When life goes up in flames 🔥

How to navigate (and embrace!) uncertainty with Maddie Burton

When tragedy strikes, how do you transform what remains into something beautiful?

It’s been nine years since my husband’s cancer diagnosis, the death of my father-in-law, and my end of my career as an emergency planner. While I don’t wish these events on anyone, I can say with confidence that without them, it’s likely

The Write-Life Balance

wouldn’t exist.

So when I stumbled across

Maddie Burton

‘s

Your Five-Year Plan

, it felt like I had found a kindred spirit—another Type A (financial) planner who had experienced loss and felt called to document her lessons learned for the benefit of others dealing with their own life transitions. On the latest interview for

The Write-Life Balance

, Maddie and I discuss:

• The four key skills she adopted while handling her mother’s end-of-life care, divorce, and job loss (and which ones she deems her superpower and kryptonite)

• How faux fur blankets remind her to live in better balance between today and tomorrow.

• Why “good financial investments” are different for everyone, and what to consider when planning for your future.

How to Navigate Uncertainty with Maddie Burton

WRITE 👩‍💻 (7:20)

After Maddie separated from her husband, her mother’s cancer returned, quickly leading to hospice care and her passing—and then the termination of Maddie’s job three weeks later. To cope with her grief, she started publishing personal essays on

Your Five-Year Plan

, eventually landing a feature on Substack Reads.

[I write] about uncertainty from a place of being a student, not—not as someone who’s figured it all out, but as someone who’s learning how to embrace it.

LIFE 🏡 (4:55)

In addition to being a writer and ex-financial planner, Maddie considers herself a student of web development and design, an athlete* (specifically, running and weight-lifting), cat mom, girlfriend, daughter, and sister. She’s a seven-year resident of the Pacific Northwest, but also holds strong ties to Chicago (her hometown) and Washington D.C. (where she went to college.)

BALANCE 🎁

After working as a financial planner and realizing her 68-year-old mom would barely reap the financial benefits of her retirement savings, Maddie concluded that it’s important to give gifts to Present Self—while ensuring it doesn’t inflict harm to your Future Self.

[Evolutionarily], we’re always thinking about what could go wrong, but we so
rarely consider, “What ways could things go right?”

PARTING ADVICE 💭 (59:56)

For anyone who wants to take on an ambitious goal, but fears the uncertainty that comes with it, Maddie points out that unexpected life transitions we fear the most (death, job loss, chronic illness) are out of our control. However, she also points out that when you have the chance to experiment with uncertainty, it’s nice to embrace the opportunity—as long as you have a certainty anchor in place.

When there’s a lot that’s up in the air in one arena of your life, it just feels so much better when you have Chicken Soup for the Soul in another.

READING 📚

Chris Anselmo

(who writes

Hello, Adversity

) and Maddie just started an Uncertainty And Resilience Book Club, which currently consists of them texting each other "What chapter are you on?" and Maddie trying in vain to catch up—they just started Master of Change by Brad Stulberg. Maddie is also reading Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas when she can't fall asleep, which has been a lovely reward for her insomnia.

STREAMING ⏯

It's awards season, and based on the movies she’s seen so far, Maddie is rooting for Past Lives and Anatomy of a Fall to take home armfuls of Oscars! Maddie also just finished the TV series Loudermilk.

COOKING

Maddie and I bonded over our love of the Instant Pot, and these two protein-rich recipes have been essential to her diet since taking up weight-lifting: chipotle-honey chicken tacos, and chicken tortellini soup. She’s embarrassed to go on record recommending cheap plastic stuff from Amazon, but finds this chicken shredder to be ridiculously useful.

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To learn more about Maddie’s work on grief, loss, and uncertainty, make sure to subscribe to

Your Five-Year Plan

, which she updates weekly-ish.

Hope you enjoyed this episode,

Sophia :)

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P.S. It’s been months since I spoke with

Heidi Fiedler

and I’m still amazed at how well her journaling technique works—my latest parenting hack is jotting down scene ideas while my daughter splashes in the bathtub. In case you missed it, here’s the interview.