Amy Cuevas Schroeder

I’ve been to Venus and back
I started my first business, Venus Zine, about women in music and DIY culture, as a freshman at Michigan State University. Thanks to the big hearts of hundreds of talented creative people, I scaled Venus bootstrap-style, from a fanzine into an internationally distributed magazine. After a decade of running the show, I sold my company to an independent publisher, and moved from Chicago to New York to start a new chapter.

I began building a new way of thinking about midlife empowerment not too long after having twin girls, moving from Brooklyn to the Chicago area to be near family, while holding down a full-time job and putting my husband through college. During that time, our daughter Isabel was diagnosed with Pitt Hopkins, a rare genetic syndrome that causes inability to walk and talk among many other symptoms.

To deal with the complexities of daily life, including undiagnosed perimenopause and navigating what it means to be “in my prime” at the same time, I started learning coping strategies, ranging from mindfulness and therapy to transcendental meditation and minimalism. I also created the Adventures in Perimenopause series to get to the bottom of this misunderstood state that millions of women face.

Now that I’m in my 40s, I wholeheartedly believe: I’m in my prime — that what I do now will pay off in my decades ahead. In so many ways, I feel like I’m just getting started with coming into my own. I’m on a mission to redefine, reinvent, and disrupt what midlife means, and I’ll be damned if anyone stops me.