Angela Rosenow

I turned 50 and realised I had no idea what I actually wanted.

Not in the way where you’re temporarily lost and need a minute to think. In the way where you sit down, get quiet, ask yourself the question directly and go completely blank.

Not because there was nothing there. Because I had spent decades running every want through a filter before it could fully form. Is it practical. Will it inconvenience anyone. Can I justify it. By the time anything made it through it was so edited I couldn’t tell if it was mine anymore.

That blank silence was the most clarifying moment I’d had in years.

Because it told me exactly where I had been abandoning myself, not dramatically, not all at once, but in the thousand small moments where I chose everyone else’s comfort over my own truth.

If you are reading this and you realise you can’t answer that question either, what do you actually want, not what makes sense, not what’s responsible, but what you genuinely want, I want you to know something.

That’s not a character flaw.
That’s a woman who was taught her whole life that wanting things was selfish.

And it’s not too late to unlearn it.

Save this if it landed. DM me HOME to book your Come Back Home Session.

Xo
Angela

I sat across from my doctor and tried to describe what was happening.

The exhaustion. The feeling that something was fundamentally wrong. The sense that my body was sending signals I didn’t have language for yet.

She nodded.
She typed.
She said it sounded like anxiety.

I left with a prescription and a quiet, familiar feeling of not having been heard.

And I kept going. Because what else do you do.

Here’s what I know now.

What was happening in my body wasn’t a malfunction.

It wasn’t anxiety to be managed or symptoms to be suppressed. It was perimenopause, and it was asking me to pay attention in a way I had never been taught to.

Not medicated. Not managed.

Listened to.

If you have been sitting in doctors’ offices describing something real and leaving feeling like you made it up, you didn’t make it up.

Your body is not being dramatic. It is telling you the truth.

And you deserve someone who will actually listen.

DM me LIFELINE if you are done being dismissed and ready to finally be heard.

Xo
Angela

Everything on paper said I should be grateful.

Good marriage. Good career. Good life. I had done all the things you’re supposed to do and arrived at the place you’re supposed to want - and stood there feeling nothing but a quiet, persistent wrongness I couldn’t name and couldn’t shake.

So I did what women do when they can’t justify their own unhappiness.

I gaslit myself.

You’re being ungrateful. You’re being dramatic. Look at everything you have. Other people have real problems. Who are you to feel this way when your life looks like this?

I got very good at talking myself out of my own experience. At shrinking what I felt until it fit into a box I could manage. At performing contentment so convincingly that eventually I started to wonder if maybe I actually was content and just didn’t know it.

I wasn’t.

I was a woman whose life looked fine from the outside and felt completely hollow from the inside. And the gap between those two things - between how it looked and how it felt - was where I had been quietly disappearing for years.

Your life looking fine is not the same as your life feeling like yours.

You are allowed to want more than fine.

DM me HOME to find out about the Come Back Home Session - 90 minutes, just you and me, to find out what's actually going on and what comes next.

Xo
Angela