Episode 146 transcript: Reinventing Yourself at Any Age: Jacqueline Perez on Midlife, Motherhood & Creative Healing
[00:00:00] Jacqueline: And this book that poured out of me it was channeled through me. I barely remember writing. It came at me over a period of a lot of I think it was the apex of dealing with some big grief that I did not understand was coming from believe it or not, empty nest There's a thing that happens to a lot of us at this stage of life.
[00:00:30] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
[00:01:05] Welcome back to Live the Width of Your Life. My guest this week is Jacqueline Perez, and she's a first time poet, the age of 60. She discovered the power of poetry during a transformative trip to Istanbul. Her debut book, Metamorphosis in Stanza explores life's intricate themes, love, lost, renewal, through heartfelt verses and QR code readings.
[00:01:27] Jack created and crafted the poems in Dawn's quiet hours, often reading aloud from her closet and when not writing or traveling. Jacqueline is a pro aging champion and the founder of Kuel Life, a platform dedicated to a normalizing aging for women. We had such a beautiful conversation talking about this book that she wrote, and I could hear Jack's voice throughout the
[00:01:50] every single poem, and they're so focused on things that all of us go through. Love, lost, renewal, becoming an empty nester when kids go away from school. It was just a beautiful conversation about the power of metamorphosis. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Take a listen.
[00:02:06] Jack welcome to the Live The Width of Your Life podcast. It's so good to be here with you.
[00:02:12] Jacqueline: It is wonderful to be here. Aneta. Thank you so much for inviting me back.
[00:02:16] Aneta: Of course. Yeah. It's so nice. It's I think we met like over a year ago. Was it something like a year or two? I don't even remember.
[00:02:24] Jacqueline: It was longer than that. I was on your podcast, I want to say, two or three years ago.
[00:02:30] I'm not making that up. I don't know. How long have you been doing it? You've been doing it for a while now.
[00:02:34] Aneta: August of 22, so it'll be three years in August. So it might have been some time. And I love that we stayed connected and I love all the work that you're doing with Kuel Life and when you reached out to me and you said, hey, I wrote this book and it's really personal, and then you sent it to me I finished reading it this week, which I wanted to, before we had our conversation.
[00:02:57] It is so beautiful and I just want you to know that I could feel your heart as I was reading through all of the different sections of the book. And I would love for you to maybe just talk a little bit about setting the stage of how this book came to be in the world.
[00:03:17] Jacqueline: Yeah, that's a big question. Think about that. Like how did anything come to be in the world?
[00:03:23] Just as a little background for your audience, just in case they weren't privy to our first conversation
[00:03:30] I'm Jacqueline and Jack Perez, and you and I had our first conversation a few years ago about my business, Kuel Life, which is a platform that's dedicated to normalizing aging for women.
[00:03:43] That's dealing with women in midlife, And so guess what though? I am also a woman in midlife. And what does that mean? We all know. All of us know by now if we've been at this for any length of time, that this part of life comes with some of the most amazing opportunities and challenges we have yet to face.
[00:04:07] And this book that poured out of me it was channeled through me. I barely remember writing. It came at me over a period of a lot of I think it was the apex of dealing with some big grief that I did not understand was coming from believe it or not, empty nest There's a thing that happens to a lot of us at this stage of life.
[00:04:38] If you ended up with a kid, because you wanted one or you didn't want one, but you ended up with one anyway, and you're now in your mid fifties, your sixties, they eventually go away. If you did it right, they eventually go away. And that transition, Aneta, from full-time parenting, and especially since I got my son through junior and senior year of high school was during the pandemic.
[00:05:06] I got so much of him. I didn't get that rite of passage of when your kid gets the car keys, they start to leave and you really don't see them anymore. They're junior, senior year of high school. I did see him and so the transition when he left for college, it hit me so hard.
[00:05:26] I didn't realize it though. I didn't know, and it spiraled me into a low level depression for several years. And this book, I think, came out at the apex of processing that grief. When you ignore transitions and you ignore grief, I think we all know this. It doesn't go away. It just sits in the corner politely waiting for you to bring it back out, and when my son went to college, I also had a bad skydiving accident that left me with three fractured vertebrae, and so I didn't get to process the grief of his leaving. I put that in a corner because I had to heal. Flash forward years of internalizing this depression. And then my sister moved away 3000 miles to California, and she and I have been super close. We had our babies 10 days apart on purpose. Who does that? That's how close we were. What happened was, I guess everything just hit me at the same time and I literally didn't know what to do with what was inside me.
[00:06:39] I didn't know what to do with it. I'm sure you have felt that way before where you just you physically feel like you can't contain the pain or the sorrow, the hurt, you just can't keep it in anymore. And that's what birthed this book.
[00:06:58] Aneta: I think sometimes when there is so much change and there's so much energy shifting and we're no longer. Able to distract ourselves. We then find ourselves in the situation where we have to address what's always maybe been underneath, but we just didn't deal with it.
[00:07:15] And with you, you just had so much change, your son going away, and then the accident, which I want to ask you about your sister leaving, and suddenly here you are feeling all the big things, all the big feelings, and, needing to deal with it in. I guess the healthiest way, whatever that was for you at the time.
[00:07:35] Jacqueline: Yeah, lying on the ground and kicking and screaming and holding my breath didn't seem like a viable option at 60, so I chose...
[00:07:43] Aneta: Could be.
[00:07:45] Jacqueline: I chose expressing it in words.
[00:07:48] Aneta: Yeah, no, I love that.
[00:07:49] What happened with the skydiving accident? I skydived twice, and I'm like, wait a second. How did that happen?
[00:07:55] Jacqueline: Yeah, so I did it three times, and the third time was the day that my son, we were taking him to college and we took him to a drop zone first before we were going to drop him off at university. He and my godson wanted to jump out of an airplane before they started school, and I thought to myself, I can't let these boys jump out of an airplane by themselves.
[00:08:17] What if something goes wrong? I need to be there to help. As if, right? What do I know? So I signed myself up and I went, and thankfully I can report that they both landed beautifully and man, my landing just wasn't great. And I heard my body break. I heard the bones go, and I remember sitting there on the ground with all that mess, because you've done it before.
[00:08:42] You get this mess of stuff. You're attached to some dude or some woman in the back or whatever. And I just remember thinking to myself I'm in this dirt field. There's all this stuff. I am in so much pain. I'm vomiting, and I just remember thinking, I just paralyzed myself. I'm 58 years old and I just effed up the rest of my life. Luckily, I can tell you, that was in August. In April of the following year, I ran the Charleston 10 K.
[00:09:14] Aneta: Okay, so your body healed from that accident.
[00:09:18] Jacqueline: I did everything I was supposed to do for the first time in my life. I listened to what doctors were telling me, and I followed the rules. I needed to be able to function. But that put my mindset away from processing my baby left, because now I'm like, my God, am I not going to walk? What's going on?
[00:09:37] Aneta: That's terrifying. So your son left, your sister moved away.
[00:09:43] Jacqueline: I lost a friendship, which I now understand happens. I just recently read that we tend to cycle through relationships about every seven years. That made me pause, like that made me do a little inventory. I'm like can I say that's true for me?
[00:09:59] And I didn't realize it, but yeah, it is true. And I recently just lost what I believed to be a lifetime relationship, and it turned out that it was a season and not a lifetime, and that loss was really painful.
[00:10:15] Aneta: It's so interesting when. We lose relationships because we tend to, I know for me personally, I just always go, what was my part in this? Was this inevitable? And I think you're right. I think that some relationships, there's just a season for it, and it's not necessarily a bad thing or blame, it's just we put this pressure that everything has to be forever and some things aren't.
[00:10:40] And I think that's okay too. It takes a lot of the pressure off. How did you deal with the grief of that, losing that friendship or that relationship?
[00:10:48] Jacqueline: I am very impressed with both of us, meaning we've both done a lot of work on ourselves. Neither one of us come at this, and we both just had real honest conversation about why the relationship wasn't working and that we still cared for each other and loved each other deeply and loved each other's families. And there's all that history, however, that right now it makes sense to just admire one another from afar.
[00:11:14] Aneta: That's so true. As I'm looking at the table of contents for your book, Metamorphosis. Which I love. So appropriate. Reading the book and knowing you a little bit I was really impressed just at the structure, which was so interesting and different. You're an amazing poet.
[00:11:32] I don't know if you've always been a poet or not, but just reading through, I was like, wow, it's really beautiful and creative and interesting and I love the structure and maybe you can walk us through a table of contents. There's beginnings and rebirth, life cycles and struggles, family and parenting, friendship and connection, seeking and craving. And then you've got the closure.
[00:11:54] And so there's these six different sections. Did you, when you were writing this book, because I've written a book and now I'm writing my second one. And it's interesting to see how books start to take shape.
[00:12:08] So did you just start writing and then afterwards you were like, this is the structure or the shape that is starting to organically come together? Or did you start with the table of contents and say, okay, this is how I'm going to organize it, and then start writing?
[00:12:25] Jacqueline: So the way that I'm built and designed, I would never start with an outline or a table of contents.
[00:12:34] Aneta: And what do you mean? The way
[00:12:35] Jacqueline: That would freeze me up. I wouldn't even know where to start. For me, it was completely organic and as I mentioned earlier, in a way, I didn't write this book wrote itself, and you would thank you for the compliment that I'm an amazing poet. Ask me when I started writing poetry. September, the month that I wrote the book, that's when I started writing poetry.
[00:12:59] I think you know this of me, I am a writer. I've been an essayist for years and,
[00:13:04] I write under the umbrella Jack's Smack. And so I honestly thought that this process would've led me to a book of essays.
[00:13:15] But when I went to sit down to write the essays, what came out was a bunch of guttural ideas that were not worthy of sentences. And I had to figure out what do I do with these guttural ideas? And that's when I thought, oh, okay. If I can get this emotion across in four lines. In stanza versus a two or 300 word paragraph.
[00:13:46] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:13:47] Jacqueline: Is that a more powerful medium? I think it's a more powerful medium. It's like I've always admired songwriters, because a novelist can use thousands upon thousands of words to get their idea across to, to get you into their world. A songwriter does it in three minutes.
[00:14:06] He or she has to repeat himself or herself a lot for those refrains so they have fewer words. I kinda looked at that and I thought, wow, I'll accept that challenge. So I'm not a songwriter, but I chose poetry. And I chose a really strict rhyming an AB, and I chose it for the whole book just to further complicate my life because not only then am I using just four lines per stanza, I also have to get it to rhyme and it has to make sense because sometimes with rhyming poetry, it can come out real sing-songy and annoying, but for whatever reason I decided I needed to make it rhyme. I don't why. Probably because I don't know much about poetry. I've just become one like six months ago. But yeah, the last time I wrote poetry before this, I was a junior in high school or a senior in high school, and my teacher made me.
[00:14:59] Aneta: It is interesting that they just found you in that way and that you have this gift and this talent. I was hoping that maybe you could read from the book to give folks a sense, one of the other things that you do is you have QR codes where you're reading and which I think is lovely. And I don't know if you have a favorite or something that you would like to share with the audience today.
[00:15:24] Jacqueline: I have a few favorites, but I picked one out specifically for your audience, given that your title is Living the Width. And so I picked out a poem that's called a journey without end. Because that's, wide expansive. And although this poem is particularly about my desire and need and just drive to constantly travel. I'm a big wanderlust person. I've traveled to more than 72, no, 72 countries and I have the list is almost endless. And so while this is about travel, it's a higher level metaphor about life, it's called a journey without end.
[00:16:13] An unfurling map beneath my hands reveals the dreams of distant lands. Each fold allure, each crease a plea to chase the wonders that beckon me. Through bustling streets and whispers of air, I seek the wonder, the thrill laid bare. In markets vibrant where colors collide. I lose myself. Spirit as my guide with compass steady and heart aligned, I trace the paths that fate has designed from sacred places where spirit soar my need for travel springs from a core.
[00:17:00] A sacred calling, a longing profound where magic lingers and memories abound. In far off lands, my soul ignites alive with odors sounds and sights. I thrive in the dance of foreign tongues, in customs rich and songs unsung. Each new horizon, a vibrant spark, transforming dullness, igniting the dark. The time between trips feels like waiting in line, a pause before stepping into the shine. With dreams of horizons calling my name, I yearn for the stage where the world is my flame. I'll roam the globe until my last breath absorbing the wonders defying death. With each new journey, my spirit will soar. Embracing the world's vibrant roar.
[00:18:11] Aneta: Oh, it's so beautiful.
[00:18:14] Jacqueline: Yeah. And so while I did write it about my need to be traveling it is a higher level message about just seeking things in life and being ready for that next adventure and filling your life.
[00:18:28] Aneta: When you started writing, did you know that this was going to be something that you were going to publish, or did you just start writing as part of your own healing journey first?
[00:18:39] Jacqueline: Yeah, I had no idea it was going to turn into a book. I wanted to write a book, Aneta. And I told myself I even, okay, I even rented an Airbnb in Chicago last summer and I set up a table, no, I'm not making this up with a great view of the city. And I set up on the round table in the living room.
[00:18:56] I had my laptop, I had all my note cards, I had all my essays. I was going to write the transformative midlife essay book, and I just, I couldn't do it. I don't know why. I just couldn't do it. So when I started writing this poetry, I didn't think it was going to be a book. I thought, shoot, I can't write that book.
[00:19:17] And then about 15 days into it, I realized, I'm like, I think this is a book. I think you will appreciate this and your audience will probably appreciate this. I was at an event in Rhode Island where I was speaking and part of the event we put a tree in the ground and everyone had to write a little note card of a manifestation for that following year, and then bury it with the tree, right? I wrote on that card, to be a published author within the year. Okay. I did that in May. I go to Chicago in July. It's not looking like it's going to happen, but I'm letting you know. It's not looking like that card's going to do anything. And then all of a sudden in the middle of September, I'm like, I think I'm writing that book. I think that's what's happening.
[00:20:02] Aneta: Yeah. Isn't that amazing when you do that? You set an intention sometimes and you don't even realize when it's naturally unfolding in front of you. And you're, the second person I talked to this week who rented an Airbnb have this sort of expectation of okay, I'm setting myself up, I'm getting the desk, I'm picking the location, I'm going to write this book.
[00:20:22] And then in her case actually ended up turning into a completely different book.
[00:20:27] And so sometimes what we think and actually what happens instead are two very different things. And so you said 15 days in, you realized, this is actually going to turn into something different. Did you choose to self-publish or did you go.
[00:20:45] Jacqueline: I did, I self-published because I have zero patience. And honestly, if I didn't self-publish, I'd still be pushing this thing on publishers, and I would've lost interest by now. I would've gotten bored with my own stuff by now and lost interest.
[00:20:59] So I knew that the only way I was going to get it out into the world. Is to just get it out in the world and then deal with it later. Now my issue is how do I sell it? How do I get it into the hands of the women that I believe would benefit from it? And I really do. I don't think I'm that special.
[00:21:16] And so I write about these truths of mine. The women that are picking up the book are saying, but this is my truth too. I see myself in this poem. I see myself in this poem. And it's very gratifying. Selfishly, it's also I'm not alone. I'm not a freak. I'm freaky, but I'm not a freak. And it's helped me feel less alone.
[00:21:40] Aneta: Yeah. I love when you talk about. It's the identity shift too when, where kids leave and suddenly they don't depend on you and they're not living in with you any longer, and they're moving into their own next level of adulthood and their chapter and their life. So what have you learned on that process? So this happened, your son left last year, is that correct?
[00:22:01] Jacqueline: No, he left almost four years ago. That's what I'm saying. I was in a weird depressive state for a few years and didn't understand why. I thought I was healing from the back. If you think about all of the stuff that I went through. It wasn't clear to me, no, he left a while ago that sucker. The thing is he wasn't doing well the first couple years, and I think any parent will tell you, you can only do as well as your least happy child.
[00:22:27] Aneta: Yeah, for sure.
[00:22:28] Jacqueline: I only have one. So that can be good or bad. It means I don't get to average out anything. But it doesn't sound like you can do that when you have more than one anyway, because it work that way. He wasn't doing well the first couple of years. That added all sorts of bizarre, extra stress to me. And now I am so proud of him, he's doing such an amazing job adulting, and he's going to be 23 in September. And we have an amazing relationship and I am incredibly proud. Excuse me, I'm just, oh my goodness. Sorry about that. I am incredibly proud of the man he's become and is becoming.
[00:23:10] Aneta: Yeah. What have you learned about yourself in terms of the process of having to have a new relationship as your child becomes an adult? Because we're always parents. We'll continue to be parents, but there is a shift in terms of our energetic connection with the child, what we're able to do with some distance. So what have you learned about yourself over the last four years?
[00:23:37] Jacqueline: I'm going to make you listen to one more poem because this is the answer. This is the answer to your question. And this is the one I made a grown man cry at a book signing the other day. So I'm letting you know right now. So here's the answer to that question.
[00:23:54] My son at 22 has spread his wings, no longer bound by apron strings yet, how can one so freshly groan claim all the wisdom of the unknown. Once held in tender guiding care, he now drifts freely through the air. I rustle with the ache inside. To stand aside, let him decide.
[00:24:27] For years I shaped his world with grace, ran interference, smoothed his pace, but now life's troubles are his alone. And from the sidelines I watch unknown. I hold the answers yet, speak them not for wisdom now must be self-taught. I whisper questions into the breeze, but wait for him to tell to seize. The fraying thread of our entwined past. A pull on the strings, however vast and in that moment, tender and slight, I'll be in the shadows, a beacon of light.
[00:25:16] So that's how I parent him. Now I keep my mouth shut unless I'm asked. That's how I parent. I keep my mouth shut unless I'm asked. The nice thing is that the less I say, the more he asks.
[00:25:32] I've found that to be true, at least with my relationship, my dynamic with my son. If I let him come to me, he's way more receptive to what I'm going to say. So I try to wait until I'm asked or manipulate the conversation to get him to ask me. I can do that.
[00:25:55] Aneta: Yeah, I think that our kids, at the same time, they're growing through their own changes and they're trying to become more independent. And sometimes it's the reminder that we're here and that we're available and they could always come to us of course. And just sometimes the reminder's great, and they will right?
[00:26:14] If there's a challenge and they all need. Things at different times. But in that process we then also find ourselves with more time and more space to focus on ourselves. I chose to leave my corporate career and start my business.
[00:26:28] So what have you done besides writing this book? What have you found yourself doing? What do you have more time to do now that maybe you didn't when you were more hands on?
[00:26:39] Jacqueline: Absolutely. So before he left, I started Kuel Life and I believe I started it in anticipation of needing a new baby, right? Because as he was getting ready to walk out that door, I started cool life. But what I do now that occupies a fair amount of my time is travel. I am a voracious and avid traveler, and so I am either planning a trip on a trip or planning someone else's trip. You know what I mean? Like I just I love to explore and so that's, I get to do a lot more of that, which I couldn't do before. I couldn't do it because I had to be at home.
[00:27:19] Aneta: That's so nice. Would you have coming up any big trips this year?
[00:27:24] Jacqueline: I actually am leaving for gobble Mexico on Saturday, but that's just, I'm going to go visit a lifelong friend of mine who just got lemurs. He got three baby leurs and I get to go with lemurs. I'm so excited.
[00:27:41] Aneta: Wow. I don't think I've ever said that sentence before. That'd be amazing.
[00:27:46] Jacqueline: Yeah I'm a little concerned because they bite because they're primates and he was saying like, they get really excited and they get really frisky and they'll take a nip at you. And I'm like, that sounds like unpleasant. I'm like I might have to wear long sleeves or a jean jacket or something.
[00:28:00] Aneta: Yeah. that sounds beautiful. One of the other things you talk about in here is just how we change and we notice ourselves changing as women at this stage of life. The body starts changing. We're noticing lines on her face and different things just in the matter sometimes of a year, how much can change?
[00:28:18] Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about I know you help women with this and you talk so openly about changes that we experience, but what have you discovered in your own journey in terms of your changing body, changing everything?
[00:28:34] Jacqueline: It's funny because if you had asked me this six months ago, I'd give you a completely different answer. However, I'm going through a weird accelerated change right now in my body, physically, and it's not good. And I've read, I did some reading and I guess there are two times in our lives where we age in an accelerated timeframe, and one is in our early forties and the other is in our early sixties.
[00:28:57] And let me tell you, girl, I'm feeling it, like I'm feeling pain, that I never, I just went to a hand specialist because my hands hurt so much that it's hard for me to lift weights. And I just let him know. I'm like, okay, if we're doing this, or I should say this really fast right now, and for the this is only auditorium.
[00:29:17] I just made a downward, like very downward, steep motion with my hand. I'm like, as long as we level out some new that I can handle. Because right now I'm in that condition, I'm very fatigued and frustrated and just in constant pain because I'm trying to figure it out. And so how I deal with it is just like I dealt with it the first time , I get out there and I talk about it I share it with other women because I don't want anyone to be surprised.
[00:29:43] And that is why I started Kuel Life because at 52 or 53, all of a sudden I weighed what I weighed the day I gave birth to my son. I looked like a Sharpe puppy with all that back fat except for Sharpe puppies are cute and it did not look good on me.
[00:29:59] And I also started feeling like I could go out in public in my pajamas and nobody would notice. It was bad and I just couldn't handle spending the next 30, 40 years of my life in some sort of invisible with some sort of visibility cloak. I deal with the same, I'm handling it the same way, so now I'm like, I have a whole new set of symptoms and I'm just forewarning women.
[00:30:22] I'm like, this might happen and if I solve the problem, then I'll share with everyone how I ended up solving the problem, which is what I've been doing for the last eight years with Kuel Life.
[00:30:33] Aneta: Yeah. And if folks haven't listened to the first session, like the first time we talked, maybe let's talk about it because I'm 53 and I am noticing all of these changes that are not good. What is happening.
[00:30:45] How did you deal with it? Like in the early fifties when the body starts changing and you're like, okay, what I used to do isn't working for whatever reason.
[00:30:53] Jacqueline: Oh girl, I feel your pain. It happened to me at the exact same time, at the exact same time.
[00:30:58] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:30:59] Jacqueline: I tried it all. I tried supplements. I tried eat less, exercise more. I tried stop drinking.
[00:31:08] I tried it all and at the end of the day what was wrong was that my hormones, I was so estrogen heavy, even though I didn't have very much estrogen, because my hormones were completely gone. Whatever I had was really estrogen heavy. And so that is why I couldn't get rid of what that midsection bloat. All that stuff, no matter what I did, I couldn't get rid of it the minute I got on, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, and I did a ton of research.
[00:31:42] It is perfect for me. It does not work for everyone, and I'm not a doctor. I'm not suggesting you run out and get it. I'm suggesting that if you've tried everything, every lifestyle change you can think of, and it's not working. You might be fighting a battle you can't win because there might be something chemically, physiologically going on that no lifestyle change is going to rectify.
[00:32:07] But just between me and you, honestly, if you're, shop around. Get your blood work done, get the answers you deserve.
[00:32:15] Aneta: Yeah, no, I'm already on it. I've definitely,
[00:32:18] Jacqueline: Okay. Good.
[00:32:19] Aneta: I just think that there's so much happening and I think everybody should, like you say, just get the blood work, talk to different specialists. Sometimes our doctors are not as well educated as they can be on hormones.
[00:32:31] Jacqueline: It's not their fault. If your doctor is anywhere near your age. They weren't taught because they didn't care about women enough to teach that stuff. It's not their fault.
[00:32:41] They just don't know what they don't know. So find a doctor who specializes, and I hate to say this, but it's called geriatric obstetrician or whatever. We're considered geriatric, which I hate that word.
[00:32:53] Aneta: Feminine hormone.
[00:32:55] Jacqueline: I hate that. I hate that. But I'll let you know right now. I've been asked, so how long will you stay on the hormones? And I'm like, until they put me in that incinerator. I'm taking them into the incinerator with me, is what I'm doing.
[00:33:07] Aneta: Yeah, that's good that's worked and that's really wonderful. What is your hope with this book Metamorphosis, because it definitely, I think, has universal messages. Just reading through the two that you read and also the table of contents. Everybody can relate to the different topics that you share in this book, what is your hope in terms of people finding it and what you hope that it helps them do in their own life?
[00:33:32] Jacqueline: I would love to see this on every woman's bedside table at nighttime table, because honestly, I think there is something in there for every woman over 40. and my sister keeps telling me, stop defining the target market. Different people read it with different in tensions and they have different things and she's right because that untethered threads poem that I read out loud an answer to the parenting question that brought a grown man to tears in public.
[00:34:03] I was reading it, he's wiping tears from his face. His youngest was just about to leave. And so he was dealing with that pain and it made me realize, women don't get to own that pain or grief of the child leaving the nest.
[00:34:15] We don't get to own that. That was a really interesting and eye-opening opportunity for me to see that. But listen if that man found something in there, I'm letting you know right now because I wrote it as a woman in midlife and I've said it before, I'm not special.
[00:34:29] I think my feelings are somewhat universal and maybe I just have a better ability to put it into concise words. And so that's my gift. Like here it is. Here's that emotion in some concise words. How about that?
[00:34:44] Aneta: No, that's beautiful. Where can folks find the book right now if they're listening and they say, okay, I need a copy and I maybe want to buy this as a gift for my friend or my sister or my mom.
[00:34:55] Jacqueline: Would love for everyone to buy it off of my site, which is therealjackssmack.com or they could buy it off of Kuel Life as well. K-U-E-L-L-I-F-E. It's on those two sites. You can find it on Amazon, however, everyone here knows that Amazon takes most of the price of the book and the book isn't priced very high to begin with.
[00:35:17] Aneta: That's perfect. We'll definitely include those links in the show notes. And Jack, I know last time I asked you what it means to you to live the width of your life and you really enjoyed that question and you're able to actually, I think you wrote a post or an article or something about it afterwards, but,
[00:35:35] Jacqueline: I wrote a Jack smack essay about it. That just really hit me. Yeah, I love that. Yeah.
[00:35:40] Aneta: Yeah. What has your answer changed at all? Or what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:35:46] Jacqueline: I don't know if it's changed or not. I'm just going to answer it the way I feel today, and then maybe I'll go back and see if it is different. I'm actually curious, but what I feel like, what my answer is right at this moment, Aneta, is basically that I refuse to stay in any of those lanes that I was told to occupy because I don't want to wait for permission and I definitely don't want to wait for the right time.
[00:36:10] Because to me that's like code for never, right? It's never going to happen. So what that looks like for me is, I launched my third business at 52. I launched Kuel Life at 52. It also means I got a Dragon tattoo at 59 that is huge on my leg in Thailand.
[00:36:27] It's the dancing with the grief and the reinvention and the joy all at the same time in the creating of that poetry. It's lifting heavy weights despite these hands. So to me, it's saying yes to all the experiences that expand me and that, I don't know I don't want to be shrunk.
[00:36:46] I don't want anything that shrinks me. I want to live a life that spills over the edges and is messy and meaningful. And I just want to quote Andy Grammar, who is a singer songwriter that I absolutely adore. And he has a line that says, I want a life I can't afford to live without. And I think that is just that speaks to me.
[00:37:10] I want a life I can't afford to live without, and how do you create that? It's got to be wide, it's got to be messy. It's got to be big. Yeah.
[00:37:17] Aneta: Yeah. that's beautiful. Jack, thank you for coming back and talking about this book. Thank you for sharing it with me. We'll definitely include all of the links and the show notes and I hope that every woman is able to buy this book and has it on their nightstand, like you said, that your vision comes true and that they purchase it as a gift because I think it's a beautiful gift to share with others as well.
[00:37:39] Jacqueline: Thank you, Anita. It was fun to catch up too a little bit.
[00:37:42] Aneta: It was wonderful. Have an amazing day.
[00:37:46] Jacqueline: You too.
[00:37:46] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.