Real Girls Reality Check(list): Grieving Who You Were (Without Apologizing for Who You Are)
Different doesn’t mean broken.
I wrote a chapter about grief in my book while watching women around me mourn things no one sends flowers for.
Not just death. But divorce. Estrangement. Empty nests. Careers that quietly stalled. Bodies that changed without asking permission. Dreams that expired without a formal announcement.
And here’s what I kept noticing: change feels like failure. Different feels like failure. And failure comes wrapped in shame, fear, and guilt.
We’re supposed to “be positive.” We’re supposed to “be grateful.” We’re supposed to handle it well and not make anyone uncomfortable. But grief doesn’t care about optics. It doesn’t care about your LinkedIn bio or your family group chat.
As grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith says, grief is anything you lose that mattered: your marriage before resentment, your ambition before burnout, your body before babies. That’s real. And pretending it’s not is how we stay stuck.
And sometimes grief isn’t metaphorical. Sometimes it’s brutal and immediate. I lost a friend recently after a short, lethal battle with cancer. She hadn’t even hit 45. One minute she was making future plans. The next, she was counting weeks. Watching someone vibrant and unfinished disappear like that rearranges you. It strips the illusion of “later.” It makes every quiet resentment feel small and every unresolved conversation feel urgent. It’s rocked me in ways that frankly I’m still untangling.
When author, Real Girl and total badass Diane Heiler lost her husband of 25 years, people told her to “buck up.” Even before he died, they insisted he’d get better. But the doctor had been honest — there was no cure. After he passed, the casseroles came. Then they stopped. The grief didn’t. What she needed wasn’t optimism. It was space. Permission to collapse. Permission to not be strong on command.
Midlife has been mislabeled for decades. What gets framed as decline is often something else entirely: a collision between who we’ve been and who we’re becoming. Dr. Nivedita Nayak calls it sacred tension… the push and pull between mourning and becoming. When we allow ourselves to honor what we’ve lost, we actually create room for what’s still unfolding. But first, we have to stop labeling every change as a personal failure.
The Stuff No One Warns You About
Grief doesn’t always show up in black dresses and casseroles. Sometimes it shows up in a comment like, “Did you forget to have kids?” Sometimes it arrives in your inbox with a cheerful “Welcome to AARP!” and you feel personally attacked. Sometimes it looks like fighting with Spanx in your bathroom and realizing you are too grown to be wrestling nylon to prove you still qualify as sexy.
And then there’s this: Diane fell in love again at 80. Not quietly. Not apologetically. She talks openly about passion, sex, and choosing joy after devastating loss. She didn’t shrink. She didn’t disappear. She lived.
And sometimes it’s quieter. It’s standing in front of the mirror and not quite recognizing the woman staring back at you.
Often the grief isn’t just about what ended. It’s about who you had to become to survive it.
I grieved the version of me who stayed quiet to keep the peace. I grieved the tightly wound, spreadsheet-carrying control freak who believed certainty equaled safety. I grieved the woman who shrank to be digestible.
Losing those versions hurt. But what emerged was bolder, clearer, and done shapeshifting.
As one Real Girl from the book put it, “The woman I was at 30 would be shocked by the woman I am now. And honestly? I love that for her.” That’s not denial. That’s growth with teeth.
Real Girls Reality Check(list): Grieve Well. Grow Anyway.
Here’s your midlife gut check. No candles. No worksheets. Just truth.
1. Name what you’re actually grieving.
Be specific. Not just “the divorce,” but the identity you built around being someone’s wife. Not just “the job,” but the sense of relevance and power that came with it. Not just “my body,” but the ease, the invisibility, or the attention it once carried.
When you name the real loss, you stop fighting a ghost and start facing something tangible.
2. Stop calling change a personal failure.
Different does not mean defective. Outgrowing something does not mean you ruined it. Choosing a new direction does not mean you lacked grit.
Sometimes it simply means you evolved. And evolution is not a character flaw.
3. Let the shame surface… then interrogate it.
Charlie Bauman reminds us that many of us still operate from old family roles: caretaker, peacemaker, achiever. When we start behaving differently, the scrutiny can be immediate. The shame can feel intense.
But that shame is often just freedom dressed in discomfort. It feels wrong because it’s unfamiliar, not because it actually is.
4. Stop editing yourself for approval.
You are not required to stay small in order to stay lovable. You are not obligated to be universally palatable.
If the real you makes someone squirm, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re too much. It might just mean you’ve stopped performing.
5. Take off the metaphorical Spanx.
If you are fighting your clothes, your calendar, your relationship, your public image, ask yourself why. Who are you still trying to impress? Who are you trying to prove something to?
Acceptance is not defeat. It’s permission. Permission to choose comfort, truth, and ease over performance.
6. Prioritize yourself without apology.
Our friend Diane Heiler said the greatest gift she gave herself after loss was learning to like herself fully and unfiltered. That’s radical at any age.
Self-prioritization isn’t selfish. It’s survival. If you disappear inside everyone else’s needs, there’s nothing left of you to love.
7. Honor the version of you that got you here.
You don’t have to hate who you were in order to grow beyond her. She carried you through what she knew how to survive.
You’re not abandoning her. You’re expanding her.
8. Decide who you are now… on purpose.
Not by default. Not by inertia. Not by someone else’s comfort level.
Midlife isn’t about clinging to who you were. It’s about consciously choosing who you’re becoming.
Here’s the truth, Real Girl to Real Girl:
You can grieve the girl you were and still love the woman you are. You can miss what was and refuse to go backward. You can feel shame, fear, and guilt and still move forward anyway.
Grief doesn’t make you broken. It makes you honest.
And on the other side of that honesty? Power.
So if you’re standing in front of the mirror wondering whether you’re too old, too loud, too different, too much… you’re not too much.
You’re finally just enough.
#RealGirlsGuidetoMidlife #RealGirlsRealityCheck(list) #MidlifeGrief
We’ve earned every wrinkle. Might as well make more laugh lines together.
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