How to Reinvent Your Life

Notes from My Misadventures

Karen Salmansohn

Feb 27, 2025

Small note before the essay.

(You can skip it. But I hope you don’t.)

I have a new book called Your To-Die-For Life.

It’s about how we wait too long. To say the thing. To change the thing.

And how life keeps giving you wake-up calls to live more boldly. And how we think we have an endless pile of tomorrows. And also: how weird it is that we think that.

Some early readers have said nice things:

“Fascinating! Who knew trauma and death could be so inspirational?”
— Jenny Lawson
“This is not only the funniest book about death I’ve ever read, it’s also an inspiring, useful guide for living with greater joy and purpose . . . and less fear and regret.”
— AJ Jacobs

If you feel moved to order my book here, I’d be wildly grateful.

If you already have, thank you.

Either way, I hope something in today’s essay reminds you: You’re still here. There’s still time.

Now… onto the essay.

First, without warning, at age 30, quit your Creative Director job in advertising.

Watch your colleagues' faces freeze in that particular way people have when they're thinking, "She's making a terrible mistake," but also, secretly, "I wish I had her courage."

Write your letter of resignation with phrases like "pursue other opportunities" and "valuable experience," the equivalent of telling a bad boyfriend "it's not you, it's me" when you both know it's definitely him.

Start to write a novel.

Pepper it with too many adjectives. Delete most of them. Keep the good ones, the unexpected ones, the ones that make ordinary things seem slightly askew and therefore true.

Notice how your characters start out as thinly disguised versions of your former coworkers, then gradually develop their own complaints and desires, like children growing away from you.

At age 32 sell your novel to St. Martins Press.

Feel legitimate for approximately seventeen minutes, before the doubt crashes back in.

At 35, receive a phone call from Miramax.

They want to option your novel to be a movie starring Marisa Tomei. Your characters. Your imaginary friends, really. They will now have actual bodies, actual voices.

Excitedly tell your mother, who will say, "That's nice. Is there health insurance?"

At age 36 move to Los Angeles to become a script writer.

The air will taste like possibilities and vehicle emissions. Pitch movie and tv ideas in rooms with long tables and people who nod too enthusiastically, and use phrases like "character journey.”

Discover that your New York sarcasm translates differently here, like a joke poorly dubbed from another language.

Date a cinematographer who speaks beautifully about light but forgets your birthday. He will own exactly one book: a coffee table volume about Kubrick that he has never opened.

Next, date nobody for a while, which will feel like a promotion.

At age 40, flee back to New York to write books again.

This is your true soulmate career love.

Notice how the city looks exactly the same yet completely different, like a familiar face after plastic surgery.

Your favorite diner is now a boutique selling candles with quirky names: Nostalgia and First Kiss.

Write and creative direct a stylishly designed book called "How To Be Happy, Dammit,” because you’ve noticed how it’s impossible to be happy without a lot of dammit.

Watch the book become a bestseller, feeling equal parts joy and impostor syndrome.

Autograph books until your hand cramps. Have conversations with strangers who tell you their therapists recommended your book.

At age 45 become a book packager.

Turn your brand of “self help for people who wouldn’t be caught dead doing self help” into a series of colorful books: "The Bounce Back Book," "Think Happy” and “Prince Harming Syndrome.”

At age 49, watch your personal life change for the better.

Finally it happens. After an earlier miscarriage that left you feeling hollowed out like a gourd, and sitting in bathroom stalls at publishing parties, breathing deeply and reapplying mascara.

Finally, at last, at 49 you’re pregnant with your miracle baby.

When your son is born, he will have impossibly small fingernails and a serious expression, as if he's been waiting a long time and is now evaluating whether you were worth the wait.

Look at your son and understand why the cliché phrase "Love at first sight" exists. It is the only thing that comes close to how you feel.

Discover how your heart now lives outside your body, wearing tiny socks that constantly go missing in the laundry.

Next at age 53, launch a new business for online courses.

Because why not?

Notice how the internet makes you feel simultaneously ancient and precocious.

At some point, your son will show you how to edit your videos and will sigh with the specific patience children reserve for technologically challenged parents.

Grow your social media audience to 1.3 million followers on Facebook. Tell your son, hoping it will make him proud.

“Sorry, Mom, nobody cares about Facebook anymore,” he'll say, with the same tone you once used to tell your mother that nobody wears pantyhose anymore.

At age 63, write a book called, “Your To Die For Life,” about the benefits of Mortality Awareness.

While your contemporaries are contemplating Caribbean cruises, write a book about how death awareness is he ultimate life hack, where people expect somberness, but wind up receiving (instead) your particular brand of feisty humor.

Become the poster child for staring death in the face and saying, “I’m not done yet. I’m still here and plan to live boldly until my very last day.”

Preorder Your To Die For Life here!

At 64, write this essay on Substack called “How to Reinvent Your Life.”

After your third coffee, re-read what you’ve written and realize: “Hmmm… this essay isn’t about what I thought it would be about.”

This isn't a story about defying age or expectations.

It’s a story about befriending change, and making it your companion rather than your adversary.

It’s about recognizing that time is not a corridor narrowing to a point, but a series of rooms.

Some rooms you'll love immediately.

Others will take time to appreciate.

Some will feel like mistakes until, years later, you realize they were necessary detours.

The room where you cried on the bathroom floor… led to the room where you held your son for the first time.
The room where you pitched a show that never got made…. led to the room where you wrote bestselling books that did.
The room where you felt most lost…. gave you the material for the work that would eventually help others find their way.

This is how life works: Nothing is wasted. Everything is material.

And everything helps you to become the next version of you.

The thirty-year-old who quit her job.

The forty-year-old who wrote a bestseller.

The forty-nine-year-old who became a mother.

They're all you.

And also not-you.

Like nesting dolls that contain each other.

So, how do you reinvent your life?

You don’t. You reinvent yourself.
Again and again.
And again.

Until you are (and it's inevitably going to happen) dead.

Even then, who knows?

Perhaps there's one more reinvention waiting. Perhaps death is just another door, another room with different light.

Or perhaps the final reinvention is simply becoming a memory in the minds of those who loved you. Told and retold, changing a little with each telling, like all the best stories.

Perhaps some day you'll become a character in your son's memoir.

Or a character in someone’s novel, recognizable only to you, if you could read it.

Which you can't.

Which is the final joke of existence. We never get to read our own reviews.

But…. until that final curtain arrives, you must keep reinventing who you are… again and again.

After all, what else is there to do with a life, but live it, in as many variations as time allows?

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