About Nicole

I’m Nicole, the woman behind Life After the Before.

I grew up Catholic in a big family and spent much of my early life believing there was a fairly predictable order to things: education, career, marriage, children, and eventually whatever came next.

My life did not follow that order.

In my twenties, I joined the Peace Corps and moved to Mali, an experience that changed the direction of my life. I later earned a master’s degree in International Management, married, became a mother, and spent years focused on work, family, and keeping all the pieces together.

Then a lot of those pieces fell apart.

I made serious choices that I deeply regret, was convicted of a federal crime, and spent roughly two and a half years incarcerated. Coming home was not the clean fresh start I once imagined it would be. I had to rebuild relationships, find work with a criminal record, figure out who I was outside of prison, live with the consequences of what I had done, and learn how to participate in a world that had kept moving while I was gone.

Reentry also brought struggles I didn’t expect. Social anxiety made ordinary things harder. Finding steady work was humbling and, at times, incredibly discouraging. My marriage had effectively ended. My daughters were becoming independent adults. I was in my fifties asking a question I never expected to be asking at this age:

Now what?

Faith became important to me again during those years, although not in a neat or simple way. I prayed, doubted, read, meditated, questioned myself and tried to understand how faith, accountability and forgiveness could coexist. I came to believe that my past had to remain true without becoming the only true thing about me.

Life After the Before grew out of that season.

I kept meeting women who were asking their own version of “Now what?” Divorce. Empty nests. Career changes. Financial setbacks. Caregiving. Loss. Starting over after fifty when the life you thought you would have is no longer the life in front of you.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m still rebuilding too.

That may be exactly why I wanted to create this space.

Life After the Before is a place to talk honestly about what happens after the thing that changed everything, to share practical resources, and eventually, I hope, to help women find one another.