NEW Season Sneak Peak

Why I’m Podcasting Again: 
Divorce, Menopause, and Rebuilding in Midlife

Watch this episode on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PGfhBrdNbw

In this episode, I introduce a new season of The Sacred AF Podcast and share why I'm creating this around the struggles that midlife women face. 

It's been three years since stepping back from my online coaching business and I've been healing the pain that divorce brought for me and my children. 

The last few years has been an intense period of survival (and surrender) from ending a marriage, losing a home, closing my business, becoming a full-time solo parent, experiencing financial instability, and going through menopause.  

I can honestly say I have processed a range of emotions from fear and anger to grief and sadness and I want to speak candidly about the “messy” parts of midlife. 

Things like loss of identity (wife, business owner, youth, fitness), my inevitable surrender to less-than-ideal circumstances, and to share the profound lessons I've learned through this process. 

This season of The Sacred AD Podcast is for midlife women facing similar challenges.  My intention is to offer comfort, empowerment, resilience, and hope, while sharing how I processed the past so I (and maybe you) can create a new future.

00:00 Why Podcasting Matters

01:53 Who I Am Now

02:15 Three Years of Upheaval

05:26 Single Mom Survival

06:26 Messy Truth and Grief

09:10 Identity Loss and Body Changes

11:08 Why This Podcast Now

13:39 Redefining Hope and Happiness

15:23 Intention for Midlife Women

17:46 Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

Transcript

The Sacred AF Podcast, NEW SEASON!

[00:00:00] I absolutely love podcasting. If I could do this and get paid for it, this is what I would do. And I'm like, Kristen, you know, that people actually do do this and get paid for it. So this is me doing the thing that I love doing even if, I don't know how that piece of it's gonna flush out.

I think it's really cool to well, A, I think it's cool like this platform, right? Podcasting. And I think the reason I like it is because I don't get self-conscious or concerned about if I can see someone watching or not watching, like a Facebook Live.

So recording it like this, like in monologue fashion, is super fun for me and I feel like

 [00:01:00] I'm not being concerned with When you're in a conversation with someone, hopefully there's a back and forth, and sometimes when I'm in a conversation with someone, I become self-conscious, like, am I taking over the conversation?

Am I being a good listener? You know all the things about the dynamics of communication between people. So this one's just gonna be short, sweet, and, just give you a sense of why the fuck am I doing this now?

So I'm going, explain who I am. I'm gonna explain where I've been. For those of you who know who I am. And haven't seen me so much, why this topic, and why now, who it's for and what my intention is for. So that's gonna be the basis of this little intro session.

So who I am, it's interesting 'cause I could just rattle 

[00:02:00] off. My resume, my experience, my history, and part of why I'm doing this is because some of those things don't fit anymore. A huge thing that's been happening for me in the last three years, and it hasn't been three years since I've podcasted, but it's been three years.

Or so around this time when I stopped showing up in my business as an online coach. And that was a conscious decision 'cause I knew I was going into my divorce and I knew that I was not going to have the bandwidth to hold space for anyone other than myself and my children. 

Part of why I am here on the planet is to be in service to something beyond me. To be in service to having conversations 

[00:03:00] that support, serve, empower, make seen, women who resonate with my story and for so long I felt like, you're selfish.

You know, you're making this about you. You're too much. Why do you talk so much? I mean, you name it. And all of that is actually what's selfish. So I had this kind of big realization just in the last few days around, there was this self-serving kind of preserving my own sanity and my peace and my privacy as I was going through these very challenging last few years.

And that was a conscious decision to not be visible. And I don't need to justify that outside of myself. But there is a part of that that I can 

[00:04:00] see is a little bit selfish and I'm okay with being selfish when I need to be, but I can feel that I am, I'm out of the acute phase and I'm pretty much almost on the other side of a combination of ending a marriage, losing a home, no longer being a wife, closing my business and going through menopause. It's been a fuck- ton of shit over the last three years and that's what I wanna share. I wanna share it because A, it helps me process and understand and come out the other side as I'm describing it.

I can actually see what I've learned. I can actually see what I've gotten, not what I've lost, but what I've actually 

[00:05:00] gotten. And that shit is worth sharing. So who I am now is.

To be determined who I am now is being woven, not back together, but from a profoundly new place. I think I've discussed where I've been, I've been in survival, going from. A dual income family to just me, to then just me and my children as a completely 100% solo parent. My ex-husband moved out of state.

I then became full-time. That was a whole next level of ...holy mother fucking shit. Like the single moms 

[00:06:00] in your life. And if you are one. I NOW see you. I NOW understand you and I'm here for you. Like part of why I am doing this is for you is because I wanna serve the women that are going through what I just went through and help you get through it and know that you're not alone and you are a motherfucking badass.

I've been in destruction, right? Letting go, actually resisting letting go. And I'm gonna talk a lot about the resistance to surrender. The resistance to what is so what is in the present moment. And I have had knock down screaming matches with God, the universe, Jesus, whoever's up there.

Watching this drama play out, I have had my gloves on and been on my knees, and 

[00:07:00] there was one day when I stood in my kitchen and I screamed up at my ceiling to the point where I almost lost my voice and it was expletives 'cause I was angry.

And I wanna share that because so much of what we experience feels like we have to polish it up. How do you polish up grief? How do you make loss more palatable? How do you take fear around "How am I going to provide for my kids when I've always been a two income family. How am I going to do this?" Terrified, angry, devastated and heartbroken. 

[00:08:00] And I believe that there is magic and I really do mean this. 

I believe that the messy parts of life deserve to be talked about. The not so pretty is still really, really profound, and it's usually in the not so pretty that is the most profound. When we're on our knees, when we're confronted by our deepest fears, my deepest fear the end of the day is I become homeless and then I die.

That's like the end result of my worst case scenario. And there were months when I couldn't pay my rent, and so I wanna talk about it because that's kind of what I do and that's why I'm here. So you'll learn as you go through this process 

[00:09:00] with me through my story, through hearing it, who I've been, you know, who I have been before.

And I can tell you that there are parts of me that had to burn down. Like there are parts of me that had to, they had to crumble because they were no longer part of me. Being a wife was an identity. Being a business owner, you know, an online coach was an identity. Being 30 pounds lighter than I am, that has been an identity for my entire life.

Fit, strong, healthy. I am now 30 pounds above where I normally am. And that in and of itself has been a spiritual reckoning, an ego demolishing, confronting as fuck endeavor 

[00:10:00] as a mature woman. So I wanna talk about what happens when we lose our youth. What happens when we lose our identity as a wife or as a mom or, as a business owner's, as a leader, right?

When we lose an identity that we've quite frankly been attached to, rested on who am I when I'm not, those things, that wasn't fun. That was not fun, that was hard, and I didn't ever believe that I could do this. Raise and support and feed and house my children on my own. Didn't think that I had what it takes.

Had always kind of thought of myself as someone who needed 

[00:11:00] help. Kind of like a little bit powerless and a little bit scared or a lot scared. Let's be honest. Why this, and why now? Why am I doing this and why am I doing it now? I haven't settled on a name yet for the podcast. I'm even tossing around a couple of different things.

Hoping for happiness was one of 'em. Hoping for happiness. I have a really strong opinion about the word hope, and I have a very tangible relationship with happiness. What it is and what it isn't. What leads to it and what doesn't lead to it. And at the end of the day, I want to speak about going through hard things, getting through it and coming out the other side, knowing yourself as.

Resilient, open-hearted, loving and 

[00:12:00] capable. This is for the woman who is in a midlife transition, and it could be all of the things that I mentioned going through a divorce, becoming a single parent, closing a business. Going through menopause and having your body just fucking betray you.

Like, what the fuck is this? 'cause I don't identify, okay, I don't identify. And, it's that resistance to who I used to be. And then the next layer of that, or maybe I'll go this way 'cause it's a deeper layer, the next layer of that. Is, who am I if I'm not fit, thin, young, and beautiful? Who am I?

And that's been very confronting as a woman, in my society with all of the young, 

[00:13:00] thin, rich, pretty, successful things that we see out in the world. I am that person who will bring the real and hopefully in doing so and, and also not just bringing the real right. It's not just about, I'm just not gonna just sit here and complain about everything that's been happening.

I'm through that phase. 'cause everything that came outta my mouth for the last couple years was angry and bitter. And, afraid. And I'm through that and I've found some real peace. 

 I want this to be conversations for hope. I used to be like hope is you sitting on your laurels, sitting on your ass and being like "Really hope works out."

I come from personal development, transformation world, which is like. Nah, you create your fucking hope. You 

[00:14:00] create your fucking reality. You create your now, you create your future. You created your past, so there ain't no hope. Get to creating, and so, I have a different definition. I can say that now. Hope for me is an intention. I have an intention for this show, this podcast, what its impact is going to be for people who are involved with it, listeners, co-creators, sponsors, if it ever gets there, contributors. And my intention for you is that you find comfort, you find peace, you find empowerment, you find resilience. You see or hear or experience yourself in my story, in my resilience, in my perspective, in how I am taking the transformation that has occurred, going through midlife, going through menopause, going through the 

[00:15:00] first five years of my fifties, which by the way, has sucked balls.

Oooh. And I was so looking forward to it. I was so looking forward to just embracing 50. And guess when I turned 50? During the pandemic. I turned half a century during lockdown, and that's when it all kind of started really pissing me off. So my intention for this podcast is that the midlife woman who's facing or in the process of seeing her identities unravel and not knowing where she stands, to give YOU hope, comfort, peace, confidence, to feel seen, to feel a little bit understood, and to create resources for 

[00:16:00] women who go through these kinds of life changes. And that feeling of like, I don't know who I am, I don't know where to place my feet, nothing is the same.

I've lost, or I'm grieving these identities that I have related to. You know, I related to being a wife and a homeowner and a family of four, for, close to 18 years. My daughter just turned 18, married for 20 something. It's an identity. I wanna give a voice to that for the women who feel like I felt.

Some of the things I'm still struggling with are who would want this? Like I'm not fit. I'm not young. My skin does not look like it used to. All of the things that we've been so 

[00:17:00] deeply conditioned to value. The things that I have placed value on. It's been challenging. Whenever I record a podcast, I come out of it released. Like I release something, I realize something, I change my perspective on something. And now that's my intention for you. And I wanna have fun on here. Like, it's not all gonna be, "Oh, this shit was so hard." I'll talk about the funny shit, some of this stuff is frickin comical and at the end of the day, I think what I've learned is how important people are.

Just how important having people around you is. Stay tuned because I'm probably just gonna start recording again and start diving into these stories that I wanna share with you, the lessons that I've learned from them, and really just 

[00:18:00] let you know that, just like everyone told me, it does get better.

And there is hope. And the next phase, I'm actually kind of excited about it and I want you to be excited about yours as well. So we'll talk soon.