I write about what nobody tells you when life falls apart
A Little Background
I've been writing for most of my adult life. But the writing that matters most to me started when my life fell apart in a way I couldn't think or control my way out of.
My first husband died a year after he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. I was 44 years old, a solo parent to two kids ages 8 and 10, and navigating intense grief I wasn't willing to call grief for longer than I'd like to admit. I had a very loud internal voice that was convinced that if I just planned better, worried smarter, and stayed one step ahead of everything, I could prevent the next disaster.
That's not what happened.
What followed was years of figuring out — slowly, imperfectly, and with a lot of resistance — what it actually takes to navigate a life that has stopped cooperating. Not the version you read about in self-help books. The real version, where the progress is invisible, and the setbacks are loud, and nobody gives you a roadmap because there isn't one.
I created Widow411 to share what I was learning with other widows. For years it was one of the most visited grief resources for widows on the web.
Then I remarried and eventually sold Widow411 — not because I was done with the subject, but because I realized the hard things I was writing about weren't happening only to widows. Loss, reinvention, and the disorientation of a life that stops cooperating isn't just a niche. It's real life.
Which left me with a new question: what do you do with everything you learned in the fire once the fire is out?
Turns out, you write about it.
Ancient Wisdom for Anxious Minds is my Substack newsletter for people who are done with the self-help industrial complex but not done trying to understand themselves. The book I'm working toward is for everyone who has ever had to rebuild something — a life, an identity, a sense of what's next — and found that none of the available advice quite covered it.
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