You can listen to the full episode here: Listen to Ep 25: Outgrowing Your Old Identity

There are moments in life when you suddenly realize something about yourself has changed. The person you used to be no longer feels like the right fit, but the new version of you isn’t fully clear yet either.

In this episode of Anchored & Alive, Blaze reflects on what it feels like to outgrow old identities, roles, and expectations. Through stories of grief, aging, and life transitions, we explore how personal growth often includes both joy and loss and why identity naturally evolves through the seasons of life.

🌿 In this episode we explore:

• why identity shifts can feel disorienting or emotional
• the grief and freedom that come with outgrowing old roles
• how major life events reshape who we believe we are
• why growth often means releasing parts of ourselves
• how seasonal thinking helps us understand identity changes
• learning to trust who we are becoming

Hello friends. I am so excited to talk to you this week about what it's like when you start recognizing a new aspect of yourself that's really starting to flourish and all of the feelings that come with that because it's almost like a transplant shock where you realize that you're in a new environment and you've become this different thing, but you didn't fit there and you fit here. It's disorienting and weird.

And sometimes we're not really sure what to do with all that because we're storytelling creatures and we have a whole history of ourselves and the way that we see ourselves and who we've been and where we think we're going.

And sometimes when you wake up and you look at yourself and go, "Oh! I'm actually this thing." There's both relief and joy, but there can also be a kind of heartbreak over, well...

What was I before? Have I lost that part of myself? What things am I missing about the old me and what does the new me want? And there can be some confusion.

And it's okay. I think that there can be both grief and joy as we recognize new aspects of ourselves or new seasons of ourselves, and that all of that can be acknowledged and is good for us.

One of the things that I'm definitely processing and going through in the last few years has been who am I as like a middle-aged person?

Because up until 40, I was thinking, okay, I'm like pretty young and youthful and I'm doing my thing. And then I hit 40 and I was like, I still doing pretty great, but very much comparing myself to my younger self.

And now in my mid 40s and I'm thinking about who am I really though now, and what do I really want and where might I be going, and what is this season of my life about?

And is who I was before appropriate now? Do I want some of that? Do I miss some of that? And what things am I just faced with having to deal with anyway, because there's nothing I can do about them?

So over the years, like this decade's been hard. There's been a lot going on. There's been death and there's been loss and there's been change and there's been growth.

I've gone from being like the mother of a toddler to the mother of a preteen and everything that comes with all of that.

Losing my brother really made me, I don't know. Different for sure, remembering so much about who I was as a kid and who we were in our 20s and 30s and 40s, and then just suddenly he's gone.

And me thinking, "Okay, I hadn't anticipated a future without him."

And that's hard. And the very act of losing him and everything that happened, you know, with my family and my childhood family following his death. All of it shifted and all of it changed and that's difficult and it makes me different and that's okay.

I find that I go through different phases of feeling now that are new to me because I hadn't, I never had grief like that before.

And it comes and it goes and it ebbs and flows in ways that are predictable and surprising to me at the same time.

And I feel like my depth of experience and feeling is deeper. My tolerance for bullshit is so much lower.

My desire to contort myself to fit other people's expectations has gotten much smaller.

And I think it's, I can't separate anything from anything else. So some of it is the losing of him.

And some of it is just the sheer fact of aging and realizing where I am in the season of my life.

And I think also when you hit your late 40s, mid/late 40s, you realize like you're mortal, you're not, I don't have forever.

And if I don't have forever, and it's been very apparent that, you know, we don't, we don't have forever.

I don't want to waste time not being who I am anymore. And I don't.

It's not that I think that I deserve to enjoy every aspect of every moment of every day of my life, but I do want to feel purpose in it.

And that purpose shifts and changes with time. So there are moments where you can wake up and realize, "I've outgrown the me that needed to track everything and try to self-improve all the time." Like, that's the big one that I'm facing.

And I don't know what your revelation for yourself is about the old version of yourself versus the person that you're becoming. And I think it is different in every season of your life.

Where I am right now, I don't want to contort myself to fit idealized version of womanhood or parenthood or beingness anymore, not for anyone else, not to look good, not to... like to me it just feels like I can't...

I can't try to do that stuff without feeling like I'm joking with myself or wasting my own time anymore.

And there was a season in the past where I did want to push so hard and I had a fantasy that if I did take really good care of myself, somehow I'm going to live to be 120 and it's going to be fabulous the whole way through.

And for me, that's shattered and, you know, I wish I still had that. I mourn that desire because it feels so hopeful and exciting and I remember how it felt to be so energized by that and inspired by it.

And yet I don't feel that way and being honest with myself.

Okay, here I am, so what can I do with that? I sometimes think of kind of wanting to write a thank you to myself of who I have been in the past and all of the things that I've tried and done.

I think when you find yourself there where you've kind of outgrown a whole phase of your life and you're moving into a new one.

It's okay to really slow down and take your time there and even in the Spring with all of the energy, even with so much happening.

It's okay to not have to push or prove anything.

Maybe that's just like the feminine energy wanting to come through to say it's okay to just allow and to be and to give yourself enough time experiencing yourself and the way that you truly are to understand what that even is.

I gave myself, like, all of 2025, essentially. Yeah, almost all of it, to just be.

To figure out who am I after that kind of a loss.

Who am I without that anchor in my life and what's important? And where am I going? And what relationships do I have that I want to nurture? And what do I have to give? And what's natural and what's not?

And I'm so grateful for everything that came before that was so nurturing and able to hold me through that period of time.

And I'm grateful to myself for how much I have pushed to understand who I am and where I relate in the world and to create a life and a space where I feel very supported and nurtured and important here and I like contributing to it and I feel motivated about that.

So there are aspects of me that have remained the same, even through everything, but they express differently now.

And I think when anyone goes through a major loss or a major life shift where things change,

There's this stripping down of who you are that you recognize yourself and also don't. And it's disconcerting and you're like, wait, what happened?

And in some areas, it's like there's this deepening of truth and there are some things about you that you realize are just going to always be true, even in pain, even in joy, all the way through.

And there are some aspects of yourself that served for a while and then just no longer seem relevant and it's so weird.

And it's almost like a tree losing some leaves or something or a whole limb shears off and you're like, "Alright, I guess that's not part of the shape of me anymore." But I'm still me, the trunk is still here, the roots are still there.

Maybe there's, you know, a storm or whatever going on. But the shape of me changes. And that seems appropriate to even just looking at the course of your lifetime.

We're not the same. I'm not the same as I was as a child. I won't be the same in another 20 years.

That's so hard to cope with as a human being to recognize that.

You know, here we are, flesh and blood, and we don't stay the same and we can't stay the same.

Even when we take really good care of ourselves, things are going to change. I think living in a multi-generational house, I'm faced with that all the time, like looking at extreme youth and elderliness and us as we are in the middle and all of the different aspects of lives and how much what's asked of us is different in all of those moments.

So if you're feeling like your identity has shifted in some way or you've outgrown something that was important in the past,

If you locate yourself now in time and go, "Well, what's really going on right now and what season am I in? What's appropriate?"

It makes a lot more sense and it can help you feel a lot more whole and healthy and not like you've lost something but more like you're occupying a position in time and space and that you're still you,

But you're you in this situation, in this time, in this moment. And for me, I find that very comforting and nurturing to just say, "Here I am and I'm going through life, going through events."

And I can continue to show up to my best capacity, however that is, and some days I have a lot more to give and some days I have less and that's fine.

But I don't generally regret who I am and what I've done and how I show up because I've been consistently moving towards being clear about who I am and what I care about and who I care about and trying to do that well.

And I think in general, mostly succeeding. And I'm grateful for that.

I think that sometimes when you release identifying yourself with a prior role, there's this great sense of freedom and excitement that comes with that as well. It's interesting because I can...

Yeah. As I'm talking about this, I think about death and loss and how like I didn't have a choice with that and...

I'm going to always grieve the loss of that relationship and it's not really gone for me, but it...

It is what it is. It's hard to talk about.

But there are other things in life, like shifting careers and things like that, that when I lost that identity as like the Blaze who was a tattoo artist or the Blaze that was owning the art gallery and tattoo studio,

That was really hard. And when I realized that I was more than just that, that that was an aspect of myself, but I am not only gallery owner or only tattoo artist like I'm Blaze and Blaze can tattoo and can have in art studio but I'm not that.

It's a lot harder for me to go Blaze had two brothers and now I have one.

And that's hard. That one's hard.

I hadn't really anticipated this episode particularly diving into grief and loss, but it seems like where I'm at, so I'm gonna share it.

It's really difficult to lose someone. And I think until you have...

It's hard to even imagine, and it does change you. And...

Even if you haven't lost anyone yet, like I'm realizing like we all lose people. It does happen eventually. None of us escapes that. That's part of being human and it sucks.

And then we all have to redefine ourselves after losses and find what's true and what resonates and find our rhythm again and our relationships. I think we do map ourselves out against the relationships and spaces in our lives.

And it's easy to take all of that for granted because in a way we kind of have to in order to function, you know, like you know who your people are and you know where they are and you know who you reach out to and who you talk to on a regular basis.

And then if one of those just suddenly stops and isn't moving with you through time anymore.

It's very disorienting and difficult. And it can be like that also with roles that we play and careers and spaces. I think in...

I can't compare them, but there is an echo of it. Like moving through your life, going through high school and college and all of that, like when you... reach the end of something like that that you've been so involved in and a part of.

And then suddenly it's just like there's a day where it's done. Yeah, you graduated, go on, move on and do something else.

That's disorienting too. And you're not really sure who you are when you're not in that role and you're not in that space anymore. And it takes a while to find your footing and to figure out how everything that came before still is a part of you and is holding you going forward. So I guess in that way it is similar, but it...

We all know it's not the same. There's something also really beautiful about embracing aspects of yourself when you realize that you're ready to embrace something that's important to you or that you've always been, that you've held back on.

So I think when you realize like, oh, I've always pretended that I like... being extroverted or being loud or going out on stage and then one day you give that up. There's the grief of like, "Well, wait, what am I if I'm not doing it?" But there's also like a relief and a giddiness around like, "Oh my God, I don't have to do that anymore. I'm so relieved. I'm glad. I'm ready to be something else."

It could be the opposite for you. You could be like, "I've been hiding my whole life, and I want to get out on stage, and I want to do all this stuff. And that's who I really am." And when you finally get out there and do it,

There's this sense of unease, like, "Oh no, this is new and I'm not sure how I'm doing it, but yeah, here I am and I feel so alive and energized."

I guess that's some of the energy that I'm feeling is this contrast between what's gone and what's available now.

And maybe that's seasonal too is that you look out and you see everything starting to bloom and you realize what's here now and it's growing on top of everything that once was.

Whether it's the same thing coming back up in a new version or it's a brand-new thing that's growing.

But nothing really went away. It's just cycles. So that feels pretty profound.

I find a lot of comfort in nature and seeing the, you know...

There is energy you've had and there's growth and there's beauty and there's so much adjustment, like nature is so flexible and it finds its way.

It finds its way and I think that's some energy that I really love embracing at this moment in time is that all things are possible. Well, maybe not. That's a lie. All things aren't possible, but things are possible. They're shaped by what's available and nothing went away.

I guess that's more true, isn't it? Like, it's beautiful and broken and sad, and it's also inspiring and cool and amazing and beautiful and gorgeous that we can't really separate ourselves from our past and our stories and our triumphs in our tragedies and all of that. It all exists. And we get to decide.

And here we are, and we have opportunities available. And we can look at what kept us safe in the past and what we're ready to shed and let go of and what we want to move towards and what we want to embrace going forward and all of that is a really exciting thing.

I like it. Thank you for being with me through this episode. I really appreciate you being here and sharing these thoughts with me.

And if anyone wants to reach out or has something to say about their own experience with this, I would be honored to hold it and appreciate where you are and what you're dealing with, what you're growing through and where you're at right now.

I wish you an absolutely fabulous and more uplifting week. And I think next week we're going to talk about how to live our lives without trying to explain it to anyone else because that seems pretty right on.

Alright, you guys have a great week and I'll see you next time.

🌿 Related Episodes

Continue exploring this Spring series on growth, boundaries, and personal transformation:

🌿 Why Setting Boundaries Feels So Uncomfortable at First (And Why It Gets Easier)
Learning to protect the time, energy, and creative projects that matter to you.

🌿 How to Activate Spring Energy Without Burning Out
Using rising motivation in sustainable ways instead of pushing yourself into exhaustion.

🌿 The Urge to Reinvent Yourself: How to Change Without Burning Out
Why spring makes us want to change everything — and how to experiment without overwhelm.

🌿 Restlessness Is Not a Crisis — Navigating Early Spring Energy Without Blowing Up Your Life
Understanding the emotional turbulence that often arrives in early spring.

🌿 Start Living in Rhythm with Your Energy

If you’re beginning to notice how your energy, emotions, and motivation shift through the seasons, the Living in Rhythm Starter Kit will help you work with those patterns instead of fighting them.

Inside the free kit you’ll find tools to help you:

• understand your emotional rhythms
• reduce burnout and overwhelm
• align your goals with seasonal energy
• build sustainable routines that actually support your life

Download the free guide here.