In this impromptu video filmed in a Paris park, Mary (known as Mary in Paris) shares her personal story of how she turned a lifelong dream of living in Paris into reality and reinvented her career after being fired at age 54. She recounts her early fascination with Paris at 19, marrying in 1997, buying a tiny Paris apartment in 2008, and the financial and family crises of 2015‑2016 that led to her husband leaving his job and her own dismissal for confronting illegal practices at a startup. Faced with limited savings, Mary decided to become a life coach, announcing the new identity and quickly generating income. When the cost of living in New York became unsustainable, she and her husband chose to move permanently to Paris, navigating paperwork over a year and relocating in March 2017. Throughout, she emphasizes that fear is meaningless, urging viewers to ignore it, act on their innate gifts, and focus on the present experience rather than distant goals. She asks the audience to reflect on what they truly want to do, stresses that age and circumstances are not barriers, and invites comments and subscriptions.
Chapters
Hello, bonjour, it's Mary, also known as Mary in Paris, and I was in my old neighborhood here in Paris today to get my summer haircut, and I decided to shoot an impromptu video complete with bugs. Here in one of my favorite parks, and I was inspired to make this little video for you because I was reflecting on how I got here. How did Mary get to Paris anyway? Like, how weird is this? And I was recalling how, you know, I had wanted to live in Paris since I first visited when I was 19. And I didn't know how that was going to happen. I had absolutely no idea. And I'm going to fast forward a lot of years to 1997 when I got remarried to my wonderful husband and we went on our honeymoon here. And I knew that I would love it because I had been here before and had really enjoyed it. And he fell in love with the city too. Again, we had no idea how we might spend more time here, and then through some very fortuitous events, we were able to purchase a small apartment— very small, like under 300 square feet— here in Paris in 2008, and we rented it out to vacationers, and we came and used it ourselves for a number of years. And then in 2015, some not so fortuitous life events happened where we had a major, major— pardon me— financial thing happen. My husband's father's health was declining and all sorts of other things were going on. I was very unhappy in my job. So in 2016, I was at a point where things were really coming to a head. And in 2016, my husband had left his job because he needed to be with his father who was in his last months, and his job wouldn't let him telecommute. So he said, okay, well, I'm leaving. And also in 2016, I had been working for a small startup for several months and they decided to fire me. And the reason they fired me was because I had the audacity to talk to them about something they were doing that was illegal, and they didn't like that I pointed that out, and therefore I was summarily fired. The reason why this was such a big deal was because my husband wasn't working. I didn't have any prospects for work at that point, and because of this major financial problem we had had the year before, we had almost nothing in our savings. It was one of those moments where you're like, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do? So I freaked out for a little bit. As one does when one gets fired. It's a very kind of scary time, and I just decided that I was going to become a coach. I had wanted to be something else other than what I had been doing, which was working in marketing and copywriting and ghostwriting and things like that. I didn't want to do that anymore, and I thought, well, I'm just going to call myself a coach because I believe I have something to share. I had kind of been talking about life coaching topics for a little while, just not professionally, but just, you know, person to person, and had really enjoyed it. And I thought, you know, I think this is something I could do. So that's what I did. I literally just said one day, I am a coach, and I started telling people that that's what I did. Fast forward a little further, and my husband and I decided, due to some circumstances, that we could no longer afford to live in New York City where we were at the time and have this Paris apartment. It just wasn't financially feasible anymore. And we were like, well, what do we do? Do we sell the Paris place? And stay here in New York, or do we do vice versa? And we were like, you know what, it's time to move to Paris. We're just going to figure out how to do it and we're going to do it, and that's all there is to it. Our daughter lives on this side of the world and we really wanted to spend more time with her. We had no idea really what it entailed to move here, but we just decided, you know what, this is what we're going to do. We're going to move to Paris and that's that. We figured out all of the paperwork. We did everything we needed to do to get over here. It took us about a year to sort all that out, and in March of 2017 we moved into our little teeny weeny studio apartment that's about 2 blocks behind me from where I'm sitting right now. What is so interesting to me when I look back on this life story of mine, and obviously I've left out a lot of things, but just to give you the, the gist of what happened, is that even though I had some fear around all of these things, starting my own business in a profession that I had never done before, moving to a foreign country and doing all the things necessary for that, and just everything involved in what I just told you, I had nerves about it. I had some fears going on, but I just didn't care. I didn't care because I knew that I had something valuable to share with people, and I also knew that I wanted to completely change my life. A lot of people think that they need to listen to those kinds of fears, and you don't. Those fears don't mean anything. They have nothing to do with what you're capable of. They have nothing to do with your level of resourcefulness and creativity. They're literally meaningless. And yet too many people, in my view, are paying attention to all of that and not paying attention to their innate gifts as human beings to facilitate that kind of change and to do it relatively quickly and relatively easily. In both cases, I was able to generate an income very quickly from my coaching business, and I think it was because I just went for it. I just decided this is what I'm doing and nothing's going to stop me. Same with moving here. We decided we were going to do it and nothing was going to stop us, and that was it. And so my question to you today is, what is it that you really want to do And what if nothing has to stop you from doing it? What if there's actually no obstacles in your way? It can look like there are obstacles in your way. Like in our case, it looked like our lack of financial resources at that time— money in the bank— it looked like that was a hurdle that we weren't going to be able to jump over. But somehow we managed to do it. We managed to get the amount of money that we needed to move almost to the penny before we needed it, like right before we needed it. We can look at all kinds of quote-unquote reasons why we can't do something, but none of them are true because you and I are capable of anything and everything. We just need to start acting on that capability. We need to start to ignore those fears that crop up because they are literally meaningless. They are there in everyone. They're universal. They're not personal to us, so we don't need to pay attention to them. And we can simply act on whatever our desires happen to be. I'm brushing the bugs away. So that's really my message today. It's pretty simple. What is it that you really want to do? What is it that you really want to do? And whether or not you even get to what you think the end goal is, it doesn't even matter. Because in my case, once I started the process of trying to move over here, I felt like I was already in a new life. Whether I made it over here or not was kind of inconsequential to the life experience that I was creating for myself during that period of time. As I'm talking to you right now, I am making some big changes in my business, and it's nerve-wracking a little bit because I don't know what I'm doing exactly. But feeling that way doesn't bother me. It's exciting. Yeah, I'm nervous and excited and taking the steps and doing all the things that I need to do out of this sense of what is next for me. Like, what could I actually create now? You know, I've created a bunch of things up until now. What's next? And that sense of, you know, nerve-wracking or stress or whatever you want to call it doesn't need to feel negative. It can actually feel really great to be in a new space within yourself, a new place of generating creative output and feeling how capable you are and living in a new way. That's what it's all about. It's not about the end goal, whatever that is. That's inconsequential. It's more about how are you living now. Are you living in a way that's exciting to you? Are you living in a way that doesn't bore you to death every day? Are you pushing yourself to experience new things and new aspects of who you are. That's the kind of life I want to live, and that's the kind of life I want for you too. And I wanted to share this message today to encourage you not because I have reached a certain goal, but just to be an example that no matter your age— I mean, when I got fired, I was 54, and when I got here, I was 55. I'm older than that now, obviously. Uh, age doesn't matter. Your circumstances don't matter nearly as much as you think they do. So what do you want to be doing, and what can you do today that reflects how you truly want to live your life? I'd love to hear your comments, so please do share them with me, and I will respond. And thanks for watching this rather impromptu video from Paris. I'll talk to you again soon, and please subscribe before you leave. Bye!
