The Tuesday Morning Nobody Warns You About

In 2021, at 48, I did what many people dream about doing. I retired early. I left corporate America after decades of meetings, travel, budgets, deadlines, and leadership roles. Like most people, I imagined retirement as a finish line. Work hard, save your money, and eventually, one day, you’re free to do whatever you want.

For a while, that sounded wonderful.

But once I got there, I realized something surprising. I didn’t actually want to stop creating. I simply wanted to stop building someone else’s dream and start building my own.
Nobody tells you that part. They tell you about the freedom. The sleeping in. The travel you finally have time for. What they don’t tell you is what happens on a random Tuesday morning, three months in, when the calendar is empty and you realize you don’t quite know who you are without a title attached to your name.

For twenty years, I’d been the person companies called in when things needed to change. My specialty was operations — specifically in food manufacturing. Pet food, snacks, desserts. I was the one who flew into an office that was closing, sat with the people whose jobs were about to disappear, and helped rebuild something leaner on the other side — customer service, logistics, project management, all of it re-engineered for efficiency. I was good at it. Twenty years at the director level, good money, a passport full of stamps. I was also, by my own honest accounting, a busy working mom who missed more of my kids growing up than I like to admit. That was the trade I made, and for a long time, I told myself it was worth it. So when I finally stopped, I didn’t feel free. I felt quiet. And in that quiet, I felt the pull to make something with my hands, for people I actually knew, on a timeline nobody was measuring but me.

Here’s the part I still laugh about. I spent two decades optimizing food production at scale, and I am, if I’m being fully honest, not a naturally gifted cook. What I am is stubborn, and I like a good challenge, and after twenty years inside the machinery of manufactured food, I’d become almost allergic to it. I wanted to make something clean. Something honest. Something with three ingredients instead of thirty. So I taught myself to bake sourdough — badly at first, then less badly — and there is something almost funny about a woman who spent her career shaving seconds off a supply chain now standing in her kitchen at five in the morning, waiting three days for a starter to do absolutely nothing faster than it wants to.

It was not efficient. It was not optimized. That was the whole point.

My baking improved, and I started selling loaves to friends, then neighbors, then friends of neighbors. In 2023, I got my first real farmers market stall. It took until 2025 — two full years of trial, error, and a few dozen loaves for the ducks in the pond — to find a rhythm that let me love it without it running my life. I’m not building an empire. I don’t even know if I’ll still be doing this in five years. As long as it’s fun, I will. The day it stops being fun is the day I’ll do something else, and I’ve made peace with that. This isn’t the first time I’ve reinvented myself, and I doubt it will be the last.

What surprised me most wasn’t the sourdough. It was what how my “retirement” took shape. My kids are grown now, building their own lives, and I actually have time to spend with them again — real time, not the leftover kind I used to ration out at the end of a long week. My husband and I are headed to Alaska in August for our anniversary. Slow mornings. Long dinners that go nowhere in particular. Nothing to prove, nothing to optimize, just enjoying what already is. None of that is really about bread. It’s about what happens when personal and professional finally get to sit at the same table instead of competing for the same hours.

I think some of us spent our first act building things we were proud of, for people who weren’t always grateful for it, and we arrive at this next chapter with more skill, more clarity, and more nerve than we’ve ever had — and no longer anyone else’s dream to build.

So we create our own path. Quietly, without much fanfare, usually messier and slower than we imagined.
If you’re sitting somewhere with your own cup of coffee right now, turning over the same questions I was turning over in 2021 — whether to fully retire, or finally start that thing you’ve been circling for years, or simply find out who you are when nobody needs anything from you by five o’clock — I don’t have a simple answer for you. I still don’t have one for myself, most days. But I can tell you this: the finish-line version of retirement was never going to be enough for me, and it might not be enough for you either. Not because something is wrong with either of us. Because we still have things to create.

I didn’t retire. I just stopped building someone else’s dream long enough to remember I still had one of my own.

I’m still building it. Slowly, imperfectly, and mostly on my own terms — one loaf, one Tuesday, and a slowly-learned lesson from a starter that never once cared about my old world of project deliverables. Turns out some things can’t be optimized. They just need three days, on their own schedule, to become what they’re going to become. I’m still learning to do the same.