Calm coach and workplace wellbeing strategist Louise Siwicki.
For most of my life, I followed the road map laid out before me: study hard, build a career, meet someone, buy the house, strive for success. Tick, tick, tick. I did all the things that were supposed to bring fulfillment, security, and a sense of ‘having made it’. And for a while, they did.
We are taught that if we simply work hard enough, achieve enough and perform well enough that happiness will follow. So many of us, especially women, have been conditioned to excel to tick the boxes, to achieve the titles, to hold it all together. We’ve worn the mask of competence and strength for so long that it has become our second skin.
But then, somewhere in my late thirties, the ground beneath me began to quietly shift. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. But it was undeniable.
What I now call ‘The Midlife Awakening’ – or as I’ve come to know it, ‘The Unravelling’ – crept in. At first, it felt restless. A lingering sense that something was off, even when life looked picture-perfect on paper. I would wake up with a sense of low-level anxiety that I couldn’t quite explain.
Then came the deeper questions: Is this it? Is this what I’m meant to do with the rest of my life? Why does everything that used to feel so certain now feel so unaligned?
I started to realise I wasn’t alone. So many women I spoke to – successful, capable, driven women – were quietly wrestling with the same dissonance. Around boardroom tables, in coffee shops, on late-night phone calls with close friends, this same quiet conversation was happening everywhere. We were all waking up to a deeper truth: the life we had carefully built no longer fit who we were becoming.
Midlife, for many women, isn’t a crisis. It’s an unravelling. It’s the slow shedding of roles, identities, and stories we’ve carried for years. It’s the perfectionism, the people-pleasing, and the belief that our worth is tied to how much we achieve or how well we hold it all together.
Biologically, emotionally and spiritually, midlife is a potent crossroads. Our hormones shift. Our nervous systems, often stretched thin after years of pushing, start to demand a different pace. The dreams we deferred start tapping on our shoulders, asking to be heard. We’re forced to reconcile the gap between who we are and who we once thought we should be.
For many women, this is also the stage where competing demands collide: career shifts, ageing parents, evolving friendships, sometimes the grief of unrealised dreams. The identities we once clung to so tightly begin to feel like clothes that no longer fit.
The Midlife Awakening isn’t about breaking down; it’s about breaking open.
For me, it was burnout that cracked me open. Years of striving, overachieving, and over-functioning finally caught up. My old ways of coping simply stopped working. The very strategies that had once helped me succeed were now the ones leaving me exhausted.
This was my initiation into the next chapter of my life – a chapter that required me to pause, reflect and reimagine who I was beyond all the doing.
And for many women, it looks like this too. It’s the colleague who suddenly questions her career path, the friend who wonders whether success was ever truly hers or someone else’s definition, and it’s the quiet voice whispering “there must be something more”.
Midlife awakening asks us to rewrite the narrative, to let go of who we thought we had to be and to reconnect with who we truly are. It invites us to move from striving to softness, from performing to presence, from perfectionism to peace.
It can feel terrifying because it asks us to step into the unknown. Many of us have built entire lives around certainty and control. But the truth is, certainty was never the point. Freedom lives in the willingness to let go.
This isn’t something we can plan for in the same way we planned our careers or our homes. It’s not a strategy. It’s a recalibration of our nervous system, our values and our identity. It’s a reclamation of our voice, our energy, and our joy.
The Midlife Awakening isn’t a flaw. It’s not a failure. It’s a calling. And when we answer that call, we don’t fall apart, we come home to ourselves.
Because on the other side of the unravelling is not emptiness, but clarity. A life that feels lighter, truer, and beautifully aligned with who we are now becoming.
