Meet Susan
Leader. Queenager. Author.
I'm Susan. I've lived many lives inside this one. Mother. Executive. Wife. Master Naturalist. Daughter. Amateur powerlifter. Seeker. I spent a long time performing a version of myself that fit everyone else's room but never quite fit my own bones.
Until now.
I lost people early and I carried grief and traumas too difficult to name, let alone feel, and they kept adding weight to a bag of grief I didn't even realize I was hauling around. For a long time I tried to outrun all of it. I built a life that looked good from the outside, but didn’t feel very good on the inside. I chased achievement, approval, the next thing that might finally make me feel better. I checked all the boxes I was supposed to check. The problem is that none of it worked.
Then, somewhere in my fifties, I made a different choice and something shifted.
I started calling myself a queenager, because I decided the second half of life isn't meant to fade into invisibility, it's actually a reckoning. It's the season of your life where you finally choose differently. I stopped shrinking and I started asking for help instead of hiding. I got curious about all of the possibilities that come along with being an older woman. I found joy again, the kind that feels like rebellion when the world keeps telling women my age to quiet down and disappear gracefully. I followed the embers of joy that led me to reconnecting with how I wanted my life to feel. And no, it wasn’t too late because it’s never too late.
I've wandered solo through trauma, grief, and reinvention.
Through loss and unexpected wonder, driven always by curiosity, the bone deep conviction that there is more, that an extraordinary life is not somewhere else but here, hiding in plain sight, waiting for us to finally look up. Nature has been my most constant teacher, curiosity my guide, community my anchor.
Grief and Wonder, a story of grief, loss, magic, and reinvention, is the book that came out of that reckoning. It's not a tidy story, because life is not tidy, and grief can make you come undone. But underneath it all, I kept finding the wonder that was there for me all along.
I live in Central Virginia, where I lift heavy things and spend time immersed in the mountains of the Blue Ridge. I write for women whose stories get talked over or dismissed. The ones carrying more than anyone realizes, not because life handed them more, but because they learned to carry it quietly. The ones who stayed busy so they wouldn't have to feel it. Who called it strength instead of avoidance, called it fine instead of the truth. The ones still deciding whether they're allowed to rewrite their story, or even remember what life was supposed to look like before everyone else got a say in it.