April 24, 2025 • 26 mins
In this episode, Erin Keating joins Dr. Diane to discuss the transformative power of self-reflection and midlife reinvention. Erin shares her journey from artist to corporate executive and how a battle with COVID-19 led to profound realizations about her marriage and career. Hospitalization served as a wake-up call, prompting Erin to reassess her life priorities. The conversation delves into the unique challenges women face in their forties, exploring strategies to navigate success and desires. Erin emphasizes the importance of writing for self-reflection and reclaiming sexual agency. The episode concludes with insights on reconnecting with one's sensual self and embracing life changes.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I wanted to tell the truth Mhmm.
About what my life felt like.
Couple months before my fiftieth birthday andit was the second wave of Omicron, but I still
came down with COVID.
And I got it really hard.
It got really quiet there for a couple of days.
I had this feeling of, like, how did I gethere?
(00:21):
How did this how is this my life?
I'm Erin Keating, and I am the founder ofHatter Than Ever.
We are a company that makes hot stuff for women40.
There is no map for us as women in our forties,fifties, and sixties.
There has never been a generation of women assuccessful as we are.
(00:44):
But no one was talking about pleasure.
No one was talking about laughter.
No one was talking about joy.
No one was talking about self expression,saying the truth.
All of that became possible because I had thisopen space in my life to reinvent.
(01:07):
And pleasure isn't just sex.
Yeah.
No.
Pleasure is about letting yourself experiencethe world through your senses.
The first thing I always encourage people to dois
Hey, everybody.
Quick break at our episode to talk to you aboutour sponsor, My Libido Doc.
One of the things that we truly believe is thatgreat sex is available to everyone, but we just
(01:33):
have to learn how.
So head over to our site to get your free copyof our ebook, Five Steps to Mind Blowing
Orgasms and Romance.
Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sexlife around, rev up your engines, and fall in
deeper love and passion with yourself and yourpartner.
(01:56):
So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you willfind that ebook there for download.
Now back to our show.
Hi, lovers.
Hi, lovebirds.
Welcome back to another episode on the lounge.
I'm your host, doctor Diane.
And as you just heard, I have an amazing guest,a new friend of mine, Aaron Keating, and we are
(02:18):
talking about what happens at midlife.
Like, what happens where so many people so manypeople talk about midlife crises, right, but it
doesn't have to be a crisis.
I think midlife is a point in time where peoplestart asking questions and, you know, kind of
go into the unknown around what is this part ofour life supposed to look look like?
(02:38):
What is our purpose?
What is even supposed to feel like?
Right?
Our needs, our wants, our preferences, ourdesires, so many things change at this point.
So I have an expert for you guys today to chatabout that, and we're gonna start by welcoming
her and hearing.
She's a really, really beautiful and alsointense story of how she got into her work.
(03:00):
So welcome, Erin.
Thank you so much for being here, and let'sstart by just telling us a little bit about the
process that you went through with gettingsick, with everything, you know, you've told me
offline where you really decided to, you know,reinvent yourself and say, what does this next
part of your life, you know, look like?
Will you tell us about that?
Absolutely.
(03:20):
Well, thank you, doctor Diane.
I'm so happy to be here, and anything with theword libido in the title is for me.
You know?
That's part of my midlife reawakening.
You know, I, I was a bit of a, like, prepschool rebel in my twenties.
You know, I had I had sort of been a good girland done all the things right that you're
(03:45):
supposed to do.
I got good grades.
I went to the right college.
I, I launched a career in my twenties, but Iwas also sort of artistic and creative.
And, I was so excited to be an adult.
Right?
I was so excited in my twenties to be an adult,and I really gave myself time to sort of
(04:08):
explore what what excited me and what moved me.
And I was a writer performer.
I thought I was gonna be on Saturday NightLive.
Like, that was my big dream.
And, you know, as my twenties went by, I foundthat it was challenging to reconcile my
artistic and kind of counterculturalaspirations with, the idea of being a grown up.
(04:35):
And like a lot of people, and especially women,I started to make decisions that would lead me
toward a capital a adult life.
Yeah.
Right?
So, I sort of pivoted from being a writerperformer and, producing shows in Downtown New
(04:55):
York.
I'd like to say I spent fifteen years in abasement theater.
You know, I really earned my chops that wouldlend themselves to a career in television, and
that is what I ended up doing as I sort ofheaded into looking for a career with a capital
c.
And so in my late twenties, early thirties, Istarted my career.
(05:19):
And then in my mid thirties, I started lookingfor a spouse because I knew I wanted to have
kids.
So then I had the career, and I had thehusband, and then I did fertility treatments,
and then I got a pair of twins, fourteen yearsago.
And, I started to build this life that lookedlike the kind of life that I was raised to
(05:41):
want.
Was it the life that I really truly wanted?
No.
I wanted a more bohemian existence.
I wanted, not to actually ever have to getmarried, but to love someone so much that we
were just renewing our commitment to each otherevery day in in deed and in action.
(06:02):
But I married someone who wanted to getmarried.
So I was like, okay.
And I, instead of sticking down the artistpath, became a producer and an executive
because I wanted to make a living.
And sort of by a thousand cuts, I think a lotof us sort of go from our youthful ideals, our
our, artistic inclinations, our morefreewheeling, expressive selves, because we're
(06:31):
trying to figure out how to get all the thingsthat, you know, our mothers promised us that we
could have everything, that we could have itall.
And so I started to build that life.
And then in my forties, I was like, wow.
I've been striving for so long.
Now I actually started to have the career, andI had the kids, and I wanted to live into the
(06:55):
promise of my own success.
But as time went on, I realized that themarriage that I was in was not the marriage I
wanted to be in, and that the career had avery, very high cost.
But I had bought a house, and, you know, I had,I had a nanny to pay, and I had a title to
(07:18):
fulfill, and I had a role to play in my in mydomestic life.
And I was really, like I I picture it as, like,just you know, it's like a plate of pancakes
just, like, stacking up, stack up.
And then I'm the waitress who's, like, walkingaround going, I hope this doesn't all fall
over.
You know?
And I say waitress because I'm in service ofeveryone else.
(07:41):
Right?
And those pancakes are not really for me.
They're for the people in my life or for thestructures that I'm serving.
And about, six months before, maybe a couplemonths before my fiftieth birthday, I was
working from home.
We were, just getting through COVID, throughthe pandemic, and it was the second wave of
(08:07):
Omicron.
I was vaccinated, and, but I still came downwith COVID.
And I got it really hard.
And I thought, well, this is just like a badflu.
I'm just gonna work through it.
So I was still on conference calls, and I wasstill on Zooms, and I was still doing all the
things that I was supposed to do, hacking up alung, going on mute.
(08:29):
And eventually, it got so bad that I, needed tocheck myself into the hospital.
And I got to the hospital, and they were like,right this way.
We don't understand why you have this so bad,but, you need to come here, and you need to
stay here.
And so I spent a long weekend at UCLA Hospital.
(08:52):
And, you know, they they they wheeled me in awheelchair down to the end of a long haul into
a private room.
And I thought to myself, oh my god.
This is like a hotel.
Like, here I am.
It's quiet.
I had an excuse finally not to be responsive towork.
(09:14):
No one could ask me for anything.
All the demands that had been pushing me towork while I was sick, to run my household
while I was sick, to you know, you have littlekids, like, they're the demands are intense,
You know?
And it got really quiet there for a couple ofdays.
(09:37):
And my room started to fill up with flowers andand well wishes from people, and the biggest
bouquet was for my work.
And that is a metaphor that will stick with mefor the rest of my life.
Like, those were the people who cared the mostabout whether or not I got well.
And, they hooked me up to all the IVs.
(09:58):
They gave me all the drugs.
I started to get better.
I started to just think my own thoughts in thequiet of that room.
And when I came time to leave the hospital, mynow ex husband, he had had a really hard time
(10:18):
managing the kids for two or three days withoutme.
Yeah.
And I think he had gone into a bit of a spin,thinking about what his life would be like if I
was no longer there, and he was pissed.
He was pissed.
You know, sometimes men have, like, two gears,angry and horny.
(10:39):
Not a lie.
We had gotten to the place where we had onegear, and that was not horny.
Yeah.
And so I left the hospital to so much angerfrom my ex about me suddenly being unavailable
for the tasks that I had signed on onto, youknow, the the the plate of pancakes that he
(11:03):
expected to be served in his life.
And I had this feeling of, like, how did I gethere?
Yeah.
How did this how is this my life?
I had never had a brush with mortality.
I had never been sick.
(11:25):
I am not a morbid person.
I don't think about death.
I don't think about illness.
I think about, like, what can I get done, andhow can I accomplish my goals, and how can I
make sure that people in my life are taken careof, and that everybody likes me?
Like, you know, those were the things that weremy concerns.
And I started to really feel the feelings thatI had been pushing down.
(11:53):
And I started to acknowledge some truths that Ihad not been willing to acknowledge.
The first being the marriage was no longerworking, and that we had taken vows that he had
wanted us to take, that in sickness and inhealth, and this was the in sickness part, and
(12:17):
he wasn't able to show up for me in the waythat I needed to be shown up for.
I needed to be cared for
Yeah.
Instead of being the one doing all the caring.
And when those tables were turned and thingswere inverted, it didn't work.
And so we decided to go to couples therapy.
I turned 50 within that period.
(12:40):
Yeah.
And six months later, he moved out.
And six months after that, I got laid off formy big fancy corporate job.
Wow.
A lot of messages coming in so many ways.
Everything happened in sequence so fast.
(13:01):
Yeah.
And I was left with a blank slate for my life.
And I had a little bit of money in the bank,and I thought to myself, what do I wanna do?
Who do I wanna be?
And the first thing that occurred for me isthat I was obsessed with podcasts, and I wanted
(13:23):
to reclaim my own voice.
And I had been licensing my voices tocorporations for twenty years.
I had been making them tons of money.
I had been really been evangelizing in serviceof these corporate missions that I believed in,
that I was on board with, that I was being paidfor.
But given my own choice, I wanted to tell thetruth Mhmm.
(13:48):
About what my life felt like.
Because I suspected that I was not alone inthis generation of women who did everything
right, who climbed the escalator.
And then I got to the top of the escalator, andI looked around, and there was nothing.
There is no map for us as women in our forties,fifties, and sixties.
(14:14):
There has never been a generation of women assuccessful as we are.
There literally in the history of planet Earth,there has not been a more capable, educated,
professionally accomplished, doing the work onourselves, evolving, you know, generation of
(14:34):
women.
And I was, like, looking around and seeing lotsof stuff about menopause, lots of stuff about
elder care, lots of stuff about how you can fixyour body and fix this and fix that, but no one
was talking about pleasure.
No one was talking about laughter.
No one was talking about joy.
(14:56):
No one was talking about self expression,saying the truth.
Like, we've been shouldering these burdens forso long.
We have been carrying our companies, ourfamilies, our marriages.
And I think a lot of us are in a similar boatas I am, which is as the estrogen started to
(15:18):
drop, which happens to all of us in ourforties, and my kids stopped needing me every
second of every day.
Now they're 14.
You know?
They're not they don't have the needs they had.
Yeah.
When I first started thinking, could probablyget out of this marriage.
That would probably be good for me.
When they were five, that was when I startedhaving those thoughts.
(15:42):
But there was no way.
They were too little, and I didn't wanna be asingle mom.
And then suddenly, like, all of that becamepossible because I had this open space in my
life to reinvent.
And I am in it.
I am not on the other side of reinvention.
(16:03):
And I'm not sure I ever will be, and I'm notsure any of us ever will be.
But, you know, one of the first things I wantedto do was reclaim my voice, so I started
interviewing incredible women who hadexperienced similar pivots in their lives or
who had expertise about things that I wascurious about.
(16:23):
I started, talking about relationships and loveand dating and sex, and I started talking about
career reinvention and, identity and how from,you know, overloving and overextending yourself
and how to create boundaries and all the thingsthat I need, those were the conversations I
(16:46):
wanted to have.
And women started to respond and say thank youfor being honest, for being straightforward,
for being vulnerable.
I am not an expert.
I am on the journey.
I'm just more deeply invested in theseconversations and bringing them to other people
as they're happening.
And I'm sharing honest too.
(17:08):
And and being honest.
And being honest, which I think is really hard.
Yeah.
Well, even I mean, it's such a great story.
Right?
I feel like it's so relatable for so manywomen.
And, you know, when we're talking about thisthis thing around, like, okay, being really
honest, like, that point when you're in thehospital and you're actually saying, like, what
(17:30):
do I wanna do?
Like, how have you found in conversations withother people?
Like, have you found any ways that or any,like, similar patterns of helping women
actually get really honest with themselves withthat question?
Because I I feel like we're not oftentimes ledor even told it's okay as women to really get
(17:53):
honest with ourselves around what do we want,and everything has this attachment around,
like, but I should be this, and I should bethis, and and it's the list of shoulds.
Right?
Yep.
So do you have anything that you've seen comeup with, you know, people you've interviewed
with your own experience to, like, help womenactually start with that place of getting
deeply honest with themselves of what do Iactually want my life to look like?
(18:20):
I think, you know, there's a 12 step saying, wegrow at the speed of pain.
And I really believe that it's hard to makemassive personal change if you are not
suffering enough.
But
how much is enough?
Right?
So
(18:41):
Hey, everybody.
Quick break out our episode to talk to youabout our sponsor, My Libido Doc.
One of the things that we truly believe is thatgreat sex is available to everyone, but we just
have to learn how.
So head over to our site to get your free copyof our ebook, Five Steps to Mind Blowing
(19:04):
Orgasms and Romance.
Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sexlife around, rev up your engines, and fall in
deeper love and passion with yourself and yourpartner.
So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you willfind that ebook there for download.
Now back to our show.
(19:25):
The first thing I always encourage people to dois write.
You know, just get a pen and a piece of paperand check-in with yourself and write, if I'm
being honest, and then take it from there.
Yeah.
We all have things that we feel like if weadmit them to ourselves, we either have to live
(19:54):
with that truth and not change, or we have tochange.
Yeah.
Change is uncomfortable, And we are taught notto be uncomfortable, to to avoid uncomfortable
feelings, to avoid awkward conversations.
(20:14):
We are also taught to throw ourselves under thebus and sacrifice ourselves for the status quo
and for, you know, keeping the plates spinning.
And if you are suffering enough in one area ofyour life or another, like, for me, the
(20:35):
starting place was sex.
I had not had sex for ten years, and I washeaded into menopause.
I was getting, night sweats.
I would wake up with, like, wet thighs.
How disgusting.
I mean, really?
It has to be wet thighs?
Thanks.
Why?
Well, why there?
(20:55):
Yeah.
I was not able to even bring myself to anorgasm, like and I had been very orgasmic and
very sexual when I entered my marriage, youknow, but through attrition and through, things
that eroded the trust in the relationship andthrough oversensitivity, and and everybody
being so touchy about everything, me included,you know, this the intimacy part of our lives,
(21:21):
like the physical intimacy part dwindled tonothing.
And for me, that had been such an incrediblyimportant way of being in my body and being
connected to myself, that that was the firstthing I wanted to get back.
And so really, like, getting honest with, like,actually, this is super important to me, was
(21:45):
the first step on my journey of, you know,reinventing for right now how I do
relationships, how I do sex, how I how I engagewith my body, how I live in my own skin.
And I, I have a friend I made through thepodcast named doctor Juliana Hauser, who said
(22:07):
to me in one of my interviews, if you can findyour agency in the bedroom, you can find your
agency in the rest of your life.
And if you can find your agency in the rest ofyour life, you can find your agency in the
bedroom.
That these things, this being able to ask forwhat you need to prioritize your own pleasure
and your own experience and your own skin andyour own connectedness and how you wanna be
(22:31):
connected with somebody else in intimatemoments.
Like, I was so hungry to get that back Yeah.
That that was where I started.
And, I it's been a wild it's been a wildadventure for the last three years, you know,
(22:53):
that has included lovers and boyfriends andonline doms and all kinds of things that, that
have made me feel like I am back to beingmyself, and I'm connected to the vital, sexy
woman that I was when I got on that escalator,you know?
(23:16):
Yeah.
And and if I can do it, if I can reconnect withmyself, and then use that juice to fuel the
rest of my life, other women can do it too.
I am not extraordinary in this way.
Well, I love your story, and I do think you areextraordinary from a standpoint of everything
(23:37):
you've, like, like, committed to.
Right?
Like Yeah.
A major commitment to say, hey.
I'm going to want my life to be different, andI'm actually going to show up.
And I think I think it's important to celebratethe, you know, extraordinary in all of us.
And I know there's I appreciate that.
I'm not saying
I'm not awesome.
I'm just saying, like, what I am doing isavailable
(24:00):
to Go to everybody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes sense.
I I do know that, like, there are womenlistening to because I to this, and I hear this
in my own work that women get to a certainpoint and they're like, well, pleasure is not
that important to me anymore, I don't need toengage in sex, and I think this happens a lot
(24:20):
around, you know, the forties, the fifties, Ithink it happens due to a lot of different
reasons, some of it is menopause, some of itis, I think people just get to a point where
it's just like going through the motions andwe're doing all the shoulds and
It's the sex they're having.
It's not sex in general.
Right.
And and that's why I think there's a level ofthat or the sex they're not having.
(24:41):
Right.
Right?
So I was so disassociated from myself.
I was ahead with no body.
I mean, I really was walking around like, theonly valuable things in my life come from my
neck up.
Right?
Like, the important things I can handle with mybrain.
So then what do you say then to, like, tobecause I think that's a very common thing.
(25:01):
Right?
We get so much in almost this, like, masculineversion of the feminine, which Mhmm.
Is super linear.
It's solving problems.
It's not in our head and not in our bodies, andwe just start to lose that connection in this
process to our femininity, to our pleasure, toour joy, our laughter, all these things you
named earlier.
(25:22):
Mhmm.
So what do you say then?
Like, if somebody like do you talk to womenever in, like, your work where it's like
somebody is I've just decided that that's nolonger important to me.
Pleasure is no longer important to me or sex isno longer important to me.
Do you have any, like, messages for anybodythat's kind of in that mindset of, hey, this is
(25:42):
just not for me anymore?
Sure.
I mean, I think the first question is, has itever been good?
Yeah.
Right?
Because if
because if you've never felt if you've neverhad great orgasms, if you've never felt, like,
just that honey dripping through your veinsfeeling of, like, good, sexy vibes and good,
(26:05):
you know, oxytocin, like, then I don'tunderstand what you would want to go back to if
there's nothing to go back to.
Right?
It is available to us, though, and the pleasureis so good for us.
I had, doctor Nan Wise on my podcast
(26:25):
I love her.
Who, you know, studied the relationship betweenthe brain and sexuality.
And if you're a person who's made motivated byhealth, like, you light up those pleasure
centers in your brain, you are working on yourlongevity, you are working on your well-being,
you are working on your cognitive skills.
(26:47):
And, you know, if you if you're a person who'slike, well, you know, that's the
I wanted to tell the truth Mhmm.
About what my life felt like.
Couple months before my fiftieth birthday andit was the second wave of Omicron, but I still
came down with COVID.
And I got it really hard.
It got really quiet there for a couple of days.
I had this feeling of, like, how did I gethere?
(00:21):
How did this how is this my life?
I'm Erin Keating, and I am the founder ofHatter Than Ever.
We are a company that makes hot stuff for women40.
There is no map for us as women in our forties,fifties, and sixties.
There has never been a generation of women assuccessful as we are.
(00:44):
But no one was talking about pleasure.
No one was talking about laughter.
No one was talking about joy.
No one was talking about self expression,saying the truth.
All of that became possible because I had thisopen space in my life to reinvent.
(01:07):
And pleasure isn't just sex.
Yeah.
No.
Pleasure is about letting yourself experiencethe world through your senses.
The first thing I always encourage people to dois
Hey, everybody.
Quick break at our episode to talk to you aboutour sponsor, My Libido Doc.
One of the things that we truly believe is thatgreat sex is available to everyone, but we just
(01:33):
have to learn how.
So head over to our site to get your free copyof our ebook, Five Steps to Mind Blowing
Orgasms and Romance.
Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sexlife around, rev up your engines, and fall in
deeper love and passion with yourself and yourpartner.
(01:56):
So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you willfind that ebook there for download.
Now back to our show.
Hi, lovers.
Hi, lovebirds.
Welcome back to another episode on the lounge.
I'm your host, doctor Diane.
And as you just heard, I have an amazing guest,a new friend of mine, Aaron Keating, and we are
(02:18):
talking about what happens at midlife.
Like, what happens where so many people so manypeople talk about midlife crises, right, but it
doesn't have to be a crisis.
I think midlife is a point in time where peoplestart asking questions and, you know, kind of
go into the unknown around what is this part ofour life supposed to look look like?
(02:38):
What is our purpose?
What is even supposed to feel like?
Right?
Our needs, our wants, our preferences, ourdesires, so many things change at this point.
So I have an expert for you guys today to chatabout that, and we're gonna start by welcoming
her and hearing.
She's a really, really beautiful and alsointense story of how she got into her work.
(03:00):
So welcome, Erin.
Thank you so much for being here, and let'sstart by just telling us a little bit about the
process that you went through with gettingsick, with everything, you know, you've told me
offline where you really decided to, you know,reinvent yourself and say, what does this next
part of your life, you know, look like?
Will you tell us about that?
Absolutely.
(03:20):
Well, thank you, doctor Diane.
I'm so happy to be here, and anything with theword libido in the title is for me.
You know?
That's part of my midlife reawakening.
You know, I, I was a bit of a, like, prepschool rebel in my twenties.
You know, I had I had sort of been a good girland done all the things right that you're
(03:45):
supposed to do.
I got good grades.
I went to the right college.
I, I launched a career in my twenties, but Iwas also sort of artistic and creative.
And, I was so excited to be an adult.
Right?
I was so excited in my twenties to be an adult,and I really gave myself time to sort of
(04:08):
explore what what excited me and what moved me.
And I was a writer performer.
I thought I was gonna be on Saturday NightLive.
Like, that was my big dream.
And, you know, as my twenties went by, I foundthat it was challenging to reconcile my
artistic and kind of counterculturalaspirations with, the idea of being a grown up.
(04:35):
And like a lot of people, and especially women,I started to make decisions that would lead me
toward a capital a adult life.
Yeah.
Right?
So, I sort of pivoted from being a writerperformer and, producing shows in Downtown New
(04:55):
York.
I'd like to say I spent fifteen years in abasement theater.
You know, I really earned my chops that wouldlend themselves to a career in television, and
that is what I ended up doing as I sort ofheaded into looking for a career with a capital
c.
And so in my late twenties, early thirties, Istarted my career.
(05:19):
And then in my mid thirties, I started lookingfor a spouse because I knew I wanted to have
kids.
So then I had the career, and I had thehusband, and then I did fertility treatments,
and then I got a pair of twins, fourteen yearsago.
And, I started to build this life that lookedlike the kind of life that I was raised to
(05:41):
want.
Was it the life that I really truly wanted?
No.
I wanted a more bohemian existence.
I wanted, not to actually ever have to getmarried, but to love someone so much that we
were just renewing our commitment to each otherevery day in in deed and in action.
(06:02):
But I married someone who wanted to getmarried.
So I was like, okay.
And I, instead of sticking down the artistpath, became a producer and an executive
because I wanted to make a living.
And sort of by a thousand cuts, I think a lotof us sort of go from our youthful ideals, our
our, artistic inclinations, our morefreewheeling, expressive selves, because we're
(06:31):
trying to figure out how to get all the thingsthat, you know, our mothers promised us that we
could have everything, that we could have itall.
And so I started to build that life.
And then in my forties, I was like, wow.
I've been striving for so long.
Now I actually started to have the career, andI had the kids, and I wanted to live into the
(06:55):
promise of my own success.
But as time went on, I realized that themarriage that I was in was not the marriage I
wanted to be in, and that the career had avery, very high cost.
But I had bought a house, and, you know, I had,I had a nanny to pay, and I had a title to
(07:18):
fulfill, and I had a role to play in my in mydomestic life.
And I was really, like I I picture it as, like,just you know, it's like a plate of pancakes
just, like, stacking up, stack up.
And then I'm the waitress who's, like, walkingaround going, I hope this doesn't all fall
over.
You know?
And I say waitress because I'm in service ofeveryone else.
(07:41):
Right?
And those pancakes are not really for me.
They're for the people in my life or for thestructures that I'm serving.
And about, six months before, maybe a couplemonths before my fiftieth birthday, I was
working from home.
We were, just getting through COVID, throughthe pandemic, and it was the second wave of
(08:07):
Omicron.
I was vaccinated, and, but I still came downwith COVID.
And I got it really hard.
And I thought, well, this is just like a badflu.
I'm just gonna work through it.
So I was still on conference calls, and I wasstill on Zooms, and I was still doing all the
things that I was supposed to do, hacking up alung, going on mute.
(08:29):
And eventually, it got so bad that I, needed tocheck myself into the hospital.
And I got to the hospital, and they were like,right this way.
We don't understand why you have this so bad,but, you need to come here, and you need to
stay here.
And so I spent a long weekend at UCLA Hospital.
(08:52):
And, you know, they they they wheeled me in awheelchair down to the end of a long haul into
a private room.
And I thought to myself, oh my god.
This is like a hotel.
Like, here I am.
It's quiet.
I had an excuse finally not to be responsive towork.
(09:14):
No one could ask me for anything.
All the demands that had been pushing me towork while I was sick, to run my household
while I was sick, to you know, you have littlekids, like, they're the demands are intense,
You know?
And it got really quiet there for a couple ofdays.
(09:37):
And my room started to fill up with flowers andand well wishes from people, and the biggest
bouquet was for my work.
And that is a metaphor that will stick with mefor the rest of my life.
Like, those were the people who cared the mostabout whether or not I got well.
And, they hooked me up to all the IVs.
(09:58):
They gave me all the drugs.
I started to get better.
I started to just think my own thoughts in thequiet of that room.
And when I came time to leave the hospital, mynow ex husband, he had had a really hard time
(10:18):
managing the kids for two or three days withoutme.
Yeah.
And I think he had gone into a bit of a spin,thinking about what his life would be like if I
was no longer there, and he was pissed.
He was pissed.
You know, sometimes men have, like, two gears,angry and horny.
(10:39):
Not a lie.
We had gotten to the place where we had onegear, and that was not horny.
Yeah.
And so I left the hospital to so much angerfrom my ex about me suddenly being unavailable
for the tasks that I had signed on onto, youknow, the the the plate of pancakes that he
(11:03):
expected to be served in his life.
And I had this feeling of, like, how did I gethere?
Yeah.
How did this how is this my life?
I had never had a brush with mortality.
I had never been sick.
(11:25):
I am not a morbid person.
I don't think about death.
I don't think about illness.
I think about, like, what can I get done, andhow can I accomplish my goals, and how can I
make sure that people in my life are taken careof, and that everybody likes me?
Like, you know, those were the things that weremy concerns.
And I started to really feel the feelings thatI had been pushing down.
(11:53):
And I started to acknowledge some truths that Ihad not been willing to acknowledge.
The first being the marriage was no longerworking, and that we had taken vows that he had
wanted us to take, that in sickness and inhealth, and this was the in sickness part, and
(12:17):
he wasn't able to show up for me in the waythat I needed to be shown up for.
I needed to be cared for
Yeah.
Instead of being the one doing all the caring.
And when those tables were turned and thingswere inverted, it didn't work.
And so we decided to go to couples therapy.
I turned 50 within that period.
(12:40):
Yeah.
And six months later, he moved out.
And six months after that, I got laid off formy big fancy corporate job.
Wow.
A lot of messages coming in so many ways.
Everything happened in sequence so fast.
(13:01):
Yeah.
And I was left with a blank slate for my life.
And I had a little bit of money in the bank,and I thought to myself, what do I wanna do?
Who do I wanna be?
And the first thing that occurred for me isthat I was obsessed with podcasts, and I wanted
(13:23):
to reclaim my own voice.
And I had been licensing my voices tocorporations for twenty years.
I had been making them tons of money.
I had been really been evangelizing in serviceof these corporate missions that I believed in,
that I was on board with, that I was being paidfor.
But given my own choice, I wanted to tell thetruth Mhmm.
(13:48):
About what my life felt like.
Because I suspected that I was not alone inthis generation of women who did everything
right, who climbed the escalator.
And then I got to the top of the escalator, andI looked around, and there was nothing.
There is no map for us as women in our forties,fifties, and sixties.
(14:14):
There has never been a generation of women assuccessful as we are.
There literally in the history of planet Earth,there has not been a more capable, educated,
professionally accomplished, doing the work onourselves, evolving, you know, generation of
(14:34):
women.
And I was, like, looking around and seeing lotsof stuff about menopause, lots of stuff about
elder care, lots of stuff about how you can fixyour body and fix this and fix that, but no one
was talking about pleasure.
No one was talking about laughter.
No one was talking about joy.
(14:56):
No one was talking about self expression,saying the truth.
Like, we've been shouldering these burdens forso long.
We have been carrying our companies, ourfamilies, our marriages.
And I think a lot of us are in a similar boatas I am, which is as the estrogen started to
(15:18):
drop, which happens to all of us in ourforties, and my kids stopped needing me every
second of every day.
Now they're 14.
You know?
They're not they don't have the needs they had.
Yeah.
When I first started thinking, could probablyget out of this marriage.
That would probably be good for me.
When they were five, that was when I startedhaving those thoughts.
(15:42):
But there was no way.
They were too little, and I didn't wanna be asingle mom.
And then suddenly, like, all of that becamepossible because I had this open space in my
life to reinvent.
And I am in it.
I am not on the other side of reinvention.
(16:03):
And I'm not sure I ever will be, and I'm notsure any of us ever will be.
But, you know, one of the first things I wantedto do was reclaim my voice, so I started
interviewing incredible women who hadexperienced similar pivots in their lives or
who had expertise about things that I wascurious about.
(16:23):
I started, talking about relationships and loveand dating and sex, and I started talking about
career reinvention and, identity and how from,you know, overloving and overextending yourself
and how to create boundaries and all the thingsthat I need, those were the conversations I
(16:46):
wanted to have.
And women started to respond and say thank youfor being honest, for being straightforward,
for being vulnerable.
I am not an expert.
I am on the journey.
I'm just more deeply invested in theseconversations and bringing them to other people
as they're happening.
And I'm sharing honest too.
(17:08):
And and being honest.
And being honest, which I think is really hard.
Yeah.
Well, even I mean, it's such a great story.
Right?
I feel like it's so relatable for so manywomen.
And, you know, when we're talking about thisthis thing around, like, okay, being really
honest, like, that point when you're in thehospital and you're actually saying, like, what
(17:30):
do I wanna do?
Like, how have you found in conversations withother people?
Like, have you found any ways that or any,like, similar patterns of helping women
actually get really honest with themselves withthat question?
Because I I feel like we're not oftentimes ledor even told it's okay as women to really get
(17:53):
honest with ourselves around what do we want,and everything has this attachment around,
like, but I should be this, and I should bethis, and and it's the list of shoulds.
Right?
Yep.
So do you have anything that you've seen comeup with, you know, people you've interviewed
with your own experience to, like, help womenactually start with that place of getting
deeply honest with themselves of what do Iactually want my life to look like?
(18:20):
I think, you know, there's a 12 step saying, wegrow at the speed of pain.
And I really believe that it's hard to makemassive personal change if you are not
suffering enough.
But
how much is enough?
Right?
So
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(19:25):
The first thing I always encourage people to dois write.
You know, just get a pen and a piece of paperand check-in with yourself and write, if I'm
being honest, and then take it from there.
Yeah.
We all have things that we feel like if weadmit them to ourselves, we either have to live
(19:54):
with that truth and not change, or we have tochange.
Yeah.
Change is uncomfortable, And we are taught notto be uncomfortable, to to avoid uncomfortable
feelings, to avoid awkward conversations.
(20:14):
We are also taught to throw ourselves under thebus and sacrifice ourselves for the status quo
and for, you know, keeping the plates spinning.
And if you are suffering enough in one area ofyour life or another, like, for me, the
(20:35):
starting place was sex.
I had not had sex for ten years, and I washeaded into menopause.
I was getting, night sweats.
I would wake up with, like, wet thighs.
How disgusting.
I mean, really?
It has to be wet thighs?
Thanks.
Why?
Well, why there?
(20:55):
Yeah.
I was not able to even bring myself to anorgasm, like and I had been very orgasmic and
very sexual when I entered my marriage, youknow, but through attrition and through, things
that eroded the trust in the relationship andthrough oversensitivity, and and everybody
being so touchy about everything, me included,you know, this the intimacy part of our lives,
(21:21):
like the physical intimacy part dwindled tonothing.
And for me, that had been such an incrediblyimportant way of being in my body and being
connected to myself, that that was the firstthing I wanted to get back.
And so really, like, getting honest with, like,actually, this is super important to me, was
(21:45):
the first step on my journey of, you know,reinventing for right now how I do
relationships, how I do sex, how I how I engagewith my body, how I live in my own skin.
And I, I have a friend I made through thepodcast named doctor Juliana Hauser, who said
(22:07):
to me in one of my interviews, if you can findyour agency in the bedroom, you can find your
agency in the rest of your life.
And if you can find your agency in the rest ofyour life, you can find your agency in the
bedroom.
That these things, this being able to ask forwhat you need to prioritize your own pleasure
and your own experience and your own skin andyour own connectedness and how you wanna be
(22:31):
connected with somebody else in intimatemoments.
Like, I was so hungry to get that back Yeah.
That that was where I started.
And, I it's been a wild it's been a wildadventure for the last three years, you know,
(22:53):
that has included lovers and boyfriends andonline doms and all kinds of things that, that
have made me feel like I am back to beingmyself, and I'm connected to the vital, sexy
woman that I was when I got on that escalator,you know?
(23:16):
Yeah.
And and if I can do it, if I can reconnect withmyself, and then use that juice to fuel the
rest of my life, other women can do it too.
I am not extraordinary in this way.
Well, I love your story, and I do think you areextraordinary from a standpoint of everything
(23:37):
you've, like, like, committed to.
Right?
Like Yeah.
A major commitment to say, hey.
I'm going to want my life to be different, andI'm actually going to show up.
And I think I think it's important to celebratethe, you know, extraordinary in all of us.
And I know there's I appreciate that.
I'm not saying
I'm not awesome.
I'm just saying, like, what I am doing isavailable
(24:00):
to Go to everybody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes sense.
I I do know that, like, there are womenlistening to because I to this, and I hear this
in my own work that women get to a certainpoint and they're like, well, pleasure is not
that important to me anymore, I don't need toengage in sex, and I think this happens a lot
(24:20):
around, you know, the forties, the fifties, Ithink it happens due to a lot of different
reasons, some of it is menopause, some of itis, I think people just get to a point where
it's just like going through the motions andwe're doing all the shoulds and
It's the sex they're having.
It's not sex in general.
Right.
And and that's why I think there's a level ofthat or the sex they're not having.
(24:41):
Right.
Right?
So I was so disassociated from myself.
I was ahead with no body.
I mean, I really was walking around like, theonly valuable things in my life come from my
neck up.
Right?
Like, the important things I can handle with mybrain.
So then what do you say then to, like, tobecause I think that's a very common thing.
(25:01):
Right?
We get so much in almost this, like, masculineversion of the feminine, which Mhmm.
Is super linear.
It's solving problems.
It's not in our head and not in our bodies, andwe just start to lose that connection in this
process to our femininity, to our pleasure, toour joy, our laughter, all these things you
named earlier.
(25:22):
Mhmm.
So what do you say then?
Like, if somebody like do you talk to womenever in, like, your work where it's like
somebody is I've just decided that that's nolonger important to me.
Pleasure is no longer important to me or sex isno longer important to me.
Do you have any, like, messages for anybodythat's kind of in that mindset of, hey, this is
(25:42):
just not for me anymore?
Sure.
I mean, I think the first question is, has itever been good?
Yeah.
Right?
Because if
because if you've never felt if you've neverhad great orgasms, if you've never felt, like,
just that honey dripping through your veinsfeeling of, like, good, sexy vibes and good,
(26:05):
you know, oxytocin, like, then I don'tunderstand what you would want to go back to if
there's nothing to go back to.
Right?
It is available to us, though, and the pleasureis so good for us.
I had, doctor Nan Wise on my podcast
(26:25):
I love her.
Who, you know, studied the relationship betweenthe brain and sexuality.
And if you're a person who's made motivated byhealth, like, you light up those pleasure
centers in your brain, you are working on yourlongevity, you are working on your well-being,
you are working on your cognitive skills.
(26:47):
And, you know, if you if you're a person who'slike, well, you know, that's the
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