Are you feeling a quiet call to end something?
Or to begin something new and scary?
But then—you’re overwhelmed with just the thought of making a major life change at this stage of your life?
After all, you’ve worked and planned for years to achieve the good things you do have now. And much of it IS so good…
And yet… that small niggling voice keeps piping up inside of you, “Is this it?”
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If you’re anything like me, you have another voice (probably several) that want to shut that small voice down.
Those voices say things like:
“We’ve got a great life here, you should be grateful, not complaining!” or…
“You had your chance and you blew it.” or….
“It’s too hard to start fresh at this stage of life.”
Maybe those voices are constantly arguing with each other—like they were for me—or maybe they’re just starting to make some noise.
You might feel like you’re mostly too busy to notice that soft questioning voice… except there it is, getting more urgent, at 3 am when you wake up for one of those nightly trips to pee.
Or, you notice that sense of boredom or frustration as you move through the necessary motions of your day.
When did I lose myself? You wonder silently.
Most of us don’t arrive at midlife feeling lost.
Nope, we feel… familiar with ourselves.
And this can be a comforting feeling. We know who we are, how we react, the way we take care of things like we’ve always done.
And then…. that knowing of ourselves can start to become unfamiliar.
Kind of like that Talking Heads song:
And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?
This is not my beautiful house
This is not my beautiful wife…
Same as it ever was…. Same as it ever was…
You’ve built a life. A good one by most people’s standards.
You’ve made choices. You’ve adapted and adjusted.
You’ve continued to take care of all the things. And probably of most of the people around you.
And somewhere along the way…you’re not sure how it happened…. There was no huge dramatic moment or clear breaking point, simply the noticing of a subtle but persistent dissonance.
A sense that you are not fully living inside your own life.
Believe me, I am so familiar with this place!
I have felt this sort of disconnection with my own life. It doesn’t yell at you, rather it hangs out in the background.
But it shows up in the way you move through your days. In the evolution of your relationships. In your changing body, and in the way you make decisions.
For many years, I thought change meant fixing something obvious.
But what I’ve come to understand is the deeper work is not about fixing what’s no longer working.
It’s really about recognizing the ways we abandon ourselves while still appearing to be doing “fine”.
It’s about the patterns that we don’t notice…. until suddenly we’re standing in a life that no longer fits.
And then comes that ubiquitous question. The one that torments so many women in those in-between moments:
Is it too late to change this?
I don’t believe it is.
Look at all the many examples of women older than you who have set themselves free. Maybe they’ve embraced a new career, become a solo traveler, or started writing books or creating art at 70+.
But that’s not really the point.
Real change asks something different from us than optics.
It calls for more than motivation or insight alone.
It asks for honesty.
For willingness.
And for a different kind of relationship with yourself. One that is clear-eyed yet, drops the judgment.
It’s self connection that is encouraging, yet takes responsibility for where you are.
For some of us, simply getting there turns out to be all the change we really needed.
For others, that journey to self connection pulls away the veil and your pathway forward becomes crystal clear.
This space is where I write about this ever-evolving process in my own life. And the learnings that come from it.
Yes, it’s about reinvention—not as a performance or a reinvention of identity for its own sake. This is about a return to yourself. A shift into resonance with who you are becoming, versus who you have been.
That’s a scary thing. And a powerful thing.
In my writing I’m exploring relationships, aging, desire, and the quieter layers of self-abandonment that shape so many women’s lives.
And about what becomes possible when you stop looking for ways to get through, to simply endure your life… and start asking yourself how you want to actually live it.
So many of us have lost touch with what we truly desire. We’ve given up on so many of those desires… to the point where we don’t even really know what those deeper desires even are.
Some of what I share is personal. Some reflective. Some directly drawn from the work I do with women privately.
All of it is grounded in one intention:
To tell the truth about this time of our lives in a way that makes it feel more honest—and more possible to change—than we have been led to believe.
If these essays resonate with you, if you’re ready to stop leaving yourself behind…I hope you’ll stay, read, and explore—even subscribe.
And if you ever feel the quiet sense of “this is me”… you’ll know where to find me.