Who Are You When Nobody Needs You Anymore?
There comes a peculiar moment in a woman’s life when some of the jobs she has spent decades performing begin to disappear.
The children grow up. The career ends. The marriage changes, or ends, or settles into something entirely different. Nobody needs you to organize the bake sale, drive somebody to practice, remember everybody’s birthday, solve the crisis, make the casserole, keep the peace or hold the whole damn thing together.
And sometimes, instead of feeling liberated, you stand there thinking:
Well, who the hell am I now?
That was the question at the center of the conversation Lisa Garvey and I had last night.
And somewhere along the way, I realized I had spent much of my own life living scripts that had been handed to me.
At eighteen, I didn’t even know I had the right to want something for myself.
I knew what I was supposed to do. I knew how a wife behaved, how a mother behaved, how a preacher’s wife behaved, how a good woman behaved. I knew how to fulfill a role.
Wanting was another matter entirely.
Eventually life dismantled enough of those roles for me that I had no choice but to meet myself.
A hurricane took my house in Louisiana. My marriage ended. I moved to Lynchburg because my daughter and her family lived here, and nine months later they moved away.
There I was.
No house. No husband. No children who needed raising.
No familiar identity to hide behind.
It was as if life had stripped me naked, stood me in front of a full-length mirror and said:
Okay, Monica. Now who are you?
That question changed everything.
You may not need a purpose. You may need an intention.
Retirement advice loves the word purpose.
Find your purpose.
Volunteer.
Stay useful.
Give back.
For heaven’s sake, apparently we’re not allowed to simply finish one enormously demanding chapter of life without immediately getting another assignment.
I don’t think purpose is where we begin.
I think we begin with how we want to feel.
During the conversation, I asked Lisa what had made her smile that day. Then I asked what had recently put a sparkle in her eye.
Out of that little conversation came three words:
Love. Excitement. Future.
There was her intention.
Not a job description.
Not another obligation.
Not something she could add to her calendar and perform correctly.
A direction.
What if you did the same thing?
Instead of asking, What should I do with the rest of my life?, what if you asked:
How do I want the rest of my life to feel?
That is an entirely different question.
And frankly, I think it’s a much better one.
The problem may not be that you don’t know what you want.
Women tell me all the time, “I don’t know what I want anymore.”
I’m not convinced that’s true.
I think many of us have simply spent so many years listening to everybody else that we stopped recognizing our own voice.
Call it intuition. Call it spirit. Call it your soul. Call it a hunch if all the spiritual language makes you itchy.
I don’t care what you call it.
But there is something inside us that notices.
It notices what feels expansive and what feels constricting. It notices the person we want to call, the place we want to visit, the idea that keeps returning, the thing that makes us unexpectedly happy.
The trouble is that those little whispers are often buried beneath forty years of:
I should.
I really ought to.
People will expect me to.
What will they think?
I can’t possibly.
We have shoulded ourselves nearly to death.
So perhaps the work now isn’t inventing a new woman.
Perhaps it is excavating the woman who has been underneath all that obligation the entire time.
Go back before everybody started telling you who to be.
If you truly have no idea what you want, I’d like you to remember yourself at ten, eleven or twelve years old.
What fascinated you?
What did you imagine?
What did you pretend to be?
Before you learned what was sensible, appropriate, ladylike, realistic or marketable, what made you feel alive?
When I was eleven years old, I wanted to fly airplanes.
I would lie in the grass near the airport, watch the planes cross the sky and think, I want to do that.
I actually did go to pilot school when I was twenty. It didn’t last very long because, at four-foot-eleven, I had a rather important problem involving my feet and the pedals.
But becoming a pilot isn’t the point.
The feeling was.
Adventure.
Wonder.
Possibility.
The audacity of looking into the sky and imagining myself up there.
Lisa told me she wanted to be Cher.
Now THAT is a childhood dream I can get behind.
But when we dug beneath Cher’s hair and gowns and fabulousness, Lisa realized what she had really been responding to.
Power.
Presence.
A woman who seemed to move through the world as if nobody got to tell her who she was.
There was the message hiding inside the childhood dream.
Your old dreams may contain information for the woman you are today.
You do not necessarily need to resurrect the dream literally.
You reclaim the feeling inside it.
And then you begin noticing.
If I could give a woman one exercise after watching this conversation, it would be ridiculously simple.
Tomorrow, take a route you travel all the time.
The grocery store. Your daughter’s house. The pharmacy. Wherever.
And notice three things you have never noticed before.
That’s it.
Three.
Because most of us spend huge portions of our lives on autopilot.
Same road. Same thoughts. Same errands. Same complaints. Same internal conversations.
Noticing interrupts that.
And once you start noticing the world around you, you may also begin noticing yourself.
I’d love to do that.
I miss that.
That looks fun.
I wonder what would happen if...
Do not immediately kill the thought.
Do not drag out the committee of practicality and ask them to review it.
Just notice.
Collect those moments.
I call something similar a joy ledger.
Not a gratitude list you perform every morning because somebody told you successful spiritual people write five things before breakfast.
I mean actual joy.
The weed pushing triumphantly through a crack in the sidewalk.
A song that makes you dance in your kitchen.
A little boy playing football.
The light hitting a tree in a way that makes you stop.
Those tiny sparks matter because joy compounds.
You are allowed to say no without submitting a legal brief.
Another thing we talked about was the exhausting habit women have of making everybody comfortable with our choices.
Someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do, and instead of saying no, we begin producing evidence.
Well, I would, but Tuesday I have this appointment and then my daughter might need me and Wednesday I have...
Stop.
“No, that doesn’t work for me.”
Whole sentence.
“Nope, can’t do that.”
Another whole sentence.
I spent years explaining myself.
These days, if something does not fit my life, I do not believe I owe anyone a dissertation defending the decision.
That is part of reclaiming yourself too.
Put yourself on your own calendar.
We make appointments with dentists, hairdressers, grandchildren, accountants and everybody else who requires a chunk of our existence.
How often do we make an appointment with ourselves?
Not to accomplish something.
Not to improve ourselves.
Not to fix anything.
Simply to listen.
I have a reminder on my phone that goes off every hour. It says:
Bring your attention home.
Home means me.
My mind. My body. My spirit. My attention.
Even sixty seconds of coming back to yourself can change the direction of a day.
Because your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess.
And you are allowed to give some of it to yourself.
Maybe this stage of life isn’t about becoming someone new at all.
Perhaps we have spent enough years performing versions of ourselves that made everyone else comfortable.
Maybe now we get to become genuine.
I like that word better than authentic.
Genuine.
There is something almost innocent about it.
Unmanufactured.
Unperformed.
Undiluted.
At the end of our conversation, that was what I kept coming back to.
The women I meet are not necessarily looking for a bigger life.
They are looking for a life that finally feels like theirs.
So if something inside you has been itching lately, if there is a nudge saying this doesn’t quite fit anymore, do not dismiss it.
You do not have to blow up your life tomorrow.
You do not have to know your purpose.
You do not need a five-year plan.
Start smaller.
Notice what makes you smile.
Notice what gives you a spark.
Remember what once made you dream.
Spend a little time alone with yourself.
And for God’s sake, stop assuming everybody else gets a vote.
There is still a woman in there.
She may have been buried beneath roles, obligations, manners, responsibilities and an astonishing pile of shoulds.
But she is still there.
And I have a sneaking suspicion she is one pretty nifty old broad.
Want to keep this conversation going?
This is exactly the kind of conversation we have every Tuesday night in Breakthrough, my private gathering for paid subscribers.
There are no recordings, no performances, no experts handing you another list of things you should be doing with your life. We talk honestly about the conditioning we’ve carried, the roles we’re ready to put down, the dreams we may have forgotten and the woman who is beginning to emerge underneath all of it.
And increasingly, I find myself sitting back while these remarkable women begin helping one another see what they couldn’t quite see alone.
If something in this article made you think, Oh. There’s something here I need to explore, become a paid subscriber and come join us in Breakthrough.
You don’t need to arrive knowing what comes next.
That’s part of what we’re there to discover.
And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.
Thank you Stacey Jenkins, Unmasked Midlife | Dr. Erin, CarolynJohnson Healing Journey, Cherie King, In Her Reflection, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lisa Garvey! Join me for my next live video in the app.
