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Why You Don’t Feel Like Yourself—Even When Life Looks Fine · Create The Best Me

• 0:00
  Carmen Hecox: There's a strange kind of loneliness that can happen in midlife.
• 0:04
  Carmen Hecox: Nothing has fallen apart. You may have a home, a relationship, a career, children you love, friends, responsibilities. Maybe you've accomplished many things you once hoped, you wish you would accomplish. From the outside, your life looks perfectly fine, and yet somewhere inside You keep thinking, why doesn't this feel like my life anymore? Maybe you can't even explain what's wrong.
• 0:33
  Carmen Hecox: You just know you're tired in a way that sleep doesn't seem to fix. You don't get excited about things the way you used to. You might find yourself scrolling through other people's lives and wondering why they seem more alive than you feel. Or maybe everyone around you still sees the same capable woman they've always known, but inside you feel strangely disconnected from her.
• 1:05
  Carmen Hecox: Today I want to talk about that feeling, not because I think there's one simple reason women experience it, and certainly not because every difficult feeling in midlife should be blamed on hormones. I want to talk about what can happen when the life we've spent years building continues moving forward, but you have changed inside of it. And more importantly, I want to help you begin to figure out whether you need to change your entire life or whether you need to simply start to find yourself inside of it again. One reason this experience can be difficult to recognize is that there may be no dramatic crisis. If your house were on fire, you would know something needed your attention. But what happens when nothing is obviously wrong?
• 2:02
  Carmen Hecox: You're functioning, you're meeting deadlines, you're answering texts, you're paying bills, you're showing up, you're remembering birthdays, You're helping people, you're doing grocery shopping, you're making appointments, you're being responsible, and somehow the fact that you're still functioning becomes evidence that everything must be okay. But functioning and feeling disconnected to your life are not the same thing.
• 2:33
  Carmen Hecox: Research on women in midlife has repeatedly shown that this period can include overlapping changes involving health, family, work, loss, financial concerns, frustrating goals, aging, and changing social roles. Midlife isn't one event. It can be several transitions occurring at the same time. That's important because sometimes we keep searching for one explanation. We ask, is it menopause? Is it my marriage?
• 3:09
  Carmen Hecox: Is it work? Am I burned out? Do I need a new career? Do I need better friends? Do I need to lose weight? Do I need more sleep?
• 3:20
  Carmen Hecox: What's wrong with me? And sometimes the better question isn't what's wrong, it's what has changed. You may still be living by an old version of yourself.
• 3:35
  Carmen Hecox: Think about the woman you were 10 or 15 years ago.
• 3:40
  Carmen Hecox: What mattered to her? What did she need? What was she trying to prove? Who depended on her?
• 3:47
  Carmen Hecox: What did success mean for her? What was she afraid of? What did she tolerate because she believed she had to?
• 3:58
  Carmen Hecox: What did she postpone because there wasn't enough time? That woman made decisions that helped create the life you have today, and some of those decisions were probably very good decisions, but you are not required to remain exactly the same person simply because your past decisions were right for you then. That's where I think many women get stuck. We assume that changing our minds means the old choices was a mistake. It doesn't. You can appreciate the career that supported your family and still realize it no longer fits you. You can love your children deeply and still struggle when they don't need you In the same way, you can love your husband and still recognize that your relationship needs to change as both of you change.
• 5:00
  Carmen Hecox: You can be grateful for the life you've built and still want something different from the next 20 years.
• 5:09
  Carmen Hecox: Those things can exist together. Research examined purpose and social roles in women across the menopausal transition found that women's sense of role and purpose can shift during this stage of life. That doesn't mean menopause automatically causes an identity crisis.
• 5:28
  Carmen Hecox: It does recognize that biological transitions occur inside a much larger social and psychological life. And I think that's a piece we don't talk about enough. We spend a lot of time talking about What is happening to women's bodies? We don't spend nearly enough time asking, what is happening to the woman living inside that changing body?
• 5:54
  Carmen Hecox: The roles that once defined you may be changing. Think about mother, wife, partner, employee, leader, caregiver, Daughter, friend, problem solver, peacekeeper, provider, the reliable one, the strong one, the person everyone calls because you'll figure it out.
• 6:22
  Carmen Hecox: Those roles can become so familiar that eventually we stop noticing the difference between this is something I do and this is who I am.
• 6:35
  Carmen Hecox: Then midlife starts rearranging things. Children grow up, parents age, bodies change, careers plateau or stop feeling meaningful, relationships enter new seasons, friendships change.
• 6:50
  Carmen Hecox: We lose people, we gain responsibilities we didn't expect.
• 6:54
  Carmen Hecox: We start recognizing that time isn't unlimited, and suddenly A role you've been performing for 20 years no longer answers the question, who am I? That can feel incredibly unsettling, especially if you're good at taking care of everybody else.
• 7:16
  Carmen Hecox: Because when people need you, you always know what to do. You solve the problem in front of you.
• 7:25
  Carmen Hecox: But when the question becomes, What do I need?
• 7:29
  Carmen Hecox: There may be a very long silence. You may have become extremely good at abandoning yourself. I don't mean that harshly, and I don't mean that every sacrifice you made was unhealthy.
• 7:45
  Carmen Hecox: There is a season when people we love genuinely need us more.
• 7:50
  Carmen Hecox: There are times when survival requires compromise.
• 7:54
  Carmen Hecox: There are responsibilities we choose because they matter to us, but temporary sacrifices can quietly become a permanent way of living. You tell yourself, I'll deal with that later. I'll rest after this week.
• 8:10
  Carmen Hecox: I'll figure out what I want when the kids get older.
• 8:14
  Carmen Hecox: I'll take care of myself once Mom is stable.
• 8:17
  Carmen Hecox: I'll change jobs when things settle down. I'll have that conversation another time.
• 8:23
  Carmen Hecox: I'll start that idea eventually. Then suddenly, later has been going on for 15 years. And because you've learned to override your own needs so efficiently, you may not even notice what they are anymore. That's different from selfishness.
• 8:45
  Carmen Hecox: I'm talking about losing access to your own preference.
• 8:49
  Carmen Hecox: Someone asks you, what do you want for dinner? And you say, I don't care. Someone asks you, what do you want for your birthday? And you honestly don't know. You finally get a free afternoon, and instead of feeling excited, you feel restless. You have time to yourself but don't know what to do with it.
• 9:12
  Carmen Hecox: That can be a clue, not that something is wrong with you, a clue that your life has become organized almost entirely around obligations.
• 9:24
  Carmen Hecox: There is also the pressure to be grateful. This is a big one. Women often silence themselves because they think wanting more means they're ungrateful. You think, I have a good husband.
• 9:39
  Carmen Hecox: My children are healthy. I have a job. I have a home.
• 9:44
  Carmen Hecox: Other people have real problems. Why can't I just be happy? Gratitude is valuable, but gratitude is not supposed to be used as evidence against your own experience.
• 9:59
  Carmen Hecox: You can be grateful and dissatisfied. You can be blessed And exhausted. You can love your family and need more room for yourself.
• 10:11
  Carmen Hecox: You can appreciate what you have and still recognize that some parts of your life need attention.
• 10:19
  Carmen Hecox: Those aren't contradictions, they're information.
• 10:23
  Carmen Hecox: Sometimes your discomfort is asking for evolution, not destruction. When people hear the phrase, my life doesn't feel like mine, they immediately imagine drastic change. Quit the job, end the marriage, move across the country, sell everything, start over.
• 10:46
  Carmen Hecox: And sometimes people do need major changes, but I would not start there because when you're disconnected from yourself, For a long time, making enormous decisions from that disconnected place can create different problems.
• 11:05
  Carmen Hecox: I would start smaller. Instead of asking, what should I blow up? Ask, where do I feel most absent in my own life? That's a very different question. Maybe it's your calendar. Maybe it's every hour belongs to someone else. Maybe it's your friendship.
• 11:29
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe you're physically together but emotionally distant. Maybe it's your work. Maybe you're successful but no longer challenged or interested. Maybe it's your friendships.
• 11:45
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe you've outgrown relationships built around An older version of yourself. Maybe it's your body.
• 11:53
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe you've spent so much energy criticizing it that you've lost your relationship with it.
• 12:01
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe it's your future. Maybe you've spent years planning for everyone else's next stage and haven't imagined your own. And you don't need to solve all of that today. You need to notice. Try this, the alive, heavy, empty exercise.
• 12:23
  Carmen Hecox: I want to give you something practical. Take a piece of paper and divide it into 3 columns. At the top of the first column, write alive.
• 12:34
  Carmen Hecox: Under that, list moments when you feel most like yourself. Don't worry about whether they seem productive. Maybe it's walking outside.
• 12:46
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe it's creating something. Maybe it's teaching.
• 12:50
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe it's laughing with a particular friend. Maybe it's traveling. Maybe it's learning. Maybe it's being alone. Maybe it's helping someone in a way that genuinely uses your strengths. Maybe it's dressing up. Maybe it's gardening. Maybe it's speaking into a microphone. Whatever it is, write it down. Now, in the second column, heavy.
• 13:16
  Carmen Hecox: What consistently drains you? Not one bad day. What repeatedly creates resistance, resentment, tension, or dread? Again, don't judge the answer.
• 13:33
  Carmen Hecox: Just gather information. In the third column, empty. What parts of your life aren't necessarily terrible but no longer seem to give anything back? Maybe you're doing them because you've always done them. Maybe they're habits, commitments, relationships, responsibilities that once mattered This isn't your permission slip to immediately eliminate everything in the heavy or empty columns. It is a way to begin seeing your life, because you cannot intentionally change a life you haven't honestly looked at.
• 14:16
  Carmen Hecox: Now ask a harder question. Look at your alive column and ask, how much room does this woman Actually get in my week? Not someday, this week.
• 14:32
  Carmen Hecox: If the answer is almost none, that matters.
• 14:38
  Carmen Hecox: Then ask, what is one small way I could make her more visible? Notice I didn't say, what is my purpose? That question feels enormous.
• 14:50
  Carmen Hecox: Research suggests that purpose can change during midlife and that maintaining or strengthening a sense of purpose is associated with better later well-being and health. But purpose doesn't have to begin as a one grand mission. Sometimes purpose begins as attention. What matters to me? What am I curious about? What do I want to contribute? Where do I feel useful in a way that doesn't completely drain me? What do I want to learn? What do I want to become more like?
• 15:29
  Carmen Hecox: What parts of myself have I been postponing?
• 15:32
  Carmen Hecox: Those questions are much easier to work with. You're allowed to become someone you haven't met.
• 15:40
  Carmen Hecox: This may be the part of midlife that scares us and excites us at the same time. You know who you've been, But you don't fully know who you are becoming. Our brains are like certainty. So sometimes we cling to the identities that no longer fit simply because they're familiar. But growth isn't always about getting back to the woman we were at our 30s. Maybe that's not the goal.
• 16:11
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe some parts of her were wonderful.
• 16:15
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe some parts of her were surviving.
• 16:18
  Carmen Hecox: Maybe some parts of her didn't know what to know now. Maybe some parts of her didn't know what you know now. Maybe the next version of you is not a restoration project. Maybe she's evolving. You don't have to know exactly who she is yet.
• 16:42
  Carmen Hecox: You simply have to stop assuming that the only acceptable version of your life is the one you've already built. What I want you to do this week— don't make a giant decision, don't create a 10-year plan, don't diagnose yourself with a midlife crisis. For the next 7 days, Notice 3 things. When do I feel most like myself? When do I feel like I'm performing a version of myself?
• 17:17
  Carmen Hecox: What do I keep thinking about changing?
• 17:22
  Carmen Hecox: Write down the answers. Patterns matter. And if you discover that your life looks fine but doesn't feel like yours, Don't immediately assume that means everything needs to disappear. It may mean you've disappeared from too much of it. That's what we're going to talk about next, because recognizing that something no longer fits is one thing. Knowing what to change without blowing up everything you've worked so hard to build is another. In the next episode, I'm going to walk you through a practical way to decide What stays? What needs to change? What needs a boundary?
• 18:05
  Carmen Hecox: What needs more attention? And what might finally be ready to end? Because this part of life isn't just about asking, who have I been?
• 18:16
  Carmen Hecox: It's also your opportunity to ask, who am I becoming? And what kind of life actually fits her?
• 18:24
  Carmen Hecox: If you would like to learn more about today's discussion, You can find that information at createthebestme.com/ep184.
• 18:30
  Carmen Hecox: Until then, keep dreaming big, take care of yourself, and remember, you are beautiful, strong, and capable of creating the best version of yourself. Thank you for watching.
• 18:47
  Carmen Hecox: Catch you next week. Bye for now. Bye.