Welcome to the chaos
You did what you were supposed to. Played the parts, followed the rules, kept everyone happy, ticked every box. And somewhere in all that doing, the thread of your own life went quietly beige, and everyone around you started calling it contentment.
You're running a script you didn't write.
Now you're standing in the middle of a life that looks fine on paper, wondering whose it actually is, and whether you're even allowed to want a different one.
Now what?
I'm Line.
No psychiatrist. No PhD. No TED talk. No 5 a.m. gratitude routine involving kale.
Eighteen years ago I had two businesses, a nice house, every box on the list ticked, and I was miserable. I'd become the administrator of my own life. So I did the least strategic thing available and bought a horse I had no business buying. He disconnected me from the stress and connected me to my soul.
That crack became a farm and a calling. Then I found my "purpose" and burned out on it, and learned the thing nobody warns you about: hollow success and holy burnout are the same script in two outfits. I ran it both ways.
I'm not here to fix you. I'm here to hand you the match.
Twenty years of horse-assisted therapy and coaching, mostly with troubled kids the world had written off. Sixteen years a foster mother. A small farm in Norway. Author of Screw the Script and Torch the Script.
You are not broken.
The script is.
So what's the script, exactly?
The script is the set of instructions you got handed before you could read.
For some women it says: be nice, don't take up space, make everyone comfortable, don't have needs of your own. For others it says: achieve, scale, be impressive, find your purpose, never stop. They sound like opposites. They are the same instruction in different clothes: Here is what a worthy woman does, now go do it until there's nothing left of her.
You absorbed it. Your mother absorbed it. Her mother before her. By the time you noticed it was running you, you couldn't tell the difference between you and the script.
Most women never notice. They die having performed it perfectly.
Midlife is when the script starts to break, and you get the rarest chance of your life: to see what's actually you.
The Books
Screw the Script names the scripts running your life. Torch the Script is where you burn them.
Don't skip the workbook. The match is in there.
Field notes from a Gen X life in motion. Stories that didn't fit in the book — written as they actually happen, no five-step plans included. Read the Chronicles →