In this powerful solo episode, Sarah explores the moment many of us reach—often in the middle years—when we realise we’ve spent too long adapting, performing, and fitting in… and we can’t remember what “just being me” feels like anymore. This is a conversation about identity, perimenopause as recalibration, and the quiet return to the person you’ve been all along—without self-erasure.
23:00 – Closing: legacy, truth-telling, and not hiding anymore
Sarah Jordan-Ross (00:00) Hey everyone, welcome back to Tabby Talk with Sarah, the podcast that breaks the silence, fosters hope and talks about the tough stuff so you never feel alone. The space where we have conversations that many people feel but don't always know how to name. The ones that sit just beneath the surface, that quietly shape our lives. The ones that when spoken out loud often bring both relief and recognition.
Today's conversation is one I believe many of us had arrived at. Not all at once, but gradually and often in the middle years of our lives. It begins with a question that to start with is surprisingly disorienting. Who am I? Who am I when I'm not just responding to what everyone else around needs from me? When I'm not being someone's
Wife, Mother, Sister, Friend, Colleague, when I'm just being me. For much of my life I was what you might call adaptable. You could put me in a ball gown or in jeans and a t-shirt, high heels or cowboy boots, sometimes high-heeled boots, and I'd find my footing.
I'd fit in and I was equally comfortable in my surroundings no matter what they were. Different rooms, different circles, different expectations. I could read them quickly and could adjust without anybody ever really noticing. For a long time I thought that was strength and to be fair adaptability is a strength.
It helps us to build relationships, to move between worlds, to create connections across difference. But here's something I've come to understand. Adaptability was never meant to cost us our own self-recognition. Because fitting in and belonging are not the same thing. Fitting in quietly asks, who do I need?
to be so this works. Belonging gently says you get to be who you are here. One requires self-editing, the other revelation. And if we're not careful, if we spend too many years blending in, adjusting, shaping ourselves to meet the moment, that line between adaptation and identity can begin to blur.
Not dramatically, almost invisibly. Until one day, a quieter question forms beneath the surface. Where do I actually belong? And who am I when I'm not performing confidence, strength or reliability for everyone around me? Now I want to say something important here. This isn't about criticising the versions of ourselves that adapt it.
That part of you wasn't false, was intelligent, resourceful, perceptive, helped you navigate your world, helped you to survive. But there is a quiet downside to living as a chameleon for too long. If you stay in camouflage long enough, you can forget who you are outside of the roles that you play and the masks that you wear.
blending becomes so automatic that it creates a gentle kind of amnesia. You might still be functioning beautifully on the outside, capable, dependable, strong, where somewhere internally a question is waiting to be heard. What is truly me? Which parts of me are authentic and which parts of those that just learned how to survive? Because let's be honest.
Survival mode doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like confidence, like being the strong one, the easy one, the one everyone can rely on. Many, many thoughtful, high-functioning people live there for years without ever naming it until something shifts. For many women, and I know I'm not alone in this,
That shift can arrive in a season of life almost no one prepares us for. We prepare our girls for menage, we prepare women for pregnancy and motherhood, but very few conversations prepare us for the realities of perimenopause. Not just biologically, but emotionally and psychologically as well. Now I want to be clear.
I don't see this as a season of breakdown, I see it as a season of recalibration. Because somewhere in this profound internal reorganisation of everything, our tolerance drops but clarity rises. Pretense becomes harder to sustain. The questions we ask ourselves begin to change.
less what is expected of me more what is true for me. That's not selfish, that's awakening. When my own mind began drifting back across the landscape of my life something surprised me. I thought for sure it would be those moments where I'd stuffed up where I'd got it wrong that would be coming back to haunt me but no.
It was those moments where I knew who I was, where I knew what I was doing. And more than that, those moments where I knew who I was and I liked who I was and I showed up as her, fully, completely, always and everywhere. No shrinking, no blending unnecessarily, not carrying the weight of expectation, just being me.
And what I realised is something I want you to hear very clearly. I didn't have to go searching for her. She was there all along. Just waiting for me to be still enough, honest enough, brave enough to really look. I'm not becoming someone new. I am returning to the woman I have always been when nothing asked me to shrink. Maybe you are too.
There comes a point in healthy adulthood when accommodation stops feeling like generosity and starts feeling like self-erasure. Not angrily, not dramatically, just clearly. And you come to the realization that you can no longer cooperate with your own diminishment. That realization is an ego, it's self-recognition. Now let me offer a gentle distinction because it matters.
This isn't about declaring war on your past self. The chameleon that helped you to survive is not your enemy. She carried wisdom, but she wasn't meant to run the whole show of your life. There's a difference between adapting from wholeness and adapting from self abandonment. One is flexibility, and that's a useful tool. The other is disappearance.
that's never helpful. And once you recognise that feeling of disappearing, your tolerance for it drops. Not with anger, but with awareness. Something else often changes in this season too. You stop managing, or maybe it's more, stop wanting to manage everyone else's emotional reactions. You begin to understand, perhaps for the first time.
Other adults are responsible for their own feelings, not you. You are responsible for honesty, for care, for integrity, but you are not responsible for cushioning every truth. Truth spoken with kindness is not harm, and silence that protects illusion rarely brings peace. So you begin speaking more clearly, not louder than necessary, not sharper than needed.
but just more honestly because there's a profound difference between being accepted for the roles you play and being valued for who you are outside of those. Now I want to pause and speak directly to anyone listening who's standing at the same edge of the same awareness. If something inside you's been whispering, I don't want to hide anymore.
Please hear this, you're not rebuilding yourself. You are re-recognising yourself. Nothing essential about you was lost, perhaps overshadowed, perhaps temporarily set aside for something that felt more important at the time. But it's still there, waiting. And sometimes, it just takes a moment of courage to really see her again.
Let me name something else we don't talk about often enough. Grief reorganizes a person. Life does too. Transitions, loss, motherhood, health challenges, marriage strain, financial stress, changes we didn't choose. None of those experiences are wasted. Even the hardest seasons carry wisdom.
I would never wish pain on anyone but I also know this.
I wouldn't choose not to have those experiences because I wouldn't be who I am doing what I do without them. And I know that I didn't walk through everything that I've lived to live small now and neither did you. The survival years often hold moments of deep joy right alongside the struggle.
They're not detours. They are part of the shaping, part of the becoming. For as long as I can remember, expression has been how I process life. I write, I speak, I sing. And it feels good not to hold everything in. Because, let's be honest, there's just so much we can bottle up before the cork explodes.
and there's a profound difference between expressing carefully and expressing freely, between having a voice and using it. I found mine and now I am using it, not to divide but to illuminate. Because connection doesn't require sameness, only the willingness to recognise ourselves in one another.
We are far more connected than the lines drawn between us would suggest. There is so much more that can unite us than there is to divide us. And that's what we need to focus on because division more often than not isn't useful. Understanding is, curiosity is, compassion is.
This stage of life doesn't feel like an ending to me. It feels like an emergence, a shedding, an invitation to stop asking where I fit and begin asking where am I free to arrive whole? So if you find yourself here, recognizing that you're no longer available to counterfeit belonging, know this, you're not losing your place.
you're finding the right one. You're not becoming difficult, you're becoming discerning. You're not abandoning love, but you are refusing self abandonment and there is a difference. Stop shrinking to preserve belonging. Choose the rooms that let you breathe. And perhaps most importantly, become someone who no longer abandons themselves just to stay in the room.
be the one that changes the room. Because legacy is not simply what we leave behind. It is what we live that outlives us. And living fully begins the moment we stop hiding. If this conversation has resonated with you, with something inside of you, sit with it.
Maybe even share it with someone who might need permission to come home to themselves. Until next time, keep showing up, keep telling the truth of your life and keep making space for the conversations that matters. I'm Sarah Jordan Ross and this has been Taboo Talk. Until next time, take care of yourselves, take care of each other.
And remember, your story matters, so share it. Because yours might be the one that makes a difference to someone else's life.