I didn’t exactly plan on starting over in my 50s. But here we are.

For a long time, my life looked fairly settled from the outside: work, family, house, routines, plans. Then life did what life occasionally does and stopped consulting the itinerary.

So now I’m rebuilding - work, home, strength, routines, independence, and whatever comes next.

Not from scratch exactly. I’m bringing a few decades of experience, a deeply ingrained need to organize things, a somewhat inappropriate sense of humor, and a dog roughly the size of a small fridge.

I live in Maine, work from home, lift heavy things when I can, spend an unreasonable amount of time near the ocean, and I’m learning that beginning again in your 50s is very different from beginning in your 20s.

Upward-ish came from that.

It’s for women whose lives have gone a little sideways—because of relationships, careers, children growing up, aging parents, moves, money, bodies changing, or simply waking up one morning and realizing the life you built isn’t quite the life you want anymore.

This isn’t about pretending every difficult thing is secretly a gift.

Sometimes it’s just difficult.

But I do believe the second half of life does not have to be the smaller half.

So this is me figuring out what comes next in real time—and sharing the useful parts, the ridiculous parts, the things I’m learning, and probably a fair amount of evidence that none of us actually has this completely figured out.

Life blew up. Let’s build something even better.