Just Another Monday

A life, honestly examined

Monday morning started as an ordinary day. The day ended extraordinary.

There was a professional meeting in my home, the kind with money on the table. For most of my life, those conversations triggered something deep in me. A constriction. A story that whispered not enough, never enough. Monday I felt that feeling rise, right on schedule. And instead of arguing with it, or arguing with the people in the room, I just... stayed with it. Breathed through it. I have learned in Kabbalah to pause before reacting. Monday, I actually did it.

That was new.

That evening our daughter FaceTimed us from Buenos Aires. She was feeling down. A year ago, maybe even six months ago, a call like that would have set off every alarm in me. The tiger mother would have shown up, full of anxiety dressed as advice. Instead we talked for almost an hour about the wonderful people she met in Rio, her summer plans, whether she would do a Master’s or an internship. Easy, warm, unhurried. She laughed. My husband and I laughed. Nothing was solved and everything was fine.

That was also new.

As I was getting ready to wind down the day, I left a comment on another woman’s Substack, someone about to turn 62, a spiritual teacher in Australia, and she wrote “I feel I am about to take off”. I told her the truth: life just gets better and better in our 60s. She subscribed. She commented “I believe you!” and told me she would be reading my work. It was early morning her time, she had literally just woken up.

I smiled at that for a long time.

Because here is what I want to tell you, honestly: I did not live a great life for over fifty years. Not because my circumstances were terrible. But because I had not yet done the one thing that changes everything, the inner work. The kind that is not comfortable. Sitting with a therapist, sitting with my thoughts for hours, writing in a journal things I had never said out loud.

The great life was not waiting for me to earn more, achieve more, travel more, or finally get everything right on the outside. It was waiting for me to go in.

I spent three decades in Corporate America. I built a career, raised a daughter, kept a marriage together even when neither of us knew how to find our way back to each other. From the outside, it probably looked fine. From the inside, I was often white-knuckling it, reactive, armored, running on empty in ways I could not name yet.

The turning point wasn’t a single moment. It was a decision, made over and over again across a decade, to stop managing my inner life and start excavating it. To feel the feelings instead of outsmarting them. To ask harder questions than I was comfortable with. To stay in the room with myself.

That work changed my marriage. It changed how I parent. It changed how I sit in a meeting when the word money makes my chest tighten. It changed what I can offer the women who find their way to this newsletter.

A great life, I have learned, doesn’t announce itself with a fanfare. It shows up quietly, in ordinary Mondays. In the moment you feel fear rising and you don’t run from it. In a stranger on the other side of the world who reads something you wrote and decides to stay.

It’s not the life I imagined when I was younger, shinier, louder, more impressive. It’s better than that. It’s real.

And it became real only when I was willing to go somewhere most people spend their whole lives avoiding: inside.

So if you’re reading this and something in you is restless, if you sense that you’re living a smaller life than you’re capable of, I am not going to tell you what to do. But I will ask you the question that changed everything for me:

Not out there. In here.

What are you afraid you might find if you actually looked?