How Did I Get Here? (And Why "Here" Looks Nothing Like the Plan)

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There's a moment — and if you're reading this, you've probably had it — where you look up from your life and think: how the f**k did I end up here?

Not in a crisis way. More like a standing-at-a-crossroads-with-no-GPS way. Men call it a midlife crisis. But for women, it's something more holistic than that. It's not just "I bought a sports car and panicked." It's a full-body reckoning with the gap between the life you were sold and the one you're actually living.

Because we were sold a very specific life. The blueprint gets handed to us young — somewhere between our first Barbie and our first viewing of a romantic comedy — and it goes like this: get a college degree, land a great corporate job, find a man and get married, buy a house, have the babies, grow old gracefully. Rinse, repeat, die. There are variations, sure, but they all follow the same skeleton. And for a long time, I genuinely believed I was just running behind schedule.

I wasn't running behind schedule. I was on a completely different train.

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The Blueprint Was a Lie (At Least For Me)

By the time I was 30, I had cleared exactly one item off that list. The degree — which, for the record, took me six years because life is not a straight line and neither am I. But I graduated into the 2008 financial crisis, which, if you weren't there, was essentially the economy taking a massive dump on anyone trying to enter it. The "awesome corporate job" was off the table. Instead, I spent a few years bartending and copy-pasting my resume into the graveyard that was early Monster.com, praying someone would call.

Someone eventually called. The job paid $36,000 a year. I was working 55-hour weeks. If you do the math — and I did, painfully — that's less than minimum wage. It took another decade before I landed the kind of corporate role that paid me what I was actually worth. Ten years. One decade. For the thing that was supposed to be step two.

As for finding a man and getting married? I'll just say this: I don't have a great picker. I've had two serious long-term relationships — both of them longer than some of my friends' marriages — and neither ended at an altar. One of those was probably 60/40 my fault. The other was more like 30/70. The honest version is that I wanted to get married so badly that I kept choosing s**t relationships wrapped in gold foil with a bow on top, telling myself the smell wasn't coming from inside the box. I stayed too long in both because I was terrified of being alone. That fear had to go. We'll talk about that another time.

Kids weren't happening without the marriage, and that wasn't entirely strategic — I genuinely don't love other people's kids, though I'm sure I'd love my own. More than that, I'm a product of divorce. I watched what it does to the parent. I lived what it does to the kid. Single parenthood was never a path I wanted to walk.

And the house? Genuinely hilarious. I was single, making sub-minimum-wage salary, in a post-recession economy — and then, just to keep things fun, we got two more once-in-a-generation economic collapses: COVID, and whatever we're calling right now with the inflation and the interest rates and the general sense that no one can afford anything. I've also spent most of my adult life in cities where the median home price hovers around $900k, so. There's that.

2 for 5. And Somehow, That's Okay.

Here's where I'm supposed to feel like a failure. I'm 39. I didn't check off the boxes. I'm 2 for 5 on the blueprint I was handed as a teenager by a society that had some very strong opinions about how my life should look.

But something else happened while I was busy not hitting my milestones.

I made three major life resets over the last decade. The first was for a job — I packed up and moved to a city where I didn't know a single soul. It also ended my first long-term relationship. The second was for sanity (DC to Charleston — need I say more?). The third was to finally walk away from a long-term relationship that had become genuinely toxic. Each of those moments came down to a decision. Not a grand gesture. Not a perfectly timed plan. Just a decision.

That's actually the part I want you to hear: it was just a decision.

It doesn't mean your whole life implodes at once. It doesn't mean you have to do everything today. It just means making a conscious choice — one that quietly starts rewiring your brain to adapt, to face hard things, to become someone who moves through fear instead of around it. Decision without action is just intention, and eventually you do have to follow through. But the making of the decision? That's the hardest part. The rest is just logistics.

We have this wildly underrated thing called autonomy. Free will. The ability to do basically whatever we want as long as it isn't illegal, unethical, or immoral. And yet so many of us — myself very much included — walk around waiting for permission. Scared our parents won't approve. Scared our partners won't support it. Scared of being judged for building a life that doesn't look like the blueprint.

Here's what years of screwing up and course-correcting has taught me: your parents just want you to be healthy and happy. That's it. I've given mine plenty of material and they've never once stopped showing up. And if your partner is the one standing between you and the life you want? I've been there. We'll talk about that too.

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What "Here" Actually Looks Like

So. Here I am.

39 and single. The dating apps are a wasteland. I live in a city with an impressive concentration of men who have the emotional availability of a decorative gourd. But I am not lonely — and for most of my adult life, I conflated those two things, so the distinction matters.

A few years ago I found a local women's group. We go to dinner almost every week. We talk about real things — the embarrassing things, the scary things, the things you can't say out loud anywhere else. We laugh, we cry, we hold each other accountable without being awful about it. They are the healthiest relationships I've ever had. I also have a life mentor who has welcomed me into her world like I belong there, and a long-distance career mentor I can call without warning to vent about the coworker who keeps taking credit for my work (almost always male, but I digress).

These are the relationships that are building me into the person I need to be for my future partner. And yes — I still believe that partner is out there. I'm just not burning the house down to find him anymore.

I'll probably never afford a house on my own without a lottery win. Kids aren't happening at this point, and I've made my peace with it — more peace than I expected, honestly. But I live ten minutes from the beach, which my teenage self could not have imagined in her wildest dreams. And every evening I close my laptop, get in the car, and walk along that beach with the actual love of my life: my Bernese mountain dog.

The corporate job is still going — though not without some scares. I'm a consultant, which means job security is basically a myth I tell myself to sleep at night. When DOGE gutted the government last year, I genuinely thought I was done. Then this year it's AI — every other headline is about companies swapping humans for machines. I get the economics. I don't think it's ethical. And it scares me, I won't pretend otherwise.

But as Mark Twain put it: "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened." Worrying has never solved a single problem I've had. The only thing that has ever worked is making a decision, taking action, and when all else fails, accepting — with as much grace as I can manage — the things I genuinely cannot change.

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Why This Page Exists

I'm a neurodivergent ADHDer with codependency tendencies and what I'll generously call an "addictive personality." Life is not easy for me, and I don't think it's easy for a lot of women who look completely fine from the outside.

This page exists because I know I'm not the only one. There are thousands of women out here who don't fit the blueprint, who are quietly measuring themselves against a standard that was never built for them, and who are exhausted by content that is either preachy, out of touch, or drenched in bro-science and performed wellness.

This is not that. This is me — real person, real job, real anxieties, real dog, real life — writing about the stuff that actually matters: how to be productive when your brain works against you, how to take care of your body without losing your mind, how AI is changing everything and what to actually do about it, and how to build financial stability when nobody handed you a head start.

No fake news. No mansplaining. No judgment.

If any of that sounds like what you've been looking for, you're in the right place. Drop me a message — I actually read them.

- Forever Wired & Wild⚡🌿