Reclaiming Myself

You know the story.

She turns forty and suddenly starts running marathons, wearing linen, and making sourdough starters named after feminist icons. She sells her belongings. She hikes Machu Picchu. She reinvents herself, and the world claps.

I used to look at women like that and think, God, I wish I were that brave. I wish I could throw out this life that doesn’t fit anymore and emerge in Act Two with cheekbones and furniture that matches.

But here’s the thing: not all of us want to become someone new.

Some of us want to become who we were before the world told us to shrink. Before we edited ourselves for survival. Before we traded curiosity for compliance. It’s not about turning into someone else. It’s about turning toward the version of myself I felt I had to abandon.

Mental health professionals don’t use the term “midlife crisis”. Midlife transition sounds more thoughtful and slightly less like buying a sports car to outrun your feelings. But even that phrase assumes we’re becoming something else.

What if it’s not a transition? What if it’s a homecoming?

Reinvention or Rebranding?

This is the part where I ruin the glow-up fantasy.

We’re told that reinvention is power. That it’s sexy and bold. But sometimes it’s just exhausting. Societal pressure to reinvent in midlife is often just rebranded shame. In so many words, you’re told to fix yourself with a new diet, a new aesthetic, even a new identity. What it actually means is: be more palatable. More digestible. Be less whatever it is that makes people uncomfortable when you stop performing the role they expected.

I don’t want to be digested, tbh. I want to be understood—or, if that’s too much to ask, at least left alone in peace with my weird hobbies and my solid sense of self.

Things I Gave Up (and Why I’m Taking Them Back)

Let’s talk about the things I was discouraged from. Not because I lost interest—but because other people told me I wasn’t “enough.”

The Young Novelist I Didn’t Allow Myself to Become

I wanted to write fiction. Actually, I did write fiction. But two adults—people with a lot of influence during my formative years—convinced me it wasn’t a realistic career. They said I didn’t “have what it takes,” that writing novels was a “pipe dream,” and that I wasn’t “enough” to make it in that world.

Neither of them had read my work. One had maybe read two novels in his entire life. These weren’t people qualified to assess talent or passion. But they spoke with authority, and I listened.

The desire to tell stories never disappeared. It just went underground. And now, years later, I’m not “reinventing” myself as a writer. I’m recovering the writer I was always meant to be. The one they tried to talk me out of.

So if anyone’s wondering why I’m still at it—why I’m drafting stories and publishing posts and building this career a little later than expected—here’s my answer: fucking watch me.

Motherhood Delayed—Not Denied

There was a time in my life when I stood at the threshold of motherhood, hand outstretched, and someone slammed the door on my fingers. And not by accident. Someone—whose permission I never should have needed—deliberately stood in the way of me becoming a mother.
That wound still stings, and I’ll likely be bitter forever. But the dream is sill alive.
Not everything worth wanting arrives on time. Some things arrive on your terms, your timeline, your own hard-won hope.
So, I'm still here. Hand still out. Heart still open.

Fucking watch me.

The Years He Thinks I Wasted

I once had someone close to me—someone from a generation shaped by strict gender roles and very clear ideas of what a woman’s life “should” look like—tell me I’d “wasted all my good years.” I was thirty-four.

What he meant was: I wasn’t married. I hadn’t had children. I didn’t have a tidy career to point to.

What he didn’t seem to see was that I’d been working full time and trying to put myself through college for years. That I had dreams, discipline, and an entire life he couldn’t see because it didn’t fit the script he’d memorized.

I’ve thought about that comment more times than I care to admit. Not because I believe it—but because I don’t.

His script was written for someone else. I’m writing my own.

Reassembly of Self

Here’s what no one tells you about reinvention: it’s not always about becoming. Sometimes it’s about returning.

There are pieces of ourselves we set aside—pieces that weren’t welcome, that got labeled too much or not enough or just wrong. We didn’t throw them away. We shelved them, quietly, and kept going.

This “new me” everyone’s so excited to become? She might just be the old you, finally walking around without an apology.

I gave the term midlife transition a little side-eye earlier—but it actually holds some weight. Daniel Levinson explored the idea in his theory of adult development. Levinson described the midlife transition, typically occurring between ages 40 and 45, as a period of reevaluating previous commitments, making dramatic changes if necessary, and giving expression to previously ignored talents or aspirations.

Additionally, Bernice Neugarten introduced the concept of the social clock, which refers to the culturally preferred timing of major life events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement. Deviations from this social clock can influence an individual's self-perception and psychological well-being. Needless to say, being told I’d wasted my life by age 34 was not exactly beneficial to my state of mind.

Understanding these concepts can provide a framework for viewing midlife not as a crisis, but as a natural and potentially enriching phase of adult development.

If you’re in the thick of self-reevaluation, here’s what you should know: this isn’t about fixing anything. You’re not broken. You’re not behind. You’re not a late bloomer. You’re in the middle of an intelligent reassessment of your life’s direction based on years of data, experience, and emotional growth.

Don’t let anyone tell you differently. If they try, you know what to say. . .

Fucking watch me.

New Kind of Glow-Up

Maybe you don’t want a capsule wardrobe. Or a side hustle, or a Brazilian wax, or a mountain-view meditation retreat. Maybe your glow-up doesn’t look like a magazine spread. Maybe it looks like refusing to apologize when someone thinks you’re too much.
It looks like rewriting the narrative, and showing up exactly as you are: messy, unfiltered, complicated, resilient—and somehow still too much for the wrong people. It looks like saying: I’m not starting over. I’m returning to myself.

If that makes me less marketable or less inspiring to the curated self-improvement crowd, so be it. I’m not here for the hashtag. I’m here to become unrecognizable to the people who underestimated me. To reclaim what they told me to bury. And to take up space, unapologetically.

So, if you’re reading this while sitting in a version of your life that doesn’t quite fit anymore, don’t panic. You don’t have to torch it all to the ground. You don’t have to become someone new. Just listen closely to the self you were before the edits.

She’s still in there.
And she’s got some things to say.

You don’t need permission to go back and get her.
Just the willingness to say:
Fucking watch me.