Why do I feel like I don't matter anymore?

Because you were trained to put yourself last, and training that old feels like the truth. Feeling like you don't matter isn't a measurement of your value. It's the residue of a lifetime of your needs coming last, learned so early it settled in before you had words for it. And what was learned can be unlearned.

Last Wednesday I sat in on a group coaching call. I wasn't the one being coached. I was watching a coach work with a woman who had raised her hand, a woman afraid of reaching out too often to the people she serves. Afraid of bothering them. Afraid of being seen. And underneath all of it, the oldest fear of all: afraid she wasn't enough.

I know that stack of fears from the inside. I would guess you do too.

Where did the feeling that I don't matter come from?

For many of us it started before we had words.

I was born in the Dr. Spock era, when the advice handed down to our mothers was to teach a baby to soothe herself by letting her cry herself to sleep. So many of us cried ourselves to sleep, night after night. You could cry and cry, and nobody came. A baby can't reason about that. She just learns it, in her nervous system, before language ever arrives: my needs don't matter.

Then the culture picked up where the crib left off. Our mothers showed us what good women do: they serve. Family first. Husband, children, then you. I was a homemaker until my daughter was thirteen, and there is a certain thanklessness to that job; children have no comprehension of the drudgery of maintaining a home. Later I got my master's degree in social work and went to serve a disadvantaged healthcare community, and learned about thanklessness on a massive scale. The patients were unhappy, so the doctors were unhappy, so the administration was unhappy. We all did the best we could. There was very little thank-you in it.

Add the betrayals and disappointments every long life collects, and it's very easy to arrive at the third act feeling like you don't matter. That accumulated weight is real, and it lives in the body as the same trained alarm I call the aging default. If you've spent a lifetime giving everything to everyone, the feeling isn't a mystery. It's arithmetic.

Why does the feeling get louder now?

Because just when you've accumulated the most to give, a new message is handed down. The culture calls it slowing down, stepping back, letting the young ones take it from here.

Wait. What?

Sit down? Be quiet? Take up knitting? Buy a rocking chair? Me?

I don't know about you, but this "you're used up, get out of the way" message makes me mad. We have invested so much of ourselves in this world, in our kids, in our careers, and just when we are truly at the top of our game the message is "you're benched."

So let me say it plainly. You matter. And the wisdom you've spent a lifetime earning is not something the world can afford to bench.

Can I just decide that I matter?

Not by thinking harder. You can't think your way into a permission you were denied. I tried for years, and I know how to think.

Permission travels by witness. You watch it being handed to another woman, and something in you says, then I'm allowed too.

That's what happened to me on that call. The coach offered the woman a picture that has stayed with me since: if a child fell into a deep hole right in front of you, you would already be climbing down. No thought about how you looked, whether you were bothering anyone, whether you were enough. Every fear about yourself clears out of the way the moment someone needs you. Fear about ourselves can only live in the space where service isn't.

The coaching wasn't directed at me. It landed anyway. Something slid down from my head into my chest, and I found myself writing two words to the woman I write all of this for. I didn't plan them. They came through my hand.

You matter.

How do I start feeling like I matter again?

Try this with me. Put your hand over your heart and say the two words, out loud if you can. I matter.

Your body may argue. Mine did, the first time. Say the words again anyway. The arguing is a pattern, learned by repetition, and patterns can be unlearned the same way, gently and often.

And then let your own uniqueness begin to move again. The exhaustion of the third act comes from decades of spending your energy on the external world's requirements while the inner fire went untended. When you reconnect with who you are underneath the roles, what you do starts to come from a full vessel, and whether anyone thanks you for it matters much less, because the giving itself feeds you.

If the word that snags for you is worth rather than matter, I've written about why worth was never something you had to earn. The two feelings are cousins. This one is about being counted. And you count.

You matter, my friend. And you always did.

Kristin Milan

Coach and author for women in the third act of life, holding faith and consciousness in the same hand. Master's in Social Work, degree in Psychology, HeartMath trained, and nearly five decades engaged with the science of change. She writes about outgrowing the aging default and coming home to a wholeness you already belong to. Meet Kristin