Don’t come home… it’s over for us.

Thirty-two years of marriage, gone in seven words.

My puppy was still asleep in my lap when I pulled over on the New York State Thruway, tears dripping onto a beagle named Strawberry who had no idea what was happening.

But I did.

I sat there with the engine running and my hands doing nothing useful, phone still warm against my ear long after she’d hung up. Cars kept passing in the other lane. Somebody’s Monday, uninterrupted. Strawberry stirred, licked the salt off my knuckle, and went back to sleep, because she was one year old and had never been taught that a person’s whole life can end in a parking lane off Exit 24.

I had been teaching the Silva Method for twenty years by then. Twenty years of telling other people how to find calm on command, how to think clearly under pressure, how to access the version of themselves that shows up on the good days.

And I was sitting on the shoulder of a highway, crying into a dog, having forgotten every single thing I knew how to do.

That’s the part I still haven’t gotten over. Not the divorce. That I had the tool in my hand the entire time and didn’t use it… because I’d spent ten years using it to survive my life instead of examining it.

There’s a difference between those two things, and it took losing everything to learn it. A technique that helps you carry a weight will get you through a Monday. It will not tell you the weight was never supposed to be yours to carry in the first place.

Back then I had two businesses. Thirty-plus trade shows a year. A marriage that had become a long, quiet negotiation I kept losing without ever noticing I’d agreed to play.

So I sat there, finally, and did the exercise properly for the first time in years. Not to get through the day. To see what I’d been refusing to look at.

What came up wasn’t news. It was just the first time I let myself hear it.

The divorce took the time thirty-two years takes to unwind, and it wasn’t graceful. But there’s a morning that stayed with me longer than the lawyer’s office ever did. I was standing alone in a kitchenware store, looking at pots. No one to ask. No one to manage. No committee in my head weighing what she’d think, what it would cost me later if I picked the wrong ones.

Just — what do I actually want.

I bought the pots I wanted, and I stood there a little stunned by how loud that quiet was. It wasn’t because pots matter. Because for the first time in ten years, the answer arrived without static. Nothing between the question and the response. That’s the whole method, really, standing in a kitchenware aisle disguised as cookware, the ability to reach what you already know, cleanly, without twenty years of noise getting there first.

I moved to Kentucky. Built something with someone who doesn’t wait around for permission either… she’s training to fly commercial jets, which should tell you what kind of person she is.

My sister came to visit a while later and told me I looked different. Less tension in my face. She wasn’t flattering me. She’d watched the other version of me for years, up close, and she was just telling me what she saw sitting across the table.

In 2022 I went back to teaching, and this time I built the whole thing around real estate agents specifically, because the moment I heard agents describe their good days and bad days, I recognized the exact shape of my own problem staring back at me. Commission-only work is unforgiving that way. It doesn’t care what you know. It only pays out on what you can reach in the moment that matters… the driveway before the listing appointment, the car outside the house you badly want, the thirty seconds before you knock.

I know that gap intimately. I sat inside it, crying, with a dog on my lap, for longer than I want to admit… and the only difference between that highway shoulder and your driveway is what’s at stake in the seven words that come next.

Diane had eleven years in the business when she sat in my classroom with her arms crossed, deciding by lunch whether to walk out early. She stayed. The following Friday, she used one of the techniques in her car before an appointment she’d been dreading for weeks. She got the listing. Her GCI went up thirty-one percent that year.

That wasn’t the first thing she told me, though.

The first thing she said was, “I stopped dreading Mondays.”

I know what it costs to dread something and have no way out of it except to sit with it until it passes. I also know what it feels like on the other side, once you finally learn to reach the calm you already know how to produce… instead of waiting for a highway shoulder and a sleeping dog to force it out of you.

If any part of my Thruway sounds like your Monday afternoon, that’s not a coincidence. Call me. Ask me the question you’re half-afraid to ask. You’ll probably get an answer you weren’t expecting… and once you hear it, you’ll already know what to do with it. Fifteen minutes, no charge, no obligation… and the decision stays entirely yours.