Ep. 224: You Didn’t Lose Yourself in Midlife… Here’s What Actually Happened

I want to start today with something I've been hearing a lot lately. Like, a lot a lot. From women in my community, from DMs, from coaching calls. A sentence that keeps coming up over and over again, said in different ways but meaning the exact same thing.

It goes something like this:

"I miss being someone who could just handle things."

Maybe you've said it yourself. Maybe you've thought it but haven't said it out loud yet.

That version of you…the one who could keep the house running. Stay on top of the schedules. Solve problems before they became crises. Manage everything that needed managing. She could hold it all together, and life felt busy, sure, but it felt manageable.

And now? Something feels different. Something feels off.

Let’s talk about it in this grounded conversation…I’m guessing you’ll see yourself in it.

Resources mentioned in this episode: midlifeclutterhelp.com

Get some powerful mantras to inspire, encourage, and life you up when you need as little something intentional to focus on. 

We have a beautiful pdf download of the 6 Mantras For Intentional Moms you can keep or print. Request them right HERE.

Visit The Intentional Mom

Follow us on Instagram HERE

Visit our YouTube Channel HERE

Rate & Review The Intentional Mom Podcast on Apple . We'd love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you listen on Spotify, you can rate & review us there, too. 

Transcript

So some of you will say it plainly. I don't even recognize myself anymore. Others feel it more quietly, like there's this fog that just doesn't lift. Like you keep starting and stopping. Like you're doing all the things, you're checking all the boxes, and you're still going to bed at night feeling like you fell short. And your list tells you that very same thing. Every single day, your list shows you how short you fell. And...

As you reflect on the day, you feel like you've lost yourself in the middle of all of this. And I wanna talk about that today because midlife women are told the same story all the time. That somewhere along the way as you navigated the past couple of decades, you lost yourself. That you just need to rediscover who you are. That the work is to find yourself again. And while that's not a totally inaccurate concept, I actually think

That narrative, that story misses something really important. And so today I want to have a slightly different conversation. And by the end, I'm going to walk you through two frameworks that I use in my own life and that I teach inside my coaching work. Because together, these two frameworks, they explain not just why life feels so hard right now, but exactly what to do about it. So let's get into it. So I want to talk about the story that women hear most often when they come to me feeling this way, right?

What they hear is you lost yourself in motherhood and managing and family and all the things. And that the goal, the way to solve it is to fix that, right? You need to rediscover who you are. You need to find yourself again. And I get it. I understand what women are trying to express when they say those things. And there is real pain underneath and kind of interwoven in that language. There is real grief.

There's a sense that the woman that you used to be, the one who felt capable and clear and confident, that she has somehow gone missing. But here's where I want to give you a little bit of pushback. And if you know me, you know that I'm going to say the thing, right? I don't actually think that most women have lost themselves. What I think has actually happened is this. Your life slowly became heavier and more complex than one person can realistically carry the same way that they used to.

That's it. That's the real story that's going on. You didn't lose yourself. You got buried underneath a life that grew faster at a faster pace than your systems did. And then your systems could continue to hold all of that up. And your energy levels, and your capacity, and your bandwidth, none of those things could keep up with the way that your life was moving along. And nobody handed you a roadmap for that. Nobody sat you down and said, hey, heads up.

The season that you're entering requires a completely different way of carrying things, of dealing with things. It's just that you keep trying to carry all those things the old way now. The heavier load, but the same grip. And that's where this spinning starts. And so I want to tell you something that happened to me because I think it'll land differently than me just explaining the concept.

So there was a season not too long ago where I was in full on burnout. And I don't mean tired. I mean bone deep, can't catch up, running on fumes, burnout. The kind where you keep moving, not just because you have energy, but because stopping feels scarier than pushing through. And here's what I don't love about admitting this. I teach this stuff. I help women. I coach women.

on this very thing. I talk about boundaries, about not over-functioning, about protecting yourself so that you can show up well. And I was doing the exact opposite. My family was mostly checked out, wrapped up in all of their own things, and I felt like I was carrying everything, the mental load, the emotional labor, the calendar, the house, the business, all of it. And instead of asking for help, I just kept going because asking for help felt harder.

than just doing it myself because I didn't want to face the sting of them not stepping up. And so I took it all on myself because it was easier that way. It felt easier anyway, but in reality, it wasn't easier. It was just survival. And really the shame of knowing that I had the tools and still chose not to use them, that part was hard for me. And it was something that I knew.

I had to own, I had to own it and I have to own it here with you today. But here's what that season though taught me. And it's what I want to make sure that you hear, because this is the thing that really, if you understand it and if you embrace it and you allow yourself to believe it, it can change everything. So it wasn't that I had lost myself, it was that my life had grown heavier.

And I hadn't changed the way that I was carrying it because here's what's happened. Here's what happens over time for most women, especially in midlife. The kids get older and you'd think that that means less work, but the needs get more complex. The emotional labor increases. You're not packing lunches anymore. You're navigating teenagers and young adults and identity crises and college decisions and relationship drama. All of those things, they are not lighter.

I would argue that all of those things are heavier and take a heavier toll and take more of your bandwidth, more of your cup of resources, as I call it, out of you than those toddler and elementary years ever did. Maybe your parents start needing more from you or your in-laws, right? That season sneaks up on most women. One day you're the kid and the next you're quietly becoming the caretaker. And then there's the decisions. They multiply, right? Not just the logistical kind of decisions.

But the weight of all of those decisions, decisions about your marriage, decisions about your health and your finances and your future and your purpose, these things are all a lot. And then there's the invisible mental load, the one that nobody sees and nobody thanks you for. And that load just keeps growing. You're holding the whole operating system of a household, a family, sometimes a business or work, and you're holding that all in your head at all times.

And so you can see how your life has become heavier. But nobody told you that when life becomes heavier, you have to change the way that you carry it. Otherwise you're going to end up getting swallowed up in it. And so you keep the old systems, the same habits, the same expectations that you had when the load was lighter. And eventually all of those old ways and all of those ways that you've always done things, they just stop working. And you started spinning in this endless loop.

of barely surviving and thinking that you're the problem. So let me describe spinning because I've used that word now twice just here today. And I want to make sure that you recognize what it is so that you know how to identify if you are in it. So spinning looks like constantly feeling and being behind, not just occasionally, but as a baseline. This is your normal.

Like you woke up already behind and spent the whole day trying to catch up, but never quite got there. And it's the same thing every day. It looks like jumping from task to task without finishing any of them. It's starting five things and completing none of them. The half folded laundry, the half answered email, the half cleaned kitchen. It looks like unfinished decisions living rent free in your head. Things that you know you need to deal with, but you keep moving them to tomorrow.

And so it looks like decision fatigue whereby 3 p.m. you genuinely cannot decide what to make for dinner, not because you're weak, but because your brain has already made 485 decisions today. It looks like mental exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. You wake up tired, you go to bed tired, you don't understand why, because you feel like you haven't done anything worthy of this.

level of tiredness or depletion. Spinning looks like clutter buildup, not just physical clutter, but mental and emotional clutter too. It's a brain that can't settle or shut off. It's a to-do list that never gets shorter, a feeling that everything is always and forever going to be unfinished. So does any of that sound familiar? Because here's what I want you to understand. Spinning is not a character flaw. It's not laziness.

It's not a lack of motivation or discipline or willpower. Spinning is what happens when your life, the demands, the roles, the responsibilities exceeds your current capacity. That's it. It's a load bearing problem, not a you problem. And when women come to me feeling this way, which they do every day, they almost always assume that the answer then is gonna be more discipline and more motivation and a better morning routine and.

getting up earlier and a tighter schedule and more hustle. But what's actually happening is that they've been carrying a life that became heavier without changing the way that they support themselves. And so the solution then isn't to grip tighter, it's to restructure the carry. And I wanna talk about something at this point that might surprise you because it surprises almost every woman that I say it to.

When I describe that spinning feeling, the constant being behind, the exhaustion, the fog, the never-ending mental load, women often already have a name for it. They call it survival mode. They come to me and they say that they are in survival mode. And they say it like it's a bad thing. Like it means that they've failed, that it means that they're broken or burned out or just not enough in some way. And I want to reframe that.

Survival mode doesn't mean that you have failed. Survival mode means that you didn't give up. Think about that for a second. Survival mode means that you kept showing up, you kept solving problems, you kept taking care of people, you kept moving forward even when life felt like too much, even when you were running on empty, even when no one noticed, you kept going. That is not failure.

That's the opposite. That's grit. That's what love looks like. That's strength operating under impossible conditions. Survival mode is what carries women through incredibly demanding seasons of life. And some of you have been in a demanding season of life for years. The season has just never ended. The intensity never let up. And survival mode just became the way it became.

the reality and so I want to say this clearly, I don't want you to feel shame about having been or being in survival mode. It served you or it is still serving you. It is what has gotten you here. But here's where we need to have an honest conversation. The problem isn't that you went into survival mode. Sometimes survival mode is exactly what carries us through.

The problem is when survival mode becomes the only mode that you know how to operate in. Because survival mode is a temporary state that got turned into a permanent setting. And your nervous system, your body, your relationships, your sense of self, they cannot thrive in permanent survival mode. They can only endure permanent survival mode. They can only just hope to survive.

You, these things and you deserve more than just hanging on for dear life and trying to endure. And so at some point I would argue that I would argue that now for many of you here we have to move from surviving our lives to stabilizing them. Even if it means that survival mode is kind of where you're at for a while.

That's the shift that we need to make. It's not thinking that we need to figure out how to get out of survival mode, but learning how to make peace with the fact of being in it. Learning how to find stability inside of it, finding your footing, building something steady enough that you can finally exhale. And that is exactly what these two frameworks that I'm about to share are designed to help you do.

So this is the part that I really want you to lean in for because this is the teaching that has changed things for so many women that I work with. I wanna share these two frameworks with you today and they work together. The first one explains why things feel so hard even when you care, even when you're capable, even when you are trying. The second one gives you the practical tools to actually do something about it. So think of it this way.

The first framework is the diagnosis and the second one is the prescription. So framework one is the four pillar foundational framework. And these four pillars are this, clarity, capacity, carry differently, resilience. These four pillars came out of my own hardest season. They didn't come from a book, they didn't come from a certification that I got. They came from the moment that I finally stopped asking, what should I do?

and started asking, what's really going on? Because that's the shift that changes everything. Most women are so busy trying to fix the symptoms that they never stop to figure out the actual problem. And you can't fix what you cannot name. You can't fix when you don't understand what's broken. And so pillar one of this foundational framework is clarity. this is what's actually.

happening. The invitation is for you to be able to see what's actually happening, not what you wish was happening, not what used to be happening, what is actually true right now. When everything feels overwhelming, the problem usually isn't that too much is wrong, it's that nothing is clear. The fog doesn't have to mean failure. You can choose to allow the fog that you feel to just be feedback. It's your nervous system saying, hey, I'm maxed out.

I need you to slow down and take a look around and figure some stuff out. Clarity is confronting reality without judgment. It's noticing what's changed. It's releasing expectations that don't match this season of life. It is not making a plan. It is not setting goals. It's just getting honest. Ask yourself, what's actually happening in my life right now? What am I pretending is still working but isn't?

What season am I really in? What is really going on? You don't need solutions yet. You just need that honesty. That's what clarity is all about. So pillar two is capacity. And the invitation here is to understand your real limits. Because I can almost guarantee you that your bandwidth, your capacity isn't broken. It's buried underneath expectations that don't fit anymore. And

Capacity changes with your season, your stress, your health, your responsibilities, your emotional load. And so trying to function at an old capacity in a new season will always leave you feeling like you're failing. Not because you are failing, but because the math doesn't work. As my kids would say, the math isn't mapping. Capacity has three primary lenses. There is time. And this means how much focused time you actually have right now.

Not in theory, but in reality. The second piece of capacity is energy. Your real, physical, mental, and emotional reserves. Not what you think they should be or what they used to be, right? And then the third piece is responsibility. Both the visible tasks on your list and the invisible labor that nobody sees, probably not even you.

And the thing is that if your expectations don't match these three things, if they don't line up with capacity and energy and responsibility, overwhelm is not only expected, it's inevitable. And so it is not a lack of willpower. It is not a willpower problem. Again, I say this is a math problem. But all this time, you keep thinking it's just you, when in reality it's math.

And so you've been solving the wrong problem. And like I talk about all the time, it is so important to correctly diagnose the problem so you can go after the right solution. And so in this case, you don't need to push harder. You need to stop asking yourself to live as though you have a capacity that no longer exists and figure out how to distribute what I call your cup of resources

which equals your capacity differently. But once you're solving the right problem, it's amazing how much easier the solution is to figure out and to apply. So now you're solving for that redistribution of your capacity. You're not trying to just willpower it. You're not trying to get up earlier and just be more mindful of your time and set better timers and ask yourself to do more quickly, right? This is the majority of what I help women with.

in the work that I do every day, it's this seeing the actual problem so that we can come up with the actual solutions. So pillar three then is to carry differently. And this is where we start to adjust the load. Most systems fail not because women lack discipline, but because the systems were built essentially for ideal conditions, right? Perfect sleep, constant motivation, quiet mornings that can start slowly, unlimited energy.

bodies that do what we need them to do. what real life just does not work that way. And so when the system collapses, women blame themselves instead of questioning the structure. Does this sound familiar? Carrying differently means fewer shoulds. It means simpler system systems. means flexibility for what I call the fluidity of life built in.

It means permission instead of pressure. The best system isn't the one that looks impressive on paper. It's not the beautiful color coded schedules. That's not the best system. Sorry if you've thought that it was. I'm not saying they don't have a purpose, but it's not the best system. It's the one. So what is the best system? It's the one that actually works inside the life that you are living right now. I always say if it doesn't work on paper, it's not going to work in real life.

which is why it's so important to work out these distributions of the cup of resources on paper. What you're carrying, the visible and the invisible load, what's yours to carry and what's not? What has to matter right now and what needs to be set aside just for now? They could be really good, amazing things that for right now, they need to be set aside. Before you keep or add anything to your life, ask this one question.

Does this actually make my life easier? Does this actually make what I'm dealing with every day feel lighter or heavier? Because if it adds pressure, it probably doesn't belong, no matter how good it looks on paper. So pillar four is resilience. So let's review what we've talked about, right? We've talked about capacity. We've talked, I'm sorry, we've talked about clarity. Then we talked about capacity.

Then we talked about carry differently. Pillar four is resilience. And the invitation here is to learn how to return to something that does help you find stability in the mindset of everything that you're carrying. Resilience is not about staying balanced. Balance is a myth for most midlife women. Resilience is about knowing how to come back when life gets loud.

and it will get loud again. How do I go back to the basics? How do I go back to diagnosing and seeing what's actually going on? Because in reality, your plans will get interrupted. Your energy will dip. Hard seasons will come. When these things happen, it does not indicate failure. It is simply life. And resilience looks like fast recovery. It's fewer shame spirals. Reassessment, a skill that I teach,

to all of my accomplished lifestyle members gives us the ability to say, okay, plan A was great, but you know what? Life came in and forced plan B upon me. So how do I reconcile these two things and come up with a strategic C that actually works for me and actually allows me to be who and what I'm supposed to be in spite of

how my goals and what I expected maybe didn't align with what actually happened. How do I make peace? How do I bring these two things together? Because when you know how to do that, you stop fearing hard seasons. You stop worrying about interruptions and disruptions and what if it doesn't go this way? And what if I can't follow through? Because what you do, what you have done when you walk through all four of these pieces, when you do it, you...

you learn how to trust yourself to handle whatever comes. When you know these four pieces and you know how to live them out, then that allows you to know that whatever happens, I will figure it out, I will handle it. You're not meant to power through life. You're meant to know how to keep yourself going even when life gets, especially when life gets really crazy. So,

The first framework that I shared with you was the four pillar foundational framework. The second framework that I'm gonna teach you, remember that is on the one that helps you see the problem. Framework two is the four pillar reset path. Now that we know what's going on, what do we do? How do we reset things, right? So this, again, the foundational framework, it tells you what's happening and why. This four pillar reset path gives you

a practical structure to actually build something different. These are the four areas that I have helped women rebuild consistently across hundreds, maybe even thousands of coaching relationships now. When they move from floundering and spiraling to steady, to actually feeling like I'm managing things, even in the midst of I'm in a survival season. And these, the stability and that...

you know what I am doing it that those kinds of feelings that these women get, they are tied directly back to these foundational pillars that we talked about. We've got to have the understanding first. Okay. So this four part, this four part reset framework pillar one is to calm your mind and you can see how this maps directly to clarity. When life becomes heavier, the mind speeds up.

There's more to track, there's more to decide, there's more to anticipate. The mental chatter, it gets louder. And so the racing thoughts, they start and they rev up. And when your mind is spinning, everything in your life feels harder than it actually is. A task that would take 15 minutes feels insurmountable when your brain is already at capacity. And so calming the mind, it shouldn't feel too woo woo to you or lame or like something I just can't prioritize right now. Trying to calm your mind.

to get that down, to come down just a few notches, it actually is a very strategic thing to do. But what are some strategic ways to do this? How do I calm my mind? Brain dumps, slowing down decision-making, right? Most things are not urgent. They don't need an urgent answer, an urgent figuring out, an urgent solution. Getting the noise out of your head and onto paper. These things create clarity.

which brings you to calm. It allows you to start making better decisions. You stop kind of reacting from exhaustion. You can actually see your life instead of just clinging to it. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. The first step towards stability is often not solving more problems. It's showing your thoughts. It's showing yourself what's actually going on so that you can slow your thoughts down enough.

to see your life clearly again, rather than feeling like everything is just all a big hot dumpster fire. So that's pillar one is to calm your mind. Pillar two is to simplify your life. And this pillar maps directly to the second pillar in the foundational framework. It maps directly to capacity. Now I will tell you, this is where I see the most resistance because women here simplify and they think that it means giving up or letting people down or doing less. But here's the truth.

One of the biggest reasons that women miss the version of themselves who could handle everything is because life was simply lighter then. You cannot carry a heavier life with the same expectations you had when it was lighter. Like we said before, the math will not math. Simplifying might mean fewer commitments, not forever, but for this season. Resolving the unfinished decisions that are quietly draining your mental energy.

It could look like releasing the expectation that everything has to be operating at peak performance all at once. Stability often begins not by adding better habits, but by removing what your life cannot realistically carry anymore. It doesn't mean that you're weaker or less adequate or losing it. Removing what can't work right now, again, right? It's a math equation that just does not work. so removing what can't work right now is again, actually

strategic, wisdom-filled move. So pillar three is to support your body and this is the heart of caring differently. Your body is different in midlife than it was in your 20s and your 30s. This is not a complaint. It is just a fact. Hormones shift. Recovery takes longer. Ever notice that? Sleep is less predictable.

Stress lands differently, harder, heavier, and it takes longer to shake. And so many women are trying to run their lives with the same expectations they had 20 years ago. Pushing through on four hours of sleep, skipping meals because they're busy, treating rest like a reward for productivity instead of a requirement for functionality. Huh, let me say that one again. Treating rest like a reward for productivity instead of a requirement.

for functionality. The thing is, is those approaches, didn't, they used to work until they didn't. Supporting your body in midlife, it means getting honest about what it actually needs now. What does rest look like? True rest, what does nourishment look like? Movement that restores rather than just depletes. It's respecting your limits, not as failure, but as feedback or as data.

When you start supporting your body the way that it needs in this season, your capacity increases, your mood steadies, not because you took a supplement of some kind, but because you stopped running on empty and started running on something real. so pillar four, said that totally backwards, pillar four is to build supportive systems. And this is what makes resilience, pillar four from the original framework,

It's what makes resilience sustainable and achievable. Your brain cannot hold everything anymore. Not because something is wrong with you, but because the volume of what you're managing now has probably for a very long time exceeded what the human brain was designed to track and support. Systems, we don't come up with those as punishment. They're not rigid. They're not color coded prison schedules, right?

They're not the enemy. Systems actually bring relief, but people a lot of times have an aversion to setting up systems because they feel restrictive. When you have a simple planning rhythm, you stop spending mental energy, re-deciding the same things over and over and over again. When you have a routine that carries the load of the ordinary, your brain gets freed up for what actually requires your active attention.

Think about it, if your brain is having to make all of the teeny tiny little decisions every single day on repeat, is it any wonder that when something happens that your brain now needs to problem solve, you can't figure out which way is up? Do you see how if we can eliminate all of those or as many of those little teeny tiny little decisions every day, if we can eliminate as many of them as we can, now all of a sudden you've got more brain space, you have freed up.

some of what you need to actually operate in this season of life. When you have decision frameworks for the predictable stuff, you preserve yourself for the unpredictable stuff. Systems carry the load so that your brain doesn't have to. So here's how these two frameworks work together, okay? The foundational framework. Clarity, capacity, carry differently, resilience. It helps you understand what's actually happening.

It gives you language for why life feels so heavy. It stops this endless cycle of self-blame and it replaces it with self-awareness. We step out of self-blame and we step into self-awareness. The four pillar reset path, calm your mind, simplify, support your body, build systems. These give you the practical structure to do something about what you've discovered with that first framework. It takes the awareness that you have and it turns it into action.

action that works. It's diagnosis and prescription. It's understanding and rebuilding together. You must have both parts and this is the foundation of everything that I teach women everywhere. And so I want to come back to where we started because I want to close this loop. The woman that you miss, the one who could handle things, who felt capable and clear and on top of it, she didn't disappear. She was simply operating in a life that was lighter.

She had fewer decisions to manage. She had fewer people depending on her. She had fewer emotional loads to carry, less complexity, fewer midlife women's hormones. And the systems that she had, even if they weren't great, they were likely mostly enough for that season. That's why she could handle it. It wasn't because she was better. It was because her load was different. It was lighter. And here's what I really want you to take away from today.

The goal isn't to become that version of yourself again. She belonged to a season that has passed. You've grown, your life has grown, your responsibilities and your relationships and your roles, those things have all grown. And so the goal then is to become the woman who knows how to carry her life because she understands it. This life, this season with Clary with the.

with the right capacity expectations and with the support structures and systems that she actually needs. That woman is not gone. She's not lost. She's just been waiting for a different woman to emerge. She's been waiting for a different approach and she's ready and you now have it. And so if you've been with me today and you recognize yourself in any of this, the spinning, their survival mode, the missing the old you, I need you to hear me. You are not lost.

You are not buried. You are not broken. You are not failing. Your life, it is so likely that your life may have simply grown heavier than the systems you've been using to carry it. And that does not mean that there is something wrong with you. This is just a capacity problem, a math problem, that has a real, practical, workable solution. Both of these frameworks, the four pillar foundational framework and the four pillar reset path,

are the foundation of everything that I teach inside Accomplished Lifestyle. This is my signature program and community built especially for women like you. Women who are done with all of this surface level talk and the surface level tips and trendy hacks and rigid systems that crumble the second that real life shows up. So also before I let you go, if this has resonated with you, I want to point you towards my sub stack. It's where I do my deeper writing.

Just like we have the deep conversations here that you can listen to, we have them there in writing too. And we unpack all kinds of clutter for midlife women, not just the physical stuff, but the mental clutter, the emotional clutter, the identity clutter that builds up when we stop paying attention to ourselves. There's a free option and there's a $7 a month option depending on how much of this work feels useful to you. And actually for the month of March only, it's just five bucks a month.

You can find my sub stack at midlifeclutterhelp.com. The link is also down in the show notes. Come on, come and hang out with us there. There's a lot of great conversations. Alrighty friend, thanks for being here today. You are doing amazing work. Even if you're just listening, recognize that you are showing up for yourself and that in and of itself is you leading yourself. This is self care.

It's not all bubble baths and weekends away. You listening, getting curious about what is actually going on and how can I make it better? That is you taking care of yourself and you should be proud of yourself for doing that. And so until we talk again, make it an amazing day.