A Currently Rebranding Journal Entry

Who Am I Now? Reconnecting With Yourself When Your Nest Is Empty

I keep coming back to the sound of it. Not a sad sound, exactly. Just quiet. The kind of quiet that used to mean everyone was finally asleep, and now just means my once busy, hectic, overly scheduled life has changed.  My nest is empty.

I am not sure when I noticed it fully. It seemed to creep up on me over time.  When my daughter first went to college, I tried to pivot my focus to when we would visit the college for a football game, scheduling all those doctor appointments I had put off, organizing files and tossing the school and sports files I no longer needed, but there was always an odd feeling in my gut.  No lunch to pack. No practice schedule on my mind — just a house that suddenly had more quiet than I knew what to do with.

When I finally let my mind settle from my old routines, I gave myself time to really sit with what I was feeling.  It wasn't sadness, exactly — yes, I missed my daughter. I missed her friends coming in and looking for snacks. I missed the sports family we'd spent every weekend with for years. But what I realized I missed the most was… me. 

It came to me slowly, but that feeling in my gut I couldn't put my finger on for a few months — it was this: I felt like I didn't have a purpose.  I had put aside small pieces of myself to focus on the roles I was honored to have.  So I turned my frown upside down and started being deliberate about rediscovering who I was.  And what I truly discovered… I'm Still Me! 

I have a whole life left to live and I can design it any way I want.  I don't have to worry about schedules dictated by coaches, I don't have to have a full dinner available every weeknight, I can go have wine with lunch on a random Saturday and then come home and take a nap.  My life is mine and I'm Still Me.

If you are sitting in a similarly quiet house right now, I want to tell you the thing I wish someone had told me first: you are not losing yourself in this empty nest. You are just finally finding the space to find yourself again.

The Question That Started This

"Who am I now?" didn't arrive as a dramatic crisis, even though it can feel like one at 6:47 a.m. with a cup of caffeine and no reason to have set an alarm. It arrives quietly, in the space where a role used to be.

For so long, the question wasn't allowed room to breathe. There was always a more urgent one waiting: what does she need, what does he need, what does the house need, what forms need filled out,  what homework project will be sprung on me this week, what does the calendar need. Somewhere in the daughter, the wife, the mother, the professional, the caregiver, the friend, I stopped being asked what I needed. Eventually I stopped asking myself.

So when the house emptied out, it didn't just empty of noise. It emptied of the questions that used to organize my days. And in that silence, an older, quieter question finally got to speak: who am I, underneath all of that?

I've talked to enough women in this season now to know I'm not the only one who feels almost sheepish admitting this. We're supposed to be sad about the kids leaving, and we are. What we don't always say out loud is that some of the disorientation is about us — about realizing we don't actually know what we like anymore, what we'd choose if no one needed anything from us for an entire afternoon. That admission can feel selfish. I've decided it isn't. I think it might be one of the most honest things we can admit in this stage of life.

Why This Hits Identity, Not Just Emotion

I used to think empty nest syndrome was just sadness with a name — something you white-knuckle through until it passes. But the more I've sat with it, the more I've realized it's not primarily about grief over the role ending. It's grief over having built an identity so entirely around that role that when it changed, I genuinely didn't know what was left.

That's not a flaw. It's just what happens when you pour yourself into something for twenty years without leaving a little aside for yourself. Women whose sense of self became fused with caregiving tend to feel this transition the hardest — not because they loved too much, but because they forgot, somewhere in the loving, that they were allowed to keep some of themselves separate from it.

I want to be honest about something else, too: this stage isn't loss. There's freedom in it. Some mornings I catch myself feeling almost giddy about an empty afternoon, and then immediately feeling guilty for feeling giddy, like I'm not allowed to enjoy a house that used to be full. If you've felt that particular contradiction — grieving and relieved in the same breath — you're not doing this wrong. You're doing it honestly.

The reality is we should be shouting from the rooftops—we did it!  We raised responsible, caring, functional contributors to society who are on the precipice of doing amazing things.  They're actually doing exactly what we should be doing too—exploring who they are, what they want, and how they want to show up for themselves now that they have independence.

The feelings you are exploring are not just about the kids leaving. It's about every title underneath that one quietly asking for attention too. The marriage that got reorganized around carpool schedules and permission slips for two decades doesn't automatically know how to be a marriage again once those things disappear. The friendships that survived on group chats about game schedules don't automatically know how to talk about anything else. The identity that got its shape from being needed constantly doesn't automatically know what to do with a day that doesn't need something from you.    That's not a sign anything is broken. It's just proof of how completely we built our lives around a role that was always, quietly, temporary.

The Day I Started Paying Attention

I didn't have a plan for reconnecting with myself. I was actually in the shower.  Not the quick shower to start your day kind of shower—but the long one—the everything shower.  I had a lot of time to think while I was washing the hair and conditioning—the everything shower takes a long time.  I had this phrase pop in my head…“I'm Still Me”.  It actually had a feeling to go with the thought.  It felt almost like a permission slip had been signed. 

What I noticed, once I started paying attention, is that reconnecting with myself didn't happen in one big gesture. It happened in small, almost embarrassingly ordinary places — a habit, a room, a morning, a conversation. Not a checklist. Just the places where I'd quietly gone missing.

One habit. I used to write. Not for anyone, not for a deadline — just longhand, in a pretty journal, before the house woke up or after the house went to bed. I hadn't done it in probably twelve years. I picked it back up not because I had something profound to say, but because it was mine before it belonged to anyone else, and I wanted to know if it still felt that way. It did. I've since found that a simple guided journal — something with a prompt already waiting on the page — makes this so much easier to return to than a blank notebook that dares you to know what to write. (This is one of the small tools I'll link to below, for anyone who wants a place to start — affiliate link, and something I actually use and love myself.)

One room. I had a pretty big closet in my craft room that I had filled with every single thing from my daughter.  And I mean EVERY SINGLE THING.  I had her daycare daily report sheets—I could have actually told you how many times my daughter's diaper was changed when she was 6 months old on a specific date.  What was in the closet isn't as important as what I did.  I went through it all and saved what was important or truly sentimental. That full closet went down to two bins with lids.  I will give it to her when she gets her own place, so she can decide what she wants.  The closet I thought was holding the memories was just holding the stuff. The memories, it turns out, we carry with us. 

One morning. For years, my mornings belonged to everyone else's schedule before they belonged to me. Now I've rebuilt the first hour around a version of myself I'd almost forgotten.  I make a cup of hot tea in my favorite mug.  I catch up on email and other important things.  I put on a red light mask and scroll through Pinterest.  Then I exercise for 30 minutes.  Seems fairly normal, but for me, I would have skipped these things or got it over with to start my day.  Now I take the time to truly enjoy having this time that's solely mine.

One conversation. I called a friend I'd let drift for the better part of a decade, not because anything was wrong, just because life got loud and she got quiet, the way friendships sometimes do when you're in the thick of raising people. We talked for two hours. I hung up feeling like a slightly more complete version of myself than I'd been that morning.

The Conversation I Wasn't Expecting to Need

The one I didn't plan for was the conversation with my husband. Somewhere in the busyness of raising our daughter, we'd become excellent co-managers of a household and slightly rusty at being just two people in a house. Our conversations for years had a functional shape — schedules, logistics, who was picking up whom. The first few weeks of the empty nest, we sat down to dinner and found ourselves oddly quiet, like two people who'd forgotten how to talk.

So we started small. We took walks together.  We went to lunch at a nice restaurant and had a glass of wine. It felt weird at first, almost like we were doing something wrong. But a few weeks in, I caught him telling me about something from work that had nothing to do with logistics, just because he wanted to tell me, and I remembered that we used to talk like that all the time, before the family calendar got so loud. If your marriage feels like it's been running on autopilot for the last decade, I don't think that's a sign something is wrong. I think it's just another closet in the house that's ready to be reclaimed.

None of these were reinventions. I want to be clear about that, because I think "reinvent yourself" is exactly the wrong instruction for this season. I wasn't becoming someone new. I was remembering someone I'd set down for a while — what brings her peace, what makes her curious, what feels beautiful to her, what gives her purpose. The habit, the closet, the morning, the conversation weren't a to-do list. They were just the places I happened to start listening again.

What I'd Ask You, If We Were Talking

If you're in this season too, a season where you are trying to reconnect with yourself, I don't think I have advice, exactly. But I have questions — the ones I asked myself, before I had any answers at all.

When did you last do something simply because you wanted to, with no one else's needs attached to it?

Is there a room or closet in your house that's still organized around a life stage that's already over?

What did your mornings look like before they belonged to everyone else's schedule?

Is there a person you let drift, not because anything went wrong, but because there wasn't room left in the day?

I don't think these questions have tidy answers. I think they're meant to be sat with, maybe journaled through, maybe returned to more than once as the answers shift. That's really the whole idea behind writing these entries the way I do — not as instructions, but as an invitation to explore your own version of the same question. If you want somewhere to actually write through these, I've put together a short companion piece for exactly that (more on it below).

Curiosity, Not Certainty

If there's one thing I'd tell a friend struggling to find herself, it's to let curiosity lead instead of waiting for certainty. I didn't know if I'd still like writing before I sat down with that notebook. I didn't know how I would feel after cleaning out 14 years of stuff in a closet. I didn't know if my husband and I would have anything to say to each other on those walks. I tried anyway, because curious felt like a much more honest starting point than certain.

I am very new to this journey of finding me again. That's fine. Reconnecting with yourself isn't a project with a success metric. It's closer to dating yourself again — you try things, some of them stick, some of them make you laugh at how wrong you were about your own taste, and either way you learn something.

The Guilt of Liking the Quiet

I want to name something I don't see talked about enough: sometimes the empty nest doesn't just bring grief. It brings relief, and the relief comes with its own strange guilt.

There were nights, before, when I fantasized about a house this quiet — and now that I have it, some part of me feels like I'm not allowed to enjoy it, like enjoying it means I didn't love the noise while I had it. That's not true. Loving the years that are over and liking the season you're in now aren't opposites. You're allowed to miss the noise and love the quiet. You're allowed to grieve a role and feel lighter without it. Both things get to be true at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out.

If reconnecting with yourself means anything, I think it means giving yourself permission to feel all of it without needing it to resolve into one tidy emotion. Some days it's loss. Some days it's freedom. Most days, honestly, it's both, arriving in the same hour.

I've started thinking of it less like a stage of grief and more like a season of renegotiation — with the house, with the calendar, with my marriage, and mostly with myself. Renegotiation doesn't require a verdict. It just requires you to keep showing up to the conversation, even when you don't have it figured out yet.

What I Know Now That I Didn't Know When This Started

I still don't have a finished answer to "who am I now?" I'm not sure that question is supposed to finish. But I know a few things I didn't know before I started paying attention.

I know that reconnecting with yourself after the kids leave home doesn't require a five-year plan or a total life overhaul. It requires a habit, a closet, a morning, a conversation — one at a time, in whatever order finds you first.

I know that underneath every title I've ever held — daughter, wife, mother, professional, caregiver, friend — there was a person who existed before any of them and is still here, a little quieter than she used to be, waiting to be asked what she wants.

And I know that maybe, in this new quiet, she's exactly who I've been looking for.

Every morning, I still check Life360 to be sure my daughter made it home safe.  Maybe that will stop someday, but for now just seeing her ping in her college home brings me comfort. That weird feeling in my gut hasn't gone away entirely, and I don't think it's supposed to. But it sits next to something else now, too — a kind of quiet curiosity about the rest of my own life, the part that isn't finished just because hers got started. That's the part I didn't expect. Not relief instead of grief, but curiosity growing up right alongside it.

If you're in this season, sitting with your own version of the quiet house, I'd love to know: what's the one habit, closet, morning, or conversation you're starting with? Tell me in the comments, or find me on Instagram — I read every single one.

And if you want a place to actually sit down and work through your own answers to these questions, rather than just reading mine, I've put together a downloadable companion for exactly that.

If you want to explore more intentionally and have a guide to help you navigate finding yourself again.  Explore our 31 Page Guided Journal, I'm Still Me.  While there is a charge for this Resource, it is a true exploration piece that can define your blueprint for finding yourself again.

You can find both pieces in the free Resources section of the website.   

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*This is part of an ongoing series of journal entries on reconnecting with yourself, one season at a time. If this one found you at the right moment, you might also like some of my other musings.  Come back, as my Journal still has many empty pages.