Midlife Chronicles:When Identity, Career, Faith & Marriage All Revolted

Everything decided to be an existential crisis this year 🤪…

At some point in my life — and I mean this sincerely — everything started exploding at once.

Career? Imploded.

Marriage? A slow, grinding psychological war of attrition

Faith? Completely dismantled.& rearranged

Body? On inflamed, exhausted, squishy, squeaky & anxious.

Identity? Gone. Poof. 💨((Witness protection)).

And I remember thinking:

WTF is happening to me?

Why does it feel like I can’t catch my breath before thenextthing hits?

Why is every single system in my life failing at the same time?

No wonder my friends called me Calamity Karen.

They weren’t being mean.

They were being… observant.

The Pattern I Couldn’t See While I Was Living It

Here’s the thing I couldn’t see then — because when you’re inside chaos, it just feels like personal failure:

Nothing was random.

Not the career blowups.

Not the sabotage (mineandother people’s).

Not the humiliation.

Not the sudden body shape crashes.

Not the relational cruelty that surfacedright when I was trying to grow.

It wasn’t “bad luck.”

It was a nervous system that never felt safe being visible colliding with opportunities that required me to be seen.

And that collision… was…well

Messy as he$&

So let’s begin with The Original Crime Scene…. (a.k.a. Early Childhood) 😙

Let’s rewind.

I didn’t grow up with space.… Quite literally… I was number seven of seven children… For context

I grew up with crowding

Crowding of bodies.(((and let’s not fail to mention that also my mom babysat in our house several children while also raising the youngest of her own children, myself and my twin.))) God love her. I don’t know how she did it… But we didn’t exactly get much FaceTime with her as you might imagine.

Crowding of noise.

Crowding of needs.

Crowding of urgency.

I learned very early how to entertain myself.

How to build things alone.

How to not ask for attention because — spoiler — it wasn’t coming.

I wasn’t neglected in the dramatic sense.

I wasfunctionally invisible.

So I adapted.

I became autonomous. Creative. Resourceful.

I made something out of nothing — food, projects, solutions.

And everyone praised that version of me.

What no one noticed was the story quietly forming underneath:

If I take up too much space, I become a problem.

How the Dreamer Got Replaced by the Life Manager

Eventually, imagination stopped feeling safe.

Dreaming hurt.

Hoping hurt.

Getting excited hurt.

So I became practical. Logical. (((Virgo-as-hell.)))

I learned how to manage reality instead of imagine it.

I learned how to be competent instead of expressive.

I learned how to anticipate disappointment before it could blindside me.

And honestly?

That version of meworked.

She held everything together.

She didn’t fall apart.

She didn’t ask for much.

But she also slowly disappeared from her own life.

The Moments I Almost Let Myself Be Big (and Then Panicked)

Here’s the part that makes me want to scream when I look back.

Every time I stepped into something that actually matched my capacity —

a bigger role, a more visible position, a creative expression that felt alive —

my nervous system lost its damn mind.

Not because I couldn’t do it.

But because I was terrified of beingexposed mid-becoming.

Terrified of:

• Being seen learning

• Making a mistake in public

• Being humiliated instead of quietly competent

So what did I do?

Sometimes I self-sabotaged.

Sometimes I cut and ran.

Sometimes I attracted people who did the dirty work for me.

Different flavor. Same outcome.

Back to safety.

Back to small.

Back to “at least I won’t be embarrassed.”

Why Everything Blew Up at the Same Time

What I now understand — painfully, clearly — is this:

You can only live split for so long.

You can’t be spiritually awake, emotionally starved, creatively suppressed, and physically dysregulated forever without the system revolting.

So my life didn’t fall apart.

It rebelled.

Career identity died.

Marriage wounds surfaced.

Faith structures collapsed.

My body screamed what my mouth wouldn’t say.

Not because I was failing.

Because I couldn’t keep pretending.

The Grief No One Prepares You For

There’s a grief that doesn’t get talked about enough.

It’s not grief over losing something.

It’s grief over realizing:

Nothing went wrong — but everything cost me.

I grieved:

• How much I shrank to keep the peace

• How often I chose safety over aliveness

• How many times I abandoned myself before anyone else could

And underneath that grief was a terror I didn’t want to name:

What if I never finish what I came here to do?

The Shift That Finally Changed Something

Here’s the reframe that cracked everything open for me:

I didn’t abandon the dreamer.

I hid her until my nervous system could handle her existence.

The dreamer isn’t reckless.

She’s just been waiting for safety.

She doesn’t need blind faith.

She needs support, structure, and resourcing.

And for the first time, I’m not asking her to disappear so life stays calm.

I’m building a life that can hold her without everything burning down.

What Success Means to Me Now (and Why I Refuse to Die Unfinished)

I don’t want fame.

I don’t want hustle culture.

I don’t want a life that costs me my body or my soul.

But I do want success.

Not ego success.

Completion success.

The kind where I can say:

• I trusted myself

• I stayed visible

• I didn’t run when it got uncomfortable

• I finished the story

Because the idea of leaving this earth knowing I could have lived fully — and didn’t — is unbearable to me.

That’s not ambition.

That’s truth.

If Your Life Feels Like a Series of Unrelated Disasters…

Let me tell you something I wish someone had told me sooner:

You’re not cursed.

You’re not broken.

You’re not dramatic.

You’re likely outgrowing the version of yourself that learned how to survive.

And survival looks chaotic when it finally starts to crack.

The calamity isn’t punishment.

It’s exposure.

And exposure — as brutal as it feels — is the beginning of something real.

This series of lived experience is what led me to create The Magnetic Midlife Community a grounded, intelligent space for women who are done shrinking, done over-processing, and ready to build a life that actually fits who they are now.

It’s not motivation.

It’s not mindset fluff.

✨✨✨✨It’s about nervous-system safety, self-trust, and reclaiming your authority — emotionally, energetically, and practically. JOIN THE COMMUNITY

👉 Explore The Magnetic Midlife Community here:

https://www.theexperienceproject.net/themagneticcommunity