Why it's ok to not know who you are anymore

What happens when you stop enjoying the things you used to love? When the job that used to motivate you feels weirdly hard to face into each morning, and the hobbies or exercise you used to do without thinking have quietly dropped off like they belonged to a different person. If you’re a working mum reading this and you’ve had that slightly unsettling thought of, I don’t recognise myself lately, you’re in the right place, pop the kettle on.

Because this comes up all the time in conversations I have with working mums, whether that’s in coaching, in Balanced Mum Academy, or in the messages I get after someone’s had a wobble in the car on the way to pick-up. And I know, “I don’t know who I am anymore” sounds big, dramatic even, like the kind of thing you should only be allowed to say while staring meaningfully out of a window in a BBC drama. It can also feel like a personal failing, like if you could just answer that one question you’d be able to fix everything, hold your boundaries, feel more balance, stop being pulled in ten directions, stop flirting with burnout, stop feeling like work-life balance is a joke someone played on you.

But here’s what’s interesting. For a lot of us, the first place we notice this ache isn’t at home, it’s at work. The drive that used to carry you through big goals, projects, challenges, suddenly feels flat. Work that used to light you up feels heavy, or irritating, or like you’re constantly trying to drag yourself towards it. And underneath that, it often isn’t actually about the job being objectively terrible. It’s the feeling that you’re not in the right place anymore, or that you’re showing up as a version of you that doesn’t feel like you. You might be sitting in the role you worked so hard for, but the energy you used to bring has gone, and that can mess with your head because you start asking, what’s wrong with me? You used to thrive on challenges, now they drain you. You start resenting work because it takes you away from your other huge priority, your kids, and then you feel guilty for resenting it, because you’ve got a good job and you should be grateful, and now we’re in a spiral and it’s only Tuesday.

Then there’s the part that working mums don’t always say out loud, but it’s there. You hear that voice in your head that says, I just don’t want this anymore, and it scares you, because you don’t want it to pull you down a path you don’t actually want. Reduced hours, stepping back, leaving work altogether. Not because you truly want to stop working, but because you can’t see how to keep it and also be the mum you want to be without burning yourself out. That’s a particular kind of pressure, because stepping back can feel like failure. Like admitting you can’t cope. Like showing your kids something you never wanted to show them. And when you’ve built your identity around being capable, driven, ambitious, admitting your drive is dwindling can feel like you’re disappearing. Like if I don’t want this anymore, then who even am I?

So let me say this clearly, because it matters. Realising you don’t know who you are anymore, or that your work isn’t lighting you up, doesn’t mean you’re broken. It usually means you’ve changed, and you’ve been so busy proving yourself, ticking off lists, and being there for everyone else that you didn’t notice until your energy and spark drifted away.

That’s how it happened for me. I used to thrive in boardrooms and businesses with massive stretching goals. I loved the pace, the stretch, the challenge. After my second child, the targets I used to chase started to feel heavy and impossible, like they were going to expose me as a complete fraud. I had imposter syndrome for the first time in my life. I doubted myself like never before. And the strangest bit was I didn’t want to keep pushing in the same way, which scared me because work was such a huge part of my identity. It took me a long time to admit the job hadn’t changed. It wasn’t the work culture that didn’t fit. It was me. I had changed after having kids. And that’s not a problem, but it is something you have to process.

And because we’re talking about burnout prevention and work-life balance here, let’s name the thing that often gets missed. When you have kids and a big job, you can end up in this odd place where you’re pulled between two worlds, and in the middle of all that, you don’t feature in your own life anymore. Between work, the kids, the house, the admin, the mental load, the emotional labour, the logistics, you can get to the end of the day and realise you’ve spent it managing everything but you haven’t actually been you. You’ve been roles. You’ve been functions. You’ve been the person who gets it done.

So why does this happen? Why do so many working mums feel like they’ve disappeared, or can’t get motivated by the things that used to work for them? There are a few reasons, and none of them mean you’re failing, or that you need to buy a new planner, or that the answer is a stricter morning routine. This is bigger than productivity. This is why “work-life balance” as a concept can feel so frustrating, because it’s not just about time, it’s about what’s happening inside you.

First, when you had kids, you subconsciously reshuffled your priorities, and that had an impact on how you view yourself. Pre-kids, maybe you prioritised work and family and then hobbies. Now you have a human to raise. Doing that, and doing it well, jumps right up the list of what matters most, and it’s also all-consuming. It brings expectation, responsibility, constant thinking. And many of us return to work and hope we can carry on exactly as we did before, as though nothing changed, because it feels safer, and because we don’t want to be seen as the person who can’t handle it. But in the background, this new priority is there, popping up in your mind all the time.

For me, that looked like sitting in meetings while half my brain was on whether nursery would call. During Covid, they called often, and it was like living in a permanent state of: "will today be the day I need to drop everything?".

It also looked like fighting off thoughts that I needed to pack welly boots tomorrow for forest school, and beating myself up for forgetting an after-school snack 3 hours later in a meeting. That’s what happens when you’ve got competing priorities and more responsibilities taking up space in your mind.

And it ends up shifting you to a task-driven way of thinking. COnstantly driven by "I just need to get this done". You move away from an experience-driven way of living. Considering how you want to feel at the end of the day, or whether you still want the promotion and the responsibility starts to feel like a luxury you don’t have time for.

So you distance yourself from the experience in order to cope, and over time, that becomes disconnection. How you feel isn't important. What gets done is everything. 

Second, your brain changes in motherhood. This isn’t an excuse, it’s just reality. When you have kids, your brain rewires to prioritise the safety and needs of your kids. The part of your brain responsible for scanning for other people’s needs ramps up. So your attention gets pulled outward, to everyone else, and it becomes harder to listen inwardly. That’s why the mental load can feel relentless. You can find yourself thinking constantly about lunchboxes, spare clothes, activities, and also the quarterly review, the meeting, the email you’re replying to at 9pm, and yet you can go weeks without asking yourself what you need.

Some working mums override their need to eat, to go to the bathroom, to sit down, because it feels like there isn’t space for that. You become so good at meeting everyone else’s needs that your own needs become background noise.

It doesn’t just apply to tasks either. It applies to the volume you hear other people’s opinions at. You can end up giving more weight to what someone else might think, while losing sight of what you actually think.... eg. Question: Do I want to send them to activity club over summer? Answer: I don’t know, what would Katie do? WHat do the kids want...they won’t like it, what will that mum at school think who takes three weeks off to be with them??  And on it goes...

That external voice starts playing a bigger role in your decision-making, and it’s no wonder you can feel stretched, and unsure, and like you don’t know what you want. If you don’t actively keep the connection to your own voice alive, the externally driven approach becomes normal. And then, when you ask yourself, what do I want, it feels like a jumble of other people's thoughts are loesely swimming in your head. 

Third, you’ve trained yourself to keep pushing. Before kids, so much of our identity is built on achievement. Promotions, projects, goals. You learn to override your natural signals because you can. Tired? -->Push through. Overwhelmed? -->Push harder.

And then you become a mum and that habit doesn’t stop, it doubles. Suddenly you’re pushing at work and pushing at home. You become someone who is constantly on. So if you slow down or take time for yourself, there can be this weird internal judgement that you’re less valuable, less dedicated, less capable. Even though logically you know that’s nonsense, it still shows up as a feeling in your body. Rest can feel uncomfortable. Stopping can feel like danger. And then you start accepting that this is the only way, this is just how it is.

Work hard equals success. Push through equals value. And that doesn’t work in motherhood, and it doesn’t work when you’re juggling more than any one person can realistically be expected to.

So what does all of this mean, if you’re a working mum trying to avoid burnout, trying to find fulfilment, trying to make work-life balance feel less like it was only something that existed for the generations before us?

Well, if you've realised you're feeling this - It means, yu changed and that's ok. 

That feeling is a response to pressure, responsibilities, and a person who has changed, but hasn’t yet shifted their expectations and choices to match. And yes, it takes getting used to. Because we’re not taught how to update ourselves. We’re taught to keep going.

The way through it is not to become more disciplined, more organised, more productive, more “on it”. The way through it is to rebuild the connection between who you are now, what matters to you, and how you’re actually living your life. To peel back what’s driving you to keep pushing and doing everything for everyone in order to feel some sense of satisfaction, when that approach is often the very thing pushing you further away.

And there’s good news here, because you’ve kind of trained yourself into this point, and you can train yourself out of it too. You can get clear on who you are now and what matters, and you can dial up your own voice so you can hear your needs and your opinions above the noise of everybody else. Not who you were ten years ago. Not what your old mentor did. Not what your mum would have you do. They’re not you. Your life is different, your responsibilities are different, and the version of success that made sense before kids might not be the version that makes you feel good now.

When you do this work, you start seeing the practical effects straight away. You can know, with certainty, that you love your work, and also accept that you want to do pick-up twice a week, and stop feeling like you have to justify it as though it’s a moral weakness. You can leave an email unanswered at the weekend and not spend the whole Sunday feeling twitchy and guilty. You can stop treating every decision like a test. You can feel like a version of you that you recognise again. That’s what balance starts to feel like in real life. Not perfect. Not calm all the time. But steadier. More yours.

And if you’re reading this thinking, okay, but how do I actually do that, the starting point isn’t a boundary rule like “no email after 6pm”. The starting point is knowing what you’re protecting and trusting yourself enough to protect it, even when the old pressure tells you to keep proving.

That’s the work I do inside Permission to Choose and Balanced Mum Academy. It’s a step-by-step process to clarify who you are now, what matters to you, and the skills to live like her more of the time, in the middle of normal life, not on a retreat with a notebook and uninterrupted sleep.

So if you’ve been feeling lost, flat, pulled, guilty, stretched, if work-life balance feels impossible and burnout feels like it’s quietly waiting for you if you keep going like this, please hear this as a warm, steady voice from someone who knows: you’re not broken, you’ve changed. And there is always a route back to yourself.

If you want to go deeper with me, you know where to find me.

Any you can find out more about Permission to Choose and Balanced Mum Academy® here.