The Story Room is the room in The Heroine Society castle (yes, we have a castle and it is fabulous!) where we write together, read together and then discuss in the Salon (which really is the room where it happens!).

I announce a quarterly theme (come to the salon if you want a head start on the next one!) and you write something. Any subscriber can submit (free or paid), and then I curate a midlife woman’s magazine that you get to download and keep (paid). Or you can come to the Lives (free) if you want to hear the piece read aloud and a discussion with the author. About two weeks after the magazine launches we all get into a room together for an intellectual salon where we discuss the theme, and the pieces that struck you.

That’s The Story Room. There’s no MFA required, no agent needed, no track record to prove.

If you are a paid subscriber you can win a cash prize, and if you’re not, you can win a subscription instead, which makes you eligible next time. All submissions get a free invite to the Salon which is a paid benefit.

On the theme

I chose The Threshold Guardian because she is the most misunderstood figure in the whole heroine’s journey.

So many of us treat a Threshold Guardian as the enemy. She’s standing in front of a door we want to get through and she can be pretty scary looking. Plus she’s got an annoying Janice laugh and says things like, “you’re too old, too late, too much, not enough” and “who do you think you are?” We want to shove her out of the way and push through.

But we forget that the point of a guardian is to guard something. A guardian stands at the door and says I cannot let you through, because, right now, you won’t be able to handle what is on the other side.

I wanted to read about what happens when a woman stops trying to conquer her guardian, and instead, tries to figure out what she is protecting. The submissions went even further. In this issue there are guardians who are mothers, husbands, a colour, a jealous friend, a hospital corridor, and, in many of them, the writer herself. Nobody agreed with anybody. And that is why we need the Salon, and why it’s going to be worth your Sunday (August 16th - you’re invited to the room where it happens.)

The two winning pieces

She Got Her Hair Done, by Di Kersey. The Essay Prize.

Di’s guardian is a jealous frenemy. She heckles in italics. Her nails are ragged, “all the better to point out my flaws with.” She is petty and specific and completely recognisable. Ouch.

What makes it win is that Di doesn’t need to defeat her, but she doesn’t let her off the hook either. She negotiates. By the end the guardian has had her hair done and her nails buffed, and when Di finally hits send, she gets a whisper on the way out: well done. Til next time.

Di Kersey writes about why women archive parts of themselves, and what happens when they begin bringing those parts back. Through essays, reflections, and the developing body of work behind Unarchived, she explores the quiet ways women disappear inside lives that look successful, capable, and perfectly fine from the outside.

https://substack.com/@unarchivedwoman · @unarchivedwoman on Facebook and Instagram

If you are a paid subscriber you can read She Got Her Hair Done by downloading the magazine.

If you are a free subscriber you can hear it when I read it aloud and then chat with Di on a Substack Live on Thursday August 6th. Here’s the link!

Meeting Death, by Susan Kacvinsky. The Fiction Prize.

A girl who already knows that marriage will move her from her father’s house to another man’s adopts the runt of the goats. Her mother tells her not to name it. I won’t spoil what happens next.

The violence of this piece arrives wearing tenderness (is it real, or performed?).

The guardian here is the mother, standing at the door of her daughter’s life saying I cannot let you go through there soft.

Susan Kacvinsky holds master’s degrees in Mythology and Archetypal (Jungian) Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. She writes the Substack Modern Mythology. Her essays have been published in The Rumpus, This I Believe on NPR, Science of Mind and Underwired, and she was a semifinalist for the Norman Mailer prize.

https://substack.com/@modernmythology · @susankwrites on Instagram

If you are a paid subscriber you can read Meeting Death by downloading the magazine.

If you are a free subscriber you can hear it when I read it aloud and then chat with Susan on a Substack Live on Thursday August 13th. Here’s the link!

The Runners-up

The Half That Stayed, by Rachel Harris. Essay.

Rachel Harris is a New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels with over 335,000 copies in print. She is the host of The Joyful Rebel Podcast and the creator of Good Girl Ghosting, her name for the socially rewarded ways women betray themselves. She writes and speaks about identity, self-trust, and the quiet work of remembering who you were before the world got loud. She lives in Phoenix and is very much still in the trenches.

joyfulrebel.substack.com · rachelharrisonline.com

Mustard Yellow Makes Me Sad, by Leslie Senevey. Essay.

Leslie Senevey is a swivel-headed beauty hunter who cares about the color of everything, will do anything for fresh flowers, and learned early on how to use her words. She is the Life Lines columnist for 76107 Magazine and has been published in The Memoirist Quarterly, MidStory Magazine, and Writing: Unfiltered.

distractedbyprettythings.substack.com

The One We Planned, by Carol Oyanagi. Fiction.

Carol Oyanagi grew up as the youngest in a family of twelve. She is a writer, dancer and life purpose coach living in Minneapolis with her husband and cat. At Quiet Zeal she writes fiction and blogs about living a quiet but exciting life. She has danced on local stages, in churches, prisons and parks, and overseas in China, Trinidad and Guatemala.

quietzeal.substack.com · CarolOyanagi.com

Featured Submissions

The Massage, by Laura K Lawless.

substack.com/@lklawless · lklawless.com

Fifteen Julys & All the Women I’ve Been, by Elizabeth Fraser-Underhill.

upandnotcrying.substack.com

Just One More Dragon to Tame, by Helen Rowlands.

helenrowlands.substack.com

The Matron Guardian, by Mary Helen Rossi.

substack.com/@maryhelenrossi

Stripped at Every Gate, by Shelley Karpaty.

shelleydurgakarpaty.substack.com

Threshold Crossings: A Quartet of Poems, by Meris Walton.

substack.com/@dailydropsofpoetry

Honorable Mentions

Every one of these women sent me wonderful pieces that are worth a read. Go and follow them.

• Act II Unscripted · act2unscripted.substack.com

• Debra Driscoll · substack.com/@thebehercollective

• Heather Gomm · changewedidntaskfor.substack.com

• Nicola Hurst · substack.com/@nicolahurst

• Anne James · substack.com/@annebuchananjames

• Elle Em Jaye · alifeservedmessy.substack.com

• Sheri Mehryar · chaosuncorked.substack.com

• Samantha Pomp · samanthapompart.substack.com

• Eileen Schweickert · eileenschweickert.substack.com

• Amelia Lee Sheldon · substack.com/@amelialee

• Lidia Șișu · lidiasisu.substack.com

• Vicki Tull · substack.com/@vickitull

What happens next

If you are a paid subscriber you can download The Story Room Magazine below…

Two Author’s Tables, live on Substack Live. I read the winning piece aloud, then I talk to the woman who wrote it.

• Thursday 6 August, Di Kersey, She Got Her Hair Done. 5pm UK, noon Eastern.

• Thursday 13 August, Susan Kacvinsky, Meeting Death. 5pm UK, noon Eastern.

The Heroine’s Salon

Sunday 16 August, noon Eastern and 5pm UK.

Ninety minutes on The Threshold Guardian with the writers of Issue 01 in the room. The first half hour is public. The hour after that is private, cameras on, sav blanc in hand.

You must register on Luma before we start. Registration closes the moment the Salon begins, so please don’t leave it until Sunday lunchtime.

Everyone who submitted to Issue 01 has a free pass, and it is already in your inbox. Paid subscribers come free - your coupon is below. Everyone else, it’s $12.95.

Issue 02 opens on Monday 17 August

I announce the new theme at the Salon the day before, so come on Sunday if you want the head start. Every submission gets a free seat at the next Salon, and next time it could be your name where these ones are.

LM x

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Submit to The Story Room. Anyone can, free or paid. The best of it goes into the Magazine, and if you win, you’re paid for it: cash if you’re a paid subscriber, paid subscriber membership if you’re not. Everyone who submits gets a seat at the Salon, for the kind of conversation you’re still thinking about three days later.

Paid subscribers get a ticket to every Salon (no need to submit), paid writing opportunities, access to the archives including conversations with winning writers, plus the Quest Library and the book -The Heroine’s Guide to Designing an Extraordinary Life.

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On the heels of my post Drowning in Doing? Become a Sacred Slacker, I want to take a slightly different turn. Not toward shame, guilt, or hustle (a bro word if there ever was one). But toward the truth, which is, as much as we’d like to deny it, sometimes we need to snap out of it, suck it up, and hunt down the energy we need to get the shit done. Because, sometimes, if the shit don’t get done, you’ll end up in a worse place than you were before all you needed to do was get the shit done.

But the problem is, if you’re peri-menopausal, sometimes you feel like your energy’s been spirited away by a trickster (Not funny, trickster! We keep you around to supply us with fun!) Or maybe, like so many of us, you’ve just spent too many years running yourself into the ground looking after the entire world, or, like Suzanna Quintana told me, you just have yourself hooked up to the world’s IV.

Most advice about this treats your energy like a jar of colorful M&Ms. You get issued a full jar every morning. You can choose to hoard the M&Ms, give some away to other people you like (but not the red ones), say no to some people who beg for your M&Ms, and if you run out of M&Ms by two that afternoon, well, you should have been more responsible with your M&Ms. This makes our lives a narrative about scarcity and self-control, and I don’t really believe in either.

So what does story tell us?

Nobody ever asks how much energy the heroine of your favourite story has. What a reader might notice, is two much smaller things. What does your favourite character keep doing that takes her backward. And what does she do in the five minutes before the hard part that takes her forward.

Bridget Jones is the patron saint of going backwards. She weighs herself, despairs, drinks, and goes back to Daniel Cleaver to get the kind of abuse she feels she deserves. Then our dear Bridget writes it all down in a diary (you know that tone of cheerful self-loathing), and then she does the whole circuit again.

Our backward steps might be less cinematic but they cost us just as much. Mine, for years, was that if I didn’t do it, nobody would, or it wouldn’t get done right, which sent me back to people pleasing every single week, and then I’d be tired, and then being tired proved I was the only one carrying it. The lie we tell ourselves feeds the loop, then the loop proves the lie, and we’re on a carousel of self-loathing. If your backward step is “I’m too tired to try,” that’s the one that keeps you from finding out whether you’re actually too tired to try.

But what about the forward steps?

Katniss, before every courageous step she takes, completes a tiny ritual. She touches the mockingjay pin. She takes Peeta’s hand. She thinks about Rue’s song. None of that makes a true impact. Not one of those gestures makes her faster or a better shot. What they do is remind her who she is and what she’s there for, which helps her take that forward step.

See the difference between Bridget and Katniss? Bridget goes backward because of what she believes about herself. She’s in a loop. Katniss does forward because of what she tells herself. She’s got a ritual.

Which means the question isn’t how do I get more energy. It’s which of my repeated loops are draining me, and which rituals fuel me, and roughly how many of each am I running? Inputs and outputs. Banking for energy.

You probably know some of the answers. There’s the regular stressful phone call that costs you the rest of the evening, or the twenty minutes with the scented candle and your favourite pen when everything becomes possible. I’m about to ask you to write the rest of them down in one place and look at them together.

And if none of that works? Grab some salt and vinegar potato chips, plug in your heated throw blanket, and rage-scream into a pillow for ten minutes. That’s a ritual too.

Your energy levels aren’t a mystery, and you’re not too broken or lazy to get moving. You’re not. You’re a damn heroine on a long, twisty, gorgeous quest, and this isn’t a burnout memoir, it’s a Heroine’s Adventure.

Narrative Shift

Limiting belief:
I’m too tired to try.

Empowering narrative:
I can find out where my energy actually goes, and get some of it back.

Reflection Prompts

What am I putting up with (or repeatedly doing) that I’ve never once questioned?

When was I last properly awake?

Who taught me that being tired means I haven’t earned my rest yet?

Reinvention Steps

Map it. Two columns, one week. Where are my loops. Where are my rituals.

Find the loop. Pick the thing on the “took it” side you do most often, and ask what you’d have to believe for that to make sense. Write that sentence down and pick an argument with it.

Build one ritual. Not a routine, a ritual. Tea before you write. One candle. A song. The point isn’t the tea. The point is teaching yourself something is about to start.

Worksheet Link:

Download here.

Join The Society

Get your writing seen, published, and paid for.

Submit to The Story Room. Anyone can, free or paid. The best of it goes into the Magazine, and if you win, you’re paid for it: cash if you’re a paid subscriber, paid subscriber membership if you’re not. Everyone who submits gets a seat at the Salon, for the kind of conversation you’re still thinking about three days later.

Paid subscribers get a ticket to every Salon (no need to submit), paid writing opportunities, access to the archives including conversations with winning writers, plus the Quest Library and the book -The Heroine’s Guide to Designing an Extraordinary Life.

$9.95/month · $90/year

Join The Society

“You’re a witch! Burn the witch!”

Wait!

In Scotland, you were innocent until proven guilty, and one of the ways to prove you guilty was to send you to a witch pricker.

The men believed (not Maisie; she doesn’t believe anything; she’s just out to get you) that if you were a witch, then the Devil had sealed his pact with you by leaving a mark somewhere on your body. It was an insensible mark. Meaning, the mark wouldn’t feel pain and wouldn’t bleed. So, if you were guilty, you’d have a numb spot. They’d just have to find it. How did they do that? They stripped you, the accused, publicly shaved off every hair on your still innocent body, and then jabbed a long brass needle called a Bodkin across your skin until something didn’t bleed.

However, the instrument itself was built to lie. Some prickers carried bodkins with hollow handles and retractable shafts. When pricking, the needle looked like it drove a full inch into the flesh, but it slid up into the barrel instead. Not a sound from you (except maybe a giggle if it tickled), and “voila,” you had “The Mark.”

That was the genius of the test. The fraud was invisible because it lived inside the tool.

And follow the money, because it’s the whole story: prickers were paid per witch. A fee for every mark found, every conviction secured. So the instrument that “objectively” detected guilt was wielded by a man whose income depended on detecting it.

What about the ducking stool? If you float, then you must be casting a spell: “Burn the witch!” If you sink... “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

This post is not about witches.

Listen. Writing is hard. I concede that learning the craft of writing is a long, gorgeous, sometimes painful, soul-healing, frustrating, uniquely human journey. I believe that good writing takes work, sweat, and a shit-ton of tears. I believe in the majesty of a delicious sentence, and I appreciate (and even teach) the ancient art of story structure. I have been writing my entire life and have a Master’s and a Ph.D. in writing, and yet I will still never be a great writer. I’m okay with that because that’s not why I write. And it’s not why most of the world writes either.

We write because writing shares ideas. Writing reaches through the page and grabs someone’s hand who didn’t know they needed your touch. Writing helps every one of us figure out who we are and who we want to be. Writing helps us process this chaos we call life. Writing is expression, and every human has something they want or need to express.

That’s why all the writers here on Substack who are celebrating the introduction of AI detection into what used to be a totally peaceful Scottish Village in 1692 (yeah, just go with the analogy, will ya) are dangerous, because while they are screaming, “writing should be hard!” What they are really saying is, “If writing isn’t hard for you, then you’re a fraud.” And, “even though I can occasionally grow a few spectacular gourds, you have so many beautiful gourds that you must be a witch. And even if you’re not a witch, it’s not fair that people like your gourds, so I’m gonna call you a witch anyway.”

Believe me when I tell you I understand the anger, the fear, and the frustration when someone (or, in this case, something) comes along and takes from you that prize they are not qualified to take. I studied acting for eight years at the highest level of training. It was hard. Learning to act as a craft is like a bundle of emotions personified, reaching down your throat, yanking your insides outside of your body, and stomping all over them. I’m not exaggerating. And yet, I would go to auditions and stand next to a sparkly-eyed, rosy-cheeked 17-year-old who just stepped off the bus from Minnesota after her star turn as Ado Annie, and she would get the part. Oh, how I wished there was a “no training” detector. Ado Annie had no craft, hadn’t practiced, hadn’t had her insides outside her body, but the auditioners enjoyed her work, so who was I to judge?

Who are we to judge?

This post is not about Pangram.

The prickers (or should we call them pricks) weren’t defending the village from witches, really. They were defending their right to judge. The raging writers on Substack right now aren’t defending writing. They are defending their right to judge.

AI slop exists. There is an abundance of essays pumped out by someone who plucked a prompt off the internet and hit publish. Substack and AI will never stop the person who doesn’t care. It only disciplines the person who does. The slop-merchant shrugs and posts, while the real writer starts sanding her voice down to pass the scan. The tool (an AI one, isn’t that ironic) punishes the exact person it claims to protect.

The belief that “I bled, so you must bleed, or it doesn’t count” doesn’t give you, the writer (or me, the actor), the right to judge other people’s effort at expression.

And here’s what this post is really about.

The AI detector is the newest scanner in an old, gendered apparatus. It’s a tool that looks objective, wielded by a corporation that profits from our expression. Just like the Bodkin, it’s engineered so the mark is found because the tool was built to find it. Unfortunately, somehow, the needle always seems to land on whoever was already easiest to burn, the resourceless woman, the person of color, the neurodivergent.

This tool is the gaze that has outlasted any individual casting it upon us, and the gaze’s biggest win is that now we’ve internalized it, and we run it on ourselves.

“Am I really a witch?” (It’s true I can be a bit of a bitch)

“Is my writing any good?” (I did use AI to sort out my thought jumble)

“Am I aging well?” (I think it might be time for that Botox shot)

“Am I good at my job?” (I’d better work this weekend to prove that I’m committed)

Substack just implemented a mechanism to do out loud what women have been made to do their whole lives silently. We check ourselves for authenticity, prove we’re real, worry we’ll be flagged. The detector isn’t a new kind of surveillance. It’s an old one being cheered on by the witches who worry about your easily grown beautiful gourds.

And just like the ducking stool, the game is rigged. Write plainly, you’re flat. Write well, you’re artificial. Age, and you’ve let yourself go; intervene, and you’re fake. There is no safe place to stand, and that is the design, because a standard you could actually meet would end the surveillance, and the surveillance is the entire point. Meet the standard, and you put the self-appointed guard out of a job.

And nobody ever built a detector for the rest of it.

So here’s the truth: your exhaustion doesn’t come from being judged. It comes from the constant submitting to the judging.

Do the one thing that got women hanged in 1692. Refuse to confess. Refuse to name anyone. Step out of the water.

Do you know why I really quit acting? Not because the sparkly-eyed Minnesotan got the part. Because no auditioner was ever going to hand me a certificate that stated, even though I didn’t get the part, I deserved it more.

I’m putting it down now. This essay is me stepping out of the water.

Now stay out of my gourd patch.

Journal Prompt:

Where in your life are you still trying to prove you are authentic? And who is judging you on it?

If you want to do something more with the prompt above, the Quest is waiting in the Quest Library for paid subscribers.

Step Out of the Water — A Quest is a printable Questbook that walks you through one thing in one sitting: finding the places you run the scanner on yourself, and writing your own declaration of refusal. You leave with a page you keep. Not homework. Just fun!

Join The Society

Get your writing seen, published, and paid for.

Submit to The Story Room. Anyone can, free or paid. The best of it goes into the Magazine, and if you win, you’re paid for it: cash if you’re a paid subscriber, paid subscriber membership if you’re not. Everyone who submits gets a seat at the Salon, for the kind of conversation you’re still thinking about three days later.

Paid subscribers get a ticket to every Salon (no need to submit), paid writing opportunities, access to the archives including conversations with winning writers, plus the Quest Library and the book -The Heroine’s Guide to Designing an Extraordinary Life.

$9.95/month · $90/year

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I know the feeling, heroine! You passed the age of forty and (poof!) disappeared. We may indeed have resented only being noticed because we were a pretty young thing, but at least we could get people's attention. And I'm not just talking about the men here. Women overvalue pretty young things, too. Widespread societal beauty and age biases can unconsciously influence women’s perceptions and behaviors.1

In other words, we can be just as blind to the wise women in our presence as the men are (check yourself next time you're in a professional environment: who do you give the most credence to?)

Let me tell you a story about my experience with invisibility while doing business in China. I vividly remember the first phone call with the consultant who would help me find my Chinese suppliers. By that point, the company had moved well beyond selling the goods of US distributors. It was time to manufacture my own products and designs, but first, I had to find a factory.

"Can your husband come?" He asked.

"Sure," I answered. "But why? He's not involved in my business."

"They'll take you more seriously if you have a man with you."

And he was right.

I felt like this…

“Where’s the bloke, love?”

That trip (and the many that followed) was an eye-opener for so many reasons, but the casual sexism was rampant. I would ask a question, and the factory owner would turn and direct the reply to my husband. The factory reps (even the women) would lead my husband first through every door, hand him every sample, and defer to his lunch order before they even came to mine.

Now, as a "ballsy American chick" (which is what one of my favourite writing lecturers here in Scotland used to call me), you can imagine that this kind of treatment rubbed me the wrong way. Most of all, my invisibility hurt my ego (It’s my company, you stupid people! I started it from nothing and grew it all alone!)

But on that trip, once I got over my bruised ego, I realized that invisibility is a superpower. While my husband took care of all the hand-shaking and question asking, I could use my superpower to become the Chinese Factory stealth operator. I got to listen and watch. I inspected the factory lines, smiled at the workers to see their reactions, noted the body language of the underlings, and picked up the samples that weren't handed to me. I left my husband to answer the same basic queries we had about every factory and got to dig a heck of a lot deeper because all the attention was on him.

This concept of entrepreneurial stealth isn't just something I made up. Flying under the radar before making big moves can significantly benefit entrepreneurial endeavors.2

Okay, so you aren't currently doing business in China, but this is all still relevant to us Westerners. We are the "invisible older women." It's a fact that our society discredits women's contributions as they age.3

Do you see the magic in this? You don't have to resent being invisible. You can re-write your narrative to "I’m the stealth operator who controls my presence." You can use your superpower of invisibility when you need to fly under the radar and change the world while no one is looking, and then when you need to make people look, you can take up the space you are entitled to.

Use this week's reflection prompts to determine how you feel about your invisibility, and then use this week's reinvention steps to put you right back into action!

Narrative Shift:

Limiting belief:

I am invisible

Empowering narrative:

I’m the stealth operator who controls my presence

Reflection Prompts:

Where Does This Feel Threatening?

• When in your life does invisibility feel like it’s robbing you of validation or opportunities?

• What happens when I allow myself to take up space?

What Might You Gain from Being Unseen?

• Think of a recent situation where you felt overlooked. How could that “stealth mode” have been put to your advantage?

Are You Hiding or Being Hidden?

• Is invisibility something imposed on you, or are you unconsciously opting out of the spotlight to avoid judgment?

Reinvention Steps:

Embrace the “Fly on the Wall” Position

• Next time you’re in a meeting, social event, or family gathering, intentionally remain quiet for five minutes and just watch. Record three things you notice—facial expressions, power dynamics, or unspoken rules.

• Goal: Help you see how invisibility can be a vantage point for insights.

Reclaim Visibility on Your Terms

• Identify a situation where you usually feel silenced or overlooked (e.g., group discussions at work or with your family at work). Prepare one assertive statement, question, or input, and then activate your Mrs. Boss powers and share it.

• Goal: Demonstrate that you can turn on visibility whenever you choose.

Invisibility & Ego Work

• Ego Check: Reflect on a situation (like my factory example) where you wanted to be acknowledged but weren’t. Write down the emotional triggers (e.g., frustration, anger) and how letting go of your ego could have improved the outcome.

• Goal: Understand how to “neutralize” ego to leverage stealth advantage without feeling disrespected.

Strategic Spotlight

• Once a week, practice stepping into the spotlight in a low-risk environment. Speak up in a small meeting or volunteer for a brief presentation if you’re at work. Express your desires and opinions without hedging at home.

• Goal: Build confidence in toggling between stealth and visibility.

Check-In

• After one month, revisit your experiences. Where did invisibility empower you? When did you actively choose to be visible?

• Goal: Solidify a balanced approach: you control when to fade back, and when to claim the floor.

Worksheet Link:

Download here.

That’s a Narrative Shift. It’s free, worksheet and all.

When you’re ready for the heavier kit: every other week I publish a Quest, a full printable workbook that walks you through a whole change, start to finish. They live in The Quest Library, alongside The Story Room (live quarterly salons and a magazine that pays writers).

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When I was in my early twenties, I had one of “those” boyfriends. Let’s call him Roger. You know the type: possessive, controlling, jealous. Oh, but he was a charmer. He said all the right things at all the right times and gave me that dimpled grin from beneath his mop of curly black hair that made my insides go all gooey, so I gave in to his demands and ignored his failings.

I was the one who schlepped the grocery bags (the weight of the plastic digging red blood blisters into my wrists) from the dirty supermarket down the block, and cooked all the ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese dinners (with an occasional chicken breast bought on a credit card - yes I was that young, that poor and that stupid), because he was just about to win Street Fighter II in partnership with his buddy (let’s call him Graham) who had just spent the last week sleeping on our living room floor because he was “between apartments.” Plus, Roger was probably too stoned because he’d been smoking weed a lot since he’d been fired from his fifth job in as many weeks, and he was stressed out.

I think I’ve gotten off track here. Perhaps I have some deeply repressed feelings.

The reason I bring up said boyfriend is because after four years of supporting him and his buddies while secretly skimming the tops off my paycheck and hiding cash in a plastic bag in the pocket of an old jacket hanging in my closet, I decided to break up with him. And he said a word to me that I took to heart.

He told me I was selfish.

We were on the phone. I had taken a job upstate with a theatre company, and he had tagged along because, guess what, he didn’t have a job to hold him in the city. He got a telemarketing job and lasted less than a week before getting fired (who knows what for). Then he started hanging out at our new apartment and telling me I needed to stay home with him because he was lonely while I was trying to make new friends amongst the company I was about to work with for a year. I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, and he should go back to the city. He moved out, called me the next day, and told me I was selfish.

As I have written in past posts, Gen X girls didn’t want to be selfish. We wanted to be one of the boys, an easy girlfriend, low drama.

In other words, we weren’t supposed to actually want anything.

Now that the word “selfish” had been thrown at me once, I was terrified of hearing it again. So I adjusted. For the rest of my life.

So here we are, in midlife, realizing we’ve spent so long not wanting anything that wasn’t culturally, relationally, or familiarly approved that we’ve forgotten not just what we want, but how to want in the first place.

And here’s the cruel part: even when our estrogen levels drop into the “all out of f**ks to give” realm, and we finally hand ourselves permission to want again, permission isn’t enough. That word, selfish, did its work. One tiny desire, said out loud, still feels like one too many. We’ve given for so long that we forgot we have a self at all. And that having one was never the crime we were told it was.

I am allowed to want to leave a party if I’m tired. I am allowed to spend money on a personal trainer to improve my health. I am allowed to say no to a request if it stresses me out. I am allowed to only give my time to the people who make my life happier, and remove the people who don’t. I am allowed to lie in bed for two days and binge The Four Seasons on Netflix if I feel like it and I have the time.

You know this to be true, and so now you’ve given yourself permission to curate yourself into the person you should always have been before you gave so much of yourself away. But here’s the problem... permission alone never sticks, because no matter how many times you tell yourself that wanting something is not selfish, it still feels like it. And someone is always right there, asking that you keep on giving at the expense of your own wants.

So here’s what I’ve done lately, and maybe it will help you. I’ve created a distinction between chosen giving vs. compelled giving. It’s the same act, with an opposite root. One version might cost you a relationship or two (people don’t like it when you stop being so easy), but the other version will cost you a self.

Your boss: “Would you just take a look at this presentation over the weekend and maybe clean it up for me?”

Your friend: “I can’t go to that wedding this weekend unless you watch the kids for me. But I know it’s your anniversary.”

Your husband: “I know you don’t love golf, but I really would love to spend the day on the green with you today.”

There’s only one of these on this list that would be a chosen giving vs. a compelled giving for me. Maybe your choice is not mine; maybe you would choose more than one. That’s okay. We’re all different, but the heroine’s journey elements are the same.

There’s one enemy in this, and it’s a single inherited word: selfish. It’s the thing that turned me into a support unit running at 100%, no off switch, for the better part of my life. And there’s exactly one weapon that works against it. It’s not permission or another pep talk, but that little question: chosen or compelled? Ask it every time someone reaches for your time, and watch how fast the fog clears.

That question got me one more thing. My elixirs. Two mantras. One I repeat to myself when, against all the evidence, my interior mean girl is still insisting I’m selfish. And one I whip out for other people when I need to stand my ground. They’re the thing I carried home from all of this, and I’ll hand them to you, but here’s the catch: yours won’t be mine. You can’t borrow these. You have to go find the exact phrases that let you build a real self, slowly and carefully, out from under everyone else’s needs, the you that isn’t some messy-middle Frankenstein stitched together from what other people wanted.

You’ll find the phrases I landed on, and a quest you can finish in a single sitting, waiting in The Quest Library.

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You’re not dead! You’re just 40, or maybe 56 like me, or 65 like my friend Jenny (not her real name, I wouldn’t out a lady’s age that would be uncouth). The point is that there is no such thing as “too late.” I started over at forty-five when I sold my business and became an author, and again at 50 when I went back to school and became an academic, and again at 54 when I started this publication. I plan on starting over every few years until I’m really most sincerely dead.

Martha Stewart didn’t quit her stockbroker career and become Martha Stewart until she was in her late forties. (Although perhaps she should have stopped trading stocks altogether. Ouch.)

Susan Boyle became an international superstar singer at 48 after appearing on Britain's Got Talent. Before entering the competition, she’d lived a quiet life in Scotland, working as a church volunteer and living with her mother.

At age 64, Diana Nyad became the first to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. She’d failed several times but never quit, becoming an international symbol of resilience and determination.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series, published her first book at 65. She had spent much of her earlier years farming, teaching, and writing short stories.

Are you really most sincerely dead?

No?

Well, then, it’s time to re-write this narrative.

Limiting belief:

"It’s too late to start over."

Empowering narrative:

“Midlife is my second act, and I get to write it.”

Reflection Prompts:

You freakin’ get to write it!! So start thinking about what comes next.

• Are there any dreams you had that you let go of due to your other responsibilities?

• Why did I stop believing my dreams were possible?

• What if it were easy to start? What would pursuing this dream look like if there were no limits?

Reinvention Steps:

The point is… It IS easy to start. You may realize your dream, or you may not, but the goal is not the point of a journey. The journey is the adventure and will bring you an abundance of elixirs and rewards.

Maybe you won’t make the NYT Best Seller. But you will rediscover the joy of writing.

Maybe you won’t make a million dollars with your new business. But you can still celebrate that first dollar going into your bank account.

Maybe you won’t meet your soulmate. But you can still enjoy the company of others and collect brilliant dating stories.

• Step One: I’m gonna make you write, but don’t worry, no one will see it but you. Write the story of what your week looks like five years from now. Don’t write a story of what you think you can achieve. Write a story of achievement beyond your wildest dreams. Read that story every morning.

• Step Two: Pick one thing to start. Write down the first thing you would need to do to step out on that journey and do it this week. Doing creates momentum.

Worksheet Link:

Find it here.

That’s a Narrative Shift. It’s free, worksheet and all.

When you’re ready for the heavier kit: every other week I publish a Quest, a full printable workbook that walks you through a whole change, start to finish. They live in The Quest Library, alongside The Story Room (live quarterly salons and a magazine that pays writers).

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Do you ever feel like your life is stuck in a monotonous loop, where each day is a carbon copy of the last?

It’s as if there's an author out there who wrote your life story, and they've screwed up the plot?

Life is drudgery when it's only a series of "and thens."

Before the day I found myself leaping from the tailgate of a sinking car onto the edge of a steep, icy embankment, my life was a series of "and thens".

You know how it goes. My story was probably, at one point, your story…

I woke up in the morning, and then I got showered and dressed, and then I got the baby up and fed and dressed, and then I made my husband his packed lunch, and then I dropped the baby at daycare, and then I drove an hour and a half to work, and then I worked all day in a cubicle, and then I drove home and hour and a half, and then I picked the baby up at daycare, and then I tried to squeeze in quality baby time (which I desperately wanted), and then I made dinner, and then I put the baby to bed, and then I sat down with a glass of wine, and then I listened to my husband complain about his work, and then I went to bed, and then, I did it all over again.

I didn't know I needed to hire a new author for a complete rewrite, and I certainly didn't expect it to be me.

You see, my heroine, every good story needs change and a dash of conflict. Humanity thrives on the excitement and growth of navigating challenges and making deliberate decisions. Without change or conflict, you don't have a story. You only have a snooze-worthy list of things happening. It's like hopping onto the C train by mistake only to realize you're on a snail-paced, tedious tour of every single local stop. You've missed the A train express ride to JFK and your next adventure.

The issue isn’t what’s happening but HOW it's happening. Most budding authors know the start and end of a story but get confused and stymied when attempting to craft the middle.

Are you lost in your mucky middle?

Have you strung together events with the words “and then” and turned your thrilling tale into a laundry list?

The structure of a story holds countless secrets we can use to improve our lives. If I were an author writing a story, and I wanted that story to change the main character, as well as excite and thrill outside observers, I would banish all those "and thens" and replace them with "buts" and "therefores."

This tiny tweak can revolutionize your narrative, but especially your life. Because the best stories aren't told; they're experienced.

Don't you want to shake up your mucky middle?

Let's rewind the tape and reimagine my life before that icy plunge into enlightenment...

I woke up in the morning, but before I got showered and dressed, I carved out an hour to play with the baby. Therefore, my husband would get up an hour early to feed and dress the baby while I got ready for work. But, less time also meant I couldn't make my husband's lunch. Therefore, we made a deal to spend a few hours every Sunday afternoon batch cooking and make it a fun event for the family. But, I was still unhappy with the length of my commute. Therefore, we carved out time for me to look for a job closer to home, giving me more time with the baby. But, my husband was still unhappy with his job and I realized I was unhappy with my husband, therefore, we made plans to attend counseling together. Etc...

Now, it's true, maybe you don't want a roller coaster of a life. Maybe you want a nice and easy stroll in the park. But ladies, does the park have to be so dull?

Check this out...

I went to the park, and then I walked my usual route, and then I sat on a bench to rest, and then I went home.

Or it could be...

I went to the park, but I started at Strawberry Fields. Therefore, I stood and listened to a hippie playing a hauntingly beautiful version of "Give Peace a Chance." But I noticed an ice cream van just off my usual route. Therefore, I treated myself to an enormous soft-serve. But the bench I usually sit on was full. Therefore, I walked while I ate my ice cream, but it was melting. Therefore, I called over a dog named Buster, whose owner took a photo of him licking soft-serve from my fingertips.

We stick to the "and then" life because it's easy, familiar, and doesn't challenge our status quo. But just as we do in stories, in life, we crave tension, surprise, and resolution, even if it's only during a gentle walk in the park.

I need to scream from the rooftops here. There's nothing wrong with wanting a quiet, familiar, comfortable life. For many of you, that is the perfect extraordinary life.

But, you can still live a comfortable life infused with the authorly/readerly satisfaction of conflict and resolution by focusing on making choices. Maybe your conflict is whether you should have a soft-serve or sorbet, or maybe you can't sit on the bench you usually do, so you have to choose somewhere else. Therefore, you will add interest, engagement, and a little more spark to your life. (See what I did there?)

Picture you, the main character, on the edge of your seat. You are totally and completely engaged in even the tiniest moments of your gorgeous existence and always hungry for the next twist. All because you dared to embrace conflict and resolution and began authoring your own epic adventure.

I'm not advocating a barrage of fireworks here (although I am cheering you on if you want to burst like a phoenix into the night sky). I'm only suggesting you consider lighting a sparkler every once in a while. They’re fun.

And, unlike me, you can start on this today. You don't even need to have a near-death experience!

The prompt is the question. The Quest is the answer.

This week’s prompt hands you the move. The Quest, Plot Your Mucky Middle, is the printable workbook that walks you all the way through it: name the “and then” loop you’re stuck in, meet your two new allies (But & Therefore), and rewrite a real stretch of your life into a story you’d actually want to read. One sitting. Yours to keep.

It lives in The Quest Library, with every Quest — open to members of The Society.

JOURNAL PROMPT:

List the events of yesterday or your plan for today. Where do you see a cluster of "and thens"? Introduce a conflict or a choice by inserting the word "but." What can you throw in your path today to wake yourself up, add some pizazz, or yank you out of your mucky middle? What might have happened if you had lived that "but" yesterday? What happens after the "buts" you’ve inserted today? Is your life a little more interesting? A little more in your control? A little more extraordinary? A little more "yours"?

Join The Society

Get your writing seen, worked, published, and paid for.

The Story Room. Paid subscribers are invited to the quarterly Salon — 90 minutes with the featured writers and the women in this room (you included). It’s the kind of conversation you’ll still be thinking about three days later. Plus all recordings — and the Magazine, where the best work is published and the writers are paid.

The Quests. Every week, the printable workbook that turns the free prompt into action. Plus the full Quest Library, every Quest yours to keep.

$9.95/month · $90/year

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You have two more weeks to submit to The Story Room Salon & Magazine. Winning submissions are paid and every submission is compensated with a free Salon ticket.
You can submit here.

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.

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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.

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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 →

Subscribe now

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

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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.

Here’s how I can help…

Join me as a paid subscriber.
Get full access to the Heroine’s Adventure course ($495 value), free Questbooks ($19.95 each value), and secret insider posts that don’t go to the general feed. The work, unfiltered.

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.
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.

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?

Here’s how I can help…

Join me as a paid subscriber.
Get full access to the Heroine’s Adventure course ($495 value), free Questbooks ($19.95 each value), and secret insider posts that don’t go to the general feed. The work, unfiltered.

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.
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.