They All Blend Together Into One Giant Mediocre Man
A is for Author Your Next Chapter | The RECLAIM Framework
It Started With Mini Goats
It was a Friday night.
I was supposed to be relaxing.
Instead I was deep in a rabbit hole of Zillow listings, mortgage calculators, and Wake County school ratings, negotiating with myself about a three-floor townhouse, a Tudor with a wood-burning fireplace, a farmhouse in the wrong county, and at one point, a serious detour into whether I could keep mini goats on a .4 acre wooded lot in town.
(I cannot. Zoning said no. I’m still grieving.)
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, someone asked me about dating.
And I said:
I don’t even remember which one that was. They all blend together into one giant mediocre man.
I said it and immediately thought…wait. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Meet Veronica
Somewhere inside me lives a woman named Veronica.
You might know her.
She’s the one in the corner with the monocle and the journal, watching everything unfold with an expression that sits right between exhausted and appalled.
She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t lecture.
She just raises the monocle slowly, opens the journal, and writes.
Dear Diary.
Two words. Maximum devastation.
I have been ignoring Veronica for most of my adult life.
The Wall
Here’s what I know about myself that took an embarrassingly long time to admit.
I wall myself off. I have for years.
Not because I’m cold. If you know me, you know I am the opposite of cold. I feel everything, all the time, at full volume. I follow true crime, because I want to embrace the victims. I carry other people’s pain like it’s my own luggage.
But somewhere along the way, after enough hurt, enough disappointment, enough times trusting the wrong person with the softest parts of myself, I learned to keep the stop sign in my head I developed at age 14, when my boundaries were about to be crossed, and build my wall.
Safe.
Protected.
Alone, but at least predictably alone.
The Crumb
And then.
Then.
Someone would show up and notice me.
Not grand gestures. Not some cinematic moment. Just — attention. The tiniest, most ordinary crumb of genuine interest directed at me specifically.
And my entire nervous system would go: OH. THIS. YES. HIM.
Zero to soulmate in about 45 seconds flat.
My brain…my beautiful, chaotic, ADHD brain that can research school districts and mortgage scenarios and mini goat zoning laws all in one Friday night, would suddenly, completely, catastrophically go offline.
Dear Diary. She’s doing it again.
The Performance
There was always something off. Something closed off, something guarded, something that told me within the first ten minutes that he was just as behind his wall as I was behind mine.
I’d feel it immediately.
And spend the rest of the date trying to talk myself out of what I already knew.
But he was there. He was interested. He had looked directly at me and not looked away.
And for a woman who had been behind that wall for so long, being seen, even a little, even imperfectly, felt like enough.
So I would talk myself into it.
Maybe chemistry takes time. Maybe I’m being too picky. Maybe this is what mature love looks like and I’ve just been chasing something unrealistic.
Veronica, in the corner, monocle raised.
Dear Diary. She’s rationalizing again. How very.
What I Told Myself
I went into relationships with people I couldn’t fully love.
Not because I was cruel.
Because I didn’t believe I deserved better.
Because some quiet, persistent voice had been whispering for years:
This is the best you’re going to get. Don’t be difficult. Don’t want too much. Take what’s offered and be grateful.
And every single time, Veronica would write it all down.
Dear Diary. She did it again. Betty Finn was a true friend and she sold her out for a bunch of Swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads.
Except in my version, Betty Finn was myself.
The Truth About Dating After 50
I am 50 years old. I am in the middle of selling my house and finding a new one and parenting three teenagers and young adults and working my day job and building a business and rebuilding a life I love from the foundation up. Whewwww, that’s a LOT.
I tried. I showed up. I performed the breezy, interesting version of myself across dinner tables and coffee shops and date nights that felt more like job interviews than intimacy.
I came home every time thinking: what is wrong with me?
Here’s what I finally figured out on that Friday night, somewhere between the Tudor fireplace fantasy and the mini goat zoning detour.
Nothing is wrong with me.
But nothing was right with the situation either.
Two Fortresses, One Check
Because here’s the thing nobody says out loud about relationships in your 50s after a long marriage ends:
The good ones… the emotionally available, self-aware, genuinely ready ones…are largely spoken for.
And the ones who are left?
They’re us.
Just as wounded. Just as walled off. Just as starved for real connection and just as terrified of it. Just as done with performing and pretending and settling, but also just as likely to settle anyway because the alternative is being alone and that is its own particular kind of hard.
Two people behind two separate walls, sitting across a restaurant table, performing fine at each other.
Dear Diary. Two emotional fortresses just split the check. How very.
Video: Let me tell you about Shrimp Obama and men.
I would drive home and think: there was nothing there.
But maybe the more honest version is: there was nothing available there. Not from him. Not from me. We were both too locked up, too worn down, too deep in our own rebuilding to have anything left to actually offer.
That doesn’t make it less lonely.
It just makes it make more sense.
The Moment I Finally Got It
My brain had just spent three hours doing what it does best.
Exploring every possibility. Feeling all the feelings. Going from practical to whimsical to absurd and fully committing to each stop along the way.
And I was lit up the whole time.
When was the last time a date made me feel like that?
You cannot author a new life and audition for someone else’s at the same time.
Something has to give.
Dear Diary. She’s finally getting it.
What Authoring Actually Looks Like
So I stepped back.
Not forever. Not bitterly. No dramatic declaration.
Just…not right now.
Right now I am doing the most interesting thing I have ever done.
I am choosing, deliberately, to be the main character of my own life instead of a supporting role in someone else’s.
I am learning what it feels like to be interesting enough to myself that swiping feels boring.
I am letting Veronica put down the journal for five minutes because I am finally, actually listening to her.
The wall is still there.
But I’m not hiding behind it anymore. I’m just not opening the gate for whoever shows up with a crumb and good timing.
That’s not giving up on love.
That’s authoring.
A is for Author Your Next Chapter
The A in RECLAIM stands for Author Your Next Chapter.
Not edit someone else’s.
Not wait for the right person to hand you a better plot.
Not settle for a story that’s fine.
Author.
You pick up the pen. You decide what happens next. You stop outsourcing your ending to whoever showed up at the right time but the wrong season.
My next chapter has a fireplace in it. It has a community of women who finally feel like they belong somewhere built for their brain. It has a business I’m building before the world wakes up. It has three kids I’m figuring out how to parent through their own hard seasons.
It has a woman in the corner with a monocle who is, for the first time in a long time, nodding instead of writing.
It does not currently have a mediocre man in it.
And honestly?
It’s the best chapter I’ve written yet.
Pull up a chair. I saved you a seat. 🔥
About the RECLAIM Framework
R — Recenter | E — Energy | C — Community | L — Let Go | A — Author Your Next Chapter | I — Invest | M — Make Something
This essay is part of an ongoing series working through the RECLAIM framework…a roadmap for neurodivergent women rebuilding in midlife.
If it resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss what comes next.
And if you have your own Veronica, I’d love to hear about her in the comments.
ADHD. Perimenopause. Rebuilding anyway.