Happy Thursday my dear friends,
How are you all doing on this amazing Thursday evening. I hope you are well. Shoot me that text or drop me the comment — I always love chatting and catching up. And don’t forget, make my day and give me a like and a quick note so we can stay in touch. After all, we are friends.
Tonight I wanted to stop by and share some exciting news with you all — at least, for me this is super exciting news — and I wanted you to be the first to hear about it.
You all know that I’m in the process of expanding my writing, and I’m landing in so many incredible places with it. The problem is… and it’s an amazing problem to have… I love all kinds of writing. I love writing other people’s stories. I love writing suspense and memoirs. But I’ve also found myself navigating back to something I hold extra close to my heart.
I love writing letters.
From my earliest memories, I loved writing letters to my granny and grandpa. I used to write to my great‑grandmother Moore. I went through a long phase of creating greeting cards and sending them to all the older folks in my congregation at church. I wrote notes to my Aunt Billie. I wrote letters to John when we first started dating.
Letter writing is probably the foundation of where I began to write. I wrote letters all through school — to the crush I had, to my two besties — and we would write to each other almost daily. Those letters were basically journal entries. We kept them going through all of middle school and into our freshman year of high school. My friend Jacqui has kept most of them.
The Universe has guided me back to my roots… back to writing letters. So I did something today, and I want to share it with you.
You see, there comes a moment in a woman’s life when she feels the quiet shift… the one that says, “It’s time to come home to yourself.”
Not loudly. Not all at once. But in the soft, steady way a tide returns to shore.
I’ve been in that moment lately — gathering the pieces of myself I left behind, listening for the voice I used to silence, remembering the woman I was before life asked me to be everything for everyone else.
And in that remembering, something inside me whispered:
Write. Write to the women who are walking this same return. Write to the ones who feel the ache and the awakening at the same time.
So I’ve begun writing letters again — tender, honest, midlife‑wise letters about becoming, healing, faith, softness, and the quiet courage it takes to return to yourself after years of forgetting.
Today, I shared the first one.
It’s called “When a Woman Begins to Return to Herself.” And it lives in a new little home I’ve created for my writing — a place where my words can breathe, where they don’t have to perform, where they can land gently on the hearts that need them.
That home is Substack.
Substack is a simple, quiet space where writers share their work in the form of letters. You can read them on the website, or you can have them delivered straight to your email like a note from a friend.
No noise. No algorithms. No scrolling past a hundred things to find the one thing that speaks to you.
Just words. Just connection. Just a soft place to land.
If you’ve ever found yourself in these blog posts… If you’re in a season of returning to yourself too… If you’re craving gentleness, depth, and truth…
Then I think you’ll feel at home in my Substack letters.
You can read the full letter here: 👉 https://dawnarae.substack.com
It’s tender. It’s honest. It’s the beginning of something new.
And if you find me there, I truly believe you were meant to.
I can’t wait to see what you think and to get your feedback. For now, though, I’m going to say goodnight.
Until next time, don’t forget:
Love Life++ Hugs,
Dawna — may the butterflies remind you that we are all still becoming
Love Life with Dawna 