There’s something I didn’t realize about writing memoir.

Especially when the story isn’t pretty.

Sustained dark corners and fears come to life.

It’s not just a moment or a chapter,

It’s a season of life that required endurance.

Writing it means going back into it,

sitting with it, letting the reel play in your mind until it’s unraveled and lying on the floor, messy at your feet.
I don’t write it as the person who survived it,
but as the person who has to bring it into sharp clarity.

Let others see themselves reflected, even painfully.

Asking for hope, strength.

It’s different than what I thought.

It’s not storytelling, it’s hard evaluation.

It’s deep reckoning.

When you’re living it, your mind guards you.
It makes sense of things.

Shows you the path through.

Writing removes the protection.

It’s split wide open, the chasm of deep, dark suppression.

You pluck scenes one by one, dropping them onto the page.

Feeling them, processing them, bleeding them.

You don’t get to skip over what didn’t make sense.
You don’t get to reframe it and lighten the heaviness.

You have to sit silently with it.
Call its name.
Let it be what it was.

Let you be who you were.

You do not judge her, the girl trying to figure it out.

She’s you but she’s not.

When abuse was part of that story
Not fists on flesh but the whispering, sustained kind,
that process takes something out of you.

You feel it in your body.
In your energy.
In the way you have to step away after writing truth.

Reach for the arms that never harmed you.

Breathe in the life that you’ve made in spite of.

I’m learning there’s something so sacred about it.

I didn’t start writing again to write this memoir.

It was a tug at the edges,

confirmation, recognition in the stories of friends.

For the first time,
I’m not surviving it.

I’m witnessing it.

And telling the truth about it
without needing anyone else to confirm it was real.

She existed,

and she survived.

Paris wasn’t supposed to be our kind of trip, traditionally.

Raised in Florida and Arizona, respectively, we were held close.

Safe.

Vacations that involved a road trip, maybe some beach.

Sporadically.

Our families never flew across oceans or engaged with other languages, unless they were at war (shout out our late WW2 Army grandfathers!)

So the thought of leaving the familiar, crossing the ocean felt, well, foreign.

It was intimidating and big and seemingly SO RISKY.

and also, as it turns out, magical.

I liked myself better in Paris.

We went for a “trip” and instead I found a version of myself who had been there all along, waiting, crushed under the weight of responsibility and ambition, American labor, American hustle.

That goddamned exhausting American Hustle.

It was disorienting to step into a softer, chic life.

A luxuriating life.

Had I ever truly luxuriated in my LIFE?

I thought not.

Taking time to turning our black and white bistro chairs toward the busy street, sun streaks bouncing on cobblestone, sipping lattes that settled easily on our systems, felt so upscale.

Unhurried.

The aberrant arrondissements never felt rushed, instead they held a casual presence, inviting a slow encountering.

The buildings loomed, existing before our entire country,

with balconets and wrought iron balustrades beckoning a life of pain au chocolat

fingertips stained with ink

and sharp little taps on a vintage typewriter.

Oh, how I wish.

We never felt pulled.

We ate the most delicious prime rib at a brasserie, voices around us murmuring late into the evening.

Dinner, 9pm.

Pastries at Louis Vuitton (and a scarf for me).

The Louvre, being wholly disappointed by the Mona Lisa yet stunned by the Victoire de Samothrace, her wings impossibly detailed, commanding.

The Venus de Milo.

The delicate, excessive trinkets of my girl Marie Antoinette.

A gleaming silver watch for my husband at Bucherer.

Crepes for breakfast at Aux Ducs de Bourgogne.

Croissants at Brasserie Pastis.

Du jus d’orange, fresh squeezed.

No one needed anything from me there.

Not my time, my medical opinion, my energy.

I wasn’t solving anything.

I wasn’t anticipating anything.

I wasn’t scanning.

I could just… exist in my body.

We sat in cafés longer than necessary, bought homemade soaps with Parisian stamps.

We noticed everything.

Observed, smelled, tasted, heard, felt…everything.

And then there was Shakespeare and Company.

It felt sacred, the scent of old books.

Layers of dust, of other lives lived.

Crowded with teetering stacks, it felt like home.

Shelves that were unmatched, wooden benches worn with age.

Small, narrow beds that housed who George Whitman called the tumbleweeds. Writers, drifting in to be inspired; sleeping among the books to absorb, think, write what their souls dictated, then moving on.

Out the second floor window, above the old typewriter on an even older desk, the Notre Dame.

This is life, I thought. This is what it really is, and this is who I really am.

A tumbleweed. Someone who would have taken the promise to read a book a day, help in the store and leave behind a piece of myself in writing.

People come to become in Paris, I could see that now.

I hadn’t been writing then.

Not in several years.

That part of me, though I thought about it every day without end, had dissolved with obligation and enterprise.

But in Paris, I bumped into myself between the dusty, overstuffed bookshelves.

“There you are,” she said tenderly, “I’ve been waiting for you to come back”.

I was coming back to a place I’d never been, and somehow it made perfect sense.

Now, when the restless urge to write crests inside me,

I know exactly where to go.

Search: Paris bookstore ambience.

Maybe the 1800’s.

37 Rue de la Bucherie, s’il te plait.

It may only be YouTube, but I go back.

I feel her again, that version of me.

No rushing, no performing, no deadline.

That’s where I met her.

In a bookstore.

In the City of Lights.

In a city I almost didn’t go to.

In a life I almost missed.

The problem with Paris is that you eventually have to leave.

But you never really do.

Not if you know where to find her.

Before Substack, before I knew how to tell the truth without shivering, I was finding my writing voice in my beloved blogs.

It’s always been there, my propensity for prolific, maybe a little scandalous,—definitely gut-punchy—storytelling. (Also, you will have to pry my em-dashes from my cold, lifeless hands. Leave me alone, this is my stream of consciousness, not AI).

I wrote a book about a girl whose parents divorced and the fallout when I was in 4th grade.

Were my parents divorced? No.

I wrote a book about a young teenager being assaulted when I was in 6th grade and when my mother found it, did she think it was about me, and did I get grounded for writing?

Yes.

Am I GenX and was I reading Stephen king with wild abandon by the time I was 10?

Also yes.

After then and before now, I was blogging away. Spilling guts on the keyboard, tossing darts at the necks of some deserving folk.

Then I went to grad school, while raising a blended family of seven, working, learning a new career with a shitload of liability and—oh yeah—all done through a global pandemic.

Writing screeched to a dead halt, and yet I thought about it Every. Single. Day.

Looking back on my writing, I can see now what I didn’t yet understand.

But I left them as they were.

Below are my previous published/widely circulated posts from a decade ago.

How I’ve missed her, and how we’ve grown.

→ My Minister Husband Had a Second Family I Didn’t Know About

An earlier, condensed version of a story I’m now telling, before I unraveled it all and realized how deep it actually went
https://www.sheknows.com/health-and-wellness/articles/1130197/minister-husband-cheating/

→ A Letter to My Kids’ Stepmom

Written when I was still trying to be gracious in a situation that didn’t deserve it (also published on SheKnows)
https://hercynfulthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-letter-to-my-kids-new-stepmom.html?m=1

→ Why It’s More Than Just a Game

A glimpse of what Chicago sports—and a Game 7—means to a family. Widely circulated in Chicago sports media, November 2, 2016.
https://hercynfulthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/11/why-its-more-than-just-game-today.html

I thought I was writing the story then, but, truth be told, I was writing around the story.

Now, circumstances have changed, children have grown to adulthood, age 50 is here and beckoning for the wide open truth and the constructs that shaped it.

That version of me believed she was telling the truth.

She had no idea what was coming.

There was a time in my life where a good day looked very, very different.

A good day meant:

No one was upset with me.

The church food pantry had some staples.

There was still $60 in the account, so I could get gas.

I got three hours of sleep after work.

I was able to tuck my babies in and not working overnight in the emergency room.

He wasn’t texting her today. Or her.

I kept it to 500 calories on Medifast for the day.

A hearty meal waited for him.

I wanted a bite. I did not take one.

He said “pretty good” instead of “it’s alright”.

No one died in front of me at work that day.

I didn’t have to go to church twice that day.

Or teach the women’s class after night shift.

I could watch an “approved” show.

I could ignore the feeling of wanting to be someone else.

Maybe I could sneak in a chapter of Twilight after he fell asleep.

Back then, life was about performance.

Pleasing. Flying under the radar. Keeping the peace.

A good day at 35 meant he was happy.

—

Now?

A good day means I wake up to the love of my life.

He brings me Starbucks.

The only her is me.

I gossip with my adult daughter in our kitchen for an hour.

My son texts that he got the job and I cry.

My 50 year old body is strong. Capable. Healthy.

I write from my soul.

I download boarding passes.

I eat 1500 calories, high protein and unprocessed, without punishment.

I can say no

and “I’m not interested”

and fuck off when I want.

I feel validated as a human.

I feel joy in the simple things-

My husband’s arms.
A hot bath.
The good makeup.
My Kindle.
My house.
My cozy couch.
My minky blankets.
The freedom to watch, read, and say what I want.

Life is about presence now. My presence.

My taking up of space.

I’m the someone else now.

At 35, a good day meant that I kept someone else happy.

At 50, it means I am.

I have never loved the desert.

I have tried to assimilate, I promise.

To appreciate the rising mountains that everyone here posts wistfully on social media. The famed sunsets, streaked in rose and peach across a sky that feels endless. The winters that are “mild,” cool and dry instead of bristling with wind and snow.

As a little girl, I tried to adapt too.

I missed the family I loved. The green trees. The drifted snow along Wilson Avenue in Wheaton, Illinois. Seasons that changed the story, as time moved forward. I didn’t understand why everything familiar had been replaced with rocks and heat and silence.

So I learned the terrain.

There was a fort in the open desert across the street that a woman once hid in from her abusive husband. When she left, I took it over. It was shaped like a crude igloo, woven from brambles and broken cacti, the desert version of shelter. My dad bought freeze-dried rations from the Army Surplus store and we’d play house in that brittle hut, pretending survival was merely an adventure.

I poked at dead coyotes with sticks to see if they would move. I put my jack-o-lantern on a rock across the street on November 1st and watched it rot in the sun over the next several days until the animals dragged it away.

I played in the concrete underpass that connected Arizona to Nevada while cars passed overhead, pointed toward dreams of Las Vegas. I understood the desire to escape. It was born in me then.

Once we moved fully into the desert, I became an independent child. Few neighbors. Homes spaced far apart. No one my age. Long stretches of quiet. I learned to occupy myself, to find escape in books. To appreciate my own company. To create interior worlds when the exterior one didn’t feel like mine.

The desert didn’t cradle me, enamor me.

It hardened me.

I’ve admired its resilience, the way the saguaros stand strong, parched, in oppressive heat. I’ve watched the sunsets fall in shades of blush and lavender across the mountains and wondered if it was enough. There is drama here. There is strength here. There is beauty if you look for it. It takes a lot to live here, to endure the landscape.

But admiration is not the same thing as belonging.

The desert is harsh and exposed. It will remind you of its power when you try and hike a trail after March. It bends for no one. The sun is unforgiving, a reminder of our smallness.

And for much of my life here, endurance was exactly what I was doing.

This place holds chapters of survival. It holds the exquisite pain of having to rebuild a life for my children. Of signing divorce papers. Understanding the finality of choices that were made. Of the tender early days after I left home in the hot anger of young adulthood, vowing not to return to the small town that raised me. It holds the pure exhaustion of working nights in the emergency room and going home to stay up with my sweet toddler girl all day while I supported someone else’s dream. I sacrificed years of sleep and health for it. Years of learning how to stay upright in my life without allowing the crumbling walls to crush me.

The very landscape mirrors that life. No adequate shade, no relief. No seasons that keep the story changing enough to be hopeful. Just intensity. Exposure. An unrelenting requirement to be strong.

My soul has never felt at rest here.

And yet — my children grew under this relentless sky. My son’s first cry came in this valley, the day that made me a mother and expanded my heart in a way I’d never known. Their laughter filled the rooms of our homes scattered across the Valley, in phases. I met my future here. My husband John. The steady ground beneath my feet. We met not in ease, but in the aftermath of everything that had already burned down. Wounded. Recovering. Hopeful. Five children between us needing the earth to feel solid beneath their tender lives again. We began again here. There are the most sacred pieces of my life rooted in this ground.

That’s the complicated truth of a place: it can hold your deepest ache and your most sacred joy at the same time.

But loving parts of a life does not mean the landscape itself ever felt like home.

Some places feel like exhale; your jaw unclenches, your shoulders drop. Breath feels open and full and healing. Air that moves through you and not against you. Like seasons that softly change and remind you that nothing has to stay the same forever.

Arizona has never been that for me.

Standing above it now, seeing the landscape spread beneath me, stark, dusty and unkind, I don’t feel anger. I feel awareness. I can acknowledge what it gave me: resilience, clarity, the kind of strength you only earn by surviving what you never wanted to have to survive.

But resilience was never my goal.

Turning 50 has made something in me sharper and more clear at the same time. The years ahead don’t feel endless anymore; there is an appreciation for the quiet ticking of an invisible clock. It ticks louder as time marches on; not in a frightening way, but in a tender one. Even here, in this barren desert, time is moving. It’s in my children navigating the same young adulthood I struggled through here. Quiet tears soaking my pillow at night knowing I’ll never tuck them in again. I’m supporting cast, and my life begins and ends with me, the person. The woman. The mortal being. It’s the quiet aging of parents and a true understanding what the sandwich generation really means. The strong body, the sharp mind, the energy I take for granted won’t last forever. Time feels precious. It feels worth inhabiting fully.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bracing for the next season of survival.

I want to see what softens me.

I think I’m finally ready to see what will hold me.

Life is full, joyful, busy these days, but the fact that when it’s a particular family member’s birthday, trauma revisits; it shows that anniversaries are peculiar in that way. “The body remembers”. Yes, it does. I wish this event hadn’t coincided with a birth in my extended family, because each year, thumbing open the party invitation, the blood drains from me and the familiar chills scatter over my arms. I am alert, vigilant. Angry. Sensing that harm is closer than I want it to be.

I won’t tell the story in full because the privacy of little people will always be more important than the adults that fail them. Some details belong to the people who survive them. The impact though? That’s mine.

A false, presumptive allegation was made. Authorities looped in. Emergency court processes during an already contentious battle. Questioning commenced that should never have to happen when the truth is known deep in the bones. But that doesn’t matter.

The system does not prepare your nervous system for that kind of violence. Rage seeps into every crevice of your life in the same way innocence is forced to answer horrific questions simply because someone wanted to “win”. There is no manual for how to hold children steady when the world around them has lost its fucking mind. There is no fairness when someone else’s instability impacts the stability you’ve carefully crafted.

What came to light, shortly thereafter, was not just absolute exoneration, but horror. The danger had never been where the accusation pointed. The next year, the truth was reframed and relief from this situation could not touch the appalling reality. The call, as they say, was coming from inside the house.

There is no celebration when truth comes late. Too late for backpedaling; just a quiet reckoning with how much damage a person can cause along the way.

This year, marking a decade, the anniversary feels sharper at the edges. With the release of the Epstein files, there’s rawness in the cultural air again. Old stories pushed harshly into the open, long-buried truth clashing against the present. The exposure of complicity. Denial stripped to the studs and unable to hide. When the world announces the truth out loud, old lies are exhumed from their rotted, dusty coffins and tossed above the corroding earth, for all to witness. The scars, still fleshy, are slashed open.

It makes me consider belief. The necessity of it, but also the bubbling danger that can accompany it, when it is collectively treated as untouchable.

I’m a girl’s girl; or maybe a woman’s woman. I treat women in practice every day. I listen. I empathize. Hearing them fills my soul. I believe women have been silenced, dismissed, punished for centuries, simply in telling the truth. With abhorrent results. Shame. The court of public opinion shouting their GUILTY loudly, without due process. Women deserve safety and to be believed.

At the same time, belief is not immunity.

And womanhood is not a shield of morality.

There’s a version of feminism that asks us to understand, forgive and contextualize everything. I don’t subscribe to this version. Pain experienced in my life has occurred far more often with a woman holding the knife, baring teeth, biting through flesh with words. Compassion without accountability is bullshit and recompense is not just for men. Feminism that cannot tolerate responsibility is not liberating, it invites that dirty word again: complicity.

I believe in protecting women, but when put in opposition with the protection of children, I will choose children, most especially mine, every. fucking. time.

I may be asked why I can’t “let it go”. Why don’t I soften the edges with my forgiveness? Especially in the subcircles of society that involve Christianity. Fact: some harms aren’t going to dilute in the solvent of forgiveness. Some harms stay rock steady, impenetrable, turning into boundaries and vigilance.

This will not happen again.

That experience changed me. I learned how easily the system can be weaponized; how truth can be buried under narcissism and bullshit narrative. How dangerous it is when accusations are confused with virtue. I learned that the most devastating damage often comes from those who know how to speak and twist the language of innocence, even cloaked in the scrupulosity of a mandated reporter.

I still believe women deserve to be believed. I just no longer think belief should be unconditional.

Some stories don’t require details to be devastatingly true.

This one certainly doesn’t.

I’m scared of fading.

Of being the woman in the room everyone hears but doesn’t really hear because she’s suddenly irrelevant.

When the calendar flipped to fifty, did it change everything?

Did something quietly shift—my face card, my gravity, the way a room responds to me?

I’m tired of hearing about wisdom.

I liked heads turning when I walked into a room. I liked phone numbers slipped to me onto scraps of paper in the nineties. I liked presenting as the whole package—pretty, smart, funny, I was told. Listen to her. She must know things. She commands space.

They thought I was born with it.

They didn’t see the obsession with calories. The money spent on good makeup. Slathering my hips and thighs in Vaseline and sleeping wrapped in Saran Wrap to wake up willowy (note: didn’t work). They didn’t see the cabbage soup or the ExLax.

Some of it was beauty’s birthright. “Good genes”, they say. Some of it was effort.

All of it was me; wanting to be seen. Wanting to take up space.

And I did.

But is she gone now?

Does fifty mean I’ve become background noise; something felt more than noticed? A movement in the curtains that makes someone wonder if anyone’s there at all?

What the fuck does fifty mean?

I know that ripping a tiny square piece of paper off of a calendar doesn’t change my self worth. Or does it?

Is it really what society is telling me or is it what I’m telling myself?

What do I actually want?

Because I feel like a walking contradiction.

Skincare. Forehead Botox. Lifting heavy. Good hair. Hormones. Keeping up with clothing trends. Loving that I look younger than I am.

And also craving quiet. Wanting to flick ambition out the window like a stubby, used cigarette. Adding caftans and new books to the Amazon cart. Falling down rabbit holes of Victorian women and their ethereal spookiness and wanting people to wonder if I’m a witch or just a woman who is done pretending.

Look at me! I’m still cute and fierce! And in the right minimizer tight-as-fuck bra my tits are still great!

But also don’t look at my tits. I just want to wear my cozy sweatshirt and a pair of Uggs, have a pound of Brookside dark chocolate and a book where someone definitely gets murdered.

I want you to absorb every word I write.

And also maybe don’t, because part of me wants to stay hidden.

And then I wonder, what if the answer isn’t choosing one or the other? Choosing between that girl and the soft, creative woman I am becoming?

What if I get to be both?

As much or as little as I want.

Salty, vibrant, spirited one day.

Private, woven softly with introspection the next.

Wearing wisdom like a body-con dress, in a body-con dress.

Maybe heads still turn as she moves through a room; not asking for permission.

Maybe she’s not apologizing for her presence.

Maybe she’s observing it. Owning it.

Gucci Flora wafts softly through the curtains, announcing her arrival.

She’s no ghost.

She’s an icon.

She is fifty.

And maybe, she gets to decide when-and how-she’s seen.

It is late October, the premise of spooky season heavy in the cooling air. Our orange and purple lights dance in the yard among the plastic skeletons. The ghosts projected onto the garage swirl and smile at goers-by. Jack-o-lanterns sit smugly at the doorstep with toothy grins.

And then there are the witches. The nod to traditional Halloween, pointy hats, victorian-era black. Broomsticks. Fables. Practical Magic. We clutch the sticky little hands of our offspring, guiding to neighbor’s homes in search of melted chocolate, sour worms.

But the air still hangs with their names. The heaviness of their spirits churns through our veins, reminding us. Most of us don’t know them by name, but we’ve heard whispers of the lore. The inaccuracies of witches burning; of stakes and smoke and galleries of chanting Puritans. We walk through every day, in the year of our Lord 2025, calling ourselves free. Pious, grateful, ambitious.

But are we?

Or are we living parallel lives to Sarah, to Goody Ann, to Rebecca, just with wifi?

Are we Sarah Good? Have the injustices we’ve experienced in our pasts settled hard in our weakening bones, making us “unpleasant”? Have we, or do we know someone whose husband pointed accusingly from his pedestal, listing his unmet expectations of his broken wife in court? Have we admonished the children of others for poor behavior? Stood up for ourselves against slanderous lies? If we’ve been reactive, are we accused of unrighteous anger, or, perhaps jealousy?

Sarah was hung.

Are we Goody Ann Glover? Have we skipped church or social gatherings at any time, when waves of depression washed over us, withdrawn from society for a time? Have we allowed the strong, steady hands of a man we weren’t married to draw our petticoats to our waists in a lush, dark room and allowed him to devour our entire, willing selves? Survived tragedy, battled grief and needed to be reminded of the power of our own femininity? Are we each able to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a foreign tongue without error, lest we die?

Goody was hung.

Are we Rebecca Nurse? Have we had a dispute with another and some time later, coincidentally they experienced tragedy, heartbreak? Have we been unceremoniously kicked when we’re down? Talked about behind the cutting backs of other women? Have we been on the receiving end of harsh rumor? Feeling hot tears fall and our self-esteem evaporate until we become ghosts? Even when we’ve given our best, our hearts, made martyrs of ourselves in the name of codependency?

Rebecca was hung.

The Invisible Hanging

We like to believe we’ve evolved past the gallows. That the noose that tightened around Victorian necks, shaming, blaming, silencing, was buried with the Puritanical system. But women are still hung, just differently now. No longer by rope, but by reputation. By silence. By the ridiculous lack of funding for women’s health. By the erasure of “women of a certain age”, their withering youth dissolving their identity until they too, become ghosts, shells, insignificant. By the invisible expectation that tightens around our throats each time we speak in spaces we aren’t traditionally welcome. If we speak through trembling voices to say “not anymore”.

Last week I was called both a cunt and a prostitute. In SPORTS comment sections.

Intelligent commentary mixed with long, blond hair and a confident profile picture will invite all the snarling accusers.

Don’t let her be confident! A blond broke up with me in 1997 and I still have hateful insecurity at my core!

In younger years, this would be wounding. I would make ample room for erasure. Shrink. It happens as the calendar turns to a half-century and relevance seemingly wanes. It happened in the first-lady seat at church, in a marriage peppered with splintering sin, in size 14 jeans, in pregnant abandonment, in college classrooms, in high school hallways overripe and stinking with rumor.

The knots progressively tightening. My breathing cut to a desperate whisper.

But now, the incantations come. They roll from my tongue, my spirit, my fortitude that was built brick by brick, on the dusty, crumbled backs of our Salem sisters.

The Incantations

To the woman told to quiet down: May your voice be loud enough to wake the sleeping saints.

To the woman reminded to smile: May your resting face be part of your revolution.

To the woman called difficult, demanding, too ambitious: May your standards be the very spell that saves you.

To the woman whose worth was measured in her demanded softness: May your edges slice through all expectation.

To the woman who stopped believing in miracles: May you remember that you ARE one.

To the woman who left the church but maintains her faith: May you meet with God in the stillness of nature, in your own laughter, in the longevity He’s provided you.

To the woman who buried versions of herself in the name of peace: May you dig her up, shake the dust and watch it settle in the October moonlight.

To the woman hung in whispers, group chats, socials, in silence: May you cut yourself free and never again ask permission to save yourself.

The Gallows

The gallows are gone, but if we listen, we can hear the creaking of the splintering wood beneath our bare feet. The weight of centuries on a single, trembling plank. The same structure that silenced Sarah, Goody Ann and Rebecca stands in subtlety now: the meetings where your ideas are used for gain of others, the gatherings where your truth makes the listener shift uncomfortably, the online pyre of public judgment flickering with every nasty comment.

Tonight, under this October moon, I reach for your hand and invite you to step down.

Let our bare feet touch the earth. Let us untie one another’s ropes; the ropes that were never ours to wear. Feel the air return to our lungs, the crispness of the season shifting against our skin, the sound of our own names rising from our throats. Let the ghosts of those women, and the generations whose blood still runs through us, walk beside us, whispering: finish what we started.

We are not the witches they hung.
We are the daughters who survived.
We are the whispers that rose from the gallows and will remember.

I sit here in a Tennessee hotel room, the lush green of Chattanooga surrounding, noting the slivers of yellow poking from the tips of leaves outside the window. It’s September now. Autumn is gently prying open the door, asking quietly, “Is it my turn?”, while light is gently slipping into hills earlier by day. After a summer full of brightness, a cacophony of laughter echoing from backyard pools, strong breezes tinged with smoking meats and coconut sunscreen, the quiet is coming. The inwardness. The soft knit of blankets on laps, warm mugs in hand, football’s joy on the screen. September has a way of tilting the sun just enough that everything feels softer, more golden, more fleeting. Autumn asks us to slow down, to notice the lengthening of shadows, to take notice of crispness in the air that wasn’t there yesterday.

I feel this shift within myself, as the months wane to the one in the dead of winter when I will delicately lick my fingertip and turn the page to 50.

This shift. It’s been creeping up on me, stalking me, really, over the past year. The sheer bandwidth I once had to juggle chaos, noise, and endless demands has thinned with the Tennessee daylight. What used to challenge me, even inspire me, clings to me like damp leaves. Wet, heavy, uncomfortable. I sit with it, counting the moments until I can peel off the dampness and step into quiet warmth. What I once powered through with vigor now feels impossible.

I note the craving to retreat; to disappear inward, to allow access to my abating energy on a limited basis, reserved for those who love well, sit with me, return kindnesses and gentle truths.

I’ve attempted, for the first time, to treat myself with gentleness and compassion. She has been the last one to receive it for so many years. And isn’t that just our way as women in the world? Push, fulfill, anticipate, fix, arrange, create, perform. As I’ve continued to grow in knowledge with an obsessive focus on midlife medicine, I’ve accepted a universal truth: this isn’t a midlife crisis. This isn’t a mood. This is earth-given, God-given, science-given biology, as real as the lush carpet under my feet.

Do you feel that? The changing of the air, the changing of your spirit? Your autumn has come, crisply and unrelentingly, begging for your eyes to turn upon her, upon YOURSELF, and turn back to her. It’s not imaginary, it’s beautifully scientific.

As our estrogen and progesterone ebb, our nervous system follows suit. The shell splinters, microscopically at first, tiny cracks fissuring through, almost imperceptibly. Softening the resolute edges that have held strong for decades. These hormones were our darling buffers, going before us in battle, waging on our behalf, shoring up the defenses without question. They steadied our heartbeat, they softened cortisol’s viperous blows. They provided resilience, strength, resolve to remind ourselves, falling into our warm beds at night, that we can do it all again tomorrow. As they wane, or vacillate wildly, the same demands that once skittered across the surface now sink deeper, heavy and insistent.

As time marches on, pulling us deep into our 40’s, the research shouts to us that we release more cortisol in response to stress than we did in the days of tucking our sweet, squish-face littles into bed. Than when we stayed out at the college bar too late and swiftly rebounded to make that 8am class. Than when the calendar flipped from 39 to 40 and we thought THAT was it. The stress itself hasn’t grown itself, typically, but the reaching tendrils of it dig deeper, creating these new, foreign bodies to respond as though it has. What was once a softly yellowing leaf fluttering to the ground is now the tree, splitting under pressure and bending to the earth.

I feel this settle in my bones, and I see it in theirs. Woman after woman sits across from me with the same trembling heartbreak: what were once fleeting annoyances now burrow, sting, unrelenting. Their eyes reflect the same exhaustion, the same longing. Their autumn is here. I sit with them in this.

And so I return to my first love: words. Writing as my refuge, as reclamation, as the place I feel most at home. This is the part of midlife I long to lean into now: the gentle quiet, the creativity, the luxuriant expression that makes my heart feel full. Just as biology calls out to us, pleadingly, lovingly, to honor her and shed what doesn’t serve us, I softly put down what drains me. Not angrily, and not with disdain. The damp, heavy leaves have served their purpose. Aching to be noticed, accepted, then silently shed. We have such a short time in this life, so our bodies gently warn us that autumn has arrived. We can pull out our chunky knit blankets and welcome her, or we can barrel through endless, unforgiving summer. I’m ready for my autumn. As writing is where I feel most at home, it’s where I’ll be meeting you.

The leaves do not fall because the tree is dying, but because it’s creating space. Leaving what no longer belongs. Shedding what no longer serves. I have pared back my limbs, not disappearing but finally appearing; stepping to the front, into my thick, soft sweatshirts of life, unwilling to pour my peace on the hardening ground. I choose quiet over chaos, gentleness over performance, writing over noise.

If you feel this, perhaps your autumn has come. Maybe it’s calling out to you, not in reprimand but in aching love, to ask you, “What will you shed in order to grow again? Isn’t it time, not to go back to an old version of you but lean willingly into your becoming?”

I’m listening.