What If This Is Just... It.
My daughter graduated high school last week.
I watched her walk across that stage, diploma in hand, and for about ten minutes I let myself just be proud. Then we got in the car and the questions started.
But mom, what if I don't find a job in child care... what if I can't afford to move out... but mom, what if...
It didn't stop. One what if rolling into the next, no space to breathe between them. I sat there listening to my daughter, who has worked hard and earned this moment and has every reason to feel ready, completely undone by everything she doesn't know yet.
I didn't lecture her. I didn't tell her to relax. I just listened, because I recognized that voice. I know it intimately. I've just usually heard it from the inside.
The Question That Doesn't Have an Age Limit
Here's what nobody tells you. The what if doesn't disappear once you "figure life out." It just changes costumes.
At eighteen it sounds like: what if I don't find a job, what if I can't afford rent, what if I'm not ready.
At forty five it sounds like: what if this brain fog never lifts, what if I'm not me anymore, what if this is just what getting older feels like and I just have to accept it.
Same fear. Different stage. Same complete absence of a roadmap.
I have a friend who messages me regularly with a version of this. My period came five days early, is that normal. I had a hot flash first thing this morning, is that normal. So many questions, every single one ending in is that normal.
Is that normal. The midlife version of but mom, what if.
What strikes me about both is the loneliness underneath them. My daughter asking what if isn't really asking for a logistics answer. She's asking will I be okay. My friend asking is that normal isn't really asking for a medical fact. She's asking am I losing myself and is anyone else going through this too.
I Know This Unraveling Personally
I didn't arrive at MyUnMess from a business plan. I arrived at it from a body that kept failing me and a medical system that kept failing to explain why.
I'd already spent the first twenty years of my adult life dealing with severe gut health issues from antibiotic overuse. One bad week a month, every month, for years. No doctor ever connected the dots.
Then I had a hysterectomy to deal with cycle complications. What followed wasn't relief. It was four ER visits in six months. Brain fog so heavy I couldn't cook a meal I'd made a hundred times. Couldn't work out. Couldn't hold a thought long enough to finish a sentence sometimes.
On the fourth ER visit, a doctor looked at me and told me to stop trying to find the problem, because I was only making things worse by looking.
I started crying right there. She asked why.
That was the moment I realized I needed to find my own solution. I couldn't count on the medical system anymore.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because it's not a throwaway line in my story. It's the entire reason this business exists. A trained medical professional told a woman in obvious distress to stop asking questions about her own body. That's not an isolated bad appointment. That's a structural failure. Most doctors get zero menopause training in medical school. OBGYNs get roughly one hour. Every woman on this earth will eventually walk through this transition, and the people responsible for her care know almost nothing about it unless they go out and self-educate.
So when my friend asks me is that normal, I understand exactly what's underneath the question. She's not just asking about a hot flash. She's asking because the people who are supposed to have answers have given her none, and she's terrified she's the only one falling apart this quietly.
Watching My Daughter Taught Me Something About My Own Fear
Here's the part that actually stopped me in the car that day.
My daughter is scared because she's stepping into something completely new with no experience to draw on yet. That fear makes total sense. Nobody expects an eighteen year old to have already figured out adulthood.
But somewhere along the way, we stop extending that same grace to ourselves.
When my brain started failing me in my forties, I didn't think oh, this is a new and unfamiliar stage of life and I haven't done it before so of course I'm struggling. I thought something is deeply wrong with me. I thought I should already know how to handle this. I thought I was failing at something everyone else seemed to manage just fine.
That's the cruelty of midlife that nobody talks about. We treat it like we should already have the answer key, when in reality, none of us have done this before either. It is, in its own way, exactly as new and exactly as disorienting as walking across that graduation stage. We're just expected to do it silently and with our makeup still on.
Ready Or Not, Here It Comes
My daughter's life will never look like it did before that diploma. Mine never looked the same after that ER visit and that doctor's appointment.
Neither of us got a say in the timing. Ready or not, here it comes... assuming you even remember it's coming, because half the time the brain fog gets so bad you can't even track that this is what's happening to you.
The difference between her stage and mine isn't the fear. The fear is identical. The difference is that hers comes with a cap and gown and a round of applause, and mine came with a doctor telling me to stop looking and a body I no longer recognized in the mirror.
I built HeadStrong because I needed someone to open a door for me that nobody else would. I built MyUnMess because I refuse to let another high achieving woman sit in her car after a doctor's appointment, crying, wondering if asking the question made things worse instead of better.
The what if doesn't go away on its own. Neither does the is that normal.
But you are allowed to ask both questions out loud. You are allowed to not have the answer key yet. None of us do. We're all just walking across a stage we've never walked across before.
With Gratitude,
Sue