Nobody warned me about the empty nest identity crisis..
They warn you about the diapers and the sleepless nights. They warn you about the teenage years. Nobody sits you down and says, hey, one day the house is going to get quiet and you are going to look in the mirror and have absolutely no idea who is looking back at you.
I remember standing in my bathroom one morning and genuinely studying my own face like it belonged to a stranger. Who is this woman? How does she dress now? What does she even like to do? For twenty something years I could answer every question about my kids in half a second. Favorite snack, shoe size, which friend was drama, all of it. But basic questions about myself? Nothing. Blank.
And the time. Oh, the time. All those hours that used to be filled with practices and pickups and someone always needing something. Suddenly they were just sitting there, wide open, and instead of feeling free I felt anxious. Like I was supposed to be doing something with all of it and I was already behind.
One fall I filled that time by doing every single Dollar Tree Halloween craft I saw on TikTok. Every one. My kitchen table looked like a craft store exploded on it. And looking back, I don’t think I even cared that much about the crafts. I just needed my hands busy so my brain would stop asking me who I was.
At my lowest points I honestly wondered if I was losing it. The anxiety felt like it came out of nowhere. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. Here is what I finally figured out.
It’s grief. It’s actually grief.
The woman I was for all those years, the mom in the carpool line, the one who knew every teacher’s name, the one whose whole identity was built around raising people, she’s gone. Not gone in a bad way. Her job is done. She did it. But she’s gone, and I never got to say goodbye to her because nobody told me I was supposed to.
When you lose someone you love, people bring you casseroles. They check on you. They understand why you’re sad. When you lose a version of yourself, nobody notices. You’re just expected to wake up one day as someone new with no instructions.
So of course it feels like mourning. Because it is.
You’re not crazy. You’re in between.
If you’re in this stage right now, standing in the mirror wondering who that woman is, filling your days with random hobbies you picked up off TikTok, feeling anxious for no reason you can name, I need you to hear this. You are not crazy. You are not broken. You are grieving someone, and that someone is you.
And here’s the part that took me longer to see. Grief isn’t the end of the story. On the other side of mourning who you were is discovering who you are now. That woman in the mirror isn’t a stranger. She’s someone you haven’t met yet.
I’m still meeting her. Some days I like her a lot. Some days I don’t recognize her at all. But I’ve stopped panicking about it, because now I know what this is. It’s not a breakdown. It’s a becoming.
If this hit home, I’d love to hear from you. Are you in the mourning stage or the discovering stage? Tell me in the comments, because I promise you are not the only one standing in front of that mirror.