After moving to Seattle and job hopping while raising three children, Powter neglected to monitor the existing funds from her success. “Someone else was handling it. I never checked balances,” she said. “I should have questioned. I fully acknowledge that. I made a mistake.” And as she aged, it became increasingly difficult to retain employment to stay afloat. “I’ve never not worked. I never thought I wouldn’t be able to make a living,” she explained. “But try to get a job as a 60-year-old woman.”

By 2018, life was “scary as sh*t,” she recalled. She was forced out of a campground where she was living in her RV and into a weekly rented apartment complex in Las Vegas. She delivered food via GrubHub and UberEats to get by. “It’s so hard. It’s horrifyingly shocking,” she said of the experience. “I’ve known desperation. Desperation is walking back from the welfare office. It’s the shock of, ‘From there, now I’m here? How in God’s name?’”

At 66, she now lives in a low-income senior community and is recovering from a recent health scare that prompted her to apply for Social Security. “That $1500 check shocked the hell out of me. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness lied. Liar. It wasn’t happiness. It was bigger than happiness. I took the deepest breath,” she said.

That stability allowed her to turn her journal into a self-published memoir, and then, last November, she met with filmmaker Zeberiah Newman who proposed making a documentary about her story. The film, Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter, will be executive produced by Jamie Lee Curtis and is expected to release next year, per People. Powter also plans to launch a podcast and exclusive live-streaming content for subscribers upon relaunching her fitness brand this week, she told the outlet.