When Your Soul Gets Loud Enough to Hear

There's a particular kind of knowing that lives in the body before it reaches the mind.

You feel it as a low-level hum of wrongness. A tiredness that sleep doesn't touch. The sense that you are going through motions that used to mean something - or maybe never did - and you can’t quite name what's missing, only that something is.

If that sounds familiar, you are not broken. You are paying attention.

The harder truth is this: most of us feel that hum for a long time before we do anything about it. We get very good at pushing through. We get skilled at making peace with things that are quietly costing us everything. We might call it being realistic, or adulting, or even just the way it is.

And somewhere underneath all that, our soul keeps sending signals.

The question is whether we're willing to hear them.

I Knew. For Years, I Knew.

My job was killing me. No, not super dramatically - I wasn't collapsing in the parking lot. But slowly, the way something dies when it's been deprived of light long enough. The stress had moved into my body and taken up residence there. Migraines that were becoming more frequent and more brutal. Clothes I was ruining with what I started calling "stress sweat" - which sounds like a joke, but wasn't. My digestive system was in open revolt; what I ate was passing straight through me because my body was in a constant state of emergency it couldn't get out of.

If a friend had come to me describing those symptoms and that job, I would have said without hesitation: nothing is worth your health. Leave.

But I couldn't hear that for myself.

I had tried to find a different job. Nothing had materialized. I had made peace, or tried to, with the idea that this was just what my life looked like. And meanwhile, I could feel something else happening - something harder to name. The mask I'd been wearing my whole life to pass as normal, to be acceptable, to not take up too much space or ask for too much or want things I wasn't supposed to want - that mask was cracking.

And I had no idea what was under it.

That's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. It's not just that the life you're living doesn't fit. It's that you've been wearing a version of yourself for so long that you've lost track of the original. The question “Who am I, really?” stops being philosophical and becomes terrifying. Because you genuinely don't know.

So you keep pushing through. Because at least you know how to do that.

What Death Clarifies

Kathy, my bio-mother, died at 62.

I was 42 at the time. And while I know it isn't logical, one thought would not stop running through my mind after she was gone:

What if I only have twenty more years?

She had assumed she had more time. She was wrong. And in the weeks and months after she died, I couldn't stop asking the questions that assumption had obscured:

What did she miss out on doing? Who had she come here to be that she never became? What regrets did she carry that she never got to rectify? Where had fear held her back - and what did that cost not just her, but everyone around her? What could have been different in her relationships, her communities, her life - if she'd chosen differently, even at the end?

And then, the questions that mattered most:

How would I answer those questions for myself, right now, while I still can?

What are the things I have desperately wanted but kept from myself? What regrets will I have if I don't start making changes? Who am I meant to be - and what am I meant to do - that I’ve been putting off, suppressing, editing out of myself for the sake of being acceptable?

Those questions didn’t leave me. They got louder. They kept asking until I had no choice but to start paying attention and, eventually, answering.

That is actually what Rooted Mystic is built on. Not on fixing what's broken. Not on a ten-step system or a secret formula. It’s built on helping women in midlife hear what those questions are really asking - because underneath all of it is one thing: the desire to feel alive again. Truly alive.

What Becoming Actually Requires

Here's what I've learned: while it might seem like being fully yourself would be the most natural thing in the world - it is, after all, just you - the truth is that becoming takes work.

Not because there's something wrong, or because you happen to be the only one who can’t figure this out. But because a lot has been layered on top of you over the course of your life. Explicitly and implicitly, you’ve been taught who to be, how much space to take, what to want and what to put aside. Unwinding that is not a weekend project.

And yet.

You can be present to the rising of the sun. You can choose your people and love them fiercely. You can start asking - genuinely asking - what you actually want, rather than what you've been told to want. You can let the questions that have been living under the surface get loud enough to hear.

You don't have to have it figured out to start. You just have to be willing to stop pretending the hum isn't there.

If Something is Stirring for You

I built my newsletter, Field Notes from the Apothecary, for exactly this - the ongoing conversation about what it means to feel alive again, what gets in the way, and what becomes possible when we stop managing ourselves and start actually listening.

It's free. It's real. And it's written for the woman who is done letting the good girl run the show.