The house is finally quiet. It’s after the school run, and she is finally able to get a few stolen moments alone as she gets ready for work. She’s sipping her coffee and looking through her wardrobe filled with beautiful things, and she wonders, “Who do I get to be today?” She stops for a moment and realizes she doesn’t know.
The thing is, she has been wearing so many other roles perfectly: the perfect mother, wife, professional, and friend, showing up for everyone else, and in all of that, she forgot someone. She forgot herself.
As she looks at her reflection, she realises with a quiet, unsettling shock that she has absolutely no idea who is looking back at her. Not because something dramatic happened. But because nothing did. Life just kept asking, and she kept giving, until one day the woman underneath all those roles went very, very quiet. This article is for her.
There is a phenomenon I have witnessed in almost every woman that I’ve coached through the years, and it rarely arrives with fanfare. I call it ‘identity erosion’, and it is one of the most common, least talked-about experiences of women between thirty and forty-five. I am very familiar with this because this woman was me 10 years ago.
What’s really interesting about identity erosion is it does not happen in a single moment. There is no particular morning when one wakes up and decides to disappear. It happens the way water shapes stone, gradually, invisibly, through repetition. For me it was through the thousand small moments I introduced myself by my role rather than my name. “Hi, I’m Tara’s mum.”
For my clients, it was through the promotions chased and missed, the peace kept because she didn’t want to make a fuss with her opinion, and the dreams quietly shelved because there simply wasn’t time, and honestly, it felt selfish to want more when she already had so much.
Then on that particular morning, something triggered me. I was in my mid-thirties, and I couldn’t answer this question. What do I want?
Three signs identity erosion may be happening to you:
- You struggle to answer “What do you enjoy?” without referencing someone else or something productive.
- When someone asks what you want for dinner, or for the weekend, or, most importantly, for your life, your mind goes genuinely blank.
- You feel a persistent, low-level restlessness you cannot name, like you are always slightly waiting for your real life to begin or waiting for someone to get you out of this slump you’re in.
If any of those landed, please stay with me. Here is the thing I need to say to you, with all the warmth and honesty that I always bring to every amazing woman I work with:
The labels did not erase you. You just let them replace you. I say that not to be harsh, but to set you free. Because if you participated however unconsciously, however understandably, in the slow disappearance of yourself, then you hold something extraordinary in your hands right now. You hold the invention and rise of what comes next.
This is not about blame. Women are raised in a world that rewards self-deletion and calls it ‘virtue’. We are applauded for our selflessness and gently punished for our selfishness until we learn, deep in our bones, that our value lives in our usefulness to others. Of course we let the labels take over. We were never told we had a choice.
But we do. We always did.
The woman you are searching for, the one who existed before she became so enormously useful to everyone else, she hasn’t gone anywhere. She has simply been waiting, with extraordinary patience, for you to come looking.
That is where the rising begins. Not with a grand gesture or a dramatic reinvention, but with the quiet, courageous decision to go looking.
The first thing I ask a woman to do is not to change anything. It is to get curious. Radical, unhurried, generous curiosity about herself.
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So before you restructure your life or reinvent your wardrobe or book that retreat, I want to offer you three questions. Not to answer perfectly or quickly, but to sit with. Over a cup of tea. In the margins of a journal. On a walk you take alone.
“Who was I before I became so useful to everyone else?” Go back. Before the career, before the relationship, before the children, before the roles multiplied and the responsibilities stacked. What did you love? What made you forget the time? Who were you when no one needed anything from you?
“What do I want, not what do I think I should want, but what do I actually want?” This one takes practice. Most women have been filtering their wants through the lens of what is reasonable, responsible, or acceptable for so long that accessing the unfiltered version feels almost dangerous. Let it feel dangerous. Answer anyway.
“If no one was watching and no one needed anything from me, what would I do today?” This is the question that cuts through every performance, every obligation, every identity that has been built for an audience. The answer, whatever it is, is information. Rich, precious, honest information about who you still are underneath it all.
Your one action for this week: take fifteen minutes, find somewhere quiet, and write your answer to just one of these questions. Not the polished answer. The true one. That is where she is. The woman you are looking for. She is in the honest answers.
I want to tell you something I tell every woman who begins this work with me. You are not starting over. You are starting from everything you have ever survived, learnt and loved. That is not nothing. That is everything.
The woman on the other side of this journey does not necessarily have a different life. She has a different relationship with herself. She walks into rooms differently. She makes decisions differently. She answers the question “Who are you?” with something that comes from so deep inside her that no role, no title, and no season of life could ever take it away.
She knows who she is when the labels fall away. And she is already inside you, waiting for you to come home. That is the rising. And it begins right now, exactly where you are.
CERI SAMVILIAN is an identity reconstruction coach, keynote speaker, and founder of the Phoenix Rising Programme, a transformational coaching experience for women ready to rebuild their confidence and reclaim their identity after life’s biggest transitions.
Website: https://www.cerisamvilian.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceri-samvilian-9103204/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cerisamvilian/
