate an entire plate of Indian-grade spicy chicken vindaloo out of spite. It was in 2002, during the height of the Y2K pop era, when the jeans were (very) low-rise and flared. We had scoured Brick Lane for the best Indian food in London. The pearl-lined, disco-decorated restaurants each promised “The Best Curry in Town” in flickering neon. The waiters catcalled us, trying to verbally drag us into their restaurants while nudging us to choose them over all the other look-alikes.

After finally settling on what was, apparently, the best place in town, my fantasy was already being teased. The chicken vindaloo called to me with its rich blend of warming, dream-away spices like hot red chilies, tangy ginger, earthy cumin, and coriander seeds.

“I will have that” I said, pointing at the menu and looking up with a sense of accomplishment after choosing between all the curry-inspired dishes.

The waiter paused his pencil on the order pad, looked up, and in a lilting voice with a doubtful side glance, asked “Are you sure? It’s very spicy.”

With that my mind was made up.

“YES!”

Although I was very sweaty, with tears streaming down my cheeks after half a serving, I kept going. I would show this waiter, who did not give a shit either way, that I could handle anything. Everything.

It burned for days, both going in and out. Every burp, and there were many, felt like a small fire escaping my throat. Every visit to the toilet was like giving birth to glowing charcoal. But damn, it was worth it. I showed that waiter, who never would have remembered me, what I was capable of.

Back then, spite was fuel.

I am not sure there is any left in me now.

I don’t have the luxury of setting myself on fire. I have kids standing in my burn radius. Or …

Can we reinvent ourselves with kids in tow or are we screwed? Should we just keep our heads down and accept that we are done? Please let me hear your thoughts? Let’s talk …

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According to Dickens, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come enters dressed like death, a mist skimming the ground. Scrooge was terrified by the unknown, the mysterious, the silence the ghost carried with it.

At this point, not even death rattles me. Quite the opposite.

Death means the blossoming of something new. The unknown is a million possible timelines stretching out in front of me, knowing I will choose between them with care. And leave it to a divorced woman who managed not to break when torn apart to, like a trained police dog, sniff out the timelines to avoid. The ones that reek of overreaching, minimizing, and settling.

The mysterious could be a tall, dark stranger. Dense, musical jungles. The open, salty sea. Things too wild to be cooked up by an imagination limited by age and accumulated disappointments.

And silence. Silence is peace. The one thing I never articulated a need for before now. The thing I always deliberately disrupted with my thirst for literal war, conflict, impossible romances, and people who made me work like an Olympic wrestler to deserve their love.

I welcome this Ghost of Yet to Come like a long-lost friend, arms wide open.Unlike The Ghost of Christmas Past and The Ghost of Christmas Present, I know this will be a shorter ride, with options presented and possibilities to grab.

I have the possibility of a future free of the old, familiar shackles that tethered me to a life that was never mine. I have the possibility of reaching a kind of freedom I did not know existed. I also know this freedom will not come cheap—t arrives with the clarity that my old life is dead.

Death is painful. It upsets the order of things. It is inevitable. But when everything is gone, demolished, something small will begin to sprout from the rubble. It will blossom into an unleashed, wild version of me, propelling me into a feral fantasy of limitless opportunity.

Even though I am beyond excited, I quip, “I am not ready.”

Truthfully, that untamed version scares the shit out of me. Especially when she sets boundaries with people who feed on the absence of them. When she is loud without reminding herself to reel it in.

This futuristic ghost is a Post-it note to my future self: stop shushing me when I stand my ground. Let me become the woman who is so fucking annoying because she is finally putting it all out there.

Alright. I am done exploiting poor Dickens and turning Scrooge from an old, bitter man into a midlife, hopeful woman stuffed with self-help rhetoric and woo-woo thoughts about quantum physics.

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A list like that can be very life-affirming, and I would love to read all the lists of midlife women. Women who have lived. Physical factors, like hormonal changes that make us less prone to nurture and more prone to not giving a fuck, and lived experiences that enhance the same lessened tolerance for bullshit, make for great lists.

Now this is a social media trend I could be onboard with. Lists from the readers of this channel.

Let me kick it off:

Things I won’t miss:

1. Cold winters that never end

2. Adulting alone

3. The sun spots on my face

4. Dating apps

5. My red hair fading like a carpet that has been put out in the sun for too long

6. Picking my kids up too late from school

7. Fleeting hope

8. Friends who are too busy

9. Night sweets

10. Lower tolerance to alcohol

Things I will miss:

1. All the different fantasies of who my person will be

2. Going on adventures and dates abroad

3. Snuggling with my daughters at night

4. Putting my feelings and thoughts into words on a screen

5. Gossiping with girlfriends over coffee

6. SEX

7. Feeling the muscles working in my body

8. The sounds of the jungle and the sea

9. Drinking from a fresh coconut

10. Watching the evolution of a forcefield against bullshit

Now it’s your turn.

Write your list. Don’t polish it. Don’t make it clever. Just make it true.

Post it wherever you live on social media—Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok—and include the tag #MidlifeLists.

Why? Because when we share these lists publicly, we make ourselves visible. We show other midlife women what it looks like to live fully, to struggle, to celebrate, and to survive. We inspire each other. We create a quiet revolution of truth, reflection, and support.

Read each other’s lists. Sit with them. Respond when something hits close to home. Let this be a place where midlife women see each other, reflect, and quietly lift one another.

If you’re reading this and feeling a nudge, that’s enough. Start your list. #MidlifeLists

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