Running on Empty: Signs You’re Overwhelmed and Need to Rest
For a long time, I didn’t really think of myself as someone who was “running on empty.” I just kept telling myself the same thing: I’ll rest when this is done. I’ll slow down after I get through that. Once this situation settles down, I’ll get back to normal. The problem was, there was always something else. The calm never lasted very long. And when there actually was a little space between one crisis and the next, I often didn’t know what to do with myself. So I kept moving. I’d clean out a closet. Organize the garage. Find another project. Find something productive to do. Occasionally, I could pick up a book, get completely lost in it, and let myself disappear for a while. But most of the time, I just kept moving. Looking back, I think some of that movement kept me from having to sit with things I wasn’t ready to face. There were choices I had made in unhealthy romantic relationships. There were parts of my life that made me think, I’m just like my mother. I didn’t want to be alone. I carried guilt about whether I had been the kind of mother my sons needed. Those thoughts were painful. Staying busy gave me somewhere else to look. And sometimes, after I finally made it through an especially difficult or stressful period, my body would seem to say, “Okay, my turn,” and I would get sick. I had spent so much time waiting for the chaos to end that I hadn’t realized how accustomed I had become to living inside it. Sometimes the Problem Isn’t That You Need Better Coping Skills One of the biggest things that changed my life was leaving environments that weren’t good for me. Work environments. Romantic relationships. Friendships. Even parts of my 12-step world. That one is complicated for me because the program itself gave me so much. The principles I learned there are still an integral part of my life. But at that time, the program was also my social life, my friendships, and my dating pool. And in one way or another, there was a lot of sickness around me. Eventually, I had to recognize that sometimes you cannot regulate yourself enough to make an unhealthy environment healthy. Sometimes you have to leave. That doesn’t mean everything about that chapter was bad. It doesn’t erase what you learned. It doesn’t mean you can’t be grateful. It just means you are allowed to outgrow places, relationships, identities, and versions of yourself that no longer fit. Experience Taught Me to Trust Myself Age has helped too. There is something about being over 50 that changes the way I see my own life. I joke that being over 50 makes me an expert. Not because I have everything figured out. But because I have lived enough life to know some things. I have made mistakes. I have survived bad decisions. I have loved people I probably shouldn’t have. I have stayed too long. I have left. I have started over. And all of those experiences have given me something I didn’t always have: Trust in myself. I may still have some of the old thoughts. Maybe part of me still wonders whether I made the wrong choices or whether I failed people I loved. The difference now is that I don’t give those thoughts the same power. They can exist without running my life. Choosing Myself Felt Uncomfortable When I started deciding what I wanted in my life — and what I no longer wanted — it didn’t immediately feel empowering. It felt uncomfortable. For much of my life, I had been used to being what other people needed me to be. Choosing myself raised all kinds of fears. Would people think I was selfish? Would they be disappointed in me? Would they leave? The biggest fear involved my children. My mother left when I was 15. We have essentially been no contact ever since. So the idea of “choosing yourself” carried a very specific meaning for me. Somewhere inside me was the fear that if I chose myself, I was doing what she did. What if choosing me meant losing my children? They were adults by then — young adults, but adults — and I still had to learn something very important: Choosing yourself is not the same thing as abandoning the people you love. Sometimes choosing yourself means you finally stop abandoning yourself. And as I started making more intentional decisions about what stayed in my life and what didn’t, something slowly changed. My life started to feel like mine. I Stopped Building My Life Around Everyone Else That shift has continued into the life I have now. Working for myself has been a huge part of it. I can create systems that actually work for me. I can structure my day around how I function best instead of constantly forcing myself into someone else’s version of productivity. I can ask myself: How do I want my day to look? How much can I realistically carry? Where do I need space? What actually matters today? That doesn’t mean I never get overwhelmed. I know one of my warning signs now. Normally, I sleep well. I may wake up a few times because apparently my bladder has entered its old-lady era, but I can usually go right back to sleep. When I wake up for no physical reason and my mind immediately starts racing — and I cannot shut it off — I know I have crossed into overwhelm. That tells me something needs to change. Maybe I have taken on too much. Maybe I need to adjust my schedule. Maybe I need to stop solving a problem that is not mine to solve. Maybe I simply need to rest. Learning my own warning signs and developing my own systems has been a game changer. I have moved from: I live to work to I work so I can
Feeling Lost in Midlife? How to Reconnect With Yourself
For me, I’m not sure I ever really knew who I was. I had a baby when I was still basically a baby myself, and I did it without a mother to show me what being a mother looked like. I learned how to become what other people needed me to be long before I had much time to figure out who I was. Becoming What Everyone Else Needed Me to Be I became a mother. A caretaker. A breadwinner. I became the wife or girlfriend who adapted to whoever I was with because somewhere along the way, I learned that was what I had to do to be loved. And life just kept moving. By midlife, I had raised two sons. I had earned two degrees and two professional licenses. I had been thoroughly broken in by community mental health. I had a slew of failed romantic relationships and marriages — don’t judge — and eventually found myself in a mostly healthy, strong relationship where I felt safe enough to start letting some of the walls come down. When Accomplishments Felt Like My Only Value For years, I thought my accomplishments were what made me valuable. The degrees. The licenses. Being able to handle things. Being responsible. Being the one who could keep going. Looking back now, I can see that I spent a lot of my life becoming who I thought I needed to be in order to survive, get ahead, be loved, and belong. I also learned to silence parts of myself. I had been told I was “too much.” Defensive. That I had an attitude problem. What I understand now is that much of the time, I was trying to be independent and stand up for myself because I had learned early on that no one else was necessarily going to do it for me. But when you hear those messages enough, you start editing yourself. You quiet your opinions. You second-guess your anger. You question whether your needs are reasonable. You wonder if being independent makes you difficult. You learn to ask, Who do I need to be for this person? Instead of asking, Who am I? Then Midlife Shows Up And then midlife shows up. For me, COVID played a huge part in that. Suddenly there was isolation, more time at home, and access to all kinds of information about healing, relationships, boundaries, codependency, trauma, and self-discovery. For the first time, I had space to absorb some of it instead of just picking up the pieces of whatever had happened and moving on. Because that’s what I had always done. Bad relationship ending? Pick up the pieces and move on. Toxic workplace? Keep going. Kids need you? Handle it. Life happens? Deal with it. Who had time to stop and ask whether I felt like I was “too much” or whether I had lost myself? But eventually I started asking a different question: How do I want to be for this last part of my life? Not, “Who does everybody else need me to be?” Not, “What do I have to accomplish next?” Not, “How do I keep everybody happy?” How do I want to show up? Learning to Show Up for Myself That question has changed a lot for me. Showing up for myself now can mean giving myself credit where it’s due. It means showing up for my business because, at this point, my business is part of me — an extension of who I am. I nurture it. I grow it. I make it pretty. I want it to stand out. It also means allowing myself to rest because I need rest, not because I earned it. That one is still a big deal. Midlife has also forced me to reconsider some of the things I once thought defined me — how I connect with people, how I experience intimacy, what I need in relationships, and even what it means to feel like myself in my own body. Redefining What Makes Me Valuable The biggest shift may be this: I used to believe my accomplishments made me valuable. Now I think my value comes from my life experience — the good, the bad, and the ugly. The things I’ve lived through. The things I’ve survived. The things I’ve learned. The mistakes I’ve made. The parts of myself I’m still figuring out. And maybe that is part of what “finding yourself” in midlife actually looks like. We Don’t Lose Ourselves All at Once Because I don’t think most women suddenly wake up one morning and decide to lose themselves. It happens slowly. You become what your children need. What your partner needs. What your employer needs. What your family expects. You learn how to keep the peace, be dependable, be useful, be agreeable, be successful, be strong. And underneath all of that can be a very real fear: If I stop being who everyone needs me to be, will they still like me? Will they still love me? Will they leave? Will they judge me? Those fears can keep us wearing a mask for a very long time. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that people come into our lives for a reason or a season. Not everyone is meant to stay. And their opinions about me are none of my business. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about people. It means their reaction to who I am no longer gets to be the final word on who I’m allowed to be. That realization makes it a whole lot easier to take off the mask. The PAUSE work I’ve been developing is really rooted in this idea: sometimes we haven’t exactly lost ourselves. We’ve become buried underneath years of caring, striving, adapting, pleasing, achieving, and surviving. Midlife can be the point where we finally have enough space — or enough exhaustion — to notice. Getting Acquainted With Her Maybe the question isn’t: “How do I get back to