#75: "Why Would She Want to Hear from Me?" Why Women in Midlife Stop Reaching Out — And How to Start Again

Somewhere between the kids leaving, the career shifting, and the pandemic teaching us that staying home was actually fine — a lot of us stopped reaching out.

One un-sent text at a time. Tomorrow we tell ourselves. Tomorrow, I'll reach out.

Just like our dreams, we file it away under "someday" — and someday is not a day on the calendar.

In this episode, I'm talking about why connection gets so hard in midlife specifically — and why the reason isn't what most of us think it is. It's not that we're too busy. It's not that we're introverted. It's a much quieter voice that says: why would she want to hear from me?

I'm sharing stories from my own life about the people I almost kept at arm's length, the excuses I made that sound logical and were completely wrong, and what finally changed. And I'm sharing the science behind why one small act of reaching out this week could start rewiring everything.

3 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE

• The social scaffolding that used to hold our friendships together has quietly disappeared — and nobody warns you it's happening
• Assuming everyone else already has their people is the fastest way to guarantee your own isolation
• Reaching out in small, low-stakes moments is how you rewire the pattern — one rep at a time

It's time to stop taking ourselves out of the friendship equation before we ever give others a chance.

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER: The Tuesday Letter with Carlene right here

DOWNLOAD THE FREE START DREAMING AGAIN GUIDE

Check out all my coaching and course offerings - Coachcarlene.com

MORE FROM ME

Follow me on Instagram:  @coach_carlene

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more dreamers who need these insights. 🎙️ Thanks for tuning in to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast! See you next week!

FOLLOW NOW
Also, if you haven't done so already, follow the podcast. I'm adding episodes every week, and if you're not folllowing, there's a good chance you'll miss out. Follow now!

Episode Website 

Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:22

Hello my friend. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast. I'm your host Carlene, and if you're new here, welcome to the Distracted Dreamer family. I am so glad that you found us. I think you're gonna love it here. So you happen to be here for a special episode. We are here on episode 75, 75 episodes, and I have to share something with you that's, uh, kind of geeky. Uh, but it's been a long time coming and I'm super, super excited about it. So the platform that I use to publish this podcast has rolled out some new features and the timing couldn't be more perfect. First, you know, you've always been able to text me through the link in the show notes, but now for the first time, I can actually text you back. Isn't that exciting? Like a real two-way conversation. So I see your message and I can reply. How cool is that? So cool. And the second thing, you can now leave me a voicemail. How cool is that? An actual voice message. And so you would just click the link in the show notes and record your message for me to listen to it. Now, I can't reply to the voicemail, only the texts, so you just decide how you wanna do it. You can text me or you can voicemail me. Pretty cool. The reason I'm telling you this well is because of course I want you to text me and I want you to voicemail me, but this big geeky tech announcement, it nudged something in me that I've been thinking about for a while now. So this podcast, like most podcasts, right, for the most part have been a one way conversation. I talk and you listen and I am so grateful that you do. But here's the truth. I have felt the gap. Like have you felt it? The gap between talking at you and actually talking with you. And you know, I've asked for texts before. I've left the link in the show notes. I've made the ask at the end of episodes, and some of you have reached out in those messages. They mean everything to me, but. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want more of that. More back and forth, more of knowing who you are, what's on your heart, and what's keeping you up at night, and what dream that you're quietly going after or that maybe you're just thinking about. And I started asking myself, why doesn't this happen more? Because I know you're out there and I know you're listening. So what's getting in the way? And here's what I realized the answer to that question. Isn't really about the podcast at all. It's about something that's been happening to us, to women in this season of life. It's something the pandemic quietly set in motion, and that midlife has its own way of making worse for us. So that's what we're getting today. Answering the question, why don't we reach out more, and I'm not talking about. On a podcast I'm talking about why don't we reach out to each other more? And I promise by the end of this episode, you're going to recognize yourself somewhere in it. And I hope that recognition it moves you to do something a little bit small and a little bit brave and reach out to somebody. Alright, let's go back to 2020 for a second. I know, I know we said we weren't going back there, but bear with me. Because I don't think we've fully processed what those years did to our social wiring. So when the world shut down, we lost more than our routines. We lost the casual, unplanned moments of connection. You know, the hallway conversations in the office or the coffee runs with a coworker or the neighbor that you'd wave to on the way to the mailbox, or you would stop and talk to when you were out walking. All of it just stopped. And for a lot of us. Especially those of us who lean a little introverted. I'm raising my hand over here. How about you? That quiet, it felt like relief at first. 'cause you know what? We didn't have to show up anywhere. Wasn't that great? We could say no to everything, and it was totally socially acceptable. Finally, we didn't have to explain ourselves, but you know what? The world opened back up. We know this. It's been years and something had shifted because that quiet. It had become very comfortable. Staying home had become a habit and reaching out and actually initiating connection, it started to feel effortful. Is that a word? Effortful in a way that it never had before. Like it's risky. And I talked about the neuroscience behind this in episode 66, so if you haven't heard that one, go back and listen and I'll link it in the show notes for you. But the short version is this, your brain wires toward whatever you repeat, and we spent a long time repeating isolation, so our brains got really efficient at it and really comfortable with it. Even now, years later, a lot of us are still living with those rewired defaults. We scroll instead of call, or we listen to podcasts instead of starting conversations, or we stay in our lane and we assume everyone else is fine and busy and doesn't need to hear from us. And we call it being low maintenance or being an introvert, or just being realistic about how busy life is. But sometimes I wonder, is it actually that, or is it that reaching out just feels harder than it used to? And we've just stopped questioning why. So now let's layer on top of all of that. What midlife does to our social world, because this part doesn't get talked about enough. So think about it, when we were younger, friendships kind of happened to us. They were built into the structure of our lives. We went to school, we made friends, we went to college, we joined a sorority. Early career, we had friends at work at the same age as us, the neighborhood playgroup, when the kids were little. We had mom friends, and we didn't have to try that hard because the circumstances kept throwing us together. But in midlife that scaffolding, it quietly disappears. You don't know what happens to it. It's just gone. The kids grow up and leave, and guess what? So do your mom friends, the career shifts, or you move to a new city? Or your friends do. That's what happened to me. A lot of my friends left after the pandemic. Um, or the book club just fizzles out, or the work friendships, they stay at work or they go away entirely when someone changes jobs. And suddenly the structure that used to hold your social world together, it just isn't there anymore. And here's the part that really gets me. Everyone assumes everyone else already has their people. We all look around and think she's got friends. She's got a whole life going on. Her calendar is probably packed. I don't wanna impose. I don't wanna be the one who needs something, so nobody reaches out. We all sit in our little worlds. Wishing for more connection, assuming we're the only one who feels this way. And I will tell you, I have done this. I have been this person a few years before we made the move to Tennessee. We got new next door neighbors in Illinois. They were younger in their thirties. So much fun to be around. And my husband, who was very much a social butterfly, he became fast friends with them right away. He and Ricky became best buds and my husband kept asking me why I was holding back, why I wasn't spending more time with them, getting to know them better. And my answer made complete sense to me at the time. It really did. I told my husband, I don't want to get close to anyone else. I'm going to miss. We're moving. Why would I set myself up for another goodbye? It sounds so logical, doesn't it? I mean, maybe it doesn't, but I think it also sounds so sad when I say it out loud now because. Of course I couldn't resist them. They were expecting their first baby and we were there for all of it. They've been out to Tennessee to visit us. They are family. So much so that Ricky officiated our daughter's wedding and I can't imagine my life without them. And then around the same time, I started going to Pure Bar after the pandemic back in Illinois. So I had the same mindset walking in the door. Don't get close to anyone. We're leaving. Keep it surface level. And then there was Stephanie. She talked to me every single day at Bar. She was genuinely interested in me and my life for whatever reason. She was so warm and so sweet. And I'd go home and I'd tell my family, there's this lady Stephanie, who just keeps etching her way right into my heart. Like, doesn't she know that I don't wanna make any new friends, but thank goodness she was scrappy and persistent and she became such an important person in my life. She was a huge source of comfort when I was going through cancer treatment and she's been out here to Tennessee to visit, and I remember her saying to me, you can't be leaving already. I just found you. And that still gets me teary-eyed. So my point is this, don't discount a friendship because you've already decided it's not going to work out. Don't protect yourself from a goodbye that hasn't happened yet because of the math on that. It's just all wrong. You don't avoid the pain of the goodbye. You just guarantee the loss of everything that would've come before it. Now when we actually made the move to Tennessee, I was lucky in a lot of ways. Two of my best friends had already relocated here. My sister is here, my daughter and son-in-law, and now my granddaughter are here, and our youngest daughter moved with us. I had people, great people, but I also knew I didn't want to rely solely on them for all my social needs. I wanted to build something new. So I found a pure bar here and I've met some wonderful people, including one woman who was in her thirties. She's a mom of two boys, and we have such a great time together, and I learned so much from her, like her perspective on things. It keeps me current, it challenges me to think differently and to see the world through a completely different lens. And then our next door neighbors here, literally the same age as our kids, and we love hanging out with them, and we love holding their beautiful new daughter. So my point is, don't dismiss a potential friendship because of an age gap in either direction. There is so much to give and so much to gain in those friendships. So don't narrow your world when you could be widening it okay, so at the beginning of the episode, I said the question that we want to answer is, what's the real reason that we don't reach out? And that's what I really wanna talk about here because I've been thinking about this a lot. We say we don't reach out because we're busy. Or because we're shy or we're introverted, or because we just got too comfortable being alone. And maybe some of that is true, but I think for a lot of us, especially for women in midlife, the real reason it's a little bit quieter than that, and it sounds something like this. Why would she want to hear from me? Have you ever had that thought? Have you ever almost sent the text? Have you. Almost hit reply. Have you almost reached out and then something stops you? It's that little voice that says, what do I even have to say? Or my life isn't that interesting, or She's probably busy with people who are more important. She doesn't need to hear from me. So that is not being shy, that is not being introverted. That is a woman who has spent so many years making herself smaller, being useful. Being low maintenance, putting everyone else's needs first, that. She's genuinely lost track of the fact that her voice matters. That what she has to say is worth saying, that she's someone worth knowing. And here's the thing, that same voice, it's the reason you haven't told anyone about your dream. It's the reason you keep your ideas to yourself. It's the reason you listen to a podcast after podcast, but never reach out and say what resonated with you, because somewhere along the way you decided, and maybe you don't even notice it, that you didn't have enough to offer to take up space in someone else's world. You decided that, and I want to push back on that so hard right now because it's not true. And I say that not as a platitude, but as someone who genuinely wants to hear from you. I might not know you, but I wanna hear from you. I don't want to hear from the polished, perfectly put together version of you, but from you, the real you. The one who's working through something, the one who had an aha moment in the car. The one who's dreaming something she hasn't said out loud yet. That's the one I want to hear from, and here's what I know about that voice, the one that says, why would she want to hear from me? The only way to quiet it is to do the thing anyway. Not once, not in some dramatic gesture, but in some small moments that slowly start to rewire the pattern. We talked in episode 66 about how connection is neurological, how your brain literally builds new pathways when you practice something different, and that works in reverse too. Every time you don't send the text, every time you talk yourself out of reaching out, you're reinforcing that old wiring. The pathway that says, stay quiet, stay small. Don't take any risks. But every time you do reach out, even in a tiny way, you are building a new neuro pathway. One where your desire for connection gets a little bit stronger, a little bit stronger than your fear. One where the excuse starts to feel a little less convincing and one where you start to trust that yes, actually she does wanna hear from you. And look, I'm the last person who should be talking to anyone about making excuses not to connect. I literally told my husband I couldn't get close to our neighbors because we were moving. I walked into Pier Bar with a whole strategy for keeping people at arms length. I had airtight reasons for all of it, so many excuses, and they were completely wrong. So I know exactly how convincing that voice can sound, and I also know it doesn't have to win. So I wanna give you a place to practice this, something small, something super, super safe, and something that counts as a rep. I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that the platform that I used to publish this podcast has rolled out some new features, so you can still text me like you've always been able to, but now I can text you back a real two-way conversation. So I see your message and I reply. Very, very cool. And again, the second thing is you can leave me a voicemail. Now, an actual voice message, I can't reply to those, but I would love to hear somebody else's voice. So you can just click the link in the show notes and record something for me to listen to. I love this so much because this is your on-ramp. This is low stakes, like no performance required here, and just you saying something real to someone who actually wants to hear it. I actually want to hear what you have to say. Here's what I'm inviting you to do this week. I wanna see how many conversations we can actually have. I don't care about downloads. I don't care about reviews, conversations, real ones. Here's your challenge and I'm making it as easy as possible. Text me or leave me a voicemail this week and tell me one thing that you liked about this episode, or one thing that you just like about the distracted dreamer or one thing that's just on your mind. I just wanna know what's on your heart today. So the link to text me is right in the show notes. And the voicemail link is there too. And you can do this right now before you even close out of this episode. I am going to be checking all week and I am going to be replying. So let's see what happens when we actually talk to each other. Now, here is what I wanna leave with you. Everything that we talked about today, the pandemic rewiring us toward isolation, midlife, pulling away the scaffolding of our friendships, protecting ourselves from goodbyes that haven't happened yet. That voice that whispers, why would she wanna hear from me? None of that's permanent. None of it is who you are. It's just what happened. And the way we unhappen it is one small act of connection at a time. So reaching out to me this week, that's one rep, and every rep counts because the more you practice saying, here I am, here's what I'm thinking, here's what I'm working towards. The easier it gets to do that. Everywhere else in your life with a friend, you've been meaning to call or with a person whose work that you admire or with a dream that's waiting for you to finally say it out loud. This podcast was never meant to be something that you just listened to. It's meant to be the start of a conversation. So let's actually have one. I will be here all week waiting to hear from you. Text me, voicemail, me, and I will be back next week. Ready to welcome you into our next conversation. Bye for now.

Carlene 19:04

Oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.