There is a part of you that you buried a long time ago. Today, we talk about what it is quietly costing you to keep it buried and how, step by step, you can bring it back. Welcome to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast, a podcast helping women in career and life transitions achieve clarity on their next steps so they can transform uncertainty into an energizing next chapter. I'm your host, Kavita Ahuja, and the founder of It's My Time Now Coaching. If you're wondering what's next in your career or life, you are in the right place. Through solo and guest episodes, you'll gain practical tips, tools, and inspiration to help you uncover blocks, gain confidence, and be, do, and have what you want. I rediscovered myself after the age of 50, and I know you can too. It's my time now to help you do just that. I'm so excited you're here. Let's dive in. In this episode, you'll discover three things. First, why so many capable women bury the one part of themselves that makes them feel most alive, and the reasons that we do it. Second, what burying your passions quietly costs you in your body, your energy, and your years, as it becomes harder to emerge. And third, the exact way I walk a woman back to herself. The four circles we rediscover together, so you can see how a buried passion becomes the very thing you give the world. So stay with me to the end because I'm going to show you how two very different women climbed the same path out. Hello and welcome back to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast. It's your coach, Kabita. If you're new here, welcome to the family. Something brought you to this episode, and I'm so glad that you've came. And if you were a returning listener, thank you. I don't take it lightly that you're here to choose to spend this time with me here today. Today I'd like to talk to you about something you have buried. A love or a talent, a part of yourself that once lit you up, that somewhere along the way you folded up and put away because life needed you to be practical or responsible or the person everyone expected you to be. It did not go anywhere, it is still in there. And today I want to talk about what it costs to keep it buried, and this is the part that I don't want you to miss exactly how you can bring it back. So let me tell you about a woman I worked with. I will keep my client's details private, but her story is true. And I'm sharing this with you today because you may see yourself exactly in her story. She had built a very impressive life, a serious and successful career in the sciences. And I want to be clear about something here because it really does matter. She really loved it. This was not a woman trapped in a work that she hated. She had a genuine passion for her field, and for a long stretch of her life it fit her. It was right for her and it was hers. She was also raising children and running a household and holding a marriage together, and doing it all and doing it very well. From the outside and from the inside too, for many years it was a good life and a full life. But underneath all of it, quiet and patient was another part of her. An artist, a musician, a whole creative world which she had loved since she was very young, and that she had set aside, because where she came from, those things were only meant to be hobbies. They were absolutely not what you built a respectable life on. You pursued the degrees, the respectable career, and the security. The art was lovely, but not serious. And so she folded it away, and got on with her life the way she was supposed to. I want to pause there because I resonated with this too, and you may also. I followed the path that was laid out for me, a traditional path handed to me from generations, of education and career and marriage and children, and I never really questioned it. Nothing was ever really wrong with it, but if you recall from the beginning of my own story series, which I shared in episode 308, I had watched my own parents struggle as new immigrants into this country, and I had absorbed deep in my bones that hard work equals success, and that you take the safe and grateful road and you do not gamble on something as impractical as a passion. Through no fault of their own, often our parents will instill in us their values, which often we learn not to question. So when I say I understand why she buried it, I mean it. Many of us were raised too. So here's what I want you to understand about a buried passion, though, because this is really the heart of it. It does not stay quiet forever. At first the cost is small, a faint sense that something is missing, easy to ignore under how busy you are, but it does grow. And for her over the years, the work that had once fit her so well slowly stopped giving her the same joy. Not because the work went bad, but because she was changing. What she valued was shifting underneath her. The ambition and the achievement that had driven her for decades were quietly making room for other things. Creativity, beauty, meaning, and the buried part of her was pressing harder and harder to be let out. And when we do not listen, my friend, the body finds a way to say it for us. For her it came as stress. That Sunday evening dread, the anxiety she could not fully explain, the heaviness that met her even before the week began. And that is what we call catabolic energy, the draining, contracting energy that pulls you down, and it what builds up when you spend years overriding your own heart. That is the internal cost, which is a slow erosion of your aliveness. But it does not stay inside. It can show up in your body as well, in your sleep, in how present you can be for the people you love. Because a woman who is quietly at war with herself has less of herself to give anyone. She said something to me that I have never forgotten, and that you can only go so far without passion. She had hit that wall. She had gone as far as achievement alone could carry her, and there was nothing left underneath it. And she came to me at that moment, when she didn't know what else was really left within her. And here is a question I want you to sit with, because it is the real cost, the one we do not let ourselves look at. If nothing changes, where does this go? Picture the woman who keeps burying it. She doesn't fall apart. She's too capable for that. She keeps going, competent and admired and quietly dimming, telling herself that the art, the writing, the music, the whatever it is, is a hobby she will get to someday. And someday keeps not coming. And one day she looks back over a whole accomplished life and realizes the truest part of her never once came out into the light. That is what a buried passion costs you if you let it stay buried. Not a dramatic loss, a lifelong one. When she came to me she was very lost and in a deep well of negativity. The work was not to find meaning outside of herself, it was to dig up all the buried parts and finally bring them out into plain sight. So we worked step by step through each rung of the ladder, slowly excavating the parts of her that up till now were hidden. By doing so, she moved from that Sunday dread to the life she now loves. She didn't stumble into it. She didn't wake up one morning transformed. We climbed deliberately, one rung at a time, up what I call the pyramid of reinvention. And let me walk you through the way we walked it, because your climb may look like this too. We started with her strengths. What is she genuinely good at? The scientific mind was obvious, the analytical gift and the rigor. But I was listening for the ones she waved away. The talents that came so naturally to her she's often stopped counting them or as talents at all. She loved to educate others, for example, especially children, about the wonders of science and how even in art, you can see the repeatable patterns like a scientist does. That was the first rung, and even here the ache was present because naming your gifts out loud, after years of minimizing them, makes you grieve a little for how long you talked yourself into being small. Then we climbed to her passions, and this rung was tender, because this is where the buried thing lives. I asked her what she loved, what made her lose all track of time, and slowly, almost shyly, the art came out. The music, the making beautiful things. And it wasn't small. She was truly gifted, and there was grief in it. Real grief, because admitting she had buried this for so long, meant admitting to herself how many years she called it nothing. Naming a buried passion is not a light thing. It hurts on the way up. But it is the rung you cannot skip. Then we came to her values, and this is the rung where she saw herself clearly, maybe for the first time in years. We looked honestly at what she had valued a decade ago ambition, status, prestige, achievement, the whole outcome-driven world she had been so good at. And then we named what she valued now, in this chapter creativity, beauty, honesty, kindness, community, education, caring for herself. And when we set those two lists side by side, not one of them overlaps, not one. And I watched that land on her because it is a painful, liberating thing to realize you have been living a set of values you outgrew years ago, running a life on rules that stop being yours. And often it is due to the expectations of others. We often lose sight of who we truly are because of the layers of expectations, responsibilities, and guilt that we take on. But the moment a woman understands she is not broken and she was not ungrateful, but she has simply changed and never given herself permission to say so is the moment everything changes. And then the fourth circle, her contribution, what the world needed that only she can give. And this is where it all started coming together for her. You see, she didn't have to choose between her scientific knowledge and brilliance and her love of the arts and music. In fact, the magic happened when she realized she could indeed combine them. What if she taught the beauty of art and science together? What if she created art that explained the sciences? The idea that the next generation could grow up knowing they neither have to bury one to have the other, that a rigorous mind and an artist's heart can live in the same person. When she recognized that, it's like a light bulb lit brightly in her soul. We did the thing that makes the whole climb worth it. We looked then at where her four circles overlapped. Because your reason for being or ikigai is never inside one circle. It lives in the place where they meet, where your strengths and your passions and your values and your contribution all cross. And for her, for the first time, she could see it. What had been a blur for years came into focus like a blueprint turning into a map she could actually follow. That is the top of the pyramid, and you can reach at it because of every wrong underneath it. It's not a bolt from the blue, it is a view you earn by climbing it. And when she saw it, the tears came. The good kind. The it was right there in front of me the whole time kind. Now I want to pull back for one moment because you might be thinking that this only worked because of who she happened to be. So let me tell you about another woman, the one some of you heard me talk about recently who had climbed to the very top of the corporate ladder and felt completely empty at the top. Two women who could not look more different. One buried a passion under expectations until it turned to stress. The other followed the playbook she was handed all the way to the top and found nothing there. Different pain at the bottom, and yet we climbed the exact same pyramid, the same four circles, the same search for the overlap. Because the pain that sends a woman to me varies, but the way home is the same. And that is the whole point. This is a process, not a piece of luck, and it works from wherever your ache begins. So once she could see her path, something extraordinary happened. Do you remember me telling you about that well of negativity when we started? That catabolic negative energy slowly, piece by piece, turned into something so positive, and it happened because she knew this was the right path. People and circumstances came her way. She took small actions at first. The action almost became easy because you cannot move towards something you cannot see, and now she could see it. It began with one hour, one hour a day giving back to what she loved. She didn't quit anything, not at first, and I want you to hear that because the fear of the dramatic leap is exactly what keeps many women frozen. She kept her whole life and carved out one hour, and that one hour released a flood of the other kind of energy, the anabolic kind, the expansive, alive energy that is the opposite of the Sunday dread, and it didn't stay into that one hour. It spilled into everything and gave her the fuel for the next step. She began to share her art with the world, and the world answered. Opportunities found her because there is something magnetic about a person doing what they love. And her two worlds kept combining, the science and the art, growing into that contribution, the teaching, the giving of it to girls who would come after her. And here's why this can matter so much to you right now in this season. Her buried passion did not come back as a hobby, it became contribution. And this is what I see again and again. Women come to me because something has triggered them to pause. It could be burnout, it could be utter frustration with their life, or deep negativity, or just to knowing that there has to be more. That trigger leads to this process of uncovering, and often when we find the overlaps between what you love, what you're good at, what you value, and what the world needs, it becomes a very thing that fuels you forward. It is your ikigai exposing itself to you. I have seen time and time again that this realization turns into something greater than yourself. It could be in the form of contribution to others, and that results in a type of abundance which is difficult to measure because it is not monetary alone. It comes in the form of fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness and meaning. And then there was that moment when it all came together, when she told me, through tears, that for so long she had been living in her head, and now finally she was living from her heart. And underneath that was the truest shift of all. Her whole life she had been doing what was expected of her by her parents, her career, her family, everyone. And she finally, gently, gave herself permission to say it's my time now. When a woman shares that with me, it's the greatest gift I can give them, because it is really the whole reason I do what I do, and the whole reason I became a coach and started this podcast. It is your time now. Because there comes a point, and if you're listening to this, it may be right now, when you have spent decades being who your parents needed, who your children needed, or your spouse or work needed, and you're finally allowed to turn and ask what you need. What is in your heart? What did you bury? And to go towards it without waiting one more day for anyone's permission or approval. It's not selfish, it's your turn. Hear me because this is the moment that matters most. That passion you buried has already waited long enough. It waited through the degrees, through the career, through raising everyone else up, through every someday you promised it and did not keep. And every year you leave it in the dark, it costs you more, not less. The women I ache for are the ones who keep waiting, who say next year, when things settle down, when the kids are grown, when it feels less selfish, until one day the waiting is all there is, and the truest part of them never came out into the light. Do not let that be your story. Do not hand this passion one more year of silence, because quiet is exactly how it has stayed buried this long. I share these stories of my real clients with you to let you know that you are not alone. I've been there too, and you can listen to my story about exactly how I came through it. More importantly, if you see yourself in these stories, it is time to do something about it. If something in you is saying yes right now, do not let it fade by morning, because tomorrow you'll be busy again and it will go quiet again. Let's talk about it because I'm here to listen. Open the show notes and book a clarity and next chapter call with me. You can tell me what you've buried, and together we can start to climb circle by circle until you can see your own path the way she saw hers. Whether or not we ever work together again. This is your time, and it will not announce itself. You have to claim it. The link is right there, and so am I. So let me leave you with the three things I most want you to carry out of today. First, the passion you buried did not disappear. It is still in you, and the reasons you buried it, being practical, being who you were raised to be, were understandable, but they were never the whole truth of you. Second, keeping it buried is a real and rising cost. It drains your energy, it settles into your body as stress, it drains your energy. As left long enough, it can cost you a lifetime of being fully yourself. And third, the way back is a climb you do not have to make alone. Four circles, your strengths, your passions, your values, and your contribution. Until you can see where they meet, and where your path comes into focus. So here is the now. This week, name the thing you buried. Just name it, honestly, and to yourself. And then give yourself one hour with it. Not as a plan, not as a business, but as a way of saying yes to that part of you. Just start with one hour. And remember, my friend, you get to decide what comes next. So say it with me, and say it with confidence. It's my time now.