How Podcasting Made Me Feel Like a Person Again (E25)

Mom's Guide to Finding Herself
Written By Mom Identity Project

Do you ever feel like motherhood has just...swallowed you whole? Like you're no longer the person you used to be? You're so not alone. In this episode of the "Mom's Guide to Finding Herself" podcast, I'm sharing my personal journey of using podcasting to reclaim my identity and find my voice again. This episode is for any mom who feels lost in the thick of motherhood and is searching for a way to reconnect with herself and her passions.

The Struggle is Real: Finding Yourself Again in Motherhood:

It's incredibly common for moms to feel like they lose a part of themselves when they become parents. The sheer demands of motherhood can make it feel like your entire identity has become wrapped up in the role of "Mom." It can be hard to find even a few minutes for your own interests, and you might even forget what you used to enjoy! Conversations with friends can become short and impersonal, and you might feel invisible and unheard. You might try to force yourself into hobbies that just feel like chores. The monotony of the daily routine can leave you feeling unfulfilled and disconnected. You might feel isolated and alone, even when surrounded by people. Sound familiar?

The Power of Storytelling (It's in Our DNA):

Humans are wired to tell stories; it's how we process our experiences, connect with others, and grow. As moms, we often tell stories about our kids, but rarely about ourselves. Sharing your story is a way to reconnect with who you are and remind yourself that you have value beyond your role as a mother. Finding a creative outlet to express yourself can provide a sense of purpose and help you feel like "you" again.

How Podcasting Helped Me Find My Voice (and Maybe Yours Too!):

For me, podcasting became a lifeline. It was a way to share my story and connect with other moms who were feeling the same way. The act of talking into a microphone and sharing my thoughts and experiences felt like reclaiming a piece of myself that I thought I'd lost. It allowed me to explore ideas, learn new skills, and build a supportive community. Podcasting has given me a way to share my experiences, which adds value and meaning to the incredible growth and transformation I've been going through. It's given me something to talk about when people ask me about myself that isn't just about my kids. And it's shown me, more than anything, that I am not alone.

Other Ways to Share Your Story (Find What Fits You):

If podcasting isn't your thing, there are tons of other ways to share your story and reconnect with yourself:

  • Journaling (Your Private Sanctuary): Reflect on your day, your dreams, your frustrations, your passions – all of it!

  • Talking to Friends (Intentionally): Schedule time to talk about you, not just the kids.

  • Online Communities (Find Your Tribe): Join groups that align with your interests and connect with other moms who "get it."

  • Blogging/Vlogging (Share Your Voice with the World): Write or record your thoughts and experiences.

  • Letters to Your Future Self (A Gift to Yourself): Document your thoughts, fears, and dreams for your future self to read.

  • Recording Your Story (For Your Ears Only): Talk to yourself as if you were creating a podcast just for you.

  • Writing a Book (Tell Your Story): Put your experiences into a narrative.

Flexibility and Intention: The Keys to Success:

The key is to find a medium that fits your strengths, interests, and lifestyle. Whatever you choose, be intentional – your goal is to share your story and connect with yourself, not just to socialize. It's about finding something that feels valuable and meaningful to you. It can be a challenge to find the time or the motivation, but it's so important to take those steps to reconnect with yourself. Even small steps can help you remember that you are a worthy individual with something valuable to share.

The Benefits of Sharing Your Story (It's Worth It!):

Sharing your story, in whatever form it takes, can help you:

  • Reconnect with your identity

  • Process your experiences

  • Gain a sense of purpose

  • Build a supportive community

  • Feel like a person again, not just a mom

  • Remember that your experience is interesting and valuable

What's Next? (Don't Miss It!)

In the next episode, we'll hear from a mom who has an incredible story of surviving an unimaginable experience and how she used storytelling to process her trauma and reconnect with herself. It's an inspiring story you won't want to miss.

Keywords: Mom Identity, Motherhood Journey, Rediscovering Yourself, Self Care for Moms, Side Hustles for Moms, Mom Support, Balancing Motherhood, Share Your Story, Podcasting, Journaling, Blogging, Creative Outlets, Reclaiming Your Voice, Monotony, Isolation, Community, Mom Life, Finding Yourself After Kids, Motherhood and Identity, Postpartum Identity, Creative Expression, Self-Discovery.

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The BoldLittleMinds MomCast is made possible by you - the listener. Your support goes directly into making each episode happen—thank you for being part of the journey!

All donations go directly to supporting the production of the Mom's Guide to Finding Herself podcast

For Your Binging Enjoyment…

25 Audio

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[00:00:00] In the last episode, I explained the importance of sharing your story on your journey to rebuilding a relationship with yourself, but you still might be saying, okay Krissy, but how am I going to do that? Today, I'm going to share how I found my voice again in podcasting, and I'll give you some ideas that you can use for sharing your story too.

Welcome to Mom's Guide to Finding Herself, where we share stories of side hustles and surviving while parenting young children. I'm your host, Krissy Bold. Let's make motherhood less lonely and help you find joy in being you again.

When I became a mom, I knew I was going to lose a little bit of myself in the process. It comes with the territory, right? But I didn't expect just how much of myself would feel invisible. It wasn't just that I couldn't find time for the things that I used to enjoy. It was that I stopped even knowing what I did.

did enjoy. I didn't even know [00:01:00] what I liked anymore. I felt like my whole identity had folded into this one role of mom. I would go to gatherings and the only thing I'd talk about would be the kids. At playdates, There wasn't any time for meaningful conversations because I was too preoccupied with making sure my kids didn't jump off a literal ledge.

Even conversations with my friends became short and impersonal from just like the sheer exhaustion that I felt and how we couldn't really relate to each other anymore. I mean, how do you not feel invisible when you don't I have a story to tell, right? I remember starting the journey of trying to find myself and I forced myself into hobbies that sounded nice in theory, right?

But they ended up feeling more like chores. Nothing really clicked. I wanted something that felt like me. a way to express myself and connect with others and process everything that I was [00:02:00] going through, but let's be honest, finding time for creative outlets as a mom can feel like searching for a unicorn, right?

It's like, what am I even doing? One thing led to another and I decided to make the leap into podcasting, right? Long story short, we are here where we are today. It was a way for me to tell my story and hear the stories of others. And let me tell you the act of sitting down, turning on the mic and just talking, like really talking felt like reclaiming a little piece of myself.

I could connect with other moms. I could explore ideas that I care about and I could learn new skills that remind me of just how capable I am. I learned all of this on my own, right? In this episode, I'm going to share with you how podcasting gave me back a sense of my identity and made me feel like a person again and not just a mom.

If podcasting isn't something that you think you want to try, I have [00:03:00] some other suggestions for you that you can use to share your story and reconnect with feeling like a person again. But let's recap first that need for storytelling. I went into that, I went into this in a lot more detail in the last episode, but let's just touch on it real quick.

Humans are wired to tell stories. It's how we process, how we connect, and how we grow. As moms, we often tell stories about our kids, but we rarely tell them about ourselves. We end up feeling invisible or unheard in our day to day life as a mom. We want something that feels like it's ours, like a creative project, a purpose, something that is a way to express yourself, but

we're struggling to find that thing that really feels like it makes us, us. And more than that, we're also struggling to find meaningful connections or conversations in the chaos that is parenting, right? Finding time to connect with your family and friends doesn't necessarily work anymore, and making new friends, [00:04:00] making new meaningful connections feels impossible.

The real problem here is that motherhood can be so isolating. We are more connected to other people now than we've ever been before, but we feel more and more alone. We stop prioritizing our own interests and dreams in favor of everyone else's. We feel like we are a burden, like the time that we need to pursue our dreams and our goals is a burden on others because they need to take time from what they're doing to support us.

And that monotony of the routine that we find ourselves in can leave us feeling so unfulfilled and disconnected. Now, If you're like me, like what I said before, you tried things. Maybe you tried doing things that you liked before you became a mom, or maybe you've tried things that seem like they would be a good fit because they work for other people, but they end up feeling more like chores than like fun. Maybe you decided you're going to go to that yoga class, but getting yourself up and out of the house is [00:05:00] more exhausting than doing it.

Actually just living your life as is, right? You enjoy the yoga class, but you don't like going to it, right? Or maybe you've tried connecting and sharing your story with your friends, but you just don't know where to begin, you don't know what to say, you don't even know how to connect with them anymore, And you certainly don't know how to connect about yourself.

You don't know what to say about yourself. You just revert to talking about the kids, right? And none of that feels right. None of that is a way to share your experience or to share your story. And it's not helping you reconnect as a person and fight that depersonalization cycle. It's not helping you gain your sense of self worth back.

Now what's going to work for you? I don't know. Everybody's different. But what I can start with is telling you what worked for me. What's worked for me so far is podcasting. It's given me a chance to connect with other people and share my story bit by bit. Now I don't share my whole life on here. There's just not time for that, but [00:06:00] it helps me at least share one part of my experience

and sharing just this one piece has helped me reconnect with myself and feel like a person again. It gives value to what I'm experiencing. I can share these ideas and these lessons that I've learned that have mattered to me, and that gives meaning to the growth and the transformation that I'm experiencing.

It makes it real. More than that, It's helped me build a community. Now I started on Instagram by creating a public Instagram page and have started my podcast from there, but using social media and now my podcast to connect with other people has opened up doors to connect with people that aren't necessarily just people who are in my age range or people who are in the same phase of life or were at one point in time.

It's connecting me with people who have a shared interest, right? I'm connecting with people on Instagram who are in similar phases of life to me, but I'm also now connecting with other podcasters. And that's pretty incredible, too, because [00:07:00] now we don't talk about my kids. This is the common thread between us is not parenting.

We talk about our ideas. We talk about our experiences. In podcasting, we bounce ideas back and forth, and whoa, this gives me a whole other facet of my identity that now I can own and I can point to. When other people ask me about me, I have something to talk about again that isn't my kids.

I'm building this other part of my identity.

The next thing that podcasting has done for me is it's given me a way to connect and hear from other moms. Now the interviews that I have done on this podcast have shown me time and time again that I am not alone. I've interviewed people who I really admire, who are experts in their field, who are experts at toddlers and children in one way or another.

And they are still experiencing very [00:08:00] similar things that I am experiencing. And whoa, what an eye opener that is. It shows me that I am most definitely not alone in this. And that is amazing to know that somebody who has gone through all of this training. I mean, I'm a trained educator. I have a master's degree in education.

I have a background in child development and I I feel like completely lost most of the time. But to hear that that's common, that other people who have a background in childhood development also feel this way, it makes me not feel like a failure and just lets me join the club, right? So that connection has been unbelievable and so amazing.

And knowing that I have a way to express myself in real time without overthinking it has been amazing. Like, sure, I take the time before episodes to give myself an outline and really think about where each episode is going, but to have real [00:09:00] conversations with other moms or to have a real conversation one on one with you right now, whoa, all of these things add up to something that's incredible, but the most important thing is it's flexible.

It gives me time to work around my life, right? I can come in and turn on this mic whenever I want, whenever I have a little bit of time and talk about my experience as a mom. And as a person, and I'm not also trying to coordinate a schedule with somebody else to be on the phone with them.

This is happening when I am able to do it, and that's pretty amazing. And I know that that's not the case in so many other aspects of my life. Do I still struggle with being able to share my story? Absolutely. Do I still struggle trying to connect with people that are close to me? 100 percent. It is a battle all of the time.

But that's not what it's about. It's not about finding something that is going to solve all of your problems and help you connect and feel like you're a part of [00:10:00] Like, you are part of this magical community again, and you can socialize whenever you want to. Like, that's not what it's about. It's about taking the steps of reconnecting with yourself in one way or another to remember that you are a worthy individual, a worthy person who has something that other people are interested in hearing.

Your experience is something that people are interested in hearing. However big or small that experience is, it's interesting, and podcasting has been one of the ways that I have been able to connect with that again. Now, this could work for you too, right? You might not think that your story is worth sharing, but it sure is.

If you love storytelling or learning new things or connecting with others, podcasting can be so fulfilling. You don't need fancy equipment. If you know my husband, you know that I did not spend hundreds of dollars on the equipment that I'm using right now. And you don't need a huge following to get started.

You can just start sharing your [00:11:00] story and sharing that you do this and people will listen and people will give you feedback. It's a way to carve out time for yourself while still feeling like you're contributing something meaningful. So. I know it can feel really selfish to take time for yourself, but when you're also sharing something meaningful with somebody else, right?

Like, I'm not just taking the time to reflect on my experience here just for me, I'm doing it for others. Then all of a sudden that makes it feel more meaningful. Right? So these are some of the ways that podcasting has helped me and I think this is a really great outlet. We're lucky to have this available to us if that's something we want to explore, but there are lots of other ways out there to share your story, right?

Big or small. Journaling. Journaling is an incredible way to share your story and talk about flexibility. You can do that whenever you want. Now sharing your story doesn't necessarily have to mean that you're sharing it with an audience. It's You can [00:12:00] share it with yourself too. Just reflecting on what your day was like to you is important.

Reminding yourself what your big dreams are, what your passions are, and what you enjoyed in the past. And does that still feel right or fit? All of those things are part of your story and you can share it with yourself. Like that is huge, but if that's not enough for you.

Then you can intentionally build in some time to talk to your friends. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode as well. Putting it out there saying. Hey, I'm going through a lot right now. Can we just have like five minutes just to pretend like things are the way that they used to be.

And just, can I like have like five minutes to talk about myself or can you ask me some questions about my life for like the next five minutes? I would really appreciate that because I'm starting to feel like a background character. I'm starting to feel like I'm fading into the background. They're going to jump in and be like, Yes, let's talk about you and, and, and start asking you the questions.

So building in some of that time, it doesn't have to be long, [00:13:00] just five minutes, set the intention of this is what I need, please help me meet this need, and then you'll actually get what you need out of that phone call. Right. It's going into a five minute phone call. can feel totally empty. If you are going into it with a purpose that you don't communicate, you're going to leave feeling disappointed.

So set the intention, set that need, set that expectation, and they're going to step up to the plate and help you out. But if that's still not working, we can join some online communities. Go into a Reddit group of something that you truly enjoy, or start following people with smaller accounts on Instagram of people that share interests as you.

Maybe it's parenting. Maybe parenting is the interest. There are so many ways out there to connect with other people on that. Maybe it's kids activities or maybe it's something that you used to love doing that you don't love doing anymore. You might still like talking about it even if you don't love doing it.

You might still like talking about it or sharing the knowledge that you gained [00:14:00] over the past from doing it. So joining those kinds of communities can be really helpful. Starting a blog or a vlog, right? Writing down your interests in a similar way as, um, podcasting is, but with video or text. You could do that as well to share your experience and share your story.

Writing a letter to your future self, right? Documenting the things that are going on in your life right now. in a letter to your future self can be really powerful because you can be so real and honest with yourself. You can be super vulnerable when you know that the only person that's going to read this is you.

So maybe that's a great way to process what's going on right now, what's already happening. and or process your dreams and goals. Ask yourself, Hey, did I actually do that thing that I was hoping to do? Or, Hey, are we still up all night with the kids? Because I'm really worried that I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life.

Like putting those fears and dreams and hopes down can really help you with that. [00:15:00] Recording your story. It's kind of like journaling or vlogging, but it's for your own purpose, right? You could just sit down and talk to yourself and create like a podcast for yourself. Record that part of your story.

Talk about your day to yourself. Sometimes hearing it out loud is the way to go. Or you could honestly truly start writing a book. One page at a time, a couple pages at a time, one chapter at a time, write your experience, write down what's going on. I mean, it seems huge. It seems gigantic, but wow, imagine how accomplished you are going to feel at the end of that journey if that's what you decide to do.

Now for me, podcasting stands out because it's conversational and immediate. It's perfect for moms who don't have hours and hours to dedicate to crafting a polished piece. And you can connect directly with your listeners in a way that feels personal and authentic. It's an evolving medium, right? Each episode is going to build on the last, but it doesn't have to, you could throw in [00:16:00] episodes about your life that don't necessarily fit in.

And it's still going to be interesting if it's on brand and you can allow your story to grow over time. But. If podcasting isn't for you, I want you to really explore one of the other ways that I gave to you, or maybe share with me a way that works for you, or that I didn't think of, that you can use to share your story, because it's important, whether you're journaling, podcasting, or something else, storytelling is going to help you reconnect with your identity.

This is a key piece of becoming you again that we really need to take some time to carve out. The medium that you choose, whatever you choose to do this with, should reflect your strengths, your interests, your lifestyle. What's something that you're actually going to find valuable, right? If it's not writing something down or talking about it, then maybe it is connecting with somebody else.

Whatever that is, just be intentional that this is your goal. Your goal is not just to connect, your goal is to share your story. And that's going [00:17:00] to take you so far.

In the next episode, I'll be talking with a mom who has an incredible story to share of surviving an unimaginable experience and how she used storytelling to process her trauma and reconnect with herself. Until then, take a moment for yourself and remember you are an amazing mom just as you are. I would love to hear how this episode has helped you. Scroll down to the comments or reviews and leave me a note there. This will make a big impact in helping moms like us find the show. Make sure to click those five stars and follow so you can join me on this journey of finding ourselves.

Mom Identity Project https://momidentityproject.com
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