A good friend of mine has a saying she pulls out whenever something feels impossible.
“We are smart women. We can figure it out.”
She says it with complete confidence. No hedging. No footnotes. Just, we are capable, the problem is solvable, let’s go.
I have been thinking about that sentence a lot lately. About how simple it sounds and how radical it actually is. About how many things I didn’t attempt for years because I had already decided they were too hard before I even tried.
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It started with a pair of nightstands.
My daughter was moving into her first unfurnished apartment — the real kind, the grown-up kind, the kind where you need actual furniture and can’t survive on a futon and good intentions.
She needed nightstands. A friend was giving some away.
They were fire engine red.
I looked at them and thought, I could paint those.
This was August 2025. I had been retired for approximately five minutes. I had never painted a piece of furniture in my life.
I went to the store anyway. Chose a beautiful cream color. Stood in the paint aisle feeling slightly fraudulent, like someone was going to ask me a technical question I couldn’t answer and the whole charade would be over.
Nobody asked. I bought the paint. I went home.
And I figured it out.
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Here is the thing about doing something you have never done before: You almost always make it harder in your head than it is in reality.
The nightstands turned out beautifully. They are sitting in my daughter’s apartment right now (cream and perfect and exactly right) and every time I think about them, I feel something I did not expect to feel.
Surprised.
Not that they turned out well. But that I had spent so many years assuming I couldn’t do things like this. That somewhere along the way I had sorted myself into a category — businessperson, not creative person. Corporate, not crafty. Capable in conference rooms, helpless in paint aisles.
The nightstands were the first time I did something like that completely on my own. No craft weekend. No one to check in with mid-process. Just me, a can of cream paint, and a decision to figure it out. And it worked.
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But here is the honest truth: I didn’t arrive at that paint aisle from nowhere.
For years — quietly, joyfully, with a glass of wine and a group of women I love — I had been building a try-things muscle.
We call them craft weekends. A group of us get together, pick a project, and make things. Candles. Crafts from wine corks. Halloween cheesecloth ghosts. Easter bunnies with floral arrangements. Things I would never have attempted alone.
The wine helps. I will not pretend otherwise.
But what helps more is the company. Some of us needed more hand-holding than others. I was usually one of them — the one who needed someone to look at what I was making mid-disaster and say, just keep going, it’s going to be fine. One friend almost never made it to the finish line on her own. We’d step in, fix it, finish it, and hand it back to her. She was always delighted with the result.
Nobody kept score. That was the whole point.
The more you try, the more confident you become.
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And then there is this.
For years before retirement, before the nightstands, before any of this, I used to say: I should start a blog.
I said it the way people say things they don’t actually believe they will ever do. Wistfully. Theoretically. As a nice idea that lived permanently in the someday category.
I had no idea where to start. I knew I could write in business speak (reports, presentations, emails) that moved things forward. But personal writing? Something people would actually want to read? I didn’t think I could do that.
And then, a few weeks into retirement, I sat down and started figuring it out.
And here is what has shocked me: The writing is coming easily. I keep finding sentences already formed when I sit down, like they were waiting. Every post feels like exhaling something I didn’t realize I had been holding. And I like it. I genuinely, surprisingly, completely like it. Like maybe the story I told myself for forty years — about what I could and couldn’t do — was just wrong. The blog I said I should start years ago turns out to have been waiting for me all along. Just like the nightstands.
— — —
The motivation is in the doing. Every single time.
My friend was right. We are smart women. We can figure it out.
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What have you talked yourself out of attempting because you decided in advance it was too hard? And have you surprised yourself lately? Tell me in the comments — I really want to hear about it.
If this landed somewhere true for you — share it with a woman who needs to read it. And come back next Monday. We’re just getting started. 🌿