My oldest friend asked the question I’d been dodging: What are you going to do to stay relevant?

“Well, what are you going to do to stay relevant?” asked my friend who had a huge job in the Biden administration.

We were standing in my kitchen, and I had just told her that my latest gig, a six-figure contract from Penguin Random House to write and package books, was winding down. My mother had joked that I was headed into retirement, but I thought, “That’s for old people.”

The truth was I really didn’t know what to do, or how to feel about either of these words, and I hadn’t yet stumbled upon the other “R” facing our generation: reinvention.

But I had reinvented myself before. 

From Celebrity Scoops to Dinosaurs

For the first 15 years of my career, I was an entertainment journalist at magazines like Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, and Ladies’ Home Journal, where I booked and wrote the monthly celebrity stories. The gig was an exciting, perk-filled way to spend my 20s, including trips to the Cannes Film Festival and monthly stays at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, where they would transfer my calls to the pool. It was my job to ask everyone from Julia Roberts and Jodie Foster to Oprah and Melanie Griffith any nosy question I wanted on behalf of my readers.

Access to the rich and infamous made me a big hit at dinner parties. After a certain amount of wine was poured, someone would inevitably prompt me to spill my latest scoop. It was fun to dish about what it was really like sharing a cigar with Mel Gibson or getting Michelle Pfeiffer to open up about her insecurities.

When I left all that for my management position at National Geographic, I was scared that I’d lose my sparkle at dinner parties. I was also daunted by the responsibilities of this more grown-up job.

I was hired to redesign the children’s magazine, a Washington, D.C.-based assignment that I took because my newlywed husband was working in D.C. as the editor in chief of National Geographic Traveler. We were commuting to our marriage, which was getting old. The plan was to give this a whirl for a year or two, and then we would move back together to New York, where the real publishing action was.

In my new role, I would be responsible for a team and a P&L for the first time. Only later would I realize the business challenge I was inheriting—the shrinking readership and the staff members I would have to fire and replace.

My husband believed I had good instincts and discerning taste, so I borrowed his confidence in me while I gained my own, which I did through making decisions before I had all the information, course-correcting, and pushing forward one increment at a time.

Trading divas for dinosaurs turned out to be a surprising upgrade. Once a month, our boss would take his direct reports out for dinner, so I’d be sitting with the editors in chief of National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, and National Geographic Traveler (my husband), privy to all the insider info. My colleagues were commissioning the edge of exploration, sending photographers and writers into volcanoes, up the highest peaks on the planet and to the depths of the Mariana Trench, then somehow getting them back to tell the story. I still got to play the nosy card because it was my job to find ways to translate all that into the pages of National Geographic Kids. 

And because of my husband’s position, we were globetrotting ourselves, going to Myanmar, Kyoto, Rajasthan. At dinner parties I had a new kind of scoop: the next hidden gem, the photographer who’d just come back from some off-the-grid adventure. I was learning, growing, and going.

When the Ground Shifted

And then life got complicated with plot twists I didn’t see coming, including a divorce, two kids born 17 months apart, and a rise through the ranks from editor of the kids magazine to chief education officer. I relaunched three failing divisions and created a $65 million kids-and-family business out of a magazine that was becoming extinct. Not bad for a job I took to play house with my hot new husband.

Then one day my new boss changed the meeting location at the last minute. I opened the door to find the HR director sitting there. All I could say was, “This can’t be good.”

“Take a seat,” was her grim-lipped reply.

And just like that, after 17 years, I was out.

By then, I was truly alone. My ex-husband died unexpectedly during a liver transplant. The surgeon had told me—and I relayed to our children, then ages 9 and 11—that Dad would have a 94% chance of surviving and thriving a year later.

Who ever thinks they are going to be in the 6%?

Turns out, us. I needed to figure out how I was going to support my kids, so I had to be open to new things. After an 18-month stint as chief education officer at an environmental nonprofit, which turned out to be nonfit, I gamely reinvented myself as a book packager and landed a big contract at Penguin Random House. 

Three years later, that contract had run its course. 

What Does Relevant Look Like Now?

Which is how I came to be standing at my kitchen island, with my oldest friend asking the question I’d been avoiding.

Her query was anything but unkind. We’d known each other since ninth grade, so she only had my best interests at heart. But still, her question stung like a slap. Wasn’t it enough that I had done everything I had done and was raising kids on my own? Wasn’t I entitled to a well-deserved break?

Obviously, she thought the answer was no.

Without a big job, I was afraid that I was losing big chunks of myself, or at least of my self-worth. As a single parent, it was my job to provide. I liked going to work, and I was good at it. Who was I without that? And there was another less practical thing I feared losing, and that was my sparkle. What would I have to contribute to dinner party conversation? If I wasn’t working-working, would I now be relegated to passing the salt?

During those high-pressure Nat Geo years, I’d watch through the window as trios of women walked their black Labs in the morning while I was yanking on a blazer and yelling at my kids to get in the car. What were those Lululemons discussing so animatedly, I wondered, and how were they going to spend their big, blank day? I was curious. 

I could live without the pressure and the deadlines. But I wasn’t ready to be the woman who only gets asked about her dog.