Aging with Purpose and Passion

Maggie Mills: Embracing Resilience and Storytelling Through Tragedy

• Beverley Glazer • Episode 106

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Growing up with a significantly older brother in Baltimore, Maggie Mills became a master of self-entertainment, nurturing a fierce independence and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Join us as we uncover how her educational journey across five different colleges fueled her passion for storytelling, inspired by the legendary photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. Maggie's career is a testament to resilience and adaptability, balancing motherhood and a sales job with a deep-rooted love for writing. Her story is not just about crafting narratives for others as a ghostwriter and author coach but also about living an extraordinary life shaped by the power of storytelling.

In a poignant turn, the episode shifts to a personal tragedy that became a cornerstone for transformation. The loss of a loved one in a motorcycle accident ignited a purpose to help others share their stories, emphasizing that every narrative holds unique value. We delve into the profound ways storytelling can connect and heal, underscoring the impact of small, positive interactions. Encouragement flows through these conversations, offering listeners a reminder that every story matters, and the connections we foster, whether through writing or simple acts of kindness, have the power to deeply touch lives.

Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please drop a review and send it to a friend - and you may also be interested in listening to "Don't Be Caged By Your Age" another empowering podcast for women

Resources:
Maggie Mills
maggie@maggiemills.com
MaggieMills.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggiemillswriter/

Beverley Glazer
https://reinventimpossible.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleyglazer/
https://www.facebook.com/beverley.glazer
FACEBOOK GROUP: https://www.facebook.com/groups/womenover50rock
https://www.instagram.com/beverleyglazer_reinvention/

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Announcer:

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host. Psychotherapist coach and empowerment expert Beverley Glaser. Therapist, coach and empowerment expert Beverley.

Beverley Glazer:

Glaser, what if sharing your story could change someone else's life, not just your own? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazer, and I empower older women to overcome challenges in business and to renew their purpose and passion in their life as well, and you can find me on reinventimpossiblecom. In this episode, you're going to meet the most published author that you've never known, and that's because she's a ghostwriter and she's also an author coach. Maggie Mills has decades of experience behind the scenes making other people shine, but she also has a huge story of her own and a powerful perspective on resilience and personal growth. So keep listening, maggie, welcome.

Maggie Mills:

Thank you so much for this opportunity to have a chat and thank you for that kind introduction. I'm impressed with myself. Can you always introduce me, please? Can you always introduce me please?

Beverley Glazer:

Well, Maggie, tell us about your childhood growing up in Baltimore. Were you an only child? What was going on there?

Maggie Mills:

I have a brother who is 13 years older than I am, so by the time I came along, he was not home, as most teenagers are, and most of the children in the neighborhood were his age, and I left to my own devices to entertain myself. For the most part which is a wonderful thing I wandered all over the neighborhood.

Beverley Glazer:

Not today, maggie, not today. Yeah, exactly From house to house visiting, not today Exactly From house to house, visiting all the neighbors Different times, much different times. But you left home when you were 17 years old. And you not only left home to go to college, but you went to five different colleges.

Maggie Mills:

Tell us about that. I'm a naturally curious person and I used to be embarrassed by that, because everyone else I knew went to one college, had one major, stayed there the whole time, joined a sorority or fraternity, knew those people the rest of their lives and my feeling was I want to learn what I don't know and what is the most challenging thing I can study right now. So I wound up going from school to school studying everything that interested me, from Chinese history to drafting to the fiction novel painting, and one of the universities actually gave me a degree.

Beverley Glazer:

I'd see my parents going crazy if I wanted to do that. They'd just go crazy. So you were very lucky. But why did you land on communications and journalism? What drew you to that?

Maggie Mills:

Oh, my goodness, I had discovered a woman through a book. Of course Her name is Margaret Burke White. She was a photojournalist during World War II before, during and after. And of course I'm called Maggie after my grandmother, but my name is Margaret. And well, we're from the South. It's Margaret Allen.

Maggie Mills:

So this woman shared my name and I just fell in love with her story. She was fearless, created her own photography career and both of my parents were photographers. So I was born with hypo in my veins and enlargers in the basement. So I loved the medium and I fell in love with the way she led her life. She would do anything to get the photograph. She was hanging out of the doors of bombers to get pictures flying, like everything. When the Chrysler building was built in New York, she had an apartment on the top floor and there's a famous picture of her sitting on the Chrysler. Is it a falcon? That's on the top of that building. I need to check that detail.

Maggie Mills:

So she sparked the belief in me that I could support myself doing something I loved. So I chased after a journalism degree and I started studying photography while I was still in high school. I started college. I couldn't wait the day of my senior prom. My project was due for critique at the college. Actually, it was the day after the prom, so I was still wearing my prom clothes. I grabbed my portfolio and raced down to the college to show my pictures. A book really set the pace for my life.

Beverley Glazer:

Yes, it's amazing the influence that it has on a young child. It could be a book, a film, something that'll just say you know, this is what I want to do, this is what's going to grab me. And you got married, you had a son, you later divorced and now you're a single mom. And how were you able to support that child? Through journalism?

Maggie Mills:

Oh my goodness. Let me say I got work in sales because that allowed me to have a flexible schedule so that I could still go be class mother a couple of days a week. I was doing outside sales, so I was on the road, but I had a very flexible schedule and a somewhat steady income there for a little bit, and so that was a wonderful opportunity. This was in the time of pagers, and so my son grew up seeing me constantly on the phone with a pager stuck to me, and there were occasions when he was in the backseat of the Subaru. And honey, we have to drop off something to a client, let's just run right in something to a client, I'm good, let's just run right in.

Beverley Glazer:

So you're all over the place, but you managed to do that for sure. And then, how did you get into book publishing from there? I mean, you know sales marketing and now book publishing. Oh my goodness.

Maggie Mills:

I um and I took what I studied journalism in high school and, briefly, one of the 400 things I studied in college managed to land a job at an ad agency and I was doing some writing for them. It wasn't my primary job, but you know how it is when you work someplace, if you show any aptitude whatsoever, they're going to give it to you. So I did some writing there and then I started doing it as a side gig and worked for a newspaper and it just. I just kept writing more and more. Eventually I was hired by a publisher and started working for them and I side gigged more publishers where I was doing a lot of rewriting and people just said they would ask me can you write this? And I always said yes.

Maggie Mills:

The first time I wrote a press release I said, oh sure. And I went and researched how to write a press release. I didn't say I've never done that before. And the same thing happened with books. I was doing a lot of heavy rewrite and one of my publishers said, oh, we've got a client who needs a ghostwriter. Do you want to do it? I said absolutely. And that's how it got started and I just wrote more and more.

Beverley Glazer:

One thing leads to another, and then, in your 50s, you decided to travel across country alone. What possessed you to do that?

Maggie Mills:

Oh, my goodness. Oh, it was something I'd always wanted to do, and one of the editors I worked with had posted a picture of waking up on Malibu Beach. I found out you could sleep on the beach in Malibu and by this point my son was out of the house and I was living on the East Coast and I'd lost my partner. So I had nothing but freedom and I thought, well, what am I waiting for? I have no idea what I'm doing, so let's do this. I had a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I had my partner's old camping gear I'd never been camping in my life and the Jeep at that point was already on its second engine and I fearlessly jumped in. And the day I told my son who's extremely supportive, he's the same as I am he left home at 17 too. He said there's one thing I'm going to ask you. He took me out to lunch. He goes I want you to get an Instagram and I want you to post every day so I know you haven't been eaten by a bear. Thank you, those are very loving words. I appreciate that and I'm so grateful.

Maggie Mills:

I started Instagram because its location mechanism works better than GPS, and there were a couple of times I didn't know where I was and I would post to Instagram and it would give me options to choose for, like pinning my location. So that's how I found out. I was in Colorado and I stopped to visit people along the way and a friend of mine messaged me and she said Do you want to pick me up in Dallas? I'd like to go part of the way with you. I said, of course, hop in, the dog will make room for you. I took the dog too. I'm not going to leave it. I'd leave the child behind. He was an adult but I'd say, I mean, he's good, he's on his own.

Maggie Mills:

And she rode with me between Dallas and San Diego with a pit stop in Gallup, new Mexico. When what was that big thing? We broke on the car, we busted an axle in Gallup, new Mexico, but that didn't stop us. We just kept on going, kept on going. We dropped the car in a repair shop and rented a van, continued out to San Diego, where we barely made it to the airport to drop her off, to fly back home, and I started zigzagging back across the country in this rented van, dipped down back into New Mexico to pick up the Jeep, and it was wonderful. I recommend it to everyone. When I meet young people first starting out, the advice I give them is not go to college, not get a good job. My advice is travel across the country.

Beverley Glazer:

Drew, but when you did it you were in your 50s. And then, when you got back, did you go right back into ghostwriting again.

Maggie Mills:

Well, I worked while I was on the road because I am self-employed so I do take time for myself, but not long periods of time. Plus, I love what I'm doing. It doesn't seem like work to me. So I at that point working from the road was not as cool as it is now, so I was sort of hiding a little bit what I was doing. I didn't tell everybody. So I was. I was working at truck stops and trying to catch signals so I could send content back to people, and so in signals when you get out in the middle of the country reception isn't great. So there was a lot of like driving around to places so I could grab a signal and keep working Campsites. I've worked in cabins and you know the old joke, like in a van down by the river. That's me yeah.

Beverley Glazer:

And so you were writing all the time and going and meeting people and discovering what does ghostwriting do for you? How do you discover yourself through that process? Oh my goodness.

Maggie Mills:

I find ghostwriting teaches me a lot. First of all, it connects me with very different people from all over the world and by doing that and intentionally working with people who are very different than I am, it helps me develop more compassion for people. Not only do they have a different viewpoint, but they've had such different and, in many cases, harrowing, frightening, inspiring experiences that I just I gasp at their resiliency. I express gratitude for my own wonderfully fortunate, blessed life and I feel like it's a blessing to help people get their stories out there.

Maggie Mills:

I'm a cheerleader. I just I think it's so important that we share these stories and because I don't get credit for this and I don't want credit these are not my stories, I just help get them out there. It helps me keep the ego in check because the goal is to let them and help them all my authors appear in the best light, and it's not about me, it's not about what I want. It's my job to give them the most professional product, but it's not about getting my way. So that ego, you got to park that over there.

Beverley Glazer:

Fairly love it, but it wasn't always easy. The love of your life had a tragic accident and you were usually on that motorcycle thousands of hours. The two of you were on together, but that day you weren't. And so what happened there? When you were spared, did you come up with some kind of reason why you were spared? What was going on, like what happened there?

Maggie Mills:

It took a while to get over the shock. I was absolutely stunned, and I know many of the people listening or watching right now. They've lost someone they've cared about and they understand what it feels like to be stunned. I felt like gee, is this what a zombie is? Because my body is moving. I'm showing up for work, my mouth is moving, words are coming out, but me is somewhere very distant. So I went through the motions and accepted invitations to go everywhere. So I didn't stay home and turn the house into a shrine and get horribly depressed, but I did question.

Maggie Mills:

I thought I didn't have survivor's guilt. I wasn't with him the day he had the accident. I was waiting for him to get home from work. I mean, I was home from work, he was out doing the marketing and so the middle of the night, when I came home from the hospital and I'm trying to process that he wasn't coming back, my first thought was here is something I can't fix, because my whole life I'd spent okay.

Maggie Mills:

No matter what goes wrong, there's a solution, we can fix this, there's a way around it. Well, there was no way of bringing him back from death that I had to accept. I have zero control over this. He's gone. And then I started immediately thinking if I wasn't with him, since so many times I was, there has to be a reason, big, big cosmic reason. You know I supposed to be doing something. Okay, I've already raised my son, I've had a great career. I don't have a medical degree, I'm not going to cure a disease, I don't have the energy to start a massive gazillion dollar nonprofit. So I would come home from work every day and flop back on the bed and kind of think, okay, what's the process for this?

Beverley Glazer:

Well, what are you good at?

Maggie Mills:

What do you like? You know those typical things. And after a few weeks, what rose up for me is I love making people feel better. I love making people smile in the most tiny, tiny ways. I'm not one of those people who, when you meet her at a business group, I want to change 1 million lives. Well, that's aspirational, but I do not have the energy to change a million lives and, trust me, you don't want this touching a million lives.

Maggie Mills:

And I thought what I love and what I feel I can accomplish is those tiny little moments, like when you're in the checkout at the grocery store and the cashier's really grumpy. Well, first of all, I feel for her because I'm thinking, oh my gosh, she's probably tired, her feet hurt, maybe the boss isn't nice. You know somebody, you know people in retail aren't always nice to you and I just love finding something to comment on or just making them smile. And I thought you know what? Maybe there's a place in the world for the people who can touch one person one moment at a time. So we decided that's what I will do. It is great for people with a short attention span, like you got me for 60 seconds and oh my gosh, just to see somebody smile, and it's just the tiniest things like thanking them for taking extra care when they wrap up something fragile for you, or yeah, my gosh, look at those nails, they are so pretty.

Beverley Glazer:

Just an appreciation for what they're doing exactly just slowing down. And being nice doesn't take much.

Maggie Mills:

It means so much and also it'll pull you out of your own mood if you sort of have that objective. We all have things that make us a little bit cranky from time to time, and although I am obnoxiously perky, I am not like this all the time. I face the same challenges as everybody else. But I also don't want to project it on them either, because my challenging day is not their problem.

Beverley Glazer:

A hundred percent. And let me ask you, because everybody says you know, oh, I have a book, I have a story, everyone has a story and everybody wants to get it out there. However, when they're looking at their story, what advice can you tell someone who has a story, wants to write Maggie, but they feel that they're either overwhelmed or they're just not worthy because there's so many books out there and everyone has a better story. You know that kind of thing. What would you tell that person?

Maggie Mills:

Oh, my goodness. Well, first of all, your story matters. Your story is unique. I work with a number of authors who are writing their stories about their journey through cancer and recovery. Sadly, this has affected many, many people. We, every one of us, knows someone. Someone in our family has been touched by it. We've been touched by it. So you would think every possible book has probably been written about this. That's not true.

Maggie Mills:

Think about when you become interested in a topic. Do you go to just one resource? Do you watch just one YouTube video? Do you get one book out of the library? Do you talk to one person? No, you seek out several resources and several voices, because everyone's experience of it is different, and one of them will speak to you. So, as the author, you are going to speak to someone. You.

Maggie Mills:

Your aim should not be to speak to everyone in the world one person. If you can help one person on their journey, then the effort is worth it and your story is worth it and it it helps us absorb what we're going through and see how we can use it in a positive way. Sometimes negative things they're very painful. We don't see any use in them, no reason. And why did this happen to me, me and when we start thinking outside of ourselves how can I describe this to someone else? How can what I've been through maybe save someone else from making the unwise decisions I did? Then you start to see the value in in your own story. It helps you process everything you've been through and that's the thing it accomplishes You're helping strangers. It's a legacy for the people around you. They want to know you and you are leaving something and a way for people to understand you and identify with you.

Beverley Glazer:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Maggie. Maggie, where can people find you?

Maggie Mills:

Oh, email is the best place. I will leave you websites and YouTubes and LinkedIn and all that, but the email is pretty easy. It's Maggie at MaggieMillscom and that's M-A-G-G-I-E at M-A-G-G-I-E-M-I-L-L-Scom. I'd love to hear from all of you. I enjoy that so much.

Beverley Glazer:

That's really perfect. Maggie Mills is the most published author that you have never known and, by the way, now you do know her, and the reason for that is because she's a ghostwriter and she's also an author coach. She spent many, many decades behind the scenes helping other people, and if you didn't catch her links, they're going to be on my site too, which is reinventimpossiblecom. If you've enjoyed this episode, you may also like Don't Be Caged by my Age with Andy Lyons, and I want you to check that out. That's going to be in the links below too.

Beverley Glazer:

And now, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you really passionate about your life? Get my weekly self-coaching tips to empower you through your journey. That link, you guessed it. It's in the show notes below. You can connect with me, Beverley Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook that's Women Over 50 Rock, and you can also get back to me for a quick Zoom if you think that I can add a little joy into your life. So that's going to be in the links right below. I want to thank you for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Subscribe, so you don't miss out on the next one, and send this episode to your friends, and always remember that you only have one life, so live it with purpose and change.

Announcer:

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossiblecom and, while you're there, join our newsletter Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life.