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Hello Reader. Let me tell you a story of how I lost it all and I built it back to be even better. |
Almost every woman I know has had a time of total upheaval in her life, a divorce, a breakup, death, kids leaving the house, being laid off…the list goes on.
But what if you could have a profound recalibration before a more aligned second act?
I think you can become substantially more aligned and influential as you age provided you stop abandoning yourself to carry impossible emotional loads or constantly resurrect things that are already dead.
The power comes from synthesis of all that you are, you have:
Lived, lost, rebuilt
Learned, refined yourself, integrated complexity
You become compelling because people can feel the earned depth.
But what if you can take it even a level beyond:
Transformation, radiance, reinvention
Or even…
Longevity, purpose, emotional evolution, beauty connected to meaning.
Because you’re not selling fantasy from the outside. You’re speaking from lived metamorphosis.
After everything with Reve, I understand how often people reach for language that softens these kinds of passages. Reinvention. Pivot. New chapter.
But in real time, it feels closer to erosion or complete hell.
After 3 months of trying to figure it out, I decided to stop trying and sat in a Vermont hotel room. I remembered I was writing a novel called Hysteria about a woman who keeps finding reasons not to die (it was originally about my fibroid surgeries and then crystallized into a story about a startup founder creating a startup around fibroids…that collapses). I remembered living in France with my hot French boyfriend and my writer ex and living on Newbury Street and my travels and food adventures and just living life. I remembered that I am a journalist first.
I remembered who I actually am underneath all the survival.
Perhaps what makes endings so difficult is not the ending itself, but the interval that follows it.
The moment when the familiar is gone but the new has not yet arrived, and there is no clarity, just a nervous system is still adjusting to the absence of what once held it together.
I suspect many of us experience this, especially those who have spent years building, holding, adapting, and carrying.
Ironically, it’s the most capable of us, the high achievers, likely a lot of firstborn children, that carry everyone else while sort of carrying ourselves.
There often comes a point where something begins to surface beneath all of that function and we desire coherence. Or even more than that—we want honesty and the unabated truth. We want to live a life that no longer requires so much self-abandonment in order to sustain it.
When I lost hope because nothing I was doing was working, it forced me to rethink.
What if all of this is wrong! What if nothing is supposed to return. What then?
This is when, not to sound like I “saw the light,” I um…
Saw the light.
Not as a fixed identity, but as a deeper sense of presence. I became less concerned with performance and in proving myself and more anchored in what feels true to me.
As a woman in perimenopause, I have noticed that many of us have lived our lives around external validation. And one day, maybe it is today, we decide we are less willing to build in ways that require disconnection from ourselves.
That’s when there is a growing simplicity in what we are drawn to, even as the outer circumstances remain uncertain.
We are drawn of course to other women going through the same thing—but not the ones who critique us or are afraid to step out of the box. No, we want the ones attempting to climb out of the box, hanging halfway over the box, dropping into the unknown outside of the box.
This is part of why I am creating something new, which I am not yet ready to reveal—not even the name—because this one is so close to the heart. This is the company I could only build after everything in my life was ripped away.
There is a different kind of life that begins to emerge when we stop trying to return to who we were and allow ourselves instead to become who we are becoming.
Sometimes what first feels like falling apart is simply the beginning.
If this intrigues you...
