There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles in after everything changes. This is about what happens when you finally listen to it.
There is a feeling that nobody really prepares you for in midlife.
It’s not grief exactly, though grief might be part of it. It’s not sadness, though truthfully, it can be. It’s more like standing in a room where something used to be, looking at the space it left behind, and not quite knowing what to do with your hands.
Maybe your kids have grown up and moved out, or they’re somewhere in between. They may be home sometimes, gone others, needing you differently than they used to. Maybe you’ve lost someone. Maybe life has just shifted in ways that are hard to explain to people who haven’t felt it yet. Maybe all of it has happened at once, which is its own particular kind of overwhelming.
Whatever brought you here, you probably know this feeling. That quiet. That restless, now-what sense of standing at the beginning of a new road without a map.
I know it too. And I want to tell you what I found on the other side of it.
When Everything Changed at Once
A few years ago, I lost my mother and my dog Molly within a short time of each other. My boys were leaving for college at the same time. The house was quieter and completely different than it was 3 weeks prior. My role as a caregiver and a mom was shifting abruptly and I wasn’t prepared for it.
Life was moving forward exactly as it was supposed to, I suppose. At times, I felt like I was falling apart, but at others I was coasting along in a numb state. But most of the time I was carrying something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I had this longing for something that felt like mine. Something that was just for me, that came from somewhere deep and real inside of me.
I didn’t sit down one day and decide to find my purpose. It didn’t happen like that. I just needed somewhere to put all of it. The feelings, the stories, the things I was figuring out one hard day at a time.
So I started writing.
The Thing That Made Time Disappear
What happened next surprised me completely.
I started learning how to turn that writing into a blog. I took a course. I started figuring out WordPress, Pinterest, email lists, SEO…all of it from absolute scratch, with zero prior experience. There were days it felt completely overwhelming and days I was convinced I had no idea what I was doing.
But this is what I noticed. Time disappeared when I was working on it.
I would sit down to write a post and look up two hours later, having completely forgotten to check my phone or worry about the things I had been worrying about. I would spend an afternoon learning something new about how to grow a blog and feel genuinely energized at the end of it instead of drained.
That hadn’t happened in a long time.
Is the blog a roaring financial success yet? Nope. I’m still building it, still growing, still learning more than I ever expected to learn about running a business from scratch. But I show up for it every single day because it fills something that genuinely needed filling. It gave me a place for my stories. It gave me a way to reach women who are standing in the same shoes I was in.
That is what purpose actually feels like when you find it. It’s not a perfectly packaged answer. Just the thing that makes you feel like yourself again.
What Finding Your Thing Actually Looks Like
What I have learned from this experience is that it’s not necessarily something you go out and find. It is already in you. It just takes something major happening in your life to finally bring it to the surface.
It looks like noticing what makes you curious even when you’re tired. It looks like the thing you keep coming back to even when nobody is asking you to. It looks like the conversation that energizes you instead of draining you, the topic you could talk about for hours, the project you think about while you’re doing the dishes.
It does not arrive with a big moment. It starts as something ordinary.
A few questions worth sitting with honestly:
What did you love doing before life got so full that you stopped making space for it? Not what you were good at necessarily, but what you genuinely loved.
What do people come to you for, even informally? What do friends and family ask your opinion on, lean on you for, trust your perspective about?
What would you do with your time if the outcome didn’t matter? Ff nobody was watching and nothing needed to be productive or profitable or impressive what would you be doing?
Your answers to those questions are pointing somewhere real. You just have to be willing to follow them, even when it feels small and uncertain at first.
You Need the Right Foundation to Build On
One practical thing I want to share with you, especially if you’re thinking about creating something of your own, whether it is a blog, a business, any kind of online presence, is that the foundation you build on matters more than almost anything else.
When I started my blog, I chose a website theme from Restored 316, and it genuinely changed everything for me. The designs are beautiful, feminine, and professional and created with whatever it is your business needs. They made my site look like something I was proud of from the very beginning, even when I was still figuring everything else out.
What I didn’t expect was that Restored 316 is also a real community. Women building website-based businesses, encouraging each other, sharing what’s working. If you’re at the beginning of thinking about creating something online, whether that’s a blog, a shop, a service, it is worth exploring. I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.
And if building an online business is not your thing at all, that is completely okay. Maybe your thing is in a kitchen, a garden, a choir, a community theater, or somewhere else entirely. The principle is the same wherever you land. Find your people. Find a community of women who share that passion and who will show up for each other, encourage each other, and remind you on the hard days why you started. That is what Restored 316 became for me — not just a tool, but a foundation of people who genuinely cared. Whatever your thing turns out to be, you deserve that same kind of support around you.
You Don’t Have to Figure It All Out at Once
Here is some advice I feel is important. You don’t have to have it figured out before you start.
You don’t have to know exactly what your thing is. You don’t have to have a big plan or a five-year roadmap. You just have to be willing to notice what pulls at you, and then take one small step toward it.
That’s how every next chapter actually begins. Not with a grand declaration. With one small thing that counts today.
If you’re in the middle of a transition right now like an empty nest, loss, a season ending before you were ready, I created something for you. It’s called When A Season Ends, and it’s a free heartfelt guide for women navigating exactly this space between what was and what’s next. It’s free, and it might be just the thing you need right now.
The Momentum That Comes After
Once you find your thing, even just a glimpse of it, the next challenge is building the habit of showing up for it consistently. Not perfectly. Not on the days when everything goes right. On the real days, the full days, the days when life keeps shifting under your feet.
That’s exactly what I built my 3-Win Daily Momentum Workshop around. It takes the simple idea of three small wins a day and shows you how to make it stick, even through the hard seasons. If you’re ready to start building real forward momentum, I’d love to have you inside.
Learn more about the workshop here.
One More Thing Before You Go
If this post felt familiar, if you recognized yourself somewhere in it, I’d love for you to read this one next: Why I Started This Blog (and What it’s Become). This post takes you back to where it all started, if you want to know how this whole thing actually began for me.
And if you’re brand new here and want to know more about who I am and what this blog is really about, my Start Here page is the best place to begin.
You are not lost. You are just between chapters. That is a real place, and it does not last forever.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through my link, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only share products I genuinely use and love.
