A note of hope for the midlife woman entrepreneur still reaching for the light.
It was around 1am.
I couldn’t sleep – which, at that point in my life, was not unusual.
I grabbed my robe and a book I’d been slowly making my way through. Something spiritual. Hermetic philosophy, universal laws.
Honestly, I couldn’t have told you what I was looking for. I just needed somewhere to put my mind that wasn’t the spiral.
I went into the kitchen and made chamomile tea in the Keurig.
Flipped on the small lamp in the living room.
Sat down.
I read for a few minutes and was just about to close the book when the words practically jumped off the page at me.
“Every beautiful flower begins as a seed that is buried deep in the dark and the dirt. It must break through its own shell and reach blindly for the light, not truly knowing for certain if it’s there.”
And then, as clearly as if someone had spoken it out loud:
You are not being punished. You have been planted. This is initiation. Keep reaching for the light.
A deep sense of peace rolled over me like a warm breeze.
I sat with it.
I want to tell you what the months before that moment actually looked like.
Because it wasn’t poetic.
It was dark.
Disorienting in a way I didn’t have language for. There’s this liminal space that opens up when you’ve outgrown who you were – and at first, you try to wait it out.
You tell yourself it’s a phase.
You self-diagnose.
You try every topical solution you can find.
The nurse in me was researching every illness, mental and physical, trying to find something that would make sense of what I was feeling. Something I could treat. Something with a name and a protocol and a clear path to the other side.
Because here is the terrifying thing about that threshold:
You can’t turn around and go back. That door is closed.
But you also can’t see which way forward is.
You’re just in it. In the void. Reaching for something you can’t name, in a direction you can’t confirm.
What that passage gave me wasn’t a solution.
Things didn’t automatically get better.
There were still periods of intense grief.
Still confusion.
Still mornings I didn’t recognize the woman getting dressed.
But something shifted.
From resistance to reverence.
I stopped fighting my shadows and started listening to them.
I began asking different questions.
Not what is wrong with me – but what is this showing me?
Not how do I fix this – but what if this is exactly what becoming feels like?
Here is what I know now that I didn’t know then:
The coaching industry has a name for what I was in.
They call it a transition.
A reinvention.
A pivot.
They build summits around it and sell frameworks for navigating it.
What they don’t talk about is the ending that has to happen first.
Reinvention assumes you know what you’re reinventing from.
But most midlife women are still mid-exit from who they had to be.
Still in the dark.
Still reaching.
That’s not a problem to solve.
That’s a threshold to be held.
The void isn’t a symptom of something gone wrong. It’s the necessary season between the seed and the flower. Between the woman you performed and the woman underneath who has been waiting… patiently, stubbornly, with extraordinary grace… for you to stop running and finally let her emerge.
You are not broken.
You are not behind.
You have been planted.
The Portal: Sacred Unraveling™ exists for the woman who is ready to stop waiting out the dark and start moving through it with intention.
Not to rush you forward.
To let something end cleanly – so what comes next is actually yours.
Book your free Midlife Calling by Design™ Audit today!
If this is your moment, I’m here.
Leave a comment