Many women arrive in midlife carrying a quiet exhaustion that no amount of productivity, success, or self-improvement seems to solve. They find themselves longing for something they can’t quite name…

If you’re a woman who has found yourself in a period of life where you just want to cash it all in, you want to get in the car and drive away, you dream about a cottage in the woods where nobody will bother you, you worry or wonder how it is that you have spent so much of your life force on everyone else’s goals or plans for you…

And you’re finding yourself in midlife wondering “who am I?” and “what would I be doing if I wasn’t doing this?”

Maybe you’re a woman that knows full well what you would be doing and it wouldn’t be doing this but you haven’t been able to extricate yourself from the job, the career, the responsibilities, the duties, that you stay engaged with because relationships for many of us as women are a primary source of our own nourishment.

If any of this feels familiar, you may be experiencing what many women encounter during the Heroine’s Journey.

What Is the Heroine’s Journey?

The heroine’s journey is not like the hero’s journey.

So many of us have heard about the hero’s journey.

It’s what many a Disney movie is modeled after.

Many myths and folklore stories that we’ve heard where the male character ventures out into the world and he slays the dragon – that’s the hero’s journey.

He rescues the princess and then he comes back a new man, a more grown man, a more responsible man.

Because we live in a very patriarchal culture, we as women have taken on a version of this, believing that if we go outside, get the degrees, follow some external trajectory, that we too will win the metaphorical princess.

We’ll get the prize, whether it’s through the degree or through the money or through the professional accolades and that then we can return home a more whole and mature woman.

But that’s not the case for us.

Why Midlife Feels Different for Women

We’re different.

Our heroine’s journey actually takes us inside of ourselves.

And our journey is one that goes within because we are here to drop into the depths of who we are.

This is, in some ways, contradictory to how we’re taught to be: We live in this highly patriarchal culture that drives us to go outside of ourselves.

The Cost of Disconnecting From the Feminine

Many women in midlife find themselves on the heroine’s journey in different stages.

The first stage of the journey is that we abdicate our connection to the feminine.

We begin to cloak our feminine qualities, our intuition, listening to our bodies, even giving ourselves time when we’re in our cycles to not work.

We give ourselves time to sit in quiet or be in nature or to listen or to rest.

We deny our body on the day-to-day, only carving out specific times for “us”, so that we can get ahead in the masculine world.

That’s the second stage, which is partnering with the masculine in order to secure a sense of safety, in order to get ahead in the world.

And then we go on as we’re in these masculine roles.

When Success Stops Feeling Meaningful

For so many of the women who I work with who are in these masculine roles, sometimes they are part of family companies where they really have to take on these masculine qualities.

I work with so many women who are doctors or attorneys or architects, CEOs who have taken on all of these masculine qualities. They don’t even know who they are in their feminine anymore because so much of their identity has been built around achievement, responsibility, and productivity.

They can sometimes be very disconnected from their body other than knowing that their body is exhausted, tired, often devoid of pleasure because productivity has become so much of our pleasure.

And so in this stage, you might be collecting your own accolades with monetary advancements in the world and finding a kind of security, possibly financial security that your family of origin didn’t have and really wanting to provide more of a financial leg up to your children.

You’re then willing to work longer hours or more years, even though there’s a kind of emotional and spiritual aridity that’s happening, a sort of desiccation in your heart and soul.

The Midlife Descent: Entering the Unknown

When we hit this period of feeling desiccated, that’s when you know that you’re beginning the descent.

This is the heroine’s journey, when we drop into a place of the unknown.

And this is often when it is that I partner with women, when they are dropping into the WTF in their life.

It might be because they’re newly separated from a partner, or because they simply can’t continue in the career that they’ve had for years or decades.

It might be because they find themselves in a place where they’re literally no longer able to ignore their body because they’ve been diagnosed with an illness, or a chronic disease, and they have to start listening to the body that they have ignored for so many years.

That ignorance of connection with their body is what has allowed them to succeed in this highly masculine world.

So the journey continues and it doesn’t end there.

One of the reasons why I’m so obsessed with the heroine’s journey right now is, number one, it’s what’s showing up on my Zoom audio and video with the women who I serve so often.

And two, because it’s a beautiful framework. It’s a beautiful blueprint for women navigating major life transitions and searching for meaning, purpose, and connection to themselves again.

This means that you’re not broken.

There’s nothing wrong with you.

Why So Many Women Feel Broken

It’s like if you find yourself in the middle of Central Park and you have all of this landscape around you and people and grass and trees and beyond that some buildings.

There’s nothing wrong with being in that place.

That is just where you are.

And if you walk two miles away, across the way, you’ll find yourself in the middle of high rises and bustling people in restaurants.

There’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s simply where you are.

And I think in a world, especially for those of us as women who tend towards self-improvement, self-help, and have logged many hours with coaches and therapists, it’s really easy to believe that there’s something wrong with me.

There’s nothing wrong with you if you find yourself in the middle of New York City or in Central Park or LA or Tahiti. Those are different locations. And those different locations will provide you with a different experience.

The Importance of Knowing Where You Are

And so the value of knowing stages of the heroine’s journey is that it gives you cairns (if you hike you know what I’m talking about).

You follow the cairns, the stacked rocks that guide you on your journey.

The heroine’s journey is a way of knowing I am here. And if I know that I am here, I’m in this place of emotional, spiritual, possibly physical aridity, desiccation, then I know that what that stage needs is moisture, softness.

Self-Devotion Instead of Self-Care

This journey, this place I’m at, needs to be fed and nourished.

For many of us as women, we allow ourselves to be nourished through ceremony, ritual, time, space, good food, community, right?

It’s not just this practice of self-care, of going and getting a massage.

It’s a practice of self-devotion, of really tending to the earth of your body, the waters of your body, allowing yourself to float.

I’m very interested right now also in alchemy.

When we think about if there’s a lot of air and dryness, then what we need is moisture, right?

Part of what brings moisture is water.

And it’s also the juiciness of being in conversation with other women who are in the same place, in a different place, have the ability to see beyond the place that you’re at.

That juiciness allows us to feel fed so that we don’t feel so alone and lost and like there’s something wrong with you. that you find yourself where you are.

We go through this journey many, many times over a lifetime, and we can find ourselves in a particular stage professionally and a different stage in our intimate partnership.

And so there’s a lot of variety for those of us that this journey might resonate for.

This Is A Time For Community and Connection

None of us should be walking this path alone. And for many of us, knowing about this journey would help to serve us and make our path so much more easeful.

One of the reasons I love the Heroine’s Journey so much is that it reminds us there is nothing wrong with being where we are.

It’s okay to be exhausted, to question life, to long for something else, to grieve what’s been lost, to feel confusion over the world around us.

It’s okay to want to burn it all down and start over.

These are signs that something deeper is asking for your attention.

The Heroine’s Journey is not about becoming someone new.

It is about remembering who you have always been beneath the roles, responsibilities, expectations, and identities you’ve accumulated along the way.

And that remembering rarely happens alone.

It happens in conversation.

It happens in community.

It happens when another woman can see your path clearly enough to walk beside you while you rediscover your own.

If you find yourself somewhere along this journey and you’re longing for support, guidance, or a deeper understanding of where you are and what’s calling you forward, I invite you to explore my coaching, mentoring, and relationship support services.

You don’t have to navigate the path alone.