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Have you ever looked at an old picture of yourself and thought like there she is. That's the woman I remember. it may not have actually been a a time where you felt like you looked better, but when you look at it, you just feel like it looks more like you.
Right. And so there's somewhere along the way, like a lot of us women in midlife, we start feeling disconnected from ourselves. we assume it's because our face has changed or our body has changed. And there's a lot of things in life that has changed. And I think there is something deeper happening, and we're gonna talk about that today when I read a piece of my upcoming book, Crowned in Beauty. It starts with a little girl in a dress twirling in a room.
Right? Because I think she may be able to explain why you don't feel like yourself anymore and how to begin finding your way back to her. Okay.
Hello Gorgeous!
Are you feeling weighed down by the physical and emotional changes that come with midlife? and Feeling lost and wondering who you are now that your kids are grown? Do you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and barely recognize the woman staring back at you?
Welcome to Making Life Beautiful Again where midlife women find the guidance and encouragement you need to navigate this unique season with confidence and grace.
Hey, I'm Michelle. An empty-nester, grandma, and Jesus lover. I know firsthand what it feels like to wrestle with self-doubt and the inner critic during midlife.
I tried every beauty trick in the book, hoping to feel better, but the mirror kept reflecting my fears: 'Am I still beautiful? Do I still have a purpose?'
Then one day, I had a breakthrough and fell in love with the incredible woman in the mirror…the woman God designed me to be and I’m here to share it all with you.
So if you’re ready for a simple way to step back into your shoes, and live midlife like you mean it – this podcast is for you!
So grab your water bottle, lace up your walking shoes, and let’s get started making life beautiful again!
So welcome, beautiful. I'm Michelle, and I'm so excited that you're here for episode 101 of Making Life Beautiful Again. And this one feels a little bit different, for me especially, because today I am actually opening up about my book that's coming out to let you hear a little bit about it. I know it can be hard to
Pre-buy a book when you don't know what it's about. So Crown and Beauty, it's been living in my head for a little while and in my prayers and in my computer and in a lot of conversations with some of you and my husband for a long time. And so there are so many parts that I could have chosen for this first book reading and book tasting, but I kept coming back to chapter one because before we talk about Esther.
And the 12 months of her beauty treatments and skincare and all of the things that I do cover in the book, and stepping into our calling, we have to go back before all of that, before life gets complicated and and we th thought that it something was wrong with our bodies, and I think some of us we, we find ourselves in positions where we're like, That color's too bright for me. I don't look good in red.
You know, that dress is too young for me. there's a lot of rules. And so I want to take us before all those rules, right? To the girl who simply just enjoyed being herself. I want to go back to her, and as I read this, I don't want you to be listening to my story. I want you to notice wherein these memories start coming up for you. and in chapter one, it's called, Do you remember the last time you twirled?
And it begins in Esther chapter two, verses five through seven, where scripture first introduces us to Hadassah. That's the young, that's her name when she was a young woman before she became known to us as Esther. So I'm gonna ahead and start there. And I write, Every girl has that dress, the one that made her feel beautiful when she spins. Maybe yours was pink with tiny sparkles that caught the sun and made you feel like you were spitting gold. Or blue and soft.
Flowing behind you like a cape while you pretended you could fly. And it actually it might not have been fancy at all, just a handmade down with a faded hem, but your little girl mind, it was everything. And that dress made you feel something, something free, beautiful, full of possibility. And it made you walk a little taller with your shoulders back and your chin up, like you were something worth watching. And you can feel it now if you let yourself go back to that memory. The weight of
the little skirt as it lifted up around you like a soft fluttering circle and the sound of your own laughter filling the room, the way your hair whipped across your face when you didn't even care. I loved my little pale green dress. It had the kind of fabric that swished and whispered with each turn, arms stretched out wide. I can still picture myself in the middle of the living room, bare feet on worn carpet. The fabric made a cool breeze against my skin as I spun.
And I twirled until dizziness overcame me and I collapsed on the floor in a fit of giggles.
so my dress and I were inseparable best friends. I bet yours was too. You never once wondered if you looked okay before stepping into view, and children don't check mirrors before running into the world. They don't suck in their stomachs or worry about what anyone thinks. They trust who they are without.
You didn't realize it then, but that little girl believed she was lovely long before anyone told her so. She felt it in her body. Beauty at that age isn't something you earn, it's simply something you embody. God built beauty into your nature the same way he built strength into boys. Boys wrestle and climb without being taught, and they want to fight and defend. And you, you twirled. You wanted to be lovely, to be seen, to delight.
Nobody had to teach you. It was already there, woven into the very fabric of how God made you as a woman. And sometimes we forget that beauty is not primarily
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about appearance. It is first about aliveness, the way you once moved through the world without hesitation or apology. That is the original design. So I want to stop there before I read another part, because I do have another part for you, because this is the idea I really want us to sit with today.
When we say I don't feel like myself anymore, it's very easy for us to blame what we can see, right? You know, our skin's changed, our bodies changed, our hair changed, our kids grow grew up, life doesn't look like it did 15 years ago, right? And obviously all those things do matter. It it really does weigh on us emotionally. So I'm not going to devalue that, but I spend a huge part of my work helping women understand and care for their bodies and the faces that they have now.
And I think that sometimes we look at those old photographs and misunderstand what we're grieving, We look and we and we say, look at my skin, right? But maybe what's really catching our attention is how freely we were smiling and how we glowed, right? And then we also think like, look how thin I was, you know, and then we may actually be looking and noticing.
that we're not thinking about our body every second of of living it when we're in that picture, We were comfortable inside of our skin. And so, the truth of it is, you know, you may not actually even care about wanting that metabolism back. Of course a lot of us do, but you you what you're missing is how easily you said yes to life and to your dreams and your passions. You know, you're missing the woman who who bought the bright shirt because she liked that
color and she didn't care what the world thought about it, right? The woman who danced when a song came on and didn't care what other people thought who were in the room, That woman who got into that family photo without negotiating with herself, you know, a lot of us we step out and we offer to take the photo so we don't have to be in it, or we offer to get in the back row so we can hide and just our little faces popping through. Right. And so this is where I don't think most of us actually want to become our 25 year old self again.
Right. I I s I certainly don't. And and I know the things now that she didn't know, right? I survived things that she hadn't faced yet. I have people in my life right now, many of them are you watching, that she hasn't even gotten to meet yet, that I would never want to go back and miss. Right. So I don't want to go backward. And and I hope that you don't either. But there are things that that girl carried.
That I don't want aging, responsibility, disappointment, or insecurity to take away from me, She had curiosity, she had delight, she had a willingness to be seen and say yes to God without hesitating about if she was capable or was good enough, right? Her sense that something was beautiful was about to happen was running pretty high, She still had hope. And so maybe feeling like yourself again isn't about
recreating that old version of you, but maybe it's recognizing what's true in her that still belongs inside of you and you want to reclaim, right? And so this is why I don't want to begin with Crowned and Beauty with the Queen Esther side of her story. I want to begin with Hadassah because we usually meet Esther, which is already in that part of that story that we all know and remember, you know, where she's in the palace. She's already had the beauty treatments.
She was chosen for the crown, but then she has courage. That's the part we all remember. But Esther had a life before any of that. And scripture tells us she had lost both of her parents and was being raised by her cousin Mordecai. And we don't get a detailed childhood biography there, right? And so I want to be careful about not creating a storyline that didn't exist because the Bible doesn't tell us. But there are things that we can simply
extract and and be inspired by from what the scripture says. And so, you know, it's important that before she was Esther, the queen, she was Hadassah. And before the crown, she was a little orphaned girl, right? And so when I started studying her story that way, I started looking at my own life in a different way. You know, who was I before certain s experiences told me who I needed to become.
Right. So she she had a a lifetime before she was even an orphan, right? Where she had her parents. So what did I believe before fear got a vote in my life and and helped me hide? You know, what did I enjoy before I became self-conscious about enjoying it? You know, what did I dream about before I knew enough to tell myself that this is unrealistic? And I know that that's a storyline we tell ourselves often because as we've gotten older, we have more experience to tell us.
what the rules are, you know, what's real, what's unreal, and so that's where chapter one goes. You know, and I'm gonna go ahead and skip a couple of pages because I want you to have plenty left over to discover and read on your own when you pick up the book. But there's another section in chapter one that I want you to hear. So later in the chapter I write about the women whose stories fascinated me when I was little.
And especially the women I read about in the in my little children's Bibles, so that's where we're picking up. Okay. There was one illustration of Esther I kept coming back to in a children's Bible that lived on my little white bookshelf. She stood in the center of the page, wrapped in royal robes, her chin was lifted and her eyes were steady. She wasn't just beautiful, but she was brave. And somehow beauty and bravery belonged together. I would stare at that picture and wonder if a girl like me, ordinary and barefoot.
I was being invited to see myself in those women, to believe that if God could use women like that with messy stories and uncertain beginnings, then maybe God could use someone like me too. That's when the seed of divine purpose began to stir in me. I wanted to live a story and a life full of
significance and beauty. You've had moments like that too.
Maybe it wasn't a Bible story at all, and maybe it was a real woman standing right in front of you, a grandmother who told you that you were going to do great things someday, and you believed her because of the way she looked at you when she said it. Or a teacher who pulled you aside after class and said you had a gift. You don't even remember what the gift was supposed to be. You just remember the way your chest felt when someone with authority noticed you just for being you. Something inside of you stood up straighter that day, even if you didn't
show it on the outside. Maybe a woman in church carried herself in a way you couldn't stop watching. She wasn't the loudest person in the room, but when she walked in, the atmosphere changed. Her clothes weren't expensive, but they were chosen with care. Her skin glowed in a way that made you think she knew a secret that you didn't and you thought to yourself, even as a young girl, I want to be like her someday. What you were watching was a woman at home in her skin.
A woman who was outside matched something settled and sure on the inside. In fact, it might not have been a person at all, just a quiet knowing that settled in your heart one afternoon when you were playing alone. A feeling that came without words, like a promise pressed gently into your heart, the sense that your life was meant for something more than ordinary, that God had handpicked you for something specific, even if he hadn't told you what it was yet. Wherever that moment happened,
Whatever form it took, it planted something in you, a seed of identity, the whisper that you were created with a purpose, a belief that beauty, bravery, and calling could all live in the same woman. And for a while, you carried that belief easily. It didn't feel heavy or complicated. It was just part of being you. When I look back at that little girl beside her bookshelf, the one who loved every story where an ordinary girl was chosen for something greater.
I realize God planted those longings for a reason. Those childhood dreams were the whisper before the calling. I believe most of us sensed something true about ourselves long before the world complicated the message. We saw beauty as an expression and understood strength, not as a power over someone, but as a presence within us. We believed we were made for something meaningful, and that belief wasn't naive, it was original. It was the first draft of your identity.
Written by God before anyone else tried to pick up the pen. Okay, that's where I'm gonna stop for now because I want you to read the rest. And of course, we have another book tasting for you next week. But but now we have to come back to the the question: where did she go? The one that we lost, right? Because if that little girl carried all of this delight and possibility, how do we become midlife women standing in front of a closet saying?
Nothing looks right on me, I'm just not gonna
go. And how do we go from running into the world without checking ourselves first to taking six selfies and then deleting all of them? Right? Like how does the woman who once thought, I wonder what God will do with my life, start to think, maybe my best years are already behind me. And and there's where the rest of part one goes in the book, because something happens between the girl who twirls.
and the woman who's hiding. And it it's it isn't always one giant dramatic moment that happens between that step from A to Z, right? Sometimes it's comments made by people that they don't even realize they're saying or or a church message that we might have misunderstood the heart of it or comparing with someone and we didn't feel like we we measured up. and it can easily be a pile of things like rejection, getting older, gaining weight.
becoming exhausted after raising our kids and taking care of everyone else, or simply just spending years being needed in one particular role so long that we stopped actually seeing ourselves outside of that role. I know that's that was me for a long time. And so eventually that woman in the mirror, she becomes unfamiliar, right? And and unfamiliar does not mean she's gone. And so I want to I want to help correct us from saying that we've lost her.
and so that's one of the reasons why this matters so much to me in midlife when I'm coaching with other women, because midlife is not the end of our life. It's just the beginning. It's the becoming moment that we have waited for our whole lives, right? When we finally have enough experience and know-how to put them together and something special happen with the Lord, what he's done in us.
So we're not digging through old pictures like trying to resurrect a woman who doesn't exist anymore. Like we're asking something better. And is what did God put in me before fear, shame, responsibility, disappointment, or age started editing me? And what does it want to carry forward into this version of me now that has this experience? So I get to take that inspiration and passion and bring my experience together and do something with it. Like, how neat is that, right?
So I want to give you something very simple to work on this week. I didn't create a worksheet this week. You're welcome. But I actually wanted to do something that felt a lot lighter for you than that. Because I want you to think about that little girl version of you that's twirling before you immediately jump to those painful memories or everything that went wrong. I want you to give yourself permission to remember something good. Like, what did she love?
What did she feel alive? When I say beauty is a lot about aliveness, you have to think about what what made her feel alive? You know, so it might have been the twirling dress, it might have been climbing trees or singing wildly with a handbr a hairbrush in your hand in the bathroom. Like, did she write stories, craft things, play the piano, put on shows for her family, spend
hours outside decorating and moving furniture in her room until she just got tired of it, right?
What did she know about herself before she learned to question it? And so I don't want you to go out and start these hobbies after answering these questions. What I'm asking you is, what is underneath those answers? Was she creative, adventurous, tender, bold, curious? Right? Did she love beauty and want to put on her mom's lipstick? Right? Did she love bringing people together?
Did she believe her life was going somewhere? Like, so when you get those answers, I want you to see what's underneath all of that. Like, where can that part of me have a little more room in my life right now? That's it. Like, that's why I didn't create a worksheet. But I will have in the Facebook group, Making Life Beautiful Again, I will have some conversation starters in there this week, just so that we can kind of all be in it together. It it's helpful, I think, for us to see that there's other women who
experience what we did or who can cheer us on when and we can remember later when you have forgotten about this, right? And so before beauty became something you evaluated, what made you feel beautiful, alive, playful, and completely yourself? Like that's gonna be one of the questions in the Facebook group. And and so if you have an older picture of yourself that you feel embodies that part of you that you can see the adventurous one, the creative one, the the mischievous one.
We would love for you to post it in there if you are open to it, right? Because we want to see those clues that bring us back to that little girl who twirled. I wanna see what she loved, you know, because I think sometimes we can look at those pictures in a completely different way. And instead of saying, I wish I looked like that still, I want to what do I recognize in her that is still in me that I do want to open and crack that door again and carry on forward, right?
And so if this conversation has hit something inside of you, this is exactly why I wrote Crowned in Beauty, right? This book started as a book about Esther's beauty preparation. And then somewhere in all of the writing and co-laboring with the Lord, I realized we couldn't start with oils and beauty treatments. Like we had to start with the woman. before we can start talking about preparing the skin, your body, your mind, your habits, you know, your appearance, we have to remember.
who who we're preparing, like the starting point and where you're actually trying to go. So this book isn't available yet for pre-order, but there is a wait list that's open. So if you want to know when that pre-order begins and opens, and be among the first who can get their hands on it, join the wait list and I'll put the link out there on the YouTube and podcast platforms. I would love to have you guys join me for that book launch week, September 16th is when it comes out.
So maybe next time when you see an old photo of yourself, I want you instead of feeling the ache of I miss her, I want you to get curious, Don't rush. go straight to looking at her in the eyes. And what do you see? What's bringing her alive in that moment, right? What made her laugh? What did she think was possible, right? You you've grown so far beyond who she is in a most beautiful way, right? And some of what she carried.
was never supposed to leave who you are now. And so we're just trying to bring those together, She's not disappeared. We just have to go go looking for her. And sometimes looking back at those photos can do that, right? but this is where that becoming begins. So next week we're opening Crowned Beauty again for another book tasting. And this time I want to take you a little bit deeper into what happened between that girl who twirled and the woman who started questioning whether her beauty was
even something she was allowed to care about. Because in chapter one, it helps us remember who we were before life got and and beauty got complicated. But the next conversation starts uncovering how it got complicated in the first place. So I hope that you guys will join me for part two of the book tasting.
Hey beautiful! I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend who wants to find a better way to live midlife!? Also, please leave a quick review for the show on Apple podcasts. It lights me up to know this podcast is helping you!
Okay, time to go hang out with my grandson and live my best midlife adventure. I’ll meet you back on Saturday for another episode. Bye!