Who Am I Now? Identity Loss After Marriage, Motherhood, and Divorce
I got invited to something last month that I didn't want to go to.
I already knew how it would feel, and I knew I'd leave the second it felt polite. Still, for a second, I thought about going anyway. Not because I wanted to be there, but because I didn't want to disappoint the person who invited me.
Then I caught myself. I said no. I meant it. And it felt free.
I bring that up because it's such a small moment, and small moments are exactly where most women lose themselves. Not in one big collapse. In a hundred small yeses to things they never wanted, said so quietly that nobody, including them, notices it happening.
I say that phrase in session more than almost anything else, and I say it on purpose. "Lost" makes it sound like an accident, like she slipped out of your pocket somewhere and you just haven't found her yet. That's not what happened. You put her on the back burner once, and then again, and then so many times it became a habit instead of a choice. You didn't do it on purpose, and you weren't weak for doing it. You did it because you were taught to, by family, by relationships, by a culture that rewards women for disappearing quietly into everyone else's needs. But the truth is she's not gone. She's still there. You just have to go back and connect with her again.
It shows up differently depending on where you lost her.
Where It Shows Up | What It Often Looks Like | The Deeper Truth |
Motherhood | Giving every last ounce of energy to the kids, chasing "perfect," pouring in more than she's getting elsewhere, from a partner, from a new town with no family close by | It felt like the safest place to put everything she had |
Divorce | Being handed a whole new life she didn't ask to build, dating again, figuring out who she is outside a marriage | Less about disappearing into someone else and more about not knowing what to do with the freedom, exciting and scary at once |
Empty Nest | The bond with her kids shifting, especially with one child, where the relationship started to feel like friendship | Can feel like losing a person, not just a role, though it can also become one of the most beautiful parts of the story |
Most women don't wake up one day and announce they've disappeared. It happens quietly, and it usually surfaces at the breaking point, the moment she's completely run out of whatever she'd been running on.
Here's what people get wrong about it.
They think it's a personal failure. That they are somehow bad at life for letting this happen. It is so much more layered than that. A hundred things bring a woman to this place, and most of them were never hers to carry in the first place. She just picked them up anyway, because that's what she'd learned to do.
and it hits high-functioning women the hardest.
Because they've gotten so good at living up to an identity that isn't fully theirs, whether it's "mom," or "the responsible one," or whatever version of "having it all together" the people around her expect, she's worn that badge of honor for so long it started to feel like her whole self. Some of that pressure comes from inside her. A lot of it comes from what everyone around her decided she should be.
For Black women, there's a layer underneath that layer.
Society paints Black women as strong by default, and then we reinforce it ourselves, sometimes without even noticing. Put a man and a woman in the same leadership role, have them say the exact same thing, and watch how differently it lands. He's a leader. She's difficult. Too much. So Black women end up working twice as hard just to be received the same way. And on top of that, we're often the ones everyone turns to when things fall apart, family, friends, even people online looking for advice they wouldn't ask anyone else. Being the strong one isn't a compliment when it means nobody ever asks what you need.
Getting her back starts smaller than you'd think.
It starts with noticing that you need to. That's it. You can't get back to something you feel you never left. From there, it's choosing yourself in the small moments, the way I did with that invitation. Saying no when you mean no. Leaving early if you want to. Understanding that disregarding what everyone else expects isn't the same as disregarding your values. It's just finally deciding how you actually want to spend your time and your energy, because
you always had that choice. You just weren't using it.
If any of this sounds like you, I want you to know you didn't fail at this. You are understood, you are seen, and I hope by the end of reading this you feel a little more free to boldly choose yourself, even if it's the smallest thing today.
If you want somewhere to start that conversation, booking a consultation might be the first thing you do just for yourself in a while.
Thanks for reading 💛
Comments