I'm Doing This for Katie.
And for every woman who deserves to reclaim the next 30 years of her life. Including me.
On February 12th, I was having an ordinary morning getting ready for work and carpool dropoff, when I did something I do every morning. I opened Facebook on my iphone.
Quickly, I found out that my friend Katie had been murdered. Stabbed to death by her own son. She was 49 years old. And she was stuffed in a garage trash can.
I called out sick. My breath caught in shock, I sobbed. I couldn’t believe that this could happen to this mother, this wonderful, mischievous, vivacious woman who made every room a little more fun and a little more alive.
Katie had been trying to reclaim her life. She moved to a new house. She was trying to start over. She had gone through years of depression, years of fighting in court for her boys against a man who wanted them only out of spite. She had survived so much. And she never got her next 30 years.
That is why I’m building The Next 30. For her. And honestly, for me. And maybe, if you’re reading this, for you too.
—
Here’s what I never say out loud.
I was born into chaos. Holes punched in walls. Things thrown. Yelling. Sobbing. A small girl being called clumsy like it was her fault she existed in a space that wasn’t safe. So I did what girls do in those environments: I became the good child. I kept my mouth shut. I kept my feelings inside. I tried to make everybody happy.
Nobody seemed happy. Turns out you can’t manage other people’s emotions. I know that now. I didn’t know it for the next forty-something years.
I married my first long-term boyfriend. He was an alcoholic, and eventually became abusive toward me and my kids. I got us out. Then I spent the next ten years with someone who was critical, controlling, and made my neurodivergent, ADHD household feel unsafe in a quieter, more subtle way. I bought a house with this man. I told my therapist I would settle and stay because I didn’t have the energy to leave.
She said, “Heather. You dread him coming home from work. You’re walking on eggshells. Your kids don’t even like him. What are you doing?”
And that was the moment. I woke up.
I realized I had never been in love with either of them. I had just wanted to be good. I had wanted to feel loved. And I had spent my entire adult life managing everyone else’s chaos because chaos was what felt familiar to me from the beginning.
—
I’m 50. And something shifted.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. But somewhere around the time I turned 50, I stopped managing other people’s shit. Just stopped. It wasn’t a decision. It was more like a refusal that rose up from somewhere deep and said: no more.
Is it strange that freedom and invisibility arrived at the same time? Men don’t look at me the way they used to. Part of me grieves that. But another part of me feels like I’ve been let out of a cage I didn’t even know I was in. I don’t have to perform anymore. I don’t have to be pleasing or pretty or available. I can just… be. Not to say that I don’t enjoy looking good when I go out, but I do it for me now.
I’m also tired. Burned out. Still doom-scrolling more than I should. Still fighting my ADHD brain, which I didn’t even know I had until my therapist gently, persistently suggested it last year. Late-diagnosed ADHD in midlife women is apparently an epidemic, because we were never the hyperactive boys in the classroom. We were the good girls, masking beautifully, running on empty.
But here’s what I also know at 50: I have at least 30 more years. Maybe more, if I take care of myself. And I am not going to spend those years scrolling TikTok and being angry about the world. I have to choose me.
—
What nobody tells you about turning 50.
There’s a feeling that comes over you. It’s not a breakdown. It’s closer to a reckoning. A strange cocktail of freedom and grief and self-acceptance that arrives all at once. You’re grieving your children growing up. Grieving the end of the version of yourself that was needed in a certain way. Grieving, maybe, your sense of being seen.
But underneath the grief is something else. A strange, quiet excitement. Because for the first time maybe ever, you get to be the center of your own life.
You have wisdom now. You have hard-won clarity. You know who drains you and who fills you up. You know what chaos looks like dressed up as love. You have mothered and nurtured and cared and given… and that doesn’t go away. But now you get to ask: what about me? What do I actually want? Who do I actually want to be?
That question is terrifying. It’s also the most exciting question you’ve been asked in years.
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RECLAIM.
That’s the word I keep coming back to. Not reinvent. Not restart. Reclaim. Like something that was always yours, that got buried under decades of other people’s needs and your own survival strategies.
I built a framework around it, because that’s how my brain works.
R is Recenter — stop orbiting everyone else’s needs.
E is Economic Grounding — money is freedom, full stop.
C is Cut Emotional Drift — the doom scrolling, the stagnation, the TikTok spiral at midnight.
L is Land in Community — real friends, not followers.
A is Author Your Next Chapter — write the identity of your next decade on purpose.
I is Invest in Energy — your hormones, your strength, your nervous system.
And…
M is Make Something — something that is yours, that you built, that the world gets to have because you exist.
To me, personally, RECLAIM means clarity. Momentum. Peace. But the kind of peace you work for, not the kind you collapse into.
—
I’m doing this for Katie.
An amazing trainer at my gym, Wendy, heard the whole story. I was sobbing in her arms at the gym the week after I found out. She put her arms around me and gave me the longest hug. She looked me in the eyes and saw my grief, really saw it, because she’s also a midlife woman, and if you’re a midlife woman, you have seen grief. You have carried grief. You know what it weighs.
Katie should be here right now. She should be doing this. Reclaiming her life, figuring out who she is now that her boys are grown. Finding her people, making something of her own. She had started. She moved to a new house. She was trying. She just didn’t make it.
So I’m going to do it. And I’m going to do it out loud, so other women can find their way to it too.
We are strong women. We have survived so much. We are a force to be reckoned with, and we have earned the right to be treated that way. Starting with how we treat ourselves.
If you’re in this messy middle… if you’re doom scrolling at 11pm wondering what your life is actually for, if your house is quieter than it used to be and you don’t know whether to cry or dance, if you’re walking on eggshells somewhere or just walking in circles, you found the right place.
Subscribe to The Next 30. I’ll be here every week. We’ll figure it out together.
For Katie. For us.
— Heather