It's Okay Not to Recognize Yourself Right Now. Illinois Therapist on Perimenopause & Identity.
- Michaela Kozlik
- 7 days ago
- 10 min read
You are so tired of yourself.
Not in a self-pity way, but maybe in a deeper, more unsettling way. You're tired of performing, of showing up as the version of yourself that everyone around you recognizes... Tired of saying you're fine when you're not. And maybe you're feeling the loneliness of living a life that looks right from the outside and feels hollow or confusing from the inside.
You don't know when it started. There was no single moment. All of this just crept in...
That's perimenopause and your identity.
The Self You Built Is Supposed to Stay
You expected that the identity you spend your 20s and 30s constructing to stay constant and consistent.
You work so hard to become someone. To figure out what you stand for, what you're good at, what your life is going to look like. And for a while that identity holds. It carries you. It gives you a sense of solid ground underneath your feet.
Then perimenopause arrives.
And it doesn't announce itself the way you'd expect. It doesn't tap you on the shoulder and say hey, I'm about to completely dismantle your sense of self, just so you know. It's much sneakier than that. And slowly the self you built starts to feel like it doesn't quite fit anymore.
The Feelings Nobody Admits To
Let me tell you what it actually feels like.... The real version.
It feels like wearing a coat you've had for twenty years and suddenly realizing it was never really yours. You don't know when that happened. You don't know whose coat it is. You just know that it's heavy and wrong and you are so tired of wearing it.
It feels like going through the motions of your own life. Saying the right things, showing up in the right places, and feeling, underneath all of it, a profound and unspeakable absence. Like you are watching yourself from somewhere just slightly outside your own body. You can't point to the thing you lost because you can't fully articulate what it was. You just know that something is gone.
It feels like rage. Not always, but sometimes like a rage so deep and that it scares even you.
And nderneath the grief and the rage and the unsettling sense of unreality it feels like a question.
Is this actually who I am? Or is this who I became because it was what was needed?
What We Don't Say Out Loud
We don't say: I look at my life and I don't know if I chose it.
We don't say: I love the people in my life and I am also, somewhere very deep down, desperate for something that is just mine.
We don't say: I am so tired of being who everyone needs me to be that I sometimes fantasize about disappearing entirely.
We don't say: I used to know what I wanted. I don't anymore. And I'm not sure I ever really did.
We don't say any of this because we're afraid of what it means. That wanting something different makes us ungrateful, or that not knowing who we are makes us unstable. And that the rage, grief, and restlessness mean something is fundamentally broken.
It doesn't.
It means you're human. It means you're in perimenopause. It means something real and significant is happening in your body and your brain and your soul, and it deserves to be spoken out loud.
What's Actually Happening and Why It Makes Sense
Here's what I know as a therapist, and what I had (and still have) to remind myself of when it was (is still) happening to me:
Perimenopause is a huge biological, psychological, spiritual transition. As I explain in You're Not Losing Your Mind. You're in Perimenopause. the hormonal shifts directly affect the brain's emotional processing, stress response, and capacity for the kind of suppression and compartmentalization that most of us have relied on for decades.
In other words: perimenopause makes it harder to keep the lid on.
All the questions you set aside because there was no time, the grief you moved around rather than through, and all the ways you made yourself smaller or more palatable or more manageable for the people around you...
Perimenopause brings them back because your system, you, your soul knows that you cannot carry this into the next chapter of your life.
And if underneath all of this there's old trauma adding to the weight, that's something I wrote about in When the Past Comes Back: Trauma Resurfacing During Perimenopause. The two are more connected than most people realize.
The Part That Surprised Me Most
The undoing is not the end of the story. When the identity I had built started to crack open during my own perimenopause, I was convinced something had gone terribly wrong.
What I am discovering, on the other side of it, is the opposite.
The version of myself constructed around usefulness and capability and never needing too much is falling away. The swallowing of the inconvenient feelings is showing up less.
What stays, what I am still discovering is something more solid and more mine than anything I had before.
I am becoming more honest now than I have ever been, more comfortable in my own skin, willing to say what I actually think, want what I actually want, and end what needs to end.
I am, in ways I could not have predicted, more myself. Not finished, but more real.
You Are Finding Yourself
I know that doesn't feel true when you're in it. I know it feels like loss because it is loss, real and significant loss, and it deserves to be grieved. But the self that's emerging from this is not smaller than the one that came before. It's actually more honest. More yours.
The confusion you're feeling is a sign that you are between versions of yourself where the old one has become too small and the new one hasn't fully shown up yet. That in-between place is hard and disorienting and lonely in a way that is really hard to describe.
It's also, I promise you, temporary. And it is also the beginning of something you will one day be grateful for.
You Don't Have to Go Through This Alone
The identity confusion of perimenopause is not something to push through on your own. It is something to be witnessed, held, and worked through with real support.
In a therapy intensive, we have real time to sit with the questions that are coming up for you.
That work is some of the most profound I have ever done with women. And it's some of the most profound I have ever done on myself.
Let's Talk
📞 773-343-5005 🌐 inpsychotherapy.com 📧 Michaela@inpsychotherapy.com
📍 Virtual therapy across all of Illinois | therapy intensives serving Chicago & Chicagoland suburbs including Evanston, Oak Park, Naperville, Wilmette, Hinsdale, Downers Grove, Schaumburg, Glenview & Libertyville
Michaela Kozlik, LCPC — Licensed therapist in Illinois specializing in trauma, anxiety, burnout, and nervous system regulation for women in perimenopause and midlife transitions. Offering individual therapy and therapy intensives virtually throughout Illinois and in person in the Chicagoland area.
FAQ: Perimenopause, Identity Confusion & Therapy in Chicago & Chicagoland Illinois
Is it normal to feel like I don't know who I am during perimenopause?
Yes. The identity confusion of perimenopause is one of the most common and least talked about experiences of this transition. The hormonal shifts of perimenopause directly affect the brain's emotional processing. When that lid comes off, and it almost always does, the questions that surface are real and they deserve real attention.
I have a good life. So why does it feel like it doesn't fit anymore?
This is one of the most painful and confusing parts of perimenopause identity confusion. The honest answer is that a life can be good and still not be fully yours. Many of us built our lives around what was expected, what felt safe, what was needed from us before we were old enough or free enough to ask what we actually wanted. Perimenopause has a way of showing us the difference between a life that looks right and a life that feels right.
I feel like I'm watching my life from outside myself. Is that part of this?
Yes. That sense of watching yourself from somewhere just outside your own body or going through the motions is incredibly common and is directly connected to what is happening in the brain. When the nervous system is under significant load, dissociation and depersonalization can show up as a protective response. I know it's disorienting and scary when you don't understand what's causing it. Understanding the context, which I write about in You're Not Losing Your Mind. You're in Perimenopause. can bring some relief. And it is absolutely something that therapy can help with directly.
I feel a rage I can't explain. Is something wrong with me?
Nothing is wrong with you. The rage that surfaces during perimenopause is one of the most honest things your body has ever produced and sometimes one of the most scary exactly because we are so deeply conditioned as women to not feel it and show it. What I have found, both in my own experience and in my work with women, is that the perimenopause rage is almost always grief underneath. Grief for how long you have been holding everything together. Grief for the wants and needs and truths that got set aside over decades of managing and accommodating and making yourself smaller. The rage is not the problem. The rage is the signal, and it deserves to be heard.
I'm afraid that if I start asking who I really am, my whole life will fall apart.
This fear makes complete sense and I want to take it seriously rather than brush past it. Here is what I can tell you from years of doing this work with women: good therapy does not blow your life up. It helps you see your life more clearly.... what's working, what's not, and what you actually want to do about it. You are always in the driver's seat. Nothing changes without your full agency and intention.
What therapy does is give you a safe and contained space to ask the questions that have been building, so that you can make conscious, intentional choices about your life. Clarity is not destruction. It's the beginning of actually choosing your life rather than just living the one that accumulated around you.
What's the difference between a midlife identity crisis and depression?
They can look very similar on the surface and they very often coexist, especially during perimenopause. Low mood, loss of meaning, isolation, loneliness, flatness, a sense that nothing fits can be symptoms of depression, and they can also be the experience of an identity in genuine transition. The important thing is that both deserve attention and neither should be treated in isolation. Treating depression without addressing the underlying identity shift often produces incomplete and frustrating results because the mood and the meaning-making are deeply connected. A thorough assessment is always part of what we do together early in the work.
Is the identity confusion of perimenopause connected to trauma?
For many women, yes. Perimenopause doesn't create identity confusion out of thin air. It surfaces what was already there like the ways you learned to be in the world in response to what happened to you earlier in your life. The identity you built was partly authentic and partly built around survival, around keeping yourself safe, around becoming who you needed to be in the environments you grew up in. Perimenopause makes those survival identities harder to maintain. And for women who carry unresolved trauma, that process can be particularly intense. I wrote about this in depth in When the Past Comes Back: Trauma Resurfacing During Perimenopause, If this resonates, that article will feel important to you.
I feel so alone in this, like nobody around me understands.
The loneliness of perimenopause is real and it has a particular quality that is different from regular loneliness. It is the loneliness of carrying our internal experience that has no adequate language in most of the conversations happening around you. The culture doesn't create a lot of space for women to say out loud: I don't know who I am and I'm scared and I need real help. You are allowed to say that. And you deserve a space where someone actually hears it without trying to fix it, minimize it, or rush you through it.
Why does a therapy intensive make sense for identity work specifically?
Because identity work takes time, in a therapy intensive, we have hours of uninterrupted space to actually go somewhere. That territory requires time and safety to enter, and a therapy intensive provides both. Many of my clients describe leaving an intensive with a clarity about themselves that they haven't felt in years, or possibly ever.
I don't have hours to spend in therapy. I can barely manage my regular life right now.
I hear this and I want to reframe it gently. A therapy intensive is not hours added on top of an already impossible schedule. It is a concentrated investment focused block of time that often does what months of weekly sessions cannot. Many clients find that a single half-day or full-day intensive moves things further than a year of weekly appointments. It is not more time, it's more focused, more efficient, more likely to create the kind of real movement that actually changes how you feel day to day. And many women find that after an intensive, everything else in their life gets easier.
How do I know if I'm ready for this kind of work?
Readiness rarely feels like feeling ready. Most women who do this work feel scared, exhausted, uncertain, and not at all sure they have what it takes. What readiness actually looks like is this: a part of you knows that what you've been doing is not working anymore. A part of you is tired enough of the status quo to try something different. A part of you, even a very small part, suspects that there has to be more than this. If that's where you are, that's enough. Reach out and let's figure out the rest together.
How do I get started?
Just reach out. We'll set up a free consultation call — no pressure, no commitment, no agenda beyond having a real conversation about what's going on and what might actually help. You don't need to know exactly what you need. You just need to book a free consultation or send an email. Everything else we figure out from there.
📞 773-343-5005 🌐 inpsychotherapy.com 📧 Michaela@inpsychotherapy.com
Comments