Bloom Your Mind

Ep 148: Chrononormativity

• Marie McDonald

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So many of my students reach a point in life where they’ve checked all the boxes: career, marriage, kids, home, stability. They’ve climbed every rung of the ladder they were told to climb. And then one day, they look up and think—now what?

In this episode, we explore that moment of disorientation that comes after meeting all of life’s early milestones. You’ll hear why so many of us feel stuck once the path runs out, and how we can begin to build our own ladders, guided by passion, purpose, and authentic desire rather than social expectation.

I’ll share how I discovered the concept of chrononormativity—the belief that our lives should follow a standard, linear timeline of education, work, marriage, kids, and retirement—and how this subtle cultural force can keep us trapped in patterns that look “successful,” but feel hollow.

You’ll hear stories from my own life—dropping out of college to heal, having kids before marriage, walking away from a prestigious leadership role—to illustrate what it looks like to step outside of the “normal” timeline and into a life designed from the inside out.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • What chrononormativity is and how it quietly shapes our decisions and expectations.
  • Why so many high achievers feel lost or bored once they’ve met society’s milestones.
  • How to recognize when you’re living by someone else’s timeline instead of your own.
  • A powerful exercise to create your next vision from a place of wild, authentic possibility.
  • How allowing yourself to imagine something “ridiculous” can lead to your most fulfilled and aligned life.

By the end of this episode, you’ll be invited to question the rules you’ve been following—and to ask yourself where the “acceptable” timeline might be limiting what’s possible for you. Because when you trade expectation for imagination, you unlock the kind of freedom that makes your life feel worth every moment.

Write your vision. Let it feel bold, maybe even a little ridiculous. Because all great ideas do—until they become real.

Mentioned in this episode:

Chrononormativity — a term originally coined by Elizabeth Freeman 



How to connect with Marie:

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We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hey everybody, welcome to episode number 148 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. We are creeping up on 150, couple weeks. I have just spent the last two days with my videographer. He is a magical human being. His name is Tone. And we are re-recording all of the Bloom Room content and a whole bunch of other content: a Make Ideas Real course, a foundations course, the art of self-love in course, a time whispering course, a relationships course. I have so much content that I've created for y'all. And I am so excited. I am just buzzing from this experience of recording with him. We've got a ton of recording days scheduled for the next few months to get this all down and polished for you. Because I have never professionally done it before. I've always just rolled the cameras and started talking. And now I have completely, you know, written everything out and organized all concepts into sort of a really clear syllabus that I've spent days and days and weeks and weeks editing so that it is the most impactful work. Taking all of my last five years of really focused work and study on this, but really the last 20 years of studying all these concepts that I share with you and, you know, funneling them down into the most potent pieces of information, the most potent practices and concepts and ways of thinking about your life and your body and your mind and the process of making any idea that you have into a real thing. So I've taken all of these and made them into these courses, and it has been so fun to record. Today we were just laughing about how we didn't know what we were getting into. We both kind of knew each other and liked each other, but just said, Hey, we should we do this? And after two days of working together, we were just like, we are a great team. This is amazing. And we kept having these moments where we would wrap the take on one of the sessions, and he would just look up at me and be like, damn, whoa, boom. You know, just he was listening to the content for the first time and it was landing with him. And he said, I am so distracted because I just want to take this course, consume this material. I am blown away by what I'm hearing, but I'm trying to focus on your image and like recording and the white balance. So it was it was really fun to make this idea into a real thing. And I am on this journey to offer you so many good things in 2026. And I'm so glad you're here with me. So today we're gonna talk about something that I coach students on all the time and that I have for the last five years. Coach a lot of students on this experience of getting past the first major milestones of life and then feeling lost. Like they had a clear direction for the first few decades of life because decisions were set out in front of them to make. So for all of us, there's this narrative that we have these specific things to decide and to plan for in our first 30 years, especially if we are traditional gender roles, traditional gender identification, traditional kind of roles that we play in different ways in our life. There's a lot of this like real normal stuff we're supposed to do, which can feel really alienating if you don't conform to those stereotypical gender identities or roles, right? But even if you do identify with those, there's this narrative that we have these specific things to decide and plan for, basically like in our first 30 years. What will we do for a living? Will we get married? Will we have kids? Where will we live? What are we gonna do? What do we like? Many of my students get most of that stuff figured out and then look up and think, now what? They are so accustomed to meeting the expectations that have been set on them that when there's not a clear expectation, it feels like daunting. And they come to me and they say, Is this what it's supposed to all be about? Like, I'm kind of bored. And I'm living my days working and taking care of everybody, and I'm exhausted, and I just want to help have some help finding something more than like kids to wake me up and give me purpose in the morning. And I'm like, I got you. I am all about it. I am all about helping anybody who needs it to find where their passion meets the world's needs, to find ideas for what they want to put their time and focus into, what they want to give their life energy to that will feel worth it for them, worth the moments of their life. I love doing it. I do it all day, every day with my students, and it's never too late to strip the socialized expectations away, find the things we're truly passionate about being and doing and creating, and creating a life we are obsessed with. I've seen it over and over again. But let's take a step back and look at how we got there in the first place. Why are we so paralyzed and confused when we've been climbing this ladder that was set out for us? And then all of a sudden we reach up and find that there's no next rung to climb to. What I see in my students is that they're really great at meeting what's expected of them, at accomplishing what they set their mind to. I can relate to that, but they aren't really clear on what they want to set their mind to, and I have been there. Our culture has such a clear, normal path for what a human life is supposed to look like that when that path gets like lost in the overgrowth, we feel lost. We aren't accustomed to tapping into our real authentic desire and passion and finding new paths that fit who we want to be if there isn't a path there already that someone else has laid out for us. I've been coaching my students on this for years, but I recently found out that there's a word for this whole concept and this whole phenomenon. It's called chrononormativity. My husband was actually reading a book next to me in bed on Sunday morning. That's my favorite thing. I get up and make coffee, and then all four of us sit around and read and watch the wind blow the trees around on Sunday mornings. Ugh, I love it so much. So he was reading and he paused the book and asked me what this word meant in the book. And I didn't know. So we looked it up. And here's the definition that we found. Elizabeth Freeman first coined this term. And here's what the definition is Chrononormativity is the expectation that our individual lives should follow a standard linear timeline of stages, such as education, work, family, and retirement with milestones linked to specific ages. This creates an artificial structure of time that dictates what's normal and what's okay and what's expected for us to do with our lives. It encourages maximum productivity and can lead to feelings of being kind of out of sync or ashamed for deviating from the most normal path. Okay. What a brilliant definition. What a brilliant woman. And even when we are on that socially accepted path, we can still feel directionless. When we've been climbing that ladder and then suddenly there's no clear next rung, like we talked about, when we're used to meeting expectations and then all of a sudden there isn't a clear next one. We have to ask ourselves what we value, what we want, whether it's socially acceptable or not. I will tell you about a few times when I experienced this in my life. I'm gonna get real with you. I started undergrad right after high school. I went to UCSD, University of California, San Diego, at 18 years old, quickly developed anorexia and was like 110 pounds, and dropped out for a couple of years to get better. Now, that anorexia was, you know, a product of a lot of things that I a lot of trauma I had lived through as a child. So it ended up being something that I am grateful for because it allowed me to put aside, you know, my focus on understanding why my brain had gotten off track and wanted to not feed my body because of all these things I had witnessed and lived through. And it allowed me to rewire my brain and get better. But I ended up, you know, being out of school for a year and going back about a year later, finishing and going to grad school. So like I ended up back on that chronormativity path, right? I ended up back on the expected path of myself. So there it is. But in that year, year and a half that I was out of school, everything felt different. People talked to me differently. Dropping out of college, not succeeding, not knowing what I was gonna do next, just working jobs, serving, managing restaurants, bartending, waiting tables. It just like people treated me differently. And I felt that for the first time, this real feeling of like, huh, this ain't what they want. And then for the second time, my husband and I met when I was about 30 and decided that we were like ready for whatever the next thing was when I was 32. So he said, What do you want to do now? Do you want me to ask you to marry me? I love that he checked in first. I think it's so weird to just like, you know, pop the question on someone if it's in a social situation or has a lot of pressure without like checking in to make sure that's kind of like where you want to go next. It's beautiful, it's great, but also I was glad to be asked. So I knew I wanted more than one kid, and it was taking some of my peers a long time to get pregnant. So I asked him if we could have a kid first. I don't want to do all the marriage stuff yet, but I did someday want to have like a love fest. Like I cared about getting everybody that I loved together and everybody that my husband Max loved together and having like a three-day party that was just a love fest. I cared a lot about that, but I cared way more about having some kids first, about making some little humans with him. So when we told people in our lives that we were having a kid before getting married, there was so much weirdness from people in my life. And I remember thinking, why do you care? This is my life. And I felt that oddness that came from making a decision that was not in line with the normal path. They did not approve. They were worried about us. They were worried that we wouldn't make it, all these things. I was like, who are you? You know nothing about our connection with one another. You don't know about us. Why are you so scared? Then I remember after getting married and having my kids, after having that big party, having a second kid, and excelling in my career, I was leading an innovation company and working so much. I was moving my family to live in LA during summers to oversee programs and spending most of my time in operations, on budgets and strategy and working like nine to 10 hours every single day by myself while my little ones were in aftercare, before and after school. I was missing all this time with their tiny little miraculous selves. And one day I just thought so clearly, this is not what I want. This is what success looks like, but not for me. And I did the work we're about to do and upended everything. And that was what started me on a path to creating the life I'm obsessed with that's super authentic to me that I'm living now. I quit my prestigious job to follow my dream. And I had the same kind of reactions from people. People were scared for me. There was more belief in me staying locked in a job that was burning me out, but that had clear upward mobility than there was in me breaking free, doubling down on myself and pursuing my dreams. And I just think that's so weird. I am not down with that. So, my question for you is where is the socially acceptable timeline keeping you stuck in ways that you don't want to be stuck? Where is chrononormativity limiting your vision for what's possible in your life? What if you listed all the ideas for what you could do next from a place of wild blue sky thinking and from being ridiculous at first? All great ideas sound ridiculous at first. And then as they become real, they just sound normal, right? Light bulbs, cars, the internet. What if you write out a wild vision from the perspective of your future self that's just so amazing, it feels a little ridiculous at first. Make it vivid. Make it feel like this wild dream feels kind of real. When I did this, when I was getting ready to make the big change out of that job that I felt so stuck in, I remember typing out the vision I had and sending it to the coach I hired to help me make this life change and career change. I described going from 50-hour work weeks to working only during school hours so I could be with my kids as much as possible. Never have them in aftercare unless they wanted to be. Working only three to four days a week, but making twice as much money as I was making on the nonprofit pay scale for company leadership. My vision included coaching, speaking, doing speaking events, leading group programs, having a podcast, leading retreats, and being a published author. And it felt ridiculous at first. When my coach wrote back that it was a bold vision, I felt kind of embarrassed. Like, oh yeah, it's a little bold. But I allowed the feeling to run through me instead of shoving it down or acting it out. I let it be there. I allowed it. I was like, okay, I'm embarrassed right now. It's all right. And I started making moves toward making the idea for my future real. Now it's four years later, and that is the exact description of what I do. I haven't finished and published my book yet, but it's coming. It's halfway done. So, where are you fitting into chrononormativity in a way that's limiting who you can be and what you can offer this world? Because you are limitless, my friend. And no one else's timeline or expectations for your life or any of your business. Write that vision out and see what happens. That's what I've got for you this week. And I will see you next week. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.