When Everything Pauses: A Midlife Reflection on Burnout, Becoming, and What Might Come Next
There are seasons in a woman’s life where everything we’ve been carrying quietly asks to be set down.
Where even the things we once loved feel heavy.
Where the energy that used to move through us simply… stops.
Where we find ourselves looking at our lives and whispering,
“I don’t know who I am right now.”
I’ve been in that space.
This last stretch of life has been layered:
hormonal shifts, grief and loss, deep life transitions, a teenager becoming a mother and me stepping unexpectedly into grandparenthood and co-parenting, all while still trying to hold a business, a family, and myself.
It caught up with me.
It slowed me down.
And eventually, it emptied me.
Not in a dramatic collapse — but in a quiet, internal unraveling.
A soft “I can’t keep doing this anymore.”
And here’s the truth no one really prepares us for:
Women in midlife aren’t just managing symptoms.
We are shedding identities.
Caregiver.
Mother.
Partner.
Provider.
Helper.
Holder.
Do-it-all-without-complaint-woman.
We are unlearning the pieces that were survival.
We are releasing the versions of ourselves we built to carry others.
We are stepping into a space where nothing fits the way it used to.
And it is disorienting.
And it is sacred.
I haven’t lost myself.
I am meeting myself again.
Not the younger me.
Not the woman who pushed and poured and hustled and gave.
Not the version who believed her worth lived in her usefulness.
A new one.
Or perhaps the truest one, the one that has been waiting underneath everything I outgrew.
Right now, I am not rushing to define anything.
I am not forcing productivity from a body that is clearly asking to rest.
I am not pretending I have clarity when really, I am living inside questions.
I am in a season of curiosity.
What if burnout is not a failure…
…but an initiation into a deeper self?
What if midlife isn’t a decline, but an emergence?
What if the exhaustion we feel is not weakness, but a call back to our own truth, energy, and rhythm, a rhythm we haven’t listened to in years because we were too busy holding everyone else’s world together?
Those questions are reshaping me.
They are reshaping my work, too.
For years, my focus has been supporting women through profound emotional healing, especially in the realm of post-abortion experience and womb-based reclamation.
That work remains sacred to me.
It always will.
But something new is rising inside me.
A desire for gentler spaces.
Softer conversations.
Community not built around pushing or striving or fixing,
but around being, witnessing, and remembering ourselves again.
I’ve been dreaming about free monthly circles for midlife women.
A place to exhale.
To not be “on.”
To share honestly.
To be seen in the mess and the magic of this middle place.
And maybe, in time, this becomes something more:
adventures together, travel, circling in person, exploring the world and ourselves at the same time, rediscovering joy and play and aliveness.
For now, though?
It is simply a seed.
A whisper.
A pulse.
A possibility.
I’m not building.
I’m listening.
I’m not launching.
I’m letting something gestate.
I don’t know where this leads, and I’m not in a hurry to define it.
Instead, I’m staying curious.
Soft.
Open.
Present.
If you find yourself in this same space, burned out, shifting, questioning, tired of holding everything and ready for… something different,
just know:
You’re not behind.
You’re not broken.
You’re not losing yourself.
You are becoming.
The pause is not the end.
It is the doorway.
And I’m right here in the threshold with you.
Jennifer
Journal Prompts for Your Own Season of Curiosity
If these words resonated, pour a cup of tea, find a quiet spot, and let these questions meet you where you are. There’s no right answer, only what wants to be witnessed today.
What parts of me am I being asked to set down right now?
Where in my life am I feeling the most resistance or fatigue — and what might that be trying to tell me?
What would it look like to give myself full permission to rest without guilt?
If I stopped striving to “get back” to who I was, who might I become instead?
What is one small way I can begin to nurture my curiosity about this season I’m in?
Let your words flow.
Let silence speak.
Let this moment be enough.