When “Having It All” Starts to Feel Like Losing Yourself

The quiet unraveling that leads you back to the person you were always meant to be.

It starts quietly.
Not with burnout or breakdown, but with the kind of fatigue that seeps in under the surface. The kind that makes you take a deep breath before walking into a room and smile when you don’t really feel like smiling.

You tell yourself you’re fine. You’ve got the career, the relationships, the house, the degree, the checklist. You’ve “arrived.” But inside, something hums—a quiet ache that doesn’t match the life you worked so hard to build.

It’s the ache that shows up when you finish a big project and feel relief instead of pride.
It’s the ache that lingers when someone praises you for being “so composed,” and you realize what they really mean is “so contained.”
It’s the ache that whispers at night, when the house is finally quiet, Is this all there is?

We don’t talk about that part enough—the unraveling that comes wrapped in achievement.

Because the truth is, many of us have learned to live by scripts that were handed to us before we ever had a chance to write our own.
Scripts about what success should look like.
Scripts about how good women lead, love, and endure.
Scripts that reward us for being agreeable, accommodating, and endlessly capable.

And for a while, those scripts work. They get us applause, access, even admiration.
But over time, they cost us something bigger: ourselves.

When “having it all” starts to feel like losing yourself, it’s not failure. It’s feedback. It’s your soul tapping you on the shoulder and asking, Is this still true?

That’s what Meant for More is all about—not blowing up your life, but finally listening to it.

Where Are You in Your Meant for More Journey?

A quick reflection to help you see which part of your story you’re living right now, and what might come next.

You don’t need to overhaul your life to begin again.
You just need to know where you are.

This quiz will help you see which stage of the Meant for More journey you’re in right now:

• Awareness: You’re starting to notice the script you were handed.

• Agency: You’re beginning to trust your own voice and make new choices.

• Action: You’re living your truth in small, powerful ways every day.

There are no wrong answers, just honest ones.

We Were Never Meant to Lead Like This

It is easy to forget how recently in our history women have been allowed to lead at all. A century ago, most women could not sign a mortgage, manage a bank account, or walk into a boardroom without an escort. Today, women hold roughly 32 percent of executive roles in the United States, according to McKinsey’s 2024 Women in the Workplace report. That is progress, yes, but it is also proof that most of us are still newcomers in rooms built by and for someone else.

We are often the minority at the table.

We know it.

They know it.

And we learn to perform accordingly.

From an early age, girls are taught to read a room before they ever learn to trust their own voice. We are rewarded for making people comfortable, praised for being adaptable, and quietly punished when we are not. By the time many women arrive in leadership, performance has become muscle memory. We have learned how to be palatable, how to manage perception, how to hold authority without appearing “too much.”

“We inherited a leadership script written for someone else, and the cracks are showing.”

As a woman who has spent her career in senior leadership, I have watched brilliant women fracture themselves trying to fit inside systems that were never designed for them. They perform strength in cultures that reward stoicism. They soften their truths to stay likable. They translate empathy into data just to be heard.

It is exhausting.

And it is unsustainable.

We inherited the wrong script. One that equates leadership with control, authority with volume, and composure with worth. A script that says feelings are liabilities and intuition belongs at home, not in the boardroom.

But the cracks are widening, and light is getting through.

The Day I Realized I Was Performing, Not Living

There was a time in my life when I could walk into any room and become whoever I thought was expected.
At work, I was competent. At home, accommodating. In friendships, endlessly agreeable.
I didn’t even notice the shape-shifting at first. It just felt like survival.

But one night, sitting at my kitchen table after everyone else had gone to bed, I caught my own reflection in the dark window and realized I didn’t recognize her. Not because she had changed, but because she had disappeared.

That was the night I understood something quietly devastating. I had built a life that looked right from the outside but didn’t feel like mine on the inside.

I was performing. Not living.

For years, I believed being “good” meant being easy. Easy to work with, easy to love, easy to rely on.
I said yes when I wanted to say no. I smiled through exhaustion. I apologized for wanting space.
I told myself it was maturity. That this is what adults do.

But what it really was, if I’m honest, was fear.
Fear of disappointing people. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of being seen as selfish or ungrateful.
I had mistaken acceptance for belonging.

And it worked, for a while. Until the pretending became heavier than the truth I was hiding from.

Awareness rarely arrives with fireworks. It creeps in softly, disguised as discomfort.
You start noticing that certain conversations drain you.
You start feeling like a guest in your own life.
You start resenting the very things you once called “blessings.”

That’s when you know a script is cracking.

Mine began to crumble the day I realized I couldn’t remember what I actually wanted anymore.
Every decision and every reaction was filtered through someone else’s expectation.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped consulting myself.

The hardest part wasn’t admitting that I had been performing.
It was deciding what to do with that truth.

Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
You can’t go back to playing a role that no longer fits.
You start to recognize that all the versions of you that people love are only half-truths.

And you start to grieve the life you built for applause.

But underneath the grief is something fierce and alive. A whisper that says, you were never meant to keep pretending.

That whisper becomes the first act of courage.

Today, I don’t perform as much. I still catch myself sometimes, slipping into old habits of pleasing or performing, but I notice faster.

I pause. I ask, “Is this me, or is this who I think I should be?”

That one question has changed everything.

It’s uncomfortable, yes. People notice the difference when you stop editing yourself.
But the relief of being real outweighs the risk of being misunderstood.

Because the truth is, you can’t live fully and perform at the same time.

One will always suffocate the other.

Reflection Prompt:
Where in your life do you still feel like you’re performing?
What might happen if you stopped?