The groves at the bottom of my road, on the way home from the trail.
Nineteen years of other people’s bills
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2002
I was 28 when I took over the billing office at a big hospital in Sacramento. Eleven people and a backlog nobody wanted to talk about. I was good at it. I liked being the one who could find the missing claim.
I stayed 19 years. That job put two kids through school, and I’m proud of it.
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2019
My youngest left for college in August. By October I was sitting in the driveway after work for twenty minutes at a time, engine off, working up to going inside. Nothing at work had changed. I had.
I’d always been the one people called when they were stuck. My sister, my neighbors, half the nurses on the fourth floor. One night my friend Lena listened to me talk someone through a job change on the phone. When I hung up, she said it.
You know people do this for a living, right?
Lena, on my back porch, fall 2019 -
2021
I gave notice at 47. For months I told people I was taking a break, because I couldn’t yet say out loud that I wanted to be a coach.
Then I trained, and coached anyone who’d let me. The ICF’s PCC credential asks for 500 hours of coaching real people, so I got very good at Zoom.
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2022
I moved to Ojai that spring. I’d visited once in my thirties and never forgot the way the mountains turn pink at sunset. I rent a small house near the orange groves now, and most mornings I walk the Shelf Road trail before my first call.
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Now
I’ve coached about 300 women since. Nearly all of them told me on the first call that they’d left it too late. None of them had.
I waited until 47 because I didn’t know this kind of help existed. Now you do.
