Only to say that this isn’t the same place we used to come to when we came, and the family reuniting here on the bank of the river is not the same family that used to come to Montana.

We’ve taken a different shape. Some of that is just time. Some of it is more than that.

But Montana is still Montana. The river we’ve come to this year doesn’t know any of this. It just keeps flowing.

But it has me thinking about family. Children. Water. It has me thinking about:

Patterns and currents. Containment and change.

Then and Now

Patterns. When we used to come to Montana, it was to our place on the northern shore of a glacier-fed lake. We came once in winter and again, for longer, in summer.

Currents. This year we are meeting in a different place. And the water is not a lake, it’s a stream. Specifically, a trout stream.

Containment: When we used to come, we didn’t fly fish. We swam. We boated. We gazed out over a body of water that remained mostly unchanged over our time there.

The Patterns of Trout and Children

I’ve never had any particular interest in trout. My gaze was more on children.

But as they’ve grown, my husband has turned his gaze toward trout. I am working on it.

Here’s what I know: trout mostly sit in shallow, calm inlets along a stream’s shore, waiting to be served. A stream is a conveyor belt of insects, their preferred fare.

Trout are a bit like children; they like their food delivered to them.

This surprises me in neither case. Who wouldn’t want that?

What does surprise me is that even though our children are now grown, I still find comfort in revisiting our old patterns.

I am still the conveyor belt.

Patterns.

Change

Our youngest has never fly fished before.

Last summer, my husband took our older son, just the two of them. They sent photos during the week and I could see the calm, the satisfied looks on their faces that only happens when you’ve spent real time outside doing something that requires your full attention.

This week it’s his brother’s turn.

I’ve watched this one watching his brother his whole life. Now he’ll stand in the same river and figure out his own way to do it. And yes, they’ll compete. And ultimately they’ll each declare themselves the better fisherman.

Where Will I Be?

I might wade in. I might even cast a few lines. But on the whole, I’ll be on the shore, at the window, or on the porch. Maybe even in the kitchen doing what I do. And this isn’t nothing. It’s its own kind of participation.

I know some will say I’m old-fashioned, trapped in time. But I will say I am lucky. I get to choose. These patterns bring me peace.

What Trout Need

Trout need cold, moving water. They need dissolved oxygen to breathe. Specifically, they need at least four parts per million in order to survive. Yes, I researched this.

Mostly, they need cold water. Cold water carries oxygen far better than warm.

What Children Need

I think children begin by needing a lake.

Lakes = containment. Lakes hold you. There’s always a shore in sight. This means you can push boundaries, knowing land is always reachable.

And then they need a stream.

Streams = change. They overflow their banks in spring and then settle in to their groove once summer lingers. They are highly oxygenated, adventuresome, raging. And they move in only one direction. Forward in time.

The View From the Shore

When the light begins to fade the boys and their father will come in, looking for me. Tired and happy, smelling like river water and sunscreen. My youngest will have caught something or not caught something, and either way there will be many versions of the story that gets told for years.

My husband will be quieter than usual, in the good way. My older son will be mostly silent until he begins to speak and then it will flow from him, an unstoppable current.

And I choose to listen, to soak up every vision, every memory of all of them.

A Place That Holds Memory

I’ve been thinking about what it means to return to a place that holds memory.

Montana holds a lot of ours. When I drive through it, past the landscapes that don’t change the way people do, I feel the years in a way that’s hard to describe. It’s not painful, exactly, but present. Like the place itself remembers.

But that’s also why we keep coming back. Because the remembering matters. Because a family that returns to the same land and the same mountains is a family that’s saying something. To each other and maybe to the ones who aren’t here to wade in anymore.

And the woman on the bank sees everything. The cast, the miss, the try again. The moment her son finds his footing in a current that wants to move him. The way her husband looks when he’s doing something he loves. She sees the mountains behind them and the light changing on the water and she keeps all of it, files it somewhere careful.

Someone has to be the one who watches. Someone has to hold the shore.

This week, in Montana, in a place that knows us even in our new shape, that’s me.

Eleven months before that, I launched a lifestyle website on WordPress, and a weekly newsletter on Kit. I’d never done any of these things before.

The website and newsletter felt brave.

Substack feels braver.

What I thought it would be

I thought I’d cross-post occasionally on Substack. I thought I’d let some of my deeper writing live here for readers who wanted more than the weekly blog. I had a strategy. I was more worried about the execution.

I thought I’d keep most of myself out of it.

Turns out, that’s not how it’s going.

What it has actually been

Writing on Substack has been a different thing entirely.

I knew, intellectually, that Substack articles lived on the open web. That they had URLs. That a stranger could find them through search five years from now. I did not understand, until I’d published a few, what that actually felt like.

A newsletter goes into an inbox, then mostly disappears. The people who read it are the people who chose to be there. The work is intimate in a contained way.

Substack is something else. The piece you publish on Friday is still publicly readable on Tuesday, on Wednesday, next month, next year. Anyone can find it. Anyone can share it. Anyone can write to you about it, including people who are nothing like the readers you imagined when you sat down to write.

Some of my Substack readers are coming over from the newsletter; others are finding me through search, through recommendations, through whatever mysterious algorithm decides which strangers will become readers. They write to me as people who don’t know me, and that’s its own kind of intimacy.

I’m finding that every single comment, even the ‘likes,’ move me in a profound way. Knowing I’ve struck a universal chord for someone, somewhere, is immensely gratifying. I know how much finding your people can save you.

What I’ve discovered

Substack was supposed to be additive. A little more personal. A little more me.

What’s happening is so much more than that.

This is because what I’m finding out is that writing here feels like letting my hair down. It feels like running barefoot through a field covered in bramble where any manner of thorn or creature could be lurking below.

It’s gotten me thinking about bravery. Whether or not we need to be brave in midlife.

Of course, we don’t have to be anything. Let alone brave. But we’re so much real, and strong, and just plain more alive if we are.

Because here’s the thing: trying counts. Failure doesn’t. There is no measure to bravery. It just is. You either are or you aren’t.

Subscribe now

A few things have surprised me in five weeks.

The pieces want to be longer here.

And shorter.

It seems the more deeply personal the Substack piece, the shorter it ends up. Not because I don’t want to let it all hang out; it’s actually the opposite.

When I split myself open, exposing my inner layers, I have this sense that I don’t want to be watery. I want to be dense. I want to leave out the explaining, the complaining. I want it to feel like it matters.

The work has started to feel like writing. This is the part I didn’t see coming.

It is also more sustaining than I expected. Something about writing pieces that will outlast the week has made the writing feel less disposable, and therefore more worth doing. The work weighs more, and the weight is mostly welcome.

The Monday blog and the Thursday newsletter are a project, a practice, a discipline. And they’re deeply gratifying. It’s a new direction. It’s my business.

But five weeks into Substack, something has shifted. The distinction may sound small. It isn’t.

Writing on Substack is the difference between doing something and being something.

Why I came here, actually

I should probably tell you the rest of it.

I have lived through some things in the last few years that have rearranged me at the cellular level. Somewhere on the long road of putting myself back together, I came to understand something I have spent most of my life avoiding: I have been keeping my voice small. I have been polite, measured, and (relatively) easy to be around. And I have run out of time for that.

The blog was step one. It’s teaching me I have things to say about midlife and that there are people who want to read about it.

Substack is a place I write as myself. To anyone who wants to find me.

I came here because I needed somewhere bigger to hold what I had to say.

What I’m learning

I don’t know yet what this will become. I know I publish every week now, but I have no idea if the piece I write next month will be anything like the pieces I’m writing now. Five weeks is not enough time to know.

But I know this: I am already not the same writer I was when I started. Five weeks of Substack has done something a year of newsletters and blogs didn’t quite do. Substack asks something different of us. It asks us to write as if it matters. As if I matter. Not just as if the subject matter matters.

It asks us to be brave.

It turns out I needed something to ask that of me. Something even more expansive than what I was already doing. I didn’t know that until I got here.

To you, reading this

If you’ve found me here in the last five weeks, thank you. I know what it costs to make room for a new voice. I am paying attention to every reply, every restack, every click that tells me someone read to the end.

And if this feels right, please consider subscribing or even becoming a paid subscriber. Every single one helps me along this journey.

And if you’ve been thinking about coming to Substack yourself, or starting any project that asks you to put your real voice out into the world, I want to tell you what I’m finding out:

The exposure is real. So is what comes from it.

Five weeks in, and I’m glad I came.

💗

Susan

Beginnings and endings. So many of them.

My mother was, of course, my beginning. We have had a long journey together. Many peaks, many valleys. But we have come to the end of our road. Just maybe not in the way that you’d expect.

I have reached my end with her, even though she has not yet reached hers.

I don’t know how much longer my mom has; no one does. And this unknowable fact has kept me on this road with her. After all, I have stuck with it for a very long time. Why give up the ghost now?

That, and the fact that she brought me into this world, which dictates that I am to see her out.

This is the natural order. I am breaking life’s natural order. And this does not feel like a small thing.

I broke contact with her one other time.

This happened in the middle of lunch, some 20 years ago. The only way I can describe the trigger to each of these events is that it is like a lightning bolt piercing the top of my skull, splitting me open. But with the splitting-open comes crystalline clarity.

But the first time, even after the clarity, I returned to her.

This time is different.

This time it feels more like it’s her or me. This time my body is making the decision for me.

Four years ago we lost our eldest son. A year after that I had what I call my body collapse. My spine, my hips, my bones gave up the ghost on me. It has been a long road of recovery.

Last week, as I drove home from my aborted visit with my mom, I broke out all across the front of my neck and chest, in a raw, painful, blistering rash. The drive was six hours and by the time I got home I knew I was going to need to see a doctor.

The last time I made a break from my mom, there was no rash. There was only the feeling of her words having split-me-open, feeling myself spill out all over myself.

Maybe it is the rash. Maybe it’s that I finally understand what my body has been trying to tell me.

But last week will be the last time I see her. The last time I speak with her.

There is that expression about loving yourself ‘more.’ Most. This has not been in my vernacular.

I have always had to love her most. Above everyone. Above all else. My husband. My children. Myself.

There is much more I could say. I could justify, rationalize, explain. But this is not a litany of my mom’s issues with narcissism, triangulation, and more . . .

So this is the final reckoning of a daughter who has tried for five decades to be good enough, smart enough, to look good but not too good, to achieve, but never more so than she perceives herself to have achieved, and to always, always, always put her first.

In the end, and we are at the end, none of this really matters.

I won’t say more because after all, she is my mother. And while I love her, I do not like her.

Around her I am unable to be me. There is no other position when in the presence of the center of the universe.

I usually use humor to disarm heaviness, but trust me, I am not doing this lightly. It is ingrained in us that there is something tacitly wrong with cutting one’s mother out of her life. And while “ghosting” one’s family has become a thing, this is not that.

I once tried creating boundaries between us. That was the beginning of our end. The center of the universe is boundless; it suffers no boundaries.

What matters now is that I choose me. I choose my marriage, my family. Me.

So I won’t be saying Happy Mother’s Day to anyone this Sunday.

I will hear it from my own kids and that will be enough. It has taken me decades but I have finally chosen me.

I am a daughter. I am a mother. I am enough.

So, regardless of the nature of our ‘work,’ we put our heads down, toiled-away and looked forward to when it would all be finished.

And herein lies the problem. We split our lives in two. The productive part and the leisure part.

Subscribe now

During our productive phase, we yearned to do all the things we didn’t have the time or energy for. Because we worked, were raising kids, were taking care of people.

Then, finally, retirement (whether it was at 40 or 70), was a hard stop.

So we slept in. We stayed up late. We did whatever it was we’d always dreamed of doing.

But the thing is, even non-stop leisure can start to feel a bit empty.

So instead, maybe we should start seeing all that ‘was’ as the rocket fuel to what’s next. Move from ‘doing’ to ‘becoming.’ Really buy in to the idea that our story shifts, moves, accelerates, decelerates, shines, falls flat, and keeps going.

Just like the characters’ lives in our favorite novels.

Why is it we can fully buy into a character’s evolution, and we struggle to think of ourselves in this way?

In our novel, a woman can stand at the end of a pier, brown as a nut from the sun with perennially unbrushed hair cascading down her back.

And in the next chapter, years later, the same woman has coiffed hair and stands over a table, surrounded by a gaggle of children watching her extrude perfectly shaped linguine from a pasta machine.

And we totally buy it.

We see it. It is this character’s evolution, her story.

So why is it that we’re so good at reading stories and so less-good at authoring our own?

Why is it that so many of us struggle at this stage to re-envision what could be. What that next place looks like.

The years we spent raising children, caring for parents, adjusting our trajectory for a partner’s career, putting our own ambitions on hold, weren’t a prelude to our real life. They are our real life, and they are material. They have given us depth, resilience, perspective, and a particular kind of knowledge about what matters that simply cannot be accumulated any other way.

Whatever happened to dreaming? As in filling those unfulfilled dreams. And making new ones. The way we effortlessly used to.

We hear “just follow your passion.” But what if we don’t have one, or we aren’t sure what it even is at this stage?

“Follow your passion” leads us to believe that if don’t have a well-thought out dream of circumventing the globe, or becoming a master woodworker, we don’t have a passion.

These things may have been the stuff of childhood dreams. But childhood dreams aren’t necessarily the dreams of adulthood.

Instead, why don’t we see that the summer we spent beneath the pier, teaching ourself to hold our breath for longer and longer periods, as a training ground for what we are capable of?

And that caring for a failing family member taught us we can do immensely hard things.

And that our own will and strength and ability just keeps growing. Through experiences. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

And that we don’t have to have done it before to want to do it now. And that if we think we can, we can. Whether it’s running a marathon or planting a garden.

And even if it turns out that we can’t, everything’s still okay. It’s all part of it. The great big, messy story of our life.

What I’m about to tell you may sound like a downer. But instead, try using it to fuel your own midlife ‘becoming’ story.

Yes, this is a true story. And it is extremely sad.

So use it as a cautionary tale to get out there and, as George Eliot said, “. . . be who [you] might have been.”

We either stop being fearless, or we start believing we’re no longer fearless. Neither is particularly good.

Here’s what I mean: at 21, a recent grad from a midwest college, I was accepted into grad school in NYC. I’d never so much as visited the city. But it was a dream program. So I jumped in, with both feet. No hesitation.

A little unhinged? Perhaps. But that’s just the way we rolled back then. Youth. That confidence thing.

Conversely, I’m finding that now, at this stage of life, trying out a new restaurant seems a bit risky. There’s generally a sense of ‘I know what I know.’ And ‘I like what I like’ going around.

Back then, in my 20s, I also firmly believed there was only one true path for me. Fiction-writing-phenom or perish.

I now know that had that been true, I would not be here today writing to you on Substack. I would have perished.

The moral of this piece: No matter what you firmly believe to be unassailably true, you may very well be wrong.

Because here’s the thing: back then, in my 20s and early-30s, I had no idea what I didn’t know.

Today, I am acutely aware of all the things I do not know:

• algebra

• how to navigate well without GPS

• what all the lines on a ruler signify (okay, algebra and fractions)

• how formulas work in Excel

• why anyone would actually like using Excel

The list go on . . . but you get the point.

One thing I know for sure is there are more endings than beginnings once you hit midlife.

People you know and love, die. Joints that used to work like well-oiled machines, stop doing that. Jobs end. Money comes. Money goes. Kids can’t grow up fast enough. Kids grow up too fast.

But here’s the thing: now that I know all this, first-hand, I’m actually pretty experienced. I know a lot of things.

And what this means is that reinventing yourself, out of desire, necessity, or somewhere in between, is possible. It’s not only possible, it’s actually quite exciting.

The big difference is we get to start designing our lives from the inside-out. Rather than from the outside-in. As some of life’s commitments fall away, or become less omnipresent, we can actually start to create a life based on us. I wrote a 3-part series on just this on Lifeticity, if you’re interested.

And not just on the ‘old us,’ from our 20s. But a new us, where we’ve learned all this stuff, done all these things, and we’re ready for a new kind of dream.

Experts call this identity reconstruction. I call it reinvention. We can find ourselves here after trauma, grief, or life transitions like retirement, empty-nests, etc.

Curiosity has become the new buzzword of staying young. Push yourself, test yourself, throw all the things you know to make you happy into a big pot. Stir. You’ll figure it out.

So are we too old to start something new, be someone new, try something different? Nope.

Case in point: for the first time, you can now listen to my article on Substack. (See above.) I’ve joined the audio revolution.

All we need to do is believe we’re still fearless. Or, that even if we fall, we can always get back up again. Perhaps just a bit more slowly.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not in crisis, or on the brink of despair over this. But other than my husband, I’m not sure what place I’m holding that’s absolutely crucial to anyone else’s life at this point.

And this is a strange feeling. Especially after years of being an employee, mother, child, sister, aunt, and so on .. .

With our kids in their mid-to-late 20s, and frankly happiest when we’re not offering advice, they don’t really need me. (I can hear them now, groaning if they read this: ‘Mom, we need you!’)

But what I mean is, if you’ve mothered kids, dogs, cats, anything really, being needed means that entity looks to you for its very survival. Our kids are surviving quite well on their own, currently.

And then there’s friends. I feel close connections to a great group of friends. But if I were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth, their lives would not be thrown into complete disarray or despair. No one would run out in front of a moving car, starve to death, or lose sight of their medication schedule.

They would probably be sad for a time. And then they’d move on.

I once made a friend cry when I told her we were moving but that she’d be fine without me. “Like a stick in water,” I said. “Remove it and the water quickly fills in around it.”

The whole idea of “mattering” is something I’ve never spent too much time thinking about. In truth, from the time I was young, I think I’ve felt the weight of my presence mattering almost too much.

It’s not that I’m actually all that important, but because there’s nothing I love more than feeling free of asks and demands, whether tangible or emotional.

Still, a conversation with a friend got me thinking about the idea that humans place a good deal of value on feeling ‘needed.’ Psychologists say it’s a necessary component of a fulfilling life.

This friend said she gets up, takes the dog for a walk, and then feels the weight of the day stretching out in front of her.

An enviable concept to many, surely. But the truth is, anyone who’s faced this might say the opposite.

On paper, this friend knows she has much to be happy and excited about. One of her kids is about to be married and another is expecting a child. But she doesn’t really feel happy or excited. And not feeling happy makes her feel ever worse.

“I feel kind of disconnected with it all,” she says.

This exchange was weirdly similar to a similar conversation with another friend. Our girls’ trip was coming to a close and she said, “Once this trip is over, I have two weeks before I meet some other friends in X, and I have no idea what I’m going to do for two weeks.”

Yes, more privileged angst, but angst, nonetheless.

So I dug into this whole topic of ‘mattering,’ and discovered some really helpful things.

At certain times in our life, whenever there’s a seismic shift in our routines, it forces a readjustment to our whole idea of ‘mattering.’ In the case of midlife, when much of what we’ve tended tends to disappear altogether, an even bigger shift is called for.

We literally have to shift from building our lives around external elements, jobs, families, parents, kids, etc. And we have to recreate our lives and our schedules and pursuits and activities around internal drivers. These would be thing like pursuits, hobbies, new challenges, etc.

Obvious? I guess so. But somehow, putting it into these words helps me understand just how big a shift this is.

You don’t need to have had kids, or even a true career to fall into this pit. Anything you did in your earlier years that dictated your days, however you paid the rent, maintained a sense of connection, a life, has to be reworked. Reimagined.

The first part of life programs us to build around the should-dos, the have-tos. The external. Suddenly our lives need to revolve the could-dos. The internal. And that’s a challenge. After all, we’re creatures of habit.

So here’s to hoping your life is full of a beautiful mix of the internal and external forces that make up our days.

But as Oprah Winfrey said: “You really can have it all. Just not at the same time.”

If you want to read more on this, you can head over on my blog.

You are either in camp ‘hanger’ or you are going to think I’m nuts. Either way, read on. I promise there’s something here for you.

Recently, I embarked on a kind of closet renovation. A new closet system, a plan, a hoped-for less chaotic experience every time I walked into my closet. I did the measuring, the remeasuring. I made the mistakes. I even measured the length of the floor wrong. How? Was this a difficult measurement? No. But I did.

And as it became apparent the rug was too short (the heavy, online order that would cost as much to return as to replace), my visions for this sublime space began to erode. Still, it didn’t feel right to spend that much to return a rug; it felt better to tell myself my mistake could mean someone would get a brand new rug for a fraction of what it was worth.

So, I drove the too-short rug to Goodwill. On the way there, I felt pretty good about it. By the way back I just felt stupid. I was in one of those periods of time where the simplest things felt hard. And the hard things felt insurmountable. By the time I was home, I found myself wishing I’d never started the project.

I’ve left out the part about how for five weeks the entire contents of my closet (the one that had always felt too small, but now seemed like it housed the contents of an entire country), lay in vertical stacks on the floor beneath the window in our bedroom.

For five weeks I stepped over the mounds every morning and night. For five weeks I dealt with towers of clothes shifting and needing to be re-stacked. I envisioned the dust collecting on my nicer things. I glanced at other items and wondered what had ever made me buy them in the first place.

I realize complaining about the travails of a closet redo is a privileged problem. But let me say this: The idea hadn’t been mine. A friend had planted this seed in my brain. I had never exactly liked my closet, but I had also never really considered “redoing” it. I’m going to say she guilted me into it. When things are hard, blaming someone is always one way to go.

Skip forward a few weeks. The system was installed. The ‘new’ rug had arrived and was in place. I’d begun the task of refilling the closet. And while it was a serious upgrade, it still didn’t have enough space. Closet systems are not able to create space out of a void. This was a disappointing discovery.

But I persevered. Everything found a place, even if it had to be double-hanger-ed, rolled, or otherwise stuffed somewhere. I was done. The closet was done.

I send my discerning friend a picture. Proud was I. I had taken her suggestion and created a much better space.

I heard nothing from her for a day or so. Apparently my closet was not at the top of her list. Then a package arrived. It was a fairly large box. I had no memory of ordering anything this size.

I looked inside and was stymied for a minute. I had not ordered these. And there were lots of them. They were those velvet-y, covered hangers. And they were all white.

I only knew one person who even really knew about the whole closet thing, besides my husband and he would never have ordered me hangers. I texted her.

“Well, of course they are from me,” she responded. “Who else would send you hangers?”

Now I was the one to hesitate: “Whyyyy did you send me hangers?”

“What color are they?” she asked.

“They are all white.”

“Yes,” she said. Full stop. “Now you need to go to your closet and replace every single one of your rag-tag collection of multi-colored hangers with the new white ones.”

“Ok?” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Call me when you’re done.”

There is no saying ‘no’ to this friend. She’s literally my oldest friend and she has proven to nearly always be right when she digs her heels in. So, I went to the closet and replaced all the non-white hangers.

What happened next was honestly a big surprise to me.

I closed the closet doors behind me, went to make dinner and didn’t think about the closet again until bedtime.

By that time I wasn’t thinking about hangers. But when I opened the doors and walked in that evening, I was overcome with an unfamiliar sense of calm. All felt right with the world. And my closet.

It was the hangers. This one, small thing had completely transformed the entire space. And it had (nearly) erased all my feelings of failure and ineptitude surrounding the project.

I wrote a piece on How to Start Seeing the Little Things for my blog after an encounter with a bird changed everything for me. And this on How To Be Happier: Focus on the Little Things.

May we never underestimate the power of the little things to completely change our outlook. And may we be forever grateful for the friends who sometimes know what we need more than we ever could.

Intention. I think I first heard it around age 7. One of my friends said something mean to another friend. The wounded friend asked me, “Do you think she meant it?” (“Meaning it” is the 7-year-old version of ‘intention’).

The word is everywhere now. “Intentional” living; “Intentional” choices, “Intentional” everything. It’s not hard to begin to think our only route to happiness and success is through full-on intentional living.

(I wrote a full post on How to Live Intentionally and What That Means on Lifeticity.com.) And don’t get me wrong: There is a whole lot of value to thinking about how we spend our time, because (as the expression goes), this is how we spend our life.

But do we need to be ‘intentional’ about everything?

When we travel, my husband likes a solid schedule. I’m a freewheeler. There’s a beauty in this contrast, if you can make it work. You end up with a schedule that’s firm enough to seem like a plan, but with enough wiggle room for serendipity. Like the photo, above.

We were strolling along Cannon Beach, in Oregon, when a couple of influencers approached us with a camera and tripod. They said they just had to get our picture against the setting sun. My husband and I glanced at each other, wondering why they’d want to, but we said ‘okay,’ just hoping they didn’t plan to make off with our phone.

“Getting our picture” turned into a 20 minute full-on shoot we both knew was going to make us late for dinner reservations. We couldn’t have known it then, but these complete strangers gave us a priceless gift.

They took some of our best photos, ever.

Lesson learned.

By all means be intentional about your life, big picture. But I’ll stand by my un-intentionality about lots of other things. And I’ll intentionally feel good about it.

And finally, as this is my first Substack post, I’d to thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading.

I intentionally chose to swim in this new space, and you are my flotation device. Thank you for being here.

I know there are lots of people who don’t like “made up words.” But there’s not a single, solitary word out there that wasn’t created by someone.

So yes, I’m going out on a limb and saying ‘Lifeticity’ is a word. Because I made it one. Because I felt like I had to.

And now I’ll tell you what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and why I made it up in the first place.

But I think I’ll do this in inverse order. Because if necessity really is the mother of invention (and it is), then necessity is the reason I created ‘Lifeticity’.

Many/most new paths tend to be an outgrowth of a thwarted one. This can be true for many reasons: Your life changed; you changed; someone changed your life; you decided to change your life, and so on.

In my case, three things changed the course of my life. One tragic, in the very worst possible sense. The second, what I refer to as ‘my skeletal collapse’ occurred shortly after the first. And the third, what I call my ‘well if you can’t follow our timeline and get back in to work now (despite what you’re going through), then we are going to have to move on without you’ event.

You may read more about all of these ‘collapses’ at a later time but this space is really about how to create a life you love, from the rubble. We all have ‘rubble.’ Of one kind or another. And even though we may hit a certain point in life and think maybe we’ve escaped the ‘rubble,’ this may not actually be the case.

So, ‘Lifeticity.’

Suffice it to say, when I knew I needed to do something to get ‘me’ back, I turned to what I’ve always done, always been, and that’s a writer.

I’d always had in the back of my mind the idea to create a place like Lifeticity. But of course, there’s fear of failure, fear of looking like an idiot, and generalized fear of being insufficient to actually do the ‘thing.’

So the first step for me was my decision that I couldn’t possibly begin the ‘thing’ until I had a name. And not just any name, a really great name.

I think I came up with roughly 2,257 possible names. But when I went to secure a domain (a URL for my website), not a single one of my possible 2,257 names was available.

And while certainly frustrating, I think this was actually a good directional lesson for my new pursuit. Necessity (really) is the mother of invention.

Coming up with even one more name (that might have an available URL) seemed impossible. So, I began making up words.

Subscribe now

What I was wanted was a word that encapsulated ‘life’ and the fact that it really is our primary job to continually strive to ‘create a life we love,’ despite the ruins we may find ourselves in.

The ‘create a life you love’ tagline, in search of a headline phase of this project went on for another month or so. And honestly, at that point I had begun spewing such nonsense that each new list of possibilities drew blank stares from even my best friends.

So I went back to the drawing board. What was this thing I was creating going to address?

-icity does have a distinct meaning . . . indicating a state, quality, or condition of being [adjective].

Key meanings include the state, quality or degree of being:

Authentic

Electric

Public

Toxic (I don’t like this one. I work NOT to be toxic)

Eccentric

2,257 unavailable names + countless hundreds of completely nonsensical words + patient, supportive friends and family who served as sounding boards to all my nonsense = Lifeticity.

Previously blank stares from my sounding boards became, “Well, I don’t hate it.”

This was good enough for me.

(Of course, I went through my own hate-stage, about 2-3 months in, where I loathed the name. I actually found it embarrassing. But I’ve moved through that.)

With time, I’ve come to believe that the word ‘Lifeticity’ exemplifies precisely what I had been trying to create all along: Life is what you make it. Minus all the horrible things that may happen along the way. And all the great things. And maybe most importantly, our lives become the intentional steps we take (as my dad always said), to make the best out of a bad situation.

Finally, I’m well aware that an audience of “everyone” means an audience of no one. But I firmly believe that when we’re writing about life, everything is fair game. So, this is for ‘everyone,’ but if I have to get specific, it’s for those of us in the second half of life.

But I could also say that everything that’s of interest, concern, delight, trauma, joy, pain, angst (existential, or not), to the midlife+ crowd, will eventually be of interest to anyone on their way to that midlife+ space.

So, you may be currently in that space, or hoping to reach it. Either way, I hope you’ll find something here that speaks to the rubble, but also shows you at least a few possible paths to create a life you love.

Welcome to Lifeticity. I’m SO glad you’re here!