Toni Peters – Author

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Go Ahead, Tell Me No

Toni Peters. November 4, 2026.

In the late 1990s, I was an independent contractor with a global skin care and cosmetics company. It was sales, which meant my days came down to asking women yes-or-no questions.

Would you like to get together for a facial?

Would you like to try the products I use and love?

Would you like to hear about a company that offers flexibility, independence, and room to grow?

With my family and friends, I could ask. They already loved me, so a no from them didn’t cost much. But the minute I stepped outside that circle, I froze. I’d see a sharp, put-together woman and know exactly what I wanted to say, and nothing came out. My self-esteem was a lot lower back then, and one simple question to a stranger felt like more than I could risk.

One day stands out. I was sitting at my desk with the phone right there and a list of five women and their phone numbers in front of me. I couldn’t even pick up the phone. My body froze. It literally wouldn’t move. I was frustrated, but worse than that, I was disappointed in myself. And that made everything harder, because I kept beating myself up over it day after day.

My business didn’t fail all at once. It fizzled out, one unasked question at a time.

A woman writes in a notebook beside a vintage telephone and books in warm sunlight.

What a no actually is

Recently I listened to a sermon Dr. Charles Stanley preached in the early 1980s, and it took me right back to those years. It made me ask what I was so afraid of.

At its simplest, rejection is someone saying no. We ask a question, and they answer it. So why does a two-letter word carry so much weight? And why does just the thought of hearing it keep so many of us from asking at all?

Dr. Stanley said that when someone tells us no, we hear three messages underneath it: we don’t belong, we aren’t worthy, and we aren’t competent.

I recognized every one. Those were the voices in my head every time I almost asked a stranger to try a product. And none of them are true.

“You don’t belong”

A no can feel like a door closing with you on the outside. Usually it means this group, this job, or this person isn’t the right fit right now. That’s a much smaller thing than being shut out of everything.

Here’s what I know now. I belong to God, no matter what. I have brothers and sisters in Christ. I’m part of the Church. Ephesians 2:19 says we are “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.” I do belong, and no one’s no can move me out of that house.

“You aren’t worthy”

This one cuts deepest, because it goes after who you are instead of what you asked. A woman who turned down a facial was telling me about her schedule, her budget, or her skin. She had no way to measure my value, because she isn’t the one who set it.

Psalm 139:14 says we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Ephesians 1:6 says we are “accepted in the beloved.” My worth was decided long before I ever asked anyone to try a moisturizer. I am worthy, and I know now that I’m worthy of the life I’ve designed for myself. So are you.

“You aren’t competent”

Sometimes a no really is about skill. Maybe the pitch was clumsy or the timing was off. Even then, it’s about one conversation on one day. Skills grow with practice, and mine never had the chance, because I stopped practicing the moment it got hard.

Fear blurs “not ready yet” into “never good enough.” Scripture keeps them apart. Second Corinthians 3:5 says “our sufficiency is of God.” Today I know what to do and how to do it. If there’s something I don’t know, I can learn it. Incompetence should only ever be a temporary situation.

What I was really afraid of

Looking back, what scared me was what I thought a no would prove. If a stranger turned me down, it would confirm everything I already suspected about myself. So I decided for her. I said no on her behalf before she ever had the chance, and I called it being careful.

Every question I didn’t ask got the same answer I was afraid of. I just gave it to myself.

Then I punished myself for it. Every day I didn’t call became more proof that I wasn’t good enough, and that made the next day’s call even harder to make. The shame of not asking hurt me more than any woman on that list ever could have.

Family members gather around a table to sort through cherished photographs and memories.

Asking again

Almost thirty years later, I’m asking again. I’m building a business that helps families turn their stories into books, and that means asking people I don’t know whether they’d like to talk.

These days, asking isn’t a big deal. I know there are families out there just like mine, families who love to share their stories. They love reunions and family gatherings, passing around photos and rehashing old times. Those are my people. If one of them tells me no, maybe they don’t have the money right now, or maybe the family historian is too ill to share stories. Whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with my sense of belonging, my self-worth, or my competence.

So go ahead, tell me no. I know who I am now, and a no can’t change that.

Is there a question you’ve been afraid to ask? A friend you’d like to reconnect with, a job you want to apply for, a dream you’ve kept to yourself? Ask it this week. Then come back and tell me how it went.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

November 4, 2026
Hope Is Not a Strategy

Toni Peters. October 28, 2026.

What twenty years in wind energy taught a woman who writes about hope.

On Sundays, I write to you about faith. About purpose. About chariots on a hill you can’t see until your eyes are opened. I am, for lack of a better word, the hope lady.

On Mondays, I go to work and help kill budgets.

I don’t lead with that at parties. It doesn’t pair well with the faith writing, and it takes a minute to explain. But I’ve spent more than two decades in the wind energy industry, and I love it, and I want to tell you about the day one sentence from a conference room lodged itself in my brain and never left.

Budget season

We were outside Houston, deep in budget season. If you’ve never done a corporate budget cycle, picture this: a windowless room, too much coffee, and a spreadsheet the size of a small country. Our job was to go farm by farm, every wind site in the region, and find money. Cut a cost here. Squeeze an efficiency there. Then roll it all up into one regional number clean enough to send to headquarters without flinching. We were hunting margin. We wanted the bottom line healthy, and healthy bottom lines do not appear because you were nice to the spreadsheet.

A printed data sheet, red pen, glasses, and coffee create a focused work setting.

Somewhere in hour three, someone floated a cost-cutting idea. A teammate looked at it, thought about it, and said the most human thing a tired person can say in a budget meeting:

“I hope that’ll work.”

And one of our Service Area Managers, a man not known for speeches, looked up and said, flat as a level floor:

“Hope is not a strategy.”

Reader, I nearly applauded.

Which is a little rich, coming from me. I had, at that point, already started writing about hope in my off hours. Hope as a lifeline. Hope as the thing that carries you through the fire. And there I was in a fluorescent-lit room in Texas, nodding hard at a man telling a room full of adults that hope would not, in fact, lower our cost per megawatt.

Both things are true. That’s the part I want to talk about. But first I have to confess something embarrassing.

I love a strategic plan

I mean I love it. I have two bachelor’s degrees and an MBA, and nothing makes me happier than a real plan with a measurable goal, action items, honest deadlines, milestones you can actually check, and a column for what we’ll do when reality laughs at the first three. Show me accountability and a clean set of milestones and I will get more excited than a grown woman probably should. My family has watched this happen. They’re used to it. It’s a thing.

So the SAM was singing my song. Because here’s what twenty years in this industry taught me about the difference between a plan that works and a plan that doesn’t, and hope has nothing to do with either one.

A solid plan. Clear goal, real action items, deadlines with teeth, milestones, room to adjust when the wind does something the forecast didn’t. That plan, executed, moves the number. Every time. Not always in the direction you wanted, but it moves, and you can see why, and you can steer.

A weak plan. Vague goals, fuzzy milestones, nobody actually accountable, communication that dies somewhere between the meeting and the doing. That plan produces frustration, low morale, and a bottom line that limps. Also every time. And no amount of hoping at it has ever once nudged it back into the black. I’ve watched people hope at a bad plan with real sincerity. The plan did not care.

So the SAM was right. At work, hope is not a strategy. I’d put it on the wall if the wall weren’t already covered in safety posters.

But I went back to my hotel room that night still turning it over, because I’m me, and I couldn’t quite let it sit as clean as it sounded in the room.

Where the hope lady and the budget lady shake hands

Hope was never supposed to be the strategy. That was never its job. Hope is the reason you sit down and build the strategy in the first place. It’s the thing that says this is worth the windowless room and the giant spreadsheet and the hard conversation about accountability. Hope points at a future worth the work. Then you still have to do the work. The two just clock in on different shifts.

I’ve lived the version of this that has nothing to do with wind farms. I’ve spent seasons of my life hoping. Hoping something would change, hoping a situation would fix itself, hoping and praying and waiting for a different life to arrive on its own. It didn’t. Not once. What changed things was hope followed by a plan followed by actually doing the thing. Hope opened the door. My feet had to walk through it.

A trail of footprints crosses the cracked bed of a dried lake beneath a quiet tree-lined horizon.

God can part a whole sea.
You’ve still got to walk across the floor of it.

So I keep both hats, and I’ve made peace with the pair of them. On Sunday I’ll tell you hope is worth everything. On Monday I’ll tell a room full of colleagues that hope is not a strategy. And I mean both, all the way down.

The folks at work don’t know about the Sunday hat.

Now you do.

What’s the thing you’ve been hoping at instead of planning for? Tell me in the comments. I had a list, and I’m not proud of how long it was.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

October 28, 2026
The Difference Between Hard and Harmful

This piece mentions a recent stroke and a family injury. Nothing graphic.

Toni Peters. October 21, 2026.

Some things are hard because they’re worth it and some are just grinding you down, and a lot of women were raised to confuse the two. To think suffering is virtue.

Today I spent two hours with an amazing group of women listening to them share their challenges and opportunities. Mostly, the conversation was about challenges. There was a common thread in the conversation. Boundaries. But there was also an underlying theme that bothers me in this moment.

These ladies are TIRED.

I could relate. Two months ago I had a stroke. And let me tell you, I’ve never experienced this level of tired before. There have been days when I could barely get out of bed. And there were days when I knew not to even try. For once, I listened to my body and what it was telling me. It needed rest. It needed to heal. It needed to process what I’d just experienced and what that experience meant for the rest of my life. I certainly never pictured a stroke into my life, but who does?

I wrote the whole of that story here, if you want it.

Some things are hard because they’re worth it.
Some are just grinding you down.

A warm cup of coffee, keys, and a rumpled cloth rest on a sunlit wooden kitchen table.

I see it in my two daughters. My oldest, struggling to wrap her head around the fact that my grandson suffered a broken neck due to a football tackle. My youngest, a young mother trying to raise two toddlers on her own with limited resources. My girls are tired.

I wonder. How did we get to this place?

But what I really want to know is this: how do we handle what life throws at us without it driving us to sheer exhaustion?

It’s not a question of faith or hope. And if you tell me that God will never put more on us than we can stand, I’m going to ask you to show me where it says that in His Word.

Show me where it says that.

Where did you first learn that suffering was virtue? A parent, a church, a job, a marriage. Tell me. I’m still working out where I learned it.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

October 21, 2026
Curiosity Is Key to Becoming Who You Actually Are

Toni Peters. October 14, 2026.

Somewhere along the way, fear started doing your editing.

It cut the parts of you that felt too risky to show. It softened your opinions, shrank your plans, talked you out of the thing you almost said and the door you almost opened. And it did it so slowly, over so many years, that you stopped noticing the cuts. You just started calling the edited version “me.”

I know that version. I lived inside her a long time.

People think the answer to fear is courage. Grit your teeth, be braver, white-knuckle your way through. I don’t buy it. I think the answer is curiosity. And curiosity is key to becoming who you actually are. Not some polished, finished, better you waiting at the end of a rainbow. The real one. The one fear keeps trimming off.

I won’t tell you it leads to a happy life, or to success. Those words are too tidy. They sound like a finish line, like there’s a ribbon to cross and then you’re done. Curiosity doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t hand you a destination. It hands you a direction, and then it keeps you moving.

So let me tell you what it actually does to a person. This is where it stops being a nice idea and starts changing things.

Your mind

Fear lives in the future. It’s the 2am loop, the worst-case rehearsal, the same worry running laps while you’re supposed to be sleeping. Curiosity can’t live there. A real question can only be answered right here, in the room you’re actually in. The second you get curious, huh, I wonder why I’m reacting like this, you’ve stepped half an inch outside the fear. You can’t be fully afraid and fully curious in the same breath. One always crowds out the other. That half inch is where your mind finally gets to rest.

Your body

A body run on fear is a body braced. Jaw tight, shoulders climbing toward your ears, that old fight-or-flight engine idling all day even when nothing is chasing you. It wears you down from the inside, and most of us have lived with it so long we think it’s just how a person feels. Curiosity shifts you into a different gear. Open instead of clenched. It stops treating an ordinary Tuesday like a threat, and your body finally gets to unlock.

You can’t be fully afraid and fully curious
in the same breath.

The people you love

Fear makes us decide things about each other. We size someone up, file them under a type, and then spend the whole relationship defending the file. Curiosity does a different kind of work. It asks. “Tell me more” instead of “I already know how you are.” When you stay curious about a person, you’re telling them you’re not finished learning who they are. There is almost nothing more generous you can hand another human being than that.

Your work

Fear keeps you in the chair that’s draining the life right out of you, because at least you know the chair. It whispers that the risk isn’t worth it, that you’re not qualified, that you should be grateful and sit still. Curiosity asks the questions that get people unstuck. What else is out there. Why not me. What if I’m wrong about the very thing I’ve decided I can’t do. The people who keep asking those questions tend to outrun the people busy guarding what they already have. It isn’t close.

Your future

This might be the biggest one of all. Fear shrinks tomorrow down to the size of what you can already see from where you’re standing. A small, safe, predictable little box. Curiosity refuses to close the lid. It keeps tomorrow open-ended, unfinished, full of things you haven’t found out yet. And you cannot be curious and hopeless at the same time. It isn’t possible. Curiosity is a stubborn little bet that there’s still something out there worth discovering, and placing that bet, over and over, is most of what hope even is.

A lone pencil rests on a sunlit windowsill beside a softly billowing curtain.

There’s no arriving

Here’s the part I don’t want you to miss. Who you actually are isn’t a fixed point you reach and then stop at. It moves. The you that curiosity uncovers this year is going to hand you off to a next you, and then the one after that. There’s no arriving. That used to scare me half to death. Now it’s the best news I know, because it means you are never finished, and neither am I.

There is always more of you to meet.

You cannot put a price on that.

So the next time fear reaches for the scissors, don’t fight it head-on. Get curious instead. Ask one honest question.

That’s the whole beginning. That’s how you start becoming
who you were underneath the edits all along.

What’s the one honest question you’ve been avoiding? Ask it here. You don’t have to answer it yet. I read every one.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

October 14, 2026
No Fees If We Win Your Case

Toni Peters. October 10, 2026.

“No fees if we win your case.”

People. PEOPLE. PLEASE.

Every time one of these commercials comes on, I lose a little more of my mind. You know the ones. Sharp suit, fake bookshelf, finger pointed at the camera, promising you the moon. Then the number flashes. Three point two five million dollars. Cha-ching. The music swells like somebody just hit the lottery.

And people believe it. Eyes go wide. Sign me up.

The fees. Not the expenses.

First, the small thing. Read the fine print. Better yet, read their lips. It’s the fees they’re waiving. The fees. Not the expenses. Not the filing costs, the expert witnesses, the depositions, the paralegal hours that pile up the second you shake the man’s hand. Those still come out of your settlement whether you win, lose, or the whole thing collapses. “No fees unless we win” sounds like free. It is not free. Somebody’s getting paid, and honey, it isn’t you first.

A note on the fees. How costs get handled varies by firm and by state. Some lawyers absorb them if you lose, some don’t, and the only place that answer lives is in the agreement you sign. I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. Read the agreement before you shake the hand.

But that’s the appetizer. Here’s what I actually need you to sit with.

What the number is for

Do you understand the kind of injury it takes to be handed three and a quarter million dollars?

We hear the number and skip right past the reason for it. Nobody writes a check that size for a stubbed toe. A settlement like that is a receipt. It’s what a court decided a body is worth after it’s wrecked and won’t ever work the same way again. It’s the price of your ability to get down on the floor and pick up your own grandbaby. It’s every morning left in your life when the first thing you feel, before your feet even hit the floor, is pain.

That’s the trade. That’s what’s hiding behind the confetti.

Three point two five million. You could not pay me that to sign up for that life. And I’d bet everything I own the people living it would hand back every dollar to have their body returned the way it was the morning before it all went wrong.

Nobody writes a check that size
for a stubbed toe.

Stop funding the commercials

So here’s where I land.

Stop funding these commercials. Every time we treat that number like a jackpot, every time somebody jokes that they hope they slip in the right parking lot, we’re feeding a machine that packages human catastrophe and sells it back to us like a scratch-off ticket.

Good injury lawyers exist. When somebody’s carelessness shatters your life, you’ll need one, and thank God they’re there. This isn’t about them. It’s about us. About the fact that we can watch a man promise millions to the maimed, set to bright and hopeful music, and feel something closer to envy than grief.

Don’t hear the number.
Hear the reason for it.

Next time one comes on, ask yourself if you’d trade places for every dollar of it.

You wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.

So let’s stop pretending it’s a prize.

Have you ever caught yourself hearing that number like a prize? Tell me. I did, for years.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

October 10, 2026
The Pancake Wish

Toni Peters. October 7, 2026.

My granddaughter Paisley turned four this week.

When Scotty and I got to the party, she met me at the door, took me by the hand, and gave me the tour. First stop was the doorway her mom had covered in a curtain of streamers, the kind you have to push through to get to the other side. Paisley walked me through it like she was leading me into a palace. Next stop was the refrigerator. She opened the door and pointed, and there it was: her “marsh marrow” birthday cake. Her mom made it for her, and Paisley wanted me to see it before anybody else got the chance.

She said it out loud

Then came presents. Paisley had asked for one thing in particular, a Disney Junior princess she calls Spinning Sophia. When she pulled the paper off and saw it, she screamed. It was the full-body scream only a four-year-old can make when the world has done exactly what she asked it to.

Then the cake came out. We sang. I was sitting with her little brother on my lap, and everybody leaned in the way you do when a little one is about to blow out candles. And Paisley did the thing you’re not supposed to do. She said her wish out loud.

She closed her eyes, and in the most reverent voice a four-year-old can find, she said, “Pancakes.”

The whole room laughed out loud. And not one of us told her she’d broken the rule. Nobody said, “Oh honey, now it won’t come true.” It was too innocent and too pure to touch.

For the record, pancakes are her favorite food. They’re mine too. She comes by it honestly.

What grown-ups learn to do

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since. Paisley asked for exactly what she wanted, right out loud, in front of everybody. She didn’t whisper it or shrink it down or worry that it was too small. Same as with Spinning Sophia. She knew what she wanted, she asked for it, and when it came, she screamed for joy.

Somewhere along the way, most of us grown-ups learn to keep our wishes to ourselves. Life teaches us that the things we hope for don’t always come, and if nobody knows what we wished for, nobody has to watch us be disappointed. For a long time I believed that.

This year taught me otherwise.

“Go at it boldly, and you’ll find unexpected forces closing round you and coming to your aid.”
Basil King

I’ve lived that. I said my dream out loud, that I would write my memoir and it would find a publisher. Then I wrote the manuscript, and the right publisher stepped into my life. Now I wish boldly. I say the thing out loud, and I go after it.

That’s exactly how Paisley went after hers. She didn’t hedge. She named it, in front of everybody, and trusted that somebody who loved her was listening.

Children ask

Jesus told the grown-ups to let the little children come to Him, because the kingdom belongs to such as these. I used to think that was about innocence. Watching Paisley, I think it might be about boldness. Children ask.

So here’s to my granddaughter, four years old and already wishing boldly.

Say the wish. Say it out loud,
even if it’s small, even if it’s pancakes.

Nobody in that room thought less of her for it. We just loved her more.

And the next time Paisley spends the night, Mimi is making pancakes.

Some wishes Mimi gets to grant.

What’s the wish you’ve been keeping to yourself? Say it here, out loud, even if it’s small. I read every one, and I’ll say mine too.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

October 7, 2026
I Don’t Bounce Back Anymore

This piece talks about living after a stroke and inside an autoimmune flare, including medication and chronic pain. Nothing graphic.

Toni Peters. September 30, 2026.

I have always been the person who bounces back.

Flu, surgery, injury, whatever it was, I’d go down hard for a few days, feel sorry for myself for about an hour, and then I’d be back on my feet before the doctor expected me. My body and I had an understanding. I asked a lot of it, and it delivered. Get knocked down, get back up, keep moving. That was the deal, and it held for most of my life.

The deal has changed.

I had a stroke. On top of that, I’m in the middle of a flare from an autoimmune disease I was diagnosed with last winter. The two of them together have handed me a body I’m still getting to know. One that does not bounce, does not rush, and does not care what my calendar says.

The naps

I take one every single day now. Not because I’m lazy and not because I feel like it. Because I run out. My energy is finite in a way it never used to be. I get a set amount each morning, and when it’s gone, it’s gone, and no amount of willpower refills the tank. So I sleep. The second my head touches the pillow, I’m out. There’s no lying there sorting through my to-do list. My body takes what it needs and doesn’t ask permission. And here’s the part I didn’t expect: I wake up rested. Genuinely ready for whatever the rest of the day holds. The nap is the toll I pay to get through the day standing up.

The medications

The picture with this piece is all of them, turned around so you can read the labels. I didn’t do that for shock value. I did it because I still can’t quite believe the count myself, and looking at them lined up like that is the most honest way I know to show you what my mornings and evenings look like now.

All of them. Turned around so you can read the labels.

One of them is a weekly injection. It was created for cancer patients. I don’t have cancer, but the drug does something I need, so I take it. It helps. It also lowers my immune system, which means the thing keeping me functional is the same thing leaving me exposed. That’s the kind of math I do now.

Everything helps and costs at the same time.
You learn to hold both.

The flare brings pain I don’t have a polite word for. Extreme is the honest one. There’s weakness on my left side that wasn’t there before. And a new trick my body picked up: I stand up and the room tilts, my head goes light, and I have to wait a second for the world to settle before I move. I’ve never had that in my life. Little things I never thought about, standing, walking across a room, getting through an afternoon, are things I think about now.

The people who bend

None of this is happening to me alone, and that’s the part I don’t want to skip past.

My family has been steady through all of it. They’ve learned to read me, to be flexible with how I’m feeling on a given day, to shift plans when I need to lie down and not make me feel like a burden for it. They don’t hover and they don’t panic. They just adjust. When your body stops being reliable, having people around you who bend instead of break is worth more than I can put a number on.

Why I’m writing this

I’m not doing it for sympathy. I don’t want the comments full of I’m-so-sorrys, and I’m not fishing for anybody to tell me how strong I am. I’m writing it because I’m sitting here looking at how much my life has changed in a matter of months, and I need to say it out loud. The woman who bounced back from everything is learning to live inside a body that doesn’t. That’s not a small adjustment. It’s a whole new way of being a person.

And I know there’s more coming. That’s the truth I’m still sitting with. This isn’t a story where I’ve reached the other side and I’m reporting back with the lesson tied up neat. I’m in it. There are more changes ahead of me, some I can see coming and some I can’t, and I’m learning to make peace with not knowing their shape yet.

Here’s what I’ve figured out so far, and it’s not much, but it’s real. I can’t muscle my way through this the way I muscled through everything else. The old strategy, grit your teeth, push harder, refuse to slow down, doesn’t work on this one. It asks something different of me. It asks me to listen to my body instead of overriding it. To take the nap even when I don’t want to. To let the people who love me help. And to stop measuring a good day by how much I got done, and start measuring it by whether I reach the end of the day with something left for tomorrow.

I used to think strength meant never needing to stop.
I’m learning it means knowing when you do.

For most of my life, my health was simple. I got sick, I got better, I moved on. Those days are behind me. What I’ve got now doesn’t fit on a single line. It’s a stroke and an autoimmune disease and a cabinet full of medications and a body relearning how to be a body, all at once.

It’s not simple. It’s complex.

And I’m learning how to live it.

If you’ve had to learn a new body, tell me one thing that helped. Not sympathy. Something that worked. I read every one.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

September 30, 2026
What If Pumpkin Spice Could Change the World?

Toni Peters. September 22, 2026.

It’s September 15th. I know this because my phone told me, and because every establishment within a thirty-mile radius has declared it, officially, fall.

Never mind that it’s ninety-four degrees outside. Never mind that I’m sweating through my shirt in the Target parking lot. The signs have spoken. Pumpkin. Spice. Season. Is. Here.

And I have questions.

We have lost our ever-loving minds

Somewhere, at some point, some person in some test kitchen took a squash. A squash! And turned it into a personality. And it worked. Boy, did it work. What started as one seasonal drink became a billion-dollar empire and, I’m convinced, a national personality disorder. We have pumpkin spice coffee, fine. We also have pumpkin spice cereal, pumpkin spice hummus, pumpkin spice dog treats, and pumpkin spice deodorant. Somebody out there is spraying gourd under their arms and calling it self-care.

We have lost our ever-loving minds. Completely.

There are grown adults setting phone reminders for the drink to come back. There are group texts, I’ve seen them, with a countdown. People who can’t agree on anything, who won’t so much as make eye contact at Thanksgiving, will drop every last grievance the second that orange cup returns. First sip and they close their eyes like they’re hearing from God.

I roll my eyes at all of it. Every year.

And then every year, around the last week of October, I catch myself.

The wanting is the whole event

Because here’s what I notice when I stop rolling my eyes long enough to look. For a few weeks, otherwise cynical, exhausted, buttoned-up people let themselves want something. Out loud. With their whole chest. No apology. A grown woman will sit in a drive-thru line twenty cars deep for a paper cup of warm sugar and feel not one ounce of shame about it. Do you know how rare that is?

We’re so careful the rest of the year. We downplay what we want. We act like we don’t need much, like wanting something small and good and a little bit silly is something to be embarrassed about. Heads down. Wanting nothing out loud.

Then fall shows up and hands us permission to be delighted by a beverage. And we take it! We take it every single time.

The pumpkin’s just the excuse.
The wanting is the whole event.

So maybe the mania is trying to tell us something.

What if we let ourselves want the other stuff that loud? The rest. The quiet morning with nobody needing anything from us. The phone call to the friend we keep meaning to call. The dream we’ve got filed under “someday” because saying it out loud feels like too much. What if we chased those the way we chase a limited-time latte?

I’m not telling you pumpkin spice is going to fix the world. It can barely fix a Tuesday.

But a little thing that gives millions of tired people permission to feel good, together, for no reason other than it’s here and it’s warm and they love it? That might be the most powerful thing on the whole menu.

So enjoy your latte. Set the countdown. And while you’ve got permission to want something small and warm with your whole heart, go want something bigger the exact same way.

See you in the drive-thru line.

What’s the small thing you’re unashamed to want this fall? Tell me in the comments. I’ll go first.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

September 23, 2026
It Took a Stroke to Make Me Rest.

This piece talks about a recent stroke and what came after. Nothing graphic.

Toni Peters. September 16, 2026.

This morning I sat with a group of women for two hours and listened to them talk about their lives. The challenges, mostly. There was a lot more challenge than opportunity in that room, if I’m honest.

One word kept surfacing. Boundaries. Who has them, who doesn’t, who’s scared to death to set one. Every woman had a version of the same story.

But there was something underneath the boundaries that I couldn’t shake. These women were tired. Not sleepy. Tired all the way down. The kind of tired that’s been building for years and has nowhere to go.

I know that tired now. I met it thirty-two days ago.

You’ve had a stroke

I woke up not feeling right. Figured I was dehydrated, so I drove myself to the ER and asked them to hang a bag of fluids. The doctor ran some tests and came back with a sentence I’ll hear for the rest of my life. “You’re not dehydrated. You’ve had a stroke.”

I was stunned. The next twenty-four hours were the worst of my life. The worst headache I’ve ever had. Throwing up long after there was anything left to throw up. I never once pictured a stroke into my life. But who does?

Here’s the part that matters. In the days after, there were mornings I could barely get out of bed. And mornings I knew better than to try. And for once, I listened to my body. It was telling me it needed to rest. It needed to heal. It needed time to make sense of what had happened and what it meant for the rest of my life.

For once. Sit with those two words, because they’re the whole thing.

It took a stroke to make me rest. Not a hard week. Not a warning. A stroke.

My body had to take the choice clean out of my hands before I’d finally give it what it had been asking me for all along.

And I don’t think I’m rare. I think I’m the rule.

The two kinds of hard

Somewhere we learned to treat exhaustion like proof we’re doing it right. Like the tired is the receipt for a life well spent. We wear it. We compare it. A lot of us women especially were raised to believe that suffering and virtue are the same thing. That the good woman is the one still standing after everybody else sat down, running on fumes, smiling about it.

So we stop telling the difference between the two kinds of hard.

Some hard is worth every bit of what it costs you. Raising your kids. Building something that matters. Loving people who don’t make it easy. That hard leaves you tired in a way that means something.

And some hard is just grinding you into the floor. Taking and taking and giving nothing back. We keep carrying it because we think putting it down would make us weak. Or selfish. Or a bad mother, a bad wife, a bad Christian.

Most women were never given permission to even ask which one they’re in.

I see it in my own girls. My oldest is trying to wrap her mind around her boy, my grandson, with a broken neck from a football tackle. My youngest is a young mama raising two toddlers on her own with next to nothing to work with. They’re tired down to the bone, both of them, and they’re too far inside it to see it.

I keep asking myself. How did we get here? And the bigger one. How do we carry what life throws at us without it driving us into the ground?

Show me where it says that

This isn’t a faith problem. I want to be clear, because I already know what somebody’s going to say.

Somebody’s going to tell me God will never put more on us than we can stand.

And I’m going to ask them to show me where it says that in His Word.

Because it isn’t there. The verse people reach for is about temptation. That He won’t let you be tempted past what you can bear, and He’ll give you a way out. It says nothing about grief. Nothing about a wrecked body. Nothing about a woman so worn down she can’t lift her head off the pillow. Somebody took a promise about temptation and turned it into a command to suffer without a word. And that lie has kept tired women tired for a very long time.

God never asked you to be a martyr to your own life.

So here’s where I’ve landed, thirty-two days in.

The difference between hard and harmful starts with one question you’re allowed to ask. Is this worth what it’s taking from me? Or is it just wearing me down to nothing?

You don’t have to wait for your body to answer it for you. I did. I don’t recommend it.

Rest isn’t the reward you get after you collapse.
You’re allowed to take it before. You’re allowed to take it now.

Which kind of hard are you carrying right now? Tell me in the comments. You can be as vague as you need to be. I read every one.

If you ever wake up not feeling right the way I did, call 911. Don’t drive yourself. I got lucky, and I’d rather you didn’t have to.

Thirty-two days ago my body took the choice out of my hands.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

September 16, 2026
I Knew at Sixteen. I Didn’t Start Until Fifty-Seven.

On purpose, fear, and the forty-one years in between.

Toni Peters. September 10, 2026.

The room was never empty. I just wouldn’t open the door.

There’s a thing I knew I was supposed to do. I knew it at sixteen, standing in the middle of my own life with a certainty I couldn’t explain and didn’t question. And then I didn’t begin it until I was fifty-seven.

Do that math with me. Forty-one years.

The writing was never my problem

I’ve read a lot of essays about the writing life lately, now that I’m finally living one. Most of them are about craft. Discipline. Word counts. How to build the habit, how to beat the blank page, how to find an hour a day you didn’t think you had. Good advice, all of it. But none of it explains a forty-one-year gap, because the writing was never my problem.

The not-writing was.

And not-writing, it turns out, is not a craft failure. You can’t fix it with a better morning routine or a word-count tracker. Not-writing is a fear. Mine had a very specific shape, and it took me most of my life to see it clearly.

I was afraid of being seen.

Good at being small

Not afraid of failing. I’d failed at plenty and survived all of it. This was different. I had spent a long time getting good at being small. Being easy to overlook. Moving through rooms without leaving a mark, because somewhere along the way I’d learned that being noticed cost more than being invisible. I was good at it. It was a skill I’d practiced for decades.

And a book is the opposite of that skill. A book is standing in the middle of the room and saying, out loud, in permanent ink: look at me. Listen to me. I have something to say, and I think it matters. For a woman who had organized her whole life around not being noticed, that wasn’t a writing assignment. It was a terror.

So I didn’t write it. For forty-one years I didn’t write it. And I told myself a hundred reasonable things about why. I was busy. I was raising kids. I was surviving. The timing wasn’t right. All true, and none of it the truth. The truth was simpler and harder. I was afraid to be seen.

It doesn’t fade. It waits.

But here’s what I’ve learned about purpose, and it’s the thing I most want to hand you.

It doesn’t fade. It just waits for you.

All those years I wasn’t writing, the thing I was supposed to write didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t expire. It didn’t move on to a braver person. It sat there, patient, waiting for me.

Atlanta, last October. She told us to do one thing, right there in our seats. So I did.

A room in Atlanta

What finally moved me was a room in Atlanta last October.

A women’s leadership forum. The speaker was good, but I want to be honest: she wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before. Dreams. Purpose. Becoming. The usual, and I mean that with love, because I say the usual too.

And then she did something almost nobody does. She didn’t just tell us to dream. She gave us something to do. A small, concrete act, right there in our seats. Not someday. Not when we got home. Now.

And I did it.

That’s the whole hinge of my story, and it’s almost embarrassing how small it was. I stopped listening and I did one thing. And something shifted that I didn’t even notice in the moment. I noticed it in the weeks after, in my own behavior. I was making different decisions. I’d stopped operating from small and hidden. I was moving like a woman who had a purpose to fulfill. Because I did, and I’d finally, physically, done something about it instead of just feeling moved by the idea of it.

I didn’t decide to become bold. I acted once, from purpose, not from courage. And boldness showed up afterward, like it had been waiting for me to go first.

I acted once, from purpose, not from courage. Boldness showed up afterward.

The courage was already in the room

Here’s what I didn’t understand until later. The purpose had been living in me the whole time, waiting behind a door in a room I’d closed off years ago. Taking one action didn’t make me brave. It turned on the light. And there it all was. Everything I’d need, standing in a room I’d been too afraid to walk back into. The courage didn’t come first. It was already in the room. I just couldn’t see it until I stopped being too afraid to look.

I wrote a while back about Basil King and a story in 2 Kings, about chariots on a hill that were there the whole time, that a terrified man simply couldn’t see. My purpose was like that. It was there the entire time. Everything I needed to fulfill it was there the entire time. I just couldn’t see any of it, because fear had my eyes locked on the army in front of me instead of the help on the hills.

Fear does that. It doesn’t erase your purpose. It just stands directly between you and your view of it.

The chariots were on the hill the whole time. Fear just had him looking the other way.

To the writer who isn’t writing

So let me say something to the writer who isn’t writing. The one with a thing inside her she knows she’s supposed to make, who keeps not making it.

Maybe it isn’t discipline. Maybe it isn’t time or talent or the right planner. Maybe it’s fear, and maybe it’s the specific fear I carried: not of the empty page, but of the person who might read the full one. Some call it writer’s block. Sometimes it’s just this. The terror of being read. Of being seen. Of standing in the room and saying I have something to say.

The page never hurt anyone. Being seen feels like it might. That’s the fear. And the only way through it is the same way I got through mine. You do one thing. You go first. You let the boldness catch up to you afterward.

I don’t recommend the forty-one-year plan

Mine waited forty-one years, and I’ll tell you plainly, I don’t recommend the forty-one-year plan. Every year you make it wait is a year you don’t get back. The thing you’re meant to make is still there, sitting on the hill, patient as ever. The clock that’s running isn’t on your purpose. It’s on you.

It’s not going to write itself. So go at it boldly, while the going is yours to do.

Purpose doesn’t fade. It waits.

What’s the thing you’ve known you were supposed to do? Tell me in the comments. You can be as vague as you need to be. I read every one.

About the author

I write about women who survive things and become someone new on the other side. I’m a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a grandmother who answers to Mimi, and the founder of Warrior Storytellers. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma, where I write before the sun is all the way up and spend most of what’s left of my free time on the water.

Something’s coming.

September 10, 2026