Episode 90: When I Stopped Negotiating With the Present

There’s a moment in midlife when you realise you’ve been living one step ahead of yourself.

Not in an ambitious, visionary way. In a restless way. The kind where you’re mentally rehearsing the next chapter while real-life you is standing in the kitchen, hungry, tired, staring at a counter that looks like a small tornado took personal offence.

In today’s episode, Letting Life Meet Me Where I Am, we talk about the quiet trap so many of us fall into in our 40s and 50s: treating the woman we are as an inconvenient draft, while we chase the upgraded version we think we should be by now.

We explore why midlife is the season that refuses performance. You can’t out-plan hormonal shifts. You can’t hustle through grief. You can’t productivity your way out of exhaustion. Your body starts telling the truth faster than your mind can decorate it, and suddenly the question isn’t How do I fix this? but What if I stopped fighting it?

This episode is a love letter to the messy middle. The in-between season that isn’t a mistake, it’s a passage. The place where you stop earning rest, stop negotiating with your reality, and start building a life that can actually hold you, not just on your best days, but on your tired ones too.

You’ll come away with simple, grounded ways to meet yourself where you are, without turning it into a crisis: checking your true capacity, choosing support over discipline, letting rest be a requirement (not a reward), and creating tiny rituals that bring you back to yourself.

If you’ve been feeling like you should be further along, let this be your reminder: you’re not behind. You’re human. And you don’t need to perfect your life to feel better. Sometimes the shift is simply this: stop abandoning yourself in the present while you wait for a future version of you to finally feel worthy.

If this landed, share it with a woman who’s been carrying too much and calling it fine. And for more soul-led, practical midlife support, visit Kiransinghuk.com and join me on Substack for my Love Notes, that gentle pause in your week.

With love,

Kiran x