Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is a certified transformational retreat leader who guides her clients towards their most meaningful and fulfilling lives, particularly when navigating life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian Horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
Why I won’t be unleashing a “Digital Margaretha” upon the world any time soon
Every few months, someone asks me a question that makes me blink slowly, tilt my head, and wonder whether I’ve missed a memo. The latest one goes something like this: “Have you thought about creating an AI version of yourself?” You know—one that never sleeps, never forgets, and could dispense wisdom on demand while I’m off fussing over the horses and mucking out the shelters.
We’re living in an age where just about everything can be automated—our emails, our shopping, our playlists, and apparently now our inner guidance as well. So it probably shouldn’t surprise me that I’ve been asked this question. A “Digital Margaretha” who could answer any question, any time, always available, always articulate, and who would continue my life’s work long after I’ve left this particular human container.
The short answer is: no.
The slightly longer answer is also no, but the reasons why might matter more than the answer itself.
I’ve come to think that being human isn’t something we’re meant to “get right,” but something we’re meant to experience. In real time. In person. Living intentionally. The vulnerability, the uncertainty, the longing to belong, the ache to be seen—these aren’t glitches to be fixed; they are the very conditions that make growth, meaning, and connection possible.
We are not here to optimise ourselves out of embodiment. We weren’t meant to glide through life flawlessly; we were meant to feel it, learn from it. I have no desire to trade real, sometimes awkward, occasionally tear-stained human connection for scale, speed, or eternal life in the cloud. We’re meant to bump into each other, need each other, and muddle through together as gloriously imperfect beings.
I get the appeal of a digital clone. It would be available 24/7, never need sleep, never forget a quote from my own books, and never say, “Give me a moment, I need to feel into that.” Frankly, it would be far more efficient than I am—and that alone should make you suspicious.
It could speak in my voice, replicate my frameworks, and display the kind of flawless recall my very human brain abandoned somewhere around perimenopause. But an AI trained on my work wouldn’t actually be me. It would be a greatest-hits remix. A reflection. A map—not the terrain, and certainly not the muddy boots on the trail.
The heart of my work has never been about information delivery. If it were, I’d just send you a PDF and suggest a nice cup of tea. What moves people forward during painful life transitions is not a perfectly phrased insight—it’s the experience of being met. Of being listened to by another human who can sit in the discomfort without trying to fix it in under six seconds.
No algorithm can do that. It can simulate care, but it can’t care. It can sound compassionate, but it doesn’t know what heartbreak feels like at 3 a.m. when the ceiling starts asking existential questions. Some of the most important moments in my life and work were born in exactly those sleepless hours—and AI has never once stared into the dark, wondering who it is.
When you work with me, you’re working with a real human being. Flesh, breath, nervous system, and a slightly alarming collection of quirks included. I’m not offering a content pipeline. When you join a course with coaching, you’re connecting with someone who has wrestled with life, lost a few rounds, learned some things the hard way, and then figured out how to build a purposeful life anyway.
I offer live coaching not because it’s scalable, but because it’s alive. Something happens when we meet in real time that simply cannot be automated. We read facial expressions. We hear the tone of each other’s voices. We notice the silence when a realisation lands. We laugh—sometimes at precisely the wrong moment. And occasionally, we enter a shared field of presence that has no business existing and yet unmistakably does.
In a world determined to automate every possible interaction, choosing in-person work is a small act of rebellion. I believe your transition and eventual transformation deserve more than a well-trained chatbot and a motivational notification.
A safe, warm, mutually supportive community—like my storytelling circles—is one of the most valuable things we can create. No one is a “user.” No one is a data point. We’re people meeting people, hearts open, fragile and vulnerable.
AI can host endless community spaces, but without real humans—with all their inconvenient emotions, pauses, and occasional verbal detours—those spaces would feel like very polite waiting rooms. In a fragmented, hyper-individualistic world, we long for moments of shared humanity where everyone leaves a little more alive than they arrived.
Community begins by becoming your own best company. When you can regulate your emotions, name what you need, and offer yourself steadiness instead of criticism, you stop reaching for other people as a way to escape discomfort. From that grounded place, human connection becomes cleaner: you choose relationships from values, not from panic or loneliness, and you show up with more patience, boundaries, and generosity. AI can support reflection, provide prompts, and organise ideas, but it cannot replace the quiet, daily choice to be present with your own thoughts and feelings. That capacity is what turns “being alone” into belonging, and it’s the foundation that makes real community possible.
In my storytelling circles, I show up as my full, imperfectly human self. I’m there live—not as a flawless digital avatar delivering pristine sound bites, but as a person with occasional bad hair days (and the odd bad hair year), spontaneous jokes, and moments where I stop talking because I’m actually thinking.
Why is that better than “perfect”? Because so much of online life has become curated, optimised, and filtered into something unrecognisable. AI will only speed this up, offering endlessly smooth, always-on personas that never hesitate, never stumble, and never risk being real. Authentic. I want the exact opposite.
My way of working is relational. When I’m with you live, I’m influenced by you. Your questions shape the conversation. Your insights spark my curiosity. You guide me as much as I guide you. That mutuality is the point. An AI version of me would never be moved by you—but I am, regularly.
None of this means AI is “bad.” It’s a tool. A very clever one. It can free up time, spark ideas, and handle tedious tasks so we can spend more time doing what we do best: connecting, creating, and making meaning.
Creating a simulated “Margaretha” would move us away from direct connection. It would quietly suggest that a polished imitation is good enough.
I disagree. Warmly, but firmly.
As the world races toward automation, I want my work to move in the opposite direction. I want it to be living proof that human presence still matters—possibly more than ever. When you reach out, I want you to know that a living, breathing human being will reach back.
So no, “AI Margaretha” will not be launching anytime soon. There will be no beta version, no upgrade cycle, and no push notifications reminding you to “optimise your inner life.” Instead, there will continue to be this Margaretha—learning as I go, listening more than I speak (most days), stumbling occasionally, laughing often, crying when life demands it, and showing up as fully and honestly as I can for as long as this human body, nervous system, and slightly opinionated heart allow.
And one day, when I can no longer show up live, my books may linger on shelves and nightstands. My tools may be passed from hand to hand, adapted, reinterpreted, and made useful in ways I could never predict. My words may echo in moments of quiet courage or unexpected clarity. But they won’t replace presence; they’ll simply point back to it.
Because this work was never about preserving me. It was never about bottling my voice, archiving my thoughts, or creating a perfectly polished version that could run forever without needing rest, doubt, or a good cry. It has always been about human connection. About what happens when real humans slow down long enough to meet each other honestly, without filters, scripts, or shortcuts. That essence won’t change. Real people, offering in-person presence to one another—right here, right now. A little messy. A little inconvenient.
Irreplaceable.
If you find yourself nodding along and thinking, Yes, this is exactly it, you’re invited to get in touch. Explain what you’re wrestling with and we’ll see if my work—and my imperfect human brain—might be useful to you. If not, I’ll still wish you well and point you toward what might serve you better.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
My fingers ache inside my gloves, each movement slow and clumsy now, the kind of cold that steals your grip. I hoist the bales with stiffened limbs, feel needles shoot across my back, the rough hay scraping at my wrists where skin meets air, already cracked.
The water sloshes, heavy, dark, my shoulders burning with the weight. Ice glistens on the surface as I walk, my face gone wooden in the wind, my lungs on fire with frozen air— the kind of cold that makes you ask what you were thinking, coming here.
But then—their shapes emerge from mist, dark bodies patient in the dawn, and something in me settles down. The rhythm starts: the hay pulled free, the scatter of the morning grain, their soft lips searching in my palm. They do not mind the bitter air, these creatures built for snow and wind.
They simply stand and chew and wait, and I am here, and that is all— no past to mourn, no plans to make, just hay and water, breath and cold. Their presence is a kind of prayer, the way they lean into my hands, the steady grinding of their jaws, the warmth that rises from their backs when I press close to check a strap or brush the frost from winter coats.
The cold still hurts—it always will— but out here in the frozen quiet, among these patient, breathing forms, I find I'm less afraid of it, less lost inside my racing mind. The ritual holds me to the earth: this bale, this bucket, this breaking dawn, these horses who know my footsteps, who teach me how to simply be when being is the hardest thing, who ground me in the present now— the ice, the ache, the steady care. Margaretha Montagu January, 2026
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Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
Trade your to-do list for a stack of books: The counterintuitive reason high achievers are choosing books over bootcamps
What This Is: A research-backed exploration of why deliberately stepping away to read, intently and without interruption, can create more meaningful life change than months of frantic productivity.
What This Isn’t: A prescription to abandon responsibility, a criticism of action-taking, or another “self-care” lecture. This isn’t about running away from your life; it’s about making your way toward clarity.
Read This If: You’ve been working hard on your “next chapter” but feel like you’re spinning your wheels. You’re exhausted from doing all the right things that somehow aren’t working. You suspect you need something fundamentally different, not just more of the same.
5 Key Takeaways
Your brain needs the story – Stories rewire neural pathways in ways that strategic planning simply cannot.
Reading creates psychological distance – The space between you and your problems allows for perspective that’s impossible when you’re in the thick of things.
Immersive reading is a form of active rest – Unlike passive scrolling, reading engages your brain in restorative, meaning-making work.
Retreat conditions matter – Five uninterrupted days do exponentially more than scattered reading moments over five months.
Recalibration precedes transformation – Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is stop, read and relax, and pay attention to what emerges.
Introduction: The Productivity Paradox
You’ve been running for months, maybe years.
Not literally (though perhaps that too), but in every way that counts: running toward solutions, running through your to-do list, running from the discomfort of standing still. You’ve read the articles, hired the coach, implemented the morning routine, set the intentions. You’ve hustled like your life depended on it.
And yet, here you are. Still searching. Still stuck. Still wondering why all that motion hasn’t translated into momentum.
Here’s the truth nobody talks about: sometimes the very act of trying harder is what’s keeping you trapped. Your overworked, overstimulated brain has been running on crisis mode for so long that it’s forgotten how to access the deeper wisdom that actually creates breakthrough change.
This article isn’t about adding another strategy to your overwhelmed plate. It’s about why five days of doing something radically different, something that looks suspiciously like “nothing” to the outside world, can create the shift that five months of grinding couldn’t touch.
The Woman Who Stopped Running Long Enough to Remember
Sarah Blackwood’s Breaking Point
Sarah Blackwood sat in her rental car outside the small stone cottage in southwestern France, engine running, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles had gone white. Through the windscreen, she could see warm light glowing from the windows, could make out the silhouettes of other women settling into armchairs with books. The reading retreat she’d impulsively booked three weeks ago.
What am I even doing here?
The scent of lavender drifted through the car’s air vents, mixing uncomfortably with the stale coffee smell from her morning drive. Her phone buzzed for the forty-seventh time that day. Another email from her business partner. Another question that apparently only she could answer. Another reminder that taking five days away was irresponsible, indulgent, foolish.
She turned off the engine. The sudden silence felt like pressure in her ears.
Sarah had built a successful consulting practice over fifteen years, survived a devastating divorce two years ago, and spent the last eighteen months “rebuilding” with the kind of determined efficiency that had made her professional reputation. Therapy every Tuesday. Networking every Thursday. Dating apps on Sunday mornings. Exercise at 6am. Meditation at 6:15am (well, most days). Affirmations. Vision boards. Strategic plans for her strategic plans.
She was doing everything right. So why did she feel like she was drowning in stinking, shallow water?
The retreat host, Dr Margaretha Montagu, had sent a welcome email that morning: “Leave your laptop in the car. Silence your phone. Bring only yourself and an open mind.”
Sarah had laughed when she’d first read it. Books? She hadn’t read a proper novel in three years. Who had time for fiction when real life demanded so much strategic management?
But here she was, divorce papers finally settled, business stable but unfulfilling, dating life a series of perfectly pleasant dinners that led precisely nowhere. She’d done all the recommended healing work, all the practical next steps. She’d hustled her way through grief and come out the other side… to what, exactly?
The cottage door opened, and a woman with kind eyes and dark hair appeared, a mug of something steaming in her hand. She didn’t wave or call out, just stood there, present and unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world for Sarah to make up her mind.
Something in Sarah’s chest cracked open, just a little.
She grabbed her overnight bag, left her laptop where it was, and stepped out into the cool evening air. The gravel crunched under her feet – such a specific sound, like every step was announcing itself. She could smell woodsmoke now, and something baking. Bread, maybe.
“I don’t actually know why I’m here,” Sarah said when she reached the doorway, her voice smaller than she’d intended.
“Perfect,” Dr Montagu replied, that single word holding no judgment, no expectation. “The women who know exactly why they’ve come rarely find what they’re looking for. Come in. Grab a book. Sit anywhere. We’ll talk when you’re ready.”
The cottage interior was exactly what Sarah’s overworked nervous system had been craving without knowing it: soft lamplight, deep chairs, a fire crackling, and everywhere – everywhere – books. Stacked on tables, lining shelves, sitting in inviting piles on windowsills. Fiction, mostly. Stories.
Sarah chose a novel almost randomly – a woman on the cover, looking out to sea – and sank into a chair by the window. The leather was worn smooth, shaped by previous bodies, previous breakthroughs. She opened to the first page.
An hour later, she was crying. Not the controlled, therapeutic crying she’d done in her Tuesday sessions, but the messy, gulping kind that comes from somewhere deeper than strategy can reach. The novel’s protagonist had just made a decision that mirrored Sarah’s own life so perfectly that it felt like being seen by someone who shouldn’t have been able to see.
She wasn’t reading about the protagonist anymore. She was reading about herself, about truths she’d been too busy to notice, about questions she’d been too efficient to ask.
By day three, Sarah had stopped checking her phone entirely. By day four, she’d shared her story in a storytelling circle, with Margaretha’s gentle Friesian horses as witnesses, and heard her own voice say things she hadn’t known she needed to say. By day five, when she walked a portion of the Camino trail with the other women, she understood what had changed.
She hadn’t figured anything out. She hadn’t made lists or set goals or developed strategies.
She’d recalibrated.
Her nervous system, which had been running on emergency power for two years, had finally downshifted into a frequency where wisdom could actually be heard. The stories she’d read had given her brain permission to process her own story differently, to see patterns she’d been too close to notice, to access creativity that strategic planning had completely bypassed.
When Sarah drove away on the final morning, her laptop still untouched in the boot, she didn’t have a five-year plan. But she had something better: a bone-deep knowing of what her next chapter actually needed to be about. Not the chapter she thought she should write, but the one that was authentically hers.
The hustle hadn’t been wrong. It had been premature. She’d been trying to build before she’d done the essential work of remembering who she actually was beneath all the doing.
Why Reading Creates Change That Hustling Cannot
The Neuroscience of Narrative Recalibration
Here’s what’s happening in your brain when you read deeply, according to research from cognitive neuroscience: you’re not just processing information. You’re running complex neural simulations of other lives, other choices, other ways of being in the world.
When you read fiction, specifically, your brain doesn’t fully distinguish between lived experience and vividly imagined experience. The same neural networks light up. This is why a powerful novel can shift your perspective as profoundly as a real-life encounter – your brain has, in essence, lived that alternate reality.
But here’s the crucial part: this only happens when you read deeply, without interruption, for extended periods. The fragmented reading most of us do, snatched moments between meetings, a chapter before bed after a draining day – that doesn’t create the immersive neural state required for this kind of transformation.
Five days of uninterrupted reading does something that five months of sporadic reading cannot: it allows your default mode network, the part of your brain responsible for self-referential thinking and meaning-making, to fully engage without constant disruption.
This is particularly crucial for people navigating major life transitions. When you’re in the middle of divorce, career upheaval, loss, or illness, your brain is already overwhelmed with trying to process reality. Adding more action, more decisions, more strategies often just increases cognitive load without creating clarity.
Reading, paradoxically, creates space. It gives your conscious mind something to focus on (the story) while your unconscious mind does the essential work of integrating your experience, processing emotions, and accessing wisdom that strategic planning bypasses entirely.
The Ripple Effect: How Individual Recalibration Transforms Communities
When you change at this fundamental level, it doesn’t stay contained. It can’t.
The person who returns from a reading retreat isn’t just calmer or more focused (though they often are). They’re operating from a different set of priorities, making decisions based on deeper wisdom, responding to life rather than reacting to it.
This shifts every relationship they’re in. Their children suddenly have a parent who’s present rather than productive. Their colleagues encounter someone who asks better questions rather than just offering faster answers. Their community gains a member who contributes from authentic values rather than exhausted obligation.
One person’s recalibration becomes a permission slip for others. When your friends see you choosing depth over speed, meaning over metrics, wisdom over hustle – and thriving as a result – it challenges their own assumptions about what’s required to navigate difficult seasons well.
This is how culture changes: one recalibrated nervous system at a time, creating ripples that eventually become waves.
Five Critical Mistakes People Make When Trying to Transform Their Lives
1. Confusing Motion with Progress
The mistake: Believing that constant activity equals healing, growth, or advancement. Filling every moment with courses, coaching, networking, and “working on yourself” because standing still feels like falling behind.
Why it fails: Your nervous system needs integration time. Without it, you’re just collecting information and experiences without actually digesting them into wisdom. Like eating constantly without ever allowing your body to metabolise the food.
What to do instead: Build in protected time for “niksen”. Not “productive rest” or “strategic reflection” – actual, unscheduled space where something other than your agenda can emerge.
2. Treating Insight Like Implementation
The mistake: Assuming that understanding your problem intellectually is the same as resolving it. Reading every self-help book but never giving yourself the conditions to embody the insights.
Why it fails: Transformation requires both hemispheres of your brain. The left brain can understand concepts, but the right brain needs narrative, metaphor, and space to integrate those concepts into new ways of being.
What to do instead: Balance analytical learning with immersive experiences that engage your whole self – storytelling, nature, creative expression, deep reading.
3. Seeking Solutions Before Allowing Questions
The mistake: Rushing to fix, solve, or strategise before you’ve fully understood what actually needs attention. Treating every life transition as a problem to solve rather than a threshold to cross thoughtfully.
Why it fails: Premature solutions often address surface symptoms while leaving root causes untouched. You end up with a new job that recreates the same patterns, a new relationship that mirrors the old dynamics, a relocated life that carries the same unresolved issues.
What to do instead: Spend time on the question. Its OK not to know. Allow confusion without immediately trying to eliminate it. This is where genuine insight lives.
4. Underestimating the Power of the Environment
The mistake: Trying to create profound change while remaining in the exact environment that shaped your current state. Expecting different results from the same context, same routines, same stimulus patterns.
Why it fails: Your environment is constantly cueing habitual responses. It’s nearly impossible to access new ways of thinking, feeling, and being when every sight, sound, and smell is triggering well-worn neural pathways.
What to do instead: Create deliberate environmental disruption. This is why retreats work – new place, new rhythms, new inputs. Your brain literally cannot fall into its usual patterns.
5. Isolating When You Need Witnessed Transformation
The mistake: Believing transformation is a solo journey. Trying to process major life changes entirely alone or only with professionals who hold therapeutic space but aren’t walking alongside you.
Why it fails: Humans are relational beings. We discover who we’re becoming partly through being seen by others. Sharing your story, hearing others’ stories, witnessing and being witnessed – this is how integration happens.
What to do instead: Seek experiences that combine solitude with community. Reading retreats, walking pilgrimages, creative workshops – spaces where you can do your internal work while being held by a container of others doing theirs.
Intention Setting Exercise: The Recalibration Ritual
Find a quiet moment. Take three deep breaths. Then write your answers to these prompts:
1. What am I running from by staying so busy? (Write without censoring. Let the truth surface.)
2. If my life were a novel, what chapter am I actually in? (Not the chapter you wish you were in – the honest one.)
3. What question am I avoiding by seeking so many answers? (There’s usually one question underneath all the others.)
4. What does my wisest self know that my busiest self keeps ignoring? (Listen. You already know.)
5. What would recalibration, not hustle, look like for me right now? (Be specific. What would actually create the space for something to shift?)
Fold this paper. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it. Let these questions work on you, rather than you working on them.
Further Reading: Books That Understand Recalibration
1. “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig
Why this book: A profound exploration of parallel lives and the choices that define us. Perfect for anyone standing at a crossroads, wondering about the paths not taken. It gently reminds us that the life we’re living might be exactly the one we need – once we shift perspective.
2. “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle
Why this book: For anyone who’s spent years performing a version of themselves that no longer fits. Doyle’s memoir is both a permission slip and a roadmap for trusting your own knowing over everyone else’s expectations.
Why this book: Not just for artists. This is about recovering creative thinking after it’s been beaten out of you by productivity culture. The morning pages practice alone can create the kind of space where recalibration happens naturally.
4. “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes” by William Bridges
Why this book: Bridges understands that transitions aren’t about the external change (new job, divorce, relocation) but about the internal process of letting go, the neutral zone, and new beginnings. Essential reading for anyone in the messy middle.
5. My book “Embracing Change – in 10 Minutes a Day” offers practical, bite-sized practices for anyone navigating life transitions who needs daily support without overwhelm. It’s designed for exactly this moment you’re in. Available here
If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn’t a reading retreat just escapism disguised as personal development?
No, and here’s why the distinction matters: escapism is about avoiding reality, numbing discomfort, or distracting yourself from what needs attention. A reading retreat is about creating the conditions where you can finally face reality without the constant static of daily demands interfering. You’re not escaping your life; you’re gaining the perspective to see it clearly. The proof is in what happens after – people return with greater capacity to engage with their actual circumstances, not less.
How can reading fiction possibly help with real-world problems?
Fiction is how humans have processed complex life situations for millennia. When you read about characters navigating divorce, loss, career crises, or identity shifts, your brain practices those scenarios in a low-stakes environment. You explore multiple solutions, witness consequences, and access emotional wisdom that analytical thinking bypasses. Research shows that literary fiction specifically increases empathy, perspective-taking, and psychological complexity – exactly the capacities needed to navigate your own challenges with greater wisdom.
Five days seems excessive. Can’t I get the same benefit from a weekend?
The honest answer is no, and here’s why: Days 1-2 are typically spent just downshifting from your normal stress response. Day 3 is when you actually begin to drop into the deeper state where insight can emerge. Days 4-5 are where integration happens. A weekend retreat gets you to the doorway but doesn’t give you enough time to actually walk through it. Think of it like deep sleep cycles – you can’t just skip to REM and expect rest. You need the full progression.
What if I don’t enjoy reading or haven’t read a book in years?
This is more common than you think, and it’s usually because reading has become another thing on your productivity list rather than a genuine source of pleasure and insight. Reading retreats reintroduce reading as it was meant to be experienced – immersive, unhurried, chosen freely. The retreat format, with others reading nearby, creates a collective energy that often reignites a dormant love of books. And if reading truly isn’t your medium, the principles still apply: you need extended, uninterrupted time in an altered environment with input that engages your whole self differently.
How do I justify taking five days away when I have responsibilities?
By recognising that returning as a recalibrated version of yourself serves everyone far better than continuing to show up depleted, reactive, and running on emergency power. The people and responsibilities in your life don’t need more of your exhausted hustle; they need you operating from clarity, wisdom, and genuine presence. Five days away can create months of better functioning. The real question isn’t whether you can afford to go – it’s whether you can afford not to. As Sarah discovered, sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is stop trying so hard and give yourself space to remember what actually matters.
Conclusion: The Courage to Recalibrate
There’s a particular kind of courage required to stop doing and simply be. In a culture that glorifies hustle and measures worth by productivity, choosing five days of reading feels almost transgressive.
But here’s what I’ve witnessed over two decades of hosting transformational retreats: the people who have the guts to step away, to read deeply, to walk slowly, to share their stories – these are the people who create the most profound and lasting change in their lives.
Not because they tried harder. Because they finally stopped trying in the old ways that weren’t working.
As author Rebecca Solnit writes: “Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
Your Invitation to Recalibrate
Imagine five days where your only job is to read, walk, recalibrate, and let something shift in the quiet spaces between. My Booklovers Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat in southwestern France offers exactly this: a chance to step completely away from the demands of daily life into a container designed for recalibration.
You’ll spend mornings with books that speak to your soul, afternoons walking portions of the ancient Camino trail. This isn’t about fixing yourself (you’re not broken) or finding all the answers (some questions are meant to be lived). It’s about creating the conditions where wisdom can finally surface, where your nervous system can downshift from crisis mode, and where your next chapter can emerge from genuine knowing rather than exhausted hustle. If you’re tired of doing all the right things that somehow aren’t creating the change you need, this retreat might be exactly the recalibration your soul is asking for. Learn more and book here
When was the last time you gave yourself permission to stop, truly stop, and let something shift in the silence? What might be waiting to emerge if you did?
What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide
“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu
What this is: A deep dive into why telling your story, out loud, to other humans who’ve been through it, matters more than you think. This is about the neuroscience, the heart science, and the practical magic of storytelling during divorce and breakup retreats.
What this isn’t: Another “journaling will fix everything” article. This isn’t about writing in a notebook at 3am (though that has its place). This is about the radical act of speaking your truth in community.
Read this if: You’re tired of keeping it all in. If you’ve been the strong one, the together one, the “I’m fine” one, and you’re wondering what it might feel like to actually say the messy, complicated truth out loud and have someone nod and say, “Me too.”
5 Key Takeaways
Storytelling rewires your brain, literally creating new neural pathways that help you make sense of chaos and move from victim to author of your life.
Speaking your story out loud activates different brain regions than writing it down, creating deeper emotional processing and release.
Witnessing others’ stories normalises your experience, shattering the isolation that keeps so many people stuck in shame.
The act of structuring your narrative gives you agency, transforming “this happened to me” into “this is what I’m making of what happened.”
Storytelling in retreat settings creates lasting bonds, providing a support network that extends far beyond the retreat itself.
Introduction: The Story You’re Not Telling Is Steering Your Life
There’s a story you’re carrying. It has weight. It has sharp edges. You might be telling yourself you’ve moved on, that you’ve processed it, that you’re fine.
But here’s what I’ve learned over 20 years of hosting crisis management retreats: the stories we don’t tell become the stories that tell us what to do. They whisper from the shadows. They dictate our choices. They keep us small.
The story of your divorce or breakup, the one you might be abbreviating into a tidy, socially acceptable summary (“We grew apart,” “It just didn’t work out”), deserves more. Not because you need to dwell on pain, but because the full, complicated, messy truth holds the seeds of who you’re becoming.
In this article, you’ll discover why storytelling during a divorce retreat isn’t just therapeutic window dressing. It’s neuroscience. It’s the bridge between the chapter that ended and the one you’re writing now. You’ll understand what makes storytelling circles different from therapy, journaling, or talking to friends, and why women who engage in this practice report feeling fundamentally changed, not just temporarily soothed.
The Woman Who Found Her Voice in the Foothills of the Pyrenees
Claire Thompson’s Story
Claire Thompson arrived at the retreat on a grey March morning with two suitcases, a perfectly timed smile, and the unmistakable air of a woman who had mastered the art of feeling fine. At 47, she looked exactly like someone who had her life together: neat blazer, excellent shoes, and that particular brand of composure that only comes from years of emotional Pilates—constant holding, tightening, bracing.
She’d been divorced for eight months.
“Amicable,” she said on the first evening, as we sat under the stars looking out towards the Pyrenees. “Very amicable. We’re still friends. Honestly, it was all very grown-up.”
She delivered this line the way one might recite emergency instructions on an airplane—calm, convincing, and clearly rehearsed. The kind of speech that sounds airtight until you notice no one is actually breathing.
The words hovered politely in the air. No one challenged them. The 200-year-old oak trees, wise old introverts, said nothing.
On the second day, after walking the Camino trail through oak forests still stripped bare by winter, Claire found herself sitting quietly with my Friesian horses, who have an uncanny ability to detect emotional incongruence. They don’t care about LinkedIn profiles, carefully curated narratives, or whether something was “for the best.” They are deeply unimpressed by performance.
That’s when something shifted.
“Can I tell you what really happened?” Claire asked, her voice suddenly smaller, less lacquered.
The horses leaned in. Literally. One of them exhaled deeply, which is horse for We’ve been waiting for this.
What followed over the next forty minutes bore little resemblance to the version she’d been offering at dinner parties. It was messy. Contradictory. Full of sharp edges and uncomfortable pauses. There was rage and relief in the same sentence. Grief tangled up with gratitude. Shame sitting awkwardly next to something that might—just might—have been hope.
She talked about the morning she found the messages. How her hands shook so violently she couldn’t hold her coffee cup. How surreal it felt to watch her life split cleanly into before and after in the space of three text messages, all while the kettle continued boiling, oblivious to the existential crisis unfolding beside it.
But then she said the quieter part—the one she almost never admitted.
That she’d known, months before, that something essential had already died between them. That she’d sensed it in the silence, the politeness, the way they talked logistics instead of feelings. And how she’d pretended not to notice. How she’d cooked increasingly elaborate dinners, as if the right combination of rosemary and optimism might resurrect a relationship that had already flatlined.
“I keep thinking I should have tried harder,” she said, tears finally arriving without prior notice. “But I also know I tried so hard I disappeared.”
By the third day, something remarkable had happened. Claire’s voice had changed. It had texture now. Depth. The careful control had softened into something truer. She laughed more freely—real laughter, not the polite exhale people use to signal they’re coping. She cried without apologising. A personal best.
On the final walk, she said, “I spent eight months telling everyone I was fine because I thought that’s what healed people do. But I wasn’t healing. I was performing healing. This—saying it all out loud, letting it be messy, having it witnessed—this is what actual healing feels like.”
Claire went home and, over the following months, made choices she’d previously been too frightened to consider. She changed careers. She moved to the coast. She started dating again—not from panic or loneliness, but from genuine curiosity about who she might become with someone new. A refreshing change from her former strategy of emotional endurance.
The storytelling didn’t fix her life. It did something far more powerful.
It gave her back her voice.
And with her voice came her agency. Her power. Her permission to stop being “fine” and start being real. And from that place, she began writing her next chapter—on her own terms.
Why Does Storytelling Work? The Science and Soul of Shared Narrative
The Neuroscience of Speaking Your Truth
When you tell your story out loud, something extraordinary happens in your brain. Neuroscientists have discovered that storytelling activates multiple brain regions simultaneously: the language centres, yes, but also the sensory cortex, the motor cortex, and crucially, the areas responsible for emotion regulation and meaning-making.
This is why speaking your story creates different results than writing it. Writing is powerful, but it’s primarily a cognitive exercise. Speaking, especially to a witness who reflect back empathy and recognition, engages your entire nervous system. Your body gets involved. Your voice carries emotion that bypassing words alone can’t hold.
I have witnessed this transformation countless times over two decades of hosting retreats. “People arrive holding their stories like grenades,” she explains. “Scared that if they pull the pin, everything will explode. But in the safety of a storytelling circle, they discover that speaking the truth doesn’t destroy them. It liberates them.”
From Chaos to Coherence: Narrative as Medicine
Divorce and breakup create what psychologists call “narrative disruption.” The story you thought you were living, the one where you knew what came next, suddenly ends mid-sentence. You’re left with fragments, contradictions, a plot that makes no sense.
Storytelling circles help you do what your brain desperately needs: create coherence. Not by prettying up the truth or forcing a tidy arc, but by speaking all the pieces, the mess and the beauty, and discovering that even contradictions can coexist in a story that feels true.
My Post-Crisis Protocols, online courses with or without mentoring, use storytelling as a foundational tool. Students learn to reframe their narratives, not by denying pain, but by expanding the frame to include possibility, agency, and future-focused meaning.
The Power of Witnesses: When Community Changes Everything
Although my Divorce Recovery Retreats are one-on-one, storytelling in a group can also be an intensely healing experience.
When eight, ten, twelve women sit in a circle and each shares her story, something alchemical happens. You hear echoes of your own experience in someone else’s words. You recognise yourself in a stranger’s tears. You discover that the shame you’ve been carrying, the particular flavour of failure you thought was uniquely yours, is actually part of a larger human pattern.
This normalisation, this “me too” moment repeated a dozen times over a weekend, shatters isolation more effectively than any reassurance. You’re not broken. You’re not uniquely damaged. You’re human, going through something profoundly difficult, and you’re not alone.
As one online storytelling circle participant wrote in a testimonial: “I came expecting to learn coping strategies. I left with a new family. The women in that circle know me at a level most of my oldest friends don’t, because they’ve seen the real story, not the edited version.”
Storytelling Creates Identity Flexibility
Perhaps most importantly, storytelling during a retreat allows you to try on different versions of your story. In the safety of the circle, you can tell it angry one moment, sad the next. You can acknowledge contradictions. You can say, “I hate him and I miss him” without someone trying to resolve that tension for you.
This flexibility is crucial for healing. Rigid stories keep us stuck. “I’m the victim.” “I’m the failure.” “I’ll never trust again.” These narratives, however emotionally true in the moment, become cages.
Storytelling circles teach you that you can hold multiple truths simultaneously. You can be heartbroken and hopeful. Angry and grateful. Scared and excited. This both/and thinking, rather than either/or, is what allows you to move forward without denying where you’ve been.
How Does Storytelling Transform Not Just You, But Your Whole World?
The Ripple Effect of Speaking Your Truth
When you change your story, you change your life. But it doesn’t stop there.
The women who told their stories during retreats often report that their relationships shift in unexpected ways. Adult children, who’ve been tiptoeing around “mum’s divorce,” suddenly feel permission to be real. Friends, relieved of the burden of pretending everything’s fine, deepen their connections. Even ex-partners sometimes respond differently when you stop performing and start being genuine.
This isn’t magic. It’s authenticity creating space for others to be authentic too. Your willingness to be vulnerable, to stop controlling the narrative, gives permission for everyone around you to do the same.
Building Communities of Resilience
The retreat experience doesn’t end when you go home. The bonds formed in storytelling circles tend to endure. WhatsApp groups stay active for years. Women meet up for annual reunions. They support each other through job changes, health scares, new relationships, losses.
It’s the most heart-warming thing. I have watched retreat groups stay connected for over a decade, providing a network of support that functions like family, but without the complicated history or judgment. “These women, who have never met in person, become each other’s witnesses for life,” she notes. “They’ve seen each other at their most vulnerable, and that creates a bond that’s remarkably durable.”
This community aspect extends the healing far beyond the retreat itself. Instead of returning to isolation, participants return to a web of connection, a group of people who truly understand the journey.
Modelling Resilience for Others
Perhaps the most profound ripple effect is how your healing becomes a template for others.
When you navigate divorce with grace, honesty, and courage, when you allow yourself to struggle publicly rather than performing perfection, you show others what’s possible. Your children, if you have them, learn that life’s hardest moments don’t have to be faced in silence. Your friends going through their own struggles, see that there’s a path through. Your community benefits from having one more person who’s faced darkness and come through it without becoming brittle or bitter.
This isn’t about being a role model in the traditional sense. It’s about being real. And in a culture that pressures us to have it all together, realness is revolutionary.
What Are the 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Storytelling Circles?
1. Trying to Be “Over It” Before You’re Ready
The biggest mistake women make when storytelling is attempting to arrive at the healing before they’ve done the grieving. They want to show up with the neat bow already tied, the lesson learned, the silver lining identified.
But storytelling isn’t about showcasing your growth. It’s about being where you are. If you’re still furious, be furious. If you’re confused, be confused. The transformation happens through the telling, not before it.
2. Editing for Your Audience
It’s tempting to soften the sharp edges, to protect your ex-partner’s reputation, to leave out the parts that feel too ugly or shameful. But the edited version doesn’t heal you.
Obviously, storytelling isn’t about being cruel or gratuitously harsh. But it is about being honest. You need to tell the real story, the one with all its complications, not the PR-friendly version.
3. Comparing Your Story to Others’
In any storytelling circle, there will be stories that feel “worse” than yours. Someone will have faced more dramatic betrayal, longer marriages, more complicated custody battles.
Don’t let this turn into the oppression Olympics. Your pain is valid regardless of how it ranks. Comparison steals the oxygen from vulnerability. Your story deserves to be told exactly as you experienced it.
4. Rushing to Solutions or Advice
When someone shares their story, the temptation to fix, advise, or offer solutions is almost irresistible. Resist it anyway.
The most healing response to someone’s story is: “I hear you. I see you. Thank you for trusting us with this.” Full stop. Let the story breathe. Let it land. Solutions can come later, if they’re invited.
5. Leaving Your Body Behind
Many women tell their divorce stories entirely from the neck up, as if they’re reporting facts for a documentary. But stories live in bodies.
Where was the betrayal held in your body? What did hope feel like? How did anger move through you? Bring your physical experience into the narrative. This is what makes stories visceral, memorable, and ultimately, transformative.
Setting Your Intention: A Powerful Exercise
Before you enter a storytelling circle, or even as you contemplate sharing your story with safe people in your life, try this intention-setting practice.
Find a quiet space. Place both hands on your heart. Close your eyes.
Ask yourself three questions:
What truth have I been afraid to speak?
What do I hope to release by telling this story?
What do I want to be true about me after I’ve spoken?
Write your answers. Not polished prose. Just the raw, first-thought responses.
Create a single intention statement that captures the essence of what you’ve written. For example:
“I intend to speak my truth without shame, to release the weight of performing fine-ness, and to reclaim my voice as the author of my life.”
Say this intention out loud three times. Let your nervous system hear you commit to it. Notice what shifts in your body when you speak it.
Carry this intention with you into the storytelling circle or conversation. Let it guide what you choose to share and what you choose to hold back.
Further Reading: Books That Honour the Storytelling Journey
1. “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk
This groundbreaking work on trauma explains why speaking your story engages your entire nervous system and why witnessing matters neurologically. It’s essential reading for understanding why storytelling heals at a physiological level.
2. “Rising Strong” by Brené Brown
Brown’s exploration of vulnerability and narrative includes powerful insights about “the story I’m telling myself” versus “what’s really true.” Her framework for working with difficult stories is practical and compassionate.
3. “The Art of Memoir” by Mary Karr
While focused on written memoir, Karr’s insights about truth-telling, voice, and the courage required to tell hard stories are directly applicable to oral storytelling in retreat settings.
4. “Stories That Stick” by Kindra Hall
Hall breaks down the neuroscience of storytelling and offers frameworks for structuring narratives that create emotional connection and lasting change. Perfect for understanding why certain stories land and others don’t.
5. “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl
Frankl’s profound meditation on finding meaning in suffering provides philosophical grounding for the storytelling work. His insights about agency within circumstances remind us that we’re always authoring meaning, even in our hardest chapters.
PS: For a daily practice that complements storytelling work, my “Embracing Change, in 10 Minutes a Day” offers guided exercises for integrating the insights that emerge from telling your story. Available HERE.
5 FAQs About Storytelling During Divorce Recovery Retreats
What if I start crying and can’t stop?
This fear is universal and understandable. Here’s the truth: you will probably cry. Maybe a lot. And that’s not a problem, it’s the point. Storytelling holds space for all of your emotions. Other participants have tissues. They understand. They’ve been there. And you know what? You will stop crying, eventually. Your nervous system knows how to regulate. Trust the process.
Do I have to share if I’m not ready?
Absolutely not. Storytelling circles work on the principle of invitation, not obligation. You can witness others’ stories without sharing your own. Sometimes bearing witness is exactly the medicine you need. When you’re ready, you’ll know. And if that’s never during this particular retreat, that’s perfectly fine too.
What if my story is too messy or complicated?
Perfect. Bring the mess. Bring the complications. The most healing stories are the ones that don’t tie up neatly. Real life is contradictory, confusing, and rarely follows a tidy arc. Your messy, complicated story is exactly what the circle needs, because it gives permission for everyone else to bring their mess too.
How is this different from therapy?
Therapy typically involves one-on-one work with a professional who guides the process. Storytelling circles are peer-based, community-driven experiences. There’s no diagnosis, no treatment plan, no expert telling you what your story means. The healing comes from being witnessed by others who’ve walked similar paths, and from witnessing them in return. Many retreat participants continue therapy alongside the storytelling work, and the two practices complement each other beautifully.
What if someone in the group judges me or shares my story outside the circle?
Confidentiality is the bedrock of storytelling circles. At the beginning of every circle, every retreat, we commit to the principle: “What’s shared in the circle stays in the circle.” Violations of this trust are extraordinarily rare. The nature of the experience, the vulnerability shared, creates a sacred container that people instinctively honour. That said, you always have agency over what you share and how much detail you include.
Conclusion: Your Story Matters More Than You Think
Here’s what I wish someone had told me years ago, and what I now tell every woman who walks through the retreat door: your story, exactly as you’ve lived it, with all its mess and beauty and contradiction, is worthy of being told.
Not because it needs to be spectacular or unique. Not because it has to inspire others or teach a lesson. But simply because it’s yours, and you deserve to be heard.
The women who come to my online storytelling circles often arrive believing their story is too ordinary, too broken, or too shameful to matter. They leave knowing something profound: speaking your truth in the company of witnesses who reflect back recognition and compassion is one of the most powerful acts of self-reclamation available to us.
As poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
Your story doesn’t just heal you. It heals everyone who hears it, everyone who recognises themselves in your courage, everyone who thinks, “If she can face this, maybe I can too.”
So tell it. Messy, complicated, contradictory, and true. Tell it until it stops having power over you and starts having power for you.
Ready to Tell Your Story in the Company of a small herd of Friesian and Falabella horses?
The Unbroken– a Divorce Recovery Retreat in the southwest of France offers two days and nights immersed in the transformative practice of storytelling, complemented by gentle hiking on the Camino de Santiago trails and the grounding presence of Friesian horses who have witnessed countless women finding their voices again.
This isn’t a retreat where you’ll be fixed or lectured. It’s a space where you’ll be seen, heard, and welcomed exactly as you are. Where your story, with all its complications, will be held by a woman who understands the specific texture of divorce grief because she’s lived it herself.
You’ll walk ancient paths, eat meals that nourish both body and soul, and discover that the voice you thought you’d lost is still there, waiting to tell the truth about where you’ve been and where you’re going.
If you’re tired of pretending you’re fine, if you’re ready to be real, if you’re curious about what might happen when you finally speak the whole story out loud, this retreat might be exactly what you need.
If you could tell one truth about your divorce or breakup that you’ve been afraid to say out loud, what would it be? And who would you trust to hear it?
Stop second-guessing yourself. Start owning your success. This book gives you the step-by-step roadmap to break free from imposter syndrome, build unshakable confidence, and finally believe you deserve every bit of your success. You ARE Good Enough!
Designed for those navigating a life transition, the Radical Renaissance Protocol guides you through an identity reset, helping you reconnect with your purpose, realign your values, and reclaim the clarity you thought you’d lost. This isn’t about fixing what’s broken: through reflection, strategic reinvention, and soul-anchored mentoring, you’ll transform uncertainty into direction and dormant potential into meaningful impact.
“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu
Research
Research on divorce recovery and storytelling largely falls into three overlapping areas: (1) narrative therapy as a structured “re-authoring” intervention, and (2) narrative/meaning-making studies that analyse how people tell divorce stories as part of identity reconstruction.
Narrative therapy (re-authoring)
A 2025 quasi-experimental study tested ten structured narrative-therapy sessions for recently divorced adults and found significant improvements in post-divorce adjustment (measured with the Post-Divorce Adjustment Scale) and significant reductions in grief (measured with the Grief Experience Questionnaire) compared with a no-intervention control group. The authors describe the mechanism as helping participants “reconstruct” divorce narratives through externalising problems, challenging dominant cultural scripts about divorce, and building a future-oriented identity story.
Storytelling as meaning-making (qualitative narrative research)
Qualitative narrative studies treat divorce stories as data and show how people use storytelling to restore coherence after a major identity disruption (e.g., shifting from “spouse” to “independent self”), often through themes like agency, reclaiming dignity, and reinterpreting divorce as a turning point rather than a failure. This work commonly highlights “narrative reconstruction” as an ongoing process—people revise the story over time as social stigma, support, and practical realities change.
The best-supported therapeutic storytelling approaches emphasise guided, relational “re-authoring” (often with externalisation, values, and future narrative practices) rather than unguided cathartic journaling. The broader narrative research base supports the idea that recovery often involves rebuilding identity through coherent self-narratives, but it also warns that cultural scripts (shame, stigma, “failed marriage”) shape which stories feel available and healing.
Karina. Batthyany, Sabine. Kraus, Erwin A. William, Yaliu. Yang Narrative Therapy as an Intervention for Post-Divorce Adjustment and Grief: Examining Psychological Outcomes Published online 01 April 2025 in the Journal of Psychosociological Research in Family and Culture Volume 3, Issue 2, pp 34-42
Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships during Life Transitions
Today’s Story: The Novel Unwritten
Louise sat at her desk on December 19th, staring at a blank document titled “Chapter One—Draft 47” while her cursor blinked with what felt like instant judgment. Outside her window, Labastide d’Armagnac’s medieval square was strung with Christmas lights, the stone arcades decorated with garlands, the village doing its annual Christmas market preparation that she’d been ignoring for two years.
Two years. Two years since she’d fled Paris—her law firm, her corner office, her miserable seventy-hour weeks—to write the historical novel she’d dreamed about since university. Two years living in this perfect medieval bastide village with its 13th-century architecture and rich Armagnac history, and absolutely ideal writing conditions.
She’d written exactly zero words that weren’t immediately deleted.
Her phone buzzed. Solange: Arriving in 20 minutes. Made cassoulet. Bringing wine. Don’t pretend you’re not home, I can see your car on Google Maps.
Louise looked around her cottage—dishes in the sink, laundry on every surface, manuscript pages scattered like evidence of a crime, the specific chaos of someone who’d given up.
Twenty minutes wasn’t enough time to hide two years of failure.
Solange arrived exactly on time because she was a literary agent and punctuality was apparently a professional disease. She took one look at Louise’s cottage and said, “Oh, merde.”
“It’s not that bad—”
“Louise, there’s a coffee cup growing mould that might achieve sentience. Also, you’re wearing the same sweater you wore in your last video call three weeks ago. Also—” she picked up a manuscript page, read it, made a face “—this is terrible. Not ‘needs editing’ terrible. ‘Written by someone having a breakdown’ terrible.”
“Thank you. Very supportive.”
“I’m not here to be supportive. I’m here because you stopped answering my ‘how’s the novel going’ texts, which means either you’re dead or you haven’t written anything.” Solange unpacked cassoulet and wine with the efficiency of someone conducting a professional intervention. “So. How many words?”
“I’ve been revising—”
“How many NEW words in the last six months?”
Louise stared at her hands. “Zero.”
Solange poured wine into two relatively clean glasses. “You moved here to write your great French historical novel about Armagnac production in the Hundred Years’ War. You researched for six months. You have forty-three history books. You have a perfect medieval village literally outside your window. And you’ve written nothing.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Because—” Louise’s voice cracked. “Because I don’t care about Armagnac production in the Hundred Years’ War. I thought I did. I thought escaping Paris meant I’d become this literary person who writes important historical fiction. Instead, I’m just a failed lawyer who can’t write, living alone in a village where I know no one, slowly going insane while pretending to work.”
Solange ate cassoulet thoughtfully. “You know everyone in this village is preparing for a medieval Christmas market?”
“Yes. Very authentic. People will dress in period costume, sell medieval crafts, there’s a storytelling competition for children about village history—”
“And you’re not participating.”
“I don’t know anyone. I came here to write, not socialise—”
“You came here to escape. Different thing.” Solange stood, walked to Louise’s window, pointed at the square. “That. That’s your novel.”
“What?”
“The village. Not historical Armagnac production—actual Labastide d’Armagnac. Now. The people preparing the market. The woman arguing with her husband about medieval costume accuracy. The baker who makes croustade the way his grandmother did. The actual living history you’ve been ignoring because you thought ‘important novels’ had to be about the past.”
“That’s not a historical novel—”
“So write contemporary fiction. Or creative nonfiction. Or a collection of village stories. Who cares? The point is you’re blocked because you’re trying to write about a past you researched instead of a present you’re living in but refusing to see.” Solange pulled out her phone. “When’s the market?”
“December 23rd. Four days.”
“You’re going to help organise it.”
“Solange, I can’t just—”
“You can and you will. They need help with the storytelling competition—I saw a notice at the mairie. You’re a lawyer. You can organise things. Also, you’ll meet people, hear their stories, remember why you moved to a medieval village instead of staying in Paris, making everyone miserable, including yourself.”
“I don’t know anything about medieval storytelling—”
“Neither do the children. That’s the point. Come on.” Solange was already texting someone. “Marguerite—she runs the bakery—her daughter is organising the children’s component. I’m telling her you’re volunteering. Done. You’re meeting her tomorrow at the mairie at 10 AM. Wear clean clothes. Shower first. Possibly burn that sweater.”
The next morning, Louise stood in the mairie—the medieval town hall, all stone and timber and centuries of bureaucratic authority—meeting Marguerite’s daughter Élodie, who was twenty-eight and terrifically organised and clearly sceptical that a random Parisian lawyer could help with a children’s storytelling competition.
“The concept,” Élodie explained, “is that children research a real historical figure or event from Labastide’s history and present it as a story. Five minutes each. We have twelve children registered. I need someone to help them structure their narratives and practice delivery. Can you do that?”
“I was a litigator. I can do narrative structure and delivery.”
“Good. They’re meeting here after school today. 4 PM. Don’t be late—they’re children, they have limited attention spans and strong opinions about historical accuracy.”
Louise spent the day reading everything she could find about Labastide d’Armagnac: founded in 1291, a bastide (fortified town) built on a grid pattern, famous for Armagnac production, occupied during the Hundred Years’ War, survived plague and revolution and modernisation while maintaining its medieval architecture.
At 4 PM, twelve children arrived with their parents, all looking at Louise with the particular scepticism children reserve for unfamiliar adults claiming to have useful knowledge.
“Bonjour,” Louise said, suddenly nervous in a way she’d never been in a courtroom. “I’m Louise. I’m helping with storytelling. Who wants to go first?”
A boy—maybe ten—raised his hand. “I’m researching Henri IV, who stayed here in 1583. But my story is boring. He just stayed in a house and probably ate food. How do I make that interesting?”
“What food?”
“What?”
“What did he eat? Was it different from what we eat now? Did someone cook it? Was it a feast or just dinner? Who else was there?”
The boy’s face lit up. “I didn’t think about that.”
“Historical events aren’t just dates and names. They’re people eating meals, having conversations, making decisions that seemed commonplace at the time but turned out to matter. Your job is to make 1583 feel real. What did the house smell like? What was the weather? Did Henri IV like the food or complain about it?”
They worked for two hours. Louise helped a girl researching a medieval plague doctor make her story less terrifying and more entertaining. Helped a boy transform his dry research about Armagnac distillation into a story about a distiller’s apprentice learning the craft. Helped twins arguing over whether Eleanor of Aquitaine had visited Labastide (inconclusive historical evidence) structure their debate as a dramatic dialogue.
By 6 PM, all twelve children had narratives that worked. Their parents looked impressed. Élodie looked stunned.
“You’re good at this,” she said as everyone left.
“I used to explain complex legal arguments to juries. Similar skill set, smaller audience, higher stakes in terms of historical accuracy.”
“Will you come to the rehearsal tomorrow? They’ll need more help.”
Louise found herself saying yes.
That night, for the first time in two years, she wrote. Not about Armagnac in the Hundred Years’ War. About the boy researching Henri IV. About the plague doctor girl. About what it felt like to help twelve children make history real through storytelling.
Five hundred words. Then a thousand. Then she looked up and it was 2 AM, and she’d written three thousand words about Labastide d’Armagnac—not historical, not researched, just observed. The baker who made croustade like his grandmother. The woman who was arguing about costume accuracy because her family had lived here for nine generations. The children who were connecting to their village’s past by making it present through stories.
December 23rd. The medieval Christmas market filled Labastide’s square with period costumes, craft stalls, the smell of roasting chestnuts and mulled wine. The storytelling competition happened in the arcades—twelve children presenting their research as stories, their parents watching, the whole village turning out to hear its own history told by its youngest residents.
Louise stood at the back, watching a ten-year-old boy describe Henri IV eating garbure (vegetable soup) in a house that still stood three streets away, making 1583 feel immediate and real and connected to now.
Solange appeared beside her. “You’re crying.”
“I’m not—these are just—it’s cold—”
“You’re crying because you’re proud of them. Also, because you finally remembered why you wanted to write.” Solange handed her a handkerchief. “So. The novel about medieval Armagnac production?”
“Abandoned. I’m writing something else.”
“About?”
“This village. These people. The children who make history real. The baker’s croustade. What it means to live in a place with nine hundred years of history and make it present instead of past.” Louise looked at the square, at the lights, at the medieval architecture filled with contemporary life. “I don’t know if it’s important literature. But it’s true. And I care about it.”
“Good. Important literature is overrated. True stories about people you care about? That sells.” Solange smiled. “Send me pages in January. Real pages, not research notes. I’ll get you a publisher.”
“You haven’t read it—”
“Don’t need to. You’re writing again. You know these people now. You care. That’s enough.”
Later, after the market closed, after the children had won their prizes (the Henri IV boy took first place), after Louise had been invited to help organise next year’s competition, she walked back to her cottage through Labastide’s medieval streets.
The blank document was still on her computer. “Chapter One—Draft 47.”
She deleted it. Started new: “Chapter One—The Storytellers.”
And wrote: The children of Labastide d’Armagnac were preparing to make history come alive, which was harder than it sounded because history, as Margaux explained to her classmates, was mostly just people eating food and making decisions that seemed boring at the time but turned out to matter later.
One thousand words. Then two thousand. Then dawn breaking over the medieval square and Louise realising she’d written through the night, that her novel wasn’t about the past she’d researched but the present she’d finally stopped running from.
Sometimes the story you need to write is the one you’re already living.
You just have to show up long enough to realise that.
At my retreats, storytelling creates a bridge between where you have been and where you’re going. It helps us make sense of our lives in a way that facts and advice alone never can. When we share stories—our own and each other’s—we begin to see meaning in what we’ve lived through, not just the hardship but also the resulting growth. Stories create connection, incite deep reflection, and allow us to gently reframe life transitions, allowing us to step out of who we’ve been and imagine who we’re becoming.
Wishing you a joyful Christmas and a happy and healthy 2026!
The Make Friends and Maintain Friendships Masterplan
During challenging times, friends often serve as our guiding lights. They may not have all the answers, but their presence helps us find our way. This holiday season, take a moment to honour the friends who’ve been a source of light in your life.
Think about the friend who calls just to check in, the one who sends a random text that makes you smile, or the person who’s always willing to listen. These acts, no matter how small, are profound reminders that you are not alone.
Just as your friends light your path, you have the power to brighten theirs. Even if life feels uncertain right now, trust that the light you share will always be enough.
When you want to give up, reach out to the friend who’ll tell you hard truths—and say yes when they volunteer you for community projects you’ve been avoiding. Stop hiding. Engage with the present instead of researching the past. Let people and their stories in.
Worst case scenario: You spend a few days helping with a children’s event, meet some neighbours, and still struggle with your original project.
Best case scenario: Your literary agent best friend shows up, finds you in crisis, and realises you’re blocked not because you can’t write but because you’re trying to write about a researched past instead of the lived present you’ve been ignoring. She volunteers you to help with a children’s storytelling competition that forces you to engage with your village, meet actual people with actual stories, and remember that the best writing comes from caring about real humans in real places, not from researching centuries-old Armagnac production in isolation. You discover your novel was always about this village—not its medieval past but its living present, the baker’s grandmother’s recipe, the children making history real, the nine-hundred-year-old architecture filled with contemporary life. You learn that writer’s block isn’t about lack of discipline—it’s about trying to write stories you don’t actually care about, and that sometimes the cure is just showing up for your community until you care enough about real people to make them real on the page.
Who has been a source of light in your life this year? How can you express your gratitude to them this holiday season? Reach out to a friend who’s been there for you and let them know how much they mean to you.
Subscribe to my Newsletter
I’m still collecting subscriptions to my news letter with these post, so if you haven’t subscribed already and would you like to find out what type of friend you are, how well you know your friends or if you and a new friend really are compatible, subscribe my filling in your email address in the box below and I’ll send you a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. You can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:
–How well do you know your Friends? Quiz – What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz – 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and – 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox!
Friends and Friendships
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox! (newsletter subscription included)
Thank you so much!
More information about making friends and maintaining friendships (including the quizzes I mentioned) is on its way to you. You have also successfully subscribed to my newsletter.
Designed for those navigating a life transition, the Radical Renaissance Protocol guides you through an identity reset, helping you reconnect with your purpose, realign your values, and reclaim the clarity you thought you’d lost. This isn’t about fixing what’s broken: through reflection, strategic reinvention, and soul-anchored mentoring, you’ll transform uncertainty into direction and dormant potential into meaningful impact.
I put the essence of who I am, and everything I have experienced that makes me who I am, with great enthusiasm, into my retreats, courses and books. – Dr Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract (cert,) Transformational Life Coach (dip,) Life Story Coach (cert) Counselling (cert,) Med Hypnotherapy (dip) and EAGALA (cert)
December 23, 2025 – 2 days to Christmas and before-last post in this series
Theme: Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships during Life Transitions
Today’s Story: The Lighthouse
Elise sat on her living room floor on December 23rd, surrounded by thirty-seven years of teaching materials in cardboard boxes that smelled like dust and institutional failure. She’d been sitting there for two hours, holding a paper turkey a student named Antoine had made in 2003, trying to decide if keeping it made her a sentimental hoarder.
The retirement community brochure sat on the coffee table, glossy but uninspiring: Résidence Les Jardins Dorés—The Golden Gardens Residence—which sounded like either a euphemism for heaven or a very expensive place to wait for death. Clean rooms. Organised activities. No ocean. No memories. No boxes of paper turkeys made by children who were now in their thirties with children of their own.
Her cottage—small, drafty, clinging to the Gironde coast like a barnacle that had developed architectural aspirations—was too much. Too many memories. Too much maintenance. Too much empty space where her purpose used to be.
She’d been a teacher. Now she was… nothing much. A person who sat around on floors all day, crying over paper turkeys.
Her doorbell rang.
She ignored it. Probably her nosy neighbour wanting to discuss the retirement community again, armed with more brochures and quasi-concern that felt like pious pity.
The ringing continued. Then someone started hammering on the door. Then a familiar voice: “Elise! I know you’re in there! I can see your car! All your lights are on! I’m freezing, and if you don’t open this door, I’m breaking a window!”
Elise scrambled up, boxes scattering, and whipped open the door.
Jean-Luc stood there grinning, wearing a photographer’s vest over a sweater that had clearly visited multiple continents, his grey hair wild from wind, a camera bag slung over his shoulder, and the expression of someone who’d just decided to show up unannounced because plans were for people with less interesting lives.
“You don’t look too bright,” he announced cheerfully. “And your garden is a disaster. When did you last weed anything? Never mind, don’t answer. I’m here for Christmas. Surprise. Are you crying? Why are you crying? Is someone dead?”
“I’m not—it’s just—” Elise gestured helplessly at the chaos behind her. “I’m packing. I’m selling the cottage.”
Jean-Luc’s smile vanished. “You’re what?”
“Selling. Moving to a retirement community. It’s really the most sensible thing to do. The cottage is too much work, I’m alone, I don’t teach anymore, I don’t—” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know what I’m living for anymore.”
Jean-Luc walked past her without invitation, the privilege of fifty years of friendship, and surveyed the disaster of her living room: boxes everywhere, teaching materials scattered, the retirement brochure gleaming like an accusation.
“Right,” he said. “We’re fixing this.”
“Jean-Luc, you can’t just—”
“I can, and I am. You’re having an identity crisis because you retired and forgot you’re a person beyond your job. Extremely common reaction, these days. Easily fixable. Also, you’re not moving to that place—” he picked up the brochure, made a face, dropped it in the recycling box “—because it looks like where joy goes to die slowly while playing organised bingo.”
“It’s a very nice facility—”
“It’s a beige prison with meal plans. You’re not going. We’re finding you a new purpose.” He started opening boxes with the confidence of someone who’d made executive decisions about other people’s lives across six continents. “What’s all this?”
“Teaching materials. Nature walks I used to do with students. Local ecology, coastal birds, tide pools—” She stopped. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not teaching anymore.”
“Not children, no. Do you think adults aren’t interested in learning about tide pools? They are. They go on Christmas breaks to do exactly that.” He pulled out a laminated guide to coastal birds, beautifully illustrated, clearly handmade. “This is excellent. You made this?”
“Twenty years ago. For a unit on migration—”
“You’re starting a business.”
“I’m seventy-two—”
“So? I’m seventy-one, and I just spent three months photographing migratory patterns in Patagonia. Age is irrelevant. You know this coast better than anyone. You know the ecology, the birds, the history. You have teaching skills. You have materials.” He gestured at the boxes. “You have a cottage on the Atlantic coast near the Cordouan lighthouse, which tourists pay stupid money to visit. You’re starting a coast walking business.”
Elise stared at him. “That’s crazy.”
“That’s your next chapter. You think I travelled the world with a grand plan? I have a camera, and I’m curious. You have knowledge and a cottage right on the coast.” He pulled out his phone, already typing. “We’re making a website. What are you calling it?”
“Jean-Luc, I can’t just start a business—”
“‘Coastal Walks with Elise.’ No, too boring. ‘Atlantic Coast Ecology Tours.’ Better. Professional. We’ll use your teaching materials as marketing—show people you’re the expert. Charge thirty euros pp for a two-hour walk. Do three walks a week, April to October, that’s—” he calculated quickly “—over six thousand euros a season, if you have at least two people per walk, enough to maintain the cottage and prove you’re not useless.”
“I never said I was useless—”
“You’re sitting on the floor crying over a paper turkey and planning to move to a place where they organise your MEALS!” He sat beside her among the boxes. “Elise. You spent forty years teaching children. Just because you retired doesn’t mean the knowledge is now useless. It means you finally have time to share it with people who’ll actually appreciate it instead of constantly asking when lunch is.”
Elise looked at the boxes. At the guides she’d made. At the photographs of students on coastal walks, all of them now adults, many with children of their own.
“I don’t know if anyone would come.”
“Then we’re doing a trial walk. Me, you, the coast. We’ll photograph it, I’ll write copy, we’ll launch your business in January.” He stood, offering his hand. “Come on. We’re going to the beach. I haven’t seen the Cordouan lighthouse in two years, and I’m told they’ve installed new lights.”
“Jean-Luc, it’s freezing—”
“So? Get your coat. The sensible one, not the fashionable one. We’re walking to Pointe de Grave, and you’re going to remember why you love this coast.”
They walked along the shore as afternoon turned to evening, the wind brutal off the Atlantic, salt spray in their faces, sand hard-packed and cold underfoot. The Cordouan lighthouse stood offshore—six kilometres out in the estuary, its white tower stark against the grey sky, the oldest lighthouse in France still functioning, built in the 1600s and somehow still standing despite everything the ocean threw at it.
Jean-Luc photographed everything: the lighthouse, the winter birds, Elise herself gesturing at something in a tide pool, animated in a way she hadn’t been in months.
“Tell me about that,” he said, camera raised, as she crouched near the water.
“Anemones. They close up between tides to retain moisture. When the water returns, they open—see the tentacles? They’re waiting for plankton.” She looked up, realised she was lecturing, and stopped. “Sorry. Teacher habit.”
“Don’t apologise. That’s your product. That’s what people will pay for.” He took another photo. “Keep talking. Tell me about the lighthouse.”
So she did. About the Cordouan lighthouse—called the Versailles of the Sea, designed by Louis de Foix, its chapel, its royal apartment, the 301 steps to the top, the keepers who’d lived there for months at a time tending the light. About how it had guided ships through the Gironde estuary for four hundred years, how it had survived storms and wars and changing technology.
“It’s still working,” she said. “After everything. Still lighting the way.”
“Like you,” Jean-Luc said. “Still working. Still lighting the way. Just for different people now.”
They walked back as stars appeared—rare, given the cloud cover, but there, faint, persistent. The cottage lights were visible from the beach, small and warm against the dark.
“Tomorrow,” Jean-Luc said as they reached her door. “Christmas morning. Nine AM. We’re walking to the best view of the lighthouse—the promontory near the fort. Bring your bird guide. I’m bringing my camera. We’re making your promotional materials whether you like it or not.”
“Jean-Luc—”
“Nine AM. Be ready. Wear layers.”
Christmas morning arrived cold and bright. Elise stood at her door at 8:52 AM wearing three layers and holding the bird guide she’d made twenty years ago, wondering if she was about to make an enormous mistake – or the first positive decision since her retirement.
Jean-Luc appeared at exactly nine, carrying coffee in a thermos and the kind of determined energy that suggested he’d planned this entire intervention weeks ago.
They walked the coastal path to the promontory—rocky, exposed, the wind constant and cold, the ocean churning grey-green below. The sun rose slowly, catching the lighthouse offshore, turning it gold against the dark water. The light was still rotating—automated now, but still there, still working, still doing what it had done for four hundred years.
“There,” Jean-Luc said, photographing. “That’s your money shot. Join Elise for guided walks along the Gironde coast, exploring tide pools, coastal birds, and the history of the Cordouan lighthouse. Learn from a former teacher with forty years’ experience. See the coast through the eyes of someone who loves it.”
“That’s too much—”
“That’s marketing. You’re an expert. Stop pretending you’re not.” He lowered his camera. “You know what that lighthouse teaches us?”
“What?”
“That purpose isn’t something you lose when you retire. It’s something you redirect. The lighthouse still lights the way—it just does it differently now. Automated instead of manned. Still working. Still valuable. Still there.” He gestured at the coast, the birds, the path they’d walked. “You’re still here. You still know everything worth knowing about this place. You’re just doing it for people who choose to come, instead of children who are required to.”
Elise looked at the lighthouse, at the coast she’d lived on her entire life, at the bird guide in her hands—worn, loved, still useful.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try it.”
“Good. Now come on. We’re going back to your cottage, and we’re launching your website. I already bought the domain name. ‘AtlanticCoastalWalks.fr.’ You’re welcome.”
Later, after launching the website (simple, professional, using Jean-Luc’s magnificent photographs), after the first inquiry came in (a couple from Paris, interested in a spring walk), Elise stood at her window watching the lighthouse blink offshore.
Still working. Still lighting the way.
The Purpose Pivot Protocol – drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, this transformative course guides you through a proven framework to recalibrate your authentic purpose and create a meaningful and fulfilling next act. Get immediate access
The Make Friends and Maintain Friendships Masterplan
In the storms of life, friendships are the shelters that keep us safe and grounded. A good friend doesn’t need to solve your problems; they simply offer a space where you feel seen, heard, and valued.
Think about the friends who’ve been your shelter in tough times. How did their support help you weather the storm? And how can you be that shelter for someone else? Friendship is a mutual exchange of strength and solace, especially during the holidays.
Cherish the friends who stand by you, and remember that your presence can be a refuge for them as well.
When retirement or redundancy makes you feel purposeless, reach out to the friend who sees your expertise as transferable—and actually listen when they tell you that your knowledge didn’t retire just because your job did. Accept that what you know still matters, just to different people now.
Worst case scenario: You try something new, it doesn’t work immediately, but you’ve remembered what it feels like to share what you love with people who want to learn it.
Best case scenario: Your world-travelling photographer friend shows up unannounced, finds you crying over paper turkeys, and refuses to let you move to a retirement community that looks like where joy dies slowly. He systematically dismantles your identity crisis by pointing out that you have forty years of teaching materials about coastal ecology, a cottage near a famous lighthouse, and expertise that adults will actually pay to access. He drags you to the beach on Christmas morning, photographs everything, launches your website without permission, and proves that retirement isn’t about becoming irrelevant—it’s about finally having time to share what you know with people who choose to be there. You discover your teaching materials aren’t nostalgia—they’re assets, that your cottage isn’t too much—it’s your business location, and that purpose isn’t something you lost—it’s something you redirect, like a lighthouse that still lights the way after four hundred years, just differently now, still working, still valuable, still exactly where it needs to be.
Who has been your shelter during challenging times? How can you express gratitude for their support?
Subscribe to my Newsletter
I’m still collecting subscriptions to my news letter with these post, so if you haven’t subscribed already and would you like to find out what type of friend you are, how well you know your friends or if you and a new friend really are compatible, subscribe my filling in your email address in the box below and I’ll send you a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. You can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:
–How well do you know your Friends? Quiz – What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz – 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and – 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox!
Friends and Friendships
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox! (newsletter subscription included)
Thank you so much!
More information about making friends and maintaining friendships (including the quizzes I mentioned) is on its way to you. You have also successfully subscribed to my newsletter.
Designed for those navigating a life transition, the Radical Renaissance Protocol guides you through an identity reset, helping you reconnect with your purpose, realign your values, and reclaim the clarity you thought you’d lost. This isn’t about fixing what’s broken: through reflection, strategic reinvention, and soul-anchored mentoring, you’ll transform uncertainty into direction and dormant potential into meaningful impact.
I put the essence of who I am, and everything I have experienced that makes me who I am, with great enthusiasm, into my retreats, courses and books. – Dr Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract (cert,) Transformational Life Coach (dip,) Life Story Coach (cert) Counselling (cert,) Med Hypnotherapy (dip) and EAGALA (cert)
Comment by e-mail: I am grieving already that tomorrow will be my last day of waking up to your words in my mailbox. I loved this story and it really hit a nerve I did not know was exposed. Thank you with all my heart. P.B.F.
Monique stood at her kitchen window on Christmas morning. It was 9:47 AM. The Biarritz Bain de Noël—the traditional Christmas Day Dip in the Atlantic Ocean organised by Les Ours Blancs, would start at 10:30 at the Grande Plage. She has done it every year for twenty-three years, always with Suzanne, her best friend since they were sixteen years old.
This year, Suzanne would be there. Monique would not.
Her phone sat on the counter, silent as it had been for three months. Three months since the argument that had started as a political disagreement and exploded into forty years of accumulated grievances. Things said that couldn’t be unsaid. Apologies attempted and rejected. Silence that had hardened into something unpalatable.
Monique had called twice after that terrible night in September. Left messages. Texted. Nothing back. Forty years of friendship—birthdays, weddings, the births of children, the deaths of parents, Christmas Day swims—ended. Just… ended.
Her doorbell rang.
Amélie stood there wearing a wetsuit and a Christmas-themed swim cap with reindeer antlers.
“Non,” Monique said.
“Si,” Amélie replied.
“I can’t—Suzanne will be there—”
“So? The beach is big enough for both of you.”
“I don’t know anyone in your group—”
“You know me. Come. We have extra wetsuits if you need one, though Martine swims in just her swimming costume, she claims it ‘builds character.’ Martine is crackers. You’ll like her.”
On the Grande Plage, fifty people stood shivering on the wet sand, neoprene clinging to their skin, breath puffing white into the salt air, swim caps pulled low over ears already aching from the wind, all of them wearing the same stubborn, faintly unhinged expression of people who had voluntarily chosen to step into freezing water on Christmas morning.
Les Dauphins Argentées—the Silver Dolphins—Amélie’s group of older women who swam year-round, rain or shine, in the Bay of Biscay, gathered together on one side of the beach, heads close, voices low. Amélie, whom Monique had met three months earlier in a bookshop, had somehow sensed the weight of grief Monique was lugging around. Without comment or ceremony, she had invited Monique for coffee and mentioned the swimming group with the offhand ease of someone proposing mild treason.
“This is Monique, everyone,” Amélie announced to the assembled women.
A woman in her seventies wearing a Santa hat over her swim cap waved. “I’m Martine. I’m the crazy one Amélie would have mentioned. And this is Colette, Lucy, Céline, Patricia, Corinne, Nina…etc.”
They gathered at the water’s edge. The ocean was steel-grey, churning, the kind of sea that looked like it had reservations about humans entering it. The beach smelled of salt and seaweed, and it had the biting coldness of December air.
“Ready?” Amélie asked.
“No.”
“Perfect. Let’s go.”
They walked into the water as a group—fifteen women entering the Atlantic on Christmas morning because they’d decided, individually and collectively, that this was a reasonable thing to do.
The cold hit like a physical blow. Not gradually—immediately, brutally, overwhelmingly. Monique gasped, her body screaming that this was a mistake, that it was not designed for this, that she should get out NOW and never do something this stupid again.
“Keep moving!” Martine shouted from ahead, already waist-deep.
Monique kept moving. The cold became something else—not comfortable, never comfortable, but manageable. Her body adjusting, adrenaline surging, the particular clarity that comes from being so cold you can’t think about anything except being cold.
They swam. Not far—maybe fifty meters out, parallel to the beach—but in water that was actively hostile, waves rolling through, the undertow pulling, the cold seeping into their bones.
Beside her, Amélie swam with the easy confidence of someone who’d been doing this for years. “You’re doing great!”
“I’m freezing!”
Amélie laughed—actually laughed. “How’s your head?”
“What?”
“Your head. Full of thoughts about Suzanne?”
Monique realised it wasn’t. Her brain was entirely occupied with: cold, swim, cold, waves, cold, why did I agree to this, yet again, cold.
“No,” she admitted.
“Exactly. Cold water is very purifying. Empties your head of everything except survival. Very therapeutic. Also possibly dangerous but mostly therapeutic.”
They swam for fifteen minutes—an eternity—then headed back. The exit was harder than the entry, legs shaking, body exhausted, but Monique made it to shore where someone had lit a bonfire (how? when? who brings wood to a beach on Christmas morning?) and other women were appearing with thermoses of vin chaud and blankets and the particular kindness of a community that swims together in hostile water.
Colette handed Monique mulled wine that tasted like cinnamon and bitter orange. “How do you feel?”
Martine appeared, still in just her costume, skin red from the cold, looking delighted. “See? Character building. You’ve more character now than you had this morning. Objective improvement.”
They stood around the bonfire, fifteen women in various states of wetsuit removal, drinking wine that was too hot and too spiced but perfect, watching the waves. The smell of wood smoke mixed with salt air. Someone started singing—”Petit Papa Noël“—and everyone joined in, voices rough from cold but sincere.
Monique looked down the beach. Could see another group gathering around their own bonfire. Les Ours Blancs. Suzanne would be there. Warming up. Maybe thinking about Monique. Maybe not.
The grief hit suddenly—unexpected, overwhelming. Forty years. Gone. The friend who’d known her since she was sixteen. Who’d been at her wedding. Who’d helped raise her children. Who’d swum beside her every Christmas morning for two decades. Gone.
Amélie appeared beside her, following her gaze.
“She’s there. Suzanne. Swimming with her group.”
“I know.” Amélie didn’t offer platitudes. Didn’t say it would heal, or time would help, or they’d reconcile. Just stood there, present. “Some friendships end. Even forty-year-old ones. It’s awful, but it’s real, so you’re allowed to grieve your loss.”
“I don’t know how to do Christmas without her.”
“You do it like you just did—badly, scared, supported by people who barely know you but who care anyway.” Amélie gestured at the Dolphins. “We’re not her. We won’t replace her. But we’re here. Every week, every Christmas, every Tuesday morning at dawn. You in?”
Monique thought about the cold water. The clarity of it. The way it had emptied her head of everything except immediate survival. The women around the fire who’d welcomed her without question, who’d handed her wine and blankets and acceptance.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m in.”
“Good. Next week, 7 AM. Bring your own wetsuit if you have one.”
Her phone buzzed. For one wild moment, she thought: Suzanne.
It wasn’t. It was Colette: Welcome to Les Dauphins Argentés. See you Tuesday, 7 AM. Bring coffee.
Then Martine: You survived! See you Tuesday. Don’t be late!
Then three other women she’d barely spoken to, all welcoming her, all assuming she’d return, all treating her like she already belonged.
Amélie sat beside her on the sand. “You okay?”
“No. But I will be.”
Monique looked at the beach where Suzanne was, where a Christmas tradition had died.
Her phone stayed silent. Suzanne didn’t call. Maybe never would again.
Some friendships end.
Other friendships begin. In bookshops. Around bonfires. In freezing water on Christmas mornings.
The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan
In a world filled with distractions, one of the most meaningful gifts you can offer a friend is your full presence. Being present isn’t about doing or saying the “right” thing—it’s about showing up fully, with an open heart and undivided attention.
When you’re truly present, you create a safe space for your friend to share their thoughts, fears, and joys. It’s in these moments of deep connection that friendships grow stronger. This holiday season, give the gift of your presence. Turn off your phone, silence the noise, and simply be there.
Presence is also a gift you can give yourself. When you slow down and embrace the moment, you’ll find clarity and peace, even amid life’s transitions.
When a long friendship ends catastrophically, reach out to new connections instead of isolating in your grief—and say yes when someone invites you to do something uncomfortable and community-based. Join the swimming group, the book club, the thing that requires showing up physically and repeatedly among people who aren’t your ex-friend.
Worst case scenario: You’re uncomfortable around strangers while grieving, the ocean is terrible, and you still miss the friend you lost.
Best case scenario: Your new friend refuses to let you spend Christmas alone crying, drags you to a cold water swimming group of older women who voluntarily enter hostile Atlantic water on Christmas morning, and you discover that while some friendships end forever and it’s awful and you’re allowed to grieve, other friendships begin in their place—different friendships, ones built on showing up week after week in neoprene among women who hand you mulled wine and belonging without requiring you to explain your loss. You learn that grief doesn’t disappear but it becomes manageable when you’re too cold to think about anything except survival, that community isn’t a replacement for what you lost but it’s what keeps you alive anyway, and that sometimes the only way to survive the end of one chapter is to literally swim into the next one, badly and scared and supported by Silver Dolphins who decided you were worth keeping warm.
What does being present mean to you? How can you practice presence in your friendships this season?
Newsletter Subscription
I’m still collecting subscriptions to my news letter with these post, so if you haven’t subscribed already and would you like to find out what type of friend you are, how well you know your friends or if you and a new friend really are compatible, subscribe my filling in your email address in the box below and I’ll send you a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. You can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:
–How well do you know your Friends? Quiz – What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz – 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and – 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox!
Friends and Friendships
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox! (newsletter subscription included)
Thank you so much!
More information about making friends and maintaining friendships (including the quizzes I mentioned) is on its way to you. You have also successfully subscribed to my newsletter.
The Purpose Pursuit Protocol – if you want to discover your life purpose, this course will provide you with the clarity, motivation and direction you need to manifest your next chapter – in both your personal and professional life. Get immediate access
The Purpose Pivot Protocol – drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, this transformative course guides you through a proven framework to recalibrate your authentic purpose and create a meaningful and fulfilling next act. Get immediate access
I put the essence of who I am, and everything I have experienced that makes me who I am, with great enthusiasm, into my retreats, courses and books. – Dr Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract (cert,) Transformational Life Coach (dip,) Life Story Coach (cert) Counselling (cert,) Med Hypnotherapy (dip) and EAGALA (cert)
André sat in the vineyard office, a generous term for a stone shed with a desk and a filing cabinet that smelled like mildew, staring at the contract from Bordeaux Wines International. Clean, simple, devastating: they’d buy the vineyard, absorb the debt, bulldoze half the vines for “modernisation,” and André would walk away with enough money to start over doing something sensible, like selling insurance or dying of boredom.
The door burst open without knocking. Cécile and Sylvie stood there like an intervention had achieved sentience, Cécile holding a laptop, Sylvie holding a thick wad of newspapers, both wearing expressions that suggested they’d driven two hours from Toulouse specifically to prevent him from doing something stupid.
“No,” Cécile said.
“Absolutely not,” Sylvie agreed.
“I haven’t said anything—”
“You’re NOT selling to BWI.” Sylvie whacked the newspapers on his desk with the force of someone making a life-or-death point. “We heard. Your cousin’s wife’s stepsister told someone at the market last week.”
“I have to sell. The debt—”
“Is fixable,” Cécile interrupted, whipping open her laptop with the determined efficiency of someone who’d been planning this ambush. “If you stop thinking like a depressed winemaker and start thinking like someone who has a product people actually want.”
André laughed—the bitter kind. “People don’t want Pacherenc du Vic-Bilh. They want Sauternes, Jurançon, famous appellations. We’re nobody.”
“You’re not nobody, you’re niche,” Cécile said. “Huge difference. Niche is marketable if you’re not an idiot about it.”
“I’m definitely being an idiot about it.”
“Correct. Which is why we’re here.” Sylvie poured three glasses of the wine she’d brought—André’s own 2022 Pacherenc, the well-balanced sweet white wine that his grandfather had made, that his father had made, that André had been making for twenty years while watching the debt accumulate like sediment.
“This,” Sylvie said, “is exceptional. Honeyed, balanced, complex. I gave it to my editor—the food editor, the one who makes sommeliers cry daily—and she asked where she could buy a case.”
“She can’t. Because we’re broke and I can’t afford marketing—”
“Marketing is free if you know how to go about it,” Cécile said. “Or if you have a friend who’s a marketing consultant and another friend who’s a journalist at Le Monde. Very convenient.”
André looked at them—Cécile, successful and terrifying, wearing a blazer that probably cost more than his tractor; Sylvie, perpetually rumpled, with ink stains on her fingers and connections at every major French publication. His best friends since they were eight years old, running through these same vineyards, before life got complicated.
“What are you proposing?”
Cécile’s smile was predatory. “The New Year’s Eve market at Viella. Les Vendanges de la Saint-Sylvestre. You’re doing a stall.”
“Cécile, that market is massive. I can’t afford—”
“You can’t afford NOT to. It’s your last chance before you sign that contract and turn this place into a corporate vineyard making bulk wine for supermarkets.” She pulled up a document. “Here’s what we’re doing: rebrand, redesign labels, create a story, social media campaign, and use Viella as the launch. One week. We have one week.”
“That’s insane—”
“Yes,” Sylvie agreed cheerfully. “But you’re out of sensible, sane options. Time to try something different.”
Day One: The Rebrand
Cécile attacked his labels like they’d personally offended her. “These look like they were designed in 1987 by someone who hated joy. Who made these?”
“My father. In 1987.”
“Well, he had terrible taste. New design: modern, clean, but with vintage elements. Hand-drawn vines, family crest—you have a crest?”
“We have a coat of arms that’s technically medieval but probably fake—”
“Perfect. Fake medieval is very marketable. Also, new name.”
“The wine is called Pacherenc du Vic-Bilh. That’s the appellation—”
“That’s the grape. The brand is ‘Domaine Saint-André’—your name, your patron saint, very traditional, very French, very ‘this wine has a soul.'” She was already sketching. “Tagline: ‘Depuis 1843. Fait à la main. Fait avec amour.‘ Since 1843. Handmade. Made with love.”
Day Three: The Story
Sylvie interviewed André like he was a diplomat in a crisis, recording everything: the vineyard’s history, the soil composition, the fact that Pacherenc was made from Petit Manseng and Gros Manseng grapes that most people had never heard of, the traditional methods André still used because he couldn’t afford modern equipment.
“This is gold,” Sylvie said, typing furiously. “You’re not just making wine, you’re preserving a dying tradition. Small-production, artisanal, sustainable—every marketing buzzword actually applies.”
“I’m poor and old-fashioned, not sustainable—”
“Same thing, different spin. By the time I’m done, people will think buying your wine is saving French agricultural heritage.”
“Vraiment?“
“Bien sur. But that’s beside the point.”
Day Five: The Social Media Campaign
Cécile had created an Instagram account (@domaine.saintandre), a Facebook page, and, somehow a TikTok account that André didn’t understand but apparently featured him looking “authentically rustic” while explaining harvest techniques.
“You have two thousand followers,” Cécile announced.
“I don’t even have Instagram—”
“You do now. I’m running it. Don’t look at the comments, they’re mostly people asking if you’re single.”
“I’m fifty-four—”
“And apparently very marketable to women who like beards and bonjour, tristesse. Focus on the wine.”
She’d posted photos: the vineyard at sunset, bottles with the new labels, a video of André explaining why Pacherenc was different from Sauternes (“smaller production, different terroir, more complex, less famous, basically the wine equivalent of an indie film”).
It was working. Orders were coming in. Not many—maybe fifty bottles—but more than he’d sold all year.
December 31st. Les Vendanges de la Saint-Sylvestre.
Viella’s New Year’s Eve market was chaos—hundreds of people, dozens of stalls, the smell of roasting chestnuts and mulled wine, everyone celebrating the last night of the year with the manic energy of people determined to enjoy themselves.
André’s stall was modest: a table, his new labels, sixty bottles of Pacherenc, a sign that said “Domaine Saint-André—Since 1843” and made it sound like a deliberate choice rather than generational pigheadedness.
Cécile had dressed the stall with vintage crates and grapevine cuttings. Sylvie had gotten Le Monde to mention it in their “Hidden Gems of Gascony” holiday piece. Between them, they’d created something that looked intentional, professional, like a vineyard that knew what it was doing.
“I still think this won’t work,” André said.
“Then you’ll have tried,” Sylvie replied. “Better than signing that contract and spending the rest of your life wondering.”
People came. Slowly at first, then steadily. They tasted the Pacherenc—honeyed, floral, tasting like late summer and something ineffably local. Some bought one bottle. Some bought six. A couple from Paris bought a case and asked about wine club subscriptions.
“Do you have a wine club?” they asked.
“He does now,” Cécile said before André could speak. “Details on the website.”
“I don’t have a website—”
“You do. I made it last night. It’s live.”
By 7 PM, they’d sold forty bottles. By 9 PM, fifty-five. André was starting to think they might actually sell out when a man in an expensive coat appeared, tasted the wine, and stood very still.
“This is exceptional,” he said finally.
“Thank you—”
“I’m Laurent Mercier. I own three restaurants in Toulouse, one in Bordeaux. I’ve been looking for a Pacherenc supplier—something authentic, limited production, with a story.” He looked at André directly. “I’ll take your entire 2023 production. Also, I’d like to discuss a partnership. Not buying you out—partnership. I provide capital, you provide wine and expertise. We expand production moderately, maintain quality, build distribution.”
André stared. Cécile kicked him under the table.
“That’s… I’d need to think about it—”
“Think fast. I have other options.” Mercier handed him a card. “Call me tomorrow. After midnight. After you’ve celebrated not selling your soul to a corporation.”
He left.
André looked at Cécile and Sylvie. They were grinning like idiots.
“Did that just happen?” he asked.
“That just happened,” Sylvie confirmed.
“Because of you. Both of you. The marketing, the article, the—” His voice cracked. “I was going to give up. Sell everything. Admit defeat.”
“We know,” Cécile said gently. “That’s why we came. Friends don’t let friends destroy family legacies because of temporary debt and depression.”
By 11:30 PM, they’d sold all sixty bottles. André stood at his empty stall watching fireworks starting to go off over Viella, and thought about his grandfather, his father, the generations of Saint-Andrés who’d made wine on this land.
“Thank you,” he said. “For believing when I couldn’t.”
“De rien,” Sylvie said. “That’s what friends do. Also, you’re buying dinner tomorrow. Expensive dinner. With your new partnership money.”
“I haven’t agreed yet—”
“You’re going to. Because you’re not an idiot, despite recent evidence to the contrary.”
The fireworks exploded overhead—gold and silver against a black sky. The year ending, a new one beginning. André’s phone buzzed. Orders. Six new orders through the website Cécile had made, people who’d heard about the wine through Sylvie’s article, through Instagram, through word-of-mouth that spread when something was actually good.
“Bonne année,” Cécile said, raising her glass.
“Happy New Year,” André repeated. “To friendship. To insane last-minute marketing. To not selling to corporations.”
“To legacy,” Sylvie added. “And to the fact that sometimes the best business plan is just having friends who refuse to let you quit.”
They clinked glasses—Pacherenc, honeyed and perfect—while Viella celebrated and André realised that his friends had given him back his future, one bottle at a time, with nothing but belief and extremely aggressive marketing.
Sometimes salvation looks like two women showing up unannounced and telling you your labels are ugly, and your resignation is premature, and your wine is too good to let a corporation destroy it.
Sometimes that’s exactly what you need to hear.
The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan
Traditions carry a very specific kind of magic—the sort that can anchor you when life feels like it’s spinning faster than a Christmas carousel after too much vin chaud. They tug us back into moments of joy and connection, and when shared with friends, they somehow amplify into something bigger, warmer, and occasionally slightly chaotic. Whether you’re decorating a tree, baking cookies that may or may not look like abstract art, or watching that holiday movie you’ve seen so many times you can recite it backwards… traditions are the glue that keeps relationships from unravelling during life’s plot twists.
And when you’re going through a life transition—the kind that makes you want to hibernate until spring—traditions can quietly slip in and remind you you’re not alone. Revisiting old ones (even the weird ones your family insists are “normal”) or inventing new ones can bring comfort, joy, and a much-needed sense of stability. It’s also the perfect excuse to pull friends into your world. Shared traditions become shared memories, and shared memories? Those are the threads that stitch friendships together long after the tinsel is packed away.
And if you don’t have the energy for anything grand, don’t worry. Sometimes the simplest gestures—a handwritten note, a shared favourite recipe, or even a virtual toast with mismatched mugs—become the most cherished traditions of all. It’s never about perfection; it’s about presence, connection, and showing up for each other in small, meaningful ways.
When a financial crisis makes you want to give up and sell out, call the friends who understand both your industry and your value—and actually listen when they tell you there’s another way. Accept help that looks like aggressive rebranding, uncomfortable social media, and friends who refuse to let you make decisions from despair.
Worst case scenario: You spend a week trying their plan, sell some wine, and still have to consider other options. But at least you tried.
Best case scenario: Your marketing consultant friend and journalist friend show up like a two-person intervention, rebrand your entire operation in a week, create a social media presence you don’t understand but that works, get you featured in national publications, force you to do a market stall on New Year’s Eve, and accidentally attract a restaurant owner who offers partnership instead of buyout. You discover that your product was never the problem—your presentation was, and that sometimes the difference between failure and success is just having friends with skills you don’t have who care enough to use them. You learn that legacy isn’t something you preserve through martyrdom and slow decline—it’s something you save through adaptation, modern thinking, and the willingness to let people who love you tell you your labels are ugly and your resignation is premature, because sometimes the best business advice comes from friends who knew you when you were eight and refuse to watch you quit now.
If you could start a brand-new tradition this year, what would it be—and who would you invite into it?
Newsletter Subscription
I’m still collecting subscriptions to my news letter with these post, so if you haven’t subscribed already and would you like to find out what type of friend you are, how well you know your friends or if you and a new friend really are compatible, subscribe my filling in your email address in the box below and I’ll send you a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. You can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:
–How well do you know your Friends? Quiz – What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz – 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and – 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend
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Friends and Friendships
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It’s time to kick exhaustion to the curb and finally ditch that terminally overwhelmed feeling, evict your inner critic, declutter your mind and take control of your life like a boss. You’re about to turn your life from a comedy of errors into a blockbuster success story (with a much better soundtrack). This two-day online course is designed for anyone facing a major life transition, needing to dramatically reduce stress, end exhaustion and overwhelm, and prevent or recover from burnout.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
Donna sat at the wooden table in her rented ski cabin, laptop open, staring at a blank document titled “Christmas Letter 2025.” Outside, snow fell steadily on the Pyrenées mountains, muffling the world in white silence. Inside, the woodstove crackled, filling the small space with the scent of well-seasoned burning oak and that particular loneliness of being on your own in a place designed for groups.
She’d rented the cabin on impulse after her sister’s Thanksgiving phone call: “Do something creative for a change. Send out a Christmas letter, review your year.”
The Christmas letter. That annual exercise in competitive life documentation that everyone pretended was about “staying in touch” but was really about proving you were winning at life.
Donna had seventeen years’ worth of these letters saved in a folder somewhere. Each one a carefully curated highlight reel: promotions, vacations, home renovations, children’s achievements (not hers—she’d borrowed other people’s for vicarious bragging purposes). Each one a masterpiece of strategic omission.
This year, she had nothing to omit because there was nothing to brag about.
She opened a bottle of wine—a decent Madiran she’d bought in the village, because if you’re having a crisis in France, you might as well drink good wine—and started typing.
Dear Friends, Family, and People I Haven’t Spoken to Since College,
Welcome to Donna’s 2025 Christmas letter, which I’m writing from a ski cabin in the Pyrenees mountains because when my therapist said “get away for a while,” I took it literally.
This year has been…
She paused. Took a sip of the “powerful red wine, full-bodied and endowed with a strong personality.” Started again.
This year has been an annus horribilis in ways I didn’t even know were possible.
Let’s start with January, when my company announced “exciting changes” which turned out to be code for “we’re eliminating your entire department.” I spent three months convinced I’d done something wrong before realising that it wasn’t personal.
In March, my mother moved into assisted living. The same week, I had to put down my dog of fourteen years. I held Cooper while the vet administered the injection. I’ve never felt more alone in my entire life. The vet cried with me, which was kind, which suggested she’d had a rough day too, and we were all just doing the best we could with what we have.
April: discovered my partner of six years was having an affair with someone who, and I quote from his mansplanation, “understands his creative vision better.” He’s an accountant. His creative vision involves colour-coded spreadsheets. I helped him pack and only broke one thing (a mug that said “World’s Best Boyfriend”—seemed appropriate).
May through August blur together into a grey period of eating cereal for dinner and watching true crime documentaries while my mother called weekly to ask if I’d “met anyone nice” yet, conveniently having forgotten about the accountant situationship.
September: Attempted to “get back out there” via dating apps. Met five different men who all mentioned their ex-wives within the first ten minutes. Started a drinking game where I did a shot every time someone said “my ex.” Nearly died of alcohol poisoning on date three.
October: My apartment building announced major renovations. I’ve been living with the sound of jackhammers at 7 AM for six weeks. My upstairs neighbour, whom I’ve never met, occasionally drops what sounds like a bowling ball. I’ve developed theories about this. None are particularly reassuring.
November: Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s, where I was seated at the kids’ table (I’m 42) because “you’d be more comfortable there.” Spent two hours listening to my nephew explain cryptocurrency.
December: Fled to France. Current status: hiding in a ski cabin, talking to myself in two languages, contemplating whether this is “self-care” or just “an OTT escape.”
The wine bottle was empty. Donna eyed the second bottle but kept on typing.
Moving on swiftly.
So that’s my year. No promotions to brag about. No exotic vacations (unless you count this cabin, which is less “romantic ski getaway” and more “Scandinavian murder mystery setting”). No children’s achievements because I don’t have children. No home renovations unless you count changing the shelf liner in my kitchen as an achievement, which my therapist says I should.
I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because I’m tired. Tired of pretending everything is fine. Tired of reading everyone else’s perfect Christmas letters and feeling like I’m the only one whose life resembles a dumpster fire in slow motion.
If your year was also terrible, I see you. If you’re also eating cereal for dinner, I salute you. If you’re also wondering how everyone else has it together while you’re held together with caffeine and croissants, welcome to the club.
Merry Christmas everyone
Donna
She read it through once. Laughed. Read it again. Started crying. Laughed again through the tears because the whole thing was absurd—her life, this letter, the fact that she was alone at Christmas, drinking a very robust if not downright vulgar vintage and documenting her failures for an audience of none.
She saved it in a folder titled “Therapeutic Writing—Do Not Send.”
Then she opened her Christmas card list—the master document of everyone she’d ever promised to “stay in touch with.” College roommates. Former colleagues. Her aunt in Milwaukee. That woman from the book club three years ago. The accountant’s mother, who she’d actually liked.
The wine decided to get its own back. Vulgar, eh?
She attached the letter. Typed a quick “Joyeux Noël!” in the subject line. Her finger hovered over “send.”
Don’t, the rational part of her brain said.
Why not, the wine-soaked part responded. What’s the worst that could happen? They’ll think you’re having a breakdown?
I AM having a breakdown. At least be honest about it.
She clicked send.
Then closed the laptop, finished her wine, and went to bed in front of the woodstove, wrapped in blankets, convinced she’d just committed social suicide.
The next morning, she woke to her phone vibrating itself off the bedside table.
Seventeen text messages. Thirty-two emails. Six missed calls.
Her stomach dropped.
She opened the first email with one eye closed, bracing herself for the onslaught.
Donna—I laughed so hard I cried. My year was also garbage. Coffee when you’re back? —Sarah
The next:
THIS. This is what I needed to read. Thank you for being real. Also I’m sorry about Cooper. Dogs are the best people. —Mike
Girl. The accountant’s creative vision? I got divorced this year and no one knows because I’ve been too embarrassed to tell anyone. Can we talk? —Jessica
She scrolled through them, stunned. Forty-seven people.
Her mother called at 8 AM.
“Donna Marie, I got your Christmas letter.”
“Mom, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“It was the best thing I’ve read all year. Why didn’t you tell me how hard things were?”
“Because you raised me to put on a brave face and soldier through?”
A pause. “Well. That was stupid of me. When you get back, we’re having a real conversation. Also, your Aunt Linda called. She’s been divorced three times and wanted me to tell you she has opinions about the accountant situation.”
By noon, Donna had responded to thirty of the messages. Turns out half her contact list was also struggling. The other half had struggled recently and remembered what it felt like.
Her college roommate was going through bankruptcy. Her former boss was in grief counselling after losing his brother. The cheerful couple? Separated. That woman who always posted happy families photos? Her teenager was in rehab.
Everyone is privately falling apart.
That evening, as snow continued falling outside the cabin window, Donna opened her laptop and started a new document. Not a Christmas letter. A group email to the forty-seven people who’d reached out:
How about January the 15th? My apartment (assuming the renovations are done). Let’s stop pretending we have it all together. Who’s in?
Forty-three people responded yes within an hour.
The Making Friends and Maintaining Friendships Masterplan
Life transitions can feel heavy, but friendships remind us that it’s okay to set the weight down, even for a little while. Playfulness isn’t just for children—it’s a powerful way to reconnect and strengthen bonds.
Think about the friends who bring out your silly side—the ones who make you dance in the kitchen, play board games until midnight, or laugh so hard you cry. These moments remind you that even in difficult times, life still has room for lightness.
Today, share one brutally honest thing about your year with people in your inner circle. Don’t perform positivity. Don’t wrap your struggles in inspirational language about “growth” and “silver linings.” Just be honest about having a hard time. Tell the truth about the cereal dinners, the dating disasters, the fact that you’re held together with caffeine and croissants. Worst case scenario: A few people feel uncomfortable with your honesty and don’t respond. Some relatives whisper concerns about you at their holiday dinners. You survive their discomfort and their whispers, and life continues exactly as it was. Best case scenario: You accidentally give dozens of people permission to stop pretending too. Your inbox floods with messages from people who thought they were the only ones struggling—the college friend going through bankruptcy, the former boss in grief counselling, the perfect couple who’s actually separated. You discover that half your contact list was also barely holding it together behind their curated holiday letters, and your honesty becomes the crack in the dam that lets everyone else’s truth pour out. You end up hosting a “Disasters of 2025” dinner in January where forty-three people show up, and somewhere in that room full of honest humans, you find your people—the ones who’ve been waiting for someone to be brave enough to say “I’m not okay” so they could finally say “me neither,” and you build a community based on the radical act of telling the truth about your dumpster fire year while everyone else was posting highlight reels.
Have you ever sent (or been tempted to send) a brutally honest holiday update instead of the usual highlight reel? What stopped you—or what made you do it?
Newsletter Subscription
I’m still collecting subscriptions to my news letter with these post, so if you haven’t subscribed already and would you like to find out what type of friend you are, how well you know your friends or if you and a new friend really are compatible, subscribe my filling in your email address in the box below and I’ll send you a set of light-hearted quizzes, quotes and questions to help you do just that. Just fill in the form below and you’ll get immediate access to them all. You can unsubscribe from this list effortlessly and at any time. Included:
–How well do you know your Friends? Quiz – What is Your Friendship Style? and Are your Friendship Styles compatible? Quiz – 20 of the Most Inspiring Friends and Friendship Quotes and – 20 lighthearted Questions you can ask to get to know a new Friend
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox!
Friends and Friendships
Discover how to build meaningful, lasting friendships and create a support system that truly has your back—delivered straight to your inbox! (newsletter subscription included)
Thank you so much!
More information about making friends and maintaining friendships (including the quizzes I mentioned) is on its way to you. You have also successfully subscribed to my newsletter.
Designed for those navigating a life transition, the Radical Renaissance Protocol guides you through an identity reset, helping you reconnect with your purpose, realign your values, and reclaim the clarity you thought you’d lost. This isn’t about fixing what’s broken: through reflection, strategic reinvention, and soul-anchored mentoring, you’ll transform uncertainty into direction and dormant potential into meaningful impact.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Crossroads Retreatin the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
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