Instead, I've spent my adult life becoming a whole lot of women.

I've been an innkeeper, a wine bar owner, a flower farmer, a coffee shop owner, a business coach, an author, and an entrepreneur. I've started businesses, sold businesses, closed businesses, and turned more than one perfectly enjoyable hobby into a job.

For a long time, I thought all that reinvention meant I couldn't stick with anything. That somewhere out there was the right career, the right routine, the right version of me, and if I could just get my shit together long enough, I'd finally find her.

Then my forties started dismantling that idea.

I quit drinking. I started questioning identities I'd worn for years. I let things end that I'd worked incredibly hard to build. I bought a house I couldn't stop thinking about. I lost my mom. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started paying attention to what was left when I wasn't trying so hard to improve myself.

I started writing.

Not because I'd figured everything out. Quite the opposite.

Writing became the place where I could look at all those lives I'd lived and finally see that none of them had been mistakes or failed attempts at becoming the “right” woman.

They were all me.