Category: Starting Over (Midlife)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to fit. Fit the mold. Fit the expectations. Fit the way other people seemed to move through the world so effortlessly while I was over here doing high-stakes mental gymnastics just to survive a casual conversation.

I didn’t know I was “masking” back then. I just thought I was bad at being a human.

School was the first cage. Sit still. Pay attention. Follow the steps in order. Don’t ask “why,” just do it the way everyone else does. But my brain doesn’t move in straight lines; it moves in spirals, side doors, and sudden bursts of understanding that usually hit me three days after the lesson ended. In a classroom, that’s called a problem. In the real world, it’s called perspective.

I spent years performing. I learned the right faces to make, the right jargon to drop, the right way to pretend I was keeping up. I worked, I “passed,” and then I stepped into the biggest, most complex box of all – motherhood.

I became a stay-at-home mom, a role that demands a different kind of disappearing act. You spend years being the advocate, the protector, and the manager of everyone else’s world while your own edges start to blur. When I finally decided to re-enter the workforce, I didn’t just want a job. I wanted to find the person I’d been sanding down for decades.

I started in a role where I was advocating for others – a natural fit for someone who “feels everything.” But then, something unexpected happened. That role evolved. It shifted. It became technical.

And suddenly, I was in a room full of boxes again.

I work in tech now. If you knew me back then, you’d be laughing. I’m not a “tech person” by any traditional definition. I don’t speak in acronyms. When someone explains a complex system to me, my brain immediately translates it into an analogy about cooking or parenting before it makes any sense.

That is exactly why I’m good at what I do.

I spent years advocating for my kids and for my clients, and now I’m advocating for the user. I work for a company that looked at my “too much-ness” – my empathy, my over-analyzing, my need to bridge the gap – and said, “That’s the missing piece.” They don’t need me to be a robot. They need me to be the translator. The one who can sit with a frustrated person and say, “I hear you, I get it, and let’s make this make sense.”

I’m getting paid to think the way I used to apologize for.

I’m not going to lie and say I’ve reached some zen state of total self-love. Unlearning decades of “you’re doing it wrong” takes time. Some days, I still catch myself trying to shrink or feeling the “imposter syndrome” that comes with being a woman in tech who didn’t take the straight-line path.

But I know the truth now. The problem was never me. The problem was the container.

I’m writing this for the people still trying to sand down their edges. For the moms re-entering the world wondering if their “soft skills” even matter (they do). For the ones who think they’re broken because they don’t learn in straight lines.

I’m writing this because you need to know that the box is optional. The thing you think is your biggest flaw – that intensity, that sensitivity, that “weird” way of seeing the world – is actually your greatest strength.

You don’t have to fit. You just have to find the people and places that have finally stopped asking you to.

They exist. I promise. I’m living proof.