**Author’s note: The following is the loose transcript of this audio recording. I have tried to clean it up a bit, but I definitely recommend listening instead of reading this one. However, in case you choose to continue reading, you should know that my speaking style is much messier than my writing style. I should also note that this project is more for me than for anyone else, so please feel free to scroll on by or to check out other sections of my work that fall into more traditional categories. For example, my mystery thriller series, “Catalina’s Chronicles,” or my memoir, “Losing Sight of the Shore: How to Live on a Boat Without Killing Your Family,” about living on a catamaran with three kids, one husband and a German Shepherd. Plus, I co-host a weekly livestream for indie authors called “Friends & Authors Live.” This project, “Marrying Myself” is more like a love letter to myself as I move into the next chapter of life. It will not be for everyone so please proceed with caution. And now, on to this episode.
Hello and welcome to “Marrying Myself.” I’m Rosa Linda Román and this is my brand new project that I just decided to create this week, like literally two days ago maybe. I was brainstorming. It’s the beginning of the second quarter of 2026 at the time of this recording and I was just looking ahead: What is coming up? What do I want? Goal setting.
I try to do that at the beginning of every quarter and I’ve got a lot of big stuff coming up. One of the things that I learned from many, many different coaches over the years is it’s really important to get clear on what you want before you try to accomplish all the things and take action, because otherwise you’re just taking action for the sake of taking action, which I certainly have done many, many times before. But now I’m in this different season in my life, and I really wanted to get clear on what is it that I want for this next chapter.
So let me back up for a second. If you’ve never met me, I am Rosa Linda Román. I go by Rosa Linda. And my background is that I was a television news reporter and anchor for my career. Then I had a second career, if you will, of being a full-time mom, and a traveling one at that. We travel frequently, living on a boat. traveling in a camper but most notably we’ve spent six years of our family’s lives with three kids and a German Shepherd, living on various catamarans and sailing around. So, I’ve had some really great adventures but the greatest adventure of course is raising these amazing humans.
Well, now I’m moving into this different season and I came to realize pretty quickly that I needed to start looking at what I was going to do now that my kids are starting to get to the age where they are becoming their own people. I mean, they’ve always been their own people, but they’re starting to move into that phase of… my two daughters are already off at college. My son is 15 and learning to drive. So he’s only three and a half years, less than that, away from graduating high school himself. So we are currently landlocked in New Mexico, which is the phase that we’re in. We each take turns and right now it is his turn and he wants to be at our home base in New Mexico, which is a beautiful thing because I love it here as well. It took me a little while to want to give up the boat. We actually still have a boat, but that’s a story for another day.
To kind of finish filling out the picture, I have been married to my beloved for almost 30 years, and we’ve had amazing grand adventures together as well. So, the title of this show might seem funny because I think that maybe people might think, “Oh, you’re saying marry yourself, don’t worry about getting married,” or whatever. No.
As I looked ahead… I became, in the last two years, an author.
I actually became an author a few years before that when I published a memoir about living on these various boats. But I became a fiction author and published four books last year in the mystery thriller series called, “Catalina’s Chronicles.” Book five, the final book of that series, is coming out in three weeks. At the time of this recording, it’s the beginning of April, and that book comes out at the end of April. And that is kind of wrapping up a chapter in and of itself, because I started writing this storyline 25 years ago when I was a TV news reporter in Phoenix. And I wrote it as a screenplay, and then eventually, just two years ago, decided I would convert it into a novel. And there’s a whole bunch of stories about how that came to be. Maybe I’ll share them here along the way. But coming to this present moment, as I’m about to wrap up this series and really focusing on stepping out into the world and back on stages… that’s one of my big goals for 2026 is to be on many other people’s stages. That might be on somebody else’s podcast or speaking as a public speaker on various actual stages. I’m very comfortable in that because of my background.
And the final stage that’s really just coming back into my world is video. Because of my background, after I left the mainstream media, and two years after I had my two daughters at that point, and my youngest was like four months old. I mean, my youngest daughter. Samuel was not yet a blip on the radar. And I started a video podcast, launched this video podcast called New Mexicast. And it was the first video podcast in the state of New Mexico. I did that throughout my children’s childhoods when they were little and through the process of moving onto the boat and all of those experiences, I documented heavily because it is my nature. I always record everything.
And that brings me to now.
I am starting to put some video content out because I’m trying to market my books. And that made me realize as I was going through that, that I have so much content already recorded that I never shared over the years because I was busy living those experiences and trying to be fully present. So, as I was working through quarter two of 2026, and just general structure of how my days would look, I realized one of the things that I’ve always wanted to do is go back and really curate what I have already recorded and the things that I, at the time, I thought, “Oh, I’m going to record this event or this moment…,” and by record, I mean it might be video recording, it might be an audio recording, it might be a journal entry. There’s so many different, or even just a half-written blog post. I have so many archives of things that I have already created. So as I was thinking about, well, what is this next chapter? And I was realizing, I had kind of, in the last few months, I’ve had the realization, since my daughters, my second daughter, Ziva left to college, and my first daughter left two years ago, I have really had a… I’ve been missing the female presence in my life.
We live up in the mountains, pretty much away from anybody. I don’t see another human unless they live in my household some days, or, you know, driving to school and stuff like that. I see people, but to engage with and really have conversations, it doesn’t, happen that often.
And the last few days in particular, my husband is out of town. He works out of town as a physician. The last few days, I’ve been really excited because I’m finishing up this series and I’ve got the characters are in my brain and I just worked through this really intense section, the grand finale of wrapping it all up. And I’m trying to talk about it with my son on the way to school. And just this morning, I was like, “Yeah, so I’ve got this scene, and this is happening, and what do you think?” And he literally turned the music up and started singing the song that he had on the queue in his Spotify account. Which is fine. That is actually his... love language. He’s very much into music and he communicates and he wasn’t trying to be rude at all. But the realization comes to me, and this has come over and over, not just in that moment, but the fact of the matter is I have spent the last 30 years being very present and supporting my beloved. So as the partner to my husband who started off as a mechanical engineer when I met him and building his business and eventually selling his business, to then going through medical school and building his medical career. And he was working in corporate as well as a senior vice president of integrative medicine for a big medical corporation. I supported him through all of that. And my kids… I have helped them, and I continue to help them, really try not to dull their shine… to quote my friend who once said that to me about Samuel. He wanted to get up on stage at our friend’s daughter’s wedding and do a toast. And we’re like, no, no, no, don’t do that. It’s their moment. And the father of the bride said, “Be careful not to dull his shine.” And I realize now, you know, a few years later, that… and he did by the way get up on stage he wowed everybody everyone was just delighted especially the bride and groom by that moment that precious moment the little boy got up on stage and toasted them, and so I have tried to remind myself that throughout the raising of my children journey that I don’t want to dull their shine. And I’ve never wanted to dull my husband’s shine for sure and everyone that I am around, I’d like to be a positive contributor. I like to be supportive. I like to do the things that bring out the light in the people that I’m around and share that with the world if I can.
And then as I sat down and I started thinking about, “Well, what is it that I want to put into the world at this stage?” I had this idea pop in my head. And it was the realization that I’ve spent a lot, a lot of time, basically a lifetime—I’m 54 years old at the time of this recording—I have spent a lifetime supporting people and really projecting, not projecting, yeah, like sharing their greatness with the world and supporting people. And really not necessarily trusting myself. Until recent years. The older I get, the more I realize, you know, I need to trust myself completely before I can do anything else in the world or really reach the level that I envision. I’ve always held this vision for myself. It just always seemed to be something in the future.
So, the epiphany.
All of this backstory brings me to this show and why I’m calling it “Marrying Myself.”
The content that I have already, which is so much, so many interesting things that I wanted to share with the world, but I didn’t want to slow down long enough to edit it or curate it or whatever in the past 30 years. Now, I’m at a point where I want to do that.
I want to go back through my archives. I want to look at everything that I’ve done and and see what’s relevant today and and see what people might be interested in at this point and so I’m creating… I had the idea of I guess… the mantra you’ve heard people say when you know you’re getting married the bride is supposed to have, “Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.” That’s the expression you’re supposed to have those four things in your wedding, somewhere as part of your wedding. And it might be a blue garter and an old, the old veil that your great grandmother wore or, and then something new, your new, you know, wedding dress or, and then something borrowed. So you might borrow somebody’s necklace. So, so basically that’s kind of something that when you’re getting married, that’s a theme, a little goal that you have as the bride. Well, I realized I’ve focused so much on other people and thinking about their needs. And when you marry your beloved, you think about how can I help support him? How can I love him best? How can I bring out the best in this relationship? How can I be the best wife? And I’ve heard the expression that every wife needs a wife. My mom likes to say that.
I thought about that. I’m like, well, I don’t know that I need a wife. But what I do need is to see the value in myself. And instead of thinking about trying to marry someone else, I mean, I’m married, obviously, happily, but marrying myself, like, what would that look like? What if I started a show, a blog, a something… where each episode was focusing on something old, meaning going through my archives, finding things that I have not yet shared, something new… what am I working on? You know, at the moment it would be I’m about to launch my book, so that would be something new. Something borrowed. As I go through my journals, there’s so much wisdom that I have discovered that I’ve written down all these years from my favorite coaches, sessions that I’ve gone to, Zoom calls, in-person events from people like Tony Robbins and Chalene Johnson and Serena Hicks and Brooke Castillo, all these coaches that I find not just fascinating, but so uplifting and that have helped me get through different stages in my journey. So that would be easy to be a something borrowed section. And then something blue that’s still open in my mind. I’m like, that could be anything. I mean, it could be right now I’m driving in New Mexico and the blue sky is stunning. It just opens up your senses and I might share something about that. Or maybe the blue, the Bahamas blue, which is the most, the bluest blue, aqua blue that you’ve ever seen when you’re on the water there in the Bahamas. Or it might be something, I was thinking it could even be something like sad, like I’m blue today.
And it could be anything, like what is blue? And the reason that lights me up is because My beloved mother-in-law, at one point when I was sharing something I was struggling with, probably when the kids were really little, she taught me that when you’re really feeling out of sorts and you just need to kind of center yourself, the thing that she would do is look for something blue. She would close her eyes and she would look for the blue, is what she said. That might be like something in your mind that is an actual blue thing, like visually blue if you visualize things, which I learned just recently that not everyone visualizes. I learned that from I went to a retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and my roommate, Terry, she doesn’t picture things in her head the way that I do, and I assumed everybody does. So that’s kind of a funny aside. um but i don’t know what that could be what something blue might be.
But I love this idea that we should be like marrying ourselves because when you fall in love like you meet your beloved and you’re getting excited and you’re going to get married and why are you getting married? Because you want to share the best parts of yourself with the best parts of themselves, and you want to be there to support the parts of them that need support and you hope they will support the parts of you that need support. And I have done that with my partner, my beloved, my husband for 30 years. We’ve been together 30 years now. Actually, this December will be 30 years since we met so I’ve done that and it changes over the over the years. Like, you know, we are much older. We have gone through raising children. We have gone through phases when we were just dating. You know, all of that.
Every stage, I have chosen, and he has chosen, we have chosen each other.
And we have chosen to continue to do the work on our relationship and all of that. And I’ve done that as well as a parent. Every phase that they’ve been in, I have chosen to be there and to support and to, you know, choose to do the hard work that it takes to make sure that they know they’re loved, to make sure that I’m treated also as someone who is beloved so that it works both ways. And to help guide them and teach them how to do that in relationships with other people. And when I’ve missed the mark, I have worked hard to correct and to teach them about how to correct and also how to give ourselves grace and all of that. So now I’m like, “Oh, I guess this next phase is about marrying myself.”
What that looks like, falling in love with myself and the things that younger me created. I actually thought about calling this the show something like, “Love notes from my younger self,” or “Gifts from my younger self” or “Gifts from young me,” something like that. That was what I first was wrestling with or playing with. I should say, I was playing with those names about the gifts that we get from ourselves from our from our younger selves and now I’m like, actually it’s all a gift. The now is a gift, what I’m working on now.
The archives, the recordings, the journal entries, the notes to myself, all of that is a gift. And that’s part of the marrying, right? Like getting to know yourself. I’m marrying myself just like I would marry my husband.
You’re getting to know that person. in a whole new way, right?
You know, of course, there’s the initial attraction and all of that. But over the years, you constantly learn more and more about them. So all of this to say, that is what this show is going to be about. It’s going to be the process of me unpacking literally and figuratively all of the things that I have been accumulating, saving, preparing, recording, All of those archives and journals and things that I’ve been,… yeah, I knew one day I would revisit them. I just thought it was going to be like after I was a grandma or something. But I actually really like the idea of doing it now. And I really like the idea of sharing it here with all of you.
So I just got home. I see my beloved, my other beloved, is Nala, who is our German Shepherd, who I adore. And she’s sitting just outside the car, waiting for me to open the door, which I love. So I’m going to wrap this up.
I’ll leave you with the question, if you were going to marry yourself, fall in love with yourself, look at the things that you are unique about and that are just so special about you, past, present, and future, how could you marry yourself? What would you do to make sure that that marriage, if you will… it sounds so silly, I know, but, you know, what is it about you that’s so special that you would choose you? I’m going to explore that in this show for myself. And I hope you, I invite you to do the same for yourself.
Thanks for listening to this inaugural edition of “Marrying Myself.” I’m Rosa Linda Román, and I will check in next time. Bye.
Well, that’s it for now. I am excited to see where I take this project. So many possibilities. But, again, I have to emphasize that this project is really for me. If it interests you, welcome! I am happy to have you along for the ride.
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