Ep #193: You Don't Have to Leave to Come Home to Yourself

Midlife has taught me something I wish I had understood years ago: sometimes the problem isn't my relationship, my marriage, or the life I've built. Sometimes the real problem is that I've become disconnected from what I truly want.

In this episode, I explore why so many women lose touch with their own desires after years of caring for everyone else and why reconnecting with ourselves is one of the most powerful things we can do.

I talk about the beliefs that keep us feeling stuck, the guilt that often comes with wanting more, and how curiosity—not drastic action—is the first step toward creating a life that feels vibrant and authentic. Whether you're questioning your relationships, your purpose, or simply wondering why life feels different in midlife, I hope this conversation gives you permission to slow down, listen to yourself, and rediscover what truly matters.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why so many women disconnect from their own wants and needs.

• How unexamined beliefs keep us feeling stuck.

• Why curiosity is more powerful than rushing into big decisions.

• How midlife offers an opportunity to reconnect with who we really are.

• Practical ways to begin honoring your own desires every day.

If this episode resonates with you, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at hello@mikkigardner.com, share what's coming up for you, and let's continue the conversation. You don't have to navigate this season alone.

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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.

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. I got a question for you. What if your marriage. What if your relationship isn't the problem? What if the problem is that you have forgotten that you are allowed to want things? Stay with me. This might seem like, duh, right? Mikki, I know how to want things. I want things all the time. I want a coffee, I want some lunch. I want a new house, I want a new vacation, right? But what I'm talking about is that women oftentimes do not know how to want things, validate their wanting, honor their wanting without feeling guilt and shame about it.

Because the thing is, women are conditioned from early on to focus outside. Focus on the marriage, on the partner, on the kids, on the other people, on caregiving, on their job, on their career, on their friends, right? Always outward. And then there's this. This sort of stereotype that a good mom is a selfless mom, right? She doesn't have needs. She doesn't need anything. She doesn't want anything. A good wife, right? Doesn't need too much. This is B.S. let's just call it for what it is. It's ridiculous.

And it's a notion. It's a conditioning. It's a belief system that has been woven into our culture, right? And we've bought into it. We've all bought into it. And so we're not going to blame. We're not going to get angry about it. But I do want to talk about it. Because when we. We don't allow ourselves to want things without guilt and shame and kind of icky feelings, what we're really doing is we're disconnecting from ourselves, from our needs, from our desires.

And when we look at midlife, right, this period of time where we actually are invited, it's a real invitation to ask, what do I want? Right? Because the external roles are changing. Maybe the kids are getting older. Maybe you've had a relationship transition. Maybe you're caregiving for different people now. Like, midlife becomes this point where you have a new chance to look and realize the way that I was structuring my life, taking care of everyone, handling those things. They don't need it anymore. Our kids grow up, right? They need us in different ways. But midlife can really become this opportunity to ask ourselves, what do we want? What do I want?

And here's the thing, a lot of women that I talk to, and I can put my hand up for this, I didn't even know I had disconnected so hard that I didn't even know what I wanted. I knew what everybody else wanted and I kind of made that what I wanted, but I didn't really know. And here's the thing. When I was thinking about this, I heard a woman recently. You know, this came up really, uh, poignantly for me. My first marriage ended, um, after betrayal. And it was sort of understood, right? It was, everyone knew why I got divorced, right? It was, it had to happen. When I left the other relationship, people didn't see it exactly the same way, right?

And he wasn't necessarily a nice guy. But I have friends who are married to nice guys, but they're not happy. They're not happy in their marriages. They have been disconnected for so long. There's no passion. There's just sort of day in and day out the same thing. There's no connection, there's no vibrancy, there's no fun left. And uh, listen, this is not a commentary on marriage because we all have to do our work on marriage. But it is important to say that oftentimes when we're married to a nice guy and when things life is good enough, it feels really hard to leave it, right? There's no social permission slip for leaving a, ah, good enough marriage. And there's really not a lot of sympathy, right? When we do that, oftentimes people don't understand and it's isolating because when you are the person that's living inside of a life that feels hollow, that feels disconnected, you've tried everything and it's not changing. It's really hard to give ourselves permission when we don't know what we want, when we're not connected to that desire within ourselves and willing to validate it, willing to listen to it, willing to go towards it.

I had a woman I was talking to recently. She's been married a really long time, has kids, has grandkids, has a really nice life. Her husband thinks everything is fine. And those are the words he used. It's fine, we don't need to change anything. And she told me she's Like, I don't want to leave. I'm not leaving. We have this life. I just want to understand how I can feel okay inside of it. And I want to be really clear here. This is not a referendum on her choice. She gets to decide what she's going to do. And I'm not here to tell her to stay or to go, but what I was there to do is to help her look at, well, what are actually the options.

Because sometimes we're not giving ourselves the full scope and the full perspective of what's available to us. And sometimes we do want to just learn to live within a, uh, life so we can feel okay. And other times we're like, I'm sick of feeling okay. I want all of it. I want the full enchilada, right? So everybody is different, but it all starts in the same place, is that it's not a problem with the other person necessarily. It's not a problem with the marriage. The problem, really, it comes from years of quietly denying our own needs, denying our truth, ignoring the messages and the desires and the urges and the needs that we have inside of us so long, right, that we lose any sense of a thread of who we are underneath all the roles, underneath all the imagery, underneath all of the outside accoutrements, if you will. And we have to really challenge this either or lie. Because staying and reclaiming yourself were never actual opposites. And she just never knew that there was another option to consider.

That is the question that I think we're here in midlife to ask, is, is there another option that I don't know about? Because the either or, it's always a lie. There's always more choice available. And so we have to really start to unpack. Well, what are the belief systems at play? You know, for this woman, when we were having the conversation, you know, part of it was, this is just what marriage is after 25, 30 years. And there was a lot of feeling like she was ungrateful for wanting more. And if nothing's technically wrong, you know, you don't get to want it to be different. You know, you just have to learn to live within it. So what we did is really start to look at, well, are these even true? You have to ask yourself, are these true statements, or are they just unexamined beliefs that we've been inherited, beliefs that we've never questioned, beliefs that have just been handed to us and we've sort of said, oh, okay, but we have to be willing to sort of notice, be honest about what we're feeling.

And it helps to do this in. In community, in dialogue with somebody else, because it's really hard to hear our own beliefs, right? When we're kind of on our own. And it helps. That's why coaching, therapy, being with other people in community, um, support groups, it helps because you can hear your own story in other people or you have people listening and reflecting it back to you so that you can start to really examine these unexamined beliefs that we have. And the first step that we have to do is willing to be curious, right? Curious before action. We have to get used to just noticing, becoming a little bit more curious about what's true and what's not true, right?

We don't want to have to get stuck in a, uh. I have to either leave or fix it because either of those feel, like, really bad sometimes. So we just want to notice. What do I like, what don't I like? M. What do I want, what don't I want, Right? What's working, what isn't working, what do I want more of, what do I want less of? But there's no obligation to act on any of that. It's just being curious. And that's what midlife offers us, is a permission slip to start to get curious, to start to, like, nose around a little bit and figure out without having to change everything.

That's where crisis comes in. So many people that come to me and I talk to who are on the other side of the crisis, whether it's illness, whether it's divorce, whether it's betrayal, infidelity, uh, blowing their life up. I don't believe that that happens in an instant, right? A lot of people say, oh, well, he woke up one day and he was just a different person. That, no, the midlife crisis comes. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts. Because it's a constant, steady disregard for what is true for you. It's ignoring the signals that your body's giving you. It's ignoring what you want. It's ignoring the truths and acting like they don't exist. It's just a constant kind of not paying attention to what's over here. And, uh, long enough, we can push it down, push it down, push it down, push it down. But it's like a beach ball that you try to hold underwater. You can hold it for a little bit, but eventually that sucker's coming up, right? And that's what the crisis looks like. It's when we can't hold it under anymore.

So instead, what's the Alternative to not get to the crisis. Well, it's a reintroduction. It's allowing yourself to be curious to get to know yourself. We change. Our, uh, taste buds change every seven years. So we don't think that we change. I was just having this conversation with friends today. There are cycles, right? We are meant to evolve. We are meant to change not in an instant, right? But over time. And so midlife can be that reintroduction. It can be the chapter where you get to meet yourself again, where you get to take stock of what actually matters to you now in this season of life, with what's actually going on with you.

Right? Again, maybe your kids are getting older. Maybe they don't need you in the same way, maybe you're an empty nester, right? There's so many different variations of midlife. And even when you move from like the Little Littles into the adolescence, right, it's constantly shifting. And we have to be willing to take stock of what matters. Letting other people take care of themselves. Age appropriate, of course, but starting to actually take care of you.

Somebody said recently to me that you can spend years getting healthy or you can spend years in, um, unhealth. And to me, that is the place that this woman came and we had this conversation. That's the place of when we are stuck in a marriage or relationship that isn't working, that we won't get ourselves out of because we've gotten stuck in the unhealth. And our first step is to become curious, to just start to notice, what do I even want? What do I like, what do I want to do? To start speaking up about little things that you need. Allowing yourself to have needs and have wants and have desires and get them. Allow yourself to receive them.

Right? It might be somebody bring, you know. Are, uh, we having burgers tonight? No, I really wanted some salmon. Then have some salmon. Right. It's like a silly example, but so often we just default to what everybody else wants. To be convenient, to be compliant, to make it easy. But you're not here just to make everything easy. You're here to live a full, vibrant life.

And I can assure you as a 50 plus, like having. I'm 50, but having reached this point, stepping into midlife, I feel more alive today because of the choices that I'm allowing myself. I know myself well enough now and I trust myself to be okay no matter what happens. I have lived through the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows, and I know that I can weather any storm. And with that comes Confidence. And with that confidence lets me open my heart to new experiences, new people, new adventures, new passions, new desires, so many new experiences. And to me, that is what midlife is supposed to look like. It's supposed to be filled with health and vibrancy. And it's not all that. There's still lows. But when we know that we can navigate those things and we do it because we know ourselves, we've been willing to take stock, to get to know the good parts, the bad parts, and to accept all of it, to find love and grace for each part of us and to move forward, letting go of the roles and the expectations that were handed to us and start to choose for ourselves.

This is the adventure of their life. This is the reintroduction. And so I just wanted to offer, right, that you don't have to leave any part of your life to come back home to yourself. You can choose that today. And we come back home by listening, by being there, by being present, noticing, getting curious and starting to slowly, over time, act in the way, act on the things that we actually want on our truth, to be willing to be vulnerable with safe people, being willing to open ourselves up more to new ideas, to new adventures. And when we're able to do that, life brightens up. It gets a lot brighter and more colorful.

And if you're wanting to get curious about life, if you're wanting to start exploring things in a different way and you want support in that, I want you to join the wait list for within. It's going to be starting in the fall, and it's for women who are in midlife who are ready to get reintroduced to themselves, right? And we're not going to only fix or leave or do this either, or we're going to start to look at what are all the options so that you can choose what the next season of your life is going to look like. It's a community of women who come together to learn from one another, to grow, to be reintroduced to themselves, to get to know themselves and to choose what's next in this next season of life, one that is full of confidence and self trust and vibrancy and new adventure and love and freedom and liberation. That's what midlife is. That is what we're invited here to do. It does not have to be a crisis, but we do that by really taking stock and taking really good care of ourselves. So if that sounds good to you and you're curious, please get on the wait list to within.

And I'm curious what resonated Is there something that we talked about today that really resonated with you? I'd love to hear from you. Email me. There is a link in the show notes. I'd love to know what you're thinking about, what's coming up for you in midlife, What's a challenge? What would you love to have a conversation around? Let me know and we'll have the conversation here. All right. Till next time, just remember that you have choice in this life and you get to choose what the next version is and the next season of the Life is going to be. And I hope you choose freedom, liberation, love and a whole lot of fun.

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 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 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.