Every month I send a link-filled round-up (like this one!) of bullshit I’m not putting up with anymore, along with ideas and recommendations to inspire. 👍🏻👎🏻

Subscribe for free and join this weekly conversation between friends who are amid the ongoing project of reclaiming ourselves in midlife.

I’m wearing flip-flops and driving with the windows down when I spot the yellow buses lined up outside my town’s one school (Grades Pre-K – 12). Never mind how long ago I last saw my kids off to the first day of school, the nostalgia hits hard.

The nights are cooler, it’s dark before 9, and maple trees up and down the road are previewing their reds and golds. I have this urge to cut up a paper bag and make book covers (IYKYK), stock up on multi-color Flair pens, and dial the red rotary phone hanging on the kitchen wall to ask Lisa what she’s wearing to the first day of school.

How is it the end of August, already? Or as my friend put it, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?” She posed this rhetorical question in our email thread earlier this month. “The older we get,” she continued, “the tick-tick-ticking gets faster and louder; purpose and time become one and the same. We don’t want to waste any of it scrolling, bingeing, etc. BUT we’re also tired.”

So tired, was the only response I could muster.

Later, I recommended she watch the new documentary on Mary Oliver, Saved by the Beauty of the Day. I love Oliver’s poetry, but it was learning about her surety of purpose that impacted me most. As in this stanza from her poem, Sometimes:

Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Where does time go? Maybe we aren’t paying attention.

I’m working on curating my life, not to make more time, but to be more purposeful about how I use it, starting with the apps.

Countless tools and technologies have been invented since my children’s last first day of school. The promise of social media was to help us stay connected to one another. Apps and subscriptions were sold to make our lives more easeful, more secure, more productive, more creative—they got the “more” part right anyway.

Three time-sucking cuts I made this month:

1. I deleted Facebook from my phone, but not my account. Since the demise of The Yellow Pages and local newspapers, small businesses in rural areas don’t have many free alternatives to advertise or connect to their communities.
   Here’s an interesting blog post on that topic: Save Rural America from Facebook! Here’s a Chrome extension News Feed Eradicator that replaces your social media feed with an inspirational quote and is helping me resist the doom scroll.

   With less to look at and a mindset that recognizes what’s crap, I reach the end of the Internet much sooner. I stare at my device like an ex-lover. What did you ever have to offer me anyway?

2. One week without Instagram. When I left corporate marketing to pursue writing, I went a little nutso-koo-koo chasing those likes. I thought building a personal brand and an online following was step one in getting a book deal. (Spoiler: It’s not. Writing the book is.)
   Meta is in the news for designing a platform that harms children’s mental health. Turns out, Instagram is just as addictive for adults, but I think I’ve found a replacement:

   

3. Reducing my Amazon entanglement is akin to Sisyphus and that rock. I’ve unsubscribe, uninstalled and am actively boycotting the following: Amazon Prime, Amazon Photos, Amazon Prime Video, Audible, Goodreads, Whole Foods, Zappos. Does anyone miss Prime? If you’re ready to break-up, wrote this nice how to guide.

How I’m Avoiding the Algorithms

OUT: Spotify – If low pay for artists, questionable practices, investments, political donations, and advertising policies that don’t exclude fascist recruitment ads aren’t enough reason to leave, the algorithm and the app are shitty and getting shittier.

IN: Qobuz – Pays artists 4-6x more than Spotify. Excellent curation – the algorithm is not in charge! New and old music discoveries are plentiful. Here’s a good review and comparison from a former Spotify user.

This next one’s for you, writers:

OUT: Reels, videos, carousels, stories, and posts for building “platform”

IN: Writing and publishing

And for the readers:

OUT: Goodreads and Kindle (because Amazon)

IN: Storygraph – Black woman-owned, independent company. I easily imported my Goodreads history, and I’m enjoying the app. Join and find me!

Also in: books you can hold in your hand.

Four book picks from my August reading list

Judevine, by David Budbill. A love letter to rural Vermont. Originally published in 1991, its “enduring themes of injustice, economic and social struggle, and the indomitable will to survive” make it very relevant to today.

The Land and its People by David Sedaris. Older and crankier, he’s a hilarious storyteller who manages to convey a deep love for the people he is shamelessly skewering.

Famesick, by Lena Dunham. If you don’t appreciate Lena Dunham, you won’t appreciate the book. I do and I did.

My Friends, by Fredrik Backman (author of A Man Called Ove). A sublime story of friendship and the power of art. Listen to this podcast interview with the author. So good! Backman is the Tom Hanks of authors.

A woman who refuses to be categorized: Dolly Parton

This quote of Dolly’s speaks to me as I think about how quickly the summer has passed and about what my friend observed—how, as we get older, “time and purpose become one and the same.”

Dolly said, “find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose.” I don’t know if there is a documented connection between Dolly and Mary Oliver, but there is clearly a spiritual one.

A Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

How is your experience of time shifting as you get older? Do you feel nostalgic? If so why? Maybe you’re philosophical as you think about purpose in relation to time? Or maybe, like me, the urgency of the tick-tick-tick is the biggest feeling?

Feel free to share your pros and cons about social media and apps below. Our relationship to the digital world is so complicated and increasingly troubling.

What books did you read this summer? I want your recommendations! Do you read physical books, digital, or audio? Tell us why.

Leave a comment

And finally, answer this one for yourself: What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

The book tucked at the end of my carefully edited and arranged “self-help-empowerment-mental-health” shelf, was not Schaef’s but a different collection of daily meditations titled Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach.

Had the woo-woo goddesses of the universe replaced Schaef’s book with Breathnach’s? The two titles perfectly illustrate the conflict I’ve been reckoning with—I should be more ambitious, but I also want the time to write and enough energy to be present for the people I love. Also, I’d really like to spend more time in the garden.

You’re not doing “too much;” you’re not doing enough!” My saboteur (that inner judgy voice) knew which of my buttons to push. She reminded me that I am a woman who needs to satisfy the purpose-productivity-people-pleasing chorus of shoulds—if only to shut them up.

My knees crackled as I kneeled to pull Simple Abundance from the shelf, then slowly lowered myself on to the wildly patterned floral rug in my office. No broken spine, no marginalia, or sticky notes and highlighted passages—sure signs I’d never read the book.

I thumbed through 365 chapters, stopping on that day’s meditation: August 5: “The Gift of Sacred Idleness.” The epigraph read,

“Work is not always required … there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.” (George MacDonald)

Ha! Score one point for the woo-woo goddesses of the universe.

When I quit my job eight years ago, I set out to follow the business advice that goes, “If you have more than three priorities, you have none.” I was purposeful about the goals I set for myself. 1. Health 2. Family 3. Writing. But I kept adding sparkly new interests and ambitions to the list—I should be an editor! I should be an activist! I should be a Substack best seller! Whenever I got distracted (which has been often), the things most important to me wilted a little bit from lack of care.

When the world got scarier in January 2025, the need to do something felt existential. Of course I should fight injustice, corruption, and cruelty. The ‘Save Democracy Shoulds’ got lodged like Eras Tour clips in my Instagram algorithm – infinitely scrollable, unavoidable, and all TOO MUCH.

I joined a community organizing group and raised my hand to help in whatever way I could. I wanted to be part of something, and I loved the people I met. But that wasn’t enough; my saboteur struck up the band—should, should, should.

For a while I sang along, from helping to clarify the group’s goals, to calling voters in swing states, to wearing an inflatable unicorn costume at a No Kings protest. But something was out of place. As much as I wanted to be all things, and more to the point, get credit for it, my mental and physical health withered; I wasn’t fully present for my loved ones, and I wasn’t writing.

When spring turned to summer this year, both my garden and I were weedy from lack of care.

I looked at the powerful and productive women around me, in real life and online. By comparison, I wasn’t even close to doing too much. My saboteur nodded, I should do more. Instead, I crawled under a patchwork quilt and watched West Wing reruns for days.

There’s a reason why Schaef’s book for “women who do too much,” remains a perennial best seller, since it was published 39 years ago. Women are conditioned to persevere. Our self-worth has been measured by our ability to do “too much.”1

Women aren’t quitters. Maybe we should be.

When I decided to leave the community group and quit the related effort to turn out voters, I felt ashamed for quitting, until my friend offered this context, “Maybe this just isn’t your season to be active in politics.”

The best guess at the origin of the verb “quit” is kweie, meaning “to rest, to be quiet.” Nature knows this. The leaves on the trees here in northern Vermont are already turning color as they pull their energy inward for the long winter.

As I began writing this essay, I thought I’d start by quoting a sad-but-still-truism from Schaef’s book. Not finding the book, I searched online for quotes from Women Who Do Too Much. On the first page of results, this one leaped out:

“KNOWING when to quit may be my greatest victory.” – Anne Wilson Schaef

Am I selfish for quitting? Maybe; maybe not. Either way, the only one keeping score is my saboteur. I closed my browser and put Breathnach back on the shelf, then went outside to weed the garden.

Woo-Woo Goddesses of the Universe: 2 — Saboteur: 0

Have you quit anything lately? How did that feel? Or is there something you’d like to quit, but the chorus of “shoulds” is holding you back? Let’s talk about it.

Leave a comment

You might also like:

Goldenrod.

Scientific name: Solidago - Medieval Latin meaning "to make whole" or "to strengthen."

Late summer light is different in northern Vermont. Like a Valencia filter, it’s sepia-tone yellow. Having nothing to do with Canadian wildfires, the yellow comes from sunflowers, black-eyed Susans and goldenrod, from tufts of sweet corn still on the stalks, and from fading seed heads of timothy grass sweeping over the hilly landscape.

The air is thick and lazy. Humidity and afternoon thunderstorms make excellent excuses for a hammock snooze while listening to a Red Sox game on WEEI. Will this be the year? Nothing should feel urgent in August, but everything does—even naps.

August is (almost) the end of summer

Technically fall begins in late September with the autumn solstice, which makes August the penultimate month of summer. But, c’mon, August is the last month of summer. From June1 - August 31, we get 92 short days to soak up the sun. Astronomically long days, I know, but emotionally so. very. short.

The other night Felix asked me if I felt old. My body? Absolutely. The other part of me—my spirit, my energy, my joie de vivre, whatever you call it— feels likes August.

June is romantic. July is a party. August is urgent.

Swimming holes are finally warm enough, and lakes are still warm enough for evening dips. Soon there will be that first cool night when someone (usually me) will say, “good sleeping weather!”

Blueberries, peaches, ripe tomatoes, fresh corn. Do you found enough friends and neighbors willing to take your extra zucchini ? August is for indulgence. Eat as much fresh produce as you can now, you can freeze, pickle, and preserve after September’s Harvest moon.

Have you had a Maple Creemee1 yet? Most stands close before Labor Day when teenage scoopers head back to school. The first day of school in Vermont is August 26! Back to school shopping and two-a-day pre-season practices before that.

Have you taken a proper vacation? Have you stacked the wood?

John Deere works seven days a week to get the vital second or third cuts baled or rolled in plastic. What look like giant marshmallows dot hayfields, and meadows are flooded with vibrant fuzzy plumes of goldenrod. One will feed livestock and the other will prepare pollinators for a very. long. winter.

I’d sleep until noon on my high-school summer vacations. Now, I’m up before 6 am, earlier in June and July when the chorus of Robins and Phoebes and Wrens start their day before dawn. This morning it was quiet and dark at 4:30 when I turned on the coffeemaker. I notice things I never used to. The grass is wet. There’s a cool breeze. The clock ticks louder.

I don’t sleep as well as I used to, and I don’t think about my age, but I do think about time. There is so much I want to do in my August era. Grow stronger and continue shedding the shoulds (those damn perceptions and expectations) that pull time and energy away from doing the things that make me feel whole—like noticing when the goldenrod blooms.

How do you feel about August? What’s it like where you live? What feels urgent for you when summer is coming to an end? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

P.S. I made you a playlist!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLciKMQ-O782g&si=qvTnt51ty-vaTccr

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

Subscribe for free and join this weekly conversation between friends who are amid the ongoing project of reclaiming ourselves in midlife.

It’s Monday morning and my throat swollen with tears I refuse to let fall. It’s a muggy, dark morning—that unique August rainy day New England dankness. My forearms stick to the desktop as I scroll Facebook and steam.

It was a tough weekend, some evidence of which appeared online (keep reading, I’ll tell you). I should have ignored it, but one thoughtless comment provoked me to an impassioned rebuttal. My hot-headed defense accomplished little but compounded my grief and sent me into a shame spiral when I wanted to be writing.

Is Ann Patchett on Facebook?

No. Ann Patchett carries a pre-paid flip phone, and, when she does search for it in the bottom of her purse, it’s often out of minutes or battery. The award-winning author said this during a Podcast interview with Debbie Milman.

Ann Patchett conjures entire books in her head before committing a single word to paper. Ann Patchett has published eight books since 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced. For her latest book, Whistler, Ann Patchett made exactly zero TikToks.

Speaking of zero, I have published zero books since 2007 (or ever). I close my browser, set a pomodoro timer, and stream binaural beats through noise-cancelling headphones. No tomato sauce to stir, no lyrics or dance beats to distract, these are my go-to methods for creative focus. Today they are powerless against the shitstorm churning in my body and brain.

Why did I open Facebook this morning? Better question: Why does anyone?

What is the problem with Facebook?

The platform’s stated mission, “Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” sounds altruistic. That Mark Zuckerberg is a benevolent visionary!

Bwaahahhaaaa. I think we can agree that’s horseshit.

Estimates1 vary, but as this graphic illustrates, it doesn’t seem like Facebook (parent company Meta) is giving people much power at all:

• About 50% of what’s in your feed is determined by an AI-driven algorithm specifically designed to keep you scrolling.

• Another 20% of your content is paid advertising (often called sponsored because it sounds less greedy).

• Only 30% of what’s in your feed is “powered” by your choices, and only sort of. The algorithm pushes posts from members of your Facebook Groups more often than posts from your friends (i.e. human people).

That’s right, you’re more likely to see content from Bobby Rando than your BFF simply because you and Bobby both belong (along with 650,000 others) to a Group called “All About Squirrels.” Meta knows that group members stay on the platform longer, which gives Facebook’s advertising sales teams more time to collect more personal data to attract more advertisers. Because money.

A Facebook authentic content experiment

In this “highly” statistically relevant sample, here are the first 20 posts in my feed as of sometime Monday afternoon:

1. Group Post – Fans of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail

2. Ad for Stitch Fix

3. A carousel of Reels featuring Law Roach. I guess because I’m watching this season of Project Runway (he’s a judge)?

4. A friend – reposting a branded post

5. Yippee, another friend! This one celebrating her upcoming book release. (Which I am legitimately excited about).

Posts 6-20: Group, Ad, Group, AI, AI, Ad, AI, Friend, Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad, AI, Group, Ad.

Facebook isn’t building community and bringing the world closer together, it’s coercing us to graze at an all-you-can-eat buffet with no sneezeguard.
No wonder then, the comments are filled with explosive diarrhea.

Okay, here it comes—the emotional turn of this essay.

What happened this weekend?

Okay, I promised to tell you what prompted all this, and here goes but it’s going to be brief because it’s still raw. Felix and I adopted a puppy in January and despite many, many, many joyful moments and falling in love, and gratitude for the affection only a dog can give, there was turmoil too. As of Saturday, she has a new family. The decision to rehome her catalyzed at dusk about six weeks ago when I had to execute an open-field tackle on this 60-pound blur of fur and muscle, lest she keep zooming at full speed toward the pasture, or worse, the road. Tears and reflection, shame and guilt flowed that night and haven’t stopped yet.

That’s all I’ll say about it. That’s all I can say.

I’ve never written about the time when Kitty lost her eye, or the night our yellow Lab Rangely died. Their stories are fully composed in my head, but I lack the self-acceptance (and the skill) required to shape these events into any shareable form.

Even Ann Patchett struggles.

Patchett may first write every story, even the luminous Bel Canto or the charming Tom Lake, in her head, but she’s never satisfied with the final result. In “The Getaway Car”, her essay about writing, the author says, “I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.”

Perhaps that’s what I lack most—the capacity to forgive myself. Perhaps that’s why my heart pounds when I expose my vulnerability (accidentally or on purpose) via social media. Or, in this essay.

Forgiveness won’t come from the comments section, and my sadness does not require public airing. Yet the easy lie Facebook sells us about building community and connection, insists that it does.

Because there is money to be made.

Felix often says, “anger is grief turned sideways.” There is much to grieve these days, and much to be aggrieved by. I suppose, then, this essay is a horizontal expression of my rage against the machine(s).

I had a very different essay drafted for this week’s newsletter, but my emotions took control of my editorial plan. I blame Mark Zuckerberg. The irony is that, after I send this essay to you, I will share it on Facebook and read every comment.

But first I need to find my smart phone; it’s somewhere at the bottom of my purse.

How’s this for irony?! Please leave a comment on this essay, like, and share or restack to help me and AMID LIFE find our people. ❤️❤️

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Dear Subscribers, THANK YOU!

Last night, I disconnected PAID offerings* and reconnected to why I write this newsletter.

After a months-long hiatus, I’m reintroducing AMID LIFE and myself (in case you forgot). I’m aiming for more simplicity, focus, and authenticity—as one does, amid life.

*If you have time left on your paid subscription, a refund is on the way!
Because, profits and pressure are not what does it for me.

Please keep reading. I’d love to hear from you.

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Eight years ago, after a peri-menopausal implosion at the office, I fled to my peri-restored old farmhouse in rural Vermont, hired a self-proclaimed life wizard, and left a 30-year career in corporate marketing to test the theory, it’s never too late to be what I might have been.

As a late-Boomer (Gen X rising), I learned early what I should be—a people-pleasing, always smiling, not-too-loud, never pushy, perfectionist. Toward the end of my corporate career, and to this day, those criteria persist.

But wait! There’s more.

Celebrities, influencers, advertisers, and personal development gurus, sell an aspirational midlife woman: having-it-all, leaning-in, philanthropic, powerful (but also at peace in her garden). She’s cured herself of menopause and aging with a combination of serums, herbs, and beef tallow. She’s a badass with a robust investment portfolio, and the pelvic floor of a 20-year-old. To learn her secrets, apply discount code: simplybe (heh).

After I left my job, I was the target audience. The perfect customer for the wellness-empowerment-purpose-industrial complex ready and eager to profit from my learned, inherited, and deeply embedded insecurities.

I should have known better. I used to write marketing playbooks and messaging designed to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD, for short) in the minds of potential customers. Once the seeds were planted, sales followed.

Now, I see FUD everywhere.

What if, instead of being afraid, I got curious? What if I decided to stop grasping for some impossible, made-up version of who I should BE and simply DO what lights me up?

That’s what AMID LIFE is—one phase in the ongoing project of dropping the heavy weight of other people’s expectations and becoming myself.

Psst. It’s also a free newsletter between friends.

What to expect

A optimistically mostly weeklyish newsletter from me, written by me, delivered to your in-box or available on the app. Here’s how I loosely organize topics and some of my favs from the archives:

• Short personal essays on career reinvention, self-reflection, and learning to live a no-shoulds life, such as:

• Longer researched pieces on the weight of expectations women carry — how it started, how it’s going, like:

• Photo diaries from Vermont—my farmhouse (and life) renovations—don’t expect HGTV or Hallmark happy endings! Here’s a favorite:

• Monthly roundup of ideas, recommendations, observations — what I’m saving and what I’m deleting. Here’s one from the archives:

• Occasional updates on my “emerging” writing career and memoir in progress. One from the archives:

Reinvention is like renovation—you’ve got to break shit.

I write about the messy pursuit of self. I question what I’ve been taught to believe and the messages I’ve been sold about who I should be and what I should want.

Are you on that pursuit too? What kind of questions are you asking? What messages were you sold to believe?

Leave a comment

Introduce yourself in the comments. It’s always nice to know we’re not alone. ❤️

Catherine

AMID LIFE is a bullshit detector. It’s also a newsletter where I tap into my professional experience to challenge the BS marketing designed to profit from women’s insecurities, and where I share personal stories of the ongoing project of shedding the shoulds.

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

New to AMID LIFE? subscribe for free and join this weekly conversation between friends who are amid the ongoing project of reclaiming ourselves in midlife.

Eight years ago, after a peri-menopausal implosion at the office, I fled to my peri-restored old farmhouse in rural Vermont, hired a self-proclaimed life wizard, and left a 30-year career in corporate marketing to test the theory, it’s never too late to be what I might have been.

As a late-Boomer (Gen X rising), I learned early what I should be—a people-pleasing, always smiling, not-too-loud, never pushy, perfectionist. Toward the end of my corporate career, and to this day, those criteria persist.

But wait! There’s more.

I was the perfect target customer for a wellness-empowerment-purpose-industrial complex ready and eager to profit from my learned, inherited, and deeply embedded insecurities.1

I should have known better. I used to write marketing playbooks and messaging designed to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD, for short) in the minds of potential customers. Once the seeds were planted, sales followed.

Now, I see FUD everywhere.

What if, instead of being afraid, I got curious? What if I decided to stop grasping for some made-up version of who or what I should BE and simple DO what lights me up?

That’s what AMID LIFE is—one phase in the ongoing project of becoming myself. It’s also a free newsletter between friends.

What to expect

An optimistically mostly-weeklyish newsletter from me, written by me, delivered to your in-box or available on the app. Here’s how I loosely organize topics and some of my favs from the archives:

• Short personal essays on career reinvention, self-reflection, and learning to live a no-shoulds life, such as:

• Longer researched pieces on the weight of expectations women carry — how it started, how it’s going, like:

• Photo diaries from Vermont—my farmhouse (and life) renovations—don’t expect HGTV or Hallmark happy endings! Here’s a favorite:

• Monthly rants, ideas, recommendations, observations — what I’m saving and what I’m deleting. Here’s one from the archives:

• Occasional updates on my “emerging” writing career and memoir in progress. One from the archives:

Reinvention is like renovation—you’ve got to break shit.

I write about the messy pursuit of self. I question what I’ve been taught to believe and the messages I’ve been sold about who I should be and what I should want.

Are you on that pursuit too? What kind of questions are you asking? What messages were you sold to believe?

Leave a comment

Introduce yourself in the comments. It’s always nice to know I’m not alone. ❤️

Thanks for reading!

Catherine

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

Subscribe for free and join this weekly conversation between friends who are amid the ongoing project of reclaiming ourselves in midlife.

I watch the ever-changing light from the window in my office. In the winter, it’s a bit blue. Spring green. Summer rose. Autumn gold. Some seasons flow quietly from one to the next, some refuse to leave, some appear overnight with a gust of wind.

I write from a small room tucked under the eaves of an early 1800’s Vermont farmhouse. The window is new and weathertight, but I miss the windy rattle and chippy paint of the old, seeded glass that was there until last summer. It had stories to tell.

I claimed this little room for my own the second I saw it—long before we moved in. It would be a sanctuary and a creative space. Before there was a kitchen stove or a reliable furnace downstairs, this room had a comfy chair and a small farm table I’d brought with me from New Hampshire to use as a writing desk.

Early on in the renovation, after vacuuming up decades of accumulated mouse droppings, pet hair, ash, and dust from the dirt road, I’d retreat here—to this room of my own—sore and discouraged. I’d binge-watch West Wing episodes from a boxed set of DVDs and drink Heady Topper from a tall silver can, while ruminating over my lack of progress.

I had a vision and a Pinterest board full of ideas to make this idea of a house into reality. I wanted everything—magically, perfectly, and right, fucking now.

In my rush to be done, I made a lot of mistakes. I painted the kitchen three times before I got the color right. But in just three seasons of demolition and rebuilding, Felix and I had a living area with a functioning kitchen, a couch, and a picnic table in the dining room. We cooked Christmas dinner on the backyard grill that first Christmas and talked about why we wanted to live here in the hills between the White and Green Mountains.

We chose Vermont from a mountain biking trail, and we loved to ski and hike with friends. I painted a future of Norman Rockwell holiday dinners with family. I bought twin beds and turned my space into a guest room.

A year or so later, after we transformed the ell between the house and the barn into our principal bedroom (not the room’s first revision—it began as a woodshed, then became a groovy family room, and by the time we arrived, a tired rental unit), there was room for two new cozy bedrooms upstairs.

This was about the same time we moved to Vermont full-time. My sanctuary-come-guest room became my home office.

All work. No play, as evidenced by the ergonomic workstation. I tried to create a library of books and art project supplies that I’d once envisioned, but the shelves I borrowed from Felix’s house were haphazardly arranged—a dusty arrangement of hobbies I didn’t have time to pursue.

I wasn’t commuting hours in traffic anymore, but as the months ticked on and the seasons spun through their cycles, I dreaded the short climb upstairs just as much.

When I left my job at the end of 2018, I turned my home office into the chaotic headquarters for finding my purpose. One shelf, then two, then four of the affordable, need-it-now Billy bookshelves bought at IKEA before the world shut down, and my writing pursuit began.

Through family Zooms and virtual MFA workshops, the particle board furniture was the backdrop for my midlife reinvention. Filled with books, re-arranged repeatedly to make room for more. Books I devoured, did not finish, and have yet to read.

Winter, spring, summer, fall—time moved at light speed. The shelves began to collapse; one of four broke under the weight of ambition and expectations. My book project was in its fifth (or 50^th) revision. “Do or do not,” says Yoda. Okay, sure. 2026 will be the year I finish my book….

as soon as I repaint and refurnish my office.

Over the recent holidays, Felix built new bookshelves for me. It wasn’t magical, perfect, or completed overnight. Felix measured, ciphered, cut, and fit the pieces together with patience and skill. Amid bowed walls and uneven floors, with thousands of steps between the freezing cold barn to cut the wood and the overheated upstairs to coax it into place, he shaped the project until it was straight, level, and sturdy.

Built-in—these shelves are part of the house now. As if they had always been here, waiting to be made real.

There has been this changing light of a dream since I bought the house 13 years ago, and really, since I was a child. I would own a cozy farmhouse, and I would write a book—and despite my innate impatience and perfectionist bent for revision, I am making these things come true.

The bookshelves need one more coat of paint (that’s my job), and then I will spend days re-shelving my books, organizing by genre and author, getting distracted by highlighted passages and copious marginalia. Finishing will take time. I want to curate as I restock the shelves, carefully keeping only what serves—leaving space for what’s to come. Maybe I’ll wait until spring.

Indeed, if I am ever going to finish my book, I’d best leave the bookshelves bare as trees in winter until the real work is done.

Thank you for reading—especially during these enraging, exhausting times. Whatever you feel called to do, do that. Keep going. The seasons always change.

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.

Catherine

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

Overwhelm turns me into a cranky, reactive bitch. Earlier this week, over my first cup of coffee, I picked on a popular writer— someone I admire, someone who had written nothing offensive, someone from whom I could learn a lot. I shared my thoughtless thoughts on Substack Notes1.

That’s one of countless problems with social media platforms (and don’t kid yourself, Substack has become one), it enables our itchy trigger fingers. Mad about something? Say something. Say anything to anyone. Tap, tap, tap, post. Feel better?

I did not.

The holiday season is one of overwhelm. The leisurely Thanksgiving meal and family time, followed by the bright lights of Christmas, the hygge of winter, the latkes, candles, and gifts, are most usually the result of the unpaid, often un-thanked, labor of women.

There are some years I’ve reveled in making a perfect holiday season—nay, demanded it! I baked, and decorated, and shopped. I wrote family newsletters. One batch of cookies burned, one not-happy-enough child, one Yankee Swap gift that didn’t get the biggest laugh—everything was ruined.

I exaggerate for effect, but as I’ve accumulated years (and I’d like to think some wisdom), I can see how those cranky Christmas feelings were of my own making.

Hold on! What’s this? Palmer is dropping her strident defense of the unequal burden women carry thanks to deeply embedded patriarchal beliefs and rampant capitalism??

No. Never. In fact, this post isn’t about the holiday burden at all. Stay with me.

The first time I met with my Life Wizard, she’d diagnosed me as “discontented” with my life. I brushed her off and continued to press forward with my midlife reinvention ambitions.

Over the next few years, I networked and volunteered. I tried my hand at consulting and gardening—failing at both. I went back to school, started writing, started writing workshops, started editing, started pitching and publishing, started to build a following, started getting paid, started this Substack, started and stopped, and started again and again, writing a book. I whined about all of it.

Not good enough. Never good enough.

I told my Life Wizard that I’d never wanted a business career, let alone one that lasted nearly four decades. I told her that I once dreamed of living in the mountains in a farmhouse, with a dog and lots of books. And yet, I was paying this woman to coach me toward else — something bigger.

“Why,” asked the Wizard, “do you judge the very life you’ve designed?”

Good question. Perhaps because there was no Internet in this dream, no algorithms, no performance of perfection?

After I posted that snarky remark on Notes, I listened to an episode of the TED Radio Podcast called “Finding Your Bliss.” Ear pods in, I stretched the tension out of my shoulders and back, lying on my yoga mat in the room I’d recently spent three days drenching in color. The walls, ceiling, and trim radiated rose-colored contentment, but I was still ruminating over what I had written.

Krista Tippet, the wise and gentle-spoken founder of The On Being Project, spoke from the TED stage, as if she were speaking to me.

You know how the thing you wished you’d said always comes to you when it’s too late? What I should have commented to the writer I admired was: I see your point, and while I agree, the topic adds to my overwhelm and makes me feel that I need to get bigger, that no matter how I try harder, do more, it will never be enough.

I’ve only recently begun to make peace with this, but bigger and more is not the life I designed. It’s not the life I want.

This holiday season, I’m guided by the concept of contentment. It’s a question I will carry with me into the New Year. It’s not exactly “bliss,” but it is a feeling devoid of expectations, a feeling that doesn’t require rose-colored glasses—a feeling of enoughness.

I’m not decorating a tree this year or hosting my children and grandchildren for homemade cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. Like so many, my holidays will be trimmed with grief over lost loved ones and with anger incited by the daily news, but also with love.

This morning, I stayed clear of social media and considered the life I’d designed. Cozy in my farmhouse with a view of the mountains, surrounded by memories of my dad and my dog, I drank coffee in front of a fire fed by wood I carried in from the snow. Contented.

How would you define contentment? Have you designed the life you wanted? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Thank you for reading!

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.

Catherine

Last year, I invited writers to share their stories, starting with this simple prompt:

Tracie Sweeney had me hooked when she asked:

Why, at the age of 67, did I decide to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu?

Why, indeed?! But as I read, I was reminded how the heaviness of emotions and memories can hold us down—if we let them. Tracie fought back.

Tracie is a “black-belt” example of strength and determination, in both the physical and emotional sense. Please read, like, and share her powerful story of taking back her control. ❤️

I am the oldest person in the beginner class. The others are working on the day’s drill, but I am here in the corner with my back on the ground, knees bent. Jamie’s knees are on either side of my hips. He asks permission to push his hand into my chest near my shoulder.

“Trap my wrist with your right hand,” he tells me.

Check.

“Put your left hand on my tricep.”

Check.

“Trap my foot with your left foot.”

I wiggle my foot into place.

“Now bridge your hips, push off with your feet, and roll over your shoulder.”

Connected by arms and legs, we flip. I wind up atop Jamie, his hips between my knees.

I’d never participated in martial arts, never watched an MMA fight or WWE Smackdown. I had no brothers to wrestle with. So why, at the age of 67, did I decide to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu?

They say to do the thing that scares you.

I told Jamie, my strength training coach, tilting my head toward the jiu jitsu side of the gym he owned. “That,” I say, “scares me.”

“You won’t get hurt. There’s no competitive sparring in beginner classes,” Jamie assured me.

Jamie didn’t bat an eye when I came to him at age 62 wanting to build muscle and strength. There was no sexism, no ageism in our relationship. I never felt physically threatened by him. But getting hurt wasn’t my fear.

I was afraid of stepping into the deep water of memories about how others had dominated my body. I decided it was time to confront the fear of not knowing what to do except give in.

The first move we practiced is called the trap and roll escape, but in the moment, there was no way I could remember the name or the order of the steps. My brain was too busy trying to push away the memory of the college internship supervisor who had pushed his way into my body one night nearly 50 years ago.

The memory crashed into my complete trust in Jamie. Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out, I told myself as I snapped back to the present.

Each day’s class introduced two new techniques. I could barely keep everything straight. In the first week, I was with a woman, a more advanced student, and an exceptional teacher. We took turns being “good guy” and “bad guy.” She was very patient and talked me through where to put a hand, a foot, a leg. But I had trouble staying present. The instructions kept getting crowded out by the memory of a high school teacher guiding my hand toward his crotch.

When I felt completely lost and questioned my reasons for wanting to learn jiu-jitsu, I reminded myself that instead of pushing and pulling heavy weights, I wanted to learn what it’s like to push and pull people, to not be afraid of another body against mine—to not submit.

As I learned new techniques, every once in a while I would remember a term. “Stuff is starting to stick,” I tell a friend. “But it’s like I know just 10 letters in a 36-letter alphabet. I can write three-letter words, but I lack the vocabulary and grammar to write sentences; paragraphs feel months away.”

In a class on positional control, it was my turn to be the good guy. My partner tells me to rest all my weight on her. After spending adulthood trying to be anything but heavy, it seemed weird to allow someone to feel how much I weigh.

“Put your hooks in,” she says.

Hooks - I knew that one! I wrapped my legs around and under hers, placing my calves just so behind her thighs. She told me to lift my knees off the ground. My hips anchored me into her diaphragm as I created a base with my hands. I pinned the bad guy.

“You want to slither across me,” my training partner says as we wrap up.

Knees and thighs entwining. Bodies slithering. Muscle memory of the times I’d felt such closeness against my will began to intrude.

I refocused on the here and now and began the next drill.

In my fourth week of lessons, Jamie demonstrated a technique called guillotine defense for the class — anchors, leverage, and pivots, even a little hop, and then the takedown. My eyes bugged out just watching the demo.

It looked impossible. But when I drilled with my partner, she guided me through each component, as she clinched my neck in the crook of her elbow. We moved slowly. I anchored, leveraged, and pivoted. A hop, a knee, a chop, and she was down. It felt effortless, magical. I laughed at the sensation.

I laughed again during a variation of the Kimura armlock. I was slow, but my movements were sure. I used my feet to leverage my torso in a movement called “shrimp,” which positioned me in such a way that I could take one of her arms out of play. I wriggled my body so that I could wrap my legs around the “bad guy’s” back, crossed my ankles, and squeezed. We disengaged and high-fived.

“I think we found her move!” my training partner tells Jamie.

I held the moment, trying to process a new muscle memory, a new neural pathway: This is what it feels like to be in a position of physical control.

When I complete 20 classes, I will earn my first stripe — a piece of white tape wrapped around my gi belt.

That tape will mean even more to me. It will represent my first steps toward draining a pool of memories and creating a new narrative.

Will the associations I have about giving up, giving in, ever go away? I don’t know, but it’s worth the journey.

Sincere thanks to Tracie for sharing her moment of change story! After spending four decades as an award-winning writer and editor, Tracie Johnson Sweeney retired to focus on other things. She’s currently writing a memoir about the transformative power of menopause and strength training. For more from Tracie, check out her Substack, Unapologetically Aging.

What have you done that “scares” you, and how did facing your fear help you turn the page?

Leave a comment

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

This past July, for the third year in a row, the part of Vermont where I live was punished with torrential rain and devastating floods. Roads were destroyed; homes, businesses, lives washed away.

When it stopped raining, we had endless sunny days in August, September, and October. Our moods shifted from kid-like summer-vacation joy to delighted disbelief, to concern. We took fewer, shorter showers and bought bottled water to fill our Camelbacks and coffee pot. We let yellow mellow.1

Like most of the state, our county was in severe drought. Felix checked the water levels in our spring-fed well weekly.

Too much. Never enough.

The same can be said about my career reinvention, my midlife reinvention, my post-menopausal becoming—whatever phrase the algorithm prefers these days, it’s all the same.

It’s been seven years since I left my job. Some days my pivot from corporate marketing to creative writing feels light and sunny, and some days there’s a deluge of “shoulds” that nearly washes me away.

I was surprised by my FOMO when I first left my job. It wasn’t the office-mate camaraderie or paychecks that I missed the most; it was the sense of purpose and achievement. I no longer enjoyed doing the work, but at least in a goal-driven, productivity-measuring culture, I could be assured I had value.2

Six months after I quit—no new job title, no business launched, on the surface, nothing accomplished—I watched the cows chewing spring grass in the field behind my house and worried that people might think I’d gone out to pasture.

My fear of not “adding value” stemmed (stems?) from decades of cultural conditioning, working and living in patriarchal systems. Add to that the all-caps messages from the purpose-industrial-complex led by Instagram influencers, myriad self-help podcasters, and the personal development books I listened to on my daily walks.

I only wanted to make a creative life, which in my heart always looked like May Sarton writing in the morning and tending to her New Hampshire garden in the afternoon, or E.B. White plucking out simple, elegant essays on a manual typewriter from a shed near the coast of Maine. But that is not how it goes in the digital age.

You must write every day, and …

You must have a platform! You must develop multiple streams of income! You must make videos, host a podcast, differentiate, and be a valuable contributor to the literary community.

I was all in. Then I was all out. Then I was all in again. I’ve written about the round-and-round so much, there are too many posts to link here. Check out the archive!

Just this summer, I decided to double down on this Substack—rebrand, post more, tack on a few bells and whistles. Ideas and advice were everywhere. If only I would do x and y and z, and, and, and, my success would all but be guaranteed.

It doesn’t rain, but it pours.

In early October, perhaps triggered by the dust that had collected on every windowsill and every page of my untouched manuscript, I cried and ranted to Felix. “I don’t have time for the one thing I want to do! I’ll never finish my book! I’m not writing…. wah, wah, wah.”

Felix had run out of his usual patience. “Figure it out!” He snapped.

I had been whining about this a lot.

You know those movie scenes where someone is flipping out and frozen at the same time until someone slaps them hard across the face and they come instantly to their senses? It was like that (without the physical slap).

I’d let algorithms and a flood of profit-driven promises poison my well. And still, I drank and drank and drank until the well was dry.

A spring is fed from the bottom up. Groundwater flows deep beneath the Earth’s surface, slowly making its way through the soil and traveling along fractures in bedrock. It eventually emerges to feed rivers, ponds, and wetlands—a life source.

Like water, creativity and contentment are natural resources. If cared for, renewable and powerful. If not, then vulnerable to abuse.

Someone else’s definition of purpose or any measure of success that can be charted on a dashboard does not feed a creative, authentic life. Not for me.

The rain returned at the end of October and continued for the first two weeks of November. There’s snow on the ground now, and the well is slowly refilling.

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.

Catherine

p.s. 👇❤️

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is a strength coach and critical thinker. She’s also a self-professed skeptic who likes to tell stories, and I’m so glad she shared this one with us. Maura was in her 40s when she took up competitive speed-skating. In her essay, we get an inside look at the sport and insight into Maura’s personal quest to be the best. The theme is 100% relatable for midlife women—even if you know nothing about cornering and cross-overs.

Racing against the clock and each other

After I cross the finish line, all I can hear for a moment is my own breathing, with my mouth open, gasping for air. Hands on knees, bent over, I let my momentum carry me around the rink for a lap or two.

I’m burning with frustration. In my gut, I already know—not good enough.

People in the stands are clapping, and I exchange “nice job” and “well done” with my competitors, smiling through my disappointment as I high-five other women. Clad in colorful skinsuits and helmets, we’re a motley group from all over the United States. We’ve raced against each other and the clock for years.

I step off the ice, balancing on the very tips of my 16.5-inch blades and hobble over to a chair, where my skate guards are waiting for me. I’m trying to keep the dirt off the blades so they don’t get dulled by grit. I sit down heavily and listen to the announcer for a moment. If someone breaks a record at Nationals, the emcee will usually call it out immediately. There’s no announcement—he’s simply listing the competitors for the next race.

I have one more race to go, but I feel done with the whole thing—the weekend, the season, and competition in general. I’m tired and a little sick, at the tail end of March in a season that started in September. The rink smells damp and sour with the breath of hundreds of people. I’m wishing for time to pass by faster so I can fly home and take a walk with my husband, outside, in the fresh air and sun.

A chance to be the best

When everything goes well, short-track speed skating feels like flying. The skate blades are long and very thin; perhaps half the width of a hockey skate. Water is poured onto the racing lanes to compress between the blade and the ice, and you hydroplane around the track, feeling speed without friction, seemingly pulled into each tight turn and catapulted through the straightaway. Time stretches out, and you sense what to do and how to move without thinking.

In more difficult moments, you fall and slide hard into the pads, or get knocked off-balance by another skater, or your legs cramp up as you hold yourself in a compressed, unnatural body position, and you’re rudely brought back to earth. Then there’s the third scenario; the race unfolds smoothly, you feel good, and yet when you see the results, you think, That’s it? That’s the best I could do?

After decades of hockey, I took up speed-skating in my early 40s and quickly became good at it. For most of each season, I competed against teenage girls (including some who’d go on to make elite and Olympic teams). I worked hard to stay out of last place.

But in March, I gather with other masters (meaning women over 30) for a chance to be the best.

This is my first year in the 50-59 age bracket, and I’ve set my heart on breaking a national record. At least one, if not two, were within my reach. I’d been dreaming about this since a meet in October, when I was close to the record times for 500- and 777-meters in my age group.

The faster you go, the harder it is to scrub off time—even tenths of a second. It requires technique, stamina, and the ability to flow, which I define as going fast without trying to go fast. Over the preceding four years, I put in the time and effort to drop my 500-meter personal best by 1.2 seconds.

“Hey Maura, how’d you get so fast?” someone says when I get back to the locker room, where most of the masters women and a few younger girls have settled in for the weekend.

“Yeah, you were so close to the record,” another woman chimes in.

She’s saying this in wonder and appreciation, while I feel like a loser.

Then the subject changes to the daily roll call of aches and pains. I can’t help but grin; the banter shakes me out of my self-imposed gray mood. After having a snack and putting on my sweats, I leave the locker room to check the official results.

The print-out confirms what I already sensed: not fast enough. I finished .7 seconds away from the record in the 500-meter distance. I’d already missed my other chance at a record by a similar margin.

At the elite level, .7 seconds would be a large gap. And yet, in masters races, and in life, it is a finger snap, a half-finished thought, an eyelash width. Take out your phone and open the stopwatch. Hit start, and see just how quickly one second elapses; you can barely say “One one-thousand.”

What if I had gone a little harder on the start? Or taken one extra cross-over into the turn? Or stretched for the finish? Then who would I be?

I sought some lasting validation of my ability and hard work, etched in stone across the years to prove I was good enough. And I missed it by a painfully thin margin.

That night, I lie diagonally across my king-size hotel bed and review the months of long, exhausting practices, the social invitations I declined, and the endless physical therapy and weightlifting sessions. Could I have done more?

I don’t see any moment where I didn’t give everything I had to the pursuit. I don’t see anything lacking in me. Maybe, just maybe, skating fast enough to be a hair from a national record is an achievement, not a failure.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the next day would be my last competition in my last season of speedskating.

We’re racing the 1000-meter distance. I’m free to simply skate, and I feel lighter, less lonely as I line up on the bench with my group. The Zamboni is almost done grooming the ice, and we’re about to start things off as the first race of the day. We squeeze together for a photo to celebrate and remember the weekend.

When the referee opens the gate, I’m unsure if I’m mourning or celebrating the end of the competition, but I am laughing with all the other women as I step out onto the ice.

And it feels good. It feels like enough.

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is the author of the Substack publication Modern Strength. She tells true stories about resilience, reflection, and strength, and turns a keen eye on our culture’s view of older people, especially post-menopausal women.

Modern Strength

Postcards from the realm of middle age—I’m talking about Resilience, Reflection, Strength, and a Hard Look at what our culture says about older people, especially post-menopausal women.

By Maura J. Zimmer

Last year, I invited writers to share their stories, starting with this simple prompt:

When sent this fictionalized story, I was reminded of the power of writing (in any genre!) to connect us and to amplify voices often silenced. It’s evident in this powerful piece. Here’s Chrissy:

“Josephine’s Reckoning” was born out of one of the most honest nights of my life. In 2020, as the world shut down, I began hosting a small circle of women in the unfinished house my partner and I had started building before COVID halted everything. The walls were bare, the air raw and open — and so were we. I had just completed a training in Nonlinear Movement, a somatic practice that helps the body release stored trauma, and I wanted to share it with friends who, like me, were feeling restless, anxious, and disconnected.

What unfolded in that empty house became sacred. Week by week, we moved, cried, and remembered together. We spoke truths that had lived quietly in our bones. One night, one of my closest friends realized she was being abused. That moment — her reckoning, witnessed and held in love — stayed with me. I wrote this story as a way to honor her courage, our friendship, and the transformative power of women who hold space for one another’s truth.

Josephine’s Reckoning

Josephine walked up the stairs, the bare hollow steps announcing her arrival. “I’m fucking here!” She exclaimed as she entered the sacred space, dropping her mat and throwing her hands up in the air. Laughter erupted from her four friends, the women she had weathered the long pandemic months with in their fragile little pod. Josephine always arrived like a storm, like a beautiful collision that forced everyone to exhale. But underneath the humor, you could almost hear the scaffolding of her insides eroding.

Josephine settled onto the raw plywood floor, its unfinished surface a mirror of her marriage—stripped bare, nothing to soften the hardness beneath. The house itself had been abandoned mid-construction when the pandemic froze everything in place. Yet the women gathered there anyway, choosing to process, grieve, move, and feel together. In that skeletal space, they christened the new home with their pain, their joy, and their laughter, etching life into its bare bones as they unraveled and were remade.

Josephine hid her face in her hands, swallowed by the fabric of her sweatshirt. “How did I end up here? How did I end up married to a tyrannical man who punches holes in the wall when he can’t control me? I just wanted to feel safe, my whole fucking life, I just wanted to feel safe!”

The room quieted. Mats shifted. A cough, a sigh, a leaning in. The laughter dissolved into listening—tentative, almost reverent. This was our “church” after all.

She continued her desperately needed rant, “Oh, and did you hear there’s a meteor that’s about to hit and blow up half of North America? That and the cancer that I’m sure is growing on my neck or the virus that’s lingering in the air everywhere!”

She was obviously fanatical, but 2020 was the year of great unraveling, where anything could happen, so a part of everyone’s psyches merely shrugged at the thought of the potential meteor hitting.

Molly leaned forward gently, her voice steady. “There is no meteor. That’s the last thing you should waste your thoughts and energy on.”

“Oh, energy!” Josephine snapped, dropping her hands from her face, her eyes blazing. “Don’t say that word in front of my husband. He hates that word—or ‘breakthrough.’ The word breakthrough is offensive to his DNA!”

Inez met Josephine’s eyes. “He is your meteor. It’s already hit. You’re the one who’s blown apart. Josephine, you are being abused.”

Josephine froze, letting the words wash over her. “I can’t leave!” she cried, her voice cracking. “I have nowhere to go—he controls all the money.”

Margo swallowed a sob because she knew this for herself all too well.

Josephine rose to her knees, her face flushed crimson, her body trembling. “Did you know he’s punching holes in the walls again? Slapping the kids?”

The room flinched.

“No amount of surgery could fix the brokenness inside him. Ha! And he thinks I’m partnering with the devil because I come here to meet with you all and move the trauma out of my body.” She laughed bitterly, then spat the truth.

“Yeah, I partnered with the devil fifteen years ago when I married him. He chose religion over me and for 15 years claimed a righteous position, invoking God as a weapon, twisting faith into control until I no longer knew what I believed. That was his armor, his excuse. How could he think this is love? How the fuck am I the deceived one here?”

SAFETY ALERT: If you are in immediate danger, please consider calling 911. If an intimate partner frightens you through coercion, intimidation, or physical violence, help is available. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 / TTY 1-800-787-3224

Margo broke her silence, tears running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry—I’m so triggered. This reminds me of how Will controlled me. God, I was so blind for so long. I went along with all his schemes, not realizing how toxic my world had become.”

Her tears weren’t just for the past—they were for every woman who’d been taught to stay silent in the name of love. Josephine sat still, her hands trembling, realizing that the God she’d been told to serve had been used as a weapon against her own spirit. And in that stillness, something shifted.

They both saw it: leaving wasn’t failure, it was faith. It was courage. It was the body remembering what the soul already knew—that love should never make you smaller, afraid, or sick.

The lesson lingered like a heartbeat: trust your body, even when your mind is confused. It knows when you are not safe. It knows when it’s time to go.

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Chrissy Powers is a licensed therapist and founder of Paradigm Wellness Collective, where she specializes in psychedelic somatic therapy and the treatment of spiritual and religious trauma. Her work bridges science and soul, exploring how the body holds memory, emotion, and meaning. In addition to her therapeutic practice, Chrissy is a writer on Substack and the author of the forthcoming book The Body Remembers: How Shame Gets into Our Bones and How the Body Tells the Truth (2026). Learn more about Chrissy and her work at Paradigm Wellness Collective.

💜October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Learn more. Support survivors.

• Domestic Violence Awareness Project

• Support for Military families

• Indian Law Resource Center: Ending violence against native women

• National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

When I tell my friends I signed up for an Improv class, they gasp, “Who are you?!”

Me. Same version. Same all-up-in-her-head, doesn’t-suffer-fools, prefers-books-over-parties me. It’s not some face your fears self-help exercise. I haven’t had an epiphany or midlife crisis. I’ve always wanted to let my inner theater kid out. There was a class; I signed up.

Yes, and—

No doubt, there will be a tiny shift in the arrangement of my brain cells, some microscopic addition to the size of my funny bone—a micro-reinvention in a long line of reinventions.

With every shift, in every failure, and every ‘suck-it-up-buttercup’ moment, we change a little bit. Maybe for better, maybe not.

Reinvention is not exclusive to midlife

Whether mother or childless by choice, peri-menopausal, post-menopausal, grandmother—call yourself hag or crone, if you prefer. Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, Boomer, et. al.—women have always been shape shifters.

Since birth, we learn to arrange ourselves to be pleasing and to play by an ever-changing set of cultural and political norms. We navigate a maze of conflicting demands, adapting our persona to suit professional, personal, romantic, domestic, and public lives. And when we throw all the bullshit out with the birth control? We’re reinventing again—big time.

Jane Goodall embodied healthy aging through a combination of continued work, a sense of purpose, and optimism—all of that, sure. And the endless emotional rewiring of our psyches.

Suppose the secret to a long life is continuous learning; I might live to 110.

Without a doubt, my menopause transition was the catalyst for a macro life reinvention—I’d go as far as to call it a metamorphosis. But I have revised myself and been reshaped by circumstance countless times.

Off the top of my head:

1. I started to smoke at age 11 or 12. My best friend Lisa and I sat by an open window in my pink toile-papered bedroom and choked on Marlboro Reds I’d stolen from my brother.

2. My last cigarette was in 2004 at a Dave Matthews Band concert in Fenway Park.

3. I lost my MILF ID card at that same concert, when the young man flirting with my friend asked, “What are you, like, 50?” I was 42.

4. From high school nerd to party girl. In college, I learned to drink and walk the walk of shame.

5. College dropout

6. I have been a wife.

7. Twice.

8. Then I became a distrustful woman who once joked, “How could I say ‘until death do us part’ for the third time and keep a straight face?”

Does reinvention just happen, or do you have to work for it? How clear is the breaking point? Does the moment of change reveal itself to you in an “I can’t take it anymore” screech, or is it a lifelong desire, deferred?

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9. Mother

10. Avon Lady

11. Newspaper Copy Assistant

12. Department Store Secretary

But wait! You say. Mother is an identity, and the others here are jobs, not identities.

Who was that young woman who wore make-up and pushed her one-year-old’s stroller around the townhouse cul-de-sacs, leaving tiny lipsticks at strangers’ doors? Not I.

When I went to work at the newspaper, a small part of me yipped with delight at the sounds of clacking machines and the smell of hot wax (back in the day, my friends!). When I started working at the department store, I discovered nice clothes and credit cards—a lasting change, that one.

It may be “dangerous to define yourself by your job,” but I know that I changed a bit of who I was every day when I went to work. In the last ten years of my business career, the original version of me had all but disappeared.

It’s not titles or rules that make us who we are—it’s what we choose to do.

Let’s keep going.

13. A stay-at-home mom with two babies (at age 25).

14. A single mother, full-time employee, and part-time college student, simultaneously

15. The new wife, with two kids from her previous marriage, referred to in whispered curiosity, ‘trophy or gold-digger?’

16. Unhoused ex-wife. Reinvention by brute force.

I could have started earlier, with childhood triumphs and traumas, and I can add three more decades of revision to the list: Single cat lady, successful career woman. Empty nester. Cougar. Hiker. Mountain biker. Girlfriend. Quitter. Crone. Writer.

Every new version of me has been formed by the life lessons that came before it.

In the same way microscopic tissue tears build muscle, reinvention is how we grow stronger.

My Improv class starts next week, and I’m nervous. I signed up, in part, just for that reason: to find my courage, become a more confident public speaker, a better collaborator, and to shake loose the sticky beast of perfectionism.

I expect I’ll see some benefit, but not before I fall flat on my face and pick myself up once again.

Yes, and—again.

Thanks for reading!

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.

Catherine

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

It’s not a new concept, but I dare say it’s poorly adopted. I’m not talking about morning pages or nightly gratitude journals. I mean, letting a day unfold without judgment—a practice I would love (i.e. desperately need) to adopt.

☘️Is this something you already do? Tell me about it.

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In this week’s essay,1 I considered the battle of midlife’s diminishing timeline v. my desire to do, produce, finish, complete, and learn absolutely everything. Tick-tock. Even half of my list is impossible.

Tallying what’s left to be done is no way to mark time. It adds to the pressure of a hectic life and feels a bit like failure every day.

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Catherine

P.S.

The best thing about writing this newsletter is making a connection with readers. I’m Sally Field when you leave a comment. “You like me! You really like me!” And if we have a little back and forth, I feel like I’ve made a new friend (a real one).

What’s even better is when readers respond to each other, building on ideas, asking questions, and offering support. So…

We grow stronger by lifting other voices, not tearing them down. Hate speech, harassment, and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

Was it July or last week when I said I was taking a break from writing weekly posts so that I could focus on my book? I don’t know.

There’s a joke Felix tells that I can’t remember, but the punchline is this: “What’s time to a hog?” I say it whenever I’m late or when something takes longer than I planned.

What’s time? Indeed.

According to my local weather service, the length of the day today was 11 hours and 46 minutes. Less daylight than dark. Soon, we’ll set the clocks back one hour. It’s my favorite day of the year—the day we all receive the gift of time.

I won’t waste it, even as cozy as an extra hour under the covers sounds. I’ve got shit to do.

This time of year, I feel an urgency to nest, to prepare for winter. The wood is stacked. The gardens given up. I’ll put porch furniture away and rake leaves. Wash summer dust from the windows. Pull on woolly socks. Bake pie.

But also, my calendar is full. The conflict between restorative wintering and my to-do list is a battle for the ages. Moreso, the older I get.

For every year we live, our remaining years become a smaller fraction of our lives. I can’t explain the math (English major), but I feel the truth of this in the back of my throat. So many words piled up, stuck and jumbled, from waiting for me to find my voice and take my writing seriously.

I complain about not having enough time to write incessantly. I say, “I have the time, but something is holding me back.” I whine about my lack of commitment and focus. “If it’s something I really want, I would make it a priority.”

Nothing is holding me back from writing. I put it off because writing is hard, and because I have many marvelous ways to spend my time—and also tick, tick, tick.

There is a line in the movie A River Runs Through It, where the father, played by Tom Skerritt, edits his young son’s essay. “The art of writing is in thrift,” the father says, editing the paper. He edits draft after draft, repeating to the boy, “Once again, half as long.”

The goal is to write a story where every word shines.

So, too, is the story of my life. I want every minute I have to shine, so I fill my schedule. Writing, my supposed priority, often finds itself at the bottom of the list behind community organizing, household chores, workshops, bike rides, naps, and pie.

Before I can write, I must clear the list of to-dos and whine about how I will never finish my book.

A new way to think about time

I found an early post by that broke open a new way to think about time. She writes this about Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library:

“The beauty of letting things play out and being curious about what happens rather than focusing on the things you haven’t done yet and the life you could be leading if only you got your act together.”

Being curious about what happens is how I want to rethink the concept of time, how I will make space for what matters.

Curiosity is the enemy of priorities.

I’ve been anxious about the waning of time and all the things I want to do that remain undone. I wonder what would happen if I followed the beauty of letting things play out instead?

What would happen if I made time for curiosity?

My sweet friend calls herself a “time optimist,” and happens to be the most curious person I know. Her method of keeping time isn’t about the calendar, the clock, or the to-do list. It’s a way to record “what really happened.”

After a car accident left her shaken, Jenny quickly filled her life to the brim, not wanting to have any regrets. Years later, a few words scribbled on a calendar in a remote Alaska cabin changed how she kept track of time.

Saw a badger. Double rainbow. Snow.

Jenny realized “it wasn’t my packed calendar that made me feel alive—it was the moments in between.” Read her beautiful essay, Keeping Time ⬇️

Wild Story

Keeping Time

I call myself a “time optimist.” It’s just a fancy word for “late,” but “time optimist” sounds nicer. I am someone who thinks moving apartments can be done in one Saturday. Who once tried to walk from one side of Boston to the other in two hours. Who, if she’s running five minutes early, will whip out a pan and start making eggs. I can’t help it. It’s j…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · 5 comments · Jenny O'Connell

Tick-tock

I’m turning the page in my planner to October in a few hours. I usually start a new month by re-listing all my unfinished to-dos. If I don’t change my attitude about time and priorities, tomorrow morning, I’ll write in my journal something like, “I once again didn’t spend time working on my book,” and list half a dozen other woulda-coulda-shouldas.

None of my self-recrimination or whining will make time stand still or make time more precious. I wonder, then, what if I tried Jenny’s method instead?

Sunrise coffee. Held a plank for more than a minute. Started a new book. Watched copper leaves shimmer in the breeze. Thanked a friend. Got mad at myself. Apologized.

Thanks for reading!

Work hard. Be Brave. Believe.

Catherine

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

The way Substack writers (mostly, if not all, women) ran Glennon Doyle off the platform was cringe. And now, as writes, it sort of feels like everyone is “pissed off at Elizabeth Gilbert.”1

Would it be paranoid to think that it’s a midlife woman thing? Millennials v. Gen X? You’ve had your time, crone2. Step aside!

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Was it the Karen trope that made us cautious? We know what Taylor Swift thinks of the wine moms, and maybe we’ve reached peak trad wife. Now there are the MAGA women, whose aesthetic Michelle Wolfe best described years ago when she said of then-press secretary, now-Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “She burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye.”

But see? I’m doing it now, too! Support women, unless <__fill in the blank__>

You might be interested in this apology post I wrote after the Blue Origin space flight, starring Katie Perry, Gayle King, and some rich lady.3

What do you think?

Can women support women, no matter what? You can start or join a conversation in the comments.

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Share what you think, feel, or know. Ask questions with kindness and curiosity.

If you’re reading AMID LIFE in your email, open this post in your browser, or use the Substack app for even more opportunities to discover and connect.

The mic🎤 is yours. Remember, we grow stronger by lifting other voices, not tearing them down. Hate speech, harassment, and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Catherine

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

How does social media make you feel?

Are you in, or out, or shaking round-about? Let’s get into it.

Have you made the break? Why or why not? Has your Facebook or Instagram experience changed lately—you know, amid these challenging times? What about Substack Notes? I delete and block what appear to be bots at about twice a week.

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Doomscrolling dependency

I quit smoking in 2004, but quitting META platforms is harder. I mean, Zuck and team did a swell job creating a platform that has no near competitors. Should Congress look into that? (I know, I know..hhaaahaaaaa… cough, sputter.)

Ahem.

I’ve deleted the apps from my phone countless times, but then there’s this one fun event or amazing view that I have to share, and it’s just easier to post from my phone—aaaannnnd, I’m sucked in again.

It’s not my fault! Like cigarettes, social media is addictive by design. And also—maybe I like Instagram videos of talking dogs and sharing my perfect, fabulous life with my Facebook friends (heh).

Tell me. What’s a person amid our terminally online culture to do?

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Reading on email? You can open this post on your browser or in the Substack app.

Why?

The best thing about writing this newsletter is making a connection with readers. t I’m Sally Field when you leave a comment. “You like me! You really like me!” And if we have a little back and forth, I feel like I’ve made a new friend (a real one).

What’s even better is when readers respond to each other, building on ideas, asking questions, and offering support. So…

Share what you think, feel, or know. Ask questions with kindness and curiosity.

Ready? The mic🎤 is yours.

How does social media make you feel?

Leave a comment

We grow stronger by lifting other voices, not tearing them down. Hate speech, harassment, and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

A rotating calendar of posts include personal essays and researched opinions, written by a post-menopausal, post-corporate, serial reinventor (me) and served with snarky, side-eye humor. Plus! 🍁Vermont farmhouse photo-diaries, and 📌lists of things, ideas & beliefs I’m either saving or deleting. 👍🏻👎🏻

Judy Blume made clear there won’t be a sequel. “[T]here are women who grew up with my books who want me to age Margaret. They ask for Margaret in Menopause. I hate to disappoint them, but Margaret is always going to be 12.”

And yet, we clamor.

What if Margaret had grown up? In the way AYTGIMM helped adolescent girls feel “normal,” a sequel could destigmatize the myriad ways adult women feel shame—about our bodies, opinions, desires, and ambition—as we age?

Imagine it with me….

The following essay was first published in September 2024

Margaret attended college and spent a few years in New York City, but moved back to the suburbs after marrying Moose, her childhood crush.

Are you there, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

I never expected to end up in New Jersey again, but I’m in love and want to be where Moose is. I know we can build a happy life here. I hope you can see that I’m doing all the right things.

When Moose’s landscaping business failed during a great recession, Margaret found daycare for their two children and went to work as an administrative assistant. She cooked dinner every night and checked on her aging parents twice a week. She asked Moose to look at the color-coded calendar she’d made for the kid’s after-school activities.  

Are you there, God?

I’m really tired. It would be nice if Moose could shuttle the kids to sports, band practice, and play dates now and then. Do you think you could put in a word for me, God?

On Saturday mornings, Margaret went to Jazzercise class and, when she had time, worked out at home to Jane Fonda videos. “Feel the burn” replaced “we must develop our bust” in her group of friends, though Margaret still wore a lightly padded under-wire bra, especially since breastfeeding her two children.

Laura Danker, the girl who developed early in sixth grade, had a double mastectomy. Gretchen, who now goes by Gretz, wore tight sports bras to flatten their chest, and Nancy recently had her DD implants removed—“a bad choice in my twenties,” she called them.

Breasts don’t have the appeal they once did, God.

Margaret thought about how different get-togethers with friends had become since their sixth-grade secret club, “The Pre-Teen Sensations.” When they were in their 40s, after a few bottles of Chardonnay, they’d renamed it “The Peri-Menopausal Disappointments.”

By the time Moose left Margaret, running off with his physical therapist to start a “.com” company, she’d earned a promotion to management. She still prayed almost every night.

Are you there, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

I feel like I’m letting everyone down—most especially myself. I don’t spend enough time with my parents or my kids. The work keeps piling up. I can’t sleep, and I think I might be drinking too much. I read this quote today, God. It said, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” But what if I don’t know what I might have been, God?”

Margaret and her friends met once a month for brunch. They drank “rose all day” and talked about their kids, partners, and jobs. They did their Kegels, swapped lube recommendations, and shared names of knowledgeable doctors willing to discuss options to relieve their menopausal symptoms.

When she turned 55, Margaret started Hormone Replacement Therapy and stopped talking to God as much. When she decided to quit her job, she had one more thing she wanted to say to him (or her – Margaret wasn’t sure).

Are you there, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Maybe I “might have been” CEO or something, but whatever I am truly meant to become, I know I won’t find what I’m looking for in the office. Happiness doesn’t magically happen because you have perky boobs, a flat stomach, and no grey hair. You have to look for it. Do the work.

I have passion and experience now, God. And I will find whatever it is I am meant to be.

And with that, Margaret thrust her arms wide to the sky and began to chant.

It’s time. It’s time. I’m finally in my prime!

Hi! It’s me, Catherine

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Take action against banned books

Judy Blume’s books, like Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, Forever, Blubber, and Beanie, are consistently among the most banned books, according to the American Library Association—because their themes include menstruation, sexuality, and masturbation. Judy Blume receives thousands and thousands of letters from pre-teens thanking her for helping them understand their bodies, making them feel seen, and less alone.

Book banning attempts (many successful) have reached record levels and more are in the works. Here are resources to protect the freedom to read.

https://pen.org/issue/free-the-books/

https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/activity

https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/

https://authorsguild.org/resource/stop-book-bans-toolkit/

FREE THE BOOKS!

📚

Work hard. Be Brave. Believe.

Catherine

For the next handful of weeks, while I prioritize completing my memoir, I’ll be serving up my favorites from the AMID LIFE archive. I hope you will continue your support with a🩷, a comment, restack, or share.

The following essay was first published in September 2024

In northern Vermont, nature declares her intent to change in late summer. She chills August nights to spur autumn into motion amid the high branches of maple and beech. An innate chemical process follows. Chlorophyll breaks down the green, carotenoids highlight orange and gold, and sugar synthesizes in the leaves before their predictable fall.

For nature, change is continual and—well, natural. For humans? Not so much. We have choices and constraints. We have hopes and dreams. Shit happens.

The day my career reinvention began

At 27, I was married with two small children. While my husband pursued his dream to become a pilot, I didn't question what I needed to do. I used my 90 words-per-minute experience to apply for secretarial jobs with good benefits. Not once did I think to ask, what do I want?

When the hiring manager asked about my goals, I was stumped. Around me, greige carpet-paneled cubicles and metal filing cabinets said security. While deep inside me, my inner voice whispered, Not this! Not this!

Every action you take is like a vote for the person you want to become.

—James Clear, Atomic Habits

I took the job and ignored that inner voice for 28 years.

WHAT do I want?

For three decades, I followed a fruitful, if unintentional, career path, and I'm proud of my accomplishments. I can confidently say I had my share of success as I rose from secretary to senior manager.

Until six years ago, when the whisper became a roar—NOT THIS!

I left my career without a plan for what would come next. I took one step, and then I ran, skipping and sprinting along a squiggly line in a frantic rush to find and fulfill my purpose. Even now, there are days when I find myself spiraling, disoriented and overwhelmed.

Should I focus on the book project or Substack subscriber growth? What about building my editing and writing group business? Do I pitch the Times or go for a long walk in the woods to connect with my muse? I know, I know. It’s ridiculous to whine. Every decision is mine to make.

Maybe I’ve been asking the wrong question.

This brings to mind the ending of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day—a book I finally plucked out of my dusty TBR pile this summer.

The main character, Mr. Stevens, is a British butler (think Downton Abbey), who entered and excelled at the profession like his father before him—following a well-worn path, doing as expected. Mr. Stevens is immensely proud of his career, but as the times change, he’s paused to reflect on the path he diligently followed.

After encountering a man who’s labored hard and is now content to sit and watch the birds in his retirement, Mr. Stevens projects,

He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that.…  All those years I served [his lordship], I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really—one has to ask oneself—what dignity is there in that?

Happiness is a choice.

Joan Didion said the source of self-respect springs from "the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life." At the novel's end, Mr. Stevens realizes something I’d like to believe I’ve always known.

Decide what you want and then make every decision after that to get it. Decide to win.

Maybe I chose a misguided path when I took that admin job in 1990. Absolutely, I made mistakes. But I don’t regret ignoring my inner voice for as long as I did. Once the kids were launched and my nest egg secured, the question could be reframed.

What do I want?

There's a light breeze coming through my office window as I write this. It's warm for mid-September as if the fields of goldenrod were absorbing the sun and the blazing maples were natural radiators.

I’ve decided to live my reinvention dream, to pursue a creative life amid the peaceful and ever-changing Vermont landscape.

It’s never too late to decide. What do YOU want?

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Work hard. Be Brave. Believe.

Catherine

That’s what this newsletter aims to be about: authentic stories by and for reinventing, resilient, and REBELLIOUS women.

I am writing a memoir about my midlife reinvention. After what feels like 1,000 shitty first drafts, my enthusiasm for the narrator (me) and my belief in the writer (also me) has ebbed and flowed. Right now, it’s flowing!

For the next handful of weeks, while I focus on finishing my book (really!), I’ll be serving up my favorites from the AMID LIFE archive—mostly early attempts from the book. I hope you will continue your support with a like or a share, and maybe …

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The following essay was first published in October 2023.

I thought the Life Wizard I interviewed was a bit too woo-woo for me when she said, “You already know your path; you just haven’t seen it yet.” I hired her anyway.

In hindsight, I realized she was right.

Our roadmaps are a grand cartography plotted since birth. Multi-colored pins mark the circumstances into which we are born, the relationships that lift us up or hold us down, moments of inexplicable wonder, and soul-shifting trauma—all dots waiting to be connected.

Like Vermont, in my case. I had no history with the brave little state other than an abiding love for Ben & Jerry. Yet, here I am.

It’s not random. Not luck or serendipity. As mused, “All my choices that led me to the here and now were intentional and I have no regrets.” Paige affirmed what I’d long wanted to believe.

The map may already be drawn for us, but we determine the route and the destination with every choice we make.

You see, I chose Felix, and because of Felix, I found Vermont. Would I have come on my own? No way to know, but I am sure of this. I made my way here, and I chose to stay.

In our early years, Felix and I drove to Vermont nearly every weekend, toting mountain bikes or skis. Still wound up from the workweek and our city commutes, we would thread through traffic just as motivated as we were to get away for a while.

“Masshole!” We cursed the red-plate drivers who cut us off on I-93. “Yankees suck!” we shouted at New Yorkers (as Red Sox fans do) when they clipped by us at speeds more suited to the nearby Nascar track.

Then, just south of Exit 32, the massive granite shoulders of Franconia Notch would appear. The last flat-landers (what we call anyone not from the mountainous regions of Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont) peeled off toward their slopeside-lakeside condos while Felix and I continued northbound—we had the road to ourselves.

We drove a little slower, breathed a lot slower, and turned off the radio news as the road narrowed to two lanes threading through the White Mountain National Forrest. One time, driving into the notch toward Cannon Mountain Ski Resort, where the summit-tram-house light shone bright and steady, I insisted that light was the North Star.

I remember seeing the highway sign welcoming drivers to the Green Mountain State for the first time. I felt a strong sense of déjà vu—no, it was more like a homecoming. A few minutes later, when we passed the exit for Route 2 in St. Johnsbury, I returned to the backseat of my grandfather’s car.

We must have taken Route 2 on drives to visit our cousins. It’s still the main east-west highway between Maine and New York. The hills and valleys were every shade of green and gold and red. Shredded wheat haybales dotted fresh-mown fields.

At six or seven, I would have held Softy, my special pillow, close to my cheek, watching rambling white farmhouses, maple trees, and sugar houses roll by.

Forty years later, I saw it again so clearly. When we turned off the exit, past the black and white cows and the tall yellow Victorian with the red barns and white picket fences, I remember thinking, I want to live here someday

What I wish I’d known

For most of my life, I thought there were “right” paths everyone should follow. I tried several routes along all kinds of roads—steep, rocky, scenic, or paved with fool’s gold. I felt like a failure when everyone else seemed to be enjoying the ride and I was getting motion-sick. I felt like a failure when the road got too rough to continue. I was lost and at a dead-end.

It never occurred to me that I could build my own road.

Maps serve many purposes: celestial, nautical, geographic, weather—treasure! They place us in context with the world. The poet Joy Harjo points out that the oldest known map, the Imago Mundi, describes one region as “the winged bird ends not his flight.” Other spots on the map read “the light is brighter than that of sunset or stars,” and “where a horned bull lives and attacks the newcomer.”

Draw a map of your life with words. Maybe you are a traveler. Maybe you are the destination. Maybe you are a buried treasure.

Take a deep breath and write.

Catherine

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.