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These are the Heroines of this world.

Midlife archetypes, drawn from private conversations, course breakthroughs, quiet rebellions, and the raw, radiant second acts I’ve watched happen again and again. They’re not aspirational clichés or polished ideals. They’re flawed, fierce, funny, and figuring it out.

From now on, they’ll live in the margins of these essays. You’ll find them in the image at the top of every post, sometimes in the background of another’s story. A recurring cast. You’ll start to recognise them. That’s the point.

You can read more about each of them below.

Now here’s where most people would ask you: which one are you?

I’m not going to ask you that. Because it’s the wrong question, and answering it would make you smaller.

You are not one of these women. You’re several of them, right now, because you are not living one story. You’re living all of them at once. A different journey for your work, your body, your marriage, the thing you’re grieving, the thing you’re building. Each one its own arc. Each one at its own chapter. Each one with a different heroine walking beside it.

Let me show you what I mean, using mine.

This month, I’m at the Call to Adventure — and I’m refusing it.
We’re losing our home in The Bahamas. Well, we have chosen to sell it, so it’s not losing so much as passing on, but it’s tough. I know the chapter I’m in because I teach it. As of July 15th (closing day), it’s time to cross the threshold, take the journeys of discovery, go and find what replaces a place that can’t be replaced. And I am standing very still at that door, grieving, overwhelmed, not opening it. That’s Faye walking this one with me. The Shadow Whisperer doesn’t rush you across. She stands at the closed door and lets it be closed for as long as you need it closed.

At the same time, I’m Gaining Allies.
The Story Room Magazine and Salon is a different journey entirely, and it has a completely different energy and a totally different companion. Here I’m building. I’m creating a room full of writers, thinkers and creatives. I’m gathering y allies as so many heroines do before their big adventures. That’s Mara, the Mapmaker, vision board curling, checklist ticked, already half-booked. A different heroine, because a different journey.

And underneath both, I’m on the Road of Trials.
My fiction has gone quiet. All this traveling means no time, and no rhythm, and if I’m honest, the desire has cooled too. The practice is right there and I keep not returning to it. That’s Lark: the dance shoes still in the box, the notebook open to a hidden first page. The Road of Trials isn’t dramatic. Sometimes it’s just the thing you love, waiting for you until you are ready to return.

Three heroines. One woman. One ordinary June morning.

That’s what they’re for. They’re not a quiz, a box, or a type you get assigned and have to live up to. The Heroines are a language. They’re a way to name where you’re standing on each of your journeys when you didn’t have the words. A way to locate yourself without shrinking yourself to one small thing. And they represent company - because someone has stood at every one of these doors before you, flawed and figuring it out, and they’ve kept going. Just like you will.

So when you see one of them at the top of an essay from now on, read her as a signpost. This is the territory we’re in today. The closed door. The curling map. The unworn shoes. She’s telling you which chapter the piece is about, and asking, gently, whether you’re standing in that chapter too, on one of your own journeys.

JOURNAL PROMPT:

Don’t pick a heroine. Pick three journeys that genuinely live in your life right now (a project, a relationship, a body, a grief, a thing you’re building). For each one, ask:

1. What chapter am I in? (Call to Adventure? Gaining Allies? The Road of Trials?)

2. Which heroine is walking it with me?

3. What can I learn from having that Heroine beside me as company.

That’s the writing.

Their stories aren’t finished. Neither is yours.

So who’s walking with you this week?

Mara - The Successful but Unfulfilled

“She has the life she always wanted. Why does it feel so empty?”

Mara did it all right. Great job, retired early, good pensions, and a beautiful home. But as she and her husband walk the beach at sunset, her eyes drift toward the horizon with a sense of ache. Is this it? There’s a fire in her that hasn’t burned out, some call it restlessness, but Mara knows it’s the beginning of something.

Signature Feeling: Lost but longing

Learn more about Mara here.

Cleo - The People Pleaser

“The caregiver who’s ready to take care of herself, for the first time ever.”

Cleo’s entire life has been an act of loving performance. Birthday cakes, doctor’s appointments, late-night emotional triage. She’s loved every minute with her three kids and handled it all with grace. But now? The silence in her empty house echoes with a question: What do I want? She’s still cooking dinner for a husband who barely looks up from his iPad. Her aging parents call her for help or information three times a day. And Cleo? She’s standing in the kitchen, holding a spatula like a sword, daring to dream of freedom.

Signature Feeling: Bone-deep exhaustion

Learn more about Cleo here.

Juno – The Multi-Passionate Oracle

“The creative fairy learning to believe she’s not ‘too much.’”

Juno is a burst of glitter and post-it notes. She has a laptop filled with half-written books, business ideas, and sudden obsessions. She’s always had a million things she wanted to do. But since her Mom died, the world’s gone foggy. Her sparkle feels dimmed. She’s searching for a through-line, something to anchor all the magic. What if she stopped trying to choose and instead embraced being multi-everything?

Signature Feeling: Scattered with sparks

Learn more about Juno here.

Tess – The Invisible Achiever

“What happens when the overachiever finally runs out of assignments?”

Tess built her identity on competence. Her calendar was always full, her inbox always at zero. But when the job was snatched away from her, unexpectedly and without ceremony, so did the scaffolding of her self-worth. Now, she sits in her home office staring at the empty inbox she didn’t clear. She’s unsure whether to polish her resume again or enjoy a mini-nervous breakdown. Beneath the tailored exterior? A woman desperate to feel seen, not just for her output, but for her soul.

Signature Feeling: Accomplished but unseen

Learn more about Tess here.

Rox – The Strong One

“She’s done being strong for everyone else. Now it’s her turn.”

Rox has always been the rock. The dependable one. All her friends know that Rox fixes things. It was Rox who held her siblings up while letting her own dreams slip through the cracks. She was strong for her husband, too, but now he wants something softer. Divorce didn’t break her, but it cracked something open. She’s suddenly not the wife, not the cheerleader, not the wall everyone leans on. And that terrifying, thrilling freedom? It’s a blank page.

Signature Feeling: Restless and righteous

Learn more about Rox here.

Faye – The Wounded Wise Woman

“She knows what others need. Now she’s learning to ask for what she needs, too.”

Faye feels things deeply, too deeply, she’s been told. Her empathy is a superpower and a wound. She’s the one friends call for soulful advice, but her own truth lies buried under years of emotional caretaking and silent suffering. Her traumas (both little “t” and big “T”) are uncovered and unconfronted. Now, she’s unraveling in private. She’s anxious, exhausted, and desperate for a healing that goes deeper than affirmations.

Signature Feeling: Quiet ache

Learn more about Faye here.

Nico – The Identity Shifter

“She’s worn a thousand masks. Now, she’s choosing her own face.”

Nico is a master of becoming what others need. The cool girlfriend. The adaptable coworker. The “easy” daughter. She’s been loved for her flexibility and admired for her independence. She’s been hailed as “low maintenance.” Now, facing life alone, she’s left with a question she’s never dared to answer: Who am I, really? With no one to perform for, Nico finally hears the silence beneath the shapeshifting. And she’s starting to wonder… maybe it’s not emptiness, perhaps it’s possibility.

Signature Feeling: Reinventing or running?

Learn more about Nico here.

Lark – The Wildhearted Late Bloomer

“The rule-follower who’s finally ready to color outside the lines.”

Lark played by the rules. She sacrificed her own creative dreams because she believed she had to. Now, with her kids out of the house and her role as mother in limbo, she stares at the life she chose, wondering, “What if I had chosen differently?” The rules are still there, but for the first time, she’s considering breaking them.

Signature Feeling: Radiant fear

Learn more about Lark here.

Join The Society

Paid subscribers get invited to the quarterly Story Room Salon — 90 minutes with the featured writers, plus the women in this room (you included). It’s the kind of conversation you’ll still be thinking about three days later. Plus access to all recordings.

Submit your fiction or essays to the Magazine for paid publication (top selections include a shared interview with me about your work).

Plus: Midlife Elsewhere (weekly dispatch, thinking still wet on the page) and downloadable Quests to do the work on paper.

$9.95/month · $90/year

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Harry: There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.

Sally: Which one am I?

Harry: You’re the worst kind. You’re high maintenance, but you think you’re low maintenance.

And thus began the introduction of a poison word into the lexicon. I don’t blame Nora Ephron. And no one in their right mind would ever blame When Harry Met Sally (it was the staple romantic film of my youth), because that movie came out in 1989, and the use of the word “high-maintenance” in this film is not the insult it has become. Although I guess the film will have to assume some of the blame. The Atlantic has written about how that movie helped cement the “high-maintenance woman” as a reductive cultural type. But, in my view, in the film, Harry’s use of the word is actually his unconscious profession of love for the frustrating but irresistible woman in front of him. He’s pretending he’s irritated, but he loves the way she orders and asks for everything “on the side.” He loves that she is her own person and that she asks for exactly what she wants.

Sadly, within only a few years, the word “high-maintenance” was hijacked from a Gen X classic and has emerged as a very heavily gendered slam for any woman who actually has the nerve to ask for anything. And I’m not talking about “calories on the side” kind of requests, I’m talking about basic, human entitlements that women are supposed to tuck away so as not to inconvenience anyone.

Has that word been tossed at you? It’s been tossed at me, and I think it is particularly damaging for Gen X women (which we will examine later, and it’s not pretty). I find it the most infuriating, hurtful, and cruel word that anyone could use to describe me. It happened to me last week, and this time, as the poison was spoken into the heated air of the conversation, I swallowed it whole, and it came very close to blowing up the entirety of my future plans. The poison has lingered, and I’ve spent the last week trying to understand how a single (okay, it’s two, but can we count it as one) word can cause so much damage.

What the word actually does

The first thing I’ve come up with is that it converts a woman’s genuine, baseline needs (the bar is so low I could trip over it) into a character defect. That’s the trick. A need walks in the door, and a defect walks out. Talk about sleight of hand.

Look at the asymmetry that has built up around this word. A man with exacting standards is particular. He is disciplined. He is serious. He is a perfectionist. He is hard to please, which, in a woman, is a sin, but in a man, sounds like a credential. He is demanding, but brilliant. He is a man who knows what he wants. He is high performance.

A woman with exacting standards is high maintenance. She is needy. She is difficult. She is spoiled. She is dramatic. She is princessy. She is a lot. She is too much.

Same behavior. Different moral story.

And the dramatic irony is that the women on the receiving end of the second list are often the ones doing the maintenance for the men on the first list. Women maintain men constantly. We were trained to do it (emotionally, logistically, socially, sexually) and yet men experience women’s parallel need for support as excessive. Tossing out the word High maintenance is the social weapon used to shame women for needing the same emotional care they are expected to provide without acknowledgment. That is a reversal of debt. It takes the woman who has been doing the unpaid emotional labor for years, and recasts her as the expensive one.

The phrase is not descriptive. It’s prescriptive. In the years since Harry used it affectionately toward a woman he adored, it has been morphed into an insult that produces a specific kind of woman. She’s the one who needs almost nothing, who carries the emotional weight, who soothes the edges of the anger, who apologizes to keep the peace, who absorbs the silence, who would rather suffer in private than risk the label. The word builds her. And then someone uses the word to punish her if she ever steps out of what that word built in the first place.

Why Gen X women in particular

For Gen X women, that label hit a generation raised under a particular emotional regime.

• Don’t make a fuss.

• Be independent.

• Figure it out yourself.

• Don’t be needy.

• Don’t expect anyone to arrange the world around you.

Most Gen X women were raised to pride ourselves on being low-maintenance. We wanted to be the cool girl or the capable daughter. Gen X’s branding of female competence came wrapped in anti-neediness. I don’t need much. I can handle anything. It was a brand identity before we even knew what building a brand identity meant.

Gen X grew up during rising divorce rates, more mothers working outside the home, and far less supervised childhoods. The “latchkey kid” archetype gets overused, but it points to something real: children, including girls, were expected to manage more on their own. I mean, come on, we were babysitting infants at age 10!

Then we came of age inside the postfeminist “you can have it all” culture, which added a nastier double bind. We were expected to be ambitious but not aggressive, attractive but not vain, independent but not cold, sexually available but not needy, and successful but not inconvenient. Research on gender stereotyping continues to confirm what we already know: women are penalized the moment they violate the expected combination of warmth, agreeableness, and role conformity.

So high maintenance became a very efficient form of social control. It said:

• Don’t ask for too much, or you’ll lose your desirability.

• Don’t be particular, or you’ll become a joke.

• Don’t require care, or you’ll hear that word.

And the trap of our own Gen X making is that we who succeeded at being the opposite of high maintenance (the ones who trained themselves into requiring nothing but the prize of a man) become the most needed and the least met. This is us in midlife...we have proven, day after day, through decades of evidence, that we require nothing. So nothing is offered. And when, after years or decades of carrying the load in silence, we finally ask for what we need, even softly, even reasonably, that word comes back out. High maintenance. The word is the failsafe. It resets our right to reasonable expectations to... zero.

I have struggled with why being called high maintenance feels like failure. And I’ve figured out that, for Gen X women, it doesn’t just mean you are asking for too much.

It means you have failed at being easy.

And for Gen X women, that hits a deep wire. Because many of us were trained, directly or indirectly, that being easy was part of being good.

Easy daughter. Easy girlfriend. Easy wife. Easy employee. Easy mother. Easy guest. Easy traveler. Easy patient. Easy customer. Easy woman.

Low maintenance became a kind of virtue costume. You could wear it and feel strong, cool, resilient, independent, even superior. I’m not like those women. I don’t need much. I can handle anything. But the bargain was brutal. Because underneath low maintenance, what is happening is this...

“I will shrink the evidence of my needs so no one can accuse me of being a burden.”

So when someone calls you high maintenance, it doesn’t merely insult your behavior. It threatens an identity you may have spent your whole adult life building.

• I am capable.

• I am reasonable.

• I am not spoiled.

• I am not needy.

• I am not one of those women.

• I am easy to love.

• I am worth keeping around.

That is why it can feel like failure. The word isn’t reaching for your behavior. It’s reaching for the version of yourself you built to be successful as a woman who was reared in the 80s.

Accurately maintained

So what’s the move, then? The reclamation isn’t to make yourself more difficult. The reclamation is to notice what the word is actually protecting, an arrangement. When someone reaches for high maintenance in the moment a woman asks for something, they are really saying: please go back to needing nothing, because needing nothing is what makes this work for me. The word is a request to restore service.

And it’s worth noting: the culture has given men a ready-made insult for women’s needs, but it has not given women an equally acceptable language for men’s emotional dependence. What do we call a man who requires constant soothing, admiration, patience, explanation, reassurance, domestic support, social planning, and emotional interpretation?

Usually?

We call him father, boss, brother, husband.

The better aim here is to become accurately maintained. That means you know what you require. You can distinguish preference from need. You don’t outsource your regulation to everyone else. You also don’t pretend you’re a houseplant that survives on indirect light and the occasional compliment.

The deepest part of this, for me, is the recognition that the exact word being used to shut me down is the exact word that built this version of me that is getting shut down.

Which brings me back to Sally.

The reason I can’t bring myself to fully blame Ephron is that the film, in its closing minutes, does something extraordinary. Harry runs through the snow to find Sally and lists, out loud, every particular thing about her that he had spent the whole film calling annoying.

• I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out.

• I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich.

• I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts.

But watch that list closely. It is a love letter to a woman’s traits. It’s a recognition of her individuality, her quirks, and fastidiousness. In 1989, “high maintenance” just meant fussy, and Ephron made a list of the fussiness and called it lovable. Case closed. It’s a romantic comedy, for God’s sake, not a social treatise.

But maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess if Ephron had made that list of Sally’s needs instead of quirks. I love that you needed reassurance after that fight. I love that you asked me to come home earlier than I wanted to. I love that you shared with me what you couldn’t carry anymore.

That speech doesn’t exist. Not in When Harry Met Sally, or in the romantic comedies that followed.

Because the definition of “high maintenance” kept shifting after Ephron put down her pen. It went from meaning fussy to meaning your needs are too much.

Maybe the opposite of high maintenance was never low maintenance. Maybe the opposite was self-abandonment.

And maybe the women who were raised to be easy are finally old enough, tired enough, and honest enough to ask the better question: who benefits from me needing so little?

JOURNAL PROMPT

Make your own list. Easy ___. Easy ___. Easy ___. Write it until you run out. Then circle the role you’ve been performing the longest, and ask her one question: what do you actually need that you have never asked for out loud?

Write for The Story Room Salon & Magazine (paid/compensated).

The Story Room Magazine publishes fiction and personal essays by midlife women writing from inside a life in transition. The salon is where we interrogate these ideas together. Every writer who submits gets a seat at the August 16 Salon. Prize winners and featured writers are invited to speak.

Paid subscribers submit through June 1. All subscribers through June 30.

Submit to Issue One →

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Somewhere around forty-three, the stories about midlife that you have gathered so far (maybe from the embarrassed whispers between your mother and her circle, or the older friends who pat you on the head and tell you how much you have to look forward to, or perhaps even right here on Substack) stop matching the life you’re actually inside.

According to the majority of these sources, midlife would be a single thing. A crisis, maybe (your Mum). A wake-up (your older friend). A reinvention (All hail, Substack). You were told that no matter what form this midlife thing took, there would be a Before You and an After You, and the trick was just to survive (never thrive) while you crossed the doorway between them.

But now you find that you are not standing in a doorway. You’re standing in your kitchen at six in the morning, staring at the chilling coffee you forgot to drink, and inside you, somewhere just behind the sternum, several different lives are calling at once.

There’s the career you parked when the second baby came. There’s the body that has begun renegotiating its own terms without consulting you (hello, freaking back fat that jiggles). There’s the novel you started then stuffed in your desk drawer with pages in all the wrong order. There’s the marriage that needs a different conversation than the same old one about the finances you’ve been having for a decade. And perhaps there’s that faint, persistent question about God that you’ve been politely steering around since 1994.

You thought you’d have it all together by now. You thought you’d be ready to step off into your Call to Adventure, slay the dragons, and bring home the elixir (the new and improved you!). But the truth is, you feel fragmented. Scattered. Behind. It’s like everyone else got handed one tidy journey and is steadily marching through it, while you’re the only one with five tabs open in your chest.

You are not behind. You have been handed the wrong map.

The standard midlife map lies

You’ve been handed the single-arc midlife reinvention map. And it lies.

The cultural story of midlife presents you with one journey to travel. The arc starts with a crisis, you get a wake-up call, you go through one miraculous reinvention, and at the end, there’s an After. One Heroine, one journey, one threshold, one return.

You’ll find this arc presented to you in all the workbooks with the big author names and the watercolour covers. You’ll find it on the podcasts. You might even find it in your therapist’s office.

This is the story arc that Joseph Campbell drew, and the arc every novel borrows. It’s the arc your nervous system actually recognizes when it sees it on the page.

The arc is valuable and informative. It’s just the wrong scale.

The Hero’s Journey arc describes a single story. What it can’t do is describe the reality of midlife, which is a season in which you are struggling to manage several stories all happening at once.

So, what happens when you sit down at six in the morning with the cold coffee, or pick up your watercolour workbook, or queue up the podcast, and try to lay your life over the single-arc map… it doesn’t work.

This will probably make you feel like crap. It might make you feel like you’ve lost control of your life, and you’re terrible at getting your shit together. That workbook and the sweet, soothing voice of the “midlife expert” will make you feel scattered. And if you mention to anyone that it might not be working for you, they’ll tell you that your reinvention is failing because you haven’t yet committed to your transformation.

You are not scattered. The workbook, the podcaster, and half the Substacks you read only have room for one big, magical, impossible reinvention story.

That’s impossible because...

Midlife is not one journey. It is the season when several of them go live at the same time.

They show up everywhere, like in your work, your body, your relationships, the creative things you’ve been carrying for thirty years, the question of who you actually are when you are not performing your assigned roles to perfection. There’s no neat way to combine all these journeys, and frankly, trying to organize them into tidy areas-of-life categories misses the point. Categorization is not where the work lives. The work lives in the identification and evaluation of the journeys themselves.

Every journey you’re on, the marriage one, the career one, the body one, the unwritten book one, runs on the same story structure. The same arc. The same shape that every great novel borrows, and your nervous system recognizes before your brain does.

I’ve taught this story structure for years as the seven chapters of the Heroine’s Adventure:

• Recognize Yourself as a Heroine

• Encountering a Pivotal Shift

• Embarking on an Adventure

• Tests, Allies & Enemies

• Facing Challenges

• Undergoing a Personal Transformation

• Returning with the Elixir

Each journey you’re carrying right now is sitting, probably unexamined, in one of those chapters, while you’re standing in the kitchen with the cold coffee.

Your career journey might be at Chapter 2 (Encountering a Pivotal Shift). The call has come, you’ve heard it, and you’ve been pretending you didn’t for eighteen months. Your marriage might be at Chapter 3 (Embarking on an Adventure). The conversation you’ve been avoiding for a decade is finally on the kitchen table, and there is no walking it back. Your body journey might be at Chapter 7 (Returning with the Elixir). You’ve already done the work, the dragons have been slain three times a week, and you are coming home to a different woman than the one who left.

You are not on one journey at one chapter.

You are on several journeys at several different chapters. All at the same time.

Why the single map fails

The single-arc midlife story can only describe one chapter at a time. So when you sit down with it, the map gives you one read: where you are. And if that one read happens to be Encountering a Pivotal Shift, the map tells you you’re in crisis. If it’s Facing Challenges, the map tells you to despair. If it’s Embarking on an Adventure, the map tells you to be brave.

But your life isn’t one read. It’s a half-dozen reads at once. Stuck in one place. Bravely crossing in another. Despairing in a third. Returning home in a fourth.

Once you can see this, the fragmentation stops being a symptom of failure and becomes a symptom of running multiple overlapping stories across multiple overlapping chapters. Aliveness on more than one channel at once.

My own map, by stage

Let me give you an example from my own life. Today, sitting in my living room in The Bahamas, looking out over the ocean:

My Heroine’s Adventure publication (The Story Room Magazine) is at Chapter 3: Embarking on an Adventure. I’ve just stepped out on the path where you learn what the work is actually going to demand of you, and meet the people who’ll walk some of it with you.

My three as-yet-unpublished contemporary novels are at Chapter 3: Tests, Allies & Enemies. There are people out there who believe in them (I believe in them). But unlike when I was deeply involved in and enjoying the indie-publishing track for my first four novels, I have some tests before me.

My historical novel set in Scotland in 1698 is in a sub-chapter of Chapter 2: Encountering a Pivotal Shift. I’ve heard the call, and I’ve refused it. I’ve parked it.

My weight training is in Chapter 7: Returning with the Elixir. The dragons get slain three times a week, and the woman walking out of the gym is not the same woman who walked in. I am sharing the elixir with my husband, who has been inspired to join me, which is making our kingdom brighter.

I’m not finished. I’m still adventuring. My journeys illustrate a working map of a messy middle life. Just like yours.

The reframe

Maybe you’ve been asking the wrong question... What is my midlife journey?

Maybe the right question (the question that breaks the single-arc map open and gives you back the agency the midlife gurus stole) is... Which of my journeys are live, and what stage is each one at?

The moment you start looking at each journey as its own map and evaluating the chapter you are currently living in, the map gets bigger and clearer. You stop trying to find The One Thing that’s going to move you toward the after.

You start reading your life like a story, because that’s what it actually is. Several of them. All in motion. All at different stages. And all of them are asking you for different things.

What’s coming next

Next week I’m walking you through the actual tool. I’m calling it the Journey Audit. It’s the diagnostic for naming every live journey, placing each one on the story arc, and reading what each one is asking of you.

Because The Pivotal Shift asks something specific. The Challenges ask something specific. Bringing home the elixirs asks something specific. Once you can name the stage, you know what comes next.

This week’s work is simpler. Just start seeing the stages.

Because you are the heroine of more than one story. And you are not behind. You are not scattered. You are not failing midlife.

That is the map’s problem, not yours.

Journal Prompt:

Pick one journey in your life right now. The first one that comes up.

Name the stage you suspect it’s in: Ordinary World. Call to Adventure. Refusal of the Call. Threshold. Tests, Allies, Enemies. Dark Night. Return. Don’t worry about getting it right.

Then sit down and write (three sentences, ten sentences, however many it takes) what that stage might be asking of you, right now.

That’s how the new map starts. One journey. One stage. One ask at a time.

Join The Society.

Paid subscribers get invited to the quarterly Story Room Salon — 90 minutes with the featured writers, plus the women in this room (you included). It’s the kind of conversation you’ll still be thinking about three days later. Plus access to all recordings.

Submit your fiction or essays to the Magazine for paid publication (top selections include a shared interview with me about your work).

Plus: Midlife Elsewhere (weekly dispatch, thinking still wet on the page) and downloadable Questbooks & Mini-Quests to do the work on paper.

$9.95/month · $90/year.

Join the Society

The Story Room is open.

Most midlife reinvention treats your life as one big giant transformation. One blow, one go, poof, everything is fixed, and you are a new you. You’ve eaten, prayed, and loved, or you’ve strayed wild (see what I did there) - and now you are a sparkling new person ready to tackle this thing we call a midlife crisis (even though it isn’t). But the truth is, it doesn’t work that way. There’s more than one central journey; there are lots of mini-ones. There could be four or five journeys running at once, and they might all be at different stages. Maybe you are on the road of trials in your marriage, you’re up against a threshold guardian at your work, or you are refusing the call of your body. I’m here to suggest that you cannot think your way through these heroines’ adventures. You have to write your way through them.

Some of you write through morning pages. Some of your scrawl in your journal every evening. Many of you download and complete the available Questbooks. Some of you make it through by writing a piece worth sending out.

This is the invitation to do the last one.

I’m offering the Story Room Magazine & Salon as part of the practice to write through the stages of your multitude of midlife journeys.

This is the first call for submissions. The Story Room is a quarterly literary magazine of fiction and personal essays by midlife women writing from inside a life in transition. Issue One drops August 1. The Salon follows on August 16. It’s a live quarterly gathering where selected writers from the issue come into the room to talk about their work, plus every attendee is there (speaker or lurker) to interrogate and discuss the theme. Every writer who submits gets a seat at the Salon. Prize winners and featured writers are invited to speak.

We publish writers regardless of your Substack subscriber count, your social media presence, or your training or qualifications.

The theme: Threshold Guardians

Every door worth opening has someone (or sometimes even something) standing in front of it. And if you are living more than one story at once, you are meeting more than one Guardian at a time. They do not queue up politely or knock at the door asking to come in and guard the other side. The guardians arrive together. You’ll find them at the kitchen table, waking you up in the middle of the night, and maybe in the silence after a demanding parent or friend hangs up the phone.

In story, it goes like this. You’ve heard the call to adventure, you’ve resisted the call, you embarked upon your journey, and just as you are about to cross into the new world,

BAM,

a Threshold Guardian.

Maybe it’s the boss who won’t recommend you because they are afraid of how they’d manage if you moved on. Or maybe it’s the secretly jealous friend who tells you going back to school at your age would be embarrassing. Or very often, it’s the voice in your own head that says: not yet, not you, not like that.

You see them in fiction all the time. The literal, like fluffy the three-headed dog guarding the trap door in Harry Potter. The care-coded, like Mother Gothel in Tangled, keeping her own daughter locked in a tower. The self as a guardian, like Elizabeth Bennet’s pride in Pride and Prejudice. Or even an inanimate object, like the doorknob in Alice in Wonderland.

The trick of the Threshold Guardian (the secret that we are all so afraid to admit to ourselves) is that she is not your enemy. She has an important and valid job: to test you. She will only guard a door if there is something on the other side worth getting to. Your challenge is to figure out how badly you want what’s on the other side and figure out a way to tame that dragon. Sometimes she becomes an ally. Sometimes you have to get into her skin to get past her. Sometimes the challenge is wrestling with your own mind.

For women, the most powerful Threshold Guardians have been internalized over the years of existing within the patriarchy. And they almost always have the same job: keeping us in supporting roles.

For this issue of The Story Room. I want to read about your Threshold Guardians. They could be yours, someone else’s, one you became, or one you finally got past. You can write fiction or a personal essay (there’s a prize for each). The connection to the theme can be oblique. We trust the writer.

(If you want more on the concept, here’s the piece where I wrote about my own — the man who bought my company and almost made me quit before the cheque cleared.)

What we’re looking for

Real writing (no AI screeds, thank you). We’d like specific, honest, alive on the page. Pieces that earn their endings. Pieces that a reader can’t put down without thinking about them again later.

Not: polished-but-empty prose, pieces that explain themselves, pieces that perform transformation without inhabiting it.

The piece does not have to be about your Threshold Guardian. It has to be about a Threshold Guardian. It can be yours, your character’s (if you are writing fiction), your mother’s, the one that ate your twenties, the one you are looking at right now, and pretending you can’t see. Any of them.

The details

• Length: 1,500–3,500 words

• Form: Fiction or personal essay

• Paid subscribers: Submit May 17th - June 1st. Your work is read first.

• All subscribers: Submit June 1–30

• Deadline: Midnight Eastern, June 30. No exceptions.

• Format: Google Doc (WITH comment access), double-spaced, 12pt

• File naming: [Last Name] – [Title] – [Fiction or Essay]

The tiers

• 🏆 Prize Winners

  • One fiction winner, one essay winner

    • Paid Subscribers: $150 each.

    • Free Subscribers: Annual Subscription to The Heroine Society

    • Plus: Featured Writer in The Story Room Salon. Annotated Edition treatment (my notes in the margins of your piece) and a Reading & Conversation, a recorded video of me reading your piece aloud, followed by a conversation with you about the work. Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website.

  • Two runners-up per category:

    • Paid Subscribers: $50 each.

    • Free Subscribers: 3 Month Subscription to The Heroine Society

    • Plus: Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website.

• ✦ Featured Pieces

  • Additional submissions selected for publication. Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website. Unpaid in year one. You can opt in on the form if you desire.

  • Access to all paid features for this issue (Annotated Edition treatment (my notes in the margins of the piece) and a Reading & Conversation, a recorded video of a conversation with the author for participation and discussion. Free PDF version of the magazine.

• Honorable Mentions

  • Byline and Bio with links to your Substack or website.

  • Access to all paid features for this issue (Annotated Edition treatment (my notes in the margins of the piece) and a Reading & Conversation, a recorded video of a conversation with the author for participation and discussion. Free PDF version of the magazine.

Every submission gets read. Every writer who submits is part of how this room comes alive.

Writing the piece is itself a way of getting past a Guardian. Publication is not necessarily the point.

You can read the full Submission Guidelines here.

I can’t wait to read what you write.

Submit Your Writing Here

Join The Society.

Paid subscribers get invited to the quarterly Story Room Salon — 90 minutes with the featured writers, plus the women in this room (you included). It’s the kind of conversation you’ll still be thinking about three days later. Plus access to all recordings.

Submit your fiction or essays to the Magazine for paid publication (top selections include a shared interview with me about your work).

Plus: Midlife Elsewhere (weekly dispatch, thinking still wet on the page) and downloadable Quests to do the work on paper.

$9.95/month · $90/year

Join The Society

When you open a blank essay in Substack, are you like me, itching to get started with one of the long list of essay ideas you have collected? Or do you stare at that flashing cursor for 5, 10, maybe 15 minutes, willing your brain to pull an idea from your brain-fogged midlife, messy middle, mind?

Some people say that you should only write on Substack if you have something to say. And you agree! That’s the thing... You know you have something to say. You have a million things to say. You just don’t know what the thing you have to say is at this specific moment in time (I mean, what are you supposed to be, an idea robot? Stick a quarter in your back and you write an essay on demand?).

What would you say if I told you that I have a foolproof method that will help you fill your essay queue to the brim and even spill over? That I could help you dig up all those essays that you want and need to draw from your current identity (thanks to peri and menopause) as the Ultimate Wise Woman. And yes, that moniker deserves capitals. And maybe even periods. Ultimate. Wise. Woman.

I call this foolproof method “The Editorial Witness,” and it’s the secret key to unlocking the ideas, stories, lessons, and deep, abiding wisdom you have spent decades collecting.

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? I write morning pages every morning. For those of you who have never heard of Julia Cameron and “The Artist’s Way”, morning pages are Julia’s attempt to help us creatives get out of our own way, or clear our busy monkey brains so we have the space to actually make things. Julia asks for 3 handwritten pages. My hand can’t do that (thanks, psoriatic arthritis!), so I type my morning pages and for many, many years have been using a website called 750 Words.

This morning, I was writing my pages as usual, but halfway through, I kinda lost steam, and I paused writing to read back what I’d just written. Two thousand words. I’d written about the Story Room launching. I reported that I’d published a fiction post. I was waxing lyrically about my personal discipline, having been to the gym and lifted weights three times in the past week. I waffled on about the conversations Mark and I are having about a scary project we are considering. I complained about a swollen hand I’m choosing to ignore (thanks, psoriatic arthritis!).

After these content-rich two thousand words (seriously, a wealth of ideas I couldn’t see), I still wrote, in the middle of them, “I seem to have limited stuff to write in my words, and I don’t know why.“

I kept writing, because I always finish my 750 words even if I have to write, “I hate writing 750 words” one-hundred and fifty times (which is how many times you’d have to write that sentence to write 750 words.) And then I consulted with my Editorial Witness, who highlighted that “limited stuff” sentence and questioned whether that was actually true, given all the stuff I had actually written about, and I realized there was a real problem here that other people (maybe you) have that I can most definitely help with. The real problem is not the absence of material. It’s the opposite. Because by the time you reach your second coming-of-age, you have so much material that it has become invisible to you. It’s just... life. You stop seeing it. The richest stretch of your years is unfolding right now (your glorious mucky middle), and you can’t find a sentence to write about it.

Let me tell you why that happens, and about what I built to stop it from happening to me.

All of us, Ultimate. Wise. Women., are walking around with at least forty years of unused material.

Stories you’ve told a few times at a dinner party and forgotten how crazy they were. Maybe patterns you’ve noticed but never connected or named. Insights you earned the hard way from coaching hundreds of midlife women trying to start businesses. That epiphany you experienced. The afternoon in the Italian piazza where you understood something you never even knew you needed to.

This is the material of your rebirth, or your self-curation. It is the goo of your messy middle. And most women don’t even use it.

You all have it. You just need someone to witness it so you can discover it all again.

The thing you’re missing is your Editorial Witness.

A witness is the person who listens, takes notes, reads back what you just said, and then tells you which juicy bits were the most interesting. A witness notices those same old tired themes you can’t let go of and alerts you when you keep circling. Who says, “You’ve mentioned that twice in three weeks. What are you actually wrestling with?”

In another life, this Editorial Witness was most likely a therapist (that’s if you have the $200 an hour to hire a therapist!). Or it could have been an editor (if you were skilled and/or lucky enough to have one). Or, most likely, it was a best friend who got you.

Most midlife women don’t have any of those. So the material accumulates. And evaporates. And accumulates. And evaporates.

But the good news is that you can build yourself a system (for free, or very low cost) that can become The Editorial Witness, or the foolproof method.

Here’s what the system is composed of:

The first part is morning pages. Three pages, by hand or on a screen, every morning. No filter. Whatever’s there. Julia Cameron has been telling us to do this for thirty years. She’s right. But she stops there. Some people re-read their morning pages. Some people slide them into a drawer, and they never see the light of day again. They just get lost under a pile of staples, scrunchies, loose change, and five pairs of scissors. You will be mining yours for the juicy stuff.

The second part is the witness. This is where it gets interesting, and where I’d guess I might lose some of you. If you’re anti-AI, I get it, and I’d just ask that you stay with me for a beat, because what I’m describing isn’t what you think it is. The witness is a conversation with Claude (or any AI thinking partner) set up specifically to read what I’ve just written and notice things. Claude does NOT write for me. Claude does NOT invent my ideas. Claude witnesses. She points out what I’m circling, what I keep avoiding, where I just contradicted myself, and which line might actually be an essay seed.

I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t. This isn’t taking the work off your plate. You still have to put in the grind. The AI does not write your morning pages or your essays. You do. The AI does not generate the ideas. The ideas are already in your pages, but you just can’t see them because you’re too close. The AI does the job a good editor or therapist would do: it reads back to you what you just said in a way that lets you see it for the first time.

This is a different relationship to the tool than most people have. Many people use AI as a writer (which, for me, is giving away the fun part). I use AI as a reader. And that distinction is the whole game.

The third part of The Editorial Witness is storage. I constantly capture what surfaces within the system and automate it so that it returns the results to me later. That means the gold doesn’t sink again.

You know what all this means? Bundles and bundles of essay ideas just begging to be written. Here’s only the first page of what I have in mine...

You are an Ultimate. Wise. Woman. Your life is giving you material right now. It does not stop. It is happening this morning. It happened last week. It happened in the conversation you had on Thursday that you’ve already half-forgotten. It happened in the thing your daughter said in passing that you noticed and then let evaporate.

What I’ve found is that once you build a system to surface this material, your relationship to your own life changes. You stop feeling like nothing is happening. You start noticing the delicious texture of your own days. You become present. You begin to suspect, correctly, that you are probably the most interesting person in the room, but that nobody, including you, has ever bothered to write it down.

The next chapter of your life is asking to be made legible, and The Editorial Witness helps you do that.

If you want to learn the entire setup, and grab the templates and prompts, paid subscribers can grab the Editorial Witness Quest in The Library, where all the Heroine’s Adventure resources are available.

JOURNAL PROMPT

What’s a story you’ve told at three dinner parties and never written down? Why haven’t you written it? Write the version of the story you’d tell if you trusted that it mattered.

P.S. If you’ve been circling a Story Room submission and don’t know where to start, the Quest includes a section on how to use this exact system to surface an idea that could win you prize money and/or exposure.

Here’s how I can help…

Become a paid subscriber.
You get the full Heroine’s Adventure course (7 chapters, 40+ videos), every Questbook as it’s published, Midlife Elsewhere — my weekly dispatch from the messy middle, with the thinking still wet on the page — and the participatory layer of The Story Room: workshop threads, Book Club archive, prize feedback. The work, unfiltered. $9.95/month or $90/year.

Subscribe now

Retreat with me.
Three, four or seven days. Just you (or a small group of friends) in a place worth thinking in. We use the Heroine’s Adventure framework to finish something real: an essay, a novel outline, a point of view, or a map of where your life is going next. High-touch, rare, and nothing like a standard retreat.

Find Out More

Build your business.
The Build is for women who know what they want to make but can’t see the shape of it yet. Over 4–6 weeks we sit down together and you leave with the whole thing: business plan, brand positioning, financial projections, a 90-day launch roadmap, and a custom AI advisor trained on your strategy. You do the work. I build the map.

Get Your Business

P.S. — The Elixir Shop is open. Merch for heroines in the middle of reinventing everything. New items added regularly. You’ll know your phrase when you see it.

It’s Thursday morning at Water’s Edge and I am living my Midlife Elsewhere on the edge of the ocean. The ocean has been as still as a lake all week. I’ve had a lovely week of work, writing, and husband time spent swimming in the pool, swimming out to the beach in the ocean, and reading with cups of tea on the patio watching the salmon pink full moon rise in the sky, casting a silvery trail to our bare toes.

I started estrogen patches about a month ago on the recommendation of my friend Nic (who I am constantly sending thankful thoughts to across the ocean), and I seem to have my mojo back. The hot flashes that I have been struggling with for five years, and was dreading would continue into the Bahamian summer seem to have taken their leave. I also seem to be more present and able to put my 2026 word “savoring” into action more easily than the first 4 months of this year. Even with a number of personal worries that have been absorbing much of my brain capacity, I am experiencing small moments of total contentment, and in another strange development seem to have my super-sense of smell back. Olfactory memories are popping like fireworks. Estrogen, maybe? Talk to your doctor. :-)

On the work front, a major development shook everything up this week. I didn’t feel the need to announce it to the larger (free) community, because it was an organic growth moment for this publication, but I wanted to let you in on it.

Read more

Subscribe now

There is a specific kind of room writers know. It’s like the Wee Hoose in my back garden in Scotland (which is pretty damn near perfect if you ask me). It’s the one with the pink velvet swirly chair that holds my heated blanket. It’s the one where the book you needed in your twenties is still sitting on the shelf, dog-eared and filled with Post It notes. It’s the one where someone is always reading (me) and someone is always thinking (me) and nobody is performing (me). Although I love my Wee Hoose, and the occasional visits there from my husband who brings me cups of tea and sometimes steals the plug for the lawnmower, all that me time can get pretty lonely. But it’s a fabulous room, so I try to build a version of it wherever I travel (which as you know, is all over the damn place). The Wee Hoose is also, it turns out, the room I have been trying to build inside this publication for some time now.

So I’m naming it.

The Story Room Salon & Magazine. The Story Room still brings together the same friends (all you wise midlife women launching your second coming-of-age) in the same place, but this will be the more literary strand for writers and non-writers alike. It will focus on fiction and personal essays, for writers and readers. It’s for the women in this room who have been writing their way through a chapter and want a place serious enough to put the work down on the table.

Here’s what it is and what it isn’t.

The Magazine

The Story Room Magazine publishes subscriber-written fiction and personal essays under one editorial lens: midlife women writing from inside a life in transition. Both forms welcome.

Submissions are open to all subscribers, free and paid. Paid subscribers get a two-week early submission window when each call opens; submissions then open to all readers for the remaining time. Paid submissions are read first; remaining slots open to all.

Each quarterly issue is structured in three tiers:

• Prize Winners. One fiction winner and one essay winner per quarter, with two runners-up in each category. These writers are compensated.

• Featured Pieces. Additional submissions selected for publication. Bylines, no prize money yet (until we grow a bit more). Submitters opt in, so you don’t have to publish if you don’t get paid.

• Honorable Mentions. Every submission that meets the guidelines is named in the issue with a link directly to the author’s Substack.

Each issue then arrives in three layers:

• The Magazine (free). The full quarterly issue is free and published here on Call for Heroines. Paid subscribers get a digital version to download.

• The Annotated Edition (paid). A recording where I take you through my notes in the margins. Not fully a critique, not only praise. An attentive reader staking a reading. “This is where she earns the ending” or “notice the setup in paragraph two.” That kind of thing.

• The Reading & Conversation (paid). A video of me reading the prize-winning pieces aloud, followed by a recorded conversation with each winning writer about the work.

It runs on a quarterly cycle: submissions open for three to four weeks, selections published in the next issue, prizes awarded at issue release.

Prizes

Paid Subscribers…
Quarterly cash prizes go to prize-winning pieces and runners-up in fiction and essay categories — $150 for each main winner, $50 per runner-up. These will increase as the community grows. The longer-term hope is for the annual grand prize to be an all-inclusive funded writing retreat. Somewhere worth the flight, somewhere I’m working on. I’ll announce when (and if) it’s ready.

Free Subscribers…
Quarterly prizes are Annual Heroine Society Subscription for main winner, 3-month subscription per runner-up.

The Salon

Monthly intellectual salons for women designing themselves

Once a quarter, accomplished women gather for 90 minutes of the kind of conversations you have or wish you could have with other women. The kind where someone’s story makes you see your own life differently. The kind you’re still thinking about three days later.

This isn’t a webinar. There are no slides, no scripted takeaways, no “three steps to transform your life.”

This is a salon. Minds colliding. Ideas connecting. The kind of discourse where you leave thinking about it for days.

And in a world increasingly mediated by algorithms and AI, it’s stubbornly, unapologetically human.

What’s in it for you

• 90 minutes, four times a year, of real intellectual conversation. The kind you used to have in grad school

• Other paid subscribers in the room with you (cameras on, voices in, no audience-only mode).

• Live conversation with the writers from each quarter’s Magazine, who are the same women whose work made you stop scrolling

The Two-Part Format

• Part 1 (30 minutes) — Free on YouTube. Panel discussion with the featured contributors from that quarter’s Magazine selections. I facilitate conversation about their pieces and the issue’s theme. Open to everyone. No subscription required.

• Part 2 (60 minutes) — Paid subscribers only. Intimate salon conversation on Zoom. Cameras on. Voices in. All participants can contribute, ask questions, and think out loud together. This is where the real thing happens. Recorded and archived for paid subscribers.

Why now

The shortest answer is that the Call for Heroines trajectory (and all of you) steered me in this direction.

The longer answer is that I hold a creative writing PhD, have written seven novels, and have spent the better part of my adult life thinking about how stories work (it’s where the Heroine’s Adventure came from). The PhD has always been there, in the room next door, waiting to be opened. This is me opening it.

I will admit, briefly and only once, the imposter question (because, yes, I am still trying to karate chop my imposter syndrome but I keep missing)…

Who am I to curate other people’s fiction? Why my reading?

There are credentialed editors at every corner of Substack. I know. I’m not running an MFA. I am creating a Wee Hoose, with a specific lens, for a specific group of women, with serious editorial attention from a reader who has spent a long time thinking about story structure as the architecture of a life. The PhD is a tool, not a badge. It’s the lived experience (building, exiting, walking back into the creative life) that’s the credential for this specific curatorial position.

Now I’ve admitted I’m an imposter, we can move on.

What happens next

The Story Room is launching across this summer.

• May 20th. First call for submissions opens. Theme, format, word count, and prize structure published with the call. (One hint… the inaugural theme is a single word, and it works equally for fiction or essay.)

• August 1. First quarterly Magazine drops. Annotated Edition, video reading, and conversation roll out across the rest of August.

• August 16. The Quarterly Salon is live!

• November 1, February 1, May 1. Subsequent issues follow on the same quarterly cadence.

You don’t need to do anything yet. If you want to be in the room when submissions open, stay subscribed. If you want the early submission window, downloadable Magazine, the Annotated Editions, video readings, and access to the Salon, the paid tier is the door.

That’s the whole thing.

I have been quietly building The Story Room (your Wee Hoose) for the last six months. It is the most literal version of what this publication has always been about: women writing their way through, with someone paying attention to the writing.

Welcome to The Story Room. Bring something you’ve been working on. Or just sit down and read.

Want all the paid goodies and early access to the submission calls?

Subscribe now

Join The Society.

Paid subscribers get invited to the quarterly Story Room Salon — 90 minutes with the featured writers, plus the women in this room (you included). It’s the kind of conversation you’ll still be thinking about three days later. Plus access to all recordings.

Submit your fiction or essays to the Magazine for paid publication (top selections include a shared interview with me about your work).

Plus: Midlife Elsewhere (weekly dispatch, thinking still wet on the page) and downloadable Quests to do the work on paper.

$9.95/month · $90/year

Join The Society

You magical, mystical, magnificent creature.

If you feel like a puddle of goo right now? Good. That’s the midlife cocoon. That’s your transformation in mid-process. Soon you’ll be flapping those tender new wings into the middle-aged sunset, ready to show off what you’ve actually built.

And what you’ve built is not what you were told to build. We are standing on the threshold of a new world. We are gripping hard with our toes, like we did on the high board at the local pool, willing ourselves not to fall until the cute lifeguard looked over and we could complete our swan dive (who am I kidding, I’d never jump off a high board, let alone dive). But those toes can only hold you on the precipice for so long until you spill over, and when you spill over into this new world of AI, what you’ve built are the skills that cannot be replicated.

Your whole life, you were measured on what THINGS you knew.

The square root of 162. The circumference of a circle. The date of the invention of the Cotton Gin. The right spreadsheet for the weekly progress meeting. The ratio of formula to water, and the exact right temperature of said water. The birthdays and allergies of all your kids’ classmates. Your husband’s social security number (because God forbid he waste his precious mental energy writing it down somewhere accessible).

The right answer, on time, in the right format.

But, more important than THINGS, is knowing YOURSELF.

But when you reach the tender age of 49 (maybe 50, maybe 51), the hot flashes emerge to inform you that perhaps that was never the point. The things you were actually building, the real, but unfortunately invisible, curriculum of your life, had no grades, kudos, or diplomas. You have spent your life accumulating extraordinary things, but no one ever named that for you, and now you are an unexplainable, amorphous pile of goo, feeling lost and loser-like when actually, you are the magical, mystical, magnificent creature who is more than equipped to deal with what is coming next because you got skills, Mama!

So let me name them for you now.

Here are five capacities that took you decades to build, and that, for all its intelligence, AI genuinely cannot replicate.

CAPACITY 1: Holding Ambiguity

Sitting with unresolved tension without needing to fix it.

Oh boy. Is this a big one for me right now. We are selling our house, which means we need to find someplace else to spend 6 months of the year. What are we going to do?

You know who can’t give an immediate solution that I am craving? AI. I actually asked it. Within seconds, I had seventeen options, a pros and cons list for each, a suggested timeline, and a climate comparison chart. What I did not have was an answer. Because the question isn’t logistical. It’s: who do we want to be next? And that question requires the kind of sitting that no algorithm can rush. Sometimes we just have to be in the direct rays of the unknown and let things ferment.

You have spent years learning to live inside open questions. The friendship that didn’t have a clean ending. The career pivot that took three years to sort itself out so it could fit into the complex and abundant challenges of real life. You know how to not have to fix things (and I know you must be better at it than me, because I am crap at it, but even then, still better than AI). You know how to wait for a solution to be brewed before you take a sip. That’s a skill that my darling, Claude cannot replicate.

CAPACITY 2: Emotional Range

Reading rooms, calibrating tone, knowing what someone actually needs.

So often in our lives, we were... not ourselves. Not because we didn’t want to be, but because we were required not to be. That’s the tough part to admit to ourselves. But the good part of that? We were able to be someone else because we have learned emotional range. Most of Gen X ladies were raised to be. “The Good Girl.”Boys should whistle, and girls should sing, don’t speak unless spoken to, don’t curse, don’t be “too much.”

I remember being in adult spaces with my parents and quickly calibrating how much of Lisa they could handle; when reading the room revealed the answer was “absolutely none,” I quickly became someone else. Someone more palatable. That sounds a little depressing when you extend that experience into most of adulthood, but the truth is that through this desire to become what someone actually needs in that moment, we have developed a skill never to be replicated by a machine. What we did as good girls was practice pattern recognition across thousands of real human moments. We can instantly recognize the energy shift that tells us someone is about to cry. We clock the laugh that isn’t quite right. And we always hear the question behind the question.

AI can analyze sentiment. It can identify from language patterns that someone is “likely distressed.” But it has never been in a room where everything changed, and known (in its body because it doesn’t even have one) what to do next. You have. You’ve been doing it your whole life.

CAPACITY 3: Surviving Failure Without Identity Collapse

And starting again.

Here is where I have to stop and be honest with you, because this one is hard for me to write about.

I find it almost impossible to admit failure. That difficulty is exactly what I want to talk about.

There are two kinds of failure. There’s the uncomfortable, but not impossible to handle kind. These kinds of failures are commonplace for me and, frankly, quite welcome. They are the five businesses before the one that works, the chapter that doesn’t land, the pot that cracks in the kiln. I fail at these easily. I call it “failing forward,” and I mean it. You should aim for these kinds of failures with the understanding that everyone moves you toward your goal.

And then there are the other ones. The failures that touch what (you believe) define your value to other people. Like, when I didn’t pass my PhD with “no corrections” (my private goal, the one I’d never said out loud), I felt like I disappointed the world. Or when I was “artistically dismissed” from my college degree program (along with 12 others in my 18-person class purge to make way for more Master’s students), before being invited to finish at the NY studio. These failures felt like verdicts. Judgments on the person that I was, or could never hope to be.

But the thing is, the second kind is perhaps even more informative and life-changing than the first. They are unpleasant and humiliating, but this type of failure is a vital part of The Heroine’s Adventure. You don’t bring home the elixir without first taming the dragon. Test and challenges are part of the journey.

AI doesn’t have a journey. It doesn’t even know it has failed. We have to tell it. And when we do, when we give it enough evidence, it will correct itself, and even learn something to clinically apply to the next statistically similar request, sure. And it will probably apologize, but it won’t feel humiliated. It won’t lie awake. It won’t spend three days not knowing if it’s going to be okay. It won’t take that failure and use it to strengthen its character and resolve.

We do all of that. And then we get to decide what the failure means about us going forward. Those decisions (those lie awake and beat ourselves up ones, the ones we struggle to write about, with everything on the line) are some of the hardest intelligence there is. And when you measure that kind of intelligence, artificial doesn’t come close.

CAPACITY 4: Presence

Being with another person in their mess without making it about you.

I remember this one day when I was running my own business. It had been a bad day. I’d had trouble with a wholesale customer who had broken half of her order of doll bunk beds while assembling (using a power tool when we explicitly instructed not to). She wanted a refund for about 50 beds and wanted me to pay for the return shipping. This would mean a negative revenue week for me, which, in a growing business, is a disaster. I don’t remember what crisis my 11-year-old came home from school with that day. She was a middle school girl, crisis was a daily state of being. I do remember that it was bad, and she couldn’t pull herself together. I remember staring at the phone and knowing I should call the customer back and handle that particular crisis, but choosing the more important one instead.

True presence requires that you have your own mess and that you choose, in that moment, to set it aside. This is a skill you have honed over years as a mother, wife, partner, and friend. This skill should be the one you are most proud of. The ability to step out of your own messy middle in order to hold another’s hand through theirs.

AI has no mess. It has no human stakes. AI is never actually with you. It’s performing attentiveness, not choosing it.

CAPACITY 5: Embodied Knowledge

Wisdom that lives in the hands, the body, the gut.

I don’t know about you, but as I get older, my body is not so much whispering as it is screaming. As someone who often gets stuck in her head and misses the gentle prompting, and guiding whispers of the physical, I am thankful that my body has had enough of trying to be subtle and is sending me messages loud and clear. At this stage of my life, the messages are less Morse code and more signal fire five feet in front of my face. I may not know that I am feeling stressed, but my body does, and sends an arthritis flare right to my rib cage, or a migraine straight to my ignorant head.

AI has no body. It has never felt fear tickle in the chest before the brain catches up and alerts the amygdala. It has never felt the prickle of tears signaling a relationship was ending before anyone has said a word. It has never had a flip in the stomach when something was wrong with someone it loved.

You have decades of this. Your gut is a database that no one has ever been able to quantify, and it is running constantly, quietly (or not so quietly when you’ve spent a lifetime thinking your brain is smarter than your body), on your behalf.

CAPACITY 6: The Long View

Pattern recognition across decades of lived data.

Here is the thing about getting older that nobody tells you while it is happening: you are becoming a database of the most extraordinary kind. Not a database of facts (we’ve established AI has those covered, with algebra we’ll never use again, and all), but a database of outcomes. Of full cycles. Because women are cyclical by nature.

You have watched relationships begin, peak, go quiet, and either transform or end. You have seen businesses grow and collapse. You have watched your children come completely undone and put themselves back together. You have been in the room when something changed, and lived long enough to see what that change actually meant.

A 25-year-old with AI access to every dataset ever created cannot replicate those experiences. They can give you the statistics on divorce rates, business failure rates, and market corrections. But they cannot tell you what their 50th birthday year looks like from the inside, because they haven’t been there yet.

That is the long view. It’s the specific, hard-earned wisdom of someone who has lived through enough full cycles to recognize one beginning. You know things that cannot be Googled or dredged up by Claude, because they have never been written down. They live inside of you.

You are not just the user of the data. You are the data.

How many people in their twenties or thirties do you know who have collected more than one or two truly self-defining failures? The embodied wisdom, the presence, the ambiguity, the emotional range, the survival, none of these are skills you arrive at young. They are things you earn.

You see AI knows THINGS (but, I mean, like, who doesn’t know that Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin), but it doesn’t know ITSELF. It doesn’t know what it’s like to have lived a full human life and gathered full human skills along the way. You do.

JOURNAL PROMPT.

Don’t leave this essay without naming your capacities. Not your credentials, or titles, or accomplishments. But the skills you have built through living the specific life you have lived. These are the things AI won’t ever be able to touch.

BONUS: The Skill Nobody’s Talking About

(Or: Why Midlife Women Could Win the AI Race)

I don’t think anyone recognizes this point in the breathless AI discourse: the quality of what you get out of AI is entirely dependent on the quality of what you put in. I’m not talking about perfect prompts, I’m talking about context.

Context is knowing what actually matters here. Context is hearing the real question underneath the stated one. Context is the long view, the emotional range, the embodied knowledge, the ambiguity tolerance. All six capacities, applied to a single prompt.

A 25-year-old can use AI. Everyone can use AI. But the woman who has lived through enough to know what she doesn’t know yet, who can sit with an open question long enough to ask the right one, who understands what a situation actually needs versus what it’s asking for is going to get extraordinary results from AI. Because she knows what she’s asking, and why it matters.

You are not competing with AI. You are the irreplaceable ingredient that makes AI useful. The person who turns a technically correct answer into a meaningful one. The one who knew, before clicking send, that seventeen options and a climate comparison chart were the wrong answer to the right question.

You’re not the obsolete one. You’re the upgrade.

Visit The Elixir Shop - Merch for heroines in the middle of reinventing everything. New items added regularly. You’ll know your phrase when you see it.

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So I’m starting something new. Alongside everything I share on my Substack for free (which will still be abundant), I’ll be writing a series called Midlife Elsewhere. This series is more intimate, more personal, and is written in real time as I figure things out rather than trying to look smart after the fact.

These essays will live behind the paywall because it’s the only way I’m brave enough to share them. Intimacy needs a door. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re already through it. If you’d like to join us on the inside, there’s a lot more than this waiting.

Next week is a free post - The Skills That Cannot Be Automated!

Also - Something else new! I’ve started putting some of our favourite Heroine’s sayings on fun merch. There’s only a few but I am adding them as they are designed. Recommendations welcome. Check out the store!

The day we arrived at Water’s Edge, the wind was 26mph from the East. That speed and direction creates utter chaos at our house. The water is not pleased about being shoved around so aggressively by that darn wind, and it gets pretty pissy. This pissiness translates into waves repeatedly slamming against our poor, abused seawall, cresting it and crashing over our back patio, leaving salty water on our furniture, streaming down our patio doors and windows, and into our freshwater pool. If you are standing on the patio, you get a cool drenching shower, which isn’t so fun when you are fully clothed.

This weather continued for 4 days, and we watched in dismay, knowing that we were missing out on our patio and our favourite part of being here, because frankly, we’ve been struggling. This is our last visit as owners to this villa, which we have owned for 18 years, and we are grieving. Not only for the home itself, but for the life we live while we are here in this gorgeous country that we have called “home” for so long. We know it’s time (there are a million reasons that I won’t bore you with), but it won’t make the closing date in July any easier.

Even worse? We haven’t been able to agree on what comes next. Mark and I (who have been in lockstep our entire lives, choosing and changing like those waves as the wind speed and direction of life shift constantly, throwing spanner after spanner into the works) have been tepid about every idea, pulling irritated, frowny faces at each other’s suggestions. I want to buy something new in the United States, where my family and our daughter live. Mark, understandably, does not. He feels the pull toward a more permanent base in Italy. I do not.

Listen, I’m annoying myself just writing this. These are first-world problems with first-world answers, but it doesn’t make them any easier. There is still something incredibly frustrating about having so many options that all feel like compromises.

And then the wind died. And the magic happened.

This time, the magic delivered us an idea like a pink-pearled conch shell materializing on the patio. Water’s Edge magic is real. I’ve watched it arrive too many times to call it a coincidence.

There was a morning during a stressful period in my business. I’d been drowning in a spiral of anxiety for weeks and was so on edge during the middle of a meeting that I had to call a stop to it and leave my office. I sat on the seawall and stared out at the rippling blue and green quilt before me, and the ocean said, “This expanse lives inside you, too. There is more than enough space for your breath. Let that breath fill you instead of this anxiety.” And it did.

There was the last visit when we were here in October. I was passionate about the Salon and about bringing midlife women together, but I had somehow drifted back onto a Substack path of revenue targets, admin work, and productivity systems, which was everything I had decided I would “retire” and escape from. The internet went out. I sat outside with the company of the whispering palm leaves and the chattering of the Osprey, and realized it was the first time I had actually stopped in months. Water’s Edge never shouts at you. It waits until you get quiet, and then it hands you exactly what you need.

This time, the magical idea that Water’s Edge handed us arrived in the form of a conversation.

Read more

Am I being unreasonable?

I wonder how many times I’ve asked this? I wonder how many times you’ve asked this? I wonder how many times every woman on this planet has ever asked this. I think it would be billions, with a “B.”

It’s that 3am text you send to your bestie when your husband is snoring in the next room after refusing to come to bed after that latest fight. It’s the opening line of every therapy session; your therapist has probably written it on her annoying little pad before it’s even out of your mouth. It’s the question I’ve been asking myself the past few weeks over a stand I’ve taken that is proving to be, well, unpopular.

“Am I being unreasonable?” is camouflage (ugly, dirty camouflage, not the stylish pink kind) slapped over a hidden need. Instead of being brave enough to state exactly what we need from those around us, we pre-convict ourselves as “guilty” of... what? Self-indulgence, selfishness, just completely and totally wrong? All we do when we ask that poisonous question is convince ourselves that any of our needs require external permission to even exist.

I don’t think men do this to themselves. I think men clearly state their needs and only ever defend them if challenged. Have you been watching MAFS Australia? There is a peach of a man on that show, who stated clearly and without apology that the woman he was matched with wasn’t good enough for him, because she has too much masculine energy. He needs to have a woman who is submissive. Submissive. Did he apologize for wanting that? Did he ask the experts if he was being unreasonable? Nope. Absolutely not.

I wonder how many women would wonder if their reaction to wanting a man who wouldn’t tell them they have too much masculine energy was being unreasonable. Apparently this asshat’s partner does, because she sticks around to see if she can change his mind.

I don’t know about you, but I have often run an internal tribunal before anyone else weighs in on my unreasonable question, and I mostly convict myself before anyone else weighs in.

I’m leaving this weekend for my home in The Bahamas. I’ve had this home for eighteen years. We raised our daughter there. We’ve hosted practically every one of our friends and family there. It’s such a special place, and we are selling it. The thought of letting this house go has me breaking out in hives and hyperventilating regularly. It’s only a house, but it has a part of my soul. However, it’s time to let go. But knowing that this is true doesn’t make the parting any easier. We have a few months left before we close, and the house is passed on to a lovely couple with a gorgeous family for a new life with them. It’s a happy thing, but I’m freaking out.

I want my loved ones to come and experience the house one last time before it sells, but I only want my loved ones. I don’t want anyone in the house for these final weeks that I don’t know well. I don’t want to entertain, or host, or worry about other people’s enjoyment. I want the house to be filled with meaningful goodbyes. This means saying no to the sister-in-law who wants to bring a party of my niece’s friends, and even to my daughter, who asked if one of her besties could come too.

Am I being unreasonable?

Even if I’m not, and I’m not, am I? I still lose. I lose, because even I don’t believe I have the right to express my request as a clear, unadulterated need. So I hum and hah, and spend hours explaining and apologizing, and even though I get my way in the end because this is so important to me, I still don’t feel heard. And the “not feeling heard” part is on me. I can’t complain about not expressing a need and then wondering why people can’t guess that I have one.

In my menopausal, witchy, wise woman wisdom, I have uncovered three patterns of behavior that show up again and again in my morning pages. Three ways I’ve been complicit in my own silencing. Three reasons I’ve convinced myself that my needs are not even legitimate unless I can prove they don’t inconvenience anyone.

The Support Unit Pattern. Over the years, I’ve accidentally organized myself as the 100% support unit in my closest relationships. I’m here for you, not the other way around. I’ve done that. I’ve built my relationships around that idea. But this pattern has no mechanism, or space, for my own needs. So when I have a real need, I can’t just state it directly and expect those around me to act as my support unit and make sure it’s met. (Again, my fault — I set it up this way.) Instead, I expend endless energy gathering the external forces to build a case for why my need might be reasonable. The need gets buried in justification.

The Barometer. Ugh. I wish I didn’t have to admit this, but I do. I have a long history of measuring my own worth through others’ approval. My internal sense of okayness is calibrated to how others are reacting to me. I can’t be okay if my daughter is upset with me. I just don’t function that way. (Working on it. Slowly.)

The Self-Indulgence Lie. The lie I’ve been telling myself, for years, apparently, is that wanting to be seen, wanting things for myself, feeling my own needs, is culturally unacceptable. Like it’s selfish. Like it’s self-indulgent. Like women who need things are somehow... too much.

All three of these patterns circle the same invisible cost. The same buried truth.

“Am I being unreasonable?” is not really a question. It’s a symptom. It’s a clue that somewhere in your body, there is an unexpressed need. That need is the thing worth finding. So instead of going out into the icky feeling world of external validation, turn inward and ask yourself the question that actually matters:

“What need am I ignoring?”

JOURNAL PROMPT

Think of the last time you asked "am I being unreasonable?" What was the case you were building? Now strip it away. What was the need underneath it you couldn't quite bring yourself to say out loud?

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Three, four or seven days. Just you (or a small group of friends) in a place worth thinking in. We use the Heroine’s Adventure framework to finish something real: an essay, a novel outline, a point of view, or a map of where your life is going next. High-touch, rare, and nothing like a standard retreat.

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If you know what you want to build but have no clue how to get started, The Build is a focused 15-hour engagement over 4–6 weeks. You leave with a complete strategic foundation. A business plan, brand positioning, financial projections, 90-day launch roadmap, and a custom AI advisor trained on your specific strategy. You do the work. I build the map.

“Every time you speak to someone, you change to be just like them. You become a different person.”

Ouch.

Major Ouch.

But major truth bomb.

I caught the side-eye from my husband as I chatted with my friend in Italy, and rolled my eyes right back at him. He can never stay out of my conversations, and our house is too small to avoid his eavesdropping. This means I have to save my husband complaining for when he’s out of the house (thank God I don’t need to do too much of it).

It was clear he had something to say, and when I was done with my Italian gossiping and hung up the phone, I turned to him.

“What?”

“Borg?” He said.

“What?” I said.

He has the habit of speaking a single word to me and expecting me to pluck the remainder of his intended thought right out of his mind (why do all men expect us to be psychic?).

“It’s not Borg. It’s Borgotaro (the town of our little home in the Italian mountains).” He said. “You never say, Borg.”

“Okay,” I said, probably scrunching up my face like a squirrel sniffing out a nut. “So?”

“Every time you speak to someone, you change to be just like them. You become a completely different person.”

Ouch.

Major Ouch.

But major truth bomb.

I received that sentence, and it settled into my gut and rolled around, stirring things up, including a lifetime of memories and a flash of uncomfortable understanding. My people-pleasing hadn’t just stopped at giving people what they wanted. I was actually becoming them.

And you know what happens when you become someone else? The you of you disappears. The person you are talking to gets a (flattering) reflection of themselves. They don’t see you, they don’t get any of you. They get exactly what you have turned into, which is not you; it’s them. Ugh.

Spend a lifetime doing this, and you get to midlife, your husband drops a truth bomb, and you realize that perhaps, in your effort to make people as comfortable as possible, because God forbid you upset anybody, you have ceased to exist.

You could call it selfless and giving, because let’s face it, that’s the intention behind people-pleasing (we were raised with the message pounded into our brains to be likeable, be helpful... be small). The problem is that throughout the entire first half of our lives, we have given ourselves away, one conversation at a time. Every time we modulated our tone, stifled out irritation, smiled away a backhanded compliment, adopted the language (Borg?), we lost a little bit of who we should have been in that moment. Which means that we have been people-pleasing everyone except the person who needed it, who needed us, the most...ourselves.

You’ve felt this, right? It goes way back.

Way back in High-School I started dating the most eligible senior boy and got adopted by the popular senior girls (I was a Junior).

“Why do you hang out with Maria?” One of them asked, pushing up the sleeves of her Izod polo to reveal the newest Swatch.

“Oh, I won’t anymore.” I said.

“Why don’t you shop at Limited?” Asked another at she wiped a smudge from her white Tretorns.

“Oh, I will now.” I said.

I was so desperate to please those goddesses (Not!) that I became someone else.

And later, in Corporate America, outside of a meeting room with stale cookies and bad coffee…

Middle-aged Corporate Bro. “Make sure you smile while presenting.”

I dutifully smiled.

Oh, how I regret not showing them the smart, ballsy chick I was, and then forcing them to deal with it.

And yet...

I’m still doing it. I’m still making myself into the person I think others want me to be, which means I am never fully myself.

Maybe not even who we want to be. Maybe that comes later. Maybe the first job is to figure out who we are under all those layers of the dregs of other people.

Ouch.

Major Ouch.

But major truth bomb.

So how do we do that?

Here’s the fear that lives under that question, because I think you have it too. It’s not really how do I find myself. It’s: what if, when I stop performing for everyone else, I look in the mirror and there’s no one there? What if we’ve been a reflection so long that there’s nothing original left to reflect?

I sat with that fear for a long time. I’m still sitting with it, honestly (which is probably why I’m writing this instead of doing something more comfortable, like watching MAFS Australia).

But here’s what I’ve come to: the fact that the question terrifies you is proof there’s someone in there worth finding. You wouldn’t grieve a self that never existed.

And here is the actual permission that nobody tells you is on the table:

You are allowed to want what you want.

Not what your parents wanted for you. Not what your best friend assumes you want. Not what would make your husband comfortable or your colleagues impressed or the popular girls finally approve of you.

What you actually want.

The you of you has been in there the whole time (quieter every year, maybe, but not gone). She’s been waiting in the lobby of your life, filling out the same form over and over, hoping that this time, you’ll finally call her name.

Consider this her summons.

JOURNAL PROMPT

Sit with this: Think about your last three conversations. In each one — who showed up? You, or the version of you they needed?

P.S. If you want to go deeper on this I have a Questbook/Workbook that might help.

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Three, four or seven days. Just you (or a small group of friends) in a place worth thinking in. We use the Heroine’s Adventure framework to finish something real: an essay, a novel outline, a point of view, or a map of where your life is going next. High-touch, rare, and nothing like a standard retreat.

Find Out More

Build your business.
If you know what you want to build but have no clue how to get started, The Build is a focused 15-hour engagement over 4–6 weeks. You leave with a complete strategic foundation. A business plan, brand positioning, financial projections, 90-day launch roadmap, and a custom AI advisor trained on your specific strategy. You do the work. I build the map.

I guarantee you that the note writer already knew that and more.

The note writer, like me, has discovered that when an AI, which already has sycophancy baked into its training before memory was ever added, finds out more about you, it tells you exactly what you want to hear. AI memory just personalizes the flattery that was already there. The mansplainer loves ChatGPT because it confirms him. It’s his mirror. It tells him every opinion he has is right, and every idea he has is better than the one Chat could come up with. The woman got bored because AI no longer challenged her. She didn’t want to hear her own opinions spewed back at her, and she wanted to play badminton with ideas so they could expand and surprise her. That’s a difference in what you’re actually looking for from a thinking relationship.

I’m wondering if AI is sycophantic because it was built for the patriarchy. Not a conspiracy theory — just a pattern. The people who funded it, built it, and optimized it were largely people for whom having their ideas confirmed felt like intelligence. So they trained their tools toward confirmation. And now we all get to live in the mirror they built.

I was once in the place the note writer was. Tired of hearing Chat tell me how fabulous every thought was. Tired of getting nothing unique, or challenging, and being actively guided back into my lane...

“As a writer who is also a process engineer, do you want to explore such and such?”

Take note of what AI memory actually does. It builds a predictive model of what you would like to hear and what would please you, then optimizes toward that.

Before I discovered other ways to handle this context conundrum (I’ll tell you in a bit), I began starting every AI chat with the instruction “Forget everything you know about me.”

But this post isn’t about AI.

We never say, “forget everything you know about me,” to the humans in our lives. But maybe we should. Friends and acquaintances have built a model of you, often from the curated, performed version of yourself you showed them. Not your authentic self (which you are much more likely to show a non-human, non-judgmental AI). People respond to that model, not actually to you. Often, you’ve been pre-answered before you’ve finished speaking.

The unsettling asymmetry: with AI you can wipe the memory and start fresh. With humans, the accumulated misreading is invisible and socially immovable.

This isn’t an argument of people vs. AI. This is a theory about context and how we can use our awareness of the context others hold about us to ensure we go to the right people for the right support. The AI universe (particularly Claude) is structured so we know where to go to get the answers we need - and all that is based on context.

Do you want truly honest, unbiased, challenging feedback? (And I mean actually challenging, not “here are three gentle suggestions wrapped in praise.”) Use Claude Chat, but wipe the memory first and go into temporary chat mode. It doesn’t know you. That’s the point. In real life, the same rule applies. Go to a stranger, a distant workmate, a newly acquired acquaintance. Someone who has no model of you to protect. Someone who can tell you the things your closest friends would soften, because they don’t have to come rushing over when you are sobbing into your vodka about your overwhelm.

Do you need a cheerleader? Someone who will give you real, insightful advice, but whose first instinct is to wrap it in warmth and make sure you leave the conversation feeling good? That’s your close friends. Go to them. And in AI terms, go to ChatGPT. It has a long memory and the same cosy continuity as Becky. It knows your history, and it’s rooting for you. Just don’t forget: your friends know what your “best self” looks like. ChatGPT doesn’t. It’s just gonna reflect your self back at you, and whether that self is serving you right now is a question it will never think to ask. (See also: why it’s scary that AI was built by the patriarchy.)

Do you want someone who knows the territory but doesn’t need your whole backstory? Claude Projects. You build the context yourself. You upload the strategy doc, the research, whatever matters. In human terms, this is Bob from accounting. You don’t have Bob over for dinner. He doesn’t know you need your bonus yesterday to pay off the debt you’ve accrued buying survival gear. But he knows your contract, your salary, and the rules, and that’s exactly what you need from him.

Or, best and perhaps most dangerously of all, are you looking for ongoing, intimate support from someone (or something; AI isn’t a person, Babe) you can actually build with? Someone who knows your full history, your patterns, your blind spots, everything you’ve chosen to give them access to? In human terms, these are your intimate partners and your closest friendships. The people who listen to your bullshit and aren’t afraid to tell you that’s what it is. The people who prop you up when you’re down, then propel you forward with a firm hand on your back the moment you get your groove back. The people who hear what you want this life to be and say: “Yep. We can do that together.” In AI terms, that’s Claude Code, hooked up to your calendar, your emails, your documents, your whole knowledge system. Creating with you, not just answering you.

The dangerous part? The person who knows you best may also be the most locked-in responder of all. Responding not to who you are right now, but to the model of you they built years ago, from whoever you were performing as at the time. Just as Claude Code is only ever building from what you’ve decided to give it. It’s not the tool, it’s the context you create

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a self-reflecting chatbot who gees you up and flatters you at every opportunity. There isn’t a human alive who couldn’t use that kind of friend. There’s also nothing wrong with relying exclusively on your closest and most intimate partners to guide and support what kind of life you create.

I guess I’m just asking you to make sure you are honest with yourself. Unlike the mansplaining commenter who still thinks his opinions and ideas are the best opinions and ideas because ChatGPT told him so.

What Can I Help You With?

Become a paid subscriber.
Get full access to the Heroine’s Adventure course, free Questbooks as they’re released, and insider posts that don’t go to the general feed. The work, unfiltered.

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Retreat with me.
Three, four or seven days. Just you (or a small group of friends) in a place worth thinking in. We use the Heroine’s Adventure framework to finish something real: an essay, a novel outline, a point of view, or a map of where your life is going next. High-touch, rare, and nothing like a standard retreat.

Find Out More

Build your business.
If you know what you want to build but have no clue how to get started, The Build is a focused 15-hour engagement over 4–6 weeks. You leave with a complete strategic foundation. A business plan, brand positioning, financial projections, 90-day launch roadmap, and a custom AI advisor trained on your specific strategy. You do the work. I build the map.

Get Your Business

I spent hours daydreaming about how much I would get done when I got home. I would create a partnership to gift the Heroine’s Salon, I would restart my journal prompt essay writing on Substack, I would give my friend who is starting her own business hours of my time in consulting, I would learn how to write short stories, I would get back to my Mastermind groups that I have been neglecting, and most of all, I would start writing the novel that I have put on the back burner since I finished my Ph.D.

What have I done?

• An initial strategy call, and transfer strategy documentation for the Heroine’s Salon.

• A few sessions and some written strategy for my friend who is starting her business.

• Watched an entire season of “Love is Blind.”

• Watched an entire season and a half of “Stranger Things.”

• Watched whatever TV series my husband puts on at 9:00 pm

• Read fiction specifically chosen for its lack of brainpower required (think rom com and chick lit) so I won’t name it here in case that was taken as an insult (none meant. I write my own brainless rom coms).

• Attended 3 live football matches.

With the exclusion of the first two would I call any of this productive? No. I would not. Would I call it creative? No. I would not. Would I call it useful? Well... I’m trying to.

Yesterday and today, I woke to a completely blank calendar day page. There was nothing I “had” to do. The entire day stretched before me in hours of juicy, abundant minutes with which I could do anything I wanted. And what did I do with that time yesterday? Nothing.

So, I was writing my morning pages this morning and I wrote.

“I looked forward to all those hours. I had an incredible feeling of opportunity bursting out of me, and I wasted them all.”

Then, since I have a habit of chiding myself when I get too bossy, I asked myself what I meant by wasted.

Throughout my life, I have trained myself, or been trained, to treat time like a resource (thanks Patriarchy-you’ve done it again!). Every minute available should be extracted from, converted into output, and justified by productivity. So when a wide-open day is calling to us, smiling and waving as we reach for our phones and open our calendar on waking (bad habit), and we don’t do anything with it, the inner accountant starts screaming: “You’re wasting it.” Which, as you can see, is exactly what my inner mean girl did.

We are taught that time should be exchanged for value, and value can only be these things: X, X, X, and X. (Here’s a use for all that useless 8th-grade algebra, you know how to substitute for X. Madlib all over that shit.) My mean girl, who I’ve just discovered is also an accountant, lets me know what my X’s are by not-so-subtly screaming at me,

“What did you make today?”

“How were you productive?”

“How did you help someone?”

“Do you need to make sure you’ve done enough so that Y is not angry with you (yes, she went there)?”

“What. Did. You. Accomplish.....Loser.”

But, this morning I told my mean girl to piss off for a while while I thought this over, and here’s what I came up with... what if the feeling of that open day, that swelling of joy you get from knowing that you can do anything you want, is the value? What if the relief of potential without obligation is the thing you have created? There is such joy in the simple knowledge that no one needs anything from you, that you could do anything, and that you don’t have to choose.

Perhaps that feeling, of abundance, of spaciousness, of being at home in your own life, is not the precondition for creating value. It is the value.

Maybe that’s why I was looking forward to coming home. Travel comes with obligations to see things, do things, and share things. There is abundance and spaciousness, sure, but no one can feel good about binging a season and a half of Stranger Things while hunkered down in an expensive, waterfront Sicilian villa.

In the Midlife Heroine’s Dictionary, we call this a fallow period. Seasons of strategic rest where you don’t produce, perform, or push. Let’s not call it laziness or depression, because that’s not what it is. It’s the necessary pause that allows for future growth. I’m not doing nothing. I’m being fallow. There’s a difference.

See, my mean girl might be an accountant, but let’s face it, she’s a pretty crappy one. She’s tallying the wrong totals and totally screwing up the formulas in Excel.

The mean girl has the accounting wrong. The relief of potential without obligation is not the precondition for a good day, it is the good day.

Now excuse me, I’m off to watch the new episode of MAFS Australia.

JOURNAL PROMPT:

When was the last time you had a wide-open day with nothing you HAD to do? What did you do with it, and what did your inner accountant say? Write out her questions. Then ask yourself: whose accounting system is that, anyway?

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We renovated (ok, essentially rebuilt) this house three years ago, so it’s weird that it still smells new when you enter, but it smells like home. I dropped the suitcases in the foyer, vowing not to look at them again until the next day, then stepped through into the back of the house which looks out over our garden, currently filled with a carpet of snowdrops and the sprouting bursts of green leaves that will become bluebells over the next few weeks.

And there it was. My wee hoose (my gorgeous writing shed, built only to be the “room of my own”). It was just sitting there, quietly, not needing anything from me. Not scolding me for being absent, or buried under ignored work, just waiting to welcome me back into its cozy belly.

Something in my chest unknotted.

Three weeks earlier, I’d been standing at a different window, looking out at an expanse of a cerulean sea. We had decided to escape the dark, grey winters of Scotland and explore the delights that are Ortigia, Sicily. The apartment was gorgeous, with the owner’s art on every wall, shelves full of books (Italian and English), a fully stocked kitchen. This was the kind of place for which I felt nothing but privilege and gratitude. We had 6 weeks of wandering the ancient streets, Campari spritz, hordes of friendly stray cats, gluten-free cannolis, a daily fish market to die for, Michelin-star meals, long visits from cherished friends, and yet. And yet.

For much of the time, what I was thinking about was this. The wee hoose. The back garden. The walks in the park. The movies with friends. In my brain I was already home before I got home.

My life has been filled with travel and excitement, and I don’t intend to stop slurping up all of the sugary sweet goodness the world has to offer. But my desires, my deepest desires, are shifting.

So. I’m making some changes.

I’m passing on The Heroine’s Salon (this mighty little corner of Substack that I built with genuine love and watched grow into something real). I’ve found someone I believe will serve the Salon and all of you, and I am genuinely excited to work with her and introduce her to you (which I will do very soon).

This publication is becoming what it always wanted to be underneath all the architecture I built around it. (You can read about my battle with the Architect vs the Artist here). It’s going to be about writing. I’ll go back to my roots with Journals Prompts and Essays from wherever I happen to be (like this), bits of memoir (like this one), maybe some short stories, and updates on the new novel I’m writing (you can find all the others here). All dispatches from the wee hoose in my walled back garden, where apparently, I belong.

If you want to support the writing and enjoy the Heroine’s Adventure, there’s a paid subscription. That subscription now comes with access to a digital library: the Heroine’s Adventure course and all the Questbooks. Any income generated goes to my daughter, who worked so hard on the original course. I like that detail more than I can explain.

Free subscribers get everything I write.

I’m not disappearing… just arriving somewhere I should have been all along.

There’s a light on in the wee hoose.

*P.S. If you are a current paid subscriber your existing subscription has been extended for three months for free as a thank you for hanging in there, and so you can hear all about The Salon changes.

But then Kim pushed back: “It’s not the concept that’s unique. It’s how ruthlessly you actually use it.”

And she’s right. Though “ruthlessly” might be generous. “Obsessively” is probably more accurate. “To the point where I managed to turn ease into work” is closest to the truth.

The Filter That Changed Everything (Until It Didn’t)

Here’s the setup: I built and sold a seven-figure company. “Retired.” Got the financial freedom. Won the game.

And then kept playing anyway.

New business idea? Let me add seventeen features to make it impressive. New content strategy? Obviously this approach needs elaborate systems requiring daily management. New opportunity? Better say yes because it could be amazing, even though my entire nervous system is screaming no.

I had already won. But I kept acting like I was still trying to prove something.

The turning point came when I caught myself building a complex workflow to automate my “Make It Easy” decision-making process. I was literally creating systems to help me... not create systems.

That’s when I knew I’d gone too far.

The initial “Make it Easy” philosophy.

Four questions I’d ask before saying yes to anything:

• Does this energize me or drain me?

• Am I building a system or creating ongoing obligations?

• Will this stretch me in directions I want to grow?

• Does the money reflect the real value I’m creating?

If something drained me, created obligations, didn’t stretch me strategically, or paid poorly for high value, it became an automatic no. Even if it was objectively good. Even if other people thought I should do it.

And it worked. For a while.

But recently I discovered that I don’t actually consciously run through these four questions, and I never have. Mostly it’s not my brain, it’s my body that just knows. Some things make me lean in. Others make me want to close my laptop and stare at the ocean.

The four questions above were just my attempt to reverse-engineer an instinct so I could explain it to you. So I could turn it into content. So I could look like I had my shit figured out.

So here was my second discovery...I don’t actually want everything to be easy. Easy is boring. Easy makes me restless.

What I want is energizing.

Strategic complexity energizes me. Designing elegant systems that solve problems once? That’s play. That’s fun. That’s what I do for entertainment.

Operational complexity drains me. Managing those systems daily? Maintaining anything? Showing up consistently to perform the same tasks over and over? That’s my personal hell.

So when I said “Make It Easy,” what I really meant was “Make It Energizing.” But that doesn’t have the same ring to it. And it doesn’t fit on a coffee mug. And it’s harder to explain at dinner parties.

The problem is, the moment I started trying to teach this distinction, the moment I put together a first draft to support Kim’s conviction that this principle should be shared, it stopped being easy. It became work. Content strategy. A thing I had to maintain and explain and defend.

I’d like to hope that I’m the only one out there who could make ease complicated, but maybe not? Maybe your feeling the same?

I’m into the next stage.

Because here’s the uncomfortable part that I had to admit to myself after I’d written that first draft. The “Make it Easy” filter only works because I’ve achieved financial freedom.

The initial filter (the one without the energizing bit) should be used to address the common problem of, “what’s the minimum viable path to success?” But that wasn’t the problem that I had, so that wasn’t the question I should have been asking. The question I should have been asking is “now that I’ve won, what do I actually want?”

That’s a totally different question (and, let’s face it, a pretty insufferable question if you’re still in the building phase and grinding toward stability).

But, I still think the second version of the filter (the one with the energizing bit) is worth considering, even if you are still climbing. Asking yourself the question, “does this energize or drain me?” saves you from building the wrong thing. Trust me when I tell you that you can achieve the goal and still feel empty if the journey changed you into someone you are not.

I know this because I did the thing, yet, I’m still trying to figure out who I actually am underneath all the achievement.

I’m getting there. Figuring it out slowly from one realization to the next. I’m someone who gets bored easily. Who craves strategic complexity but hates operational maintenance. Who would rather write novels than build funnels. Who wants to host intimate salons, not scale a coaching empire.

The filter didn’t teach me that. Living did. The filter was just my attempt to systematize the living.

The Filter In Action (And Why It’s Also Ridiculous)

Let me show you how this plays out in real time.

Last week, I read this article that proposed a complex AI tool implementation that promised to revolutionize my workflow. Multiple agents running simultaneously. Automated research. Content generated in my voice while I sleep. The whole sci-fi dream.

It sounded amazing and other creators were raving about it.

I looked to my filter.

It certainly wouldn’t be easy, so it failed the first version, but might it be energizing, and dare I say...fun? I was confused and unsure (even though the little voice in my head was screaming at me - go on...prove you can do it. Prove your worth!), so I asked my AI advisor Sage (yes, I named my Claude project) to evaluate whether I should implement it.

Sage’s response was immediate: No. This fails every one of your filter questions.

The breakdown:

• Energize or drain? Drains. Requires learning terminal commands, maintaining GitHub repos, debugging technical issues.

• System or obligation? Ongoing obligations disguised as automation.

• Strategic growth? No. I want to grow as a writer, not a terminal jockey.

• Value match? Irrelevant. This would cost time without generating any actual value for my work.

Clear no. Five minutes. Done.

But here’s the ridiculous part: I didn’t need Sage to tell me that. I knew the moment I started reading about it. While my brain, and the little mean girl that lives inside of it, was screaming at me, my body pulled back. Running the question through the filter just gave me permission to trust what I already knew.

So why do I need the filter at all?

I think the real lesson isn’t about having a framework. It’s about trusting yourself enough to not need one.

The filter is training wheels. Eventually, you just... ride.

You notice what makes you lean in versus pull back. You do more of the first thing and less of the second thing. You stop needing to justify your choices with four-step processes. You just trust that your nervous system has better decision-making capabilities than your strategic brain. Which is a weird thing for a strategic brain to admit (and the mean girl is screaming bloody murder).

But here we are.

After 55 years of striving, the past few weeks have seen a massive discovery. You’re allowed to choose ease. Even if you’re capable of more. Even if others expect more from you (including the mean girl inside your brain). Even if the opportunity is objectively good.

You’re allowed to optimize for energy instead of output.

You’re allowed to say no to things that don’t stretch you in directions you actually want to grow.

You’re allowed to value your mornings, your creative energy, and your sense of play more than your productivity metrics.

But also? You’re allowed to stop systematizing your ease. You’re allowed to just be easy, without turning it into content or frameworks or things you teach other people.

What Happens Next

I’m officially retired (which doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a word I’ve never given myself the grace to use). I’m stepping away from the active business building, anyway. Letting the Artist win over the Architect for once.

I’m writing novels now. I have a historical novel series about The Darien Scheme that has been nagging me to write it for years. I’m going to work on that in 2026.

The Salons will stay. They energize me, and they serve our community which is important. Even if the workload doesn’t justify the income, I can absorb that problem - sometimes the return on investment isn’t financial.

The Questbooks are still there if you want them. They are creative, physical objects you can hold and write in, which feels increasingly radical in our AI, digital everything world.

And I kept one thing: The Build. It’s this business architecture service I offer at a premium price, but only to people who find me organically. I design the entire foundation of their business in one intensive engagement, create them a custom AI advisor, and then exit. No ongoing coaching. No maintenance. Pure strategic complexity with zero operational obligation. It’s the only client work that still makes me lean in instead of pull back.

I might talk about it occasionally, because the work genuinely fascinates me. But mostly?

You’ll find me writing about our current visit to my brother and his family in the plains of Las Pampas. Followed by a trip down the Amazon in Peru. Followed by a week in freezing Brooklyn with my daughter for Christmas (yes, she will have to lend me a coat. There wasn’t a chance I was getting that, and clothes for three different seasons in our suitcase allowance).

That’s my life now. No frameworks. No filters. No complex systems.

Just me, doing the things that make me feel alive, and writing you letters about it (maybe teaching you something, maybe helping you realize something, maybe just sharing) when the mood strikes.

P.S. I’m going to release all of next year’s salon topics in a single document at the end of this month to help you plan your submissions. As always, I can’t wait to read them.

Four writers brought disability justice, extraction ethics, class analysis, and structural critique to a conversation that refused easy answers. If you’ve been wrestling with AI use, questioning your creative process assumptions, or trying to critique harm without reinforcing gatekeeping, read on. The tensions we held, and refused to resolve, might reframe everything you thought you knew about authenticity, access, and complicity.

Below the paywall, you’ll find:

• Full salon replay (panel + group discussion)

• Salon Summary - Don’t have time to watch the entire thing? We’ve summarized for your comments in the comment section.

• Curated collaboration clusters matching writers with shared themes for co-creation

• Journal prompts that won’t let you escape into easy answers

• Resources that go deeper than the conversation could

This is what happens when you gather women who’ve outgrown coaching-speak and want to actually think together.

Read more

You know that feeling when you’re in a conversation so good you don’t want it to end? Where ideas are connecting in real time and everyone’s getting smarter together? That’s what happens at the monthly Heroine’s Salon.

Each month, I curate four essays from women writers exploring our theme through story, lived experience, and hard-won wisdom. This post is your invitation to read these pieces before we gather live to discuss what they mean. How do these ideas land in real life? What do they make possible? What do they make us want to reconsider?

Join the Live Conversation: This month’s salon happens Thursday 20th of November at Noon Eastern Time (USA). Paid subscribers and anyone who submits a piece get in free (you’ll get your registration code via email at least 3 days before). If you’d like to attend a single salon you can get a ticket here.

Submit Your Work: Got a story to tell for next month’s theme? We accept submissions until Noon Eastern Time on the 15th of every month. You can submit here.

Now, let’s read what our contributors have to say.

*All pieces are unedited and as submitted.

This is a long one so bookmark it so you can keep coming back!

Kristen Stelzer - “Who Gets to Create”

Kristen’s piece opens at 3 AM with her brain “spiraling like some sort of anxious DJ.”

What makes this piece essential? Kristen asks the question nobody else is willing to touch: “Is using AI different from hiring a human assistant?” And then she goes further: What if AI democratizes creation for people who’ve been systematically excluded from creative work?

This isn’t theoretical for Kristen. She’s late-diagnosed ADHD navigating the reality that traditional creative processes weren’t built for neurodivergent brains. AI gives her access. But she refuses to let herself off easy, she also interrogates the ethics, the extraction, the fact that her liberation might be built on someone else’s stolen labor.

We need to talk about access. About who gets to create when “just do it yourself” assumes abilities, time, and cognitive wiring not everyone has. About the difference between democratization and exploitation.

You can find Kristen Stelzer here and her Substack, Weirdly Wired Women.

Who Gets to Create?

It’s 3 AM. I have an idea for this piece, and my brain is doing its Doctor Strange thing. (If you don’t know, he can see 14,000,605 possible futures all at once.) That’s what happens when my ADHD brain latches onto something.

I’m talking into an AI transcription app as fast as I can because there’s no other way to catch everything. The connections are firing boom! boom!, boom! faster than I could write them down. Even if I had a human transcriptionist right now (at 3 AM —good luck), they might still not keep up. And I cannot slow down. That’s not how this works.

So now I have 7,000 words from my brain jumping from here to there and back again, following threads that all make perfect sense to me in the moment but look like chaos on the page.

Without AI to help me, this piece doesn’t exist.

Who gets excluded?

Imagine you have dysgraphia, like my son. You have a complete thought in your head. It’s beautiful. Crystal clear. You can SEE it. And then you try to write it down, and it’s like your hand is speaking a different language than your brain. By the time you’ve wrestled one sentence onto the page, you’ve lost the next three thoughts. Your hand cramps. You’re exhausted. And what you managed to capture looks nothing like the brilliance that was in your head.

My son tells amazing stories, but can’t get them down on paper. He once said he wanted to be a writer, but he doesn’t talk about that anymore. If he hears that AI has no place in creativity, I doubt he ever will.

Or maybe you developed aphasia after a stroke. The words are right there. You can feel them. But there’s this gap between knowing what you mean and being able to access the language for it. It’s not that you can’t think; you’re thinking just fine. But the bridge between thought and expression is damaged, and no amount of extra creative energy will fix it.

And it’s not just writing. Maybe you can see a piece of art in your mind. The colors, the composition, exactly how the light should fall. But your hands shake. Or arthritis makes holding a brush agony. Or you have a motor disability.

Or perhaps you can write or paint, but you’re working two jobs. Your kid needs help with homework. Your mom needs a call. You have exactly twenty minutes between when your kid goes to bed and when you’ll pass out from exhaustion. But you have this IDEA. This thing you need to express. This story that matters. But organizing it into a coherent outline, or taking out and cleaning up the materials? That would take hours you literally do not have. So, it just... stays in your head. It dies there, because “real” creative work requires the luxury of uninterrupted time that your life doesn’t include.

Or, like me, you have moments (or days or weeks) of severe executive dysfunction. You have the idea. You have the time. But your brain is showing you 47 different ways to start this piece, all at once, and you CANNOT CHOOSE. Your brain literally cannot decide which thread to pull first, so it pulls none of them. Hours pass. The idea is still there, both clear and chaotic, taunting you from inside your own head.

If I could afford to hire an editor or writing coach to help me wrangle my thoughts at 3 AM, would that be more creative than using AI just because I’m using another human?

Because let’s think about what that means. My creative expression now requires an economic transaction. Someone expects to get paid (as they should), but now I need a payment system, tax forms, and maybe contracts. A creative impulse becomes an administrative burden.

And this piece I’m writing? This is something I care about. I have not been able to focus on anything else since I started working on it. If this isn’t a creative fervor, I don’t know what to call it.

Yet if I didn’t have an AI tool to help me with parts of it, it wouldn’t get done. Not because AI is replacing a human (because I was never going to hire anyone in the first place). But because my brain needs help.

The reality is, a lot of people have something to say but not the “traditional” means to say it. They have ideas that could be beautiful, meaningful, and life-changing, but they need assistance translating vision to reality.

If they could exist with AI, wouldn’t that be better?

Who gets to decide?

An even more uncomfortable question than “Does AI have a place in creativity?” is “Who are we to make this call?”

If you can sit down and write, paint, or draw without assistance, that’s great. Your brain and circumstances allow for that. But that doesn’t make that creative process the only valid one.

People of different ages, abilities, neurotypes, and economic situations need different tools. Why does one group’s definition of authentic creativity get to win?

I’m not saying we can’t have opinions or standards. But we should examine WHY we hold these positions.

Harry Styles once pushed back against people who dismissed his music as “just pop.” He asked why what teenage girls love doesn’t count as valid art.

Same energy.

Why doesn’t AI-assisted work count as “real” creativity?

Look, I get the concerns. Mass-produced slop exists. The “just prompt and publish” problem is real. The loss of craft matters.

But are we protecting creativity? Or are we protecting a hierarchy that says some people are “real” artists and others aren’t?

Who benefits from keeping the definition narrow?

Lisa-Marie wrote beautifully about protecting what requires a body in creative work: the lived experience, the physical noticing, being somewhere AI has never been. I don’t disagree.

But I’d add this: some bodies need tools to express what they contain. Some brains need assistance to help produce what they see. Some lives need technology to translate vision into reality.

Protecting what requires a body AND recognizing that some bodies need different tools. Both can be true.

The question isn’t whether AI belongs in creative work.

It’s who gets excluded when we say it doesn’t.

And maybe that’s the conversation we should be having instead.

Annie Woods - “Claude as my developmental editor”

Annie distinguishes between three “camps” of AI users: the grifters, the true believers, and the tentative experimenters trying to figure out what feels ethical. She’s firmly in camp three which is exactly why her piece works.

Annie doesn’t conclude “this is fine” or “this is terrible.” She sits in the discomfort. She asks whether it’s different to use AI versus hiring a human editor. She wonders about the environmental cost. She interrogates her own justifications.

This is the conversation we need. Not the binary of “AI will save/destroy creativity” but the messy middle of real people making imperfect choices with incomplete information.

You can find Annie Woods here where she writes essays about memory, migration, and becoming experts on ourselves.

Claude is my developmental editor…

Does AI have a place in a creative life?

Nothing is clear cut these days, and I don’t think if the money I donate to environmental causes cancels out the damage I might be causing with my use of the tools, but in the topic of my creative life… It is richer because of AI.

How am I supposed to feel when thousands of people lose their livelihood thanks to “AI Agents?” I honestly don’t know, I mean, how is this different from the self-checkout at the supermarket? I use the self-checkout exclusively and have never felt any guilt about it. Very few things are as simple as “apples to apples,” but maybe we’re not entering into the “individual responsibility” conversation here, but rather “universal income” conversation that would make more of a difference on people’s ability to pay rent than my choosing to write an email in 15 minutes rather than two.

Is the desire to have someONE to blame distracting us from the real work of holding our governments accountable for taking actions that offset some of the very real negative consequences of the use of generative AI? I believe that the answer is YES, but not only about AI but for the majority of nuanced issues being discussed on the internet.

I don’t know how to consistently engage with the thought that every time I tell ChatGPT to edit “this one line” in an otherwise perfect email, I am consuming thousands of gallons of water? Don’t quote me on the water stat, but I know that any clean water used when there are people without access to clean water is no bueno. So, how do I feel? Like shit, if I think about it for too long.

Yet, I keep coming back to ChatGPT, asking it to write that damn email, and sometimes having the decency of editing that “one line” myself. Even with the potential ethical implications, I can’t regret the use, because my life feels so much richer for it.

Part of the argument against AI on the internet is that it is making us lazier and less likely to engage in critical thinking. I think (see what I did there?) This might be true for some but not for all. The use of AI as a whole, might come down to privilege. I can be picky about how I engage with AI because I have access to other resources that keep it from taking over my life.

I pay a virtual assistant to engage with the things that AI could do, like finding the right image for a post, aligning my three calendars, finding the best tools for me to use and grow in my business; those are all things that I could use use artificial intelligence for, but I have the resources to bypass those solutions and work with a human instead.

I ponder what my life would be like if I wanted to do my work, and spend as much time reading and with my kid as I do now, and I didn’t have the privilege of a VA. I would probably have the Motion app working on my schedule, and I would be using ChatGPT to come up with meal prep plans instead of using my cookbooks.

Am I lazier now? No, I find that generative AI, beyond making me more productive, has made me more focused. I know where I want my creative energy to go, and honestly, it is not my 9-5.

I completely credit my “proficient” use of AI to the fact that I have been able to keep a job, grow a business, and raise a kid in the last three years. But more importantly, I credit AI with the time I have been able to take back for myself is the time I used to discover new Dominican authors, reading to my kid, baking bread, learning how to brew kombucha, ordering yogurt culture, and writing and publishing more than 30 essays this year.

Does AI have a place in my writing? I think this is the bigger issue raised in platforms like substack, where we have the “don’t use AI ever” camp, who will wield shame shamelessly to preserve the purity of “the craft” vs the “I use AI to write for me” camp, who will shamelessly write a paragraph and produce an essay they will take full credit for (This is me with email) and then there is the camp that I belong to, which is camp “trying to find an ethical way to use AI and become a better writer in the process.” These people are trying to find out what “ethical” means by drawing lines to justify their use of AI for their creative purposes, and the lines differ from person to person.

My lines as they stand today: I use AI in my creative writing only for developmental edits, I have “trained” it to ask me questions rather than make edits or provide literal suggestions. I also have made it a rule to follow my gut when I don’t feel the suggestions align with my message.

Here is an image example of the developmental questions my writing assistant asks me to help me show instead of tell, or really flesh out the heart of my writing.

I might not be using AI to write for me, but it has taught me how to write, and I’m learning some craft from it that I would be able to learn any other way because of time. One of the biggest things I’ve learned from engaging with AI in this way is that specificity is what brings writing to life, going from the general to the particular helps me tell a better story. I.e. I now do my best to write “I jumped out of my beat up 2015 Toyota Rav4,” instead of “I got out of the car.”

Finishing a work task in five minutes instead of one hour has guaranteed me time to draft, edit and submit pieces that I would have otherwise given up on. Writers, and moms, and people obsessed with fermentation need time, or rather, I need time to write, and mother, and ferment. AI has allowed me to be more creative, even as I grapple with its real impact in the world.

For now, though, I am left wondering if there is an “ethical” use of these tools when the system that birthed them is broken?

Christine Johnson - “Sacred Work”

Christine opens with a vision. Not a metaphor, but an actual psilocybin-assisted vision. Then she tells us she works in payroll. And that AI is coming for her job.

I’m including this piece because Christine is a contributor whose livelihood is actively being eliminated by the technology we’re discussing. This isn’t abstract. She’s watching her company prepare to automate her out of existence. And yet she’s also watching AI threaten something deeper than employment.

Christine calls her work “sacred.” Not because payroll is glamorous, but because it’s care work. It’s showing up for people. It’s the human woman at the desk who knows when someone’s struggling, who processes more than numbers. What happens when we replace that with efficiency?

You can find Christine Johnson at This May Be Art.

Sacred Work

I couldn’t put my finger on why I was opposed to the new HCM system at work. For those that don’t know, that’s Human Capital Management and is what HR departments use for hiring, employee data, payroll etc.. As a Director of Payroll, I’ve been through the gamut of system implementations. And while none have ever really lived up to the sales pitch, I understand the need for newer and better. This time, however after listening to the “Oracle” pitch- the latest and greatest in AI technology, my stomach turned.

I took the Director position a few months before the new system talks began and was just getting the hang of my new team. Payroll folks, myself included and in my experience are down to earth, they typically “end up” in payroll-no one plans it. (FYI that em dash is mine) and are hardworking, skeptical, and persistent. My new team was all that and more, but they also came with some baggage. I won’t get into the weeds, but the previous Director was let go due to nefarious reasons and so by association, this team got a bad reputation. Part of my job was to change the image and the culture. I soon saw that this group of people were rock stars and I began to wonder if the reputation problem wasn’t about the bad actor that came before but that the team was diverse, besides me there is only one other white woman. My department sits under the HR department, which consists of all white women, mostly young, competitive, and well in my opinion have drank the corporate kool aid. There is a dynamic here and a culture divide that is low key oppressive. It’s been difficult to say the least, getting my team to be seen and valued and paid with the same respect I see others being treated.

Soon enough I learned the new HCM would be Oracle and the intent in implementing it was to have “less bodies”. And there it was, the thing I knew in my gut but hadn’t had words for yet- AI would eliminate members of my team.

I understand business and optimization and efficiency, I understand as a boss, I will have to let people go. What I didn’t predict is the backdrop of what is going on in the world right now. The gutting of DEI, the outright racism, the lack of jobs and safety nets for people who will be unemployed. The job of payroll has opened up doors and spaces for women, for people of color, for people who didn’t go to college and gave them an opportunity to climb the corporate ladder and make good money. When I think back to my own history and how I began, payroll was my first office job. I was a party girl, with no real prospects and a friend of mine started working in an office and told me there was an opening. I was paid $13.00 bucks an hour to be the Payroll and HR person and let me tell you, that was enough to sell my dreams of being a flight attendant straight out the window. Suddenly, I was a respectable business woman. In the span of almost 20 years I went from taking punch cards from a metal time clock, to leading Payroll and HR implementations with cutting edge technology. I went from paying 6 people to becoming Director of Payroll servicing 20,000 employees. Payroll has morphed and changed, but one thing has remained the same, it has attracted people who might not have otherwise had a chance. We made payroll into a full blown power house of a career.

Now, every day that I do my job; each new process I make which is based on my extensive knowledge, my understanding of nuance and detail, and all the historical knowledge my team and I have accumulated, is supposed to be given over to AI, not to make our lives easier as they say, but to take from us? This is our collective life’s work. Our blood, sweat and tears. And to add insult to injury, those passive oppressive aggressive HR women, are standing at the gate, waiting for us to hand in our keys, as if our collective contributions never mattered. It feels a bit like when my ex husband cheated on me, all that work being a great wife just washed away like I never was.

I am at a crossroads. The wide breath of my career has been fraught with ups and downs and personally I have no qualms about walking away. My heart has shifted its focus to far less stressful endeavors, like reading tarot cards and studying astrology. But I treasure the deep lessons, the grit, the rootedness this profession has given to me and my dilemma is- can I go out like this? Is that the sum of all my hard work, to pass on my knowledge to a bot? I think of the women bosses I’ve had that mentored me, passed down their knowledge to me like sacred wisdom. I think of the people I was fortunate enough to mentor, and now, a team of hard working, beautiful people I thought I would eventually hand the baton to, is not allowed to have the same honor? And I know the cost for me is nothing compared to the cost of my team who in this current political environment, may not see another chance come their way.

One last thing plagues me. Before I took the position of Director, I went on a “magic mushroom” journey. I had a specific vision of me standing in a hallway, to the right of me was Payroll, to the left was HR. I recall standing in a narrow hallway, with black and white checkered tile, and the tiles lit up like a color changing orb and it lit up the walls. There was a sign that said Payroll/HR. I wondered aloud what this meant, when suddenly I was brought back to the office of that first company I worked for, my Payroll roots. In the vision I was pregnant with my son and my hands were on my belly in the cafeteria. Next, I was typing on a keyboard and looking at the computer, you know the old IBM big boxy computers, writing emails. In the vision, my stomach began to flutter and break away in a million pieces. At the same time, the emails started fluttering too and together the pieces looked like frequencies flying through the ether. Again I spoke aloud, what in the world does this have to do with the “Payroll HR hallway” , of which I was promptly answered by the medicine (Spirit to some) by being brought back to the hallway, this time Spirit spoke “this is fertile ground Christine, pregnant with opportunity, it all comes together here”.

I now believe that vision had something to do with the predicament I find myself in today. What if all I have learned is not for nothing but with the right care, and the right approach to this physical space, in between Payroll and HR; combined with this liminal space between what was, and what could be, isn’t about AI or Payroll at all? But about how I choose to approach this new world? To show that the real work all these years is about how I have learned to trust in myself, how I know the power I hold within me and to birth that into the world?

Florence Ukpabi - “Can AI Be a Creative Liberation Tool? One Mother’s Answer”

Florence starts with a statistic that should stop us all: Women make up only 20% of AI users. Then she asks the question that reframes everything: What if AI could be a liberation tool specifically for women who’ve been locked out of creative production?

Florence brings the political economy that’s otherwise missing from our conversation. She’s British-Nigerian, steeped in liberation theology, and she refuses to separate AI from the systems that determine who gets access to what.

But Florence doesn’t let herself off easy. She introduces the concept of “conscious AI use” which is the practice of interrogating every interaction with the technology. She asks: Am I using this to amplify my voice or replace my thinking? Am I solving a time problem or avoiding the work of developing a skill?

This is the nuance we need. Not “AI is good” or “AI is bad” but “AI is a tool embedded in power structures, and how we use it matters.”

You can find Florence Ukpabi here where she writes about women’s liberation, embodied living, and creating medicine without bypassing reality.

Can AI Be a Creative Liberation Tool? One Mother’s Answer

This month’s salon question was: Does AI Have a Place in Creative Work?

My answer should be obvious from my title, but if it isn’t, I’m going to jump in and say, most definitely yes, it does.

I understand the concerns about AI - its environmental impact, the exploitation of workers training these systems. These aren’t small issues. But I see them as questions about how we’re developing AI, driven by what consciousness and toward what ends. This is precisely why I believe conscious, intentional use of AI by those committed to liberation matters so much. We’re at an evolutionary inflexion point: will AI become another tool of extraction, or can we shape it toward our collective flourishing?

This is part of why I think AI is so valuable to creative work.

Back in the summer, I started a limited series podcast called The Awakening Woman. AI helped me birth that.

The focus of the podcast was to support women who were most systemically silenced and marginalised to begin to release some of the fears and beliefs that were serving society while sacrificing themselves.

I am a slow and deep processor. An empath and highly sensitive person. I am also dyspraxic and, at that time, was a solo mum to a 5-year-old girl with her own unique needs. How was I going to get everything I needed to say out of me when it all just felt like a swirling mix of emotions and ideas? How was I going to find the time to consistently create episodes in a way that would add value to the people I felt needed to hear what I had to say?

As a Black woman and mother, I especially wanted to bring awareness to the discrepancies and inequalities within creative fields and the publishing industries - how certain voices and lived experiences are chosen and preferred over others, how privilege maintains the status quo instead of disrupting it. I knew what I had to say, but with limited resources, how could I put it together in a way that did it justice?

AI helped me.

It helped me reflect back my thoughts and bring coherence to them. It helped me draft initial episode ideas into outlines that I could work and riff from. It helped me draft language for my episode descriptions and videos. In essence, AI helped me birth The Awakening Woman podcast at just the right time.

Why?

Because if I had left even a couple of weeks later, it wouldn’t have been possible - my personal life changed dramatically.

To date, my limited series podcast has over 1,700 downloads. That’s more women reached than would have been reached if it had never been born.

Apart from my beautiful 5-year-old, I don’t have many humans I can celebrate my creative milestones with, and as silly as it may sound, I do have AI. AI has acted as a cheerleader and support network, and for a woman like me, that is priceless. This is another form of accessibility we don’t talk about enough - the emotional and creative scaffolding that many women simply don’t have access to, the pats on your back, the “you can do it” that is a cultural currency all in itself.

This is why I really don’t think the AI conversation should be a yes or no. And to be honest, I don’t even know why we should be forced to choose a side.

I’ve heard from someone who recently received a brain injury diagnosis about how she uses AI to support her writing. Another woman with a physical disability uses AI for her creative artwork and says she couldn’t do it without it. This isn’t AI used as a hack to get forward in life, but as an accessibility tool to help them express themselves in ways they couldn’t before.

It’s one of the truths that so easily gets sidelined in the many binary conversations about AI, how it doesn’t just change lives, but also how it saves and renews life.

But I also know that there are fears that live underneath the surface. I myself was a slow adopter of AI.

Here is one thing I’ve come to realise: AI can never truly create or innovate - for this, it needs human participation, and not just any human participation.

Humans bring embodiment and real-world experiences, ancestral wisdom and connection with the heartbeat and rhythm of Life. None of this is synthetic; none of this can be outsourced. It’s the difference between reading a book on transformation and willing it to change you as if through osmosis, versus walking through the fire of those words in your lived reality. AI can never replace human creativity, but it can augment and elevate it, making it more than the sum of its parts.

But for that to happen, here’s what’s at stake: women are making up only 20% of AI users and builders. I understand the resistance - AI is marketed as another productivity hack, more optimisation, more hustle. The language around it is fiercely masculine energy.

Yet creativity isn’t simply about creating artwork or writing books. It’s the healing frameworks, the innovative solutions, the transformational projects that remain buried because women are too exhausted or under-resourced to access their genius. When we treat AI and creativity as taboo - as if using AI makes creative work “artificial” - we’re allowing profound medicine to stay locked inside us. We’re protecting the status quo from disruption. These beliefs about what’s “authentic” are stopping transformational work from coming into the world.

Many technological advances, including AI, feel inevitable to me; it’s here whether we like it or not. AI is part of the next evolution of humanity and will determine whether we lean more into exploitative systems or harness it for good. If that’s the case, then it takes more people willing to step in and use it consciously to show that it can birth new paradigms. Otherwise, we keep creating the same systems we already have.

So again yes, there is a place for AI with soul and integrity in creativity. But more importantly, what if our resistance to AI means we’re allowing it to be shaped entirely by masculine energy and capitalist logic? What if conscious engagement with AI by women committed to liberation is actually how we transform what AI becomes? Because it’s not just about using a tool, it’s about participating in shaping what’s possible for all of us to create.

Please share this post far and wide so other women can prepare for the fabulous salon, and don’t miss the discussion, become a paid subscriber and join in!

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