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.

Then I stopped.

I lost people early. I carried grief and traumas too difficult to name, let alone feel, and they kept adding weight to a bag I didn't even realize I was hauling around. For a long time I outran all of it. I built a life that looked good from the outside. I chased achievement, approval, the next thing that might finally make me feel like enough. It never did.

Somewhere in my fifties, something shifted.

I started calling myself a queenager, because I decided the second half of life isn't a slow fade, it's a reckoning. It's the part where you finally get to choose. I stopped shrinking. I started asking for help instead of hiding that I needed it. I found joy again, real joy, the kind that feels like rebellion when the world keeps telling women my age to quiet down and disappear gracefully.

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. Community, my anchor.

Grief and Wonder, a story of loss, magic, and reinvention, is the book that came out of that reckoning, my first book. It's not a tidy story. Grief rarely is. But underneath the loss, I kept finding wonder waiting for me, small and stubborn, refusing to leave.

My children are wild and non conforming and creative and kind, and they taught me more about courage than any self help book ever did. 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.