At forty-six, I find myself in the thick of an identity crisis — not the glamorous midlife kind I half-imagined, with red convertibles and reckless affairs, but a slower unravelling, layer by onion layer.
I’ve been here before. In my teens, deliberating between university and travelling the world as a model. Then after having a child, when a question mark flashed for years: who am I now? Domestic abuse damn near killed me with sorrow, followed soon after by the disaster of the Covid mandates. And somewhere in the middle of it all, my body began to stage a quiet mutiny — the mind fogging over like a Sydney winter morning, people-pleasing melting like snow on sunlit pavement.
I built a life from chaos and creativity: runways, camera clicks, campaigns and cancellations — a stubborn forging of war-torn roots and generational trauma into relentless forward drive. It didn’t seem to matter if I felt like death warmed up inside; I could project a happy face, appear well, and always take the next step, no matter how many stairs life pushed me back down.
And then the body simply said: no more.
No more compartmentalising and pretending. No more tearing myself down to build others up. No more half-lovers and half-friends. No more running the engine on anger, fear, anxiety, perfectionism and spite. My body was done being whipped like a dead horse. It wanted healing, safety, love and attunement — not more doing, more achieving, more applause.
Was this perimenopause, dissolving the old scaffolding into midnight doubts? Was it PTSD? ADHD? Were they connected? Was this the end of one story, or the messy birth of something truer?
I’d always had a touch of the inattentive and the intense — internal chaos masked by high-functioning perfectionism, special interests and obsessions, a direct communication style, an allergy to lies. For decades the mask held, because the mask was rewarded: the same perfectionism that built luxury collaborations and a brand from nothing. Then perimenopause stripped the masks off one by one, and the perfectionism that had fuelled everything turned saboteur — feeding autoimmune flares, chronic stress, and the cortisol clinging stubbornly to my middle.
My Balkan family doesn’t believe in trauma, yet is irrevocably shaped by it — no one can say where the culture ends and the trauma begins, they’re so intertwined. Their prescription was always the same: get up and go, rise like a phoenix. But every time I forced it the old way, I crashed for weeks.
What I suddenly wanted — needed — was to talk with them about everything that happened to us, everything our ancestors carried. To get to the bottom of the stories running through our bloodline, to straighten the creases of perception and centre the truth. No one else wanted this. It wasn’t what they knew as healing. So everything got pushed deeper under the carpet, in favour of pleasantries and unearned peace — the kind that comes from a secret covenant to be codependent together, not the kind that comes from resolution.
Accepting that I wanted a different energy in my relationships — one the people around me couldn’t push through their own pain to offer — only deepened the wanting. If they couldn’t, I would. Broken, hurt and lonely as I was, I would look at everything that happened. I would process it. I would stop letting it drive — unconsciously — my attraction to abusive men, to fickle friends, to the critic narrating my head, to what I believed I could expect from life. But I’d have to do it differently this time, because the old scripts no longer worked.
So I’ve been running a different experiment on myself: gentleness, of all things. Dropping the all-or-nothing script for a 70/30 one — good enough on most things leaves room for what actually matters. Rest scheduled without guilt, like a meeting I refuse to cancel. Strength instead of punishment, protein instead of penance, and sunlight every single day — the cheapest medicine I’ve ever been prescribed and the only one that never came with side effects. Some of it is science, some of it is folk wisdom wearing a lab coat — and I’ll be pulling apart the actual evidence for each piece of it (cortisol, adaptogens, the midlife middle) in coming editions of The Protocol, because I’ve read too many studies at 2am to let the wellness industry mark its own homework.
They say the best things in life are free. Recovering from burnout, I finally felt it: sunshine bringing light back into my soul, bare feet on the ground, a body quietly remembering that it always knew how to recalibrate. That tangle of unspoken emotion poisoning my thyroid digested when I chose truth over others’ comfort.
Some call midlife a catastrophe. I’m starting to think it’s a reckoning that doubles as a revelation. As the estrogen curtain falls, the illusion slips exposing reality — as much gift as curse. Perfectionism can soften into presence. Isolation can teach what real connection costs, and what it’s worth. Burnout, if you let it, teaches gentleness — the one subject nobody in my bloodline ever studied.
A midlife “crisis” can become a love letter to the magnificent mess. In the essays ahead, I’ll show you how I’m finding my way back.
P.S. — The image above is “Themis,” photographed on the Adriatic during the pandemic — one of my limited editions of fifty, signed and numbered. The censor band is for the internet only; the print itself is unaltered. She lives here: https://myempiricallife.com/product/themis/