Hello and welcome!

I’m Sue. I write about ordinary life, especially the parts that don’t fit neatly into the story of “a good life” we’ve been told:

Why we’re afraid of things. Identity and how it shifts. The way we grow out of things we thought would be forever. The way we lose things we thought we could never live without. Why we are our own worst enemy. How grief and joy can sit in the same room without one of them having to leave. What resilience actually looks like. The strange aliveness hiding in regular moments.

Why yes, I do have a pension for navel gazing, thank you for noticing. But beyond that, life threw me a lot of curve balls, and you know what happened? They NEVER played out how I thought they would. Widowed at 48, raising teenagers on my own, building a thriving corporate career, and then leaving that career to pursue writing. None of it worked out as expected. So basically I gave up the problem solving, answer-finding, or future-predicting that filled most of my first four decades on this planet. Instead I’ve become obsessed with trying to see what life, what reality actually is, rather than the stories our minds and culture like to tell us it is.

This is especially true of the parts of life I used to rush past, while trying to avoid eye contact: bad moods, awkward transitions, moments when I felt stupid or like a failure. I’ve discovered there is gold in these uncomfortable experiences, meaning a little bit of wisdom or acceptance or insight that allows me to feel more alive right here, right now. It definitely beats always striving for a future that can’t help but be ten steps ahead.

So every week, I publish an essay about looking at something a little more deeply. Not to give you answers. Not to fix what’s broken. Just to expand what you see.

Sometimes it’s about loss or transition. Sometimes it’s about traveling or silly mistakes or parenting budding adults. Often it’s about sitting with complexity instead of scrambling to solve it, leaning into curiosity instead of certainty, examining the squirmy feeling I’m having instead of just trying to make it go away. And always it comes with permission to be messy and contradictory and fully human.

Want to kick the tires? Here’s a sampling of posts that capture what we do around here pretty well:

#118: The year I finally stopped fighting Dry January.

#123: When the future you ordered doesn’t arrive.

#141: The art of making a mistake, gracefully.

#147: Finally, someone gets it.

#148: The Japanese art of spaciousness.

This column comes out once a week on Saturdays. All my words are free, but there is an option for a paid subscription. We share those dollars with Experience Camps for Grieving Kids. Check them out.

If you are not one for subscribing, you can read the column weekly through the Substack app.

If you are one for listening, you can also subscribe to my voiceovers on your favorite podcast app.

If you came here looking for posts specifically on loss, please head to this section:

I never look at my subscriber lists, so feel free to unsubscribe when my writing no longer serves you. Peace.

Finally, you can find more of my words in the anthology Unexpected Gifts and in my book Do Loss: A New Way to Move through Change.

To noticing and the gold it reveals,