Ep #184: Leaving Yourself On Read

What if the reason your life feels off in midlife isn’t because something is wrong… but because something inside you is finally waking up?

In this episode, I explore what it really means to “leave yourself on read” — those moments when your body, intuition, and inner knowing are trying to guide you, but you override them, delay them, or ignore them altogether. I share how this disconnection shows up in subtle ways — exhaustion, resentment, misalignment — and why midlife makes it harder to keep ignoring the truth.

This isn’t about blowing up your life or making dramatic changes. It’s about learning to respond to yourself in small, honest ways that rebuild trust, energy, and alignment.

If you’ve been feeling disconnected, stuck, or unsure of your next step, this conversation will help you come back to yourself.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why you’re not confused — you’re just not responding

• How your body communicates misalignment

• The cost of overriding your intuition

• Why small, honest responses change everything

If this resonates, I’d love to support you. Reach out or join the waitlist for the next cohort — you don’t have to do this alone. https://calendly.com/coachwithmikki/co-parent-breakthrough-call

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Full Episode Transcript:

What if the reason your life suddenly feels so misaligned in midlife isn't because something is going wrong, but because something inside of you is finally waking up? Well, welcome to Led from Within. I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is a podcast for women who are done outsourcing their authority and are ready to claim a life aligned with who they are today. Because midlife doesn't need to be a crisis. It can be a return to yourself, to clarity, to courage, and to inner authority. So let's begin.

Welcome back to the podcast today. Uh, this is one that I feel like I have done over and over and over. And we're talking about leaving yourself unread. Yes. Like the text messages. If you're like me and so many of us, you may keep telling yourself that you don't know what to do. But what if the truth is you really do know? Because you do. But you're likely leaving yourself on red. Your body's been texting you for years. Those little nudges, that tightness that you feel, the quiet knowing that you just can't shake. It's those moments where something feels off, but you just keep going anywhere. You open the message, maybe you read it, and then you tell yourself, um, not yet. I'm going to deal with it later. Or maybe I'm overreacting. Or maybe it's just not that big a deal. So you leave it there. You leave it unread, in action, but fully seen and felt in your body. Your body and your soul are constantly communicating with you. Not in words, but through sensations, through emotions, through patterns that keep repeating until you finally pay attention.

It might be through the exhaustion that maybe doesn't feel like it makes sense. Maybe it's to the tension in your chest when you say yes, but you really mean no. Or through the relationship that keeps showing up in the same dynamic over and over and over. And most of us have been trained to override it, to rationalize it, to explain it away, to stay busy enough that we just don't feel it. But ignoring the message doesn't make it go away. It actually just changes it. So it's, uh, louder. So your life has to speak. And so this is where I want to start. Right here. And I want to ask you, where are you leaving yourself unread? Where do you already know something, but you're choosing simply not to respond? Maybe it's in that relationship that something feels off, but you keep telling yourself it's fine, it's fine. Maybe it's in your body.

You're tired, you're depleted. Something feels not right, but you just push through it anyway. Maybe it's this quiet sense of your life that it just doesn't actually fit you anymore. It may used to have, but now you're just like performing the life that just doesn't fit you keep showing up as that, ah, version of you that everybody expects you to be. And you tell yourself you just need more clarity. But here's the truth. You do not have a clarity problem. You have a response problem. Because, uh, in midlife, the messages are only going to get louder. What we could ignore in our 20s and our 30s, you can't ignore in the same way anymore. The misalignment starts to feel heavier and heavier. It's more exhausting, it's more obvious. And that heaviness, it's not confusion, it's just simply misalignment. Your body is not betraying you. It's trying to tell you something. It's trying to inform you with every single signal it's sending you. It's trying to communicate that tight feeling when you say yes, but your body contracts. It's information.

The resentment that's building when you don't speak up and speak your truth, that's information. That same pattern that's showing up in different relationships, that's information. Even the numbness, even the disconnection, that is information too. But because when we override ourselves enough time, we're not silencing the message, not at all. But we do start to lose access to it. And I think this is what most of us misunderstand. Your intuition doesn't scream. It never will. It repeats. It shows up again and again and again until you're willing to listen. But your intuition is quiet. It's an inner knowing. It's a felt experience. It's not heard. And a lot of us don't respond because we think responding means blowing up our lives. We think that if we tell the truth that everything is going to fall apart. If we admit what we know, then we have to make some massive irreversible decision. And that feels terrifying. And so instead we do nothing. We stay in that in between, reading the message but never answering it. But alignment isn't built through these dramatic exits or these dramatic moves. It's built through small, honest responses. It's built by showing up and listening to the little nudges to the emotions that are being felt.

Emotions are just little messengers telling you what your body already knows. And so we've got to stop asking ourselves what's the big decision I need to make. What's that big move I need to do? I want you to start asking something different. I, um, want you to start thinking about what is one honest response that I can give today? 1. Not 10, not 100. 1. Maybe it's telling the truth in the smallest moments instead of staying quiet. Maybe it's setting a boundary where you would normally completely overextend yourself. Maybe it's admitting something to yourself in journaling or writing that you've been avoiding. Maybe it's choosing to rest instead of pushing through. Maybe it's having one honest conversation. Maybe not the whole thing, but a first step. Because the fact is, every time you respond to yourself, your energy starts to come back online. Every time you override yourself, it's like we fragment.

You split yourself between what you know and how you're actually living. The fragment split. And that split. That's what feels exhausting, is when we're split between what we know to be true and then this life we're performing. Alignment isn't about everything being perfect. No, it's about everything being honest. About feeling cleaner, quieter, more grounded, even when that's uncomfortable. Because alignment doesn't always feel easy, not at all. But it does feel true. And that freedom that you're looking for, that relief, that aliveness, that feeling like yourself again, that doesn't come from figuring your whole life out. It comes from finally responding to yourself, Listening to the nudges, listening to your intuition, starting to trust those messages and act on them. So I want to ask you, what is the message that your body and your soul has been sending, that you've been postponing, that you've been leaving unread?

Where in your life are you saying, um, not yet, when you actually already know the answer? And what is one small, honest response that you can make today? That's not this big, scary decision, but it's just the next honest step. Because a lot of times we don't need more clarity, but we do need to stop leaving ourselves unread and go within and start responding to our life. Responding to the messages, responding to the truth that lives inside of you. I mean, here's the thing. This is the work that I do in my own life every day, right through, uh, small, honest decisions. Telling the truth, even when it's not easy. Asking myself, what does integrity look like in any situation? And how do I move towards that? How can I be honest with where I am today? Sometimes it looks like rest. Sometimes it looks like choosing ease. Sometimes it looks like saying no or having a boundary. And this is the work that I do with my clients every day, helping them build that trust within themselves, build that connection and that communication with their intuition.

Ground themselves in their nervous system, in their bodies, in their experience, and heal so that they can hear the answers within because they are there and they're always sending messages. It's just up to us whether we're going to listen or leave it on read. This is the work that we do within. So if you're interested, I would love for you to join us in the next cohort. There's a link in the show notes where you can sign up to be on the wait list and find out when the next one opens. You're not alone in this, and the truth is, is that you're not confused. Even though sometimes we feel like it. You just might be disconnected from your own responses. Your body's telling you the truth, but oftentimes we are just negotiating with it instead of listening. And every time we override ourselves, we lose energy. But every time we respond, we get it back. And that clarity and that freedom you want comes from the action of responding and listening. It's a different way of being, but liberation, freedom, aliveness, the version of you and who you're becoming in midlife, it's on the other side. So I'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I hope that it spoke to you and you found something useful to take away from from it. If you did, I would be so grateful if you would take 2 seconds to subscribe to the show, which will help you because you won't miss another episode. And it would help me because you would never miss another episode. And if you are in the giving spirit and would take 30 seconds to rate and review this episode, it would do wonders for the show and for me. Thanks so much for being here and I can't wait to talk to you again next week.