Yesterday I dropped an entire canister of baking powder on the kitchen floor.

Not a little. The whole damn thing. It hit the hardwood and exploded like I’d just lost a cartel turf war in my own kitchen. I stood there for a second staring at the crime scene and thought: well, this escalated.

Then, without even thinking, I grabbed an old credit card out of the junk drawer and started scraping it into a pile.

Which made me stop. Because that’s a weird thing to know how to do.

And just like that, it was 1980 again. I was just sixteen.

⁂

I worked in a cultured marble sink factory back then. I had been wandering around for about a year. No school, no real address, just couch surfing, street smarts and the quiet toughness of a girl who had already learned the hard way not to flinch. My sister and best friend were already working there, which was essentially the entire hiring criteria.

Imagine spending eight hours a day in a warehouse where the air itself had stopped trying. Everything coated in fine white powder — the machines, the shelves, your lunch, your lungs. OSHA would have evacuated the block and handed us each a very serious pamphlet, had the agency actually ever check in, which it never did. My job was sanding the sinks on a moving conveyor belt, in an unventilated room, wearing paper outfits that fit no one, with an angle grinder the size of a small engine and sandpaper I changed by feel alone because I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face through my mandatory goggles. By the end of every shift I looked like I’d been processed through a very aggressive bakery.

It wasn’t exactly where little girls dream of ending up. But I didn’t dream much as a little girl.

And speaking of white powder, it was here where I met, let’s call him, Joseph Smith.

I’m calling him that because I can, and we were in Utah, and because Joseph Smith was famously good at convincing people to follow him somewhere they probably shouldn’t have gone.

If Hallmark made greeting cards for poor life decisions, ours would’ve read: Congratulations on meeting your future husband in a sink factory. Inside: Nobody saw this ending coming. Except probably everybody.

He was charming in exactly the way that makes perfect sense at the time and absolutely none in retrospect. He had a very nice Harley, a ponytail held together with three elastics like a Hell’s Angel edition of My Little Pony, and a business model I perhaps should have asked more questions about. Though to be clear, that’s entirely on me. He didn’t lead me anywhere I wasn’t already heading. I was not running a rigorous vetting process. My hiring criteria at the time was essentially: does he buy me things, does he make me laugh, does he have a place to sleep, and is he not actively being sought by the police. Joseph checked all the boxes. Welcome aboard, buddy.

What I didn't know, and what I was about to find out, was that I had just accidentally auditioned for a supporting role in the low-budget Utah version of Scarface. But instead of a mansion, I was living in a Sears, Roebuck kit house in a neighborhood called Sugarhouse. No lie.

⁂

Armed with my cousin Dee’s birth certificate, I sauntered into the DMV and traded it for a driver’s license. A real one. Issued by the actual state of Utah. Dee’s name, my face, and just like that I was twenty-one. It was like winning the lottery, and the prize was a nightclub called Oscar’s.

Wednesday nights were ladies night. Dollar drinks and male strippers. I attended the way some people attend church: faithfully, and in my best outfit. Hair so big it required its own zip code. A rabbit fur coat, worn by a woman-girl with absolutely no reason to wear a rabbit fur coat. And that is where I met Scorpion, a stripper who was basically me in male form: wild, mile-high hair, completely committed to the chaos.

After that, everything blurs into a highlight reel. Pool parties where clothing was optional and mostly theoretical. Nights that turned into weekends without anyone noticing the transition. A room in our house I was told not to go into, which I respected for approximately forty-eight hours. I’m still not going to tell you what was in it. Some things you save for the memoir.

I drove a ‘64 Camaro that I had no business owning, until I drove it into the side of Godfather’s Pizza after taking out a fire hydrant. The police let me go. I went back to the party. Anyone brave enough to ride with me faced two hazards: my driving, and Calvin Klein Obsession at a concentration lethal in a closed car.

I was absolutely living the life.

I was also perhaps not asking enough questions about the business model. But I will say, it was the start of my entrepreneurial education. Tuition was steep.

I am pausing here because I just had to Google whether writing this on Substack could constitute self-incrimination. I think I’m good.

⁂

Here’s the thing about that kind of life: you just sort of drift in, one questionable decision at a time. You don’t notice you’ve stopped touching the bottom until you’re already in the deep end. To be fair, I wasn’t exactly working with a full set of resources. I was running on survival instinct, dehydration, mild malnutrition, denial, and whatever terrible idea wandered past wearing a leather jacket. My late teens and early twenties were a long series of you know what, fuck it. And somehow, statistically inexplicably, I survived all of them.

I scraped the last of the baking powder into the dustpan and noticed I had a smirk on my face. The kind that belongs entirely to you and a pile of radically bad decisions that turned out fine. Eventually. More or less.

Oven timer chiming.

I’ll leave it there.

That’s what’s on my mind this week. Meanwhile, in the actual kitchen — muffins baking. Music on. Pull up a stool. Recipe below.

Powdered Doughnut Mini Muffins

(with a little jelly middle)

Author's Note: I am not a professional writer. I write because I need to tell these stories. I use Claude for spelling, grammar, structure, and occasional emotional support. The story and writing are all mine. Judge accordingly. Now, relax.

Relax

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The last few months have been full of questions. This morning, they were strangely quiet.

I’m at peace.

It took me a long time to be able to write that sentence without qualifying it, softening it, or making a joke right after it. Thirty years of practice. Retreats on four continents. A meditation cushion that has outlasted every version of me that thought peace was something you earn at the end, like a tiara.

It isn’t. It’s something you cultivate, slowly, in the dark, without applause. And then one day you notice it’s just there. Weirdly quiet. Rooted. Yours.

Here’s what it looks like, now that I’m on this side.

The more at peace I become, the less chaos I can hold. Not tolerate. Hold. My hands are simply full now. They’re holding finer and more precious things than what I used to carry. So when noise arrives, drama, urgency, the old familiar swirl, there simply isn’t room.

I’ve stopped explaining myself. Not out of pride, and not because I’ve run out of words. I have plenty of words; ask anyone. I stopped because I finally understood that being misunderstood is survivable. For most of my life I treated it like an emergency, something to be corrected immediately, or else… what? Now I let it be. Some people will read me wrong, and I’ve made peace with being a skimmed book.

I’ve stopped showing up in places that disturb my calm. This one took the longest, because I was raised, like most women of my generation, to believe that attendance is love. It isn’t. Attendance is attendance. Love can be a note or a call. And some days, my silence is a form of love. I show up fully where I can arrive whole, and I’ve learned to be gentle with myself in the places I can’t.

I choose silence over proving my point. Not every point needs a defense attorney. Most of them, it turns out, just need a witness, and I can be that for myself. I learned this from my daughter. One of the biggest lessons of my life was the day she said ” Mom, I don’t need you to fix this, I just need you to listen.” Almost stopped my heart. There is a particular sweetness in letting a conversation end unresolved and sleeping anyway.

I choose distance over forced connection, and I’ve stopped calling that coldness. It’s honesty. My energy has become sacred territory to me, not in a precious way, in a practical one. And not everyone is meant to cross that ground. That’s not a wall. It’s a garden gate, and I decide when it swings open, and it does still swing open, wide, for the right souls, at the right time.

I’ve had a very long life of running, giving, acting, apologizing, showing up as someone else to please someone else. I’m tired. Maybe this is what it took for me to reclaim my peace.

None of this is arrogance. It’s alignment. It’s what happens when the inside and the outside of a life finally match.

And here is the part I most want to remember, the part I would whisper back to the woman I was at thirty-five, drafting her midnight explanations, attending everything, holding everyone’s weather:

Protecting my peace was never about shutting the world out. The world is still all the way in; I love it more now, not less. It’s about keeping my inner rooms clear enough to hear my own soul. Because the soul talks quietly. It doesn’t yell over drama. It doesn’t compete with noise. It waits. Patient. It knows where I am. I now know where to find it. It’s in the peace and quiet.

Some days the gates are open, some days they are closed.

Today they are closed.

I’m in the garden.

I’ll open them again when I’m ready.

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(buy the damn cheese)

Most people who know me would probably describe me as fearless. The girl who left home at fifteen. The woman who built things from nothing. The one who moved across the world the way other people move furniture. From the outside, I’ve never looked like someone who waits for permission.

That’s true, mostly.

But underneath the feisty, slightly reckless, spontaneous, leaper-off-cliffs woman, there is still a part of me quietly waiting for permission. The word alone almost makes me choke on my own spit, but there it is. Not permission to do things—I have never struggled with that. Permission to simply be me.

I don’t use the word validation because validation is about performance. Someone watching and approving.

This is different.

This is about existing. About taking up space not as an achievement but as a given. About being the full, unedited, slightly too much version of myself not for an audience but because she’s here, she’s been waiting, and she is frankly tired of the anteroom.

⁂

Permission is sneaky. It never introduces itself as permission. It disguises itself as “after I lose ten pounds,” or “after the kids leave home,” or “after I know a little more,” or “after this project,” or “once things settle down.” Life never settles down. The waiting became the condition. We became so thoroughly trained in the art of waiting that we stopped noticing we were doing it. The smaller, safer, more palatable version of ourselves became the one we introduced to the world while we were getting the other version “ready.”

There is no other one. There never was. What there is, what there has always been underneath the waiting, is fear.

⁂

Fear is incredibly well branded. It shows up wearing practicality. Timing. Reasonableness. Professionalism. Not wanting to make anyone uncomfortable. It tells you that maybe next year you’ll finally write the thing. Start the business. Wear the outfit. Move to the city. Leave the relationship. Say what you actually think.

Last week I stood in the grocery store for five full minutes holding a wedge of absurdly expensive French cheese I had noticed the week before, so you could say I had been stalking it. I really wanted to try it. I picked it up. Put it back. Picked it up again. Apparently some ancient committee in my head had decided forty dollars’ worth of cheese required unanimous approval. I bought the cheese. It was excellent. Fear will do that. It’ll turn the smallest act of permission into a moral dilemma. Excellent marketing. I bought it for years. The committee was never really discussing cheese.

⁂

I was taught to believe that certain expressions of myself were inconvenient, or embarrassing, or didn’t fit the shape of what was wanted. It came from the accumulated weight of lived experiences that were never in my control. Nobody ever said it out loud. They didn’t have to. I learned that the safest version of me was the edited one.

That’s the part that got trained. Not the part that left home at fifteen — she was never asking anyone. The part underneath her, the quieter one, that learned much earlier than that to make herself acceptable before she made herself known.

The edit costs something. It’s not neutral. Every small act of self-management chips something off. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a little, consistently, over years, until one day you’re standing in your own life wondering why it fits like someone else’s.

Fuck that.

The full version of who I am doesn’t look anything like what I was told it should look like. It is weirder, louder, more specific, more contradictory, more surprising. It takes up more space. It makes some people uncomfortable. It says things the edited version would have swallowed.

⁂

Here’s the math that finally did it: I’m sixty-ish. The actuarial tables and I have reached an understanding. Whatever time is left, am I really going to spend it being palatable? Introducing the contained version at parties while the actual one — the one who laughs from the diaphragm, says the thing everyone’s thinking, starts a business at an age when she’s supposed to be simplifying, writes essays like this and hits publish before the fear wakes up — waits in storage for a readiness that was never coming?

The world does not need another edited version of a person. It has plenty of those. What it needs, and what it is genuinely starving for, is the complete, unmanaged, fully expressed version of us exploding into life with everything we’ve got.

Buy the expensive cheese. Take the long way. Say the thing you’ve been rehearsing in the shower for six months. Order dinner and dessert and eat them in the wrong order. Cancel the plan you said yes to out of guilt and spend the evening doing absolutely nothing. Tell someone they matter. Block the person who doesn’t. Go to the movie alone. Wear the thing. Say the thing. Do the thing you’ve been dressing up as “not the right time” for approximately your entire adult life.

The right time was always now.

You just kept postponing it until it looked more like permission.

Fuck that.

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(daisy and the deer in the trees)

I hate the 4th of July.

I have always hated the 4th of July. I am not a social creature, and forced festivity is my personal purgatory. I know this will not land well with the people who plan the gathering, buy the bunting, and assemble the jello flag with blueberries and strawberries arranged into stars and stripes. I was raised on that jello. I ate it the way I attended the party: on a flimsy white plate, alone, out on the fringe. Maybe on the lawn. Maybe on a chair down by my grandmother’s pool. Somewhere just outside the frame of the group photo, which is where I have lived my whole life, doing my thing.

So there I was this 4th, in the country, where it is generally, famously, aggressively quiet.

Until it wasn’t.

The storm was already coming. You could feel it, the way you feel a mood change in a room before anyone says anything. Daisy and I were hunkered down, ready for the power to go out, and I noticed a deer standing in the stand of trees at the back of my yard. Sheltering. Waiting. Smart.

That’s when the neighbors (the same ones who, in a neighborhood of otherwise complete serenity, let their large dogs bark like it’s a paid position) decided that 75 mile an hour winds were the ideal conditions for fireworks.

The explosions ripped through my already taxed nervous system. Daisy lost her mind and ran laps through the house until I finally wrapped her in a blanket and held her on my lap: all fifty pounds of labradoodle, which is most of a Debi. And the deer just stood there in the trees, staring at me. I stared back. We had the exact same expression on our faces. The only difference between us was that I technically knew what was happening, and I’d like to tell you that helped.

It did not.

Then the storm hit, and it was violent. Lightning as loud as the fireworks. Rain so hard it was deafening. The trees went nearly sideways and something cracked out there that I still haven’t gone to inspect, because some damage you’re just not ready to look at yet.

Which is, of course, the whole point of this essay.

⁂

I have been quiet lately. I took time off from writing to get quiet, figure out... something. I couldn’t tell you what. That’s the honest answer to everything right now: I have absolutely no clue.

My house is on the market. It will sell. It hasn’t yet. And the gap between those two sentences is where I currently live.

I wrote about missing the city, and every word of it is still true. I miss my freedom. Locking up and leaving. No house responsibilities, the people, the culture, the clicking of my heels on the sidewalk. The plan is fully built, because of course it is: high rise in the city, next to a park for Daisy, walking distance to everything I love. It’s laid out like a flight plan. I am ready for takeoff.

Except.

The house hasn’t sold. It has been two weeks, which in real estate is nothing and in my nervous system is a hostage situation. It has given me time. Time to get up every morning and walk the same cul-de-sac (yes, the same one, the scenic prison yard has grown on me slightly). Time to spend an few hours in the yard, which is now planted, tending things I am just learning to keep alive. Time to befriend Mary and Joe, the couple in their eighties across the street. She lives in the original house, the grand one, from when all of this was a single estate in the early 1900s. My house was the servants’ quarters. We stand at the end of our driveways and talk about the land.

It is starting to feel a little romantic out here.

That scares the hell out of me.

Because I am not a torn person. I am a make-the-decision-and-never-look-back kind of gal. It is, frankly, my signature move. I have built companies, sold companies, bought and gutted a house, and reversed entire life directions with less internal debate than most people give a dinner order. And now, for the first time I can remember, I am standing completely still in the middle of something and I cannot see which way to walk.

I am the deer in the trees. Lots going on around me. Nowhere to run that’s better than where I’m standing. Waiting out the storm.

⁂

Here is the part I actually want to say, and it’s the part I’ve apparently been in training for, against my will.

I’ve spent thirty years building a relationship with whatever you want to call it: the universe, intuition, God, my own deepest knowing. Long enough to recognize that the moments I hate the most are usually the moments that change me the most. I have always been placed in the right place at the right time, the good because I trusted it, the bad because it was a lesson wearing a bad outfit. It has never once failed to work out. Never. And right now I am clearly being placed in the middle of this stillness and asked to do the one thing I find hardest in this life:

Nothing.

Not decide. Not force. Not build a spreadsheet about it. Just float, in the unknowing, without grabbing for the exit.

And here’s what the practice has taught me, the thing I know in my bones even while every cell in me is scratching at the door: this in-between place, the one with no map and no title and no closing date, is where the magic actually happens. Not after the decision. Not once the boxes are packed and the plan is executing. Here. In the suspended, uncomfortable, completely unresolved middle. Every meaningful thing that has ever rearranged my life got its start in a place exactly like this one, back when I was too busy white-knuckling the uncertainty to notice.

The middle is not the waiting room. The middle is the room.

I know this. I believe this. Some days I still hate it here. Some days I love it here so much it confuses me. I think both of those things are allowed to be true at once.

⁂

So this is what the next month looks like: I will get up. I will walk the dog around the same loop. I will say hi to Mary and Joe. I will water my fledgling bushes like a woman who has never killed a plant in her life. I will make muffins. And I will let the rest flow through me, because I cannot force this one, and somewhere underneath the frustration I know that’s the blessing.

The offers will start coming in. And when they do, I won’t be cornered into anything: I’ll have a choice. The high rise and the park are still sitting right there waiting. So is staying. So is saying no to both and letting some other door open. For once, I’m not forcing the answer ahead of schedule. I trust that when the moment comes, I will know. I always know. That part has never failed me either.

The deer eventually walked out of the trees. After the storm passed.

Not before.

For a seat at the table—and the price of a fancy NYC muffin—hit the subscribe button. You’ll be welcomed with open arms into this circle of like-minded humans, and you’ll be fueling my new journey. I can’t promise it won’t be messy, but I promise it’ll be real.

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A few days ago I posted about blocking someone. Long story short: he was Big Mad. I’d been engaging with him: thoughtfully, generously, though admittedly in bits and spurts, and that, apparently, was the problem. The responses were too short. So he explained to me, at length, and then at greater length, and then at a length that could only be described as a TED Talk no one bought tickets to, that I was “a taker, not a giver.” Which struck a nerve. Not a good time to poke the bear, let me just say that. I told fuckface that I had a lot going on in my actual life, but this (whatever this was, spiraling out of him in real time) was not a sufficient “excuse.”

This got me thinking about my community here on Substack. I came here to be vulnerable. To be open. To be real. To not perform, to not contort myself into engagement-bait just to keep the feed alive, which is, for the record, exactly what I did for too many fucking years, both in real life and on every other stage that asked me to.

And what I got here was the same energy in return. A community of actual humans. Real voices, speaking from their souls, writing about the things that matter, that need to come out. I support that, and I have absolutely felt that same support right back.

So no, I’m not upset at fuckface. I’m grateful. He made me realize that in all my time here, with all the connections I’ve made, they feel more real than any other social platform I spent years trying to build around. I feel a part of something.

I’ve got some big stuff going on right now. The life-changing kind. I can’t sit down and write with full authenticity at the moment, because I’m busy processing and making some enormous decisions for myself, my family, and my future. The kind of things I need to chew on quietly and internally before they’re ready to become words on a page.

The other gift I got from this; I didn’t feel like I needed to make a huge dramatic announcement about it, like I have had to do on other platforms (”taking a break, whatever”), then wait for acknowledgement, approval, maybe even applause, if I’m honest. I felt comfortable knowing I could come on here, making my small contributions and doing what I can for this moment, and guess what, it was enough. No dramatic exit or reentry. My page keeps poking along and growing, and people are still reading the honest essays I’ve posted that came out of that real place.

So thank you, fuckface. Truly. Thank you for making me realize that, amidst a sea of genuine humans, I’m allowed to take a break. That I can pop in and play with my little notes, my tiny life rafts, and let them pull my mind off the heavier things for a while.

And to all of you who read this: thank you for being here. For being real. For being part of my life. I feel you. And I am, sincerely and absurdly, super grateful.

So, a taker, not a giver. Duly noted. Though I guess I did have something that authentically needed to come out after all.

(the morning ritual that sang to my soul and calling me home: Ralph, Daisy, and Central Park)

Bless my heart.

I mean that in the most loving, most what the actual hell was I thinking way possible. Because I did a thing. A very Debi thing. I had a feeling. A specific, cinematic, deeply romanticized feeling about a life that looked a certain way. And I built it. Completely. Obsessively. With everything I had, which if you know me at all, you know is a dangerous amount of everything.

Full gut renovation. This is and is not a metaphor. Decorating like I was expecting to entertain Martha Stewart. The kind of renovation that makes you question not just your choices but the structural integrity of your own judgment.

I was building the dream I wanted. A quiet place in the countryside where I could paint, bake, tend a little garden, and luxuriate in my hard-earned early retirement. The quiet, I imagined, would be good for me. A place to finally land and plant roots.

It took exactly 26 months to figure out it was someone else’s.

⁂

Here is what I know about myself that I apparently needed to spend two years and enough money to make a grown accountant weep to confirm:

I am not meant for the quiet.

For me, the quiet is not the same as stillness. Stillness I have. I have a spiritual practice that spans more than thirty years. Slow movement, yoga, stacks of journals I have carted around the world, spilling my soul onto paper while I sip coffee in silence in some remote corner of somewhere. A meditation practice that goes everywhere with me, including one or two weeks a year in actual, literal silence, at retreat centers that call to me from wherever on the map they happen to be. This is my life’s work. My path. The thing I have given more to than anything else, and continue to.

And with all of that self-awareness fully intact, I am telling you, with zero contradiction:

I am still not made for the quiet.

I am a movement person. A friction person. I need the freedom to follow my soul’s GPS, which recalculates constantly and occasionally at a moment’s notice. I need to consume this world — taste it, walk through it, sit inside it in coffee shops I have never been to and watch the whole beautiful mess happen around me.

People may think this contradicts the introvert in me. It doesn’t. Some of us don’t find our peace in the quiet — we find it in the anonymous chaos. I want to be surrounded, not engaged. To stand in the current of all those lives and feel them rushing past without having to step in. The energy feeds me. The anonymity protects me. Both, at once, and the only place I’ve ever felt I can be completely me.

⁂

So here I am, out here in the beautiful countryside, feeling, well, stifled. Uncreative. Beige. I have baked, yes, but I have not picked up a paintbrush. I have barely written in the journals. My once-global movement practice has been reduced to walking my goldendoodle, Daisy, around the same loop, day after day, with the quiet bewilderment of a woman who had been quietly filed away.

My vision was to build my home, find community, set down roots. What I found was a lovely enclave of couples fifteen years younger than me, busily filtering their offspring through the school system and into college. And then there’s me. Single. Sixty. Possessing a deep and abiding wish to wave warmly from a distance. I’ll say hello, but with my usual social caveat: “just out for a quick dog walk before I have to run…” However, I will , under all circumstances, politely decline the offer of coming in for coffee to discuss what the people three driveways down are doing with their new fence. I do not have the bandwidth for small talk. I never have. I’d rather lie down in the road.

I know this about myself. I’ve always known this about myself. So, once more, with feeling: what the hell was I thinking.

⁂

I wrote about a corner once. Madison and 63rd — sun on my face, the light about to change, a thousand strangers moving around me, and the biggest breath I’d taken in months. I called it home and then spent a whole essay terrified that calling it home was just running in a prettier outfit.

Here’s what I didn’t have words for yet.

A few weeks later it found me again — different block, this time a perfectly frothed cappuccino at my old morning coffee haunt. Same breath. Same oh, there you are. And this time I didn’t reach for the old argument about whether I was running or staying.

Because it was actually neither.

It is not running. It is not staying. It is something older than both, something stitched into my DNA: I am wired to be in it. In the noise, the motion, the anonymous warmth of a city that has no idea who I am and no opinion about what I do.

⁂

I am not unhappy out here — I want to be clear about this. The house is genuinely beautiful.

It started life as a 1937 two-bedroom with a basement nobody had set foot in since the fifties, last truly inhabited by an adorable couple in their nineties. He had a little upholstery workshop attached to the garage, full of ancient industrial sewing machines and the feeling that real work had happened there for a very long time. I could write an entire novel about that workshop. Maybe I will.

The 2-acre property had been left alone for years. Vines were choking trees. Thicket overtook everything and made it impassable to walk the grounds. People had apparently decided it was an excellent place to abandon whatever they no longer wanted. I cleared it all. The house. The land. The years of neglect. And somewhere along the way, I swear I felt the whole place take a breath.

I brought it back to life.

I turned it into a four-bedroom home with a guest cottage. It was a project. I am very good at projects. I have written before about how much I love to build. And that love, it turns out, was an excellent place to bury a much quieter knowing: that when all of this was finished, I would be standing way out here, at the start of a dream I was no longer sure was mine.

The last contractor left two weeks ago.

And here I stand, in this beautiful home, on this beautiful land, in the quiet.

And the quiet, the very thing I had been aching toward for two years, the thing I renovated my entire life to obtain — is, as it turns out, slowly stifling me. It is doing the precise opposite of what it promised. I built a sanctuary for my creativity and accidentally built it a very tasteful, very expensive holding cell.

⁂

Because, as it turns out, my creativity does not breathe in silence. It breathes in chaos — the good kind. The kind where a thousand things are happening at once and I get to reach in and pluck out the bits and pieces that feed me. Extraordinary pastry at least twice a week. A table in the city where I can watch people and love every single weird one of them — inventing their lives, narrating their stories to myself. A yoga studio on 36th and Lex where I can sit in total silence and then walk straight out the door and dissolve into a sea of humanity.

That is the contradiction I have stopped trying to resolve.

Because there is a difference between a life that looks like what you thought you wanted and a life that feels like you.

I lock up and I go. I hop on the 6 and ride those old mustard-yellow-and-brown seats, studying faces and feeling inexplicably connected to people I will never speak to. I get off wherever something calls me, climb the stairs into whatever neighborhood is waiting, find somewhere new to sit and something new to order, and I feel — alive.

I want the box from the bakery. The noise. The full-body certainty that the entire world is happening and I am inside it.

The house goes on the market tomorrow.

That’s what’s on my mind this week. Meanwhile, in the actual kitchen — muffins baking. Music on. Pull up a stool. Recipe below.

Cinnamon Swirl Muffins

On blood oranges, unmatched socks, and other things left undone.

I didn’t brush my hair today.

There is a blood orange on my counter. It’s been sitting there for three days, looking like a regular orange, lying to me.

This morning I finally picked it up. I didn’t rush. I didn’t have the oven preheating or the muffin tin greased. I just stood there holding it, feeling the weight of it in my palm. When I finally put the knife to it, the sound was a sharp, wet snap. And then the color — that deep, bruised crimson that always feels like a secret.

I just sat with it.

Watched the juice pool on the cutting board. Licked a few drops off the side of my hand — tart, sharp, almost summer-like. I didn’t do anything with it for twenty minutes.

I just let it be a cut orange on a Sunday morning.

Old Debi would have had that thing zested, juiced, and the bowl in the dishwasher before the scent even hit the air. Old Debi treated ingredients like suspects she needed to interrogate and process before they could cause any trouble.

This is different.

There was a version of me — she lasted about fifty years, give or take — who ran everything like a one-woman military operation. Schedules. Systems. The sock drawer organized by color and weight. The car washed on a specific day. Projects completed before bed. Thoughts finished before they were allowed to leave the room. She was formidable. She was exhausting. She got an enormous amount done and felt absolutely nothing while doing it.

One of my spiritual mentors, a Broadway actor turned shaman, who could see through a performance at forty paces and has never once let me get away with anything, gave me homework in one of our video sessions.

Leave your socks unmatched in the drawer.

What the fuck?

After our session, I walked into my room and opened my very neatly arranged sock drawer. I unmatched the socks. Messed them up a bit. Stood there in front of the open drawer for a full minute, completely perplexed. Closed it. Walked away with more anxiety than socks deserve.

Then something weird happened: I forgot about them. Not completely. Let’s not get carried away. But enough.

The next morning, without thinking, I opened the drawer to get dressed and there they were all happily unmatched. The world had not ended. Something very small and very tight in my chest loosened slightly, like something old letting go of its grip. It was bizarre, but I got the message.

Then more homework.

Walk away from a project in the middle of a thought. Don’t finish the sentence. Just — stop. Put down the pen or close the computer. Leave the room. Let the thought exist somewhere between started and done.

That was more than what the fuck.

This felt violent. I am not being dramatic. It felt like leaving a child in a parking lot.

I did it anyway.

Here is what I have learned, slowly and with significant resistance, about the version of me currently standing in the kitchen on a Sunday morning with a cut blood orange and unbrushed hair:

She is not falling apart. She is not being irresponsible. She is not one unmatched sock away from complete personal collapse, which is genuinely what the other version believed with her whole organized chest.

She is just — present. She is inside the moment instead of processing it, managing it, extracting its productivity and filing it away before it has a chance to actually land.

The blood orange sat on my counter for three days because I wasn’t ready for it yet, but also because I was enjoying the beauty of it, just sitting in the bowl, wondering what it looked like on the inside. Because some things deserve to be approached slowly. Because the version of me who would have grabbed it and immediately thrown it into a batter without giving it a single moment — without the weight of it in my hand, without the snap of the knife, without the almost violent color and the juice running down my arm — that version would have made a perfectly acceptable muffin and missed the whole thing entirely.

I kept that list of undone homework and still work with it, most times with the face of someone being asked to voluntarily touch a spider.

Things like: leave a dish in the sink overnight.

I actually did that last night. My matching tea cup and nightly biscuit saucer. I put them there. I admired how lovely they looked together — this small matched set that brings me joy every night — and then I walked away.

The dishwasher was sitting right there with its open mouth.

I did not feed it.

I woke up the next morning and the cup and saucer were still there, happily unbothered, completely indifferent to my anxiety about them. And then, instead of shoving them into the dishwasher like evidence, I washed them by hand, dried them, and put them back in their little place to wait for tonight.

And something else loosened.

I am building a very strange and very specific skill set that will never once appear on a resume and is, I am increasingly convinced, some of the most important work I have ever done. It is teaching me that life is meant to be savored — slowly, like blood orange juice running down your arm. Loose. Flowing. Full of things that surprise you when you finally stop moving fast enough to let them.

It has opened up my creativity in ways nothing else has. Because creativity needs space. It needs room to breathe. It cannot live in a sock drawer organized by color and weight.

I made muffins this morning. Blood orange zest in the batter — didn’t measure it, just kept adding until it smelled like it belonged in just the right way. Left the squeezed halves on the counter. Didn’t clean them up immediately.

The muffins were extraordinary. The counter was a mess. Both things were fine.

The child in the parking lot was never actually in any danger.

Not abandoned.

Just waiting for me to stop panicking and walk back.

That’s what’s on my mind this week. Meanwhile, in the actual kitchen — muffins baking. Music on. Pull up a stool. Recipe below.

Blood Orange Cranberry Muffins

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(I’m out.. enjoy)

There are two types of people and we keep seating them at the same table and then acting surprised when one of them is already in a cab.

We have been doing this forever. Pairing up lingerers and leavers at dinner parties, holiday tables, business dinners that were supposed to end at nine. Watching the friction happen in real time and calling it a personality conflict when really it’s just a dining incompatibility.

The first type orders the tasting menu. Eight courses, each one a single perfect bite. They want the intricacy, the construction, the specific genius of a thing distilled to its essence. They can eat in focused silence not because they’re rude but because the food is asking for attention and attention requires quiet and quiet is not, despite what the other type believes, the absence of enjoyment. It is the full presence of it. They finish and are satisfied — completely, genuinely satisfied — and they are ready to go. They cannot understand why anyone would want to spend more hours at this table. The meal is over. The conversations was delightful. Perfect.

The second type orders the osso buco. The full plate. The long evening. The bottle that becomes two, the conversation that has no agenda and no end time and no particular destination and that is entirely the point. They are not just eating dinner. They are eating time. They are eating connection. The table is the thing and they intend to stay at it until every last bit of it has been experienced.

Both of these people are lovely. They just need to stop scheduling dinner together.

I say this with enormous affection for both of them.

⁂

I am a tasting menu person. I have always been a tasting menu person. This is not a recent development or a phase — it is simply how I am made. I know this in the way I know I will never, under any circumstances, enjoy a group tour.

The long dinner. The business dinner that starts at seven and is still going at eleven, the holiday gathering with its mandatory second and third helpings of conversation — is the social equivalent of sitting in a dentist’s chair for four hours without anesthesia. I am present. I am polite. I am slightly uncomfortable in my chair. I am nodding with the specific enthusiasm of someone who has a mouthful of dental equipment and cannot actually speak but wants the dentist to know they’re engaged.

And inside, something very small and very honest is quietly perishing.

I spent decades doing this for work. Business dinners are their own specific genre of endurance sport — the client who wants to really connect, the colleague who has a lot of thoughts about the industry, the dinner that is technically about one thing and actually about establishing that everyone at the table is a serious person who takes things seriously. I showed up. I ordered the sea bass. I stayed until it was over.

And then I went back to my hotel room and lay on the bed fully clothed staring at the ceiling like a person who had just narrowly survived something.

This is not antisocial. This is self-preservation.

⁂

What I’ve observed is a strange cultural consensus that the long table people are doing something morally superior. That their capacity for extended human contact is evidence of depth, warmth, emotional health. That the rest of us, the ones who are genuinely finished after one perfect hour, are somehow less connected, less present.

The real work of relationship, in my experience, is showing up completely for the time you’re there. Not performing presence for four hours while your actual attention left around hour two. I would rather give someone one hour of genuine, focused, fully-arrived attention than four hours of convincing theater.

The tasting menu is not the lesser meal. In fact it is the more demanding one. Every bite is considered. It is also the more intimate dining experience, if you are paying attention — which tasting menu people always are, because we know we only have one and we are completely there for it.

⁂

Here is what I want to say to every other tasting menu person who has spent years explaining themselves at dinner:

Nothing is wrong with you.

You are not afraid of intimacy or commitment or depth. You are someone with a specific and efficient appetite for connection. Someone who goes all the way in, all the way present, and is then genuinely, completely done. The leaving is not the problem. The leaving is just what happens when you’ve fully arrived and fully experienced and fully meant every single bite.

The osso buco people will not always understand this. They will keep inviting you to the long dinner with the best intentions and slight confusion about why you’re already putting on your coat.

You can love them for it. You can show up for the hour you have.

Just maybe don’t let them pick the restaurant.

That’s what’s on my mind this week. Meanwhile, in the actual kitchen — banana nut muffins, a walnut crumble, and a maple glaze that has no business being as good as it is. Recipe below. Music on. Pull up a stool.

Dark Cocoa Espresso Mini Muffins with Chocolate Shards and Sea Salt Flakes

For a seat at the table—and the price of a fancy NYC muffin—hit the subscribe button. You’ll be welcomed with open arms into this circle of like-minded humans, and you’ll be fueling my new journey. I can’t promise it won’t be messy, but I promise it’ll be real.

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After much reflection, I’ve made the difficult decision to pivot.

I will no longer be writing essays. I will be writing about writing essays. This is where the real readers are. This is where the real money is. I have done the research. By which I mean I have looked at who has the most subscribers.

It is not the writers.

It is the people telling the writers what to do.

My new content pillars:

• Why Your Newsletter Isn’t Growing (I do not have a newsletter that is growing)

• The 7 Hooks That Convert (I have never converted anything)

• How to Find Your Voice (mine is still missing)

• Build in Public (build what)

I will post eight times a week. Each post will reference a book I have not finished. Each post will end with the phrase “more on this soon” and there will not be more on it soon.

I will begin every piece with a personal anecdote that is technically true but emotionally fabricated. “Last Tuesday, over coffee with a founder friend—” I do not have a founder friend. I had a yogurt.

I will use the word framework a lot. I will turn ordinary observations into frameworks. Noticing things will become a 3-part framework. Drinking water will become a 5-pillar system. I will trademark none of it but I will imply that I have.

I will sell a course. The course will be about how to sell a course. The course will include a module on building a course. There will be a waitlist. The waitlist will be the product.

I will host a LIVE titled “Writing That Resonates.” and spend the first eleven minutes waiting for people to join while saying “we’ll just give it another minute.

And every Friday, I will post a screenshot of my own analytics with the caption grateful — and you, dear reader, will not be able to tell if the number is going up or down, because I have cropped it strategically, and because at this point, neither can I.

More on this soon.

Debi | M2M

For a seat at the table—and the price of a fancy NYC muffin—hit the subscribe button. You’ll be welcomed with open arms into this circle of like-minded humans, and you’ll be fueling my new journey. I can’t promise it won’t be messy, but I promise it’ll be real.

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(traveling between two worlds - a little magnet from the NY Metro Museum)

You can’t always get what you want.

Except — and Mick Jagger, bless his perfectly preserved little heart, somehow missed this — you absolutely can. You just might not notice, because by the time you get it, you’ve already started wanting something else. The Rolling Stones wrote a song about longing and accidentally wrote a song about running. About the gap between wanting and having. About how the having, frankly, was never really the point.

I have been testing this hypothesis since I was fifteen, standing in a thrift store with six dollars and the profound conviction that a set of matching dishes was going to fix me.

Here is what I know about myself, at sixty, that I could not have told you at fifteen, or twenty-five, or forty-five, or six months ago when I moved into the most beautiful house I have ever built and immediately started researching apartments in Manhattan: I am not looking for a home. I never was. I have been using homes the way other people use therapy — to locate the problem, excavate the wound, and then leave before the hard part.

The hard part, it turns out, is staying.

There is a hunger. I want to be precise about this because I have spent a long time misidentifying it.

It is not ambition, exactly, though it looks like ambition from the outside. It is not restlessness, though that’s the word I’ve always used. It is something older than either — a void that needed filling, and a very convincing story about how a house was going to do it. The building was never the point. The building was just what I did with my hands while the emptiness waited.

It starts small and scrappy. Fifteen, feral, two years on various surfaces that were technically not beds. He is twenty-one with a car and a job, and when he asks if I want to move in I say yes before the sentence is finished. We buy dishes. Silverware. Dull knives that stay dull because neither of us has learned yet that knives require maintenance — a metaphor I’m going to leave right there on the counter.

I make the place look intentional. Like someone lives here on purpose. I teach myself to cook with tremendous confidence and catastrophic results. Six months in, I am bored.

Not bored the way you’re bored on a Sunday. Pacing bored. Animal bored. The boredom of a creature who has solved the puzzle and needs a new one immediately or something is going to get chewed.

This is the part I kept not understanding about myself. I thought the boredom meant something was wrong — with the house, with the man, with me. I thought if I just found the right combination, the void would close. So I kept upgrading. New man, new house, more considered, more finished, more completely mine. Each one built with everything I had. Each time, briefly and unmistakably, the satisfaction of the made thing.

And then it passed. And the void came back. And I started looking.

The houses get bigger. There is a pink mansion at some point — six thousand square feet, a golf course, a garden. I stand in the middle of it and think: I have arrived. I am drinking a bottle of wine a day by then. Maybe two. Which is, I understand now, information. The kind you underline twice and still somehow don’t read.

⁂

When I got sober, the noise cleared. And in the quiet, something enormous was just sitting there: I hadn’t been building homes. I had been building escapes from myself. The making, the choosing, the transforming of raw space — it was never about the house. It was about having somewhere to put the hunger so I didn’t have to look at it directly.

And then, as if the universe wanted to make sure I’d really gotten the message and also wanted to be a little cruel about it — Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated. That house. That kitchen. A woman in her second act with flour on her hands, building something entirely her own, making it look like the most natural thing in the world. That, I thought. That is what I am building toward.

So I built it. The forever house. The kitchen. Every detail considered. The arrival.

I moved in six months ago. I cannot breathe.

I walk through the rooms I designed, I look at the garden coming in, I think: yes, this is exactly right. And then something in my chest tightens — some animal thing, some creature that was very patient through two years of tile samples — and it says, quietly and without apology: but when are we leaving.

Last Tuesday I started looking at apartments in Manhattan.

I know. Believe me, I know.

⁂

Let me tell you about a corner.

Madison Avenue and 63rd Street. Sun on my face. The light about to change. Hundreds of people moving in every direction — their energy everywhere, their lives completely illegible to me, their presence warm and total and utterly anonymous. I am alone in the middle of all of it. I am no one’s neighbor. I am not expected anywhere.

I take the biggest breath.

There it is.

That is home. Not the house. Not the hamlet. Not the Meryl Streep dream — though I have the kitchen. I have the view. I have the thing I am finally, actually building. I sit in the middle of all of it and feel, if I’m being honest, vaguely like a hostage.

And here is where it gets complicated. I am sixty, and I have learned enough to know that the thing that feels most like freedom isn’t always freedom. Sometimes it’s just the next form of running.

So I am sitting with a question I have never once let myself sit with: what if I stayed?

Not because I have to. Not because the house is beautiful, though it is. But because there is something I have never tested in sixty years of building and leaving — what happens after the restlessness? What lives on the other side of it?

I have never waited long enough to find out.

And that terrifies me in a way the restlessness never has — because the restlessness is familiar. And familiar things are seductive. I know how to pack. What I don’t know how to do is sit in a finished room and trust that I deserve a thing that doesn’t require constant motion to justify its existence — or mine.

There has always been a whisper underneath all of it. That the stillness will swallow me. That home is something that happens to other people — people who know how to stay, people who didn’t spend their formative years learning that nothing is permanent so you might as well be the one who leaves first.

Manhattan is eleven stops away. Everything I said I needed — available, there. The question is whether I can learn to carry it with me rather than chase it. Whether the breath I take on that corner can eventually be taken in a garden in Bedford, in the quiet I have spent my whole life outrunning.

I don’t know if this restlessness is identity or armor. I don’t know if sixty is when you finally make peace with who you are, or when you get brave enough to ask whether who you are is actually working for you.

What I know is this: I built something real. And for once, I am not leaving yet.

The Rolling Stones were wrong, and they were right, and they were wrong again. You can get what you want. What you need turns out to be a moving target — and maybe that’s not a problem to solve. Maybe the whole project was never arriving. Maybe it’s learning to be a person who can take a full breath in more than one place.

I’m giving myself time to find out.

The house is still beautiful. The garden is coming in. Manhattan is eleven stops away.

I’m not packing yet.

For a seat at the table—and the price of a fancy NYC muffin—hit the subscribe button. You’ll be welcomed with open arms into this circle of like-minded humans, and you’ll be fueling my new journey. I can’t promise it won’t be messy, but I promise it’ll be real.

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Woke up with this on my mind: how long it took me to just be okay with how I’m wired. Which is ridiculous, honestly, considering I’ve had sixty years to get acquainted with myself.

I don’t need a lot of people. Never did. I used to think that was a problem — spent a good portion of my life trying to recalibrate to accommodate society. Be more available. Reach out more. Show up louder. Perform the version of connection that other people seemed to need from me. And I did it. Got very good at it, actually.

But god it was exhausting.

Here’s the thing about being an introvert that nobody really talks about — it’s not that you don’t like people. I love people. Deeply, specifically, in small quantities. It’s that peopleing costs something. Every interaction has a price tag, which sounds transactional, but it’s true for me. And some days the kindest thing I can do for everyone, including myself, is go home, close the door, stop answering things for a while, and resurface once I’ve recalibrated.

And I used to feel so guilty about that.

I remember being on stages. Conferences. Keynotes. A room full of people looking at me expecting something and I would deliver it — completely, genuinely, I was really there. And then I would have to find the nearest shower and just stand in it. Let the hot water run until the noise of the room washed off. Until I could hear my own thoughts again. Until I was just me, in a bathroom, in the quiet, finally.

Which sounds very dramatic, but honestly felt less dramatic than pretending I didn’t need it.

I never said that out loud because it sounded like a confession. It wasn’t. It was just maintenance. The thing introverts do that nobody sees because we do it alone, quietly, and with a slight amount of guilt.

I spent forty years performing extroversion because the world I was in required it. Business requires it. Leadership requires it. Building something from nothing and getting people to believe in it requires a kind of loudness that doesn’t come naturally to me but that I learned, practiced, got genuinely good at. And then I’d come home and need three days of silence to recover.

My close people knew. Sort of. Not really.

Because I’m also fucking funny and loud and can work a room when I’m comfortable. I genuinely light up around the right people, so nobody quite believed the introvert thing. They still don’t. I say “I’m an introvert” and people react like I just told them I churn my own butter—which I actually do, but that’s not the point.

There’s a shyness in me that I’ve protected my whole life. Not performed over — protected. There’s a difference. The performance was real but it was a layer. Underneath it has always been this quieter thing that needs stillness the way other people need company.

I used to be confused by that.

I’m not anymore.

This morning I sat on my back deck. New wood smell. Trees. The dog. Nobody needing anything. No calls, no calendar, nowhere to be. Just me and the particular quality of morning light that makes everything feel briefly, completely perfect. And I thought — oh. This is it. This is what I’ve been walking toward without even realizing it. The quiet. The permission to finally be exactly as much or as little as I actually am on any given day.

I read somewhere that introverts don’t offer less — they just need less to know things are still good. That hit something in me I hadn’t really had words for before.

Because I have loved people very deeply without needing constant contact, reassurance, or proof that the connection was still there. Sometimes so quietly they couldn’t even feel it. And I couldn’t always explain that.I just knew it was there, deep and steady and completely real, even when I disappeared for weeks. When I needed to let the world wear off for a while. When I came home and closed the door and didn’t answer anything for a while.

That was never absence. That was just me, refilling.

I’m better at it now. Slower, quieter, more intentional about where the energy goes and who gets it and how much. Not because I care less. Because I finally understand the wiring well enough to work with it instead of fighting it.

Shyness is not a flaw. I want to say that clearly because we’ve done something terrible to that word. Made it into something to overcome, something apologetic, a little shameful, something that needs fixing before you’re ready for the world.

A flower is shy. Nobody tries to fix a flower.

Which, honestly, feels like useful information.

It opens when it opens. Completely itself. On its own schedule. Toward its own light.

I’m just trying to do the same.

(A man taped a banana to a wall and sold it for $6.2 million. We are not so different.)

David Ogilvy said: “Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ballpark.” He said it about advertising but he meant it about everything — the terror of committing to something so completely yours it might not work. He meant: swing anyway.

I’m a branding person. Have been my adult life, even when I didn’t have a word for it. I have built brands from nothing, named things people told me were unnameable, and taken considerable heat for it. Worth it. And yes — I have knocked it out of the ballpark. So when I say what comes next, I’m not theorizing.

The branding industry, however, has other ideas. Find your why. Define your audience. Choose your tone of voice from the following twelve approved options. Then spend the next eighteen months editing yourself into a black hole, emerging slightly before the heat death of the universe with a brand that is perfectly polished, deeply intentional, algorithmically optimized, emotionally vulnerable, aesthetically restrained, and completely indistinguishable from everything else.

Go spend twenty minutes on social media right now. I'll wait. Notice anything? The vulnerable opener. The pivot to universal truth in the third paragraph. The italicized kicker. Everyone found their voice and somehow it turned out to be the same voice. Beautiful stories, slightly identical fonts.

I say this with full awareness that I spent considerable time critiquing everyone else’s work before looking at my own. The lowercase thing? Guilty. The italicized kicker? You’re reading one right now. We are all, to varying degrees, swimming in the same aesthetic soup and calling it a point of view.

This is not a criticism. It’s a diagnosis. And the cure is nerve, not craft.

⁂

I have branded a waxing salon. Which, if you’ve never tried to explain to a bank why you need a small business loan for a concept called LunchboxWax, is its own kind of character-building exercise. The name alone made people nervous. Lunchbox. For waxing. With a logo that looked like a bathroom sign but cheekier. Nobody asked for it. Nobody said the market needed it. A focus group would have killed it in the first ten minutes.

We put an ad in the Super Bowl program. A hairy football. Uh, no. Two words and an image and people stopped in their seats. Because it was wrong in exactly the right way. Because it made them feel something — amusement, recognition, mild offense — which is three more feelings than most ads produce. That’s the gap. Right there. The place where everyone else flinched and we leaned in.

The gap doesn't show up in conventional thinking. It shows up when you're willing to make people slightly uncomfortable. The idea that sounds like a joke until it doesn’t. The category that didn’t exist until someone decided it should. Virgin Atlantic put a piano bar on a plane. Apple sold computers to people who thought computers were for nerds. A woman from Sun Valley, Idaho decided that a waxing salon could also be a women’s empowerment movement, built a franchise with fifty locations across the country, and sold it for enough to buy a lot of very good olive oil—with a name called LunchboxWax.

Absurd.

The gap is always obvious in retrospect. It is never obvious in advance. That’s the whole point.

⁂

Here is what I know about branding that no masterclass will tell you: your weirdness is your category. The thing you keep editing out of your Substack bio because it sounds too specific or too strange or too much — that’s the thing. That’s the nerve. The instinct to sand it down is the instinct that makes everything safe and forgettable and exactly like everything else.

Ogilvy also said: “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.” Which is another way of saying: the thing that makes you laugh is probably the thing that will make other people feel something. And feeling something is the only thing that works.

Nobody is paying close enough attention to notice if you fail. This sounds like a consolation prize and it is actually the most liberating thing I know. In the beginning, the audience is small, the stakes are low, and the only thing you have to lose is the version of yourself that was too afraid to try the weird idea. That version isn’t very interesting anyway.

Take it from someone who has built a few category-defying brands and is currently building another, which either makes me some weird sort of expert or a glutton for punishment. Probably both.

The risk is the brand.

The gap you’re afraid to step into is the only one worth stepping into. The safe version of your idea already exists. Someone already made it. It’s fine. Nobody talks about it.

I’ve gone from waxing to writing to whatever comes next — and what comes next involves muffins, a category that doesn’t exist yet, an instinct I’ve learned to trust completely, and the kind of ambition that probably should have retired when I did.

That’s how I know it’s right.

That's what's on my mind this week. Meanwhile, in the actual kitchen — banana nut muffins, a walnut crumble, and a maple glaze that has no business being as good as it is. Recipe below. Music on. Pull up a stool.

Banana Nut Muffin with Walnut Crumble + Maple Glaze

Dear Body,

I caught you in the mirror this morning. Not the way I used to — that quick, critical inventory of everything wrong or soft or different. Just... saw you. Stopped. And felt something I don’t have a better word for than tenderness. So I thought I’d write you a letter.

You were never the problem. I want to say that first, because I spent an embarrassing amount of time acting like you were. Too much, or not enough, or simply in the way of whatever I was trying to outrun at the time. I dragged you through decades of bad decisions, poor nutrition, zero sleep, and a relationship with alcohol that I will not be relitigating here except to say: you survived it. We survived it. And I am still not entirely sure how.

You showed up for everything. That’s what gets me now, when I get quiet enough to actually feel it.

You showed up when I was fifteen and sleeping on floors and eating whatever was available and asking nothing of anyone because asking felt more dangerous than going without. You carried me through streets I had no business being on, kept me upright in situations that should have leveled me. You just kept going. Kept breathing. Kept waking up in the morning with a stubborn loyalty I didn’t know to appreciate at the time.

You showed up when Lily was born. But actually — you showed up nine months before that. I quit drinking the moment I found out she was coming, and for the first time in my adult life I was just... in here. With you. Sober and present and watching my body do something I had never given it credit for being able to do. I watched you bloom. Literally bloom — that belly, that skin, the aliveness of growing something — and I was undone by it. It was the most miraculous thing I had ever witnessed and it was happening from the inside. Too much for me to hold for long, if I’m honest. The emotions that came with actually being in my body were bigger than I knew what to do with at the time. So when Lily arrived and the world got loud again, I retreated. Checked back out. Handed you back to autopilot. Classic me.

But something had been planted. A seed of knowing what it felt like to actually be here. You kept that for me, quietly, until I was ready to come back for it.

You showed up through all of it. The maiden years — brutal and beautiful and completely unsupervised. The years of motherhood, which asked more of you than I knew to ask. The years of building relentlessly, running hard, never stopping — you carried all of that too. Quietly. Not without complaint — I just wasn’t listening yet.

⁂

I didn’t learn to live in you until my fifties. That’s the honest version. Before that, you were transportation. A vehicle I occasionally remembered to maintain, more often forgot, and periodically drove into the ground. First came sobriety, which gave you back to me in ways I’m still discovering. Next, meditation — sitting still long enough to notice you were there, which sounds simple and was in fact one of the hardest things I have ever done. Then yoga, slowly, the way you learn a language you should have grown up speaking.

And I mean that literally — a decade of sitting still, breathing, learning that you don’t push through a body. You live in it.

I wasn’t quiet for a very long time.

I’m listening now.

⁂

Here is what I know about you at sixty that I didn’t know at thirty, or forty, or even fifty:

You are not declining. You are distilling.

Every line on this face is a story I actually lived. Every soft place is evidence of a life that included pleasure and comfort and enough — finally, enough. The grey I spent years highlighting over and under and around is just light, catching differently now. You move more slowly and I am learning — still learning, it’s a practice — to move with you instead of ahead of you. To let the pace be what it is. To stop apologizing for taking up exactly as much time and space as you need.

The maiden was fierce and feral and magnificent and I wouldn’t trade her. The mother cracked me open in ways I didn’t know I needed. But the crone? She’s the one I’ve been waiting for. In the old stories, before someone decided women past a certain age were something to fear or dismiss, the crone was the keeper of wisdom. The one who had survived enough to finally know something. The one whose power was distilled, not diminished.

That’s us.

⁂

I caught you in the mirror this morning and I stopped. Not to critique, not that old reflex of quick inventory. Just to look. And what I felt was something close to awe. You are softer and slower and more lined and more real than anything I could have imagined, and you are — I need to say this clearly — beautiful. Not in spite of the miles. Because of them.

You are not what I thought a sixty year old body would look like, back when sixty seemed like a foreign country I’d never visit. You are more. More honest, more earned, more completely and unapologetically yourself than any version that came before.

So here is what I want to say, finally, after all this time:

Thank you for not leaving when I wasn’t paying attention. Thank you for Lily, and for every morning, and for every ordinary morning that turned out to be anything but. Thank you for the meditation cushion at five in the morning and the quiet walk at seven and the mirror at whatever hour I happen to pass by.

I’m here now. I’m paying attention.

And for the record — you look incredible.

All my love, finally and completely,

Debi

I spent a lot of years being very visible. Loud, intentional, slightly outrageous. I pushed boundaries in marketing because I could, and because it worked spectacularly — the kind of working that builds franchises and gets you flown places to tell your story into microphones. There was a version of me that knew exactly how to take up space and leave an impression that stuck. She built things. Scaled things.

Made people pay attention.

⁂

(LunchboxWax. Super Bowl Official Program)

⁂

When the noise finally settled — when the title, the role, the expectation of being that version of me disappeared — I expected some kind of clarity. A next thing. A cleaner identity. What I got instead was space. And in that space, something strange happened: nothing.

The New York Times ran a piece recently about getting weirder with age — actual headline, I did not make that up — and I knew I had found my people when the writer mentioned she regulates her nervous system by cruising the orderly aisles of office supply stores. Same, Jancee. Same. A geriatrician named Dr. Leipzig, 74, summed it up with what I can only imagine was complete serenity: “You come into yourself.” Research from Texas A&M backs this up. What the research is really saying, along with so many of us at a certain age: the particular flavor of odd that you are eventually stops being the thing you apologize for. It becomes the thing people show up for. I read it, nodded, and moved on with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had already gotten there and was pleased to see the data finally catching up.

Because here is where I actually am: I am the woman who built a business from nothing and pushed every boundary she could find, and I am also the woman who wants to stand barefoot in her kitchen at ten in the morning with no agenda and no one watching. I am weird, unhinged, funny in ways that occasionally make people uncomfortable, and I am also soft, careful, still learning how to tend to something that used to get overlooked. All of it is true. None of it cancels anything out. Dr. Leipzig would probably nod at this. I would probably make her slightly nervous at a dinner party, but we’d get along fine.

We spend so much time trying to decide which version is the real one — which one to lead with, which one people will understand, which one is worth claiming. What I’m realizing is that the question itself might be the problem. So I stopped asking it. And something interesting happened instead.

There’s a new brand taking shape. Not dragged out of ambition or strategy or the relentless forward momentum that built the last one — this one arrived on its own schedule, quietly, the way things do when you finally stop forcing them. It lives in the kitchen. It runs on instinct and olive oil and the particular kind of confidence that comes from having already proven the point once. Loudly. I know how to find the nerve of an idea and press until it sings. I’m just doing it differently now. Softer entry, same sharp edges underneath. All the versions of me standing around the counter at once — the builder, the nurturer, the one with opinions about everything — and for the first time, none of them are being managed. The compass has changed: not will this work, but do I actually want this. That’s a different question entirely, and it leads somewhere I haven’t been before.

I can feel the shape of it. That’s enough for now.

Turns out performing a version of yourself for forty years and then just... stopping — that’s the most grown-up thing I’ve ever done. I used to think becoming nobody meant losing something. Losing identity, losing relevance, losing the version of myself that people recognized. What I didn’t understand was that becoming nobody was the only way to stop editing myself into something smaller.

A girl is no one. And a girl is everything.

⁂

This week I made lemon drenched olive oil muffins for the first time, which feels relevant. Olive oil cake — and its muffin descendants — is one of those things that should not work on paper. The name is doing nobody any favors. As a flavor descriptor, olive oil conjures nothing you want for breakfast unless you are aggressively Mediterranean in ways most of us are not before nine in the morning. It looks like nothing. It is dense and slightly flat and does not photograph well and does not care. And it is, without question, one of the most quietly extraordinary things you can put in your mouth. The lemon cuts through. The olive oil does something to the crumb that butter simply cannot. It is understated in the way that only completely confident things can afford to be.

I thought about that as I pulled them out of the oven. How the most coveted things frequently have the worst PR. How the thing that looks like nothing is often the thing worth staying for. How you don’t need a glamorous name or a recognizable shape or a particularly impressive presentation if what you actually are is just — that good.

Nobody. No one. Nothing to prove. Just the muffin.

Now go bake the damn things.

Lemon Soaked Olive Oil Muffins

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Someone here said last week they were in their sixties and still hoping to find someone to share moments with. It stuck with me for a bit. Not because I judged it—I didn’t. I genuinely don’t understand it. When people talk about partnering up, I do that side half head turn like a puppy does when it doesn’t understand what you’re saying.

I wondered for a long time if something was off. Turns out, nothing was. What I came to realize, as I meandered through life and partners, is that I am simply wired differently. I just don’t carry that gene. And I know I’m not alone in this. Which is its own kind of irony.

There is a quiet category of person that doesn’t get a lot of airtime. Autonomous. Introspective. Emotionally independent in the truest sense. Not because they’ve been hurt into it, not because they’re protecting something, but because solitude is where they recharge, where they think, where they become most fully themselves. These are people who pursue their own inner life with the same devotion others pour into partnership. It’s an active choice.

But we are the exception, and in our very loud, extroverted world, there is very little language for us that isn’t quietly pathologizing—the lone wolf, the commitment-phobe, the one who just hasn’t found the right person yet.

I have found plenty of right people. That was never the problem. The problem — if we’re even calling it that — is that I have always been most right with myself.

There’s this underlying assumption that you’re incomplete. It starts early—the Disney version, the other half, the missing piece, the one who makes you whole. And it follows you, quietly, for decades. Long enough that a life lived solo starts to look like a life still waiting. That contentment alone is temporary. That eventually, you’ll come around.

Single implies absence. A chair with no one in it. Solo implies intention. A table set for one, by choice, with exactly what I want on it.

⁂

Here’s the thing — by most measures, I am a catch. I am interesting, I have my own stuff, I travel well, I know good restaurants, and I will never ask you what you you’re thinking about when you’re quiet, or what series you want to watch next.

The problem is not me. It’s the proximity.

Prolonged proximity short-circuits something in me — not dramatically, just a quiet creeping overstimulation that starts at the edges and works its way in. I don’t become difficult. I become absent. I go somewhere inside myself that has nothing to do with the person standing next to me and everything to do with the fact that I need — genuinely, physically need — to be alone in a room. It is not personal. It is almost neurological.

Look. I would not want to date me. Not long-term. I say that not as self-deprecation but as genuine, hard-won self-knowledge. I am wonderful at a distance. I am best in small doses. I know this about myself the way I know my coffee order.

⁂

There was a man. There has occasionally been a man—I am not a monk. This particular man I had known for almost twenty years, in what I used to call, accurately and affectionately, a vacationship. Between our own separate lives, we would find each other, go somewhere beautiful, talk about everything, and then disappear back into our own worlds until the next time.

He was the real deal. On paper and off it. The kind of person you call when you’re stranded in another country in the wilderness and you know, with complete certainty, he will come find you. Funny. Perceptive. Understood me in the specific way that only someone who has known you across many versions of yourself can. Last year, we thought maybe we’d make a go of it. Real this time. He was retiring. I had just retired. We both had means. We knew each other. It seemed almost logical.

The first few months were lovely. Walking through New York City in the fall holding hands, thinking: hmm. I can see this. Traveling, easy and familiar. Him in my apartment, me in his, thinking this might actually work. I could grow old with someone who can also change a lightbulb. Simple math.

And then I bought the farmhouse. It started with observations about what it could be. First nail. Then opinions about the yard—a pool, he thought, how nice it would be to have a pool. I hate pools. Then the television, which apparently needed to be on, often, at volume. Then the sleeping. I want to be precise here: he was breathing. Normally. Like a person. And I was lying there at two in the morning watching him breathe and experiencing something I can only describe as a very calm, very clear, absolutely certain need for him to not be in my bed. Then the chicken and rice. Three nights a week. Chicken and rice. I cannot explain why this was the detail that broke something open in me, but it was.

And then I stopped.

Not dramatically. Not with a conversation or a confrontation. The calls got shorter. The texts slowed. He knew — he knew me — and that was that. When I went back through it, looking for the real reason, it wasn’t the pool or the television or the poultry. It was something quieter and more fundamental.

I watched my “I” become “we.” Slowly, without announcement, the pronoun shifted. Our renovation. Our plans. Our yard with its hypothetical pool. And my “I” — the one I had spent decades protecting and understanding and building a whole life inside of — started to shrink. People call this becoming one. They say it like it’s the whole point.

It is not the point for me.

I have written about leaving before—the times I couldn’t breathe, physically, the walls closing in. That Christmas Eve. The slow tightening of a corset around my chest, living inside someone else’s version of a life.

This was quieter than that. No crisis. No detonation. Just a slow, certain recognition that I was disappearing—and that I was the only one who could see it happening.

⁂

Solo is not lonely. The world tends to conflate them and they are entirely different experiences. Lonely is absence. Solo is presence — full, deliberate, complete presence with yourself and the life you’ve chosen.

I have never felt more whole than when I’m alone in a foreign city with nowhere to be and no one to check in with. I have never felt more like myself than in a quiet kitchen at ten in the morning with just flour and butter and the particular silence of a house that is entirely mine.

If it’s selfish, it’s the honest kind. The kind that knows exactly what it needs and doesn’t apologize for it.

This is choice.

And in a world that has spent decades trying to convince me otherwise, that has always been enough.

We are a culture of relentless addition. More habits. More goals. More optimized morning routines and five-year plans and versions of yourself to grow into. The self-help industrial complex would have you believe that the work is always additive, that you are a house under perpetual renovation (yes, I know, another renovation metaphor, but when you’re living in it, it’s inspiration) and the answer is always another room.

Nobody talks about demolition.

Nobody talks about what happens when you stop building and just stand in the rubble for a while, not because something went wrong, but because you finally ran out of things to add.

I’ve been in that rubble for five years now. And I want to tell you something about it that surprised me.

It’s not empty. It’s actually quite full.

I wrote about The Unwinding, about walking it off, moving through the disorientation of a life suddenly gone quiet after decades of noise. That was the first layer. The pacing. The processing. The long exhale after the door closes.

But underneath the unwinding was something harder.

The undoing.

Un-doing. Two words, really. The active, deliberate work of taking apart the false identities, the titles, the roles, the carefully constructed versions of yourself you built for specific rooms and specific audiences, and not replacing them with anything. Just letting the space breathe. Just seeing what’s actually there when you stop running the old story and start existing without it.

Unlearning the hustle. Unlearning the need to justify your presence in a room with your productivity. Unlearning the voice that says if you’re not building something you are wasting something.

That voice, by the way, is very loud. And very convincing. And almost entirely wrong.

And I suspect I’m not the only one who knows it. I’ve read so many of you here who have handed in the notice on your old identity, walked away from the title, the role, the thing that told the world who you were. Whether you left a job, a relationship, a version of yourself that stopped fitting, you know this particular unease. The one that lives in the gap between who you were and who you’re becoming. This is for that gap.

I discovered this in the most unexpected classroom.

A maisonette just off the lobby of a pre-war building, steps from Central Park, with a kitchen I had just remodeled and dreamed about for years. Finally mine. I had just sold my company. I had just arrived at everything I had been working toward. And I was completely out of my mind.

Not visibly. Not dramatically. I was doing all my practices, meditating, moving, all of it. But underneath was this low hum of unease, this need for something to do that would also, somehow, not be doing. Something that required just enough of me to keep the chaos quiet but not so much that I had to hold it all together.

I started baking muffins.

I know.

But here’s the thing about muffins, they are forgiving enough that you won’t ruin them, and demanding enough that you can’t ignore them. They require your presence without requiring your full attention. They don't know who you were. They don't care.

I would come in from the screaming streets, from the city that never once asked me to slow down, pull out some flour, butter, and whatever fruits and bits I had in the pantry, and baked muffins. And then I would stand in front of the oven for the full sixteen minutes and just watch.

I’m not sure if it was intentional, or something inside giving me permission to just stop.

Not thinking about next steps. Not solving anything. Not building toward anything.

Just watching something rise.

I started leaving them with the doormen. Small plates, warm muffins. And somewhere in those mornings, while mixing, standing, and handing them off with a bit of child-like pride, something in me began, very quietly, to come undone.

The un-doing is stillness.

It’s the part where you stop long enough to ask: which parts of this are actually me, and which did I just pick up along the way and forget to put down?

The answer is uncomfortable. And clarifying.

And worth every quiet minute in front of that oven.

We are not meant to be forever in construction. Nature doesn’t work that way. The tree doesn’t apologize for dropping its leaves. The garden doesn’t hustle through winter. There is a season for undoing. For letting things fall away without rushing to replace them.

Just being—really being, without agenda or output or proof of existence, is the most radical thing I know how to do now.

In a culture that wants you productive, optimized, and always becoming something,

stillness is an act of quiet rebellion.

subtraction is a practice.

and sometimes the bravest thing you can do

is stand in front of an oven for sixteen minutes

and just watch something rise.

This is how Sundays look now. The muffin tops are still warm, the apples softened into something just shy of jam, the pecans breaking where they want. The brown butter lingers in the air—nutty, quiet, a little deeper than it started.

I’m standing at the counter, not even bothering with a plate, watching the light shift through the trees outside the window. There’s something low playing in the background—slow, steady, not asking anything of me.

Nothing urgent. Nothing to fix.

Just this.

Now go bake the damn things.

Apple-Pecan Muffin Tops with Brown Butter Pecan Crumble

(sixteen minutes in my kitchen)

.

I have a complicated relationship with the term “inner child.” It sounds like something that lives on a shelf between an amethyst crystal and a bookmark that says You Are Enough.

Not because the concept isn’t real — it is, devastatingly so — but because somewhere between the therapy offices and the wellness industry, we turned what should be a quiet act of recognition into a full production. There are guided meditations. There are journal prompts. A candle is usually involved. And somewhere in all that infrastructure, the actual child got lost.

Which is, if you think about it, exactly what happened the first time.

My original self — I refuse to say “inner child” again, we’ve already established my feelings — was a scrappy little feral creature who built forts in the backyard because the adults were occupied and she needed a home and she was going to make one, full stop. She didn’t wait to be told what to do. She didn’t read the instructions. She dragged wood and cardboard from wherever she could find it and got to work, because the alternative was standing around feeling invisible, and that option had already been exhausted.

She was, objectively, a lot.

And then life happened. A series of events I’ll summarize as: enough turbulence to rewire a nervous system before it’s finished forming. The original self didn’t disappear. She did what anyone does when the environment becomes inhospitable — she went underground and waited.

Patient little thing.

The problem is that we don’t go looking for her in the right places. We look in the therapy office, which is a reasonable first stop except that I personally spent years making excellent eye contact with therapists while telling them a very compelling and almost entirely managed version of my story. I had the vocabulary. I had the self-awareness. I had the origin narrative polished to a degree that concerned no one when it should have concerned everyone.

What I didn’t have was any intention of actually changing.

The original self is not interested in your narrative. She is not impressed by your insight. She does not care that you can identify your attachment wounds and trace them back to their source. She wants to know one thing: are you going to let her out, or are you going to keep writing extremely articulate Substack posts about her?

Fair point, Debi.

The places I actually found her were inconvenient and unglamorous and mostly involved sitting still, which I was bad at for decades. A church basement full of strangers who had made a comparable mess of their lives and were inexplicably funny about it. A meditation cushion at five in the morning where I eventually got quiet enough to hear something underneath the noise. Teachers and mentors who weren’t interested in my version of the story — who looked straight through it, actually, with a mildly unnerving amount of accuracy — and waited for the real thing to surface.

That took longer than I would like to admit. But here’s what I know now: she doesn’t need to be healed. She was never broken. She just needed someone to stop performing long enough to show up.

I was in my garden this morning, completely absorbed in something that is not productive by any meaningful standard. Specifically, I was on my hands and knees attempting to make the border of a flower bed geometrically perfect — an endeavor I am choosing to describe as “mindful attention to detail” and absolutely not as the thing my landscaper would recognize immediately as a woman with a problem.

The house was not being cleaned. No one was being networked with. I was moving dirt around with my bare hands with the focused intensity of someone defusing something, which is, if you trace the thread all the way back, exactly what I was doing in a backyard, circa 1970.

She found me. Or I found her. The logistics are unclear and honestly irrelevant.

Here’s what I know: she didn’t need a program, a diagnosis, or a decade of analysis. She needed me to get on my knees in the dirt and stop being so impressive for five minutes.

She was never lost. She was just waiting for me to come back outside.

(A long-awaited view. Misty mornings and spring blooms. 4.19.26 🌸)

I moved into my house on January 1st, but I didn’t truly arrive until this week.

For three months, I lived in the sharp edges of a renovation gone wrong—a contractor who vanished into thin air, appliances in the garage, cold water, and no heat in the dead of winter. I survived on the fierce loyalty of friends who came running from the city, my family who kept my spirit (and my temper) in check, and a legendary crew from Queens who finally breathed life into these walls.

The chaos is finally quiet. The last box of shoes is unpacked, the yard belongs to the dog, and the kitchen—my kitchen—is warm. This Sunday, my edges are finally melting. The tension is leaving my shoulders, replaced by the scent of blackberries and cardamom.

I am finally able to just… exhale.

For the heat rising through the floorboards, I am grateful.
For the friends who didn’t wait to be asked, thank you.
For the sister who kept me sane when I was ready to roar, thank you.
For the simple luxury of a working tap and a flushing toilet, I am grateful.
For the smell of the trees and the rushing water of my stream, I’ll take it.
For the view out every window carefully placed, I’ll take it.
For the hundred of you who found me in the middle of the mess, thank you.
For this soft morning, and this peace, I am okay.

The muffins are still warm, the blackberries collapsed into little pockets of jammy sweetness. The cinnamon–cardamom crumble hangs in the air—soft, spiced, just enough to make me feel like something is shifting inside.I’m standing at the counter, not even bothering with a plate. I’m just letting the room settle around me, lost in a hazy indie mix that feels as quiet as the house. Nothing urgent. Nothing to fix.

Just this.

Now go bake the damn things.

Blueberry Muffin Tops with Cinnamon-Cardamon Crumble

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I want to talk about boxes.

I spent a solid decade professionally dealing with a very specific and beautiful kind of box. Over 10,000, if we’re being honest.

Not those boxes.

The other ones—the ones we’re supposed to fit into, the ones that make everyone else more comfortable because they know where to put you.

We are sorted into them constantly, whether we realize it or not. Age brackets. 45–54, 55–64, 65 and up. I’m actually looking forward to “and up.” That feels like the box society pays the least attention to.

Then there’s race, gender, religion.

Political affiliation—don’t even get me started. I was at the DMV the other day and was force-fed options I didn’t want until I found the one tiny, almost apologetic box at the bottom that said I didn’t have to answer.

And then there’s the big one—the one that follows you everywhere, sits down across from you at dinner, corners you at the farmers market, shows up before your name even lands.

Occupation.

For a long time, I had a very good answer. A clean one. A satisfying one. The kind that made people nod and move on. I built things. I scaled things. I sold one of them for a number that sounds made up when you say it out loud.

And then one Tuesday, I didn’t.

About five years ago, I sold my company. The short version is: I built something from nothing, held it together with grit and adrenaline and a level of control that was probably worth discussing with someone, and eventually handed it off to people in very good suits on a Zoom call. Digital signatures. Congratulations exchanged. Cameras off.

It was a Tuesday.

I sat at my kitchen counter and cried. Not sad crying. Not happy crying.

The kind that has nowhere to go.

Nobody tells you about the Tuesday. They tell you about the exit. The deal. The number. The handshake. The moment you walk away. What they don’t tell you is that somewhere in that process, you also hand over the answer to the question everyone asks within five minutes of meeting you.

Retired? That feels... aggressive. Entrepreneur? Technically—but I’m not currently entrepreneuring anything, which feels like a misuse of the word.

There is no box.

And people don’t like that.

If I’m honest, it’s not entirely convenient for me either.

At first, I did what you’re supposed to do. I traveled. Disappeared a little. Let the noise burn off. For almost two years, no one asked me what I did. They asked where I was from, where I was going, whether I’d found a good bakery. I spent time in small villages and got to feel that kind of connectedness. It was the first time in decades I wasn’t being filed into anything, and for a minute, I thought that was the whole point.

Then I came home.

Living in Manhattan was always a bucket list box I wanted to tick—and it was one of the best chapters of my life. Disappearing into a sea of millions of people, completely anonymous. Free to explore, to try things on, to move through my day without being known.

But somewhere along the way, something shifted. I had been craving a small community. And being away made me understand what that actually meant—not just proximity, but connection.

So I found an old farmhouse. Thirty-eight miles from the city—close enough that I could throw on my black NYC uniform, hop a train, and be there in time for coffee. But far enough away that I could stand outside in the morning and hear absolutely nothing. I spent two years bringing her back. Planted roots. My soul was ready for the shift—quiet, slowness, community.

But here’s the thing about that.

You don’t disappear in a smaller town. You are just… you. Standing in line. Talking to neighbors. Buying dirt. And if you stay in a conversation long enough—or about five minutes, I’ve timed it—it always, always comes back to the same question:

So, what do you do?

Retired, I say. Which does not end the conversation—it reroutes it. Oh, what did you do? And now I’m expected to compress thirty years into something digestible, which is impossible—and also not the point.

Because the truth is—I don’t actually know what I do.

“I don’t know” is not an acceptable answer.

The system agrees.

I learned that the hard way talking to a lender at a local credit union. Lovely, patient man. Spreadsheet energy. He asked the question.

So, what do you do?

Retired, I said.

You’re young to retire.

Am I.

He paused. Opened my financial statement, all the backup documents to support that I was a financially mature person who could easily pay back a $200 monthly payment. I could hear him reading—actually felt it. I knew what was coming.

Hmmm.

I own my home outright. Structured my money carefully. Did the thing the way you’re supposed to do the thing. I asked for a small line of credit, something I didn’t really need, but thought it would be nice to have. For a garden—basically dirt.

The call lasted twelve minutes. Not lender-friendly, he said. No job. No W2. No social security.

No man’s land.

And just like that, I was on the wrong side of a system I had technically already won.

That was the moment it clicked.

There is no box for this.

Not for someone who doesn’t need the system anymore—but doesn’t fit the version of “retired” it understands either.

Too young for done. Too restless for nothing. Too something for everything.

And we live in a world that really, really wants you to pick something anyway. Define yourself. Label it. Put it in your bio. Make it easy. The world doesn’t like open loops. It wants you categorized. Explained. Filed.

I am not pushing back against identity. I am pushing back against the pressure to perform one before I’ve actually found it. One is a process. The other is branding.

And I am not ready to be a brand.

Some mornings I wake up and feel freer than I have ever felt in my life.

Other mornings I feel like I accidentally deleted myself.

Both are true.

Sometimes on the same Tuesday.

The notebook keeps filling up. The ideas are still there—I’m just not forcing them into shape the second they arrive. Something is forming. I can feel it, even if I can’t name it yet.

So I’m writing from here. Not because I have it figured out—I don’t—but because I have a feeling I’m not the only one standing in this strange, unmapped territory, slightly underdressed for whatever the occasion is supposed to be, waiting for someone to come up with a word for what we are.

Until then—

I’ll be at Ace Hardware.

Paying cash.

(Esalen, with its famed naked baths in the background)

I have been meditating for twenty-five years. I want you to hold onto that number, because by the end of this story it is going to seem either deeply impressive or completely beside the point. Possibly both.

Meditation, for me, is not a wellness trend. It is not a morning routine optimization or a stress management technique or something I started doing because a podcast told me to. It is home. It is where I go when I am stuck, when I am sad, when I am happy, when something in my body has decided it knows something my mind doesn’t want to hear yet. I sit when I want to, and, most importantly, when I do not. You get the idea.

Because here’s what I know: your conscious mind is just the surface. Underneath it — doing their own thing, completely unbothered — are entire ecosystems. The body truly does keep a ledger. You only find out what’s on it when you get quiet enough.

Which is why, once or twice a year, I go somewhere to get extremely quiet.

The retreats have ranged. In Joshua Tree they burned locks of my hair in a ceremony — I respected the commitment to the bit without fully understanding it. I’ve traveled from the jungles of Thailand to an old farmhouse in Ireland, and spent cumulative years at my two homes away from home: Spirit Rock in the hills of Marin and Kripalu in the Berkshires. And then there are the proper silent ones — seven full days wearing my “in silence” pin proudly on my shawl, no books, no writing, no eye contact. Brutal would be an understatement, but that’s a whole other story. I have ugly-cried in a yurt, a tee-pee, on the side of a mountain, in a cave — the list goes on. I’ve done this voluntarily, which really does sound unhinged. And in most cases, at the time, I was.

I’ve done breathwork, where the facilitator says just breathe and somehow by 10am you are hyperventilating on a yoga mat convinced you are briefly dying and then inexplicably fine. I’ve done Vipassana, where you sit in silence for ten days scanning your body centimeter by centimeter until you have either achieved liberation or developed a very strong opinion about everyone in the room whom you’ve never met — usually both. I’ve done sound baths, ancient ceremonies, radical dancing, and that one workshop where someone burned so much sage I ended up at the medic station questioning my life choices.

The through-line in all of it: get quiet enough to hear what’s underneath the noise. What’s actually running. Sometimes what you find is profound. Sometimes it is genuinely transformative.

And sometimes it is a Ding Dong.

Esalen is a retreat center in Big Sur, perched on a cliff over the Pacific like someone dared the California coastline to hold still. Since 1962, it has hosted some of the greatest minds in human history — Maslow developed theories here, Huxley lectured here, Hunter S. Thompson was once the security guard, which tells you everything you need to know about the vibe. And it is one of my favorite places to retreat.

It was early spring. My company was in hyper-growth mode and burning it at both ends was a spectacular understatement. I needed rest badly.

I flew into the Bay Area, rented my car and hit an In-N-Out for the drive in. This was not a contradiction. This was strategy.

I arrived, dropped my bags, walked out onto my deck overlooking the ocean, and took a breath so big I am fairly certain I caused a small swell. I had not breathed properly in months. I was here. Let’s do this thing.

The week settled into a lovely rhythm. Morning meditation. Yoga in the afternoon. Workshops. Meals that were beautiful, virtuous, and aggressively brown — brown rice, steamed everything, something labeled porridge that I suspected could reorganize my internal organs for the next quarter.

But there were cookies from 4-5pm. Kombucha and cookies, every single day, and I started waking up thinking about them. I want to be clear: I am a person with a lot of time on the cusion, and by day three I was structuring my entire afternoon around a snack window. By day four, something in me was quietly losing its mind. By day five, I would have committed a minor misdemeanor for a convenience store snack cake.

Day five is also the day I ended up in the bathtub.

The baths at Esalen are actual claw-foot bathtubs arranged on a wooden deck carved into the cliffside. You fill them with hot spring water and sit looking out at the Pacific, which at that height and angle feels less like scenery and more like the world just dropped away. Clothing is optional. Clothing is, in practice, not particularly present.

I was soaking. The ocean was doing its thing. A man nearby was having a very serious conversation about consciousness and the dissolution of ego. His face had the serenity of someone who had personally met awareness for coffee and they got along great.

And then my mind said, completely unprompted: look at all the Ding Dongs.

I had a brief internal exchange with myself about this. Where did that come from? You are a middle-aged woman and you just called a man’s penis a Ding Dong? What the hell? And then — immediately, with zero hesitation — my brain pivoted directly to: I want a Ding Dong. Not that kind. The snack cake kind. The Hostess kind. The thin waxy chocolate shell, the aggressively fake cream filling, the thing I ate in the back of a station wagon in 1978 that, apparently, lives rent-free somewhere in my hypothalamus.

I began mentally unwrapping one with the focus of a neurosurgeon.

I may have gotten slightly too absorbed, because I realized my mouth was drooping open — which is not a great look when you are attempting to be discreet with every manner of dangly bits floating freely in your peripheral vision.

Here is what twenty-five years of meditation has taught me, delivered to me on a cliff in Big Sur, naked and slightly under-nourished, surrounded by evolved humans:

The mind will grab for anything. A snack cake. An old argument. A sudden urgent need to reorganize your kitchen at 2am. It does not care if it is elegant. It just wants out of whatever is actually happening underneath.

The practice is not making the thoughts stop. The practice is watching the Ding Dong thought arrive, fully clocked in, ready to work — and choosing, just this once, not to follow it to the snack aisle.

I didn’t achieve transcendence that afternoon. The man next to me possibly did. His face went very still toward the end. He probably dissolved something important.

I made peace with the fact that I was thinking about a snack cake.

Which, honestly, after twenty-five years — might be exactly the same thing.

I came home from Big Sur with two things: a slightly more spacious relationship with my own mind, and a craving I could not shake. One of those I can offer you as instant gratification. The other one takes a little longer. Start with the muffin top. The grown-up Ding Dong below.

Ding Dong Muffin Tops with Mascarpone Center and Chocolate Glaze