Ep. 236: The Permission Nobody Gives to Midlife Women

Well what I’m here to give you today is surprisingly…

Not a strategy. Not a framework. Not a five-step plan.

But what I’m here to give you today is: Permission.

Specifically: three permissions that nobody in your life is going to hand you. 

Not your kids. 

Not your husband or partner. 

Not your mother or your best friend or the women you follow on Instagram who seem to have it all figured out.

The permissions I'm talking about today are the ones that midlife women need most — and receive least. 

The ones that sit quietly at the root of so much of the stuck, heavy, is-this-really-it feeling that we've been talking about these past few weeks.

And before I get into them, I want to say something directly.

If you have been waiting for someone to tell you it's okay…to become someone different than who you've been, to set some things down even if it inconveniences other people, to actually believe that you are capable of the hard thing that's in front of you — you have been waiting for something that is never going to come from the outside.

And that's not because nobody cares about you.

It's because nobody else has access to what's happening inside you the way you do. 

Nobody else can see your internal landscape. 

Nobody else knows the full weight of what you've been carrying or what it's costing you or what this season is actually asking of you.

Which means the permission has always been yours to give.

And today, we're going to talk about how to actually do that.

So, let’s dive in!

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Transcript

Well, okay, so we're talking about permissions today. And these are permissions that sit quietly at the root of so much of the stuck, heavy, is this really it sort of feelings that we've been talking about these past few weeks. And before I get to them, I wanna say something directly. If you've been waiting for someone to tell you it's okay, that it's okay to become someone different than who you've been or,

to set some things down, even if it makes life harder for other people, or to actually believe, truly believe that you are capable of the hard thing that is in front of you, then if you've been waiting for those things, what you need to know is that those things are never gonna come from the outside. Those are not external circumstances that are gonna come to fruition around you.

And it doesn't mean that the people around you don't.

care about you, it's because nobody else has access to what is actually happening inside you the way that you do. Nobody else can see your internal landscape. Nobody else knows the full weight of what you've been carrying or what it's costing you or what this season is actually asking of you, which means that the permission, it has always been yours to give to yourself.

And today we're going to talk about how to actually do that. So know that we've covered a lot of ground in the past few weeks. This is actually the third episode in a series of topics, a series of installments in the same topic that I have been talking about.

Jennifer Roskamp (01:47.104)
So two weeks ago, in the first episode here of this series, we talked about grief. We talked about the losses in midlife that never get a funeral, the invisible weight that accumulates when something shifts but nothing officially ends.

And then last week, we essentially diagnosed why the weight builds and its identity clutter. We talked about the layers of roles and expectations and old versions of yourself and unprocessed disappointments that pile up quietly over the years until the heaviness now becomes something that you can't ignore or deny anymore. And today, this is where we're actually going to do something with those conversations that we've had thus far.

And we're not doing a dramatic overhaul. This isn't all about a life reinvention. It's not a radical departure from everything that you've built. That's not what I'm going to be suggesting here. I'm just going to be laying out three specific, honest, deeply needed permissions. And they are this. Number one, permission to become someone different than who you've been.

Number two, permission to make decisions about who you're becoming without giving everyone else the biggest piece of the vote. And third, permission to believe, actually believe, not just say, but believe that you can do the hard thing that's in front of you, no matter what it is.

And friend, let me just tell you that this is so timely for me today that I'm excited to share this with you all the more. So by the end of this episode, I want you to feel less like you've been waiting for a green light that's never coming and more like you understand that the light was always yours to give. So that's where we're headed. Well, I want to tell you about a decision that I made a few years ago that changed more than I expected it to.

For a long time, I poured a glass of wine every night at the end of my day. The time was always different, but it was kind of the signal. I kind of needed it in a clinical sense, I guess. And again, I needed to investigate. I needed to examine what that was all about. What was that glass all about? Because what I was learning and what I realized is that this was my signal to the end of the day. This was my.

ritual in exhaling. It was the thing that marked the end of the chaos and the beginning of something that felt like it was just mine. My time, my space, my opportunity to focus on myself finally at the end of a long day.

It was the moment really that the day shifted. It was the moment that I felt like I could breathe a little. It was the moment that I stopped carrying everything quite so tightly and felt like I could put some things down. And for a long time, I told myself, this is fine. There's nothing wrong with this because it was fine. It was fine on the surface. Nothing dramatic was happening. Nobody was concerned. Life looked completely normal from the outside and mostly it was, but I started to notice something. I started to...

that it wasn't about what was in the glass. That's not what I was reaching for. It was relief. That's what I needed. It was escape. It was silence. was...

Silence, right? Something I rarely have in a household of 11 and in time 10. It was a way to soften the sharp edges of a day that had asked a lot of me. The stress, the loneliness sometimes, the frustration, the quiet disappointment in myself or in my circumstances that I hadn't found another way to process. And so that glass of wine, it wasn't a problem. It was a symptom. And once I saw that, once I was honest enough with myself,

to look at what was underneath that habit instead of just the habit itself, I couldn't unsee it. And so I made a decision. I made a decision to stop pouring that glass. And it wasn't because someone asked me to. And it wasn't because anyone noticed or was concerned or even I wasn't concerned that there was a problem. Nobody was watching. Nobody was waiting for me to change. Nobody gave me permission.

I gave myself permission. I gave myself permission to make that choice. And I want to say this. I am now in a much different place, a place where I may choose a glass of wine still. But I choose it from a place of agency now.

And this conversation, it isn't about whether I or you drink the glass of wine or whatever or not. This isn't about whether to drink or not to We're not here having that debate. I'm here to talk about the decision, though. And here's what I want you to hear about that decision, because I think it illustrates everything that we're going to talk about today.

Whether we're talking about what's in your glass or whether we're talking about what's on your schedule, here's what you need to hear. First, I had to give myself permission to become someone different, someone who didn't need that nightly ritual, someone who was willing to feel the sharp edges instead of trying to soften them. That required me to believe that a different version of me was possible. That was what I needed to believe. I needed to believe that who I had been

wasn't who I was required to stay. And any time that you want to make a change in something about who you are, you will have to give yourself the same permission. You are allowed to be someone different. Second, I had to make the decision without letting what everyone else might think about it be the biggest piece in the equation.

What would it mean for social situations? What would I say when someone offered me a glass of wine at a dinner party? What would my husband think? What would it look like? I considered those things, but I didn't let them decide for me because this decision was about who I was becoming and that belonged to me. And third, I had to do the hard thing quietly.

Without fanfare, without anyone cheering me on or checking in or holding me accountable, it was just me deciding and then following through day after day in ordinary moments when the habit wanted to insert itself again and nobody would have known the difference either way. That decision was one of the most clarifying things I've ever done, not because giving up that nightly ritual is some noble achievement, but because of what it taught me and how to change.

and how to create change that actually works. Because it doesn't wait for permission from the outside. It starts with a quiet decision that you make on the inside. Change starts with a quiet decision that you make on the inside, and it requires you to believe before there is any evidence that you are capable of becoming the version of yourself that you're deciding to become.

And that's really what we're talking about today. We're talking about all three of those things. So let's go through each one of those permissions one by one. And I want to go slowly here because I think each one of these deserves real space. So permission one. Permission one is that you are allowed to become someone different. And I want to start going deeper in this by saying something that sounds simple, but it lands hard for a lot of women.

you are not required to stay the same person that you've been. Now that seems obvious when I say it out loud. Of course you're allowed to grow and change. Of course you're not frozen in place. But in practice, in the lived daily experience, especially of midlife, a surprising number of women are operating as if we're stuck. This is just who I am. This is just how it has to be.

They're carrying essentially this fixed identity, a settled sense of who they are, what they're capable of, what fits them, what doesn't. And that identity was largely formed in a different season. It was built around different circumstances, different capacities, different versions of what they believed about themselves in the world. And they've just kept on. They've just kept that identity without examining it, without asking whether it still fits the woman that they actually are right now.

Here's what I want to say about that. Becoming someone different, doesn't mean that you're betraying yourself in any way. It's not that you're abandoning yourself. It's not leaving behind, it's not leaving behind the people who love you or who you or anything about like the life that you've built.

It's just growth. And growth is what you were made for. But here's the piece that I really want you to focus in on. And this is the capacity piece, which is something we talk a lot about here, capacity. But I'm talking about it in a little bit of a different way today. Capacity is talked about a lot. And I talk about it a lot because most women never realize that it's even a thing, right? Capacity is things like your time and your energy and your brain power and your ability to focus.

refer to this as your cup of resources. It's what you have to carry you throughout your day and to help you execute as you go about your day. But the truth is that's not the only thing that capacity, that's not the only type of capacity that we need to understand. And another important thing to understand is that you don't have, nobody has unlimited capacity and you never did. And I think this is one of the most under discussed truths, especially about midlife. We talk about burnout.

We talk about overwhelm. We talk about doing too much, but we rarely talk about the honest practical reality that you are a finite human being with a finite amount of time and energy and emotional bandwidth.

Part of becoming someone different in this season is going to require that you be ruthlessly honest about what you actually carry well right now. Not what you carry, but what you actually have the ability to carry well. Not what you used to be able to carry, not what you've always carried, not what everyone else expects you to carry, but what you can actually carry with intention, with presence, with something left over for yourself.

this specific season of your life. And here's something that I also think doesn't get said enough. Sometimes the things that you need to set aside because you can't carry them well right now in this season, some of these things that you're gonna set aside are not bad things. And I want to say that again a little bit differently because it's important. Sometimes you're gonna be setting aside things that are good things, genuinely good things. Things that mattered, things that served you, things that

were right for a different season, but that just don't fit this one. The commitment that made sense five years ago, but drains you now. The role that you stepped into out of love that has slowly become obligation and maybe ushered in some resentment. The standard that you held yourself to when your life looked different, that now it's just simply not a realistic standard anymore. Setting those things aside, it doesn't

make you a failure because you can't carry them. And it doesn't mean that they don't matter either. It doesn't mean that you're giving up or that you're checking out or that you're becoming someone who doesn't care. It just means that you are being honest about your capacity and intentional about how you use it.

This isn't admitting that you are now weaker. It's just managing in reality. The truth is it's managing yourself with wisdom. And here's the question I want you to toss around.

It's not the question of what you're carrying that was never yours, but really going a layer deeper. What are you carrying that you haven't consciously chosen? What have you been carrying without realizing it? Because it's just always been there, because you never stopped to question it, because the thought of setting it down felt like it would require a conversation that you didn't want to have, or a disappointment that you didn't want to cause.

what in your life right now is happening not because you genuinely chose it, but because you just kept going with it. Because there's a difference between choosing something and just continuing something. And a lot of women arrive in this midlife place having continued a great many things that they never actually chose. And the weight of all of that continuing, all of that automatic, unexamined forward motion is part of what makes this season feel so heavy.

In reality, you are allowed to stop, to look, to ask honestly, does this still fit me? Is this still mine? Is this something, here's a good one, is this something that I would choose today, knowing what I now know, being who I am now? And if the answer is no, you are allowed to set it down. So permission one was examining. It was you're allowed to become someone different.

Permission two is this. Permission two is talking about how, permission two is talking about how you can make decisions about who you're becoming.

without giving everyone else essentially the deciding vote. And this is the one that I think is probably going to be the hardest to examine. And so I want to say it carefully. I'm not telling you that the other people in your life don't matter. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't consider what they think, what they request, what they see. These people matter. The people in your life, your kids, your spouse, your coworkers, your family, your close friends,

what they think and their needs are real. Their feelings are real. The impact that your choices have on them is real. And I would never stand here and tell you that you make decisions in a vacuum as if you exist in isolation from the people that you love. That's not what I'm suggesting. But what I am saying is this, when the impact on others becomes the primary filter, the first and heaviest, most dominant filter,

that you use, the loudest voice in the room, the thing that shuts down the conversation that you're having with yourself, even before it starts, you stop being a participant in what you're becoming.

You become the supporting character, essentially, in everyone else's story. And for a lot of midlife women, that's exactly what has happened, slowly without anyone meaning for it to. You became so attuned to everyone else's needs, so practiced at running every decision through the filter of how it would affect your people, that you stopped asking what you actually needed, what you actually wanted, who you were actually becoming. And now you're standing in the middle of this midlife place feeling

invisible, feeling lost, feeling like you don't recognize yourself and wondering how in the world this even happened. Here's how it happened. In some things that you, in some things, there were things that you gave others the deciding vote on in your life. It's, and you did that for so long that you forgot that you had a vote too.

And I want to be honest about why this happens because I don't think it's as simple as people pleasing or a lack of confidence, though those things can play a role. I think for a lot of women, it comes from something deeper. It comes from a place of love, from genuine sacrificial care for the people in their lives, from the belief absorbed over years and decades that good mothers and good wives and good friends put others first and that their needs come last.

that wanting something for themselves is somehow taking it from someone else. And that belief just is not true. But it is incredibly common. And it has a cost. A lot of women haven't realized there's a cost that we've paid. And so here's the permission that comes in number two. You can consider others without being controlled by them. You can love your people deeply and still make decisions that aren't what you would

what they would prefer you make. You can factor in the impact on your family and your friends without making that impact the final word. Others do deserve a seat at the table, but they are not the only ones sitting at the table. You are becoming someone. That process belongs to you. And the weight of others' opinions and their potential disappointment, the adjustment that they might be required to make, their preferences about who you are and how you show

up, that weight does not get to be heavier than your own honest reckoning with yourself. You are allowed to decide who you are becoming, even if it requires someone else to adjust, even if it creates a conversation you've been avoiding, even if it means disappointing someone who has gotten comfortable with a version of you that was costing you everything. You are allowed to have your own seat at the table.

even if you've been ignoring that for a long time.

Permission three is you can do the hard thing. And I saved this one for last because I think it's the one that makes the other two possible. Because here's what I see constantly in the women that I work with. They know what they need to do. They've done the reflection. They've named the grief. They've diagnosed the identity clutter. They've gotten honest about what they're carrying and what no longer fits. They can see clearly what the next step is. And then?

They stop. Not because they don't want to move, but because somewhere underneath all of that there is this quiet but persistent belief that they can't. That this is the hard, this thing will be too hard. That the other hard things that they've done somehow don't count or they don't transfer here. That this time will be different.

And I want you to hear me clearly and say that belief is lying to you. You have already done extraordinarily hard things. You've raised, maybe you've raised children through hard seasons that asked everything of you. You have held relationships together through difficulty. You've survived loss and disappointment and seasons that broke you open and asked you to put yourself back together without a manual. You've shown up when you had nothing left to give. You've carried things that nobody saw and navigated things that nobody prepared you for. And you did all

those things. Maybe not perfectly. I promise not perfectly. And not without struggle. Not without moments probably of completely falling apart in the midst of it. But you did it. And this, whatever the hard thing is in front of you right now, this is not, this is not going to be the thing that that proves you finally can't.

You don't need to feel ready to do the hard thing. Readiness is largely a myth. It almost never shows up before you start. It shows up after. It shows up in the doing, in the moment that you realize you're already in motion. You're already in the middle of it, and wow, I'm still here. I haven't fallen apart yet. You also don't need motivation, but it too is something that we wait for before we take action.

Motivation is unreliable. It comes and goes. It shows up when things feel exciting and fresh and possible, and it disappears the minute that things get hard or inconvenient or uncomfortable. You cannot build a life of intention on motivation. You build a life of intention based on decisions.

And what you need is a decision, a real one, made quietly and privately when nobody is watching and nobody is, nothing feels exciting and everything in you wants to just keep going the way that you've always been doing it because change is hard and uncertain and the familiar is at least predictable even if it isn't working.

The decision to just do the hard thing is available to you right now. Not tomorrow, not when things calm down, not when the kids are older or the season shifts or conditions are finally right, right now. You can choose to do the hard thing right now and you are more capable of following through on it than you have probably been giving yourself credit for.

So we've talked about those three permissions, but I want to talk about something else that I think is important. There's this version of this conversation that we've had today that could feel heavy, right? That could feel like one more thing that you're supposed to do, one more area where you're falling short, one more place where...

The bar is being raised, and you don't think you can reach it. That's not what this is. The fact that nobody gives midlife women these permissions, it's not an indictment of the people in your life. It's not evidence that you're unloved or unseen or unsupported or unappreciated. It's just the truth about how permission works.

I'll say again, nobody else has full access to your internal landscape. Nobody can see the weight that you've been carrying the way that you can. Nobody else knows exactly what this season is asking of you or taking from you and what you need to set down in order to be able to move through it well, which means that that permission has always was always yours to give. And I hope that you hear that not as a burden, but as an opportunity to take authority in your own life.

Jennifer Roskamp (23:27.292)
You are the authority in your own life. Your own capacity matters. Your growth matters. And yes, your kids and your husband and your friends and your other people counting on you matter, but it doesn't matter as much as you giving yourself the permission that you need to reclaim who you are and grow into who you want to be.

We're not looking to become someone unrecognizable in most cases. We're not looking to abandon what you've built or the people that you love to just stop waiting for the green light that says it's OK to grow into something different. You don't need to start completely over. We're not starting from scratch here. You don't need a...

big dramatic announcement or a big reveal or anyone else's blessing to to step fully into where you are now and where you want to grow into you just need to decide and Then you just take the next step so let me illustrate this with an example and it was my way to Allow myself to allow myself to stay inside of a commitment that I made to myself

I was in the middle of doing the first 75 hard challenge. I've done this five times. The 75 hard challenge is a mental toughness challenge that requires two workouts a day, among other things. And one night, in the middle of this 75 day stretch, the day, everything that day had gone sideways. The day was long, the evening was full, and by the time I got to my second walk, it was 1230 in the morning.

12, 30 in the morning. But I hadn't walked yet. And so I laced up my shoes and I did it. The next day, my mom asked me completely reasonably why on earth I would go for a walk at 12, 30 in the morning. Nobody would know. Nobody was checking up on me. Nobody was going to hold me accountable or penalize me or even notice if I didn't do it. And I said, but I would know.

That was it. That was the whole reason I did it. It wasn't because anyone else was watching and it wasn't because anyone else gave me permission or told me that it mattered or was waiting to see if I followed through. I did it because I made a decision and I meant the decision that I made. And the only person who needed to know that, the only person whose opinion of my follow through that actually mattered to me in that moment was my own. And I went and I walked at 1230 in the morning alone in the dark.

And that walk had nothing to do with fitness, but it had everything to do with being a woman who keeps promises that she makes to herself. And I want you just to marinate on that thought for a minute because I think it's one of the most important things that I can actually say to you today. Most of us are very good at keeping promises to other people. We show up, we follow through, we do what we said we would do, even when it's inconvenient, even when we don't feel like it, even when we're exhausted and stretched thin and running on empty because someone is counting on us, because we don't want

to let other people down because the external accountability is real and visible and has consequences that we can see. But those promises to ourselves, those are often the first ones to go. When something has to give, it's often the things that we're doing for ourselves. The walk we were going to take, the boundary we were going to hold, the decision we were going to make, the hard conversation we were going to have, the version of ourselves we were quietly becoming that gets set aside.

because nobody noticed, because nothing external broke, because the cost was invisible. And over time, that pattern, the one of breaking the promises that we make to ourselves while faithfully keeping the ones we make to everyone else, that pattern slowly erodes something fundamental in us. It erodes self-trust. It erodes the belief that what we want and need and are becoming actually matters. It sends this message over and over again that we're not worth keeping promises to.

And that is a lie that is worth interrupting because here's what I've learned. Self-permission, it isn't a big dramatic moment. It isn't a declaration or an announcement or a turning point that you can identify in a timeline. It is a quiet decision that you make when nobody is watching. It is showing up for yourself in the ordinary unglamorous moments when nothing is riding on it except for your own integrity. It's the 12, 30 in the morning walk. It's the boundary held even when it would have been easier to let it slide.

It's the decision to become someone different made not with fanfare, but with the simple daily private active follow through. That's what reclaiming your life looks like in the middle of a real life. It's not a transformation story with a clean before and after. It's just a woman deciding again and again and again in the quiet moments that she's worth showing up for.

Nobody is coming to do this for you. Nobody is going to show up and sort through your identity clutter or make the hard decisions or hand you the permission slip that you've been waiting for. And I know that that might sound harsh or lonely or isolating, but I want you to hear it is freedom because it means you don't have to wait. You don't have to hold your breath, hoping someone else notices what you're carrying or gives you clearance to set some of it down or tells you it's okay to lean into and to become who you are wanting to become. You have full ownership of what happens next.

The permission is yours. And you have always been more capable than I think you probably gave yourself credit for. So here are three things that I want you to take away today. Number one, you are allowed to become someone different. Growth is not abandonment. Changing is not leaving. Becoming the woman that this season is asking you to be is not a rejection of the woman you've always been. It's the natural, necessary, entirely allowed next step.

Two, others matter, but they don't get the deciding vote on who you're becoming. Consider your people, love them well, factor in the impact, but don't give them the whole table. You have a vote in your own life, use it. And the third thing to take away is that you have already done hard things. You can do this one too, whatever it is. Stop waiting to feel ready. Stop waiting for motivation. Stop waiting for the evidence that you can start. The evidence comes after you begin, after you make the decision, after you

take the step and trust that you are more capable than the doubt is telling you. So,

I want to take a moment and again kind of summarize what we have done over these past three episodes. In the first episode in this series where we talked about the grief that we all carry, you got a language for something, right? I gave you that language. I named what it was. You learned that that heaviness that you're feeling, it isn't a character flaw. It's grief. It's real grief for real losses that never got a funeral. And in the second episode and what we talked about last week, you got a framework for

understanding why that weight accumulates. Identity clutter is what we named it as. It's those layers of roles and expectations and old versions of yourself and unprocessed disappointments that build quietly over time until the weight is now undeniable. And today you got permission. Permission to become, permission to decide, permission to do the hard thing without waiting for anyone else to tell you it's okay. That is not a small thing. It's actually everything. Because here's what I believe about midlife women and I believe

this deeply from years of working with women and from my own experience in living this season.

If you feel stuck in your life, it's not because you're broken and everything doesn't feel heavy because something is fundamentally wrong with you. You don't feel like you've lost yourself because you've failed. You are a woman in the middle of something real and significantly and genuinely hard. And you have been carrying a lot of it alone, probably without the language that told you what was actually happening and without permission too. And that changes now.

If you want to go deeper, if you're ready to start sorting through what you've been carrying and begin moving into this next season with more clarity and more intention and a lot more peace, make sure you grab my free guide. It's called This is Why Midlife Feels So Heavy, and you'll find it down in the show notes. It's the perfect companion to everything that we've talked about across these three episodes. Again, you'll find the link below. And if what we talked about today and in the couple of weeks prior, if these have meant something to you, if these three episodes have given you something real,

and put a name to some things that you haven't been able to identify, share it. Share it with a friend, share it with a sister, with a woman in your life who you know needs to hear this too. And that nudge that you're feeling today about whatever it is, just follow it, explore it, see where it leads, get curious about it.

This is exactly the kind of conversation that midlife women need to be having. And whoever you share it with, she will be so grateful that you've shared that message with her. And so until next week, lead yourself well. Get curious about yourself and about where you want to go. And remember these three permissions that I gave you here today. And make sure to grab the free guide below. It's going to help anchor everything that we've talked about. And so until we talk again.

Make it an intentional day.