About Between Business Cards

As a retired physician and empty nester, I started writing to probe which life lessons help pick us up when life trips us.

Like you, I’ve held a lot of roles: sibling, employee, spouse, healthy person and one facing illness. Some of those titles even made it onto my business cards. But life has a way of editing our identities—whether we’re ready or not.

Over time, my roles changed. I was divorced. My parents passed. I experienced painful estrangements and major illness. And through it all—showing up, struggling, transitioning—I found unexpected lifelines: family, friends, books, projects and small, quiet gestures that kept me afloat.

This isn’t a self-help blog. It’s more of a help-yourself-while-I-stumble-through blog. It’s about the collective us—the ones trying to unstick ourselves from the mire of shifting identities, expectations, and grief. Sometimes with grace, sometimes with grit, and often with a little humor.

At a party once, a newly found friend asked me what I did. I had just been “involuntarily separated” from my job.

I replied, “I’m between business cards.”

They laughed.

And so—with a bit of self-deprecation, a dash of fear, and a commitment to truth-telling—this is where I share some of my stories.

Maybe they’ll meet you somewhere in the middle of your own.