That’s not a metaphor. I actually broke it.

So I did what any sensible 61-year-old does when she can’t move. I started picking a bone with ChatGPT.

I gave it a prompt and it gave me a prompt response. The answer came back clean and simple and a little devastating, the way truth sometimes is.

Here was the prompt.

Knowing what you know about me, tell me what my true purpose is. Where am I avoiding the hard thing. What would my life look like if I were in integrity with it. Be the mentor I can’t afford to hire. Don’t be polite.

Here’s what it wrote back:

Your purpose is not to run an ecommerce store.

Your purpose is not to create journals.

Your purpose is not to build a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a Pinterest engine, a Shopify funnel, or a beautiful brand.

Those are vehicles.

Your true purpose is to translate pain, wisdom, and lived experience into language that helps women trust themselves again.

Whoop, there it is. The thing I’ve been so unable to name. The work that six decades of life has brought me to.

It also said a few things that would be rude if they weren’t so true.

You may be addicted to potential. You are over-capable, under-focused, and still slightly hiding behind preparation.

Yikes. Guilty as charged.

Tag. You’re it. Run the prompt. Let me know if you get a truth bomb to share.

A Few Gathered Things

Kelly Clarkson shares this hard truth she got from her therapist (and a message we probably all need to hear).

Alicia Keys shares the single most powerful word a people pleaser can speak.

The secret to an extraordinary life might come down to this one morning practice.

What I Underlined This Week

“I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they’re being kind. I didn’t fall — I dove.”

— Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

Warmly,

Renee

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the Civil Rights Era had already begun. It had started in living rooms, in churches, in the quiet daily refusals of people who were done long before the cameras arrived.

Rosa Parks became the name history attached to a movement that was already moving. She did not start it. She just made it impossible to ignore.

That is how it usually works. Eras rarely begin with a declaration. They begin when enough people realize, quietly and separately, that the old rules no longer explain what they are living.

The shift happens first in the body — a persistent wrongness, a low-grade awareness that something has been off for a very long time. The language comes later. And once the language arrives, there is no going back.

This is the language for what’s happening to me.

Where I Come From

I came of age in the 1970s. I longed for a playbook and was given a bible. I went on to be a Fascinating Girl, a Surrendered Wife, and a Praying Mom.

I wanted to be good. Not just good, but loveable. And for a long time, all that was available to me was a patriarchal version of who I should be. That version served an agenda I can no longer support.

I followed the rules. All of them. And I still ended up feeling like a failure at who I was “supposed” to be and a lonely ghost of the woman I was designed to be.

I am done with that now.

What I have come to understand — through decades of lived experience, through reading and reckoning and paying close attention — is that what happened to me was not a personal failure. It was a systemic one.

The rules I followed were not neutral guides toward a good life. They were instructions written by a culture that needed women compliant, legible, useful, and quiet.

The Feminine Integrity Era is the name I’ve come up with to explain what’s happening to me. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably feeling it, too.

It is the era in which women — specifically women who spent their lives inside systems built to spend them — are reversing course.

Not through rage, not through reinvention, not through burning their lives to the ground. But through something quieter and more permanent: the decision to assign authority inward. To be internally referenced. To treat their own knowing as legitimate. To stop pouring their feminine energy into systems that have always used it against them and turn it toward themselves instead.

What Makes an Era

Historically, eras do not begin because someone announces them. They begin when the old rules stop explaining reality. When enough people feel the fracture at the same time. When language finally catches up to lived experience and gives people a shared room to stand in.

Every significant era in human history began through some combination of forces. The Feminine Integrity Era meets every one of them.

1. A Crisis Exposes the Limits of the Old Order

The crisis that marks the beginning of this era is not a single event. It is a slow, grinding accumulation — the “what the actual fuck” moment spread across millions of women’s lives simultaneously.

Women over 60 are the generation that was handed the most complete version of the patriarchal feminine script.

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The rules failed us not because we applied them poorly, but because they were never designed for a woman’s wellbeing. They were designed to keep the system fed. The crisis is the moment a woman realizes that power was a super drug — and she was given the placebo. Her condition worsened. The patriarchy thrived.

The women didn’t design the system. They were handed counterfeit currency — told it was real, told to spend it, told to pass it on to their daughters. And when it turned out to be worthless, they were left holding nothing.

That recognition is happening right now, in living rooms and doctor’s offices and morning journals all over this country. It is quiet. It is enormous.

2. A New Language Emerges

Eras turn on language. The Enlightenment gave people the word reason as an authority that could challenge a king. The Civil Rights Movement gave people the language of dignity and equality as moral demands the law could not ignore. The Women’s Liberation Movement gave women the language to name the private costs of male-centered systems for the first time.

The Feminine Integrity Era has its own language. It is precise by design, because vague language produces vague results.

Feminine Integrity has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with the state of being whole and undivided. It is not a mood or a brand or a self-help aspiration. It is the ability to live rooted in your own voice, values, body, and energy, without being fractured by cultural conditioning, “good girl” programming, or systems built on masculine definitions of success.

Assigning Authority Inward is not “trusting yourself” — a phrase so flattened by overuse it has lost its edges. It is the specific act of relocating authority from the external sources you were trained to defer to — God, men, institutions, experts, family structures, cultural rules — and placing it where it has always belonged: in your own earned wisdom, trusted gut, lived experience, and clear-eyed truth.

Third Act Sovereignty is not retirement. It is not decline. It is the first time in many women’s lives that the conditions for genuine self-authority finally exist — children grown, roles loosened, the performance of acceptable womanhood no longer worth its cost. The Third Act is not the end of something; it’s the awakening of something better.

This language is not aspirational. It is descriptive. It names what is already true for women who are done — even if they did not yet have words for what they were done with.

3. A Group of People Stops Accepting Inherited Authority

This is the heartbeat of the Feminine Integrity Era.

For most of your life, you were trained to place authority outside yourself. In a preacher’s skewed interpretation of scripture. In a husband’s certainty. In a doctor’s confidence. In what the culture decided a woman your age needed: Slimfast. Purity rings. Guilt trips.

You did not do this because you were foolish. You did it because you were trained. The problem was never you. The problem was where you were told to look.

The Feminine Integrity Era begins at the moment you dissolve every inherited belief, ingrained pattern, and energetic tie that was formed in manipulation, distortion, coercion, or fear.

Not because the outside world has suddenly decided to support you, but because you finally have enough evidence — decades of evidence — to have your own back instead of wasting all your energy pulling knives from it.

This is your Dorothy moment — the moment you realize the authority you were told to place outside yourself was inside you all along.

This is not rebellion. Or hysteria. It is wise discernment. And it’s so damn sexy.

4. Writers and Ordinary Women Make It Feel Real

Every era needs people who give it texture — who make it something you can feel, not just understand. The emotional truth of an era often precedes its formal recognition by years.

The Feminine Integrity Era is being made real right now by women who are quietly doing the thing. Creatively writing. Making art. Underexplaining. Buying themselves flowers. Choosing their own company over performing graciousness they do not feel. Saying “I know what I think” and meaning it.

These women are not waiting for permission. They are not asking if it is too late. They already know it is not. They are the era, whether or not anyone has named it until now.

The Intellectual Ancestors

The Feminine Integrity Era does not arrive out of nowhere. It stands on the shoulders of women who have already taken a machete to madness.

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 70s gave women legal rights, public autonomy, and the language to name the private costs of male-centered systems. It changed what women were allowed to do. The Feminine Integrity Era works at a deeper level — it changes who you assign authority of your life to.

The Second-Wave and Third-Wave Feminist Movements built the foundation. Writers like Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, Carol Gilligan, Audre Lorde, and Marion Woodman did the intellectual work of naming the systems.

, author of On Our Best Behavior mapped precisely how the seven deadly sins were weaponized as a control structure against women’s appetite, desire, anger, and self-possession. Martha Beck points us to our own North Star. Harriet Lerner named the anger. Clarissa Pinkola Estés named the instinct.

The Feminine Integrity Era inherits all of this. And it goes one step further: it asks what happens when the woman who did everything right finally stops. What comes after compliance? What do you become when you are no longer organized around other people’s comfort?

There is no nostalgic proof. No original self to point back to. The woman who arrives here is not returning to who she was. She is the woman who realized there was no original map — and decided to draw one. Because if there is nothing to return to, then you have to trust yourself enough to build yourself anew.

This Is Not Reinvention

Let me be clear about what the Feminine Integrity Era is not.

It is not reinvention. The word “reinvention” implies you need to become someone new. You do not. You need to become undivided — to stop fracturing yourself across the demands of a culture that was never designed with your wholeness in mind.

A woman’s peace is not found by being easier to live with.

It is not empowerment. “Empowerment” has been drained of meaning by overuse. It implies power was taken and must be reclaimed. The truth is more precise: authority was never located inside you in the first place. You were trained to look for it elsewhere. This era is not about reclaiming anything. It is about assigning authority inward for the first time.

It is not a midlife crisis. Sheri Salata — founder of a transformational community for women — calls this “the last chunk of life.” That is exactly what it is. Not a crisis. Not a transition.

It is not personal development. Personal development operates from the premise that you are a project to be optimized. The Feminine Integrity Era operates from the premise that you are already whole — and that your work is not to improve yourself but to stop cooperating with a system that survives only if you stay broken.

Why Now

Because the women who are over 60 right now are the first generation to have lived through both the old world and the new one in a single lifetime.

A 35-year-old woman grew up with feminism as a visible, named conversation. She had language for it while it was forming her. She could see the system, even if she was still inside it.

The woman over 60 didn’t have that. We could not read the label from inside the jar. The conditioning happened in an era when it wasn’t called conditioning.

We came of age when the rules were total. We watched them begin to crack. We raised children through the transition. We held jobs, held families, held communities together — often while holding ourselves in check. We survived the full weight of the patriarchal feminine script.

And we are still here.

We are not fading. We are not declining. We are not winding down. We are, for many of us, freer than we have ever been — and angrier, and clearer, and more capable of living on our own terms than at any previous point in our lives.

This is the moment. Not because it was scheduled. Because it is earned.

An Invitation

If you have read this far, you already know whether or not this is you.

You are not a woman who needs to be told she is enough. That is child’s play. And you have worked your ass off performing a role you were clearly overqualified for.

You followed the rules. All of them. And you are still here, with decades of lived experience, a trusted gut, and a clear-eyed truth that does not need anyone’s permission to be real.

Welcome to the Feminine Integrity Era.

The women who find their way here are perhaps the truest version of a “born again” woman.

Not born again into a grand finale of submission.

But born again into themselves.

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Three of my girls and I spent another Easter in Florida. It’s becoming one of my favorite traditions because it combines so many things I love:

• Being outdoors

• Covered dishes

• An eclectic group of people with life stories to tell

And during this gathering of 25 people, here’s what I realized...

Walking is hard on my dad and getting harder.

Caring for my dad is hard on my mom and getting harder.

Me knowing that I will never walk away from an Easter dinner with my partner of 55 years is hard and getting harder.

I’m plenty grateful and sometimes frustrated at myself for not moving past hard things faster.

But I think the flipside is also true:

I don’t rush through the beautiful things either.

When I saw this picture of my folks, I couldn’t help but think of all the situations they’ve weathered or gone through with us 5 kids:

Divorces, infertility, suicide attempts, depression, anxiety, mental illness, car accidents, ambulances, 105 degree fevers, heart attacks, miscarriages, remarriages, broken engagements, too many heartbreaks to number, devastating middle of the night phone calls, burying parents, bankruptcy, robberies, emergency surgeries, custody, courts, adoption, burying siblings....

The thing that struck me is that theirs is a pretty ordinary life.

Let that sink in.

Sometimes I think we really misread the room when we think we’re the only ones who’s lives feel broken or messy.

We should not.

But still, through it all, I can tell you that my parents would not call their story a tragedy.

In fact, they would say the opposite.

They would tell you that “it has been a wonderful life”.

I’m working on being able to say the same.

I’m trying not to let the unlived versions of my life create a wound that won’t heal.

I was in charge of the Greek salad and charcuterie board for Easter.

(I think I nailed them both!)

But my most important role of the day was holding up this guy for our Easter picture.

Warmly,

Not every fire is accidental. Some are set on purpose.

Like the fires burning on the river path where I walk. For weeks, I’d watched the underbrush of the forested trail being cleared away and raked into piles, now ablaze.

Trained workers in orange vests monitored the fires to keep them from spreading uncontrollably.

A “controlled burn” — a fire set on purpose — doesn’t destroy the land. It restores balance and protects it.

Interesting.

I started wondering what a controlled burn might look like in a woman’s life.

When she stops trying to preserve what is overgrown, fallen or dead:

• Old stories.

• Old identities.

• Old beliefs.

Not because the past meant nothing. But because a truer life cannot be built on top of it.

By now, life has given her some bruises. And it’s given her intelligence. Wisdom. Confidence.

She can trust herself to know the difference between a controlled burn and scorched earth. Her discernment is hard-won.

The problem is most of us still want renewal without loss.

We want the truer life without the grief of dismantling the old one.

We want to become more fully ourselves while keeping every structure intact, every relationship undisturbed, and every identity we've assumed close by for sentimental return.

But that is rarely how it works.

The new does not rise neatly beside the old.

What We’ve Been Taught (And Not Taught) About Burning Things Down

We’ve been taught that a woman’s fire — her anger — is not “ladylike,” and that women who let something go without leaving claw marks trying to save it are simply not trying hard enough.

We never learned about sacred rage. The protective kind. The regenerative kind.

Like a lodgepole pine that can only release its seeds when triggered by fire — seeds that will ultimately heal and restore the forest.

Women and seeds. Anger and flames. Both are required.

I write for women who were raised to be good — but are becoming someone better.

Necessary Endings

“A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.” — Glennon Doyle, Untamed

Everything she built, accepted, or grew into was real. Even beloved. A life organized around other people's needs, tended carefully, held together by her. It sheltered everyone she loved — and for a long time, that was enough.

But sometimes old-growth casts deep shade. Nothing tender and new can take root below it.

Knowing a cycle is complete — rather than waiting for it to end on its own — carries its own kind of magic.

Sometimes the burning is prescribed.

End of Accommodation

“Until you cross a line with her and then she burns that shit down.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, The Divine Feminine

A “whole” woman’s natural state is liberated. Wild. Relaxed.

She is not looking for a fight.

But she watches for her line. And she knows when it’s been crossed.

A sacred circle is drawn. A match is lit.

Women don’t usually burn things because they’ve stopped caring.

They burn things because they’ve finally started caring.

When a woman cares more about what’s sacred inside her than keeping peace with what violates it, her natural power returns.

Agency and Discernment

“It is our task to choose what is right for us to make, how hot to make our own fire, and when to throw out our own ashes.” — Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames

A mature woman learns not only that she must burn — but what to burn.

She doesn’t just light the match and walk away. She studies the wind. She knows which areas need fire and which need protection. She manages the heat, tends the edges, stays until it’s done.

She’s not torching her whole life because she is irrational or reckless.

She’s lived long enough to discern between:

• What is living and what is dead

• What is healthy and what is poisoned

• What can be repaired and what has become scrap metal

She is not at the mercy of her own transformation. She is its faithful steward.

What becomes of the ashes?

In nature, they return to the soil — restoring what was depleted, becoming the fertile ground for new growth.

But in a woman’s life, it’s more complicated than that.

The grief. The lost years. The identities she outgrew. The relationships she kept breathing life into long after they flatlined.

Not every experience transforms into something useful.

Some of it will always be scorched earth. And a sovereign woman knows the difference.

At some point, even the ashes must be thrown out.

She is not burning down her life.

She is finally creating the conditions for it to flourish.

Sometimes fire is the only way the living thing survives.

A Few favorite links:

The world doesn’t want women to be angry for a reason. This is the reason.

Whether you’ve left or done the leaving, this anthem’s for you.

Can something be absurd, theatrical, and good for you? Not only can it — it might be exactly what you need.

What I underlined this week:

“When [anger] informs us, it is a drive shaft of compassion and care; when mined for its lessons, metabolized and transmuted, it is the energy that changes the world.”

Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior

Three years ago, I slipped off my wedding band and started sleeping alone in a king-size bed.

After three decades of yanking the covers over my lifeless marriage, I now have the whole bed to myself and a morning routine to die for.

My coffeemaker starts automatically at 7 and by 7:10 I’m back in bed with a fresh cup of coffee and I’ll stay there until 9 or 10 when I hop up for work.

Sometimes I’m writing. Sometimes I’m reading or meditating. But always I’m content — until that pesky little voice starts turning up the gas to see if I’ll toss a match.

You might call her your inner critic. I call her Marcia, after my ex-mother-in-law, since they both agree I’m the problem.

“Oh, hey there. Alone again? When are you going to stop pretending you want this? Why do you keep acting like you’re choosing this? Why would anyone choose this? Nobody wants this.”

Unfortunately she’s not the only one who’s questioning me.

Inquiring minds want to know…

If it isn’t the first question out of people’s mouths, it’s always the second:

Are you seeing anyone? Have you started dating yet? Do you think you’ll ever get married again?

Clearly I have no choice but to doubt my own reality. I mean, is it even possible to feel content when I’m no longer chasing the cultural requirement to be “chosen”?

And there’s the rub, right?

For self-aware women, the greatest barrier to a better future isn’t a lack of vision — it’s the terror of going off script, even when we’re no longer right for the part.

We want a better story about our lives, but won’t betray ourselves to write one.

• We’re too committed to truth to practice internal perjury.

• Too emotionally intelligent for toxic positivity

• Too familiar with manipulation to risk self-deception.

You aren’t questioning your past; you are questioning your present. You want sovereignty, but you need it come with coherence.

Am I settling for the Zonk Prize?

When I was in 7th grade I discovered the game show “Let’s Make a Deal” where a bouncy contestant is offered a choice: Keep what’s behind Door #1, or trade it for whatever’s behind Door #2.

Sometimes the trade turns out brilliant. And sometimes you get the Zonk — the humiliating “prize.”

I’m convinced this is where my ruminating got its start.

Is this what I did? Did I make the wrong deal? Did I trade in the marriage, health insurance and security behind Door Number 1 for the coffee in bed Zonk deal behind Door Number 2?

And just like that, I’m second guessing my reality and misremembering events. I’m lost in a tug of war between trusting my real contentment and believing the bitchy voice inside me who’s arguing it’s all some kind of trick.

It’s no wonder I crave quiet mornings in bed.

“This is what it means to rest in silence. Because this is when all those voices, those ideas and stories we wrestle with inside us, the ones that keep us up at night and lead us to believe we aren’t worthy of love, or of anything good—This is when the whole clamorous riot goes mute. This is when we understand what freedom is. The silence that returns us to love.”

Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed

Why This Happens: Your Internal Authority Structure Has a Glitch

How can you be this emotionally intelligent and still get bullied by the “Marcia” in your head? Because your internal authority structure has been trained to prioritize safety over peace..

Here’s 3 reasons your analytical mind keeps pulling you back into the tug-of-war:

1. You Were Trained to Provide a Bulletproof Deposition

High-functioning women are often the ones holding the families, the businesses, and the complicated schedules together. You’ve learned that to be taken seriously, your decisions must be defensible.

• The Trap: You can’t just choose coffee in bed; without being able to explain why it’s a worthy choice to anyone who asks (even when that person is you). Since you can’t quantify the value of solitude factually, your mind treats your contentment as a consolation rather than the hard-won reality it actually is.

2. You Are Mistaking Vigilance for Wisdom

Vigilance is a function of the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system. It’s our biological factory setting—we are born wired to scan for threats in order to survive.

• The Trap: Your mind thinks that if it stops questioning, it’s being naive — which sounds insulting and the exact opposite of the woman you’re becoming. It assumes that inner peace isn’t a reliable safety signal. It second-guesses every thought, convinced that if you stop analyzing for even a second, you’ll be blindsided by a mistake you should have seen coming.

3. Your Body Knows the Verdict, but Your Mind Won’t Rest Its Case

Your body registers truth while your mind is still building its argument. Relief after leaving a difficult relationship. Calm in a quieter life. Wholeness after years of living fractured. Pleasure in your own company.

• The Trap: Your body has already reached a verdict, but your mind is still collecting evidence. As Einstein put it, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” The analytical mind that built the loop cannot be the same tool that breaks you out of it.

The Surprisingly Simple Antidote to Gaslighting Yourself

In 1817, philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined a phrase to describe what happens when we temporarily set aside logic to enjoy a story.

He called it The Willing Suspension of Disbelief — a willed, conscious choice he described as “poetic faith.”

He was talking about poetry.

I’m talking about a practice that can change your life.

For decades, you’ve been trapped in a cycle of doubt — analyzing everything and mentally overriding your own joy.

Suspension of disbelief breaks the stalemate by offering something more helpful: a temporary commitment to a new belief instead of more wrestling with unanswerable questions.

It’s a conscious decision to let your body participate in truth-testing.

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Here’s What Changes When You’re Willing Suspend Disbelief:

You learn to live intelligently with uncertainty.

You stop waiting for absolute proof before allowing yourself to trust your own experience. Instead, you gather evidence through living. You make decisions. You take actions. You discover through embodiment what analysis could never prove. This is liberation.

You exit the analysis loop faster.

The old pattern—analyzing, doubting, analyzing more, doubting harder—doesn’t own you anymore. When you notice the loop starting, you have a tool. You pause. You name what’s happening. You choose suspension instead of continuation. You move forward with a plan.

You replace self-doubt with self-trust.

Your mind stops being the only voice in the room. Your body gets a vote. Your intuition counts. Your gut wisdom matters. When these multiple forms of knowing agree, you become more aligned and able to trust what you feel to be true.

You strengthen personal agency.

You stop waiting for the right answer to arrive from outside yourself. You realize: there is no external authority who will tell you what’s true for your life. There never was. You begin to experience the freedom that comes when you stop doing what you’re “supposed to do” and have the audacity to want what you actually want.

You respect your lived experience.

Your body’s signals matter. Your gut intuition matters. Your peace matters. The quiet joy you feel in your own company is evidence. The relief when you stop performing is evidence. The coherence you feel when you make a decision from your whole self—not just your intellect—is the most reliable evidence you have.

3 Reasons Why It Works:

• It Lowers the Stakes: You aren’t “reprogramming” yourself or signing up for surgery; you’re merely presenting a reasonable possibility.

• It’s Intellectually Honest: You aren’t “tricking” yourself because you are admitting you’re doing it. You’re saying, “I know I have this old conditioning, but I’m choosing to see what happens if I ignore it for a moment.”

• It Supports Integration: When you stop forcing yourself to choose between logic and intuition, something unexpected happens: You start to feel whole.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Your 4-Step Practice to Get Clear on What’s True

STEP 1 — Name the looping thought.

What is the question your mind is trying to settle?

____________________________________________________

(Example: “I’m trying to figure out if I’m actually happy alone or if I’m trying to talk myself into it.”)

STEP 2 — Acknowledge the limit of analysis.

Ask yourself honestly: Is there any amount of thinking that will resolve this? If you’ve been circling this thought for days, weeks, or years — the answer is probably no.

Your mind has done everything it can. This is not a failure of intelligence. It’s the limit of analysis.

☐ Yes (write it): ______________________________________
☐ No

STEP 3 — Suspend. Reframe. Neutralize.

First, instead of debating an unanswerable question, offer your mind a new possibility to consider.

I am willing to consider the possibility that _________________.

(Example: “I am willing to consider the possibility that I’m telling the truth about the life I want right now.”)

Next, take the drama out of your statement by neutralizing it with two true, grounding statements. Then add your possibility as a third.

“The coffee is warm. The house is quiet. And I am willing to consider the possibility that I’m telling the truth about the life I want right now.”

“It’s raining outside. There are birds at the feeder. And I am willing to consider the possibility that my childhood religion isn’t a match for my spiritual growth anymore.”

STEP 4 — Ask the only question that matters.

Take your focus off your thoughts. Ask yourself instead:

What is the feeling I’m experiencing right now?

Is it in line with who I’m becoming?

When you become less obsessed with dissecting your thoughts you can be more obsessed with who you’re becoming.

I’d love to hear from you!

How would you finish this sentence:

I'm willing to consider the possibility that…….

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🎧 Prefer to listen?

When we were home for Thanksgiving, my mom handed my daughter an old suitcase full of slides and a modern-day View Master so she could actually see them.

She came across this one of me and my best friend Lori who lived across the street.

We were a year apart in school, but inseparable at home.

I spent most of our time at her house because we could smoke rolled-up toilet paper cigarettes in the bathroom while her mom was at work.

I slept over almost every weekend. We’d lie in bed pressing Andy Gibb album covers up to our lips and obsessing over how it would feel to run our mood-ring-bedazzled-fingers over his hairy chest.

I love this picture.

I love how I’m trying a new trick and she’s holding out her arms to me.

“You can do this. You’re doing it! I’ll catch you if you fall. ”

And me—skating on one leg—trusting and believing her. But more importantly, trusting and believing in me.

On Saturday mornings, we stayed in bed listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 on her Panasonic Toot-a-Loop radio.

Here’s what gets me. That ten-year-old is gloriously unbothered about what anyone thinks.

• She hasn’t been trained by untrained people on how to be good.

• She isn’t self-editing to keep the peace.

• She isn’t dumbing herself down to charm a man.

She was smart. And she was proud of it.

The thing is, I want to know who I was before culture clipped my wings. I want to know the true identity hiding under the false one I’ve been living tethered to.

I want to know what it’s like to truly be her. To truly be me.

So I’m spending this year intentionally undoing decades of cultural conditioning and surrendering to the unvarnished version of the woman I want to become:

Liberated, full of herself and gloriously unbothered.

And I’m going to do it in real time.

With you—if you want to.

🧠 A few gathered things

• I don’t love AI, but every now and then, it turns out something worth saving.

• I love this encouragement for anyone woman who needs a reminder that you are more than what went dark.

• Here’s what I’ve decided I want to be when I grow up.

📖 What I underlined

People will love you. People will hate you. And none of it will have anything to do with you.

–Abraham-Hicks

❓ A reminder for you:

You’ve been conditioned into believing that staying quiet and small is the only acceptable way to live.

Don’t believe it. You’re not cringe or annoying. You’re fucking magic.

Amie McNee, Author & Artist

Warmly,

Renee

I had a hard conversation with one of my girls over the holidays.

She went home 5 days ago and we haven’t spoken since.

It’s weird for me not to reach out to her. Until now, I always have.

I’m a social worker, Enneagram 4, INFJ—call it what you will— but relationships are my jam and I’m a junkie for improving them.

But I just can’t fix this.

I knew what we were arguing about (how she was going to get a new phone) was not the thing we were really arguing about (her choosing “team dad” after he and I divorced).

I know why she’s still holding a grudge against me and even though she’s said she’s forgiven me, her actions say otherwise. And I just can’t chase her down anymore because here’s the thing:

I’ve finally forgiven me.

On December 23, right when I was about to hammer out my New Year’s resolutions, I got an email from Jason Feifer’s and he said he was giving the new year a “theme” and said,

”You should theme your year, too.”

So I did. My theme for 2026 is:

Forgive yourself. For all of it.

Nothing I’ve done deserves a life sentence and if we’re really being honest with each other, I’ve served my time.

“You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years.

Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There

Nadia Weber Boltz preaches that we should “Forgive Assholes” so I decided to start by forgiving the asshole in my head. That bully of a voice that keeps telling me I haven’t suffered long enough to prove I’ve changed.

The voice that wants me to confuse living with guilt for living with integrity. And tells me that if I feel bad enough for long enough, eventually I’ll feel good.

(✋ Anyone else ever feel that way?)

Maybe you’re like me and you’ve kept yourself pinned to the mat for a mistake you made years ago.

If so, here’s what I know for sure:

You’ve done enough time. Walk around the bars you raised and choose freedom for yourself. Here’s how:

✅Tell the truth to yourself.

✅Name what happened.

✅Name who it hurt.

✅Be real about your regret

✅Forgive yourself.

I have never been a terrible person. At 60, I get to say that. I have a truckload of receipts to prove how good I’ve been.

But good isn’t the goal of my life anymore.

Freedom is.

🧠 A few gathered thoughts

Taken me years to learn what Liz Gilbert elaborates so beautifully here.

It’s a little humbling that this young man understands the kind of relationship I have with my adult daughters in 2026. I want to be a lighthouse, not a rescue boat.

📖 What I underlined

❓ A question for you

Do you deserve to be free of something from your past that you can’t change? How would it feel to decide your contract with self-punishment was over?

Warmly,

Newly dating and suddenly aware of the “masculine/feminine” thing, I was ready for anything that might unravel the mystery and teach me what “feminine” truly meant—and how to be good at it.

I grew up in the Methodist church smack dab in the middle of purity and diet culture—graduating with the slim-fasting, diet-pill-popping class of 1983.

The lessons I got about how a woman should behave went something like this:

• Never intimidate a man with your intelligence.

• Never be smarter than one.

• Never give up on one.

• Never lift anything heavy in front of one.

• And for (literally) god’s sake, never have sex with one until you’re married.

But here I am at 60 watching our sweet earth burn, our culture turn to shit and fear and hatred reign supreme.

And I won’t cooperate with that narrative any more.

So here’s what I’m doing. I’m going to work on feminine integrity. (I think I made that up) Not in the moral sense, but in the unbroken sense:

I’m moving into 2026 exploring the liberation that comes when highly capable women reclaim their time and choices and rely on their hard-won wisdom and confidence to live life entirely on my own terms.

Perhaps by bring my own life into balance, I can leave behind a legacy of wholeness instead of brokenness. For myself. For our daughters. For society. For mother earth.

I hope some of you will join me.

📖 What I underlined this week

❓ A question for you

What is the distance between the soul you are, the soul you want to be and how you’re actually landing in other people’s lives?

Warmly,

“I can’t enjoy my life when people are suffering.”

I wrote that in my journal this morning.

There are so many things that steal my joy.

Sometimes, it’s guilt.
Usually, it’s fear.

When things are really good, I pull in the reins by imagining disaster or catastrophizing what could happen.

Brené Brown calls this "foreboding joy."

That reflex to armor up.

To beat pain to the punch.

We think this protects us, but it doesn't.

Intellectually, we know being happy doesn’t trigger disaster. But emotionally, it feels like a safer bet.

So, how do you become a better steward of joy?

I’m not Jewish, but there’s this idea in the Talmud that’s been helping me reframe my capacity for receiving joy:

One day, we’ll be called to account for every good thing we were offered—
and refused to enjoy.

I don’t know if that’s how things will go.
But I do know this:

Joy may not feel safe.
But refusing to experience it won’t protect me from pain.

Maybe the real danger of joy isn’t feeling it but missing it altogether.

Of all the tragedies I can work up in my mind, that might be the worst of them.

🌿Gentle Nudge:

Watch for—or create—a moment of joy today. Then receive it with a grateful heart.

The first time I ever wrote about being unhappy in my marriage, I’d been in it for 18 days.

And yet I held onto it for 32 years.

I did the same thing with my candy apple red Dodge caravan. Rust started eating away at it, but I drove it another 4 years until the bottom literally fell out.

Let’s not get started on the pair of hermit crabs I got when I was 12 and kept them until their exoskeletons hung like noodles out of their shells.

Closure has never been my strong suit.

I’ve been a white-knuckle gripping kind of gal.

But in this gentle era of my life, I want to practice letting go faster and do it with less guilt and more grace.

🌿 Finding a Better Way to End Things

Linda Carroll Curtis calls it Honorable Closure.

It’s a framework for ending things — relationships, roles, identities — with intention and integrity.

Not with drama.
Not with avoidance.
Not with silence masquerading as strength.

It’s about leaving clean.
It’s about looking backward without fixating.
It’s about moving forward by unhitching your emotional U-Haul.

🌿 What Makes Closure Honorable

Honorable closure means:

• Telling the old story in a new way.
  Instead of recycling pain or pretending you’re “fine,” you give voice to the truth of what happened — and then be on the lookout for what’s working now. This helps you honor the lessons without staying stuck in the hurt.

• Resolving your regrets.
  It’s not about shame or endless self-blame. It’s about courageously owning your part, seeing where you could have shown up differently, and turning those insights into growth.

• Letting go and letting it be.
  Notice what you're still holding onto—resentments, expectations, or grudges. Remember that forgiveness isn't about the other person; it's more badass than that.

• Being intentional about how you end things instead of ghosting, avoiding, or letting resentment fester.

Linda emphasizes that people often stay too long in the wrong situation (a job, a relationship, a project) because they don’t know how to leave well — or they fear the unknown.

Honorable closure provides a framework for moving on in a way that’s emotionally clean, not messy or ambiguous.

🌿Creating Your Honorable Closure Statement

She encourages writing a “closure statement” — not always shared with others — that:

• Names your reasons with honesty
  (This is why I’m choosing to step away…)

• Acknowledges your part and growth
  (Here’s what I’ve learned, how I’ve changed…)

• Offers gratitude where possible
  (I’m thankful for what this gave me, even if it was painful.)

• Releases resentment or emotional clutter
  (I choose to let go of blame, even if I’m not ready to forgive.)

💡Why This matters:

• It clears emotional residue and stops the recycling of guilt, blame, or regret.

• It respects the past without staying tethered to it.

• It models emotional integrity and maturity, especially for those of us committed to growth.

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Gentle Nudge

Closure takes practice. Most of us weren’t taught how to leave well — only how to try harder.

Linda’s work gives us a map out of the trying trap.

Maybe you’re stuck in a job you hate.
Or a friendship you’ve quietly outgrown.
Or a marriage where your spouse has never truly known what keeps you up at night…

This could be your cue for closure.

To leave — not with rage or regret…
But with reverence.
Not in pieces…
But on purpose.

✍️ Honorable Closure Statement

1. What I'm Leaving: "I am choosing to step away from _______." Name the relationship/role/situation clearly and without judgment.

2. Why I'm Leaving: "I've grown to understand that this is no longer aligned with who I am becoming." Add a simple explanation — be honest but not blaming. This isn't about fault—it's about fit.

3. What I'm Taking with Me: "I'm grateful for _______." List some moments, lessons, or insights. I'm choosing to honor what was good — the growth, the learning, and the unexpected gifts I didn't see at the time but now carry with me.

4. What I'm Leaving Behind: "I release both myself and others from carrying _______." Name what you're setting down—resentments, expectations, old stories. Not because the regret, the "what ifs" don't matter, but because I want to be free.

5. My Intention Moving Forward: "I move forward with _______." Clarity, integrity, and openness. I trust that this ending is making space for something new and necessary.

Often all we need is enough light for the next step:

• The clarity to name what we're leaving

• The courage to say why

• The wisdom to collect what matters

• The freedom to release what doesn't

🕯️ What are you still holding onto… that you might finally be ready to give an honorable closure to?

You’ve done everything “right.” You’ve stayed loyal, worked hard, kept the peace, held the relationships, and showed up — even when it cost you.

You were trained how to stay, serve and submit.

But you were never taught how to leave well.

I turned 60 this week and want to live the next 25 years with more joy and agency AND do it in a way that’s gentle and kind to myself.

When it comes to pushing, pulling, and holding — I’ve spent decades building those muscles.

But my “letting go” muscle? Oof. That one's going to need some strength training.

Here are 3 exercises I’m practicing to get fit for my next 25 years.

1. Start Loud Quitting

Lisa Congdon explains “loud quitting” as the intentional decision to quit something assertively and in a clear way.

She went on a systematic mission to examine and quit everything in her life that felt:

• Finished or draining.

• One-sided or obligatory.

• Without purpose or joy.

Lisa shares:

“I cannot tell you the level of joy and excitement I felt once I realized that I could change my own life.

I was lit on fire because for so many years, I had no sense of agency and all the sudden I was like, wait, I can do whatever I want.

I can create the life I want. And so, I just started to do that.”

Author Jen Hatmaker recently shared on her podcast that she’s loud quitting Codependent Parenting of Adult Children.

After pouring everything into her kids, she realized:

“This is not my life. Once you're in the young adult zone, you're going to have to just care about your life the most.”

As a high-functioning codependent, this hit hard.👊🏻

I have four daughters and for years, mothering has been my full-time gig — But it’s not healthy any longer to care about my adult daughter’s lives more than they do.

The baton was always meant to be passed.

It’s their turn to run with it now.

2. Know When to Fold-Em

Sheri Salata, author of The Beautiful No, describes a pattern among many of us with traditional upbringings have absorbed—staying in friendships, jobs, or relationships far beyond their natural conclusion, all in the name of being "nice."

Sheri Salata calls it what it is: “Stay-too-long-itis”, the belief that being nice mattered more than being well. So, she stayed too long in friendships, jobs, and roles that no longer fit.

“We were taught that being nice was more important than creating our own beautiful lives.”

I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. Holding surface-level relationships together out of habit. “Performing” connection instead of feeling it.

But staying too long costs something — years of your life, pieces of your soul.

Sheri invites us to “Love people deeply but hold relationships lightly. Not every person is meant to walk you home.”

We don’t need to carry the hand we’ve been dealt for the rest of our lives. Choose what to discard and draw fresh from the pile.

✨ Learn more about Sheri’s free community HERE

3. Our Season of Holy Decisions

In a Facebook post, author Jen Hatmaker offered a gentle, but firm reframe:
Midlife is not a crisis — it’s a renaissance marked by holy decisions.

Her invitation? To choose what stays on your calendar, in your hands and in your heart.

“You can step confidently into what’s next if you are no longer carrying what you aren’t meant to carry.”

🎥 Watch Jen’s short video reflection here »

You get to decide:

• What do I keep?

• What do I let go of?

• What's worth fighting for?

• What deserves to fall away?

🌿Closing Gentle Nudges

You don’t need permission to release what’s no longer yours to hold.
But in case you do — here it is:

Let go. Loudly if you must. Quietly if you prefer. But bravely, always.

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about “loud quitting” — just hit reply!

It was the first thing my sister-in-law said after my oldest daughter came out during her junior year of college.

It was almost the last straw.

The last straw came weeks later, in the second row of our trendy mega-church.

I watched as the preacher seemed to look my daughter straight in the eye to land his point:

“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that marriage is anything but a union between a man and a woman.” — Senior Pastor of Christ Community Church

The sermon was supposed to be about marriage. I knew that going in.

• I thought it was about being a good partner—being patient, loving and kind.

• I thought it was a sermon for all sinners, not just the targeted ones.

• I thought I was doing the “Christian” thing by bringing her there.

• I thought the message being preached was: Whoever you love, love them well.

But I thought wrong. This wasn't a sermon about love at all.

It was a deliberate assault on the LGBTQ community and a fatal blow to the faith that had raised me.

I knew how uncomfortable she was the moment we’d sat down. I watched sideways as her eyes pooled with tears and then spilled down her face.

And I felt my heart crack before turning to stone as my firstborn - the daughter who’d spent the day before scrubbing profanity off playground slides -stood up and ran out of church.

Her dad ran after her. I ran after them both.

We stood for a long time in the parking lot holding each other and here’s all I remember:

The way I kept repeating, "I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know," and the judgmental silence of 657 congregants who stayed in their seats.

Love was not patient. Love was not kind.

And I was done.

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The Unraveling

Growing up, faith wasn't just a Sunday morning ritual—it was the fabric of our life.

Our avocado green VW van wore its badge of belonging—a white and blue Dove of Peace license plate that signaled exclusive membership in the Christian Club.

When you passed another on the road, you'd point your finger to the sky—a secret handshake reminding each other that Heaven's gate was narrow and there was only ‘One Way’ to pass through it.

Back then, I believed the Bible was the most reliable narrator on how to be a good human—and more importantly, what it meant to be a 'good girl' in this world.

I needed a playbook, and the bible was handed to me.

I memorized scripture like coordinates on a map, certain if I followed the directions precisely, I'd reach that promised land of milk and honey.

But pretty early on, I discovered a confusing mismatch between the woman I was and the 'good girl' I was expected to be.

The message grew louder with each passing year: You are here to be pleasing to God and man.

You are not here to be self-expressed or self-determined.

WTF?

Yes, that training was from an actual text book I was handed—the rules I tried to follow for the first five decades of my life.

But watching those same teachings wound my daughter— those were fighting words at a time when I was ready to rumble.

This wasn't just about me anymore. The faith I had inherited wanted me to forget about myself, but it was asking my daughter not to exist at all.

Standing in that church parking lot that day, I knew it was time to create a Sanctuary of my own.

Finding a New Path

My exodus from traditional church wasn't the end of faith—it was me being 'born again' into a deeper, lovelier version of one.

I looked for voices who understood the complexity of modern-day life and offered gritty wisdom I could relate to.

Sarah Bessey's ‘Field Notes for the Wilderness’ offered grace for that grit. But it was Kate Bowler's words on the back cover—'This is for all who need to be reintroduced to a spirituality full of grace, mercy and love'—that sold me on her book.

Here was someone who understood that faith could be confusing AND unmistakably gentle.

In the midst of my spiritual landslide, Bessey tossed me a lifeline:

Next came Rainn Wilson's 'Soul Boom' which helped me reimagine what ‘sacred’ could mean.

He reinforced what I intuitively knew to be true: that simple moments and honest conversations were also holy.

His ideas about transforming the world from the inside out was the Kool-Aid my parched soul had waited to be passed.

These words echoed my growing sense that transforming chaos into peace might require abandoning religion and reforming my faith.

Ryan Holiday's ‘The Daily Stoic’ became my modern-day Upper Room by offering an updated daily spiritual practice—one focused on living well rather than living by the books.

His teachings from the Stoics about serenity, self-knowledge, and resilience, felt like a new and improved form of prayer.

Creating a Sanctuary of My Own

Years before my daughter came out, when my marriage was falling apart, I started writing 'gentle nudges' to myself. They were short notes and dripping with compassion, the way I’d talk to a friend.

When my faith began to unravel, I stitched it back together with this practice. What had once helped me rebuild from a crumbling marriage now became my tool for creating a new kind of sanctuary—not within church walls, but within my own heart.

I leaned into wisdom from poets, mystics, philosophers, and spiritual thinkers instead of labeling them some kind of anti-Christ.

Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist, captured what I was feeling when he wrote about being willing to risk disapproval by 'daring more courageously to lead a life with different values and priorities than the ones you had been taught.'

In short, I gave up being a good Christian in order to be a better human.

If there is a God, I trust they know my heart.

But if this decision means I’m going to hell, then I can't think of a better reason to.💜

I won’t ignore the evidence of good any longer.

I won’t hold a magnifying glass to my mistakes until they smoke like dry leaves on hot summer days.

I’ve worked my ass off to be a good person.

How did someone like me—so full of compassion, love, empathy, and concern—turn into a bad person?

I didn't. And I'm not.

I am a good person, but not a perfect one.

So I refuse to let decades of following the map to the high road be dismissed over the handful of times I got lost.

Sometimes, every right turn you take leaves you with only one turn left—the one that both saves you and makes you die a little inside.

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The Truth About Being Human

So, here’s what I’ve decided: INTENT MATTERS

I've decided good people can do bad things for careful reasons and remain good people.

I'm granting myself leniency for the things I did trying to hold my family together, even when those actions caused harm.

Like cracking someone's ribs while performing CPR—I meant well, but something still wound up broken.

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s ever felt like this. In a music video that’s been viewed over 61 million times, singer Sara Bareilles sings about my kind of woman:

Life should be measured in context and nuance.

The war that rages between "right" and surviving often leaves us struggling to reconcile the person we are with the person we were groomed to be.

But perhaps that's the point—each difficult choice, each regretful moment of putting survival over perfection, shapes us into someone new.

Which leads me to this…

I've decided I am more than the sum of my mistakes, and without them, I would be so much less.

Now when I look for evidence of good, I find it.

In 2017, my daughter and I joined a quarter million people for the Women’s March on Chicago. We were fired up, outraged and ready to go.

Eight years later, I sat on my couch and did nothing.

It’s not because I cared less - in fact, I cared more.

We had a literal promised land on the ballot: A land of hope and possibility. Glory days. America the Beautiful. Spacious skies.

And we had the promise of a wasteland: A land of vitriol, perpetrators, felons and filth.

America chose the wasteland.

I was (and still am) in utter disbelief about how wrong I was about the version of the American dream I thought we all shared.

So, the question I'm trying to answer—and maybe you are too—is: How do we move forward when we feel politically powerless, doomed, disgusted and frozen in place?

I'm figuring it out as I go, but here are three steps I'm taking today.

Step 1: Call It What It Is—Languishing

They say you can “name it to tame it. If that’s true, Corey Keyes author of Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down, helped me give language to this indifference I’ve been feeling.

He calls languishing a “wakeup call” and a form of burnout. (OK, I’m woke and burnt.)

In the podcast How to Move from Languishing to Flourishing, Keyes describes how having very little discretion over how things happen can lead to burnout.

If “locus of control” is feeling like you have control over the events that impact your life, languishing is what happens when you don’t.

also talked about this in his New York Times essay: There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing.

Even if you're not depressed or burned out, you might be languishing—feeling a sense of emptiness and stagnation.

Cool. We're languishing. Now that we know what to call it, we can stop being confused or overwhelmed by it.

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Step 2: Allow Yourself a Grace Period

The Washington Post just published an opinion piece by author Anne Lamott titled, “The Resistance Will Not Be Rushed.” In it, she admits she’s not sure what her role in the resistance will be but that “now is a time of quiet”. I feel that in my bones.

Along with half of America, I have been feeling doomed, exhausted and quiet. A few of us, approximately 75 million people, see the future as a desert of harshness. The new land looks inhospitable.

Lamott insists that we’ll begin to notice things growing in the desert, but until then, her marching orders are simple: left foot, right foot, breathe.

agrees. In her exquisite book, “On Our Best Behavior: The seven deadly sins and the price women pay to be good”, Loehnen urges women to give themselves grace as they forge a new way forward:

It will take rested souls to do the brutal work of dismantling and rebuilding. But remember…this work has been done before.

We are standing on the shoulders of the maids and cooks who walked endless miles during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.

For 13 months, they stayed off the buses and stood their ground. Their resistance was nonviolent, time-consuming, grueling AND effective.

Soon, I believe we’ll be called to “stay off the buses”, too. Our streets will look different, but our mission will not.

Now is the time for replenishing, wintering and shooting down deep roots to prepare for the season to come.

Step 3: Balance Scaling Back and Leaning In

Kelly Cervantes, who writes took the words right out of my mouth in her recent piece, “WTF”.

Turns out I’m not the only one still walking around wondering what the F%&$ just happened.

Cervantes outlines her post-election “workout” so well that I’m just going to borrow it:

✔ Make life just a bit simpler in this immediate aftermath
✔ Stay informed (but with boundaries)
✔ Choose where to focus your energy

This work is too important to be haphazard about. Your job right now isn't to solve everything that’s being demanded of you. It's to:

• Acknowledge what you're feeling

• Give yourself grace

• Come back into balance

• Stay ready

The work of dismantling and rebuilding will take rested souls. And you, my friend, must be rested when the marching orders come.

But in the meantime, left foot, right foot, breathe.

Damn. That was a year ago and I’ve been thinking about her question ever since.

As women in midlife, many of us carry our regrets like a backpack full of bricks—heavy, burdensome, and full of self-loathing at the ones we added ourselves.

Learn to love them? That feels like too much to ask.

But maybe we can pose a gentler question: Can we accept that mistakes and regrets are part of an ordinary life?

Poet Marie Rania Wilke answered the question a century ago:

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Here are 3 tender lessons on how to let go and learn to live with the things you can’t take back.

Lesson #1: Claim Them as Yours

Cheryl Strayed, author of "Wild," speaks about being in your 50s with a kind of reverence that only comes from deep acceptance. Her most profound lesson? Claiming all of it.

Its saying how wild it is to let all of the things that are true about my life, the pretty things and the ugly things, the hard things and the easy things, how to let them all be true and claim them as mine.” — Cheryl Strayed

Lesson #2: Stare It Down

Katherine May, in her transformative book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times reminds us that sometimes retreat is necessary for repair. She introduces us to the concept of "wintering"—those dark phases when life asks us to pause and heal.

“It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience, and to commit to healing them the best we can.”

Life isn’t always up and to the right. Sometimes you have to sit in the valley with your backpack of regret until you’re strong enough to start climbing again - and do the best you can.

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Lesson 3: Stop Cringing and Pursue Compassion

Sarah Jakes Roberts, who became a mother at 14, offers perhaps the most powerful insight: You can't punish yourself and heal at the same time. She shares:

For me, I had to sit with myself until I no longer cringed. I had to sit with myself until I no longer felt shame. I had to sit with myself until I could experience compassion where I once felt guilt.

And from that place of compassion, I learned to love who I am. This is my story.

Roberts, author of Power Moves, believes it’s not too late to become the version of yourself you still hope to be.

Deeper Exploration

If you want to hear more of these conversations, here ya’ go!

Listen Now:

🎙️My So-Called Midlife: Embracing Your Crone Age with Cheryl Strayed

🎙️Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen: Wintering With Our Feelings

🎙️Mel Robbins: How to Create a New Version of Yourself

🌟 Rilke wrote in "Letters to a Young Poet," we must "learn to love the questions themselves”. Perhaps Naomi Judd's question isn't meant to be answered but rather lived.

I’ll be 60 this year and I had to look it up online to be sure that’s still midlife. Good news, Wikipedia says I’ve got another five years.

It’s hard to know where to begin and I’m all angsty about being perfect, but I’m taking a leap and trusting the net will appear.

It’s January 2025 and here’s my starter goal:

I want to spend this year becoming my favorite version of myself and I want to do it with other women who want the same.

Why? Because the "try hard" version of me is exhausted. (And let's face it, if trying hard was going to work, it would have by now.)

For a whole year, I’m going to share what I’m living, loving and learning about becoming a gentler woman who bends towards femininity, but without all the toxic cultural baggage attached to it. That’s the version sounds divine.

Three Commitments to a Gentler Life

1. Being intentionally more loving to myself.

Last year I slipped the ice and broke my wrist.

While avoiding surgery, I had to wear a brace for 6 weeks. My immediate response? A very masculine "Carry On Warrior" attitude. Carry heavy boxes? No problem. Lift my suitcase into the overhead? I got this.

About a week after the fall, I found myself barking orders at my broken body to get dressed for the gym. It was the dead of winter—I was cold, exhausted, and mentally drained. As I gathered my gym clothes, I felt my whole body shutting down. Seconds before pushing myself out the door, a soft thought emerged: Renee, your body is literally broken.

I don't know what was driving me that day, only that it wasn't loving or kind. This year, I'm not going to rush through my own care. I'm choosing to practice loving kindness towards myself instead.

2. Being Committed to My Enduring Wellbeing

As an empath and highly sensitive person, codependency and lack of boundaries are my spirit animals. I'm wired to prioritize harmony in relationships over harmony with myself.

Being committed to my wellbeing means learning what delights me and doing more of it. It means trying things I haven't tried before:

• Getting a massage

• Going back to therapy

• Trying restorative yoga

• Experimenting with sound healing

I've just ordered Terri Cole's new book Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency to help keep me on track.

3. Becoming an Energetic Match for the Life I Say I Want

I'm new to energy work—this isn't something they teach you when you grow up Methodist. The first step I took in becoming an energetic match for the life I say I want was to get really clear on what that life looks like.

Tara Mohr, expert on women's leadership and author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up offers a powerful meditation called the Inner Mentor Visualization that helps you meet your future self. If you've got 20 minutes, it's worth exploring. (Pro Tip: If you have trouble sitting still and quieting your mind/body, start around minute 9)

Inner Mentor Visualization.

This year is about waking up every morning and mentally rehearsing the life I want to live, then finding small ways to start living that life now.

And if you don't know exactly what life you want? That's okay—just stretch in the general direction. You may not be able to put a pin in the map, but let this be a year of letting your internal compass guide the way.

🎉I’m a New Year’s junkie, but you will never find me at a party because:

a) I’m a raging introvert

b) I’m way too busy dotting the i's on my list of resolutions

This year is no different except that I’ll be 60 in April and after six decades of trying really hard at life, I’ve decided to usher in what I’m calling my “Gentle Era”.

What exactly is a Gentle Era?

Right now, it’s a definition in progress. I’m going to let it evolve over time and discussions this year - hopefully with you.

I know it’s about feeling good in my body, seeing the humanity in people and accepting life’s complexities as a woman in the middle of them. It involves moving through the year gently, with subtle shifts of practicing what feels right for me instead of constantly pushing myself for dramatic overhauls.

In other words, transformation is so 2024.

Unlike years past, instead of furiously scribbling formal resolutions, I’m borrowing powerful mantras from 3 wise women who delivered their own version of gold, frankincense, and myrrh this year.

Sheri Salata, Mel Robbins and Kelly Corrigan are reliable guides for those of us clawing our way through midlife. (If I had an advisory board, they’d be on it. If they had a therapy couch, I’d be on it.)

Here’s what I’ll be saying on repeat this year…

1: Maybe

Sheri Salata, author of The Beautiful No leads a weekday morning meditation where she introduced the revolutionary practice of softening our resistance to life with the practice of saying “maybe”.

It’s become my new favorite thing. As far as I’m concerned, it should be added to the short list of polite things to say: Please. Thank you. Maybe.

Think about all the rigid language you use with yourself:

I’ll never try online dating.

I can’t change careers now.

I won’t ever be able to afford that.

Ick. I’m done with crusty layers.

Saying “maybe” is a very different energy than the rigidity that’s peppered with I can’t, I won’t and I’ll never. It’s a gentle softening to possibilities. It turns black and white absolutes into multicolored options. If you say it with a shrug, it works even better. Pepper it with a hint of doubt and it works great on your kids.

🎙️The Practiced Life Podcast with Sheri Salata

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2: Let them

A moment at her son's prom sparked author Mel Robbins realization about the power of two short words: “let them”. Instead of managing everyone else's reactions and choices, Robbins offers a simpler way:

In essence, stop wasting your life on things and people you can’t control. Her new book, The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About, pairs brilliantly with my Gentle Era. Let them is my anti-battle cry for 2025. You do you, sweet pea. I’ll do me.

🎙️The Mel Robbins Podcast

3. Tell Me More

Kelly Corrigan has often been hailed as the Poet Laureate of the Ordinary, but that’s a lie. She’s the extraordinary author of the book, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say. In it, Corrigan talks about the profound power of learning to say, “Tell me more” a way to have better relationships with the ones we love.

It’s the opposite of manhandling relationships. It’s metaphorically sitting on your hands when you desperately want to lend one. It’s showing up with less command and more compassion.

“Tell me more” is a way to make people feel seen and safe when telling their stories. In my Gentle Era, I’m trying to ask better questions instead of constantly doling out answers, which means practicing saying these things more:

Go on.

What else?

Is that all?

🎙️Kelly Corrigan Wonders

So there you have it. Three Gems for a Gentler Era:

Maybe. Let them. Tell me more.

Simple words that create subtle shifts. Nothing fancy or dramatic - just small adjustments that might make life feel a teensy bit better.

I'll be exploring what it means to live in my Gentle Era all year, and I'd love to hear what resonates with you.

Which of these phrases might find its way into your own conversations?

Rule 1: Own Your Decision

Having “personal agency” is about realizing you have the power to make changes and take control of what happens next.

After two decades of trying to save my marriage, I finally made the decision to give up on the dream but stay for the kids. Exercising my personal agency helped me see myself as a woman capable of making well thought out decisions for herself instead of being a victim.

Rule 2: Manage Your Expectations.

When I got married, I expected to be with a partner who was equally yoked to success of our relationship, and it took many years to realize I was not.

In her book Expectation Hangover, Christine Hassler writes “we suffer when our reality does not match the expectations we are so attached to”. Instead of focusing on the unattainable, you should shift your mindset: Forget the goal line and focus on your soul line.

Releasing the picture-perfect image of your marriage allows space for something more genuine. It’s not about chasing perfection—it’s about giving your kids a stable, loving environment and showing up for yourself, even when life feels shitty.

Rule 3: Make Peace with Your Regrets

You can never go back and rewrite the past. Never.

Author Cheryl Strayed knows this better than anyone. In her book Tiny Beautiful Things, she offers the most gut-wrenching advice about what to do with the life we didn’t choose:

I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

So salute. Bless and release. Carry on.

Rule 4: Strengthen Your Walls.

Walls in a good marriage are bad. Walls in a bad marriage are good.

When I decided to stay married for the kids, I had to protect my heart to preserve it. If you can’t afford therapy, read a book, listen to a podcast, or create a kickass playlist You need to figure out a way to become slightly more bulletproof.

Realize the rules of engagement have changed and building walls of protection is required.

Rule 5: Shorten Your Horizon

Waking up every morning to the idea that this is all there is will not serve you.

Instead of obsessing over the untrue (and unhelpful) thought that “this is all my life will ever be”, I constantly reminded myself, “this is just my now.” Author George MacDonald had the same idea when he wrote:

“No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow’s burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.”

I stopped handing the microphone to my anxieties about all of tomorrow’s burdens. You should too. Today’s burdens are enough for now.

Rule 6: Reignite Your Passion

Trying to save a lifeless marriage was all consuming for a while, but once I declared it DOA, I needed to find a way to come back to life.

I’ve always been passionate about words and self-expression, so I started to stoke those fires. (Shameless self-promotion here: My first passion project was designing this deck of Moving On Encouragement Cards. It’s for women whose relationship has ended. Breathing life into this project breathed life back into me. To rephrase Howard Thurman’s great quote:

Rule 7: Be a Chooser, Not a Beggar

I spent years begging my spouse for a better marriage (and feeling pathetic most of the time.) Until I became a chooser.

Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl wrote about the profound power of being a chooser in his bestselling book Man’s Search for Meaning:

The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.

I had no control over whether my spouse would give or withhold affection. Be faithful or on the prowl. Be supportive of my needs or dismissive. This was NOT the future I would have chosen for myself, but I had to make a choice every morning.

Staying in a bad marriage for the kids is hard. Leaving a bad marriage when there are kids is hard.

Every day I woke up and chose my hard.

Rule 8: Know When to Leave

For as many times as I thought about not staying in the marriage for the kids, the benefits had outweighed the costs for 30+ years.

Even though my kids were witnessing an unhealthy version of marriage, but they weren’t being harmed or abused so I couldn’t justify leaving my marriage because I was (rightfully) unhappy.

But that all changed one night in February when I woke up to find my spouse sitting on my bed and I felt the hair raise up on my neck and I knew my soul was in the kind of danger I couldn’t repair.

I filed for divorce the next day.

I keep a pack of Virginia Slims hidden in a drawer at work. I bought them 12 years ago after a long day with the kids and a spat with the spouse.

I remember walking into the Shell Station asking for the menthol lights and damn near died when the cashier said, "That'll be $6.28". The last time I bought a pack of cigarettes, they cost a buck.
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I drove to my office which is just outside of town and sat on the concrete stoop with a cigarette in one hand a long neck Bud in the other, taking long drags from both.

It was a stolen moment from a life I loved and daily chose, but one that cost me something in return, too.

These are challenging times of uncertainty and change. But I refuse to give up hope.

It's my act of peaceful rebellion to chose beauty right now.

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