Izzy's visiting again next week, and it had me thinking about this one — so I'm bringing it back for anyone who missed it the first time.

I found the perfect dress.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was combing through the racks at a local consignment shop when a silver Greek key pattern caught my eye. A Tory Burch dress, no less—A-line, flattering, and just right for the big fat Greek wedding I was attending at the end of the week. It was a little short, but I noticed a substantial two-inch hem—a tall girl's dream. With a quick trip to the tailor, I'd be good to go by Friday.

I brought the dress to Jane's shop, where she stood like a queen among mountains of tulle and sequins—wedding gowns, prom dresses, and formal wear in every shade. No one would trip down the aisle under Jane’s craftsmanship.

This was a small job. Could she squeeze it in?

After examining the dress, Jane sighed the sigh of a woman who has hemmed for too many panicked prom moms, then scribbled on a slip: $50. Ready by Thursday.

Fifty dollars. The dress had only cost forty.

Ouch.

I paused, flustered, but told myself to focus on the win: I'd scored the perfect dress, and I'd have it ready in time. I mean, it's not like I could hem it myself.

Except I used to be able to hem it myself.

Standing there, I started thinking about my old sewing machine. Had I been too hasty tossing it?

I learned to sew as a pre-teen at the Singer shop back when I was allowed to walk a mile to the city mall unsupervised. I practiced on my mother's old metal machine—built like a Mack truck and just as loud.

After I got married, I purchased a used sewing machine and started using it. First job? Maternity clothes. There weren't many off-the-rack options for a 5'10" pregnant woman with long limbs and a professional job. My mother and I found some patterns, although fashionable choices were few and far between. The results were ugly outfits that fit well.

From there, I moved on to window treatments for our entire house, which were way easier to sew than clothes, just bulkier. Then on to Halloween costumes for my little girls.

Of course, by the time I bought fabric, notions, and trims, those homemade costumes cost double what they would at K-Mart. But I didn't care. I loved the process.

The day came when I didn't have time for sewing. I didn't have time to brush my hair, let alone anything as frivolous as fairy princess and Snow White costumes.

The machine sat neglected. Its plastic body yellowed like a forgotten Tupperware lid, and when I did pull it out, the stitches were erratic and angry. I hadn't known that sewing machines needed servicing (this seems obvious now, but I was under the impression it was a toaster with thread), and after one last move, I sent it to a landfill.

That marked the end of my sewing era, aside from the occasional reattached button or emergency hem.

My mother, who was German, referred to these domestic skills as Handarbeit or handwork. It was the kind of knowledge passed from mother to daughter, taught quietly and never applauded. Certainly never labeled as creative.

It was women's work, plain and simple.

But now, I had paid more for a hem than I had for the dress itself. And I had a granddaughter who wanted to sew saddle blankets and ear bonnets for her toy horses. It made me wonder: was it time to stitch this part of me back together?

My granddaughter, Izzy, already had a $20 battery-operated kids' sewing machine. It was adorable. It also couldn't sew through felt, flannel, or fake fur.

After a bit of Craigslist hunting and a chat with a sewing machine repair guy, I took the plunge and bought a new Singer 4423.

I was back in business, baby.

Izzy and I headed to Michaels to gather supplies for her new horse. Beige fabric for the body, white for the blaze, green felt for the eyes, and we postponed our decision on the neck rope.

We like to leave room for design evolution.

Her new horse would cost more than the two mass-produced $7.99 ones she already had, but it would be hers. Made with her imagination and with our hands.

And that changed something for me, too.

This wasn't about "practical" anymore. I wasn't sewing because I had to: I was sewing because I wanted to. For joy. For beauty. For connection.

That old word Handarbeit took on a new meaning. Yes, it was a skill. Yes, it had value. But maybe it was never just about chores and holey socks.

Maybe it was always art.

Women's work has a long history of being overlooked—unpaid, undervalued, and unseen (unless you forgot to iron it). But lately, I've started noticing something hopeful. One of my LinkedIn connections, who typically posts about her roles as a realtor and musician, has begun documenting her sewing journey. Her handmade clothes are exquisite, they fit her perfectly, and now people are asking her to sew for them.

She even started a YouTube channel.

It made me wonder: why aren't more artisans posting on LinkedIn? Why is it all "10 Ways to Increase Productivity Before 8 AM" and zero ways to stitch a neckline?

When did we decide that what we make with our hands matters less than what we do with our keyboards?

It's time to change that conversation. It's time to value the artisan alongside the analyst.

And maybe—just maybe—someone out there is looking at their old sewing machine in the closet and thinking, you know what? Let's get back at it.

What do you think?

I discovered something called “visible mending.” It reminds me of the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, except applied to clothing. Check it out!

I loved her flamingos, her shades of pink, and most of all her loose, flowy fit. I met her on a clearance rack a few years ago. She was only $5.99 and she was definitely coming home with me.

Later, after examining her more closely, I realized I’d missed a tiny hole while I was busy falling in love at the store. Hence the clearance tag. No matter. A couple of stitches later, no one would be the wiser.

I wanted to wear her everywhere, but every time I reached for her, I found another reason not to. What if I got cold? Menopause—that petty little gremlin—had turned me into someone who could need a sweater in July depending on which way the wind was blowing. Then there were the less practical reasons. My shoulders looked too bony. My skin too pale. My neck too... wrinkly.

Funny how the weather was never the actual issue.

This weekend, her time finally arrived. We were in the middle of a blazing heatwave, the hottest weather I’d ever experienced. When I slipped her on, I considered trying something different.

No bra.

I looked to see how shrunken my girls appeared. You could barely tell they were there. They seemed perfectly content to stay out of the spotlight. I bent over to make sure neither was planning an unscheduled appearance. Still good. No free show.

As I stood there inspecting myself, a memory floated up. Another house. Another husband. Another time I wore spaghetti straps.

Back then my boobs were just past their prime after birthing and breastfeeding three children. They hadn’t packed up and left yet, but they were definitely considering a new location further south. That day I wore a worthless strapless bra, that spent the entire evening sliding down while I kept shimmying it back into position.

Later my husband casually mentioned that one of his friends, who’d been visiting our home, had quietly asked him if I was wearing a bra underneath.

Until then, I hadn’t realized anyone had been evaluating my body. I thought I was simply wearing a summer top. Turns out I’d been unknowingly entering a panel discussion.

That awareness has never completely left me.

Standing in front of the mirror all these years later, I realized I was still anticipating the same judgment. I’m sixty-three now. By this age you’d think I’d have earned a lifetime exemption from caring what strangers think of my breasts.

Apparently not.

Some part of me still imagines an audience. Men, certainly. Women too. Plenty of women carry water for the patriarchy. Some days I suspect I’ve been volunteering.

The flamingo top wasn’t really about the flamingo top. It was simply this week’s version of a negotiation I’ve been having with my body for decades.

The negotiations don’t stop with bras. Oh no. My forehead would like a word. So would my jowls. And don’t even get my neck started.

Most mornings I stand in front of the mirror conducting what can only be described as a performance review of my face.

Lately, I’ve been watching videos created by a plastic surgeon who critiques celebrity cosmetic procedures.

“Look at the length of her forehead,” she’ll say, measuring the distance between a celebrity’s eyebrows and hairline with one finger. “See how it’s longer in the after photo? That’s aging, not the surgeon.”

Or she’ll point to someone’s eyelids.

“See how little lid skin she has now? I would’ve done a brow lift instead.”

After enough videos, I’ve become surprisingly qualified to diagnose myself.

Botox on the forehead.

A little filler in the cheeks.

Maybe an eyebrow lift if money were no object.

But then there’s my neck.

She never talks about the neck.

I must learn more.

In another strange twist—because apparently I contain multitudes and at least two competing personalities—I also spend time following women who are aging naturally. Women who let their white hair grow, reject the endless messaging that they’re no longer enough, and seem completely uninterested in apologizing for the passage of time.

They’re the women I want to become.

Apparently, I consume both kinds of content with equal devotion, as though one day one side will finally win custody of my brain.

One writer here on Substack, , put words to something I’d only been circling. She wrote about wanting the polish of a woman who’s had “work” while also longing for the freedom of a woman who hasn’t. (Click to read A Sea of Sameness: Why Our Polite Silence is Killing the Pro-Age Movement.)

She questioned whether staying silent about these contradictions—not wanting to judge another woman’s choices, not wanting to seem vain ourselves—is just another version of the Good Girl script.

Wow. That got me.

Even my silence had been performing. I can’t not follow the script.

So here’s what’s true, unglamorously.

I didn’t get Botox.

I didn’t go braless.

Turns out courage and nipple confidence don’t always arrive on the same day.

For the next time I flirt with going braless, I bought Nippies from Amazon—tiny adhesive circles whose entire job description is to let a sixty-three-year-old woman wear a flamingo top without negotiating with a strapless underwire.

They’re less a fashion statement than a cease-fire.

Not full surrender to the bra. Not full defiance either.

Just a woman who’s spent decades bargaining with her own reflection, hoping to spend a little less of the rest of her life arguing with the body that has carried her this far.

Did you miss last week’s Substack Live with Sean Chavis? Don’t worry! I got you. You can watch it below.

Kneeling in the inky darkness, I couldn’t see anything. I listened to the murmurs of the priest aimed at a child on the opposite side of another screen. The sound of the door sliding open, jolting me to full attention. Finally, it was my turn.

Dusty light crept in as I began the familiar prayer, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned...” I can’t remember what sin I had conjured to confess that day as I was just a child finding her way in the world.

One word is seared in my brain from that confession though, and it wasn’t from anything I said. Rather, it was the priest calling me “sonny” when he addressed me. I had recently gotten a shag haircut, and with my long, skinny body and brown-framed glasses, I could have easily been mistaken for a boy. Fire rose from deep within and burned on my cheeks. Despite the darkness, I’m sure my shame was visible to the priest and to everyone waiting outside.

How had Father picked up on my secret fear that I might be mistaken for a boy, even without seeing me?

I didn’t like how I looked, that was for sure. Wearing glasses was non-negotiable to walk without bumping into things, and the frames were not cool back then.

I was a tender shoot that had grown too tall for itself. The nuns lined us up like soldiers in size-order. Being the tallest in my classroom meant I was at the end of the line. If it was an odd-numbered line, I was often riding the caboose solo.

The girls wore shapeless polyester box dresses with saddle shoes and knee socks. As ugly as it was, the navy plaid cardboard dress was a great unifier and equalizer among the girls, mandated at no shorter than knee length by the school. Parents didn’t always get that measurement right because we were growing kids. To save time and expense, busy moms made sure the length was on the uber-safe side so not to invoke the ire of the nuns.

The worst, for me, was how my mom hemmed my skirt an inch below my knobby and very hairy knees. Maybe she thought she was doing me a favor, but handing me a razor to shave my legs could have been a solution. Just throwing it out there.

Then, without any warning, girls started sprouting breasts, and their uniforms became 3-D trapezoids. Mine remained resolutely 2-D.

Oh, how I wanted that third dimension.

Outside of the uniform, my fashion sense was tragically lost. Nothing in the department store fit me. My sleeves and pants were always too short. I lived a mile from a mall with dozens of shops, but there weren’t many choices for a middle-class beanpole like me.

Sometimes we would take a drive out to Neshaminy Mall where the Sears Roebuck purported to carry tall sizes. The reward for the ride was one pair of pants that touched the top of my shoe, but in a fabric that I didn’t really like. I had to make a choice: look pretty-ish (remember the glasses?) or keep my ankles warm.

As I got into high school, I still had to wear a uniform, but I could finally find jeans that fit for my social life. Teen sizes saved the day. By the time I got to college, I had traded my heavy-rimmed glasses for contact lenses.

The girl who had been mistaken for a boy in the confessional was starting to disappear.

I wore what I could cobble together, and my roommate and I were soon swapping outfits for parties.

We were both middle-class kids at Villanova, and we blended in. It was there that I first noticed how differently some girls moved through the world. I remember a classmate, Jennifer, slowing a convertible alongside me as I walked to class. She leaned out from the passenger seat — perfect coiffed bob, stylish boyfriend at the wheel — and offered me a ride. What impressed me most was her leather gloves. Buttery, beautiful, clearly expensive. They had been chosen, not cobbled together.

I understood in that moment that some girls had been curated their whole lives. I had been making do. I was too embarrassed to get into the car. She wasn’t ashamed to be seen with me, and I’ve never forgotten that.

I was feeling better in my clothing, though. Suddenly I was getting more male attention, something that astonished this ugly duckling. When I got my first job working as a civilian at the Navy, I lived at home and the paychecks kept rolling in. I had car payments and student loans, but I had something else, too: disposable income. I need that extra dough for the wedding invitations which arrived regularly, as that was the season of life I was in.

For my friend Patty’s wedding, I found a dress at Bloomingdale’s and it wasn’t on sale. I tried it on anyway, and I knew it had to be mine, even if I had to hide the price tag from my mother when I got home. Sure, I was paying for it myself, but my mom was ready to pounce if she thought I was indulging myself and living frivolously.

It was a red Adrienne Papell peplum dress with a black suede belt.

God, I loved that dress.

I found the perfect pair of black suede pointy-toe pumps to go with it. That dress transformed me from the inside. The peplum gave me a shape I never knew I had. A row of red buttons ran down the back of the skirt — not small, but deliberate, a little bit sexy.

The red said "Look at me!" in a way that nothing in my wardrobe ever had before.

I felt powerful. I felt strong. I was a goddess.

I wore it to my friend's wedding that fall. I remember standing in the reception hall and feeling, for the first time in my life, that I had arrived somewhere. Not the wedding. Myself.

You might think this was a turning point where I became a fashion icon.

You would be wrong.

Fashion kept going for my throat. Try finding maternity clothes in 90s when you’re almost six feet tall. After walking 15 city blocks from my office to get there, I remember containing my disappointment as my last hope for maternal couture limped away. I was foolish to have pinned high expectations on the only store in downtown Philadelphia, the Pea in the Pod boutique, that carried a wardrobe for professional expectant mothers. Turning slowly in the mirror in a shapeless floral tent, I thought, even now, even as I carry this whole new life inside me, I could not find something that fit and was affordable

My mother and I eventually resorted to sewing some career girl outfits. They were functional. They covered my body. That was enough, I told myself.

Then came the years when I was just happy to have clothes without spit-up on them. Fashion be damned.

My mom, knowing my struggle with a lack of time to find functional (not fun) clothing for the office, brought me a rust-colored, ultra-suede structured jacket back from a trip to Germany. When I tried it on, wind hit my wrists and forearms, and not in a good way.

Wear it anyway, she said.

Of course, she said that. She’d been saying that to me my whole life.

I forced a smile and nodded. Little did she know that jacket would never see the light of day. Something snapped inside me — quietly, finally. I made a pact with myself to never wear something that didn’t fit again. I had spent a lifetime being handed whatever was available, whatever was close enough, whatever would do.

I was done with whatever would do.

I found my way to TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and the end-of-season sales at Bloomingdale’s. I searched out the better brands that gave me the length I needed. But money was still the ceiling, and the accessories that pulled a look together always pushed the cost out of reach.

It wasn’t until I stepped into a high-end consignment shop a few years ago — with time to kill and no particular agenda — that something opened up. Tory Burch. Veronica Beard. Anthropologie. Armani. The girl who once drove to Neshaminy Mall hoping Sears had one pair of pants in her size could now try on things that had been curated, refined, chosen with intention. At prices she could actually afford.

I was in my sixties. Was I too late for my style revolution?

Nope, I was just getting started.

I think about what a feminist Instagram creator, (here’s the link to the reel by hope_peddler) who said recently that bringing mindfulness to the way we decorate ourselves for the world is a political act. That how we compose ourselves is communication.

People will be repelled or drawn in. I believe her.

A woman who spent decades invisible — in clothes that didn’t reach her hands, in uniforms that erased her shape, in a jacket her mother said to wear anyway — has something to say when she finally walks into a room looking exactly like herself.

Curating outfits takes intention and time, and now I indulge myself in them. I think about mixing a plaid with a polka dot, pairing a vintage skirt with a t-shirt and a beaded belt. I compose myself the way a painter approaches a canvas — deliberately, joyfully, with full knowledge of what I’m doing and why.

I was always her. She just needed something red.

If this essay resonated with you, I'd love for you to join me on Tuesday, June 23rd at 11am EST for a Substack Live conversation with of . Shaun is a former cookbook editor, committed secondhand shopper, and a woman deep in her own radical act of reinvention. She's recently relocated to Mexico City, having shed 140 lbs. and almost everything she owned to get there. She writes about fashion, identity, and dressing yourself intentionally at every age and size with humor, practicality, and zero apology. We're going to talk about clothes, reclamation, and what it means to finally show up looking exactly like yourself. I have a feeling it's going to be a conversation your closet needs to hear.

My ability to comprehend the invisible is expanding. I think I have reached a new level of awareness of what that means.

As a person of a certain age, whenever I visit my doctor, he’s far more concerned with what’s happening internally than what’s on the outside. (Hey, did you just say “duh”?)

This epiphany hit differently in February, when I was in a car accident. An MRI revealed that a cyst on my liver had burst, and that I had “other” stuff going on inside. Technology that allows a look at your invisible innards is quite the mind-fuck.

My organs were a silent mob.

When I was young, I could ignore what was happening inside my body, unless I got a pounding headache, severe menstrual cramps, or an upset stomach — in which case I demanded answers. What was happening to me?

I’ve heard anyone, including me, say words of gratitude for their heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, or spleen for the indispensable work they do. That is our way, isn’t it? Out of sight, out of mind.

Except the mind is also out of sight, so...

It wasn’t until I was lying on Tobi’s acupuncture table that I started to have a clue about Chinese medicine’s emphasis on the organs and how their condition contributes to disease and wellness.

I have been seeing Tobi for years — first for massage, then for acupuncture. She told me a story of her acupuncture professor and how she asked him where he placed the needles for treating himself.

“Nowhere” he said. “I just do Qigong.”

Say what?

What is Qigong?

It’s been a strange mystical journey since asking that question. I will spare you the months of research and rabbit holes and share my definition.

Qigong (pronounced Chee-gong) is a body movement practice that includes mobility exercises, breath work and meditation. Its goal is to bring focus on your internal energy — Qi — throughout the body and release any areas where it may have gotten stuck.

If you read anything about Qigong, the Qi is subject to a variety of definitions. I will tell you the one I landed on and am currently embracing: Qi is the functional energy responsible for your body, mind, and spirit.

Gong means work. Qigong is the work of managing your life force energy.

We are born with the energy of our parents, but it isn’t a lifetime supply, and we can’t make more of it. We can only protect it by building our own Qi through food, air, sleep, and the way we choose to live. And here is what I know about midlife women: we have not been living that way. We have been spending.

We have been recklessly generous in giving our energy away for decades. To our children, our partners, our jobs, our aging parents, our communities. Society taught us, the good girls, to pour out and keep pouring, without ever asking if we had anything left in the vessel.

I spent the better part of this year studying, practicing, and eventually getting certified as a Qigong teacher. Last Saturday morning, I stood in Tobi’s beautiful studio in Asbury Park — the same place where my healing began — and taught my first class.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t a little bit nervous. But the moment we began moving together, something settled. The room grew quiet in that way that only happens when people are actually present in their bodies. I looked around and thought: This is it.

If any of this is calling to you, I’d love to have you join me.

Starting this Sunday, June 7th, I’m teaching a weekly Qigong class online — every Sunday morning at 9:30am Eastern. Think of it as our Sunday church of replenishment — a weekly ritual for refilling the vessel.

If you’re new to practicing Qigong with me, your first class is free. Come and see if it speaks to you.

No special equipment. No special clothing. You don’t need anything you don’t already have.

If you’d like to join me for either, just reply to this email and I’ll send you all the details.

Come curious. Come as you are. Just come.

You may have noticed we’ve been spending some time with death lately.

My father’s passing. Mary McGreevy’s obituary obsession. Kacie the Death Doula on last week’s Substack Live, where the comments and messages told me we struck a nerve.

I want to acknowledge that, and I also want to tell you I’m not planning to rename this newsletter The Daily Obituary.

But I’ve stopped apologizing for where the writing takes me. And lately it keeps taking me here, to the edges of things, to the moments when the performance finally stops. And I think I know why.

Death is where the good girl rules go to get exposed.

You can fake your way through a lot of life. You can smile when you’re exhausted, shrink when you’re angry, say I’m fine when you are very much not fine. But you cannot performance-manage your way through dying.

Kacie told us about the good girl who dies without acknowledging what she wants. That made me realize I had been doing it too — not on my deathbed, but in my planning for it. And that’s what this essay is about.

It was six long years.

Six long years of managing my mother’s every earthly need. After she ran away from her home, I knew my plan to keep her in familiar surroundings wouldn’t work. Especially not with my full-time job, one kid in high school and two in college, a new house and a new marriage.

I just couldn’t cut myself into any more pieces.

I had to find a place where she couldn’t elope — managed care lingo for a senior runaway. After visiting multiple facilities, I settled on a place that could manage dementia and her mental health needs.

Having both conditions meant she needed a lot of oversight. The staff assured me they could handle whatever behavior my mother exhibited. Immediately after moving in, my mother began packing all of her belongings from her new room that I’d just set up, and demanded to go home. Every time I visited her, she would beg to leave, her things often re-packed, and would try to follow me out through the locked doors. Sometimes the staff helped calm her; other times I was on my own.

Every visit was gut-wrenching as my nerves crescendoed the longer I sat there dreading my exit. My mother wasn’t the type to make new friends; her mind focused only on getting back home.

Her time in dementia care ended up being six years.

Much of her time there was rough. She had days when she fought with the staff, becoming violent, and had to be subdued. It was awful to hear screams when I entered the secured wing. I recognized who it was. I knew what her rage sounded like. One time after walking in and hearing her, I couldn’t cope and just turned around and left.

They do not pay aides and nurses nearly enough.

I held every medical staff member who took care of my mother with the highest regard. I had a team helping me. They did what I could not. I needed every single one of them.

My mom died two months into the pandemic, not from COVID, but from her disease. Watching the slow progression over six years had been terrifying and relentless. They say dying from dementia is like dying from a thousand paper cuts. They are right.

During and after my mom’s health odyssey, I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t go out this way. I don’t want an audience watching my mind and body deteriorate. At least my father died within three months of his lung cancer diagnosis. At the time it seemed too quick, but in retrospect, six years is an eternity. For the last year and a half of her life, she was on hospice, which was very confusing when she didn’t die right away like my dad did.

In the thick of my mom’s disease, I told my two oldest daughters to put a pillow over my face if that happened to me.

“MOM!”

Their shrieks assured me they wouldn’t be doing that.

There goes that option.

I totally understand the burden it would be to ask a third party to end my life for me. Instead, I’m putting my wishes in writing, like an Advanced Health Directive and a Medical Aid in Dying patient form, if it applied. (The MAID form with the proper authorization from doctors, allows you to take autonomy over your death.)

My living will is much more detailed than my parents’ was. For example, I put in a “do not hospitalize” statement in case I am already a diagnosed terminal patient from disease A, and then something unexpected, like disease B, tries to take me out.

I learned this lesson the hard way when my mother had sepsis while in the nursing home. The staff called an ambulance when they found her unconscious. The hospital doctors made her better so she could be a paying customer at the nursing home for another two years in a near-vegetative state.

No, thank you.

It’s all very morbid, but since you’ve made it this far, my conversation with Kacie on last week’s Substack Live stirred up some thoughts.

said women are not done being good girls on their deathbeds. They are still managing everyone else’s comfort. They are apologizing for taking up space, even as they’re leaving it.

As I was writing all of this down for you— the detailed Living Will, the do-not-hospitalize clause, the Medical Aid in Dying paperwork I intend to get in order — I realized how very practical, very organized, very me, it all sounded.

And underneath all of it, if I’m being honest, was one quiet, driving thought:

I don’t want to be a burden.

Not: I want to live fully until I can’t.

Not: I want to die the way I actually want to die.

Just don’t make it hard for them. Don’t make it what it was for me.

That’s the good girl. She didn’t go anywhere. She just learned to file paperwork.

Here’s what I’m thinking about now.

There is a difference between planning and disappearing. Between taking care of things and making yourself small before anyone has even asked you to. Between I want to die on my own terms and I just don’t want to inconvenience anyone.

My paperwork is real. My wishes are real. But if I’m honest, I built most of them around my children’s workload, not my own peace.

And what does my peace actually look like? I know exactly. I’ve seen it in my mind a hundred times. A house with French doors thrown open to the beach, with sheer curtains lifting in the breeze. The smell of salt air. The sound of waves, and above them, the laughing of seagulls. Sand. Light. The ocean doing what it always does, indifferent and eternal, while I simply watch it and breathe.

That’s my death. That’s what I actually want. But I had to write an entire essay to find it.

Kacie sees women continue in their good girl roles until the very end. Not just planning. Apologizing. Managing. Keeping the mood light. Making sure everyone will be okay before they go.

The good girl doesn’t die. She just gets quieter.

So here’s the question I’m leaving with myself — and with you. When you imagine the end of your life, who are you picturing? Who is the plan actually for?

Because not wanting to be a burden is not the same thing as knowing what you want. And you are allowed — you have always been allowed — to want something for yourself. Even then. Especially then.

Let me know in the comments what your beautiful death would look like.

My dad was the fastest gun in the West.

This is the photo of him somewhere in the New Mexico, wearing a cowboy hat, holding the reins of a horse, looking like a man who would never wait around for anything.

And he didn’t.

If my mom gave him a honey-do list, he finished it before the ink dried. There was no lollygagging. He was all action, no matter what you asked.

Except.

There is always an except, and this one had to do with his health. It’s not like he never went to the doctor. He took care of himself, going for the necessary checkups before my mom became disabled and dementia took control of their lives.

Taking care of her became his sole priority.

This was nothing new, really, as she’d always been his number one concern. Dementia took hold of my mom with a vengeance after surgery to mend a broken bone. My dad blamed himself for what happened to her, and caregiving became his penance. All of his time and attention were dedicated to taking care of my mom.

So when he was told to get some follow-up tests for the spot they saw on his lungs, he was beyond slow. He just never went.

I don’t remember when the coughing started, but it wouldn’t go away. He coughed all the time.

Finally he made the appointment.

He received a stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis in December. The doctor reassured him that there was hope and treatment possibilities. The doctor knew people who were walking around with stage 4 and living fully.

My dad felt confident that would be him, too.

I took care of my mom while my dad went to the hospital down the street for chemotherapy.

More and more though, he struggled to breathe, and it became clear one Friday in early March that the treatments weren’t working. A visiting nurse told me that the oncologist was admitting my father to the hospital.

The doctor was blunt about it. “You will not be going home again.”

He told me that my dad had only a couple more weeks to a month left, a shockingly short and grim life expectancy.

That night, from his hospital bed, he called me.

“Do you think I should get a second opinion?”

This was the same man who had no interest in pursuing one in December when he received the stage 4 diagnosis.

“Dad, I think it’s too late for another opinion.”

I hated saying those words. I hated to give up hope. I hated the thought that he would not be here much longer.

The next morning, his ability to breathe declined precipitously, and the nurses began administering morphine. Before the sun came up on Sunday morning, hospice called to tell me my father didn’t have much longer and to come in right away.

“His skin is mottled.”

The nurse thought those words would explain her urgency. To me, her words made no sense.

This was happening too fast.

Didn’t the doctor say he still had a month left? What does mottling mean anyway? No one had ever taught me the vocabulary of the dying.

I got my mother up and dressed, wheeling her chair through the quiet corridors of the hospital’s hospice unit by 6 a.m. A white blanket covered my father up to his chin. He seemed at peace, in a deep sleep from which there was no rousing him.

Unlike the day before, there was no oxygen mask, no IV, and no heart monitor beeping. His breathing was loud and jagged, with long pauses between breaths. The sound reminded me of the nights I used to clamp my pillow over my head because he snored so loudly from their bedroom across the hall.

Now it seemed like he was gasping. Sometimes I wondered if he might take another breath, but then he eventually would.

I had positioned my mother next to his bedside right near his head, but she didn’t seem to understand why we were there or who it was laboring to breathe in the bed next to her.

We were in the third hour of our vigil when I called my best friend to update her on my family’s situation. Mid-sentence, I noticed a sudden, terrible silence.

My dad had stopped breathing.

He had taken his last inhale while I was talking about him on the phone, and then…nothing.

Why had I thought I had the luxury of a few minutes to talk on the phone?

I thought I had time.

Deep down, I hadn’t imagined that he would actually die. Or that there would be no warning — that he could just stop breathing without an announcement or the consideration of allowing me to be ready.

I wasn’t ready.

A nun came in at the moment of my bewilderment. I announced he’s not breathing. Like an irrational child, I hoped she could fix something or tell me the obvious wasn’t true.

She took a stethoscope out of her pocket, placed it on his chest and listened. She turned and told us he was gone.

I looked at my father’s lifeless body. He looked like his old self, except his mouth hung open. I asked her if we should close his mouth. All the people on TV always had their lips pressed together when they died.

Maybe he had done it wrong.

Sister was kind and told me the facts of how real people die. The muscles all relax, including the jaw.

Even though I was in a hospice unit with a man who’d been given a death sentence two days earlier, I was in shock. I never thought my father would die. Not really.

He would never leave me to take care of my mother alone. He knew I wouldn’t do it right, that I couldn’t manage her. That had been his job.

But he was gone, and he had left so quickly. No two weeks languishing in a hospital. When he realized he was dying, he did it like he did everything — quick and in a hurry.

The fastest gun in the West, one last time.

I was a 50-year-old woman the day my father died, and I didn’t know what any of it should look like. No one had taught me the vocabulary of dying, or told me there would be no warning, or explained that the body knows how to let go even when the people in the room do not.

My dad held the reins of everything — the house, my mother’s care, every list he was ever handed. And then, without waiting for permission or an audience, he let go of those too.

I think we deserve to know what letting go looks like. Not to be afraid of it, but to stop being surprised by it.

That’s why I’m talking to Kacie Gikonyo, a death doula, on Substack Live — Tuesday, May 19th at 11 a.m. EST. She will talk about preparing the dying and their families for death, and I want to hear what she knows that no one ever told me. I invite you to join us.

Check Kacie out below.

Mark your calendar and I look forward to seeing you next week.
PS (I will send out a reminder on Monday with the link.)

This is the story about how I gave up my autonomy, sense of self, my freedom and instead became enmeshed with the dogma of the Catholic Church for 16 years.

No one forced me to do this. I did this to myself. I’m telling you this not because my story is unique, but because I don’t think I’m the only one.

Early in my marriage, I realized my husband and I were incompatible. The red flags had been there while we were dating. I saw them and looked the other way. They're not the point of this story.

I had already decided he was the one.

I was tired of being single. The love of my life, my boyfriend from college, had gotten away. There was no one who compared to him. I had had steady boyfriends since our break-up, and this relationship checked off important boxes. He provided enough to make a potential marriage work: a good job, steady income, attractive, and he came from a loving blue-collar family much like my own.

We had a lot in common, and fell in love.

I explained away his shortcomings, God knows I had plenty myself. Instead I focused on his positive attributes. I’d already had way too much negativity in my life with my mother’s harsh words and inability to be pleased. She thought all my boyfriends sucked, so it was easy to dismiss her complaints about this one.

Once the dust settled after a whirlwind romance, I found myself married and gave birth to two daughters in quick succession. Despite living in a family of four, I felt inexplicably alone. My spouse was physically there, but he had not woven himself into the emotional fabric of our family.

Our marriage appeared intact from the outside. It was an image we both cultivated and people expected to see.

I had achieved the dream of a suburban home with a white picket fence, but I was the one running things: the bills, the kids, the decisions. He didn’t fight me on it. He just let me. And I mistook that for a partnership.

Financial insecurity made our union worse. We’d bought a house that we had to stretch for and were now saddled with a big monthly mortgage payment. It was difficult making ends meet.

Instead of divorcing, which barely crossed my mind, I took the path of least resistance. I stayed put. Taking note of my situation, I concluded I could no longer trust myself to make important decisions. Clearly, I had settled, and now too much was at stake with two babies for whom I longed to provide the very best.

The church became a logical place to land. The building was a short walk away. We went every Sunday morning, as was my training. My mother did not allow skipping mass. It was a sin after all. I fell away from church during the free-wheeling lifestyle of a college student, but moving home landed me back in a familiar weekly pattern. Every Sunday without fail, we attended mass for the next 16 years. It gave the week its rhythm. It was what I knew.

I didn’t dive deeper into Catholicism right away because mostly I was trying to get through the day with two toddlers. Then my son came along, and my energy stretched across three people who depended on me for everything. For a long time, that was enough. They were the salt of the earth, filling my cup with joy.

As they grew up, the hollowness of the marriage confronted me. I had come up for air and found out there was no ‘there’ there.

My solution was to attend daily mass after the kids got on the bus. I was the youngest in a group of gray-haired folks. If I got there early, I could say the rosary in my pew before mass started. It comforted me to be in the church’s quiet. I thought it was God who drew me there. He saw me. He could fix this.

I journaled during this time, and when I read those entries back, I could see how despondent I was. I begged God to heal my husband. To make him come back to us. Even though his body was there, his mind and heart were not.

The church gave me language for my suffering that made it feel sacred instead of senseless. I wasn’t lonely — I was carrying my cross. I wasn’t trapped — I was honoring my vocation. I wasn’t unhappy — I was being tested.

Once I had those words, I didn’t need my own anymore.

I listened to Catholic AM radio and cassette tapes whenever I could — running errands, folding laundry, waiting in the pickup line. I filled every quiet moment with the church’s voice so there was no room left for my own. I called it studying.

Now I see it for what it was: I was drowning out the doubt. I thought it would be my salvation and the key to staying in my marriage. I would somehow rise above the dysfunction.

I enrolled in a Catholic lay program to take a deep dive into the faith. The pastor had to approve it, and I felt lucky when he did. The course was a series of classes over a couple of years. I had to complete a project for our local church in order to graduate.

I became a Eucharistic minister, and when that wasn’t enough, I became a teacher in the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), a program for people converting to the faith as adults. I headed a regional Catholic women’s annual retreat called MOM (Mary Our Mother) – Heart of the Home.

I didn’t think of those things as work. I thought of them as service. But I was staffing the church for free — training their new members, standing at their altar, completing a project for the parish just to earn a certificate. The more I gave, the more invested I became, and the harder it was to imagine walking away from everything I’d built.

That’s how it works. They don’t have to lock the door. You lock it yourself.

By then, the church had become the lens through which I saw everything. People outside the faith weren’t just different — they were lost. Ours was the one true faith.

Friends who slept in on Sundays, who questioned doctrine, who trusted themselves over scripture — I pitied them quietly. I didn’t realize that the wall I’d built between us and them was also the wall keeping me in.

The full story of why I left my marriage is one I’ve told before and won’t retell here. What I’ll say is that love came back into my life, and it reminded me what it felt like to be fully seen. That was the jolt. Everything I’d been holding in place started to unravel.

When I finally left, I thought the church would catch me. I’d given it sixteen years. I’d walked to daily mass. I’d trained converts. I’d stood at the altar and placed the Eucharist in people’s hands.

Surely that counted for something.

I went to the pastor. He told me the failure of my marriage was my fault — something I’d set in motion as a reckless twenty-year-old. There was no curiosity. No compassion. Just a verdict.

After that, I was shunned. Not dramatically — no one stood up and pointed. People just stopped talking to me. The women I’d run the retreats with, the ones I’d trained alongside, they looked through me.

I was trouble. I had broken the rules, and the rules were all that held us together. There was no fabric underneath. I’d mistaken structure for love.

I didn’t make a dramatic exit. I just stopped going. It wasn’t a door slamming. It was more like finally putting down something heavy that I’d convinced myself I needed to carry.

What took longer was understanding what those years had actually been. I used to think my time as a Eucharistic minister, an RCIA trainer, a student of the faith — I thought that was devotion.

Now I see it differently.

I was grappling. I was circling the things that never made sense to me, hoping that if I got closer, studied harder, gave more of myself, the belief would finally take root.

Someone once told me, “If it all made sense, what would be there to believe?” And I accepted that. I let it quiet the questions. But the questions never actually stopped.

The truth I couldn’t admit, not to the grannies at daily mass, not to the converts I trained, not even to myself, was that I never fully believed. Not deep down. I gave it lip service. I performed belief the way I performed a happy marriage, convincingly enough that even I almost bought it. And when the belief didn’t come, I did what I’d always done: I blamed myself. If I just studied more. If I just prayed harder. If I were smarter, more faithful, more something, it would click.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? The system tells you that doubt is your deficiency. Not a sign that something doesn’t hold up; rather, a sign that you don’t measure up. And for a woman who had already decided she couldn’t trust her own judgment, that was the perfect trap.

I found the word for what I’d been doing on TikTok, of all places. A woman was talking about religious deconstruction — the process of pulling apart the beliefs you were handed and deciding which ones, if any, are actually yours. I didn’t even know it was a thing. But listening to her, and then to others — atheists, former evangelicals, ex-Catholics — who methodically picked apart the very doctrines I’d been asked to swallow whole, I felt something I hadn’t expected. Not anger. Relief. Someone was finally saying out loud what I had been too ashamed to whisper: this doesn’t make sense, and it’s not because something is wrong with you.

I’m still in that process. I put up a tree every December, not for the birth of Christ, but for the winter solstice — for the pagan roots underneath the story I was told. I keep what I choose to keep. I leave the rest. That’s not rebellion. That’s autonomy. And it’s taken me a very long time to know the difference.

What are you not allowed to question? Start there.

If you found something here worth keeping, pass it on. A like, a comment, a restack — it's how The Pebble in Your Shoe finds the people who need it most. And if you have wisdom of your own to add, the comments are open. I'd love to hear what you'd put on your list.

Who agrees that grandmothers have more than earned their own research study?

Dr. Neal K. Shah, a Johns Hopkins and NIH-funded researcher, certainly does. In an Instagram video, he speaks about why grandparents seem more joyful with their grandchildren than they were with their own children.

My children haven’t expressed this thought to me, but they see a different version of me than when they were growing up.

Emory University scanned the brains of grandmothers looking at photos of their grandchildren. The emotional center fired instantly. Scientists called it “Grandma Brain.” When the same grandmothers looked at photos of their adult children, their brains responded totally differently, not with less love, but with a different kind. The brain fired in a more thoughtful, complex way. (Translation: still love you deeply, just with a side of “have you paid your taxes?”)

The lead researcher asked the same grandmothers what was different. Not one of them talked about love, but said, “This time I’m not scared, I’m not exhausted, no one’s judging me. This time I get to show up and feel every single moment without the weight of the world on my shoulders.”

Grandparents don’t love their adult children less, but love their grandchildren in a way they wished they could have loved their own children: freely, lightly, and without the weight of the world on their shoulders. This is their second chance. And watching them take it is one of the most beautiful things a family can witness.

I watched that video three times because it named something I hadn’t found words for yet.

I was a good mother. I was also scared, exhausted, and carrying more than I knew. My children got my best and also my worst moments, my unfinished edges, my fears I hadn’t yet faced.

My grandchildren get what’s left after I put all of that down. Turns out, what’s left is actually the good stuff.

So this birthday (I turned 63 last week) I wrote some things down. Not a confession. Not an apology. A few things I know now that I wish I’d known then. The weight I’ve finally set at the door. And the things I’m still, honestly, wrestling with.

I’m writing it for my kids. None of us should have to wait until we’re gone to pass on what we know. But if you find something here, that belongs to you, take it.

1. Your house doesn’t need to be perfect.

It doesn’t have to be sterile or pass a white-glove test. It doesn’t have to look like the soft hues of a Pottery Barn spread. It doesn’t need to impress anyone. Your kids don’t care what your house looks like. They don’t need color-coordinated sofa pillows. They only need their home to feel safe, like a warm embrace, a refuge from the outside world.

So keep those pencil marks on the wall to show how much they’ve grown, frame their crayon drawings, and display their dandelion bouquets.

2. People will come and go in your life.

Your childhood friendships may not last until you’re 40. That’s normal and totally ok.

I think of the friends you made in those years on the cul-de-sac — how close you all were, how permanent it seemed. And then life moved everyone like a handful of dice thrown in the air. Not all friendships survived the distance, and I know that hurts. Childhood friends know where you came from. Later friends will know who you decided to be. You need both, but the second kind you have to go find.

What I know at 63 is that new friendships can happen faster than you’d expect, and go deeper than the ones you spent decades building. You get pickier. But you also get braver about saying, ‘I want to know you better.’ I never had that courage at 30. There’s less pretense — you show up as you actually are, not who you think they want to meet. And if it doesn’t work out, you’re okay. You’re not devastated. You’ve learned that some people are for a season, and that’s enough.

3. Don’t waste your time drinking.

I used to inventory it, shop for it, spend my hard-earned dollars on just the right bottle, and then choose the best occasion to drink it. The amount of mental energy I gave to “what should we open?” could have powered a small village. It was nothing but a means of escape. I never spent as much time chasing the ripest mango, which is food that was actually nutritious.

Looking back, I can’t name one positive thing about the experience of drinking. Back then, I didn’t know that it was a carcinogen. Now its widespread knowledge that alcohol contributes to 7 types of cancer and many diseases.

If that’s not enough, it causes you to say or do regrettable things you normally wouldn’t if you were sober. You will make plenty of mistakes on your own, don’t let drinking make you add to your list.

Plus, you feel like crap the next day. A truly inefficient hobby.

4. Your body keeps the score, but it also keeps showing up.

The body that annoys you with its allergies and menstrual cramps is a friend, not a foe. It gives you data which you should take seriously.

Think about what this body does without being asked. Your heart has beaten roughly 100,000 times today alone without a reminder, without a thank you. It grew your children from nothing. It has carried you through every hard thing you’ve ever survived, and it is still here, still showing up, still asking only that you pay attention.

When it speaks — an ache, a flutter, an exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix — listen. It’s not betraying you. It’s trying to tell you something.

5. You are enough. You are perfect inside and out. Really.

You’ve heard this before, but I want you to really hear it. Corporations trying to sell you something invented the standard you’re measuring yourself against. The diet and beauty industry alone is worth over a kajillion dollars, built entirely on making you feel you’re not thin or pretty enough. No one actually looks like the magazine cover. Not even the woman on it! She’s been smoothed and shrunk and lit within an inch of her actual humanity.

Ok, that’s five things. I could have written fifty. But you have lives to live, and so do I.

What I can tell you is that I’m not done learning. The list of what I’m still wrestling with is probably longer than the list of what I know. Fear, for instance. Fear and I have reached a truce, but negotiations are ongoing. She still shows up uninvited, but she no longer runs the meeting.

Rest still feels like surrender some days.

And there’s a voice that occasionally asks, “Who do you think you are?” She’s quieter now, but she hasn’t left the building.

But I’m not waiting until I’m gone to say what I know. None of us should. I hope you take these words to heart.

Which brings me to this coming Tuesday.

I’m so excited to welcome to Substack Live — creator of Tips from Dead People, where the departed pass on what they wished the living knew. Join us Tuesday, April 21st at 11 a.m on Substack Live. Because this conversation — about what we carry, what we pass down, and what we finally set at the door — is one worth having while we’re still here. Just click here on Tuesday. Don’t worry, I’ll send you a reminder on Monday.

In the meantime, you can check out Mary’s Substack out below.

Tips From Dead People

Welcome to the inside of my brain, stuffed full of potato chips, semi-colons, and obituaries.

By Mary McGreevy

If you have Instagram, you can follow her there.

Can’t wait to see you on Tuesday!

On Saturday, I went to the No Kings Rally in Toms River, New Jersey.

I brought a homemade sign that caused some enthusiastic honking. (Scroll all the way down for a peek.)

There were so many amazing signs, but one impressed me the most. The sign belonged to a 94 year old, in a wheelchair, and read: NO KINGS. (Not in my 94 years — NOT EVER.)

I don’t know her name. I know she showed up. And I know that when a 94-year-old woman wheels herself to a rally, the least the rest of us can do is get off the couch.

This was the biggest turnout yet — over 8 million people at more than 3,300 events across all 50 states. Organizers are calling it the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. The first rally drew 5 million. Then 7 million. Now 8 million. Something is growing.

Was it fun? Yes. Was it energizing to be surrounded by people who are paying attention? Absolutely. But I want to be honest with you: a rally doesn’t save democracy. Showing up on a Saturday feels good. The harder work happens on the other days — in the conversations you don’t walk away from, with the people you can’t quite avoid.

Last fall I wrote Why Good People Must Stop Being Quiet — with actual scripts for those moments when someone drops a lie at the dinner table and you freeze. If you haven’t read it, now is a good time. If you have, it might be worth another look.

P.S. April Fools! There is no 94-year-old. There was no rally. Democracy is fine. Everything is fine. (It's not fine. She was real. Go read Why Good People Must Stop Being Quiet and get those scripts ready to play a part in saving our democracy.)

A few things going forward:

I’m writing twice a month now — a choice I made intentionally, not reluctantly. You’ll still hear from me, and when you do, it’ll be worth opening. I’m also hosting a monthly Substack Live. If you haven’t joined one yet, keep an eye out — the next one is coming soon.

Show up when it matters. See you in two weeks

If this piece resonates with you, I'd love to know. Leave a comment, tap the like button, or share it with someone who might need it — someone who maybe hasn't thought about their Mrs. Gallucci in a while.

Suddenly, I’m a person with strategies.

The weekend officially starts on Thursday now because that’s the day estate sales begin. It’s important to get there early on the first day for a chance at the most coveted items, but seasoned buyers know it’s the final hours when you can get the best deals.

I like to think of myself as both disciplined and opportunistic — a dangerous combination in a house full of other people’s things.

There were only a few hours left when I find myself on the second floor with a stuffed brown and white horse under my arm. Seven silk scarves lay scattered on the bed. Not the Chanel ones — they had gone first — but the less bougie ones. I examine each one, since I am bougie myself, only taking the ones marked 100% silk. After all, I’m a businesswoman, not just an admirer of beautiful things. (Though, to be clear, I excel at both.)

I have an eBay store to stock, but my goal is not to bring too much home for myself. I don’t want my kids to be forced to clear it all out one day, standing over a pile saying, “What exactly was Mom doing?” This strategy is not working out well now that I haunt estate sales every weekend like a well-dressed trespasser with exquisite taste.

The bedroom echoes with its bare walls and floor. I remind myself to look around, really look, because the best stuff isn’t shouty—it never has to be. I step to the bureau and see a two-foot long laminated Union Leader newspaper article from January 1967, with a smaller one, also laminated, nearby. Sandwiched underneath is a report typed on a typewriter, flawless, telegraphing its ancientness on brittle, yellowed paper — from the era when one mistake meant starting the whole page over.

And then the India ink paintings appear.

Grainy art paper with swirls of brown, pink, yellow, and blue. Faint staple marks in the corners hint at their time on a classroom bulletin board — high up on the wall, just out of reach for a room full of wiggly third graders.

Suddenly I see myself, my chin resting on my desk with a straw between my lips, gathering up all my breath to blow the watery ink across the paper. I’d done this type of painting as a child, too.

I don’t stop to read the articles or the report, but gather all the pieces in my free hand. I have to have this. (A phrase that has never once led to a minimalist lifestyle.)

I pay $5 for mementos from a former third-grade teacher, Mrs. Patricia V. Gallucci, of Battle Hill Elementary School in Union, New Jersey. Less than a latte, more than a small act of faith.

I read her obituary later — she was 91 when she died. In all these years, she never threw away this collection. The family, if there was one left, didn’t want it. Somehow, either Patricia herself or the universe decided it should end up among the lamps and purses and silk scarves for someone to find.

When I get home, I read the newspaper articles about Patricia’s art projects and her own typewritten words. Patricia was not only interested in teaching her students about the process of making unique designs using colored India ink and water. She wanted them to discover the joy of seeing LIFE — she capitalized the word — in the pictures.

Her students reported seeing clouds, rivers, and even Abraham Lincoln with a curl in his hair. Some wrote that they saw poetry. At the end, Patricia notes: “This type of activity provided the opportunity for each child to use his individual creativeness.”

Before Individual Educational Plans (IEPs) existed, before differentiated learning had a name, Patricia Gallucci was already doing it. She put ink in water, let every child breathe on it differently, move it differently, and then asked each one to look and say what they saw. Not the right answer. Their own vision.

I had a teacher like Patricia, too. Mine was named Miss France. I remember her being soft spoken and kind, a rarity in a strict Catholic school with rowdy classrooms of 40 or more students, the educational equivalent of crowd control with a stiff ruler.

In third grade, Miss France had us memorize Joyce Kilmer’s poem called “Trees.”

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

Miss France taught me to see the sacredness of an ordinary tree. Trees, in all their glory, aren’t shouty either, and yet, somehow, they hold the entire sky.

Life came at me with its brutal demands, and those early sparks got buried, not extinguished, just filed under “later,” where so many important things go. I’m sure you had a Miss France too — someone who pointed you toward beauty before the world got loud. Maybe you’ve forgotten her name. Maybe you’ve forgotten what she showed you.

That’s why it matters to have people like Jenny Santa Maria in your life as an adult. Jenny is a pysanky egg artist and a former special education teacher who spent her career devising ways to reach children that the standard approach couldn’t reach. Jenny is the kind of person who refuses to accept that there is only one door in.

During our recent Substack Live conversation, we considered how different the world would be if every child had an IEP.

What if every child had someone who found the particular way they see?

Patricia did that in 1967. Miss France was doing it in 1969 with a poem. Jenny does it today with wax and dye and eggs that reveal themselves layer by layer.

There is a saying that every person dies twice — once when they stop breathing, and a second time when their name is spoken for the last time.

Patricia kept her typewritten report for sixty years. She laminated the newspaper articles. She kept the evidence of what she had done and why it mattered. And now her name is in this essay, which means you just said it too, at least in your mind.

Patricia V. Gallucci taught children to see LIFE in the chaos of ink and water. Miss France put a poem in my body that I still carry. Jenny Santa Maria is still out there coaching adults, mostly women, to see what’s already there, layer by layer.

I'm doing my own version of it — writing it down, keeping the record, trying to point people toward what they might have forgotten they could see.

I don’t know yet whether what I’m building will last. I don’t know if anyone will want it when I’m gone. But I’m writing it down anyway. I’m keeping the evidence. After all — someone always comes in the final hours.

In case you missed it, here is the Substack Live from Monday.

I'm bringing this one back from last year because I can't think of a better way to prepare for what's coming. On March 23rd at 11 a.m., I'm sitting down live with the incredible Jenny Santa Maria—the artist who led our pysanky gathering and inspired every word of this piece. If you've ever wanted to understand why writing on an egg feels like resistance, or you're curious about trying it yourself, join us. The live will be even richer if you've spent a few minutes with this essay first.

I'm the smallest I can be. On the floor, I've got my knees close to my chest and my arms wrapped tightly around my shins. With my chin tucked toward my chest, I rock back and forth, back and forth, along my spine, until momentum lifts me upright, and I'm almost sitting. I'm balancing myself on my sitting bones while still keeping my egg shape.

I like this tiny version of myself.

In yoga, we call this pose a cosmic egg. Returning to my egg roots reminds me of how we begin life, safe and warm in our mothers' wombs. The cosmic egg is a powerful symbol in Hindu mythology, representing the universe's creation and containing the primordial elements from which life emerges.

Eggs have so much to teach us.

Eggs are nutritionally rich and culturally profound. However, the tenacious bird flu has limited their availability, and grocery prices for a carton have soared accordingly. People are so upset about this that they made egg prices a political platform during the last election.

Eggs are having their day.

Ancient people understood their scarcity. In cold climates, chickens don't usually lay eggs over the winter. In the spring, the appearance of eggs meant renewal, life, and the rebirth of nature.

Creating Pysanky: An Ancient Art of Resistance

I recently had an opportunity to make something unique with an ordinary chicken egg. Friends and I recently “wrote Pysanky” with artist Jenny Santa Maria. You've probably seen these beautiful eggs but may be unaware of their profound meaning. The tradition of using wax to create eggshell designs and add color with dye predates Christianity. It was a pagan practice traced back thousands of years to pre-Christian Slavic cultures.

The word pysanka comes from the Ukrainian verb "pysaty, " meaning "to write," since designs are written onto the egg using a wax-resist batik technique. People used this writing to communicate with symbols like the sun, wheat, flowers, fish, spirals, triangles, and crosses.

With the Christianization of Kyivan Rus in 988 CE, many pagan customs persisted and were absorbed into the Christian calendar. The pysanka transitioned from a fertility talisman to a symbol of Christ's resurrection, demonstrating an early example of cultural adaptation rather than erasure. In the tenth century, the pysanky tradition was absorbed into Christian culture and associated with Easter. The egg became a symbol for the tomb of Jesus.

The Myth That Keeps Ukraine Strong

The Ukrainian people have held tightly to a pre-Christian myth that has perpetuated the practice of pysanky.

It goes like this:

A terrifying serpent monster is chained deep in the Carpathian mountains. This evil beast strives to break itself free, threatening to bring destruction to the world. Every year, the creature sends out minions to spy on humanity. These creatures report back on how many pysanky they have found. As long as people continue to decorate eggs and keep the tradition alive, the monster remains bound and powerless.

The more pysanky created, the tighter the chains become. However, if people were to stop making pysanky, the monster's chains would loosen, and eventually, it would escape, bringing chaos, suffering, and destruction to the world.

The legend of the chained monster connects Pysanky to preserving peace and order, and the myth resonates even more powerfully today.

Americans can relate to this mythological creature as we witness our struggles with forces beyond our control. We are also fighting battles against corruption, misinformation, and the erosion of democratic norms.

In both contexts, the monster represents forces that threaten to overwhelm us. In both cases, the creative act becomes a form of resistance—a way to assert that beauty and tradition will persist despite destruction. We may feel powerless, but we can raise the collective spirit through our creative actions, just as Ukrainians have done through centuries of occupation and oppression.

For Ukrainians facing war, creating pysanky represents a continuation of cultural identity that has survived centuries of attempts at erasure.

Cultural Survival Against All Odds

Pysanky's survival through centuries of cultural transitions and political upheavals speaks to the resilience of this folk tradition. During the Ottoman, Polish, and Russian rule, Ukraine, lacking independent statehood for much of its history, was controlled by various empires. Despite these external influences, pysanky persisted as an oral and artistic tradition passed down within families, particularly by women.

Because pysanky were created in people's homes rather than formal settings, the art avoided suppression more easily than other cultural expressions.

The Soviet era, from 1922 to 1991, presented perhaps the greatest threat to this tradition. The Soviet regime sought to suppress religious and nationalist expressions, and pysanky, with its deep connection to both, was actively discouraged. Many Ukrainian artists and rural practitioners stopped making them for fear of persecution.

However, Ukrainian communities in other parts of the world, particularly North America, kept the tradition alive. Ukrainian immigrants to the US and Canada established cultural centers and museums dedicated to pysanky. In the 1960s, a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism and folk art movements helped reintroduce pysanky to new generations.

In 2023, the first Easter season after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, artists organized fundraisers and sold their pysanky eggs to raise money to benefit Ukraine. These efforts continue as the war drags on.

Pysanky reminds us that art created in kitchens and living rooms can outlast empires.

Fragility and Resilience: Lessons from a Broken Egg

The chained monster's minions were diabolically active while I was writing my pysanky egg. I broke my egg not once but twice and had to start over with a new egg each time. I was especially distraught the first time because I had received the coveted blue chicken egg, which meant my base color would be a spectacular background for my design.

But it was not to be.

In those moments of frustration, I remembered life’s essential lessons:

• Everything is temporary.

• Life is fragile.

• I can always begin again.

Another friend broke her egg while she was melting the wax from the egg, the final step of the process. Coach Jenny swooped in and preserved as much of her artwork as possible, even though the egg was now missing its base.

There's something profoundly metaphorical about creating art on such a delicate surface. The process teaches patience, acceptance, and the courage to start over—qualities that echo the resilience of the Ukrainian people throughout their turbulent history.

The egg's fragility mirrors our vulnerability, while the act of creation demonstrates our capacity to just keep going.

Coming Together: The Communal Power of Creation

In times of war and oppression, Ukrainians have made pysanky a symbol of resilience and national identity. Pysanky brings people of all ages together, reinforcing the bonds of our humanity.

Women coming together creatively has become especially meaningful since the pandemic, when these gatherings were rare. Our group shared concerns about the current political climate and the need for stress relief. By creating pysanky, we could discuss other things that bind us together while supporting Ukraine.

While writing on our eggs, we often worked in meditative silence as we transcribed our messages. Pysanky symbolizes peace in Ukrainian tradition and is a form of prayer. This communal silence created space for processing difficult emotions about global events that often leave us feeling helpless.

Creating Pysanky as Solidarity

In this time when many Americans feel restricted in showing support for Ukraine, creating pysanky offers a tangible way to express solidarity. The creative act itself becomes an act of resistance against fear and complacency. Writing pysanky here shows we are aware of this native art form and engage with it alongside Ukrainians, even though we are far away and may otherwise lack the power to influence world events.

Creating pysanky connects us to a tradition that has survived centuries of attempts at cultural erasure. By participating in this tradition, we affirm its continued relevance and power. Each egg we create symbolically tightens the chains on the monster of destruction, whether in Ukraine or in our society.

Interested in trying pysanky? Consider this:

• Researching local Ukrainian cultural centers that might offer workshops. If you're here in New Jersey, you can find Jenny Santa Maria conducting workshops everywhere! Follow her on Instagram for more info.

• Contacting art centers and community education programs.

• Checking out YouTube and learning this beautiful art at home. You will need these basic supplies: raw eggs, beeswax, kistka tools, dyes, and candles.

• Creating a space where participants can both learn the technique and discuss its meaning.

Through these small, beautiful acts of creation, we participate in a centuries-old tradition of resilience. We remind ourselves that even in the most difficult times, we retain the power to create beauty, preserve culture, and strengthen community—one tiny, cosmic egg at a time.

Want to see a brief tutorial on creating Pysanky? Check out this brief Youtube video.

There’s a scene in Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir that I can’t shake. In the early days after her husband’s arrest, before she fully digested the scope of what he had done to her, she went to the prison and brought him a bag of warm clothes. She was worried he might be cold.

I know that woman.

I was that woman.

I had those same feelings for a man who had only been physically present for most of our marriage. When he spoke of us in conversation as “We decided…” “We went…” I would feel validated for that moment when he considered me a part of him.

I took care of him, even though he offered little in return. I shopped, cooked, cleaned, and took care of our children. I worked a full-time career.

The worst part?

I enjoyed taking care of him. It gave me a role in his life. He got the best I had because that’s who I was trained to be.

I don’t know exactly when my dissatisfaction crescendoed. It was a series of cracks, not a single break.

A set of books that reminded me I was capable of longing.

A LinkedIn message I almost didn’t send.

A friend who asked me one question that undid twenty years of certainty.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I lost twenty pounds — and my husband never noticed I was disappearing.

When Gisèle decided to open her trial to the public, she did something I hadn’t yet learned to do.

She refused to protect everyone else from her truth. But truth in a woman's mouth is rarely received as simply true.

Because of its complexity, it is often not clear to those on the outside. Others deliberately distort it. Mostly, people enjoy being uninformed — seeing only headlines, hearing only whispers — and their understanding of a few “facts” is colored by their own lens and desire to be right.

Gisèle knew opening the trial could go sideways. It did. Her husband, Dominique, had videotaped every assault. She was comatose in the footage. That’s some rock-solid evidence.

Gisèle even fought for the footage to be shown publicly so no one could claim ignorance about what rape actually looks like.

She won that fight. And then the court reversed the decision and locked the public out anyway.

Those images alone should have been enough to convict them.

They weren’t.

One defense attorney pointed to the rhythmic movement of Gisèle’s hips during an assault and told the court she was enjoying it. A drugged, unconscious woman’s involuntary physical response was used as evidence of her consent.

Her own body, turned against her.

As women, we’ve learned our truth is only for us. For the outside world, it is negotiable when coming up against men, especially wealthy, powerful, and connected men.

But who am I kidding? It’s the same with ordinary men in our lives, even though they have slightly less leverage than the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world.

When I left my marriage, people assumed I had been having an affair, and that’s how they treated me.

One day, I stopped at my neighbor’s house, two doors down from our family home. This was the woman I saw every week when we used to drive our kids to school together. We knew each other well. But this time when I knocked, she didn’t welcome me in. Instead, I stood on the stoop and spoke. I got the hint and left.

After my husband and I split, I still looked to my church community for support. When I shared with my parish pastor everything that had happened, I was looking for a lifeline — some hope that I hadn’t ruined my life and my family’s. He assured me it was all my fault, and Larry’s too, confirming what I had already thought.

Great support, Father.

At an outdoor fair that summer, a man who was also a Eucharistic Minister looked through me when I spoke to him. It was as if I wasn’t even there.

I continued to attend church, with no interaction from anyone except one woman who had recently gotten divorced. She offered kind words, which were unexpected, and I fell apart before her. She told me it would be okay, although I couldn’t imagine how.

My own parents cut ties with me. My mother’s words haunt me still. “I am ashamed of you.”

I was tried in whispers, convicted without a courtroom.

Virginia Giuffre didn’t even get that much mercy.

Virginia was sixteen when Jeffrey Epstein first trafficked her. For years she told her story to journalists, to lawyers, to anyone who would listen. She named powerful men. She was specific. She was persistent. And for years, the world found reasons not to believe her.

She was too young, too damaged, too inconvenient. The men she accused were too wealthy, too connected, too important to be brought down by one woman’s testimony.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the man she accused of assaulting her when she was a teenager, was only arrested this past February, not for what he did to Virginia, but for sharing government secrets with Epstein. The system that had ignored her for decades finally moved, and it moved for paperwork.

Virginia Giuffre died by suicide in 2025. She did not live to see it.

She told the truth her entire adult life, and the truth was not enough. The truth is never enough when the world has decided in advance that a woman’s account of her own experience is negotiable.

This is what we are up against. Not just monsters like Dominique Pelicot or Jeffrey Epstein. But the everyday machinery that turns women’s testimony into something that can be bargained with, dismissed, or simply ignored until we are no longer here to repeat it.

Let’s always remember Virginia Giuffre and the price she paid.

Gisèle Pelicot survived the assaults, opened her trial to the world, and published her memoir. She is prospering now with a new partner, her children, her grandchildren, and her voice fully her own. Her book is called A Hymn to Life. The title is not ironic. She means it.

I too found a new life with my husband Larry. I outlasted my parents’, my neighbor’s, and my priest’s judgment. I write about it.

I don’t know how to make this hopeful. What I know is that Gisèle Pelicot is still here. I am still here. And we are both, finally, telling our own stories.

Writing this one cost me something. If it cost you something to read it, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. And if you know a woman who is carrying shame that was never hers to begin with — please send this to her.

PS My Substack Live with Jenny Santa Maria, the Pysanky Egg Artist and Art Coach is postponed. It will now be on Monday, March 23rd at 11 a.m. I’ll send you a reminder next week.

The best thing you can do if this landed? Like it, restack it, and tell me in the comments what's waking up in you. These conversations are why I'm here.💙

March arrived this week, and I felt the first whisper of something loosening.

On Monday, I immersed myself in the annual Philadelphia Flower Show, where beauty whispered to my spirit and senses. I wandered through exhibits exploding with impossible colors. The tulips were so saturated they looked painted, while smiling orchids defied the gray Northeast winter, perched in the crooks of tropical trees. Every once in a while, a whiff of hyacinths filled the air with something that smelled like a yes.

Nature does its work silently, never breaking its rhythm. Not quite spring yet, but the promise of it. The way the light shifts ever so slightly, and your body knows before your mind does.

I needed that promise. Because the world has felt so heavy lately. Heavy in ways I don’t have words for, and I suspect you feel it, too.

And so, this week I went looking for hope. Not the toxic positivity kind — the real kind. The kind that tells the truth about the darkness and then points toward the light, anyway.

I found it in two unexpected places.

The first was Viola Davis at the NAACP Awards. The video came to me from my Pysanky egg artist friend Jenny, who shared Viola’s speech in her newsletter. Viola stood at the podium and said something that stopped me cold:

“The definition of hell: On the last day on earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become.”

I had to sit with that for a while. Not because it frightened me, though it did, a little, but because it cracked something open. All that potential. All the versions of ourselves we’ve quietly folded up and tucked away because life got complicated, or someone told us we were too much, or we got so good at being the good girl that we forgot to ask what we actually wanted.

For those of us in our third chapter, that sentence hits differently. We don’t have unlimited runway anymore. The question isn’t someday. It’s now.

Which brings me to the second thing I found — a word I’d never encountered before, in a publication called , from fellow Substack writer, .

Amy shares her joy at finding the word “Suerza’” (pronounced soo-wair-zah.) It’s a made-up word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, that blends the Spanish words for luck (suerte) and strength (fuerza). Koenig’s definition made me hit the pause button, just like Viola did.

Suerza: A feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all. A sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds.

There it is. That’s the antidote to the heaviness.

Not denial. Not pretending the world isn’t what it is. But this: you are here.

Against extraordinary odds, you made it to this exact moment. All the generations before you, all the near-misses and the heartbreaks and the losses, you are breathing and reading these words and feeling the first hint of March light.

The luck that you made it here. The strength to finally become her.

Spring doesn’t ask permission to arrive. It doesn’t wait until the world is less of a mess, or until we’ve figured everything out. It just comes, quietly and insistently, pushing up through the cold ground.

You get to do the same thing.

This is your season to ask: what version of myself have I been postponing? What have I been waiting for the world to settle down enough to become?

The person you could have become is still possible.

She’s been waiting to meet you.

Suerza. You have more of it than you know.

QUESTION: What’s waking up in you this March? I’d love to hear.

P.S. The friend who brought Viola's words into my life — Jenny, the Pysanky egg artist — is joining me on Substack Live on Thursday, March 12th at 11 a.m. for a conversation about creativity, expression, and making beautiful things in a heavy world. I'd love to see you there. Please mark your calendar.🤍

I was in a car accident last week. I’m okay — mostly — but it meant no newsletter, no post, just me and a hospital bed and a lot of waiting.

While I was recovering, I kept thinking about Keith Bumgarner’s piece that I’d been saving for the right moment. This felt like it.

Keith writes about trauma, survival, and what it finally took — nine therapists and seven decades of living — to find real healing. His story is not easy to read. It’s also not easy to look away from. He writes with the kind of honesty that makes you braver about your own story.

Please support Keith by liking, restacking, and writing a supportive comment.

I’ll be back soon. For now, I’m grateful to hand you over to Keith.

From being scalded with boiling water to being imprisoned for hours at a time in a wooden box, my father’s severe torture shattered my sense of safety, boundaries, and self-worth—especially when coupled with my mother’s failure to protect me.

Now at 71, I appreciate the strength and resilience these experiences forged, which enable me to share my story. Sexual abuse by adult women began when I was 10 and continued throughout adolescence, igniting a destructive sexual obsession that dominated my early life. Healing began at 67, when I finally found a trustworthy, competent therapist whose guidance helped me understand the impact of my trauma and reclaim my life. This recovery journey gives me both hope and the courage to tell my story.

I sat across from nine different therapists before I found the one who could actually help me—Kim Asher*, MS, LPC, CCH.

Nine.

If you’ve ever “started over” with a new therapist, you know what that number really costs. It’s nine rounds of hope. Nine waiting rooms. Nine intake forms that ask you to turn your life into tidy categories. Nine first sessions where you try to sound coherent while your nervous system does cartwheels.

I’m in my seventies now. I’ve carried complex trauma for decades—and the familiar fallout that so many of us learn to treat as personal defects: depression that doesn’t politely resolve, chronic anxiety, compulsive over-control, attention that misfires under stress, and a body that sometimes acts as if the danger is still happening.

So when I say “nine,” I don’t mean I was being picky. I mean I was trying to survive my own history with help that was actually safe—until my first session with Kim, when I felt something small but unmistakable: a quiet internal exhale.

The myth that keeps us stuck

We’re taught to believe that if someone is licensed and we’re willing, therapy should work. You bring the pain; they bring the expertise; healing ensues.

But therapy isn’t a rational transaction. It’s a relationship. For trauma survivors, the relationship isn’t a bonus feature—it’s the engine. That’s what nobody tells you at the beginning: finding a therapist can feel like dating, in the least romantic sense of the word. Not because you’re looking for perfect, but because your nervous system is deciding who is safe enough to tell the truth to.

And if you were trained early in life to override your instincts—to stay polite, stay quiet, stay “reasonable,” no matter what your body is screaming—then you’re especially vulnerable to staying with the wrong fit far too long.

I did.

What nine wrong fits taught me

Looking back, those nine attempts weren’t failures. They were reconnaissance missions into what my healing could not tolerate.

One therapist was undeniably brilliant—quick, polished, impressive. But when I started talking about adolescent abuse, her attention slid toward the wrong thing. Not my fear. Not the betrayal. Details. There’s a kind of curiosity that isn’t clinical; it’s invasive even when it’s disguised as “assessment.” My body knew that before my brain could explain it.

Another therapist revealed his worldview early: he believed women caused men’s problems. Then he launched into stories about his divorce like I’d paid admission to his wounds. It became clear his pain was driving the therapy, not mine.

And then there was the therapist who brought a faith lens. I wasn’t so sure about this, but I tried, because many people I respect find real comfort there. In session three, she reframed my adolescent abuse, and she suggested it wasn’t really abuse.

If you’ve never had a professional minimize your harm, let me translate the effect: it doesn’t just hurt your feelings. It teaches your nervous system that help is dangerous. That is the opposite of healing.

Each bad fit clarified the same lesson: credentials matter, but integrity and self-awareness matter more.

The three non-negotiables I finally learned to honor

After more therapy than I care to count (and more life than I ever expected to survive), here’s what I believe truly matters.

1) Trust your body.

Your nervous system is not being dramatic. It’s reporting. When I walked into Kim’s office the first time, something in me loosened—not a miracle, not “fixed,” just enough to tell the truth. If you find yourself tensing up before sessions, manufacturing enthusiasm you don’t feel, or editing your truth to avoid disappointing your therapist, your body is telling you something. Listen.

2) Expertise matters, but it’s not everything.

If you’re dealing with complex trauma, find someone trained in trauma work. If addiction, grief, or OCD is part of your story, seek that specialization. But technical knowledge without relational skill is like a scalpel in the wrong hands—precise yet dangerous. I needed someone who understood trauma and could sit with me in the mess of it without flinching, moralizing, minimizing, or making it about themselves.

3) Style is substance.

Some therapists are active and directive. Others are reflective and quiet. Neither is “better.” They’re different. You need to know yourself well enough to recognize which approach serves you. I’ve always been good at intellectual analysis; I can think circles around my own pain. I needed someone who wouldn’t let me stay in my head—someone who would gently, persistently call me back to what I was feeling in my body.

The cost of waiting is real

Here’s the hard truth: staying with a therapist who isn’t helping you means continuing to suffer. It means paying money to stay stuck. I wasted months—years, if I’m honest—with therapists I knew weren’t right because I felt guilty about leaving, worried I was being too demanding, or convinced myself the problem was me.

The problem was never me.

And if you’re reading this, wondering whether your doubts are valid, the problem isn’t you either.

Permission to leave

You don’t owe your therapist your suffering. You don’t owe them another chance if your gut tells you this isn’t working. You don’t owe them an elaborate explanation for why you’re moving on.

The therapeutic relationship is built on trust, yes. But it’s not a friendship or a family bond. It’s a professional relationship designed to support your healing. When it stops serving that purpose—or when you suspect it never did—you’re allowed to leave.

Gratitude for past help shouldn’t trap you in present ineffectiveness. You can honor what someone gave you and still recognize that you need something different now.

What finding Kim taught me

Working with Kim, the difference wasn’t mystical. It was structural.

She had the expertise I needed—a deep understanding of complex trauma, especially the kind inflicted by trusted caregivers. But more than that, she had a way of being present that made truth-telling possible.

She doesn’t let me hide, but she never shames me for trying. She sees through my defenses without making me feel exposed. She can sit with the worst of what I’ve experienced without looking away, yet she never gets lost in it with me. She holds hope for me when I can’t keep it for myself.

This is what a proper fit feels like: not comfort exactly, but a steady sense that you’re working with someone who knows how to guide your brokenness toward a path of healing.

Trust the journey

If you’re searching for the right therapist or wondering whether the one you have is actually helping, trust your experience. Trust your doubts. Trust that you deserve care that genuinely enables you to heal.

Nine therapists taught me what I didn’t need. Kim is teaching me how to handle what happened.

Your journey will be different from mine. Keep searching until you find someone who helps your body believe you’re safe again.

*Kim Asher is a licensed professional counselor and a member of ACA.

Education: The Ohio State University—1991, B.A. Psychology

Georgia State University—1995, M.S. Counseling Psychology

Thanks, Keith, for sharing your struggle finding the right therapist and for normalizing the discernment process. I’m so glad you found Kim.

Since I came across Keith here on Substack, I was impressed with his candor about the sexual abuse he experienced at the hands of older women. This topic is rarely discussed, especially publicly, and I admire his bravery and determination to come out from under by telling his story.

In the words of Gisèle Pelicot, “Shame must change sides.”

Here are some other of Keith’s pieces I urge you to read.

Don't Let the Past Steal Your Soul

The Note (part 1)

From my earliest memories, I suffered severe physical abuse by my father, including scalding water on my wrists, repeated attempts to submerge me, confinement in a wooden chest until I soiled myself, and nearly daily beatings with a makeshift weapon. This ongoing violence, coupled with the total absence of protection or love from my mother, shattered my…

Read more

a year ago · 13 likes · 17 comments · Keith Bumgarner

Don't Let the Past Steal Your Soul

The Space Between Words

This post is dedicated to my therapist, Kim Asher, who has served as a key factor in my intelligent and functional learning journey regarding dissociation, helping me become my complete self…

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Keith Bumgarner

Don't Let the Past Steal Your Soul

Eleven Days and Two Blocks Too Far

This story may be truncated in your email. You may read the story in its entirety in your browser or the Substack App…

Read more

8 months ago · 14 likes · 9 comments · Keith Bumgarner

Don't Let the Past Steal Your Soul

Nightmare at the Biltmore

From my earliest memories, I suffered severe physical abuse by my father, including scalding water on my wrists, repeated attempts to submerge me, confinement in a wooden chest until I soiled myself, and nearly daily beatings with a makeshift weapon. This ongoing violence, coupled with the total absence of protection or love from my mother, shattered my…

Read more

9 months ago · 7 likes · Keith Bumgarner

You can subscribe to Keith’s publication here.

Don't Let the Past Steal Your Soul

My story of redemption and healing, regarding the life impact of my physical, emotional and sexual abuse as a child and adolescent.

By Keith Bumgarner

This one's heavy. Estate sales, my mother's last day at home, and the immigrant workers I see but maybe don't really see. I don't have answers, just questions that won't leave me alone. If it resonates, let me know. Comment, share, restack—I want to know if you're sitting with this too.

Did they know it was their last day at home?

I kept asking myself that, walking through the estate sale with its opened pack of Depends keeping no secrets on an accent chair.

They couldn’t have known, or they would have stripped the bed and emptied the pantry. They would have given the children’s books, clothes, and toys to their rightful owners.

You learn a lot about people when you walk through their homes. The biggest bedroom belonged to the couple. The second bedroom had no bed at all. Instead, it held a heavy walnut desk and organized plastic bins of baseball cards. The third bedroom, this one was special. It belonged to the beloved grandchildren. A granddaughter had come first with pink-painted walls and a white floral bureau. Almost as an after-thought, a bookshelf with two Hess trucks, Duplo blocks, and a rainbow of magnetic tiles, was the only evidence there might have been a boy in this room.

A pink cotton dress hung in the closet, ready for summer.

The Mrs. probably would have taken the time to peel the wax from the candelabra if she thought over a hundred people would walk through their house.

No one prepares you for your last day in your house. Most times you won’t wake knowing it is your last day.

My mother ran away on her last day.

That decision would change her living arrangements permanently. It wasn’t much over a week after my dad died when she decided she didn’t like her caregiver, a kind-hearted Black woman named Janice. Janice wore a wig and fake eyelashes during the day, but took them off at night. I think it confused my mom, an old white German lady, to see someone transform like that.

Or maybe it was having a black person in her home at all.

I had hired Janice to stay with my mom in the house after I went back to work. No sense uprooting someone with dementia who had already lost her life partner.

Even though Janice always locked the door, my mom’s mind wasn’t gone enough not to remember how to unlock her own back door. She walked to a neighbor’s house in the cool spring air without a coat and told them someone was keeping her against her will. I got a call at work and drove over to pick her up.

Once Mom was back home and she realized Janice wasn’t leaving, she called the police. They took my mom to the hospital for a psych evaluation, after which I transferred her to a locked dementia care facility. I couldn’t take any more chances that she might try to run away.

If my mother had known it would be her last morning to wake up in her own bed that fateful day in March 2014, would she still have run away?

Maybe the thought of a last day disturbs me because I know I will have a last day too. The rat-a-tat-tat of my neighbor’s roof brings me out of my ruminating. The temperature is in the teens this morning as I watch the Mexican roofers pull off tiles. They defy gravity as they walk the steep pitch with athleticism and grace.

How are they working in this cold?

It’s morose, but I wonder what would happen if one of them fell. He would have left home this morning, not knowing he wouldn’t be letting his dog out again.

He and his crew probably feel like that every day.

The estate sale felt tragic because those people didn’t know. But what’s more tragic? To live your whole life not knowing when it will end, or to live every day knowing the home you’ve made could be taken from you?

These men know. And we’re the ones making them know.

I’m inside my warm house selling my mother’s crystal necklaces on eBay while men risk their lives in the cold outside my window. ICE could detain and deport them any day. Men who are visible and invisible at the same time.

I see them, but do I see them?

I don’t know the answer to that. I just know the question won’t leave me alone.

This one is close to my heart. It's about being too scared to eat at the table you've been invited to—and what happens when you sit down anyway. If it resonates, share it with a woman who's been walking back and forth on something. And I'd love to hear your big chicken moment in the comments.

“I live in alignment with the truth of my life.”

That’s what the tattoo on my arm means. I got it at 62, at a goddess gathering, knowing full well I would be disappointing a very important person in my life, my husband.

I met Tobi, a massage therapist, six years ago. While she worked on my back, we chatted, getting to know each other. She was easy to talk to and a superb listener. Her intelligent hands knew what I didn’t say, as my body telegraphed my life story without words.

Over time, we discovered we had much in common. We were both yoga teachers who’d grown disillusioned with the yoga industry. Our hair went gray early in life, and we let our natural color grow out. We both struggled with parents who had mental health issues, and we both had divorced.

One thing about us was starkly different, though: Tobi’s body was a canvas of many tattoos, and I had none.

Tobi inspired me at every appointment. She sparked so many ideas in me, often giving me a laundry list of things to do when I left. She was part coach, part masseuse, part acupuncturist, all rolled into one.

After COVID lifted, Tobi started ladies-only group gatherings, where we could mingle and meet other fabulous women. Here, everyone could speak from the heart. Tobi’s gatherings were sacred spaces of connection and loving support.

This year was even more remarkable, though. This was the first time she was holding the gathering in her own space. She’d gotten a degree in acupuncture a few months earlier and was now running her business in a newly rented studio.

Generously, she allowed me to invite a few friends to join. Altogether, thirty of us worked on our vision boards and ate vegetarian food, with the option to get a tattoo if we wanted. Tobi mentioned at my appointment earlier in the week that Norali, the tattoo artist, would be there.

Tobi has seen me undressed. She knew I didn’t have any tattoos anywhere, yet she asked if I was getting one. No, I hadn’t been planning on it, but that question watered a seed.

The night before the gathering, my husband and I were out with a friend. He mentioned I was going to the goddess gathering the next day, and I added that a tattoo artist would be there.

“Would you get a tattoo?” our friend asked.

“I’m not saying no. I might.”

My husband either didn’t hear me or thought I was kidding. He goes off about tattoos sometimes—how he believed people lived with regret after getting them and how they would remove them if they could. He routinely sends my kids articles about tattoo ink causing cancer. I know his position. Some tattoos are in poor taste, I’ll give him that. But I’ve also seen works of art, ones that make me want to ask the person their story.

Two of my three kids have tattoos. I was with my daughter during a correction session for an ill-advised college tattoo. I got excited watching the artist work, and had visions of him tattooing a giant peacock on my back.

I easily talked myself out of it, citing wrinkly skin, back rolls, and probable regrets later.

But now I was thinking about it again. Norali did hand-poke medicine tattoos—intentional marking rooted in presence and symbolism. She intuitively channeled each tattoo. Her clients could choose from an array of beautiful, one-of-a-kind ancestral magic. Two of the women I invited already had one from Norali and were getting another one that night.

They also asked me if I was getting one. I shrugged.

I walked over to where a woman was getting tattooed to watch Norali at work. I considered the templates available to choose from that day. They were interesting and intricate; still, I couldn’t decide.

I kept going back to watch, making everyone slide in so I could get by. Each woman receiving their tattoo was so at ease, breathing steadily as the ink took shape. Everyone in line already had tattoos—this was just another layer of their story, not a big deal. One woman was covered neck-to-toe in them, and Norali was somehow finding one last bare spot to fill.

I felt like a big chicken. Like Tobi had invited me to a feast, but I was too afraid to eat. All this nervous energy, walking back and forth, looking at the designs again, watching the needle do its work, trying to borrow courage from these women who had already claimed this for themselves.

I knew what was waiting at home. That voice in my head telling me this was too much, not classy, that I’d regret it. It wasn’t just my doubt but the disapproval of others, especially my husband, already internalized before I’d even made a choice.

But what if I left without doing it? What if I drove home knowing that I had let fear control me? That thought felt worse than the tattoo itself. Worse than the conversation I’d have to have with myself later. I didn’t want to be the woman who came this close and then backed away because of wrinkly skin, or cancer articles, or someone else’s opinion about what belonged on my body.

I returned to my friend who had added to her tattoo that day and examined it again. It was so her—beautiful.

Weary from my deliberation, I sat down with Norali. “This is my first tattoo.”

Norali bowed her head. “I am honored that you are trusting me with it.”

I chose the tattoo with the message: “I live in alignment with the truth of my life.”

I didn’t feel a thing as she worked. Instead, I focused on listening to each lady speak and tell her story. When Norali finished, I was excited to see it.

My friends looked so shocked and proud. Tobi beamed. Norali even posted a photo of my forearm with her tattoo on her Instagram.

On the way home, the closer I got, the more nervous I became.

When I told my husband, he thought I was kidding at first. I showed him the evidence on my arm. His eyebrows rose, and his eyes widened.

“Oh, no!”

He muttered something about my tattoo making his day even worse.

Later, I tried to name it. “I know you’re really disappointed in me.”

Somehow, he’d turned a corner. “It’s your body. You can do what you want.”

And that was it. Technically, the right answer. I knew it would take some time for full acceptance.

But he was right about one thing: it is my body—my body that had carried three children, that had done what others had expected of it for decades, that other people’s ideas had shaped about how it should look, what it should do, what marks were acceptable and which weren’t.

At 62, I claimed a different truth. Not just the image on my arm, but the act itself. I am my own person. My body isn’t for anyone’s pleasure except my own. Not even someone who loves me gets to decide what I write on my skin.

When I look at that tattoo now, I see more than Norali’s beautiful hand-poke work. I see the woman who was too afraid to eat at the table, too afraid to take up space. And I see the woman who sat down anyway, despite the nerves, despite the voice of disapproval she’d already internalized, despite knowing the conversation waiting at home.

I see a woman living in alignment with the truth of her life.

What’s your “big chicken” moment—the thing you almost didn’t do because you were too scared?