Or maybe we’ve confused manifestation with emotional avoidance.

(Or maybe I need to stop scrolling.)

Every time another "here’s how I manifested my dream life" video shows up in my feed, I feel myself flinch. The formula is usually some version of this: think better thoughts, raise your vibration, journal as though it's already yours, don't entertain negativity for too long or you'll call more of it into your life.

Then, almost inevitably, the camera pans to the beautiful house, the beautiful husband, the beautiful children, the toned body. I can't decide if I'm watching a manifestation coach or a new version of the trad wife. It feels like they’re repackaging an old story for modern women. Smile more! Be grateful! Stay positive! Don’t dwell! (Granted, I just finished listening to Yesteryear and my brain might be projecting but I don’t think so…. )

If you’re feeling sad, angry, tired, disappointed or uncomfortable, turn that frown upside down before the Universe mistakes you for someone who doesn’t deserve abundance.

And if your life still isn’t what you want?

Maybe you’re thinking the wrong thoughts.

Maybe you’re blocking your blessings.

I don’t fully disagree with the messaging. I 100% believe our thoughts matter. I believe in practicing gratitude. I intentionally look for beauty in ordinary days. I think our brains are wired to notice what’s wrong before they notice what’s right, and there is something deeply healing about retraining ourselves to celebrate what is already here. Gratitude reminds us that our lives are made up of far more than what we're still waiting for.

But unlike the modern day manifestation messaging, I don’t think gratitude is where transformation starts.

I think transformation starts with accepting the reality you're actually living and whatever authentic emotion comes with that acceptance.

It's about being in relationship with the life that's already here.

Feeling the ache of what isn't here. Feeling gratitude for what is. Feeling delight over an incredible run. Crying because someone else got what I wanted, and laughing with a friend an hour later. Missing my mother. Loving my body one day and struggling with it the next.

Letting all of it belong.

Isn’t that what aliveness is? Not becoming someone who only vibrates at a high frequency. Becoming someone who is willing to experience the full frequency of being alive.

I don't think we're here to become women who never feel disappointment. I think we're here to become women who can stay with things. Stay with grief long enough for it to soften. Stay with envy long enough to hear what it's asking for. Stay with pleasure long enough that we stop believing it only arrives once we get the house, the partner, the body, the business.

Pleasure isn’t a reward for finally getting everything right.

It’s what becomes available when we stop arguing with the life we’re already living.

Where I know I differ from the manifestation advice flooding my feeds is this: I think our willingness to fully inhabit this life is the portal to the next one.

Carolyn Elliott wrote something years ago that has stayed with me:

"The paradox is that once you fully commit to being who you already are, having what you already have, and hugely celebrating it, you become a masterful practical magician, a force of nature capable of shifting circumstances very easily."

That isn't bypassing reality. It's committing to it.

The more I’ve tried to outrun the heartache and grief I’ve felt about life and its circumstances, the more life ran me. The more I've raged, shouted, cried and released, the less my life has run me. The more magnetic I’ve become.

It’s easy to look at someone’s life on social media and believe you’re doing something wrong. That you’re being punished. That you’re somehow less deserving.

You might be surprised to hear this but I was far more rich and successful on paper at 25 than I was at 45. Ironically, my then husband and I were into manifesting.

We manifested the bigger house.

The nicer cars.

First-class flights.

Ocean-view property.

And I wasn’t happy.

I wanted ocean views.

What I didn’t know to ask for was peace.

I wanted first-class flights.

What I didn’t know to ask for was relationships where I could exhale.

I wanted more money.

What I didn’t know to ask for was sobriety.

I wanted success.

What I didn’t know to ask for was becoming someone I respected.

My life today is far richer, even though I have far less.

Last year I wrote often about the disbelief I felt looking at midlife. How could this be my life?

But the more I leaned into the embarrassment, disappointment and grief, the more I realized this was the life I’d always wanted. Not the debt or the lack of savings, lol

But a life where my relationships are genuine, supportive and loving.

A life where I can walk to the places I love.

A life where alcohol and drugs don’t exist.

A life with a partner who doesn’t use them either.

A life where I’m still running.

A life where I’ve forgiven and been forgiven.

A life where I get to travel.

A life where I get to spend time with my kids.

A life where I’m proud of the woman I’ve become.

A life where women trust me with the parts of themselves they usually hide.

It’s a life I don’t think I could have recognized if all I’d done was journal about the one I didn’t have.

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xx,
Ashley

I find myself thinking about desire, and talking about it, more than I ever have. In conversations with friends. On podcasts. With my coach, my mentors, myself.

How can that be, when my entire career has been rooted in conversations about it? From the dressing rooms of my lingerie and sex toy shops, to coaching women on dating, sex, and relationships, to writing a column on dating and romance for three years. I get the texts, the calls, the questions, all the time. What is good sex? How do I know if I’m having an orgasm? Should I pursue this person or let them come to me? How do I squirt? How do I not squirt? My boyfriend won’t initiate, we only have sex if I start it, what do I do? What’s the best sex toy? How do I stop spinning out? Help, I can’t stop looking at his Instagram.

All of it, at the core, is rooted in desire.

On a recent run, I was listening to a workshop on women reclaiming their sexuality when the host segued into a brief history and in her words, the true meaning of the word virgin. She suggested that virgin wasn’t originally about sexual experience at all, but about a woman who belonged to herself.

When you hear the word, if you’re like me, your mind might wander straight to sex. And your first time. Then maybe the shirt you had that said VIRGIN across the chest, the one you wore because you meant it, and you wore it to a Marilyn Manson concert and got invited backstage. You went. The bassist asked how old you were while a few of you sat criss-cross applesauce in a parking lot. Fifteen, you told him. Laughing, he grabbed a Sharpie and wrote JAILBAIT just above your barely-there boob. You know now, in a way you couldn’t have then, exactly how not okay that was. You’re grateful today that you declined the invitation to go on the tour bus.

As soon as I set foot in my front door, I grabbed my computer. Why hadn’t I heard this before?

I hit the googles.

The English word virgin comes from the Latin virgo, which described a young woman. A maiden. Someone unmarried. Depending on the context, it could refer to an unmarried young woman or imply sexual inexperience; its meaning was not always as narrowly sexual as it is today. Over time, religious and cultural ideas increasingly narrowed the word around chastity, purity, and sexual experience.

Interesting.

In ancient Greek, a related word was parthenos: a maiden, girl, virgin, or unmarried woman. Modern Jungian writers have interpreted these goddesses as symbols of feminine autonomy: women whose identities were not organized around marriage or attachment to a man. A woman who was still, in some sense, her own.

Several goddesses carried the title. Athena. Hestia. Artemis. Their virginity included sexual abstinence, but modern interpretations have also seen something larger in it: these goddesses were not defined through marriage, partnership, or motherhood. They remained, symbolically, their own.

Leaving aside for a moment, the meaning of virgin as sexually untouched, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say many women in midlife are, for the first time, inhabiting their agency.

Their voices.

Their wants.

Their bodies.

Their lives.

Their sexuality.

If you’d asked me five years ago, maybe even four about my desires, sex would have been top of the list. This is the first time my identity hasn’t revolved around a man, around dating, around what I can now see clearly was an absurd amount of emotional output over mostly forgettable people. The meetups. The overthinking. I used to think dating gave me more autonomy, more time that belonged to me and gave me more room for self discovery.

Looking back, that was delusional. It took up almost everything and yet, in relation to desire and fulfillment, it was almost as narrow as the word virgin as we’ve come to know it.

Desire got packaged for us as one thing, sexual, and for a long time I let it stay that size. I married in my twenties. Spent almost all of my thirties and early forties in an exploratory era. Juicy. Hot, even. But, I can see now how much of what I called desire back then was actually about being wanted. Chasing and being chased. Giving pleasure and performing the receiving of it. What can I try next, and with whom.

Today my desire feels more contained and yet, somehow bigger. Less about the next thing to try. More about knowing myself well enough to know what I actually want, in bed and out of it, and letting my partner know me there too. Getting curious, at forty-something, about what else I desire, beyond the bedroom, beyond being chosen.

What makes this even more interesting for me is that I am in a serious relationship. And I don’t know if it’s hormones, my age, or a ‘I’ve been here before’ or what, but the internal clock I used to carry everywhere, the one that ran its own methodical countdown, six months, twelve months, whatever the next step was supposed to be by whatever deadline I or society had set, has stopped. I’m not managing him toward a timeline. Pressuring for a ring and picturing a dress. Waiting for him to ask me to move in.

I mentioned this to him a few weeks ago while we were out on a walk. It’s so nice that I can just be in this relationship and where it is today, not in my head about it. He joked that he wished I was pressuring him at least a little. (funny how that works)

None of this means I don’t want these things with my boyfriend. I just don’t feel like my sense of self depends on these choices.

Especially when I notice that I have a major amount of desire bubbling up inside and it’s all flowing towards getting to know who I am and what I actually want my life to look like. Which turns out to be a stranger and more interesting project than I expected at this age.

I don’t know if this is true for every woman at midlife, but it’s true for me. There’s a whisper I’m starting to hear, pointing me in directions I’ve never gone. There is no urgency to arrive anymore and all of my attention is on wanting to see the woman I’ve never been. The one I somehow already recognize.

And that is a first.

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We talked about quitting drinking in midlife, why so many of us become seekers of self-help and personal growth, and what we’re really searching for underneath all of it.

We also got into one of my favorite conversations: the stories women inherited about desire as they age. We’re told that sex fades, that desire is only about sex, and that wanting less is simply part of getting older. But what if none of that is true? What if desire is about so much more than sex? What if it’s the life force that fuels our our capacity to feel fully alive and it’s finally coming online?

Whether you’ve quit drinking years ago, you’re questioning your relationship with it now, or you’re simply interested in what it means to come back to yourself, I think you’ll find something in this conversation.

I hope you’ll give it a listen.

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Most of us learned early that certain emotions weren’t welcome — not in public, not in relationships, sometimes not even alone. So we got very good at managing. Reaching for something to take the edge off. Keeping the lid on whatever was building underneath.

This episode is about what’s actually under there. And what happens when you stop trying to keep the lid on and let it move through instead.

Jealousy. Grief. Rage. Disappointment. The feelings we were told made us hysterical, crazy, too much. Turns out they were just incomplete.

I recorded this in 2023. I’m putting it back out because everything I’m building now grew from what’s in here — the idea that a body that learns to feel everything becomes a body that needs to escape nothing.

In this episode:

• Full catastrophe mode. What it is and why some of us live there

• The NOW practice: Name it, Open to it, Watch it; a body-based framework for processing emotion in real time

• Swamping: a practice from Mama Gena for moving emotion through the body completely, including what it looked like the night I used it

• What a 20-mile run in Taos taught me about grief I didn’t know I was still carrying

• Why pleasure and self-touch are part of how the emotional cycle actually completes

If you’ve been holding something for a long time and you’re ready to stop — this one is for you.

The women I work with aren’t running out of energy. They’re running companies, raising children, managing households, taking care of aging parents, showing up for everyone who depends on them. That’s not depletion. That’s misdirection.

In this episode I’m talking about the difference between life force, eros, and aliveness, and why so many women find themselves reaching outside themselves for something that was never actually out there.

In this episode:

• The direction problem: why desire goes underground, not away

• The double bind: what happens when you spend decades getting good at everyone else’s needs and forgetting your own

• What it actually looks like when desire goes dormant: the dance class that never happens, the trip that never gets booked, the question you can’t answer

• Why pleasure isn’t indulgence. It’s information.

• Why midlife, as disorienting as it feels, might actually be the moment desire finally gets loud enough to hear

If you’ve been feeling that low hum of something missing, this one’s for you.

Which sounds ridiculous until you consider how much of our lives have been organized around everyone else.

Children.

Partners.

Work.

Parents.

Schedules.

Responsibilities.

I certainly didn’t.

There was a version of a free evening that I had down to a ritual.

I’d open a bottle of something good, pour a glass before I’d even decided what to eat, and then spend a satisfying amount of time selecting snacks that would actually pair well with it. Olives. Something with goat cheese. Those tasty rosemary and salted La Panzanella crackers. Fig spread if I had it.

Then I’d climb into bed with all of it and put on whatever season of The Real Housewives was current. It didn’t matter which city. The point was the particular pleasure of horizontal television watching with wine and no obligations until morning.

I told myself, this is the life.

I’d actually say it to myself.

This is the life.

And I meant it.

What I didn’t understand then, and what took me an embarrassingly long time to work out, was that I had no idea what I actually wanted to do with unstructured time.

I had built an entire life around two organizing principles: working and mothering. When neither of those was required of me for an evening, I reached for wine.

Looking back, the wine wasn’t even the most interesting part.

The part that still gets me is that if you’d removed it, I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself.

I’ve been thinking about this since I received a message from a woman in her early forties. Her daughter is still in high school but barely home. She’s single. Hormonally in the thick of it. She wrote that she knows this chapter is supposed to feel like hers. She can feel the invitation of it. And yet most mornings she wakes up feeling like she’s living someone else’s life in a body she doesn’t quite recognize.

I recognized everything she was describing.

The wanting to want your own life. The gap between knowing it’s your turn and actually feeling turned on by it.

The irony is that many of us spent years counting down to this chapter. We anticipated the other side of the heavy years. The years of being needed by everyone. The years of being stretched thin.

And then we arrive and discover we’ve spent so long responding to everyone else’s needs that we don’t have a clear sense of our own.

Not what we want to watch. Not what we want to eat. Not how we want to spend a free hour. Not even, sometimes, how we want to spend the second half of our lives.

Most of us have been some combination of daughter, partner, mother, employee, caretaker, and manager for so long that we’ve mistaken the role for the self.

And when the roles start loosening, the disorientation is real.

It doesn’t always announce itself as an awakening.

Sometimes it announces itself as wine o’clock.

Or at least it did in my experience.

The wine filled the gap because it gave me something to do.

I knew exactly what the evening was going to look like. I’d pour a glass, assemble the snacks, put on a show and settle in.

It never occurred to me to ask myself anything else.

What did I actually feel like doing?

What sounded fun?

What was I interested in?

I couldn’t have answered those questions if you’d paid me.

The disorientation didn’t disappear when I put the glass down.

If anything, it doubled.

I found myself much like the woman I mentioned earlier, thinking: I have no idea what’s next for me because I don’t even know me.

Most every decision I had made up until that point was rooted in someone else.

Is this good for my kids? Is this what a good wife does? How will this look from the outside?

Up until my kids moved out, I had never lived alone. I was almost forty-two.

Questions like what I would watch on television without wine or whether I’d ever meet someone who didn’t drink suddenly felt trivial.

The bigger questions were harder to avoid.

How do I want to spend my life?

Who do I want to become?

What do I actually want next?

What surprised me most was realizing that the wine hadn’t been creating those experiences.

It had just attached itself to them.

For years I gave the glass credit for things that were never coming from the glass in the first place. The first time I went two-stepping sober, I had more fun. I had mind-blowing sex without a drink. I spent two weeks in Paris and didn’t think about wine once.

Even doing nothing.

Especially doing nothing.

When I took the wine away, those things didn’t disappear.

If anything, they became easier to find.

The question I keep coming back to is whether many of us have confused relief with pleasure.

The evening glass of wine, the snacks, the horizontal television watching. That isn’t inherently a problem. I genuinely enjoyed it.

The question is whether what we’re reaching for at the end of the day is actually what we’re hungry for, or whether it’s simply the closest available substitute.

Maybe that’s why so many women feel unsettled when the kids grow up, the marriage changes, the career stabilizes, or the drinking stops.

For years we’ve been responding to what everyone else needed from us.

Then one day we’re left alone with a much more complicated question:

What do I need?

Not pain. Something more like pressure. Forceful, deliberate, pushing down into my pelvic floor like a contraction without any cramping. I stood there, water streaming off me, 38-degree cold still on my skin, and thought:

That’s never happened before.

And then it happened again.

The Russian Bathhouse on 10th Street is not a wellness experience. No one is optimizing anything. The saunas are downstairs in a narrow, darkish space that feels vaguely like a dungeon, which honestly describes the energy too. It’s mostly men of all shapes and sizes huddled together sweating and talking. The whole thing feels slightly intimidating.

The Russian sauna itself makes the hairs in your nose burn the second you open the door. They keep buckets of cold water near the benches so you can drench yourself and survive another five minutes. Longer being maybe another five minutes. Ten max.

The cold plunge is 38 degrees reminding you that sometimes, hell does freeze over.

Nate and I were there the day before Faith’s final graduation ceremony from Parsons and Eugene Lang. Five years. New York. The portfolio she submitted the night before it was due.

I stood in that cold water and my body bared down and pushed. Twice.

What the f, I thought.

We cycled through the steam rooms, the dry saunas, back to the cold plunge. Thirty minutes later I told Nate I needed to sit down and chill for a minute. The endorphins were endorphining and I was feeling a high that, as a sober person, doesn’t come around very often anymore.

I looked at him and said, I feel like I did in the 90’s after taking ecstasy that was cut with heroin.

He laughed.

And then I started talking about Faith.

About how she was staying in New York. How I think I always believed she might come back, even as the visits became less frequent and her life there got bigger and more real. Even as I kept saying, and meant it, I think it’s the perfect spot for you.

Something in me still held onto a version of the story where she returned. Maybe that’s what I was feeling sitting in the cold plunge. The felt and unfelt.

I don’t think I realized how much until I was sitting half naked on a granite bench in a towel crying in a Russian bathhouse while my pelvic floor tried to spiritually birth something from my body.

From the moment Faith was able to hold a crayon in her hand, she didn’t let go. With as much focus as she could muster, she would scribble while laying on her belly on the floor, upright in her stroller, from the high chair at restaurants.

When my ex-husband and I were setting up her 529, he wanted to choose University of Colorado Boulder. I didn’t want to pick a school.

What if our daughter ends up being an artist and wants to study in Paris? Then what are we supposed to do?

I don’t know if you call that mother’s intuition or what, and I’m certainly not trying to take any credit, but… I wasn’t wrong.

The acceptance letter from Parsons arrived and it was decided. Faith would move to New York in the fall of 2021 and I would officially be living alone.

However, it was still pandemic times and college kids were spending more time at home than usual. Which worked for me.

Between shutdowns, holidays, me going up there and her coming back home, we never went more than a month apart. Just when I would find myself feeling sad or getting itchy we would reunite.

(Is this giving co-dependency or what.)

Then the visits stretched further apart. The coming home became less and the reality of her staying longer in New York became more obvious.

When she started talking about living there permanently I didn’t say anything other than, I think it’s the perfect spot for you.

However true that was, it’s not what I was thinking.

I can’t even say deep down I wanted her to move back home because it wasn’t deep down. It was right there on the surface. I just knew better than to say it.

This weekend wasn’t mine to make about what I was feeling. It was her accomplishment. Her ceremonies. Her time.

I kept it on her.

And I genuinely was proud. Beyond proud. Watching her move through the city, her classrooms and ceremonies fully herself. The first of us on my mother’s side of the family to graduate college. I kept having flashes of her as a little girl scribbling on scraps of paper.

But somewhere between the sauna, the cold plunge and the endorphins doing whatever the hell they were doing, something else came up too.

Not that I was losing my daughter.

Just that something was over.

Her childhood maybe. Or this particular phase of mothering. The version of my life organized around someone needing me in a very specific way.

She’s her own woman now. That’s the whole point. I know that.

Still, I sat there breathing and crying and then started laughing.

Holy hell, I have to get out of here. I don’t know what’s happening to me.

But I think my body knew before I did.

The morning I left New York to head back to Austin, I woke up early and went to a 12-step meeting. I was sipping a London Fog and talking to the woman next to me. She looked to be in her thirties.

“My daughter just graduated college,” I said. “It feels weird. Like mothering is officially over.”

She laughed.

“I promise you I’m not just saying this because you need to hear it, but I’m the youngest of five and my mom tells us all the time: I mother more now that you’re all gone than I did when you lived with me.”

The stress and chaos of (single) working mom life feels just like yesterday. Probably because I’m still in the process of my nervous system rewiring from years of being in the trenches. Every day had some element of urgency or emergency tied to it. Not waking up on time. Traffic. Forgotten lunches. No less than 23 separate conversations from the car to the classroom, then more traffic on the way to work, and by 9am my body was already bargaining… coffee now, wine later.

I can’t remember a single night before I quit that I walked through my front door, kids behind me, backpacks full of homework, dinner still to be made, without wine being the first thing my mind went to. I know this because when I did quit, that threshold became the most specific place I’d ever felt a craving. My body had learned exactly where it could escape.

The association was that clean. Bread and butter.

The problem was it eventually stopped working. Every night around 2:30, 3am, I’d wake to my heart racing and cryptic thoughts reeling. What had taken me out of my body and thoughts, dragged me back in to experience it processing something it didn’t want. The older I got, the worse it became. I told myself it was stress. The average life is stressful!

That’s not what was keeping me up.

Alcohol is a depressant. That’s why the first glass works. Everything slows down, including the thoughts that won’t stop. But your body is also remarkably efficient at processing what it doesn’t want. By the second half of the night, it’s fighting back. Cortisol spikes. The nervous system rebounds. Suddenly you’re awake. Heart pounding. Brain already mid-conversation. That strange feeling like you’ve forgotten something terrible or been dropped into the middle of an emergency. The real downer is this: You weren’t sleeping, you were sedated.

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A few weeks ago I watched Bill Maher interviewing Ezekiel Emanuel, who just wrote Eat Your Ice Cream. The conversation circled around pleasure and health. Ice cream isn’t bad for you if it brings you joy, that kind of thing. Bill wasn’t having it. And then, almost in the same breath, he offered that anyone who was too stressed or anxious should have a scotch when they get home to relax their nerves. Emanuel didn’t agree. Neither did I. Which is a rare moment between me and Bill.

The thing is, I understand the instinct completely. Because when you take that first sip and feel the back of your throat warm, that slight tingling where the base of your ears meets your jaw, (is that just me?) and the tension starts to leave your body, your brain registers it. It clocks alcohol as the answer. And for a while, it is.

What we don’t talk about is the moment before you pour. The specific quality of needing something. Not the drink exactly, but the exhale the drink promises. The body desperately trying to find the exit from a day that never officially ended.

That’s what the sleep problem is actually about. Not the wine, but the day that never ended.

What many women discover when they finally remove wine from their wind down is that the sleep comes back faster than they expected. Within days sometimes.

Your body is waiting for the chance.

What takes longer is the other thing. Learning what to do at 9pm when there’s no ritual to mark the end. When the door closes behind you and the day is technically over and your nervous system hasn’t gotten the message yet. That gap between the day ending and the body believing it is where most women get stuck.

I asked one woman I was working with to describe what walking through her front door felt like at the end of the day. She paused, then said:

“Like suiting up in armor. I need a shield of protection for the next few hours.” She’d been using wine for years.

Another woman said, after six months: “I didn’t know I was that tired. Not from the drinking. From the years of never fully arriving anywhere. Moving from one fire to the next with nothing in between, but the glass that masqueraded as my way out.”

Neither of them went looking for a ritual. They went looking for the exhale the wine used to promise. They just found the first thing that actually delivered it.

Before You Pour:

When you walk through your front door, stop before you do anything else.

Tell your family you need a timeout for 10 minutes (or 2 if that’s the only realistic option. Say you have to Pee!)

With both feet on the floor, feel the ground under you. Let your eyes move slowly around the room. Not looking for anything, just noticing what’s actually there. A corner. A lamp. The color of the wall. The sun coming through the window. Let your gaze land somewhere that feels neutral or easy.

One hand on your chest. Maybe the other on your womb space. (my instinctual go-to move of late)

You’re not doing anything. You’re just grounding. Letting your nervous system register that the day is over and you made it home. That you’re here, in this specific room, and nothing is required of you in this moment.

Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.

That’s the crossing of the threshold the wine is simulating.

Your body already knows how to do this. It just needs something to tell it that it’s allowed.

I work with women who are tired of reaching outside themselves for something that stopped working. I help them come back into their bodies in a way that actually feels good. You can learn more at www.ashleykelsch.com or reply to this post.

I was listening to my teacher on a call when she said that healing and transformation only happen in presence.

It made me think of all the times I needed healing and where I went looking for it. The first sip of wine, a warmth filling my body, the first exhale I’d had all day. A warm bath with a book. Sex, my body alive in all its sensation, oblivious to any thought.

Transcendental. And gone the moment it was over.

As soon as the glass was empty, my clothes were on, the bath drained. I was left with what was. And how confused that would leave me. Isn’t this self-care?

These acts were certainly meeting the need in the moment. Admittedly, some sexual experiences left my needs feeling met for days. But once the buzz or the high or the warm wet relaxation dried up, there it was. The need. The constant inner vibration and static. The desire for more. That quiet question: is this it? The anxiety and overwhelm, immediately followed by: I’ve got to get out of this.

If changing the way I felt and avoidance were jobs, I could have made a career out of them. A successful one at that. I drank, moved, took anti-depressants and fucked my way through deaths and divorces. Economic downturns? Blinders on booking flights across the ocean and shopping. I couldn’t feel my reality, let alone look at it.

Isn’t self-care being packaged in a cocktail, a cream, another body and sold to us as the way, when what we’ve really been thirsty for is permission to soften, feel good, take up space in our own lives? And so far as I can tell, the messaging is exactly that. Have a drink and relax. Sign up for a dating app. Buy this book, change your hair, join this or that, take time off. YOU DESERVE IT. We call it self-care if there’s a nice bottle and a better candle involved. Nobody is asking what you’re actually trying to get away from. Or why the self needs care at all. No one profits off you relying on your body’s wisdom.

After several decades of reaching outside myself, I reached a dead end. I surrendered. No wine. No more casual sex. No trips. No shopping. I started to listen to what was there, moment by moment. It didn’t take long to understand the constant-ness of doing more, being busy, and trying to control every area of my external life was wreaking havoc on my body. Let’s just say there is no amount of face cream or cum that can solve for cortisol, adrenaline and epinephrine coursing your veins. (And if we are getting technical, one can hardly cum with all of those chemicals.)

When I stopped trying to change the way I felt, the way I felt started to change. I could breathe. I softened. I started to feel all that was coming up in this moment. And I realized this was the erotic act. Not the wine. Not the sex. This. Being present with what was. The pleasure of arriving to myself, as an altar, with my arms tightly hugging me back, was the embrace I had been looking for.

I witness the women I know and work with running the same errand. Different products, different people. Still empty. She doesn’t know yet that she was always the source. In many ways she has been taught to fear her body. So that’s where it begins.

And somewhere in that turning toward, she turns on.

What she finds is never out of reach. A few moments of quiet breath before she reaches for anything. A hand on her own chest. The question: what do I actually need right now? Usually the answer is smaller than she expected. A moment to soften. Permission to be.

That’s where transformation and healing begin.

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Should I go out and be wild this weekend?
Or should I be sober?

Like those are the only two versions of a life.

And I keep thinking… why are those the only options?

Wine was sold to us as the thing that would make us looser, freer, more ourselves. Sex got sold the same way, as something that required a drink first. Most of us bought both, without noticing they were the same pitch.

I want to talk about what it means to want both of those things, and to finally have them, without needing a drink to get there first.

The Lie About Inhibition

The promise is always the same: drink this and you’ll finally be free. Looser. Funnier. Sexier. Liquid courage exists as a phrase because we’ve collectively agreed that the sober self is the inhibited one, the buttoned-up, performative, socially anxious version, and alcohol is what removes the obstruction between you and your real self.

But look at what’s actually happening. The woman at the dinner party who’s had two glasses isn’t freer. She’s numbed. The thing that was inhibiting her, the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the people-pleasing, is still there. She just can’t feel it anymore. The inhibition didn’t leave. It went underground.

That inhibition isn’t random.
It got learned.

Which means she never actually solved it. She rented the feeling of freedom for a few hours and woke up with the same inhibitions, plus a mild hangover and the low-grade shame that comes from not quite remembering if she said something weird.

Inhabited and Uninhibited Are Not the Same Thing

There are two words I want to distinguish, because most people use them interchangeably and they are not the same.

Inhabited is a relationship with the interior. It is about whether you are actually present inside your own experience, in your body, in your sensation, in your emotional life. A woman who is fully inhabited feels what she feels when she feels it. She is not watching herself from a slight distance. She is not managing her own experience in real time. She is in it. The parts are known to her. She has moved back into the house.

Uninhibited is about what moves between interior and exterior. It is about expression, flow, the absence of obstruction between what’s happening inside and what you allow to come out. A woman who is uninhibited says what she actually thinks. She takes up space without apologizing for it. She doesn’t edit herself mid-sentence based on what she thinks you need her to be.

The relationship between them: you cannot be genuinely uninhibited without first being inhabited. Because uninhibited means the inside can move freely to the outside, but if no one’s home inside, there is nothing to express. You’re not actually uninhibited. You’re just performing it.

What the Wine Version Actually Does

Alcohol produces the sensation of being uninhibited by removing your awareness of the inhibition. The anxiety goes quiet. The self-consciousness dims. But the inhibition itself, the exile of certain parts, the conditioning that made the wine necessary, is completely untouched. You didn’t become freer. You became temporarily unaware of what’s been holding you in place.

Same thing with sex.
It’s not that you need the drink.
It’s that without it, you don’t feel like you can fully be there…
or be the version of yourself you think you’re supposed to be.

This is where it breaks down. You can’t be truly uninhibited in a body you’ve abandoned. The woman reaching for wine to feel free isn’t more herself with a drink in her hand. She’s less present to herself.

Real uninhibited works the opposite way. Someone has to be home for the inside to move freely outward.

What the Reclamation Actually Looks Like

A woman who has done this work, who has met the anxious part, the performing part, the good-girl part, the parts alcohol was animating or anesthetizing, that woman is no longer controlled by those parts in the same way. She is not numbing the obstruction. She knows how to be with it. The parts that used to require wine to surface are just available. Integrated. Hers.

That is genuinely uninhibited. Not chemically unaware of her inhibitions. Actually able to move with them without being blocked.

Inhabited is the work. Uninhibited is what becomes available after the work.

Which means the thing wine was pretending to sell, freedom, aliveness, access to yourself, is real. It exists. Women have it. They just don’t find it at the bottom of a glass.

They find it on the other side of having stayed.

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Over the years I’ve heard different suggestions on what one should do with them:

Keep them. You can go back and review the goings-on of life during that particular period. Especially relevant for those waiting to one day write a book.

Burn them. Any thought put on paper is officially materialized and part of your reality.

Stop journaling. Record everything on your computer so you can easily search names, have everything in one place, and save a tree.

In 2021, after both my kids had moved out, I started going through my life contained in containers and boxes. I came across a few journals from my senior year of high school. One was specifically designed for seniors and full of prompts. Favorite song. Best friend. Most memorable moment. You get the idea.

Also with the journal were mix tapes made for me by an ex I’d lived with shortly after senior year ended. One night I came back to our place and found him and his best friend reading through said journal. My ex started making fun of me for some of my song choices. His best friend, I think feeling bad after watching how betrayed and embarrassed I was, offered that “this Jewel lady isn’t that bad.”

I don’t believe I ever journaled that account.

Standing there with this memorabilia in my hands, some memories coming to the surface, I felt nothing. It was as if it had happened to someone else. I took the high school journals, the mix tapes, and a few other things taking up space and put them in the trash.

Several weeks ago I was working on a practice I wanted to take a client through and found myself paging through old journals looking for notes I’d taken on it. The feeling of neutrality was not the first thing I experienced, or frankly the last, as I thumbed through my legacy of thinking.

Oh my god. This is embarrassing. Was this really what was consuming you? If anyone saw this. I totally forgot about that. Probably blocked it.

Once the flood settled, I noticed something. Over the course of ten years, my thinking and patterns were all the same. Only the names of the people changed. It would be no different than looking at weather patterns and being able to predict, with 99.9999% accuracy, exactly what I was going to say and do next.

I would let the guy come back.

I would not save the money.

I would not follow through with the goals I set.

Later that evening, over dinner, I asked my boyfriend what he does with his journals once they’re full.

I save them, he said.

Huh. I’m thinking about burning all of mine. Well, with the exception of some entries — conversations with my mom before she passed, some stuff with the kids.

Really? Are you sure?

Honestly, it’s the same thing over and over, I told him. It’s all ice cream. Just another flavor. I don’t have to have it documented to know how I reacted to a particular event or person. It hasn’t been until the last years that my responses have actually changed. And yet, it doesn’t take much to think like she thinks.

Nadia Bolz-Weber put it better than I could, in a piece called “The Cringe of Palm Sunday”:

“The nature of regret, and the practice of morbid reflection itself, is in some way rooted in the idea that we are different now. We like to think it’s true — that given the opportunity to go back and do things differently, we would. We would, as improved, wiser people, make completely different choices. After all, we are better versions of ourselves now. And I kind of think that’s true. And I kind of don’t.”

The changes I’ve been living into these last couple of years have come as something of a surprise.

I cut my hair off in 2024 and immediately regretted it. That had never happened before. I’d always felt more like myself with it short. It was such a small thing, but I remember standing there thinking, that’s strange.

At the beginning of the year, my boyfriend and I decided to eat less meat. I was resistant at first, a little annoyed about it. Within a few weeks, something flipped. Not in a disciplined way. I just didn’t want it anymore. I can’t really explain that shift.

Earlier this week I found myself sitting in a tattoo removal office, going over pricing. I don’t regret getting them. I just wouldn’t get most of them today.

None of these feel dramatic on their own. But taken together, they feel like something underneath has been rearranging itself.

I know some of this is simply growing out of things. Twenty or thirty years of anything might leave you with I’ve had my fill. But I can’t help wondering if some of it is coming from somewhere deeper… an identity reshaping itself, getting more specific. Like she was always there, but the brain was running on repeat, filled with noise and driven by something outside of myself.

That’s what I read when I go back through my journals. Even with the judgment, there’s a disconnect. Like reading someone else’s handwriting in your own hand.

I want to burn it all and start from scratch.

Nadia's right that I can't be sure the new version would have done things differently. I actually lean toward thinking I would have done it all the same, even knowing what I know today.

But moving forward? I'm at least giving her something different to write about.

p.s. Turns out ‘that lady’ Jewel still holds up.

I sat with that for a while.

My adolescence did not feel like an awakening. It felt out of my control. And given the messaging I was receiving around sex, it seemed like something I shouldn’t open up to experiencing.

The feelings were real. Hormones are real. If I were being generous, I’d say our bodies were coming online and we were shifting into sexual beings.

Awakening implies something more conscious. A turning toward, a recognition. What I remember is being introduced to sex-ed, being told it was okay to have sex to have a baby, to never have sex until I was married and literally nothing about sex being pleasurable. Let alone an explanation to all the pleasurable feeling coming out of nowhere.

Girls were introduced to sex in adolescence. Most of us were not awakened to it.

The distinction matters. An introduction means someone hands you a thing and says: here, this exists, navigate accordingly. An awakening means you actually understand what you’re holding. And more than that, you understand that it’s yours.

An awakening means you have agency. Most adolescents are still operating inside someone else’s rules.

For most women, if the awakening comes at all, it arrives much later. After years of performing desire more than feeling it. After enough distance from everything she was handed to start asking what, if anything, was actually hers.

A number of years ago I was asked to speak to a group of women about sex. It sounded straightforward. It wasn’t. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is no single conversation about sex. Every woman walks in with her own conditioning, her own history, her own relationship to her body.

Including, perhaps especially the topic I chose; a pleasure practice. Masturbation.

Most women have learned about their own bodies by way of someone else’s hands.

Women’s pleasure — how to feel it, whether they’re allowed to feel it, what it means that they feel it — arrived to them filtered through someone else’s wants and expectations. Through conditioning that made very clear, early and often, that her body’s primary job was to be useful. To others. To function. To perform.

Not to feel. Not for herself. Not as its own source of information.

And I believe, from this very conditioning, girls have learned not to feel safe in their bodies, not to know their bodies, not able to embody what they are experiencing and most crucially, feel into their desires.

We were taught from the very beginning to look outside ourselves to feel good. To hand our pleasure over and call it normal.

When you don’t know how to access your own body, you find something that does it for you

Which is why it’s no wonder most women are reaching for alcohol. It’s the one socially acceptable place she’s allowed to stop performing. Nobody questions it. And for a while, it works. It manufactures the exhale, the loosening, the brief sensation of being present in a body she was never given permission to fully inhabit.

Then she arrives in her forties and fifties, estrogen making its quiet exit, and the questions she’s been successfully outsourcing start surfacing anyway.

Whose life am I living? What do I actually want? Why doesn’t this work the way it used to?

This is her awakening.

You may have heard of it. Someone branded it as a crisis.

But a crisis implies something has gone wrong. This is something going right.

There’s a difference between a sexual awakening and what most of us experienced in adolescence. What happened then was an introduction.

The awakening is what happens when you realize most of what you were handed was never actually yours.

It’s desire coming back online on your own terms. It’s appetite returning. Not just for sex but for your life. For what you want, what you feel, what you’re no longer willing to numb.

For a lot of women, the thing standing between her and that appetite is what she’s been using to manufacture it.

Removing alcohol forces you to confront and feel all of it. You are suddenly exposed to the version of you underneath the drinking — the one who has wants and edges and a body full of information she’s been trying to quiet. The one who’s been there since adolescence, waiting.

A sober awakening is the same house. You just enter through a different door.

Sobriety is about stopping. A sober awakening is about what you find when you do.

The awakening is meeting her again.

And realizing the answers were never in the glass.

They were in you. They’ve always been in you.

You just weren’t taught to look there.

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It was 4th of July weekend. My parents had been told by a friend’s brother that we met some boys at the movies on a double date. Which wasn’t true. When I went to explain that we just saw them there, I was told to be quiet. They didn’t believe me.

I can’t even count how many of those moments I wasn’t allowed to speak. Feeling the unfairness of the world and tiny amounts of rage building in me. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to share my side of things. Why no one believed me. Why it was always, don’t talk back. Perhaps it was a parenting era of don’t talk back and speak only when spoken to, perhaps it’s just the way things go with girls, but after years of it, I learned, don’t speak.

Unknowingly, I carried the weight of the anger and rage along with me.

Unless I was drinking. The arrival of alcohol brought with it the girl who had been told to be quiet. I could feel myself harden with the first drink. I was the girl who would be across the room from the guys and then suddenly slamming them into a doorway laughing. Pushing people in pools. Saying snarky comments. In my twenties, with my second husband, picking fights. Going to get a water bottle from the fridge, noticing they weren’t labels forward, throwing them over my shoulder at him. This part of me, the girl who wasn’t allowed to talk, was mad. And drinking allowed her to express it.

Quitting drinking closed the door on the part of me that raged for a short time. Honestly, I had entered such a state of resentment. Everything was “it must be nice”, and “why me/why not me?”

Until a few years ago. Something happened, and I can’t say for sure what, but I remember feeling burned up inside, like a bomb was about to go off. I also remember how icky I felt inside.

My stomach felt like a vat of green toxic bubbling goo percolating up from within. It rose into my chest, thick and hot, like it was going to spill over.

I. Did. Everything. To. Resist. It.

Distract myself, take a shower, call a friend. Nothing worked. Finally, I laid down on my floor and just let it take me over. I laid there breathing into every little bit of it as it boiled through my body, watching it and not interrupting it.

The sensation itself didn’t last that long. It certainly didn’t have the repercussions of a wife yelling at me for throwing her husband in the pool with his Rolex on.

Admittedly, with people close to me (like my boyfriend), when there is a breakdown, I’ve noticed ‘my practice’ of using my voice can way overcorrect. I find myself saying, I don’t know what came over me. I’ve had moments where I’ve felt like I’ve blacked out. Emotionally flooded and saying things without a filter. Things that I would have never said before.

For a short time I thought, maybe this is hormones, but I don’t think so. I think this is me finally stepping into the belief that I can say what’s on my mind. Besides, blaming hormones feels disempowering. Just like raging out while drunk did. That version of me was never created by alcohol. She is finally allowed.

So for now, I look for the moments in settings that give me an opportunity to use my voice even though it feels terrifying. Like asking the guy at the gym if he’s using the machine he’s sitting on.

For the girl who was told to be quiet, it feels like the bravest thing she could ever do.

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Not only did I feel gaslit, I felt an immense pressure and guilt. Like I had to explain myself. Justify why I didn’t want to drink anymore.

I’m sorry for letting you down.

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But I was also gaslighting myself. My reasons for drinking seemed justified. My kids are older, I deserve to have a good time now. I can meet friends for happy hour and Aperol spritzes. Go get drinks on a date. Sit on my sofa after a long day and relax with a glass of red and a good book. Writing this now, I think of how we romanticize a toxic ex. You don’t remember the bad fights and the breakups. Just the sex and the makeups.

On the outside, everything appeared normal. Nothing that looked like what we picture when we hear “rock bottom.”

And I often wonder how many women fall into this — an uncategorized, internal rock bottom. The kind that shows up as disconnection rather than catastrophe.

Don’t get me wrong. I had moments that still carry some emotional residue. Being catty with other women. Picking fights with my partner. Jumping on bar tops to dance. Drinking wine at lunch and then picking my kids up from school. Embarrassing consequences I haven’t fully forgotten.

But what I’m talking about is something slower. The erosion of who I was. The voice I couldn’t quiet down after a second glass of wine. The consistent feeling like shit in the morning, making promises to skip wine with dinner that evening, only to pour one anyway and then criticize myself for doing so.

This plus the hormonal hell-scape many of us find ourselves in in our late thirties and into our forties. Without any knowledge of peri/menopause, I just assumed this was how I was wired.

So when I tried to tell the people around me that alcohol wasn’t working, it didn’t land. It couldn’t. Eventually I had to make a choice nobody else could make for me. Nobody else was going to tell me. They'd already told me I was fine.

The night before my last drink was like most nights, but not. A friend invited me to join them at June’s for a glass of rosé. Which turned into two. This turned into us going next door for sushi, which arrived with sake and another glass of wine. I don’t recall drinking the wine after the sake.

What I will never forget is lying awake from around 2am to 6am thinking I might be having a heart attack and that maybe I should call the paramedics. And the stream of thoughts, more like an interrogation, reeling through my mind as I struggled to fall asleep.

Why did you say that earlier? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone knows you’re a fraud. How do you think you’re going to work after a night like this? They’ll know something’s wrong with you.

And on and on and on it went.

When it finally ended, I thought: we’re done here. That day I chose something different. I chose me.

Nobody witnessed my rock bottom. It didn’t look like anything from the outside. I went to dinner with a friend, had some sushi, came home. And then I was alone at 4am convinced I was dying while a voice in my head took me apart piece by piece. Nobody saw that part. Nobody ever does.

I think that's the rock bottom nobody talks about. The one that doesn’t cost you your job or your marriage or your reputation. The one where you get up the next morning, make breakfast, and go to work anyway. Where your bills are paid and your kids are fed and from the outside everything looks completely fine. Somehow we've decided those women don't qualify. That if your life is still technically intact you don’t have permission to say this isn’t working.

So most of them don’t. They just keep going.

It still amazes me how hard I tried to fit in, to prove I could be normal. I was willing to lose myself for you.

Today the conversation is very different. There isn’t one.
I am no longer gaslighting myself. I am no longer looking outside of myself to affirm or validate my decision. I’m so solid in where I stand that I don’t need to explain it to anyone.
I’ve found a new joy in the space between me and the person whose face can’t hide their disappointment. The face that reads: oh, one of those.
I just let their projection sit between us in silence.
I don’t care.
I’m willing to lose that person to save myself.

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It’s been almost four years since I woke up and decided I wasn’t drinking anymore.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought.

But something was different that morning. I’d spent the night with massive anxiety, real fear, and a question I hadn’t let myself ask out loud before. Can I go on?

The reasons I thought I drank were simpler than I wanted to admit. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to be out with everyone else. I was a newly empty nester trying to figure out who she was now that the job she'd organized her life around was done.

And underneath all of it, my hormones were changing. My career had shifted. Everything was rearranging itself at once.

My body just couldn’t handle alcohol anymore.

So I subtracted it.

What I didn’t know yet was that alcohol wasn’t the only thing that no longer fit.

What it revealed was that I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted.

Which was destabilizing in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

And embarking on the hero’s journey sober wasn’t exactly helping. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.

I recently shared on Instagram that at the end of that first day, at 5 after work, I grabbed a wine glass, filled it with sparkling water and made the decision to be conscious of what I was feeling. I was instantly clear on why I had been reaching for wine at the end of the day; my system was wound so tight and riddled with anxiety. The sensations felt terrible and the thoughts were all consuming. And so I took long breaths and rode the waves.

I did this every day for at least 3 weeks for a minimum of 20 minutes. I didn’t know it then, but I was self regulating my nervous system.

As time went on, I saw the blank canvas I was working with. Only, I didn’t really know what to put on it.

The Layers We Wear

Sitting where I am now, I have so much compassion for that woman. The one who made every decision by asking what does a good mom do? A good daughter? A good girl?

Never: what’s good for me? What’s in alignment with who I’m becoming?

Some people would say, well, you’re a mother. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

Coming out of the other side of it, I’d beg to differ.

The demands. The expectations. The lifelong grooming to care for everyone else, to take on the invisible labor without complaint, to never ask for help or speak up for yourself.

That is the perfect recipe for, well. A cocktail.

It’s little wonder the alcohol industry targets women with mommy juice, rosé, and skinny margaritas. We are crawling out of our skin. And this is the only thing that makes us feel comfortable in it.

The harsh truth is that’s a lie. Alcohol isn’t relief. It’s compression. Like Spanx. Except you never take them off.

And every year, every role, every expectation you absorbed without question: good mom, good daughter, good girl. That’s another layer.

By midlife you’re wearing twenty years of them.

You can barely breathe. But you’ve forgotten what breathing felt like, so you call it normal.

Your life just gets tighter.

What I can tell you is this: as I’ve focused on taking the layers off, old identities, dated beliefs, resentments, past experiences, I’ve felt something I didn’t have a word for at first.

Lighter.

Not happy, exactly. Not fixed. Just… less compressed.

I can breathe inside my own life in a way I couldn’t before.

The Question Underneath It All

The question you’ve been asking, is it my hormones, a hangover, or something else entirely, probably doesn’t have just one answer.

It didn’t for me.

It was all of it, arriving at the same time. Hormones, exhaustion, a creeping awareness that something about the way I was living no longer felt right.

It didn’t feel like a neat crisis. It felt like the slow realization that the life I had built no longer fit inside my own body. And something had to go.

The layers are real. But they do come off.

Slowly, one by one, they come off.

What’s the thing in your life right now that no longer fits?

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The career pivot. The financial freedom. The relationship that actually feels good. The body you want to live in. The version of yourself who doesn’t need wine at the end of the day.

You meant it. You weren’t lying. And yet.

I think about this with my own life sometimes. I was twenty years old when I saw a woman running and had a quiet, wordless thought: I want to do that. No plan, no journaling, no affirmations. Just something in me pointing toward something in her and saying yes. Twenty-six years later, I’m still running.

In my early thirties, I had the same kind of knowing about alcohol. I didn’t want it in my life anymore. That one took time and real work, but it happened. It became true.

And then there’s the financial freedom. The version of my forties where work was a choice. I wanted that too. Said it just as clearly. And yet, I’ll be honest with you, this bish does not have a choice.

So what is actually going on?

Because the wanting felt the same. It always felt like wanting.

The Part That Positive Thinking Misses

Most of us, when we want something we’re not getting, reach for the same tools. We journal. We set intentions. We do the affirmations. We try to think more positively and visualize the outcome.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, as a starting point.

Emmet Fox wrote that real change happens at the level of the heart, not the intellect. That prayer isn’t about forcing outcomes but about creating a pause, a place to bring what you want without rushing to make it happen through sheer will. I believe that. The pause matters. The turning inward matters. And I can’t recommend his book The Sermon on the Mount enough if this is territory you want to explore.

But I also think we’re contending with something that positive thinking and even prayer don’t fully account for.

Carolyn Elliott captures it this way in Existential Kink: focusing only on the light is like staring up at the sun without noticing you’re standing in something that smells terrible. You spray affirmations over it like perfume. The smell doesn’t go away. And meanwhile, shadow work is looking down at all that shit so you can clean it up, or even compost it into a lush garden.

Here’s what Elliott says that stops most women cold: having is evidence of wanting.

The first time I sat with that I got defensive. Because I did want it. I genuinely, consciously wanted it. And the idea that some hidden part of me was working against that felt like one more way to blame myself for something that already hurt.

But that’s not what she means.

Jung called this the shadow: the parts of ourselves we’ve pushed underground because they didn’t fit the life we were performing. The part that doesn’t believe she deserves it. The part that’s actually terrified of having what she says she wants.

It’s not a character flaw. It’s not weakness. It’s just that some part of you learned, somewhere along the way, what was safe, what was allowed, what would happen if you actually got the thing.

For a long time, I interpreted this internal tension as inconsistency. As a lack of discipline. As evidence that if I really wanted something, I would have made it happen by now. But over time I began to notice that the part of me resisting certain changes didn’t feel lazy or self-sabotaging. It felt protective. Protective of familiar identities. Protective of the ways I had learned to navigate the world, even when those ways no longer fully fit.

When I look at the financial freedom I keep not quite reaching, I have to be honest with myself. There might be a part of me that knows what having it would require. The visibility. The claiming of space. The loss of the story that’s kept me striving but never arriving. Striving feels purposeful. Having means something else is asked of you.

That’s a shadow. And it’s been running the show from somewhere I wasn’t looking.

Three Brains, Three Agendas

To understand why this happens, it helps to understand what you’re actually working with.

You don’t have one brain. You have three, and they don’t always agree.

Your neocortex is the thinking brain. The one reading this right now. The one that sets goals, makes plans, and says I want to change. This is where your conscious intentions live.

Your limbic system is your emotional brain. It holds memory, attachment, and the deeply felt sense of what feels safe or threatening. It doesn’t respond to logic. It responds to feeling.

And your reptilian brain, your survival brain, is running patterns so old and so automatic that you barely notice them. Its only job is to keep you alive, and it defines alive as familiar. Change, even change you consciously want, can register here as threat.

So when a woman says I want to change (the drinking, the marriage, the career, the financial picture) that's her neocortex speaking. Her conscious mind. And she means it completely.

But her limbic system is holding a different kind of memory. What happened the last time she tried. What it cost her. What she had to feel when the thing she reached for didn’t work out.

And her survival brain is just doing what survival brains do. Keeping things familiar. Keeping things known. Treating the life she already has, even the parts she hates, as safer than the life she doesn’t yet.

Three brains. Three agendas. And willpower, which only lives in the neocortex, is outnumbered two to one.

This is why white-knuckling doesn’t work for anything. Not for sobriety, not for financial change, not for leaving the marriage, not for finally building the thing you’ve been circling for years. It’s not a discipline problem. It’s a competing agendas problem.

So What Do You Actually Do With This?

You start by getting curious rather than critical.

Instead of asking why can’t I just do the thing I said I wanted, which is a question that always leads back to shame, you ask something softer; What might I be getting from not having this? And you hold that question with genuine openness, not as an accusation.

It becomes less a question of why can’t I make myself do this and more a question of what might this part of me be trying to keep safe. And that question changes everything. It moves the conversation out of shame and into curiosity.

For years, I avoided looking at certain parts of myself because I was afraid of what I might see. The woman who had made choices she regretted. Who had numbed out instead of speaking up. Who had sought relief in ways that didn’t ultimately serve her.

When I finally began to sit with those parts, not to excuse them, but to understand them, something unexpected happened.

I began to see that those versions of me were not trying to ruin my life. They were trying, in imperfect ways, to protect me. To cope. To feel something. To access parts of myself that had nowhere else to go at the time.

And then, slowly, something I did not see coming: I started loving the hell out of her.

Because she was trying. In all the wrong ways, with all the wrong tools, but she was trying to survive something. To feel something. To access parts of herself that had nowhere else to go.

When I brought some loving light to that darkness, it wasn’t as dark.

That part of me isn’t gone. I’m not fixed. She’s still in me, she’s just not running the show from a place I can’t see anymore. She’s integrated. And because of that, I feel more whole than I ever did when I was busy pretending she didn’t exist. And because I’m not living in shame anymore, because I’m coming from a place of self love instead, I’m not the least bit inclined to be dishonest with myself or with anyone else.

That’s what Jung was pointing at. Not the elimination of the shadow, but the integration of it.

What I keep coming back to is this: the things we say we want and keep not getting are often pointing at exactly this. Not a strategy problem. Not a timing problem. A shadow problem. Some part of us that learned, a long time ago, that wanting too much was dangerous. That being too visible was dangerous. That having the thing would require becoming someone we don’t yet know how to be.

You don’t have to love every part of yourself immediately. That’s not how it works and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But you can start by looking. Holding it out in front of you where it can’t come at you sideways. Getting curious about why she keeps stopping just short of the thing. About what she might be protecting you from. About what she learned, and when, and whether it still needs to be true.

She wasn’t trying to sabotage you.

She was trying to keep you safe with the only map she had.

Understanding that is where the real work begins. Not the willpower. Not the vision board. Not the affirmations sprayed over something that needs composting.

The looking.

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I have spent years listening to both.

First in the dressing rooms of my lingerie and sexual wellness store. Then in coaching sessions around dating, sex, and relationships. Then in sobriety work.

Different rooms. Different problems. Same story.

Women who couldn’t get out of their heads and into their bodies. Women who felt they needed to perform, to give, to show up for everyone else while quietly checking out of their own experience. Women who believed that pleasure, orgasm, and feeling genuinely turned on was only available through someone else.

I heard the same things over and over.

“I just need to get it over with.” “I can’t orgasm unless I’m in love.” “I’m too tired. Too touched out. Sex is the last thing on my mind.” “I feel completely disconnected from my body.”

And then there were the affairs. More than you’d think. Women not necessarily looking for another person, but desperate to feel some sort of excitement in their lives.

What became obvious to me wasn’t that these women had bad partners or low libidos or broken relationships.

It was that they had completely lost access to their own bodies.

They couldn’t be present during intimacy. Couldn’t tap into their own desire. Couldn’t access that primal, alive energy without someone else unlocking it for them first.

And even then, they weren’t sure it was really theirs.

Then I started working with women on sobriety.

Same story. Different substance.

Women who couldn’t be in their bodies without wine. Who couldn’t access themselves sober. Who couldn’t let go, feel pleasure, or tap into their life force without alcohol lubricating the way.

The presenting problem looked different. One group wanted better sex. The other wanted to quit drinking. But the root was identical.

Both groups were outsourcing what was actually theirs to begin with.

The reasons varied. Social and religious conditioning. Sexual trauma. Chronic stress. Years of performance pressure and people-pleasing. Unprocessed grief. Shame around their bodies or their desires.

And decades of practicing how to disconnect so they could keep showing up, keep performing, keep being what everyone needed them to be.

But the pattern stayed the same. Somewhere along the way, they had both found something outside themselves to bridge that gap.

For one group, it was a partner.

For the other, it was wine.

Why This Intensifies at Midlife:

At midlife, this pattern becomes harder to ignore.

Estrogen drops, which lowers your baseline dopamine. You have less buffer for stress and less capacity to feel pleasure naturally.

Identity destabilizes. The roles that once defined you begin to shift or dissolve. The question of who you are becomes more urgent.

Your nervous system cannot maintain the performance anymore. Years of holding it together begin to surface in the body.

You are not reaching for wine because you are weak. You are reaching for it because you feel flat, and it is the only thing you know that brings you back to yourself.

Alcohol becomes the bridge back to sensation, to aliveness. Not because it restores you, but because it lowers the threshold enough to let you feel anything.

And this pattern has a name.

Regena Thomashauer has been teaching for decades that what many women experience as flatness or loss of excitement is often disconnection. Disconnection from anger that was never expressed. From desire that was never lived. From pleasure that slowly disappeared under responsibility and over-giving.

She argues that women are trained to be accommodating, appropriate, selfless, and small. Over time, that conditioning dulls a woman’s turn-on. Her creativity. Her sexual desire. Her emotional vitality. Her playfulness.

In her framework, turn-on is not indulgence. It is a sign of health. And when women are no longer connected to pleasure, they reach for what she calls the Four D’s: Drinks, Drugs, Desserts, and Drama. Not because they are broken, but because they are trying to feel something. *When she says drugs, she means antidepressants as much as anything else. The prescription kind that flatten the lows but also flatten everything else.

I saw the same thing in the women I worked with. The substance changed. The strategy did not.

What This Actually Looks Like

I was sitting with a group of women at dinner recently, listening as each one described her current state.

“I am just so depleted by the end of the day. I walk in and all I want is to pour a glass of wine.”

“I come home from work and my husband and kids are already expecting dinner. I just want a fucking time out.”

“I binge Netflix every night. It is the only way I can shut my brain off.”

None of them felt like they had time to take a breath, let alone regulate their nervous system, before the next round of demands hit.

These were not alcoholics. These were successful, intelligent, high functioning women. And every single one was using something outside herself to regulate.

Drinks. Drugs. Desserts. Drama.

For many women, this is the only way they know how to come back to their bodies.

The irony is that the body already knows what to do.

It knows how to regulate. How to feel. How to move emotion through and let it go.

Desire, grief, rage, pleasure. The body is built to let it rise, move, and pass.

Most of us were never taught how to stay with sensation long enough for that to happen. We were taught to override. To push through. To stay in control. When sensation became too intense, whether sexual intensity, emotional intensity, or nervous system activation, we learned to shut it down.

Wine works fast. So does sugar. So does drama.

They cut the feeling off before it can complete.

Over time, interruption becomes the strategy.

Wine As False Pleasure

Alcohol gives you temporary access to the parts of yourself you have shut down. The same parts that struggle to show up fully in intimacy without help.

The sensual woman. The wild woman. The woman who wants and does not apologize for it. The woman who can actually feel pleasure without guilt or performance anxiety.

And just as often, it softens the parts that feel overwhelming. The anxious one. The exhausted one. The one who cannot stop holding it all together.

Wine lets you bypass the conditioning that taught you to be small, appropriate, and good. For a few hours, it can feel like you are alive in your body again.

But that feeling is deceptive. Wine does not give you access. It dulls sensation while creating the illusion of depth. You may feel looser, louder, more expressive. But underneath, the system itself is turned down.

Real erotic life force requires the opposite. Not numbing, but feeling. Not dissociation, but presence. Not escape, but embodiment.

The same is true in sex. You cannot access depth while simultaneously muting sensation. When sensation is repeatedly interrupted, desire does not disappear.

It flattens.

In your sex life. In your creativity. In your appetite for your own life.

The real shift is not about quitting wine.

It is not about fixing your sex life.

It is about whether you know how to stay.

Stay in your body.
Stay with sensation.
Stay long enough to let it move.

Because being fully here cannot be outsourced.

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I looked at her, confused. My hair was in a ponytail. I hadn’t washed it in a couple of days.

“Thanks,” I said, with half a smile.

“I just love seeing a woman age naturally,” she added.

That’s when I realized she meant the grey. The grey hair lining my face that I hadn’t covered. Not because I’d made some philosophical decision about aging naturally, but because I’d been too busy to get in for my hair appointment around the holidays.

My instinct was to tell her to mind her millennial elders. But I thanked her again and kept walking.

The interaction stayed with me though.

It made me think about all of it. The Botox, the fillers, the hair dye, the declarations about aging naturally. Whether any of it is actually the point.

Or if it’s all just distraction.

A way of not having to feel what it actually means to watch yourself age. To see time passing in your own body. To know, on some quiet level, that this is finite. That we are, slowly, disintegrating. That one day we will die.

I asked myself if that was true for me. Then I did the thing I usually don’t do.

I stopped and sat with it.

With the temporary nature of my existence. With the fact that I’m going to die.

I won’t lie... my chest tightened. I felt afraid. Maybe even terrified.

Not of how it will happen, but of the simple truth: being here today means I won’t be here one day.

Sitting with that didn’t send me spiraling. It did the opposite.

It reminded me why I’m here at all.

Not just to live, but to feel my aliveness. To stop escaping and start inhabiting my days. To meet what shows up with breath and steadiness.

To be present in my relationships with my children, my family, my lover, my friends, my dogs. To speak with integrity. To act with intention. To forgive, forgive, forgive.

To not take for granted a single wrinkle, stretch mark, mile run, tear shed, belly laugh, or moment of connection.

The woman in the airport wasn’t really seeing me. She was projecting her own story about aging onto my unwashed hair.

I wasn’t fully present either. I was busy deciding whether to correct her, feel annoyed, or let it go.

Meanwhile, life was just happening around us.

That’s the real distraction.

Not Botox. Not hair dye. Not whether you choose to do something or not do it.

But all the fucking energy we spend making meaning out of it. Deciding what it says about us. Whether it makes us more evolved or more authentic or more acceptable.

So yes, I’ll still get Botox. I’ll dye my hair again when I have time.

But I don’t want those choices to pull me away from what’s underneath.

In the end, the wrinkles won’t matter. The grey won’t matter.

What will matter is whether I actually felt my life. Whether I was present for the people I love. Whether I let myself be seen and loved fully. Whether I experienced the full range of my aliveness. The pleasure, the grief, the rage, the tenderness. Instead of numbing or performing or distracting my way through it.

My forties have been my biggest awakening yet. Spiritually, sexually, sobriety-wise.

It reminds me of the butterfly metamorphosis. Not the pretty, inspirational version, but the actual biology of it. A caterpillar doesn’t just grow wings in the chrysalis. It dissolves. Completely breaks down into liquid. The old form has to disintegrate for something new to emerge.

That’s what midlife has felt like. You spend the first half of your life building a self based on what you think you’re supposed to be. What your parents wanted. What society expected. What would make you acceptable, lovable, successful, good. You’re encased in all those shoulds.

Then something cracks it open. You realize: I don’t actually have to be any of that. I can finally be free.

The parts I’d been hiding, the ones I’m finally accepting, weren’t flaws. They were the parts that didn’t fit the mold I was trying to squeeze myself into. The anger. The desire. The refusal to perform niceness. The big personality. The sexuality. The parts that were “too much” or “not enough.”

I don’t give a fuck about being what everyone around me says I should be. I can age how I want. Botox or grey hair or both or neither. Without needing anyone’s approval for my choices.

It’s like being birthed into your real humanness. Into all of it. Without too much concern for who’s watching.

This is what 46 means to me: acceptance of who I am. Of the temporary nature of this body, this life. Of all the parts I tried to hide or change or perform away.

And from that acceptance comes freedom.

Freedom from the performance. From the approval-seeking. From all the shoulds I spent the first half of my life trying to squeeze myself into.

The freedom to feel alive in this body. Not preserve it or perfect it, but actually live in it while I’m here.

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I’ve watched this pattern play out over and over, in my own life and in the lives of hundreds of women I’ve worked with. We look for ourselves everywhere except where we actually are.

If it’s not a man, it’s a martini. If it’s not a martini, it’s a MasterCard. If it’s not a MasterCard, it’s a muffin.

We keep reaching outside ourselves, convinced that the next thing will finally make us feel whole. The next promotion, the next relationship, the next bottle, the next whatever. Worthy. Alive.

It’s an insatiable tank that will never fill.

You can stuff every hole you have (literally), do this long enough, and you’ll discover it’s nothing more than a game of whack-a-mole. One craving goes down, another pops up.

None of those things are what you actually need.

Here’s what’s actually happening; you’re drowning.

You’re managing the job, the kids, the aging parents, the partner who doesn’t see how much you’re carrying. You’re navigating a world that feels like it’s constantly on fire. The news. The politics. The economy. The climate. The everything.

Your body is changing in ways no one prepared you for. You’re not sleeping. You’re constantly anxious. Your nervous system hasn’t come down from high alert in years.

And wine is the only thing that makes you feel like you can finally exhale.

It’s not about the alcohol. It’s about the moment when everything stops demanding something from you. When you can finally just be.

Except you’re not really being. You’re numbing. And you know it.

The Real Problem

You already know this. You know that drinking every night isn’t making your life better. You know you’re using it to cope, to relax, to feel something other than the endless numbness of taking care of everyone else’s needs while ignoring your own.

Here’s what no one tells you… you don’t have a drinking problem.

You have an aliveness problem.

Wine has become your way of accessing parts of yourself you’re not allowed to be when you’re sober. The fun version. The relaxed version. The version who doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks. The version who actually feels something.

And wine also has a way of denying access to parts of yourself that you don’t perceive as safe to feel. The grief you’ve been carrying for years. The rage at how small your life has become. The loneliness even when you’re surrounded by people. The terror that this is all there is.

Somewhere along the way, wine became both the key and the lock.

It lets you access parts of yourself. And it protects you from parts of yourself.

And you forgot how to do either one without it.

I know this pattern because I lived it.

What You’ve Been Missing

For years, I tried to face hard times through ways I genuinely thought would work:

Have a drink; it will relieve and relax you. Find a man; having someone to love you and protect you will make you feel safe. Shop; you’ll look and feel better. Pound the pavement until you can’t think; if you’re thin, you’ll be praised.

I deprived myself of feeling, nourishment, and pleasure.

I distracted myself with attention, validation, and material things.

I fell into depression when one didn’t work. I blindly defaulted to the next external high.

What I didn’t see was this: I was constantly choosing things outside of myself to feel good about who I am. To be noticed. To be chosen.

I was never choosing my Self. The one unidentified with the title, the man, the outfit or the friends.

Tuning In and Turning On

Your body has been trying to get your attention for years.

Every time you reach for wine, your body is saying: “I need something. I’m overwhelmed. I’m exhausted. I’m numb. I want to feel alive.”

Wine just helps you ignore it for another night.

The message is still there in the morning, isn’t it? You still wake up feeling the same emptiness. The same disconnection from yourself. The same sense that you’re moving through your life like a ghost.

That’s because wine doesn’t give you back what you’ve lost. It can’t.

You're not the problem. You're the solution. You are the way back to wholeness.

Not the wine. Not the man. Not the promotion. Not the new dress or the perfect vacation or the number on the scale.

You.

What Wine Is Actually Doing

Wine isn’t random. It’s serving a specific function in your life.

For most women, it’s doing one (or more) of these five things:

1. PERMISSION Wine lets you be the fun version. The relaxed version. The spontaneous version. The version who doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Wine gives you permission to let go, to stop performing, to finally just BE. Without it, you feel like you have to stay in control, stay responsible, stay “on” for everyone else.

2. ESCAPE Wine helps you not feel the anxiety, the overwhelm, the grief, the rage, the emptiness. It buffers you from emotions you don’t know how to handle. It creates distance between you and the reality of your life. Without it, you’d have to actually feel everything you’ve been avoiding and that feels impossible.

3. CONNECTION Wine helps you feel close to your partner. Vulnerable with friends. Intimate in ways you can’t access sober. It softens the edges, lowers the walls, makes you feel less alone. Without it, you feel disconnected, awkward, like you don’t know how to be close to anyone anymore, including yourself.

4. ALIVENESS Wine wakes you up in a body that’s gone numb. It makes you feel sexy, engaged, turned on by life again, even if it’s just for a few hours. It promises you energy, passion, desire. Without it, you feel dead inside. Like you’re just going through the motions of a life you don’t even want.

5. TOLERANCE Wine helps you tolerate what you actually hate. The marriage that’s gone cold. The job that’s slowly killing you. The life that doesn’t fit anymore. It makes the unbearable bearable. Without it, you’d have to face the truth: something has to change. And you’re not ready for that.

Most women have more than one.

And here’s the truth: until you know what wine is doing for you, you can’t stop drinking it.

Because you’re not just giving up alcohol. You’re giving up permission. Relief. Connection. Aliveness. The ability to tolerate your own life.

No wonder you keep pouring a glass.

This is why willpower doesn’t work. Your conscious brain says “I don’t want to drink.” But your body says “I NEED this”—and your body is right. You do need something. You just don’t need wine.

You need to learn how to give yourself what wine was giving you. You need to meet the parts of yourself wine was protecting you from. You need to give yourself permission to be the woman you’ve been hiding.

That’s the real work. Not “stop drinking.” Not “count your days.” But actually understanding what you’ve been using this FOR and then learning how to get it back without alcohol.

What Aliveness Actually Means

When I talk about aliveness, I’m talking about something most women at midlife have completely lost.

I call it erotic energy. And before you close this tab, I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about EROTIC in its truest sense: your life force. Your passion. Your curiosity. Your full engagement with being alive.

Think about a time when you felt completely turned on by life. Not sexually, but ALIVE. When you wanted to devour a book, create something, dance in your kitchen, stay up talking for hours. When everything felt vivid and possible. When you felt AWAKE in your own body.

That’s erotic energy. And most women at midlife have lost it entirely.

Frankly, wine becomes a cheap substitute for it.

Wine promises you that feeling of aliveness. That engagement. That sense of being fully present in your own body and life.

It delivers numbness instead.

Real aliveness, real erotic energy, is what presence gives you back.

A Practice to Start

Before you reach for wine tonight, try something with me.

Put your hand on your heart. Feel the warmth of your palm against your chest.

Take three slow breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth.

Now scan your body. Where do you feel tension? Your jaw? Your shoulders? Your belly? Just notice. Don’t try to change it.

Ask your body: “What do you need right now?”

Not your head. Your body.

And then listen. The answer might come as a sensation. A color. An image. A knowing. It might be: rest. Movement. Touch. To cry. To scream. To be held.

Whatever comes up, that’s what’s true.

Ten out of ten times— it’s not wine.

Your body knows why you drink. Your brain just hasn’t learned to listen yet.

The Way Forward

I’m not saying you need to quit drinking forever. I’m not saying you need meetings or labels or a whole new identity.

What I’m saying is this: you need to get curious about what wine is actually doing for you.

Because once you understand the function it’s serving, you can start to find other ways to meet those needs. Real ways. Body-based ways. Ways that actually give you back your aliveness instead of numbing it.

That’s what the work is. Not about NOT drinking. About reclaiming what you’ve lost.

Your energy. Your presence. Your passion. Your desire to actually be in your life instead of watching it pass by from behind a wine glass.

Your aliveness.

This isn’t about deprivation. It’s about getting yourself back.

The wild, alive, turned-on version of you that wine promised but could never deliver.

She’s still here. She’s just been waiting for you to tune in.

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I hadn’t had a drink in 90 days. I was going for six months, maybe never again. But as soon as it occurred to me that we were in a disaster, my defenses collapsed. The only solution - besides getting everyone to safety and stocking food - was wine.

I didn’t question this. It literally felt obvious. Necessary. I specifically remember saying to my friend, “Shouldn’t I be able to have something to help me get through this? I just feel like I make everything harder.”

Of course you drink. What else keeps you standing when everything else collapses?

Sitting here today, five years later, as the country unravels in ways that have everyone’s nervous systems on high alert for different reasons during an arctic blast, I watch my former patterns play out across social media: “This is going to require several bottles,” “I don’t know how to get through this without drinking,” “This is too stressful,” “If there was ever a time...” I know exactly what they’re thinking.

When Austin shut down that week, my nervous system went with it. I shut down completely. All I could do each day was check in with my family, cook, and drink wine. By the end of the week, I was riddled with anxiety, picking a fight with my friend for only grabbing 3 onions when my recipe called for 5 and unable to sleep the night we got our power back.

My friend that I was staying with picked up on my edgy energy and insisted I follow a guided meditation. Reluctant, I laid down in a quiet room and as the narrator explained that anxiety comes from extreme apprehension and worry, I started crying.

Yes. All of us in this world right now, yes.

Then he asked me to breathe. I thought,

No, I don’t want to.

He asked me to start with a body scan, to just bring awareness into my body. That was definitely a no.

Because as soon as I tuned in, I could feel just how icky and uncomfortable my insides felt. It was like a cauldron of boiling liquid releasing static, frantic energy throughout my body. I felt sick. My body was pumping and dripping cortisol head to toe.

This was the moment I realized how completely in my head I was. Survivor mode. Freaked out. My body was screaming, and I’d been doing everything I could not to hear it.

I did the meditation twice. The second time, something shifted. Labeling the anxiety, narrating it, describing it out loud - that moved me out of my primitive brain and into my prefrontal cortex. I could think again. I could feel my body without it feeling like a threat.

And from what felt like a faraway place, I heard the word: safety. Safety was what I needed. I just didn’t know how to get it.

What I didn’t understand then was wine wasn’t helping me relax. Wine was the only thing my nervous system recognized as safety. When the power grid collapsed, my internal system collapsed too. My body, flooded with cortisol and pumping adrenaline, did what it had been trained to do: reach for wine.

I hadn’t learned how to be in my body when everything felt like it was falling apart.

That was then.

Unlike today.

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