The Woman You’re Becoming: How to Find Yourself Again without Going Back
“New life starts in the dark. Whether it’s a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, new life starts in the dark.” ~Barbara Brown Taylor
It’s late summer in Nebraska, and the season is turning if you’re paying attention. The corn has lost its tender green. Goldenrod is showing off along the roadsides, and the grasses have grown tall and unruly.
Soon, combines will run after dark, trailing harvest dust over the fields and across town. Nebraska knows what is coming. The whole earth is changing, and none of it seems worried about getting back to June. It is moving toward fall, leaving summer as surely as it left spring. Nothing out here is scrambling toward an earlier version of itself.
So why are women so convinced we need to get back to ours?
I spent most of spring trying to return to the old me. It began with a run and plans to grow stronger, rebuild endurance, write more, expand my business, renew old friendships and finally do the things I had delayed.
I had so many plans.
Then, one cool April day, somewhere between one step and the next, the world disappeared. I woke on the ground, bleary-eyed and disoriented, staring through tree branches into an April sky so blue it felt rude.
Tiny buds had begun to open above me. Cool air pressed against my face. Hard earth held me. Spring kept pushing toward new life while I lay there, realizing my body had brought me to a stop.
My body stopped me before my mind got the message.
Almost at once, I began thinking about getting back. Recover. Regroup. Make a better plan. Get back to the old me.
If I couldn’t get back into shape as intended, I would get back to the me I had been before the fall. Back to strong. Back to trusting my legs. Back to waking without wondering whether my body would cooperate with the calendar.
I wanted normal, whatever normal meant. I didn’t see how much of my hope pointed behind me. I wasn’t asking what my body needed now or what this season required. I was asking how quickly I could make myself behave like the woman I remembered.
When I couldn’t, I called it a setback.
There seemed to be many. If it wasn’t another fall or syncope episode, something emotional caught me off guard. A conversation or memory would reach backward and press a finger against an old bruise.
There were things I thought I had prayed through, written through, cried through, forgiven and surrendered. I had filed them away under things I thought I was finished with. Then something happened, and there they were again, tender where I was certain I had healed.
I wanted healing and getting back to the old me to behave like a checklist:
Face the thing.
Learn the lesson.
Forgive.
Heal.
Move on.
No circling back.
Instead, I kept returning to places I thought I had already crossed. Why did this still hurt? Why couldn’t my body do what it once had? How could something bring me to my knees after I had fought so hard to stand?
Beneath every question lived one I could not stop asking: Why can’t I get back?
Getting Back had become the measuring stick for my life. If my body wasn’t where it had been, I was behind. If an old wound hurt again, I had gone backward. If I needed more rest, I was losing progress. I measured today’s Heather against a woman who belonged to yesterday.
Eventually, I asked a better question: What if back isn’t where I’m meant to go?
The woman I kept trying to return to no longer exists, but I don’t mean that sadly. She is here, folded into me. She lived a whole life on her way to becoming this woman.
She loved fiercely and got things wrong. She carried babies against her chest, raised children who grew beyond the reach of her arms, buried dreams, found new ones and survived days she thought would undo her.
She left pieces of herself in hospital rooms, kitchens, school parking lots, church pews, along highways and inside houses we once called home. She learned some things gently and others because life offered no gentler way. Through it all, God gathered every version of her into the woman standing here.
I don’t need to go back and find her. I am what became of her through the seasons just as surely as April spend it’s way into June and even now how summer is fading into Fall.
Life happened to her. God met her there. Of course she changed.
So why had I decided getting back to the old way of things was the was to go forward?
The question loosened something in me. A setback did not mean I was moving backward. Old grief did not erase the healing God had done. A body asking for something different was not betraying me.
Healing is not returning to who we were before life happened. Healing is learning to live whole and honest after it changed us.
Beneath every interruption, this truth kept rising: I don’t need to get back to the old me. I need to care for the woman who is here.
I don’t need rigid routines built for the body I had five years ago or expectations borrowed from a season already gone. I need sacred practices willing to change as I do.
Practices with room for a body that alters the plan, grief that circles back and questions still unanswered. Room for joy that looks different and rest I do not have to earn.
I need honest prayer, movement without punishment and journals filled with words I do not clean up first. I need Scripture I do not rush through for the satisfaction of a checkmark. I need long conversations, handwritten letters, good books, Nebraska sunsets, laughter and enough quiet to notice God.
Perhaps this is what sacred rhythms are for. They do not keep us frozen in place or lead us back to who we were. They keep us close to God while we change.
I spent spring chasing an old version of myself. Now late summer leans toward harvest, and I see her differently. I can thank her for what she carried. Grieve what she lost. Honor what she survived. Then let her belong to the season God gave her and turn toward the woman standing here.
Perhaps you need permission to do the same.
Finding yourself again is not about going back. It is learning to live faithfully in the life beneath your feet while staying open to who God is forming you to become. Forward does not have to mean faster. Sometimes it means growing roots deep enough to change without losing yourself in the changing.
For me, that has meant replacing the frantic pursuit of getting back with sacred practices for moving forward. Practices that keep me close to God, teach me to listen to my changing body, give me somewhere to put what hurts and leave room for whatever He grows next.
I don’t want to build my life around getting back anymore. I want to build one rooted deeply enough in God to keep becoming moving forward.
These are five practices helping me do that.
5 Sacred Practices for Finding Yourself Again
Learn to Listen to Your Body and Name What You Feel
One of the first things I learned was to separate what my body was experiencing from the story my mind immediately attached to it. A racing heart, tight chest, trembling or sudden exhaustion didn’t automatically mean something terrible was happening, so I started asking simpler questions first: Where do I feel this? Is it pressure, heat, tightness, pain, heaviness or fatigue? Then, what am I feeling emotionally?
There’s a reason similar skills are taught in Navy SEAL mental-toughness training. One of their “Big Four” strategies is arousal control: pause, breathe, think, then act, giving the thinking part of the brain time to catch up with the body’s stress response. I wasn’t training for anything remotely resembling BUD/S, but I was learning something I desperately needed: not every sensation needs an immediate story.
Sometimes my body needs care. Sometimes my heart needs tending. Sometimes they both do, but learning to notice the difference has helped me stop treating my body like a problem to solve and start learning its language.
Start Dreaming Again and Make Plans for Your Future
When did we start putting on experiation date on dreams? Becoming a midlife woman is the best time to dream. You’re old enough to have gleaned wisdom and apply it to your dreams. I still want to write books, start a side business, make plans to travel to Iceland and create retreats where the woman I love can gather around together in person.
You are allowed to have plans for the future you haven’t live yet. Remember that. The woman dreaming now knows more about grief, God, motherhood, disappointment, courage, bodies, love, and how quickly a decade can disappear.
Dreaming again is an act of hope. I make plans knowing life might rearrange them but I make them anyway because I refuse to believe becoming and dreaming have an expiration date.
Try Something New and Let Yourself Be a Beginner Again
I started watercolor.
I’m not telling you this because I’ve secretly become an accomplished watercolor artist. My incredibly gifted artist of a daughter takes one look at whatever I’ve painted when she gets home from school and says, “It’s good for a five-year-old.” Then she proceeds to explain everything wrong with the lighting, color, angles and approximately seventeen other things I haven’t learned yet.
One day she asked me why I had suddenly decided to start painting. I told her I think there was a time when I didn’t believe I had room for anything frivolous or time-consuming. When I was raising babies and little kids, free time came with guilt attached to it, and somewhere along the way I stopped giving myself permission to spend time on something simply because I wanted to.
She stared at me and said, “That is the STUPIDEST thing I’ve ever heard.”
Fair.
But she was right.
Somewhere in motherhood, I had confused giving my life to the people I loved with believing every piece of my life had to be useful to someone else. If something took time away from kids or work or whatever else needed me, guilt was waiting nearby to remind me there were more responsible things I could be doing.
I had forgotten that joy doesn’t have to earn its place in my life.
So now I paint badly. I mix colors I probably shouldn’t, get the shadows wrong and occasionally produce something my daughter generously ranks somewhere around kindergarten art class. And I love it.
We’re allowed to be beginners. We are allowed to have hobbies and dreams that aren’t practical and don’t produce anything measurable. It’s about finding the whimsy that’s tucked inside your heart. And for the record, I’ve also taken back up cycling, archery, knitting and, sending letters and cards all handwritten.
Start Journaling in a Way that Works for You
The day I held my first journal was the day my soul was born. I had so many of them but I couldn’t seem to find a way to work for me other than having 5 half used notebooks all over the house. Then I stumbled onto The Traveler’s Journal by Paper Republic. It’s a fillable system that you can design in a way that works for you. Mine is NOT from the Paper Republic due to budgets but I found a great one off of Amazon and filled with several composition books and one large journal. Together they have a monthly calendar, a placed for dedicated notes, lists, another for sermon notes, another for work notes, and another for Bible Study. The last is dedicated for daily field notes of life.
I gave my inner life a physical place to live.
There’s something about handwriting that slows me down enough to hear myself think and hush the fussiness in my soul. Allison Fallon writes in The Power of Writing It Down, “We all have infinite strategies to keep us from hearing our own voices.”
Maybe that’s why I’ve always needed pen and paper. Writing slows all the noise down long enough for me to hear what I’m actually thinking.
And research suggests something is happening beyond the page itself. Studies of handwriting have found richer patterns of brain connectivity while writing by hand compared with typing. For me, though, the evidence is much simpler: when I write things down, I notice things I didn’t know were there.
My journal has become a place where I meet myself on paper.
Break Big Goals Into Small Steps You Can Actually Begin
I’ve learned one of the quickest ways to keep myself from starting is to make the goal enormous in my head. I don’t need to write today, I need to finish the book. I don’t need to move my body for ten minutes, I need to get back into shape. I don’t need to take one step toward a dream, I need to know exactly how I’m going to make the whole thing happen.
No wonder we get overwhelmed.
Alli Worthington writes, “Tiny steps will make a huge difference over time.” She recommends taking those big goals and breaking them into smaller, manageable pieces so we can focus on the next step instead of being overwhelmed by the whole thing.
That’s what I’ve started doing. Ten minutes of movement. One page written. One email sent. One drawer cleaned. One phone call made. One small step toward something I’ve been putting off because the whole thing felt too big.
I stopped asking what I could finish and started asking what I could begin.
I don’t need to know every step between where I am and where I want to be. I need to know the next one. And when the next one still feels too big, I make it smaller.
