Ep. 230: The Real Midlife Crisis... It's Not What You Think

When you hear the phrase "midlife crisis," what do you picture?

Be honest.

Because for most of us, the image is pretty specific. A man in his late forties. A sports car he definitely doesn't need. Maybe a motorcycle. Maybe a younger girlfriend. A dramatic, visible, kind of embarrassing unraveling that everyone around him can see coming before he can.

That's the cultural shorthand for midlife crisis. And we've all laughed at it a little. Or rolled our eyes at it. Or quietly hoped it wouldn't happen to the people we love.

But here's what nobody talks about.

There is another kind of midlife crisis. A quieter one. A slower one. One that doesn't come with a sports car or a dramatic announcement or any external sign at all.

It happens inside.

And that’s what we’re talking about today.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

The Losses Midlife Women Carry That No One Talks About

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Transcript

Okay, so last week we talked about the losses in midlife that never get a funeral, the grief that doesn't look like grief. And if that episode resonated with you, today is the next natural step because naming the grief is important, but it's only part of the picture. Today we're going one layer deeper. We're talking about why the weight accumulates in the first place, the actual mechanism behind why so many capable, intentional...

Strong women arrive at midlife feeling heavy and lost and disconnected from themselves, even when nothing has gone dramatically wrong. It's called identity clutter. And once you understand what it is and how it builds, two things are gonna happen. First, a lot of things are gonna start making sense. Second, you're gonna stop blaming yourself for feeling this way. That's the goal. So let's get into it.

Now here's what I want you to walk away with today. I want you to understand the mechanism, not just the feeling, the actual reason why midlife can feel so full, even when your life looks completely manageable from the outside. Because here's what I know from coaching women through this season. Most of them are not struggling because something is fundamentally wrong with them. They are struggling because they are carrying things that they didn't even realize they are carrying. Old expectations and outdated

Versions of themselves that they're quietly still measuring themselves. They're now solves against. Disappointments that got filed away instead of processed through. Roles that don't quite fit anymore and all of it is piling up layer after layer until one day the weight is undeniable and they have no idea where it came from. When you understand how that happens, you stop blaming yourself for feeling it. And that's what our conversation today is all about.

So I wanna tell you a story about a version of myself that almost never existed. When I graduated from high school, I did what everyone expected. I enrolled in college. I went to a community college where I signed up for my Gen Ed courses and I told people that I was studying psychology and that's actually what I thought. It sounded reasonable, it sounded responsible, it sounded like the right next step. But here's the truth, I never really wanted to be there. The only thing I had ever really

dreamed about in a genuine way since I was a little girl honestly was being a hairdresser. That was it. That was the dream. Simple, clear, and totally mine. But nobody around me took it seriously. My friends were going to college. My teachers and guidance counselors assumed that college was the path. And really, my parents kind of expected it too. And so without anyone explicitly telling me that I was wrong, I absorbed a very clear message.

The thing you actually want isn't the right thing to want. And so I just played along. I switched from psychology to social work somewhere in there thinking maybe a different major would make it feel like a better fit. But every semester I felt more and more disconnected, more like I was living inside someone else's story, like I was wearing a life that didn't quite belong to me. And I kept hoping that if I just wore it long enough, it would eventually feel like mine, but it never did.

So after two and a half, three years, I finally worked up the courage to tell my parents the truth. I didn't want a career in psychology. I didn't want to be a social worker. I just wanted to do hair. And to their credit, once they really heard me, they supported it. And so I finished my associate's degree, and I enrolled in cosmetology school. And I loved it. From the very first day, I loved it. It felt like coming home to something I had been standing outside of for years. But here's what I want you to notice about that story.

For two and a half or three years, I was accumulating layer upon layer that weren't actually mine. And I wasn't being dishonest exactly. I wasn't being malicious in any way. I was just doing what so many of us do. We absorb the expectations of the people around us and slowly, quietly, we make them our own, telling ourselves the story that this is who I'm supposed to be until we can even barely hear the voice underneath that says, but hang on.

This isn't actually who I am. And that gap, the gap between the life that you're living and the life that actually fits you, that gap has a weight to it. And you probably can't see it. You might not even be able to fully articulate it, but you can feel it. And for a lot of midlife women, that gap has been accumulating for a very long time. Again, it's not because they made wrong choices necessarily.

It's not because they've failed, because life is long and roles are heavy and seasons change. And most of us never had a framework for regularly checking in and asking, does this still fit? Is this still mine? Am I still living toward the life that I actually want or have I slowly been layering on someone else's version of it? This is what identity clutter is. And it's one of the most significant and I think least talked about reasons why midlife feels so heavy.

I'll never forget that moment that I finally said it out loud to my parents, not because the conversation was easy, it wasn't, but because of what happened inside of me when I stopped carrying the weight of the wrong story. There was this immediate sense of alignment, like something just clicked into place, like I could finally breathe, like all the way down. That's what it feels like when you start clearing identity clutter. And I want that for you too.

So let's define this clearly because I think it's important to understand exactly what we're talking about. Identity clutter is not a crisis. It's not a breakdown. It's not a sign that your life is wrong or that you've made catastrophic mistakes. It's just an accumulation. It's what happens when a woman lives a full invested responsible life for years, for decades, without regular space to ask this question, the one that says,

does this still fit? And it builds in layers. So let me walk you through what those layers actually look like. The first layer really is our roles. You are a lot of things to a lot of people, Wife, mom, daughter, friend, maybe employee or business owner or volunteer or caretaker. And each one of those roles came with its own set of expectations, its own demands, its own version of who you're supposed to be inside that role.

And for most of us, stepped into those roles one by one without fully choosing them in a conscious way. They just kind of accumulated and then they expanded. became the structure of our entire identity. And here's what happens over time. The roles shift. Kids grow up, parents age, marriages evolve, careers change, and suddenly the identity that you built around those roles doesn't quite fit the version of your life that you're actually living now, but you're still carrying it.

because you never had a moment to set it down and ask which parts of this are still relevant? Which parts of this are still mine? So that first layer is roles. The second layer is expectations. Now, some of these you choose consciously, but a lot of them you absorbed from your family of origin, from your culture, from the women around you, from the picture you built inside your head of what your life would look like by now. And over time, those absorbed expectations became internal.

They stopped feeling like the external pressure and they started feeling like personal standards, like the bar that you hold yourself to without even questioning where the bar came from. And here's what that does. It means that you're constantly measuring yourself against a standard that was never actually yours to begin with. And...

coming up short against a standard that you didn't choose is exhausting in a very particular way because you can work as hard as you want and still feel like you're failing because the target was never designed for your actual life. The third layer is the versions of yourself that you're still quietly comparing yourself to. And this one is pretty subtle, but it is significant.

Most midlife women are carrying a mental image of a previous version of themselves. The version who had more energy and more clarity and more capacity. The version who hadn't yet been through the things that wore her down. The version who felt lighter. And they use that version as the measuring stick for who they should be right now. But here's the problem with that. That version of you existed in a different season.

with different demands carrying less accumulated weight. You cannot hold yourself to that standard in this season of life. It's not a fair comparison and it is costing you. So the fourth layer is unprocessed disappointments. Now we talked in episode one in this series about the losses that never get a funeral. This is where they live because when a loss doesn't get processed,

When there's no space to grieve it, it doesn't disappear. It just gets filed away. It goes into a kind of internal storage. And over time, that storage fills up. The relationship that changed, the dream that didn't unfold, the season of life that ended before you were ready, the version of yourself you assumed would come that quietly, gradually didn't over time. None of these had a moment of acknowledgement. And so they just stayed.

running in the background, adding the weight that you are already carrying and adding more weight to it. And you never even realized that they're a part of it. And the fifth layer, this really is the one that ties it all together. It's the gap. The gap between who you thought you'd be by now and who you actually are. And I wanna be careful here because I'm not saying that you should have been someone different. I'm not saying your life should look different than it does. I'm not...

What I am saying is that most women are carrying an unexamined assumption about how things were supposed to go. And the gap between that assumption and their actual reality is a source of quiet, chronic weight that never gets named or said out loud. And so there it is. That's identity clutter. It's roles that no longer fit. It's expectations that you absorbed but never chose.

It's old versions of yourself that you're still measuring yourself against. It's unprocessed disappointments that filed away over time. And it's the gap between the life you assumed you would have and the life that you're actually living. Layer by layer building slowly until the weight feels undeniable and you have no idea where it came from or what it is. Now here's what I want you to hear. You're not broken. You're not behind in understanding all of this and you're not failing. You're just layered and there's a difference.

Now I want to offer you a reframe here because this is really powerful. Identity clutter is not a character flaw. It is not the result of bad decisions or weak willpower or emotional immaturity. It is what happens when a woman lives a full invested deeply committed life and never has the space or the permission or the framework to regularly sort through what she's carrying. This is not a personal failing. That is just what

life looks like when you've been busy living it. Think about a closet, right? Not a metaphor closet, your actual closet. If you haven't sorted through it in years, it fills up. And it's not because you're lazy, it's not because you're disorganized, but life moves fast and things accumulate and there's always something more urgent than sorting through old clothes. And one day you open the door to your closet and it's overwhelming and you don't even know where to start. Identity clutter is the same way.

It's what happened to your internal sense of self over years and decades of living. And just like a closet, the solution isn't just to burn the whole thing down. It isn't to throw everything out and start over from scratch. It's to go through it intentionally without urgency and ask honestly for each thing, does this fit? Does this still belong? Is this still mine? Some things you keep, some things you release and slowly, not all at once and not dramatically,

that weight begins to lighten. And here's the other thing that I want you to hear in this reframe. You're not lost. And I know that that word gets tossed around a whole lot by women in midlife. I hear it constantly. I don't know who I am anymore. I feel so lost and I understand why it feels that way. But I want to add some gentle pushback to that conversation because I think it misdirects the work. You're not lost. You are layered.

The woman that you actually are, the one with her own desires and her own instincts and her own sense of what fits, she didn't disappear. She's just underneath all of those layers. She's been there the whole time. And so the work isn't to find a new version of yourself. The work is to kind of clear off enough of that clutter to hear her again, to figure her out again. That's a very different task. And honestly, it's one that is filled with a whole lot more hope.

then something is lost, I have to find her or create her from the beginning. And so I wanna give you something practical here. It's not a 10 step plan, that's not what this is, but something that you can actually do with what you've heard here today because awareness is the starting point, but awareness without any direction can just feel like more overwhelmed. Like what do I do with this all, right? And that's not what I'm here to give you. So here are three questions, just three, and I want you to sit with them.

Not rush through them, not answer them quickly, but actually let them land, actually think about it. Question number one, what expectations are you still holding that may no longer fit? Not the ones you consciously chose, the ones that you just absorbed, the ones that became your internal standard without ever really examining where they came from. What are you holding yourself to that was never actually yours to carry? So question one,

What expectations are you still holding that may no longer fit? Question two, what version of yourself are you quietly comparing yourself to? Who is the measuring stick? Is it the you from 10 years ago or 20 years ago or the you before you had kids, before all the losses, before the seasons that asked for more than you had expected? Is that comparison fair? Is it even possible? And what would it feel like to release that standard?

Question three, what disappointment never really have the space to be acknowledged? Now know that this one takes courage because there are things that most of us have filed away and told ourselves that we're over it, right? When really we just stopped talking about them. What's in the storage? What loss never got its moment? What expectation quietly died without a funeral? You don't have to answer all three of these questions today and you don't have to do anything with the answers right now.

But the act of asking these questions honestly and of being willing to look at what's in that closet, that's the beginning of the clearing, the clearing of the identity clutter. And here's what I want you to remember as you sit down with these questions. This is not about changing your entire life. It's not about blowing up what you've built or abandoning the people that you love or starting over from scratch. It's about getting honest, slowly, without this sense of urgency with

compassion, the lens of compassion, using that to look at yourself and to examine what you're still carrying that no longer belongs here, just like those clothes that don't fit in your physical closet. Because midlife is not just a season of loss, it's also a season of recalibration, of choosing consciously and intentionally what you carry forward and what you don't. That is not loss, that's actually freedom.

So before we end today, I want to give you these three things. One, identity clutter is real and it's not your fault. It is the natural result of living a full life without regular space to sort through what you've been accumulating. You didn't cause it by being inattentive or weak or uncaring or broken. You caused it by letting yourself be human and human is exactly what you are.

Two, you are not lost, you are layered. The woman you actually are hasn't disappeared. She's just underneath all of that accumulation. And so the work that we need to do isn't reinvention, it's excavation. There is a significant difference between those two things and that difference matters enormously for how you approach what comes next.

The third thing I want to remind you of is to start with one honest question. Not a plan, not an overall, not a to-do list, not a complete audit of your entire identity. Just one question. Pick the one from today. I gave you three options. Pick the one from today that landed the hardest. The one that made you feel a little bit uncomfortable. And sit with it. Sit with it for today. Sit with it for the week.

That discomfort, doesn't signal a red flag that says, run away, that's something you should avoid. That is the feeling of something that is actually true starting to surface. So let it surface. Know that if today's conversation gave you language for something that you have been feeling but couldn't quite explain, I want you to know that that's not an accident. This is exactly the kind of conversation that I...

love having with women. It's what I am here to do. Because midlife women deserve more than surface level advice and cheerleading. They deserve honest conversations that actually go to the root of what's going on. That don't just treat the symptoms, but actually diagnose the real problem. And the real problem for so many women that I work with isn't that they're lazy.

or undisciplined or broken or behind. It's that they've been carrying things that they didn't even realize they were carrying and no one ever gave them permission to set any of it down. And so I'm giving you that permission today. You don't have to keep carrying all of it. Not the outdated expectations, not the older versions of yourself that you've been measuring against. Not the disappointments that never got acknowledged. Not the rules that no longer fit the woman that you're becoming.

you get to choose what to carry forward. And that choosing that slow, honest, intentional process of deciding what belongs and what doesn't, that's what recalibration looks like. And that is what we're gonna talk about in next week's conversation. Because really episode three in this series is where we actually start to set things down. And if you wanna head start on that work, grab my free guide, This Is Why Midlife Feels So Heavy.

you'll find it linked below. It's going to walk you through why this season feels the way that it does, what you've been carrying that you may not have realized, and a simple but powerful shift that can begin to make these things feel more manageable. Again, you'll find the links in the notes below. And if this conversation resonated with you, would you share it with a woman that you know needs to hear it? You already know who she is, send it to her and know that I'll be back next week and we're going to talk about what it actually looks like.

to begin putting things down, not perfectly, not all at once, but intentionally, and with a whole lot of grace. And so, we'll talk then.