If this is your first time reading one of my Daily Dose stories, Welcome. From time to time, I write a five-episode arc of micro-fiction drawn from the women of Echo Canyon. Raven, Riley, Quinn, Val, Skylar. Women in later life finding what comes next.
This story is about Raven’s decision that didn’t end when the fiction did. It opened something larger. If you’d like to read the full fiction arc first, you can find it here.
Life’s Threads is where I step outside the scene and talk about what the story stirred. The questions beneath it. The parts that feel uncomfortably familiar. And, occasionally, the ways my own life mirrors what my characters are navigating.
This story’s reflection grew out of Raven’s story but landed somewhere much closer to home. The offer from the National Equine Therapeutics Council for a 3-month training program forced her to stand between two versions of herself, at 70 years old.
I think about how often women in our sixties, seventies and eighties find ourselves in that same place. Capable of doing more. Tempted to say yes. But aware that the life we want now doesn’t always match the life we built before.
These pivots are not theoretical. They shape our days, our energy, and the work we choose to stay close to.
If you’re navigating one of these crossroads yourself, I hope this article hits home.
Raven was not afraid of the offer. She was torn. She could go. She could say yes to prestige, visibility, influence. She could step back into a life where she was always on the move, always needed somewhere else.
Many women would.
Many of us have.
Because we were trained to say yes to anything that looked like recognition. Or, we want to prove it to ourselves.
The difference is between what we can do and what we should do, especially later in life when the stakes are not ambition anymore. The stakes are our energy, our peace, the shape of our days, and the people who rely on us.
But here is the truth of what we need to be honest about, out loud.
Just because we are capable does not mean the opportunity is meant for the woman we are now.
Can you relate?
Every few months, someone suggests I create another online gardening course. They mean it kindly. They tell me people would sign up. They remind me how good I am at teaching and how much money it could bring in. And they aren’t wrong. I could do it. I have the experience, the audience, and all the materials sitting right there in my files.
But whenever I start to lean that direction, I feel the shift. The more I pour into gardening work, the less space I have for my fiction. The women in Echo Canyon need my full energy, not the scraps left over after building slide decks and filming demos. My writing voice goes quiet when I overload my plate, and that silence tells me everything I need to know.
There was a day this fall when I actually opened a new document and started outlining a class. Ten minutes in, I felt it. That tug backward. That sense of drifting into a life I lived fully for decades but no longer want to center. I sat there for a minute, recognizing the old pattern, the old pull. Then I closed the document.
Not because I couldn’t do it.
Because it didn’t belong to the life I’m building now.
That is the heart of these later-life pivots. The choice between the path that still fits and the one that doesn’t, even if we’re perfectly capable of walking it.
Raven found the same middle path many women carve out quietly.
She didn’t refuse the future. She reshaped it.
She chose a version of the opportunity that matched her current life instead of one that belonged to her past.
Hosting the program in Echo Canyon was not the obvious choice.
It was the honest one. And they went for it.
If you’re staring at your own pivot, or if life has recently handed you a choice that doesn’t fit the woman you’ve become, I hope you remember this.
You’re allowed to create a third option.
You’re allowed to choose what’s best for the life you have now.
You’re allowed to say no to what once would have been a yes.
Raven didn’t bend herself to meet the offer.
She let the offer bend toward her.
That is a later-life power few of us were taught to claim.
But it’s ours now.
I wrote this micro-fiction series while I was in the middle of a similar reckoning myself.
Below are how my experience shaped the stories on this page. My stories have layers I only share inside. And the private moments of the women in my books. The pages these women never meant anyone to read. If you want to sit closer to them, I invite you to become a Story Insider.