Keep the Joy. Leave the Twerk.

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Millennial women. To the front, please.

Apparently we’re all having a midlife identity crisis. Shocking! Right?

Well, not really. Everyone calls it that. That’s not what I see. Story time.

You know how we millennials are deeply unserious. So there I am, dancing (albeit mindful of the knees), singing a trendy, catchy song that planted itself in my brain whether I wanted it to or not. Just doing my thing.

My 17-year-old walks by. Gives me the scowl-and-side-eye combo, which I’ve since learned has an actual, official name now: cringing.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“What do you mean? What does it look like I’m doing?” I say, and keep on keeping on.

He’s still watching me. I go, “This is joy!”

“Yes. I see that,” he says. “Why?”

“Why? What do you mean why?” I say.

“Where is it coming from? On a random Tuesday morning?” he asks.

“First of all, Momma got a life too, boy.” (cue the baby boy reference)

He smiles. Nods his head in approval. Walks away, letting me know I’m doing too much on his way out. “Keep the joy. Leave the twerk,” he says.

😒

Here’s the part that’s harder to post about.

There’s a guilt that comes with this. My kids didn’t get the joyful, dancing-in-the-kitchen version of me for a long time. They got the tired one. The stretched-thin one. The one running on fumes and doing her best, which some days wasn’t much. So there’s a strange, uncomfortable feeling in becoming this lighter version of myself now, like I owe somebody an explanation for showing up different than I used to. Like it’s almost hypocritical to be joyful now, in front of the same kids who lived through the version of me that wasn’t.

I don’t have a tidy bow to put on that. I just think it’s honest to say it out loud instead of pretending the joy showed up clean and simple, no complicated feelings attached. Healing comes in messy layers, and so does showing up different for your kids than you used to.

The who-even-am-I era

A lot of us stopped checking in with ourselves somewhere along the way. Nobody sits down and decides one Tuesday to stop having a personality. It happens the boring way. One deadline, one commitment, one everyone-else’s-needs-first at a time, for years, until you look up and the people or the role you built your identity around don’t need you in the same way anymore.

Empty nesters know this one. So do the moms whose toddlers turned into teenagers who’d rather text their friends than talk in the car. So does anybody who left a career, ended a relationship, or watched a role they poured themselves into quietly change without anybody sending the memo.

You built an entire self around being needed a certain way, and then that way ended. Now you’re standing in the space it left, asking who you are now. That’s the whole story, really. Just what happens when the thing you built yourself around moves out.

It’s Not a Crisis. We’re Simply Embracing the Woman We Should’ve Been All Along.

Somebody, at some point, decided a woman past a certain age is supposed to talk about her “best years” like they’re a finished project. Like the whole point of your thirties and forties is grieving your twenties. I need us to stop saying that out loud, even as a joke, because I don’t actually think it’s true and I don’t think we believe it either.

My best years being behind me would mean I peaked while I still thought skipping meals was a personality trait and had no idea how a 401k worked. Respectfully, no.

Reclaiming yourself when you don’t know who you are

Here’s the actual hard part nobody puts in the caption. How do you reclaim a version of yourself you can’t even picture anymore?

You don’t start with a five-year plan. You start small and honestly kind of dumb. What song makes you want to move your body for no reason. What you’d order if nobody at the table was watching your choices. What you used to love before it stopped being “practical.” That’s data. That’s the trail leading back to you, and it’s usually been sitting right there this whole time, just disguised as something too small to count.

The trap that I fell in all these years was thinking I had to have the whole thing figured out before I was allowed to feel joy again. I didn’t. I just had to notice the moment when it showed up. Mine was dancing badly in a kitchen on a random Tuesday.

Becoming HER isn’t staying a TikTok trend

Trends fade when the algorithm moves on. This is sticking around because what’s underneath it, women finally naming that they built themselves around everyone else’s schedule for way too long, isn’t going anywhere. Call it a long overdue correction.

So if you caught yourself doing something a little too joyful for a random Tuesday, and somebody gave you a look for it, good. Keep doing it. Keep the joy.

Lose the twerk, though. My knees have filed a formal complaint.