Midlife, Rage & Losing Your Mind: A Q&A with Branden LaNette
The podcast host, author, and mom of six on identity shifts, midlife chaos, emotional exhaustion, and the freedom that comes when you stop pretending it’s all just “fine.”
Some podcast hosts ask polite little questions and keep things moving. And as a recent guest on her show, I can tell you this: Branden LaNette is not that girl.
She built the Listen Bitch Presents: Tell Me Why You’re Special podcast around the kinds of conversations most women start having in parking lots, therapy, or after two margaritas and a nervous system collapse. Identity. Rage. Midlife disappointment. Power. Sex. Exhaustion. Starting over. And the weird freedom that shows up once you stop trying to be universally liked.
And you guessed it: I’m obsessed.
Branden is also the author of four books, including Once Upon a Time, Bitches: Design Your Fairytale Life, Control Your Destiny, and Become the Hero in Your Story, and somehow - in the middle of all of this - the mother of six kids, which legit feels less like parenting and more like surviving a long-running psychological experiment fueled by snacks, laundry, and emotional support beverages.
What I love most about her work is that she refuses to package womanhood into tidy little lessons or inspirational garbage made for mugs and Instagram graphics. She talks about the stuff most women are still trying to soften, hide, or laugh off. The resentment. The overstimulation. The simmering irritability. The emotional whiplash of holding everything together while also wondering where the hell you disappeared to inside all of it.
So instead of another polished “tell me about your journey” interview, I wanted questions worthy of the conversations women are actually craving right now.
Your podcast feels like the exact opposite of polished internet culture. What made you want to create conversations this raw, honest, and unfiltered?
Branden: Honestly? Because I was exhausted by the performance of it all. I got online and everywhere I looked its highlight reels and soft lighting and women talking about their “journey” like they were accepting an Oscar. Nobody was saying the actual shit. And I just kept thinking somebody has to say the truth. I fell for the fake bullshit and saw by the curtain. I had lived enough life by that point, survived enough bullshit, made enough bad decisions and clawed my way back from enough of them that I genuinely could not stomach sitting across from a microphone and pretending. We are in the arena and we’re getting our ass kicked and no one should keep them that to themselves . That felt like a betrayal of every woman who was sitting in her car crying in a Target parking lot not knowing why. I wanted her to hear something and feel less alone and less crazy. Polished doesn’t do that. Real does that.
Between your books and your podcast, you seem deeply interested in identity and the masks women wear. What part of yourself have you stopped performing in midlife?
Branden: The agreeable version of me. God knows she was exhausting. For both of us. I spent so many years being the woman who softened her edges so other people could stay comfortable and I look back at that now and I feel genuinely sad for her because she was so capable and so loud on the inside and so quiet on the outside. I stopped performing “easy to get along with.” I stopped performing “I don’t really have opinions about that.” I stopped performing the version of Christian woman that fit neatly inside a box somebody else built. My faith is louder now and my mouth is louder now and somehow those two things coexist beautifully and I have zero apologies about either one.
Was there a specific moment where you realized the version of success or womanhood you’d been handed no longer fit you anymore?
Branden: It wasn’t one moment it was more like a slow leak that eventually became a flood. But if I had to pick something I would say it was standing in the middle of a life that looked correct from the outside and feeling absolutely nothing. Like I had checked all the boxes I was supposed to check and I kept waiting for the feeling that was supposed to come with that and it just never showed up. And I remember thinking this cannot be it. This cannot be what I hustled for. That question cracked something open in me that I don’t think ever fully closed back up and honestly thank God for that because the woman on the other side of that crack is so much more interesting than the one who was white knuckling a version of herself that was never actually hers to begin with.
What’s been the biggest emotional or personal shift for you in midlife so far that nobody properly warned you about?
Branden: That you stop caring what people think and it doesn’t feel like freedom right away it feels like grief. Because when you stop performing for people’s approval you also lose the validation that came with it and nobody tells you that part. Nobody warns you that letting go of the need to be liked also means letting go of the feeling of being liked and that there’s a season where you’re just standing in the gap between who you were and who you’re becoming and it is uncomfortable as hell. I also was not prepared for how much clarity would come with age. Like I can see things now that I could not see at 25 and part of me wishes I could go back and warn her and part of me knows she wouldn’t have listened anyway.
Your work has this underlying energy of “enough!” Why do you think so many women hit midlife and suddenly start questioning everything they tolerated for decades?
Branden: Because the deal they made with themselves expires. You can only override your own needs for so long before your body and your brain and your spirit start sending you notices that the contract is up. And I think women specifically are trained from basically birth to make themselves smaller and more palatable and more accommodating and we get really good at it and then one day something shifts and you hear your own voice inside your head going wait a minute and once you hear it you cannot un-hear it. We also belittle ourselves to the word just, like I’m just a mom. I think it takes our power. I also think God wired us for more than tolerance. I think somewhere deep in us we know we were made for something real and the older we get the harder it is to pretend otherwise.
And finally: after the books, the podcast, six kids, all the chaos, growth, reinvention, and truth-telling… tell me why YOU’RE special because I know why you’re special to me!
Branden: Oh I love that you ended with this. Okay here’s what I know. I am a woman who has six kids and a microphone and a whole lot of opinions and I have never once made any of those things smaller to fit someone else’s comfort level. I wrote books that people told me wouldn’t sell because the title had a word in it that made people clutch their pearls and those books are on Audible and Amazon and real women are reading them and feeling seen. I built a podcast from nothing with no roadmap and no team and no permission and I kept going even when the numbers were small because I knew the message was right. I am not the most polished person in the room. I am absolutely the most honest. And I think that counts for something. Actually I think in a world drowning in curated bullshit toxic positivity content it counts for everything.
Women are starving for conversations like this right now. The real ones. The complicated ones. The ones that make you laugh, cringe, text your friends, and feel slightly called out all at the same time.
Do yourself a favor, go follow Branden on IG, TikTok and Facebook, binge the podcast, and dive into everything she’s building!
#RealGirlsGuidetoMidlife #NoFilterinMidlife #MidlifePodcast
We’ve earned every wrinkle. Might as well make more laugh lines together.
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