Step 4 of 12 · Complete Wellness For Women
Who Were You Before All This?
Who Were You Before All This?
Step 4 · 11 min
🎬 Video lesson coming soon
Here is a question I want you to sit with for a few minutes.
Who were you before?
Before you were someone's mother. Before you were someone's wife. Before you were a daughter managing something for someone. Before you were the woman who handles things.
Who were you when you were just yourself?
Maybe you have a clear answer. Maybe you don't. Maybe there's a particular thing that comes up — a passion, a quality, a way of being in the world that you haven't inhabited fully in a very long time.
Or maybe the question feels slightly disorienting. Like looking for something you put down so long ago that you've forgotten where — or even exactly what — it was.
Both answers are valid. Both are worth exploring.
This lesson is about the part of you that exists underneath the roles. And about what it means to find your way back to her.
Matrescence: Anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term 'matrescence' in 1973 — the developmental process of becoming a mother, analogous to adolescence. Like adolescence, matrescence involves profound hormonal, physical, psychological, and identity shifts. Unlike adolescence, it is culturally invisible and receives almost no support. Many mothers experience a crisis of self that they have no language for and receive no acknowledgment of.
Identity Foreclosure: Developmental psychologist James Marcia described 'identity foreclosure' — adopting an identity (daughter, wife, mother) before having explored one's own values, desires, and sense of self. Many women have been encouraged toward foreclosure from childhood — 'good girl,' then 'good wife,' then 'good mother' — with no cultural infrastructure for the question: who am I beyond these roles?
The Third Figure: Psychotherapist Tara Mohr writes about 'the third figure' — the woman a person is becoming, beyond the roles and identities that have defined her until now. Accessing this figure requires pausing the performance of the current roles to ask: underneath all of this, who is actually there? What does she want? What is she drawn to?
In 1973, an anthropologist named Dana Raphael coined a term that I believe every woman should know.
Matrescence.
She used it to describe the developmental process of becoming a mother — the profound hormonal, physical, psychological, and identity transformation that happens when a woman gives birth to a child. She modelled it on adolescence: the idea that becoming a mother is a developmental transition as significant and disorienting as the transition from childhood to adulthood.
Like adolescence, matrescence involves enormous change in who you are. How you see yourself. What you want. What you fear. What your body feels like. What relationships feel like.
Unlike adolescence, matrescence receives almost no cultural recognition. Adolescence comes with rituals, with support structures, with permission to be uncertain and in transition. Matrescence comes with a to-do list.
Which means that millions of women have gone through one of the most profound transformations of their inner lives — and received no language for it, no permission to grieve the self they were before, no acknowledgment that what they're experiencing is not weakness but developmental upheaval.
But this identity loss — the feeling of 'I don't know who I am anymore' — is not only for mothers. It happens to women who have dedicated themselves to careers and find them hollow. To women who have organised their sense of self around a relationship that has changed. To women who have been such excellent daughters, wives, colleagues, caregivers — that one day they realise they have never quite answered the question: outside of all this, what do I want?
Psychologist James Marcia called this identity foreclosure — when someone adopts a role or identity without ever exploring whether it genuinely fits. Many women have been encouraged toward foreclosure from childhood. Being a 'good girl' was the highest praise available. Then being a good wife. Then a good mother. Each role offered belonging and approval, and each one required a certain suppression of the self that might complicate the role.
The question 'who am I, really?' can feel frightening precisely because it has been suppressed for so long that it feels destabilising to ask.
But it is not destabilising. It is liberating.
And the answer does not require you to upend your life, abandon the people you love, or reinvent yourself. It just requires a small turning of attention — toward the woman underneath the roles, and toward what she needs.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
This is a journaling practice. Set aside fifteen minutes. Pen and paper, not a screen.
Write these five prompts and spend two to three minutes on each.
One: Who was I at fifteen? Not who I was supposed to be — who was I actually? What did I love? What was I drawn to? What made me come alive?
Two: What did I give up — or set aside — to become who I became? What did I trade? What was the exchange?
Three: What would I be doing, right now, if no one needed anything from me for a week? If there were no obligations, no one to consider, no expectations to meet?
Four: What small piece of that — even a fraction of it — could I bring back into my life right now? Not all of it. Just one small piece.
Five: If I were to write a letter to the version of me that existed before I became everything I am now — what would I say?
Don't edit. Don't perform. Write what is actually true.
When you've finished — read what you've written. Especially the answer to question four.
That small piece. That tiny return to something that was yours — that is the thread. Pull it gently. Follow where it leads.
The return to yourself doesn't require you to leave anything behind. It just requires you to stop leaving yourself behind.
The roles you inhabit are real and they matter. Your love for the people in those roles is real. I am not asking you to diminish any of it.
I am asking you to remember that you also exist. That beneath the mother and the wife and the daughter and the colleague — there is a woman. And she has needs that are not less real for being unspoken.
Finding your way back to her — even in small moments, even in the margins of a life that will continue to be full and demanding — is not a luxury.
It is how you remain whole.
I'll see you in the next lesson.