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On October 10, I'll be speaking at TEDxHSRW in Kleve, Germany. The theme this year is Limitless, and my name is on the speaker list.
I've known for a while. Telling people took me a lot longer.
Not because I wasn't excited. I was, and I am. But being excited about something and saying it out loud where people can hear you are two different things, and only one of them has ever come easily to me.
So if you found this by searching something like "afraid of self promotion," hi. You're in good company, and I mean that as a fellow member, not an expert.
Saying it out loud was the hard part
Here's what I know about myself. Tell me about your thing, your kid's thing, the thing you're nervous about, and I'm all in. I'll ask follow-up questions. I'll remember it the next time I see you.
But when it's my thing, I tend to leave it out of the conversation. I'll talk your ear off about almost anything else. I just don't have much practice saying "here's something I'm doing, and I think it matters." [VALERIE: if you want it here, one true sentence about where that habit comes from. Otherwise cut this line.]
Somewhere along the way, I think staying humble turned into not saying it at all. And that's a different thing. Humility was never supposed to mean pretending the thing you're doing doesn't count.
I'm not sure I would have put words to any of this if I hadn't had to sit down and write a talk about it. Which is a funny way to find something out about yourself, but I'll take it.
Why someone who'd rather be in the audience said yes
[VALERIE: one sentence on how the TEDxHSRW opportunity actually came to you.]
Yes was not my first instinct. I've never been comfortable being the one everybody's looking at. I'm much happier in the crowd, pointing at somebody else and telling everyone what she just pulled off.
I said yes anyway, and I want to be honest about why, because it isn't a believe-in-yourself story.
I said yes because of the women I've been talking to since I started Half Nester™. Women who've checked every box. Raised the kids, built the career, taken care of everyone, and then found themselves standing in a life they worked hard for, feeling a little off and not knowing why. I know that feeling from the inside. And I know how much it helps to hear someone say it plainly: you're allowed to feel that way, and nothing about you is broken. You're in a transition, and at this stage of life, transition is the one thing that's guaranteed.
That's the message. And it doesn't help anyone if I keep it to myself because I'd rather not be looked at.
That's what settled it for me. I don't have to be a different person up there. Just the same one, somewhere more people can hear.
Who am I now that my kids are leaving? I hear that one a lot.
Here's the part that still makes me laugh a little. I'm about to stand up and talk about roles shifting, and mine are shifting under me while I practice.
I'm still a mom to four. I'm still Mike's wife. I still have patients who count on me and work that needs doing. None of that went anywhere. What's changed is how much room each of those roles takes up, and nobody sent me a memo about it. [VALERIE: one true, ordinary example of a role shifting at home this year, if you'd like one here. Otherwise cut this line.]
If you've ever typed "who am I now that my kids are leaving" into a search bar, or the version that goes "who am I now that they need me differently," I want you to know you're not the only one. Sometimes it doesn't even come out as a question. It comes out as "I don't know why I feel this way, everything is fine." The tidy term for it is a midlife identity shift. I just think of it as being a Half Nester.
I wrote a lesson about this, and I'm still in it
There's a lesson in the Half Nester course called Navigating Roles, Relationships & Identity Shifts. It's the second lesson in the whole course, which tells you how central it is to all of this. I didn't write it because I had it figured out. I wrote it because I finally recognized what was happening to me, and recognizing it turns out to be most of the help.
Naming it doesn't fix anything. But it means that when the feeling shows up, and it still does, I'm not standing in the middle of my own life wondering what's wrong with me. I know what this is. It's a transition. It has a name. I can work with that.
What this is teaching me so far
The talk is written. I'm rehearsing it now, which is a whole adventure of its own.
What I can tell you is what the process is teaching me, because it's more than I bargained for.
I'm learning that being uncomfortable with attention doesn't mean I shouldn't have any. It might just mean I'm not used to it. I spent a long time treating those two things as the same.
I'm learning that pride and humility can sit in the same chair. I can be proud of what Half Nester has become and still be the person who'd rather hear about your day. I'd been acting like I had to choose, and nobody ever asked me to.
And I'm learning that the roles I've spent my life growing into aren't going anywhere. They're just making room for one more, and some days it fits better than others.
I'm also learning that understanding a thing doesn't make it comfortable. I understood all of this before I said yes, and saying yes was still hard, and telling people was harder. Nobody hands you a version of this where the feeling goes away first. You get the feeling and the yes at the same time, and you carry both.
I don't have the ending yet. I'm somewhere in the middle, and I've made my peace with that. Mostly.
If you're in it too
So that's the whole story, or at least the part I can tell so far. On October 10, in Kleve, Germany, I'll stand up and say out loud, to a room full of people I've never met, the thing I've been saying to women one at a time for a while now.
If any of this sounds like you, if you've checked the boxes and something still feels a little off, you're not the only one standing in the middle of it. I'm right there with you, and I've got a whole talk to prove it.
Writing this post was its own version of saying it out loud. It still feels a little strange. I'm sharing it anyway.