You’re Allowed to Change Your Mind

I had a podcast.

Actually, I’ve had three.

This is probably the kind of sentence that makes a person seem either very industrious or deeply unable to leave well enough alone. I prefer to think it means I am optimistic. Every few years, I apparently become convinced that the thing the world is missing is another podcast hosted by me.

The first was Do You, where I interviewed entrepreneurs, writers, artists, coaches, solopreneurs and other people who had, in one way or another, decided not to do life the way they were supposed to. We talked about unconventional lives and what it meant to “do you” in a culture that is very invested in telling you who you should be.

(The irony, of course, is that I called the podcast Do You while spending a good portion of my life wondering if I was doing enough, doing the right thing, or doing it the way I was supposed to.)

The second one was Seriously Single, which was about being, well, seriously single. I started it at a time when being single and living a solo life did not yet have quite the cultural cachet it has now. Boyfriends weren’t embarrassing back then. There were no “boy strikes.” There was no language for the particular pleasure — or panic — of building a life that didn’t revolve around finding someone to share it with. For a long time, I felt like the odd woman out, and so I felt it was my duty as a single woman to share that being single isn’t all that bad. In fact, it’s healing and, dare I say…kind of the best?

And then there was Love, Brie, which is basically the podcast version of this newsletter. Or maybe the newsletter’s podcast offspring. I imagine that someday I will interview people I think are interesting and spend an hour talking to them about the things I want to talk about. But that day is not today.

Because I think I am done with podcasts.

And, weirdly, I don’t feel like I failed.

Bear in mind, this is coming from a person who has worn many different hats in her life, including the New York Mets hat that’s on my head right now.

But the list of jobs — titles, maybe even identities — includes actor, writer, author, model, playwright, journalist, columnist, communications specialist. These are the big ones.

Then there are the lesser-known ones, the ones that have greatly impacted my life, maybe sometimes even more so than the ones above: grass-cutter, dog walker, waitress, bartender, hot-dog server (yes, this is a thing), receptionist, assistant, personal trainer, coach, unemployed.

I don’t see these as failures, or as evidence of someone who can’t hold a job. I see this as evidence of a life that was lived and experimented with, and someone who tried.

Tried to make a living. Tried to survive. Tried to create. Tried to carve out a place for herself.

And mostly just…tried. Period.

I write this now as I just made a pretty big business decision that might look, on the surface, like throwing in the towel, but I think it was a decision that will (hopefully) lead me down the path I am more aligned with.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy making these pivots. Especially since I am not where I want to be professionally, it’s so easy for me to have regrets. And I do. I have regrets about not truly focusing on one thing and being so painstakingly stubborn that’s all I did. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t tried hard enough.

Like, with the podcasts. Maybe I should have just picked one and stuck with it. Who knows — maybe I could have had a Spotify deal by now. (Or at least an iHeart one.)

And yet…I think it’s important to try. I think it’s important to keep experimenting and see what else is possible. Yes, even at 43. Especially at 43.

I was talking with my friend, Jackie, the other day, and I was telling her how I thought I was having a midlife crisis, which is something I’ve been saying a lot lately. Maybe it’s because I think it sounds chic, or maybe because it’s true.

Anyway, I told her this because I feel like I want to torch things I’ve made and return to screenwriting — something that I’ve been joking (not joking) about for a while — and she told me that she didn’t think that I was having a crisis, but that I was waking up to something that had been dormant for a long time.

And then I think…wait, isn’t that what a midlife crisis actually is? An awakening to who we truly are?

Her answer honestly feels better than thinking that I am setting my life on fire because I think I wasted it. LOL.

I think it’s easy to feel bad about paths not taken. To guilt ourselves for sometimes taking the easy route. But what’s really easy? Growth is growth no matter what side of the street you happen to be driving on.

There’s a danger in looking back at all the things we’ve tried and deciding that they were a waste of time because they didn’t become The Thing that we so desperately thought we needed/wanted.

Let’s take my first manuscript and book proposal, for example. Both went out on submission, in 2025 and 2023, respectively. Neither was ultimately picked up. Does that mean they weren’t worth my time? That I failed because they didn’t reap the exact outcome I wanted?

I’ve had to ask myself this more times than I’d like to admit, and I’ve finally decided that no. They don’t mean I failed. They mean I was willing enough to try.

Life can feel like that, too. You can convince yourself you failed at life — which, by the way, isn’t really a thing — because you didn’t make x amount of dollars, or marry by x age, or do The Thing you said you were going to do in high school.

But I’m starting to think life is more like a finger-painting experiment.

A little dollop here. A little dollop there. Some things you think are going to turn into a masterpiece and instead look like something your four-year-old niece made on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Some things you think are throwaways end up becoming the exact colour you needed. You mix it all around and, eventually, you have something. You don’t know if it’s good, but you do know that it doesn’t look anything like what you thought you were making.

But it’s yours all the same. You did it, and this is what you have now.

That’s the thing: sometimes you just need to do something to find out that this is what you actually want — or that you don’t want it anymore.

And maybe that’s the whole point of experimenting. You don’t experiment because you already know what’s going to happen. You experiment because you don’t. You experiment because you’re willing to risk something different from what you know — or think you know.

And at this age, I feel pretty confident saying that what you think you know at 23 or 33 isn’t necessarily what you know at 43.

And thank God for that.

When I was 30, I was very confident in my “Do You” attitude. In fact, I was so confident in it that I got “do you.” tattooed on my left arm. The period was important. I wanted it to be a statement (and also not to be confused with anything less tasteful because, trust me, over the years I’ve gotten plenty of, “Sure, I’ll do you.”)

At the time, I was very laissez-faire about life. I was all about sticking to our own timelines, not society’s. Fuck the rules. Fuck the pressure to have it all figured out by a certain age. Don’t fall for Big Brother or Uncle Sam. Or, you know, whatever the 30-year-old version of Big Brother and Uncle Sam was.

My heart was in the right place. I wanted to make sense of a life that I was living that looked very unlike the ones that others around me were having.

Around that time, I wrote one of my first published essays for She Does the City. It was called “Why No Woman Should Ever Be Scared of Turning 30.”

In the essay, I wrote about quitting my full-time job as an editor to pursue my passion for a career in TV and film. I was very sure of myself. I knew what I wanted. I knew what I didn’t want. I had a tattoo to prove it.

And here I am…still not doing that.

Again, it’s easy to think that I failed myself by not going after that. But life is tricky. Bills need to be paid. Life happens. Old habits die hard.

In that essay, I wrote:

So you looked at Facebook recently and your newsfeed is a sea of engagement announcements and wedding pictures and baby bumps. Real grown up shit. When everyone is getting married and traveling and, you know, doing BIG things around you, it’s definitely easy to catch a case of the “have-nots” and feel sorry for yourself with visions of spinsterhood and a house filled of cats dancing in your head when you’re single and still living in your parents’ basement. But this needn’t be the case. The only thing you need to worry about is your own happiness. If you’re single, you’re single because you’re fucking single. Not because you’re picky or like to stay home and watch Netflix in your sweats and it’s definitely not because there’s something wrong with you. You’re single because you haven’t found him, or her. It’s not your time yet. And maybe it’s not your time to own a condo or give birth to another human, either. That’s OK, too. Thirty looks different to everyone. The best thing (besides not comparing your life to those on your Facebook) is to celebrate your victories. Maybe it was finally getting that promotion or paying off your student loan or winning a short story competition. Don’t categorize your victories as “big” or “small” – they’re yours and yours alone, and that’s what makes them dope.

I was onto something there. But I just didn’t have the life experience to back it up.

Not yet.

Maybe I needed to spend all those years doing all those different things to get to a place where I could recognize what I still wanted. Maybe I needed to take risks to get comfortable taking more. Maybe I needed to make the podcasts to realize I wanted to spend my time creating something else. Maybe I needed to say no to something to get closer to a yes.

Maybe that’s the beauty of creating your own life.

Because no matter how old we are…we get to try again.

****

What I did this week as a 43-year-old single woman:

• I took my cat to the vet for a check-up. She didn’t have explosive diarrhea! We both consider this a win.

• I visited a new coffee shop not too far from my apartment, La Batard. It’s French, and if you don’t know already, I am a big Francophile. I was feeling a bit cranky that day (hormones and heat are not a great combo), but I was able to write for a bit and enjoy a very crumbly croissant.

• I cleaned out my car. With a vacuum and a bucket of soapy water and everything. This is a big deal because I believe this to be a blue job. I don’t care — call Gloria Steinem. I hate anything that requires me to get dirty or use a hammer. Not that cleaning out my car required a hammer, but you catch my drift. Unfortunately, the guy I’m seeing doesn’t live close by and I wouldn’t ask him to do this, although I’m sure he would because he very graciously cleaned the period stain out of my comforter last week.

• I walked Bernie! I always walk Bernie — three times a week — but Bernie is always worth mentioning.

  

  

  

Thanks for being here!

Love, Brie xoxo

Leave a comment

there's no such thing as a timeline

·

April 15, 2025

When I turned 30—well, 31—I wrote an essay about turning 30. I remember wanting to share the things I had learned, the things you should know, and definitely not stress about. Like, yes, you're going to get a chin hair. Yes, you'll probably gain weight faster. Yes, you’ll scroll your Facebook feed (because back then it was just Facebook, not Instagram or TikTok) and feel like everyone else is moving forward, doing the things, and meanwhile you might feel just… stuck.

Love, Writing

How I got my first book deal (and lit agent)

·

August 22, 2023

For those who might be unaware, besides being a freelance writer, I am a published author. I wrote Friendship Signs, for Adams Media, which was published in 2018, and Joy in the Stars, collaboration with BuzzFeed for Running Press, which was published in 2021.

Share