The Midlife Identity Quake: Grief, Change, and Not Recognizing Yourself

From the video captions, as spoken.

Now, Midlife also arrives for a lot of Women as a bit of an identity quake, okay? Body composition changes with no change in how you eat. A Woman who knew who she was suddenly feels unrecognizable.

Perimenopause quietly removes the physiological scaffolding that's been holding up the identity that you knew yourself as, your competence, your vitality, your motivation, and your ability to connect. So this is so important to understand that, you know, our identity, our relationship with ourself can be turned upside down in Midlife. All right. And again, everything that we're experiencing has a physiological floor underneath it. And Midlife is the season when that floor starts moving. So the question that starts to kind of bug Women in Midlife is like, who am I now in my weight gain, my hair loss, my fatigue, my overwhelm, my bloat, my 'eh, don't touch me', and this inner tension. This is a huge far cry from the question we may have been used to, like who am I in my well-being?

Who am I in my capacity in life? And it is a brutal in between place to live in, okay, for years at a stretch. I think for a lot of Midlife Women, there's also grief in this layer. All right. Grief for the body that maybe you had. Grief for fertility closing, whether you ever wanted another child or not. Sometimes there's grief for the Woman who could do, 3 days on 5 hours of sleep and still feel delighted about it, all right?

And this is a season that also other things get stacked in the same decade for Midlife Women. Parents, their parents are aging, getting frail, children leaving home, friends, peers getting sick. So I think that for Midlife Women, there's also a grieving in several directions at once. You know, while her Nervous System has the very least amount of resources available in her adult life, and she's expected to handle all of this in life. You know, so when a Woman seems maybe checked out or burnt out or irritable, this is often a Nervous System with nothing left in the tank. You know, again, mine was, while every lab I was handed back said normal. And so much of what gets called depression and anxiety in this season of life is physiology that nobody has looked at.