I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Jen Murtagh, co-founder of Maturn, for the latest episode of the Life is Beauty Full podcast. Our conversation explored success, burnout, worthiness, and what happens when the life you've worked so hard to create no longer feels like the life you want to keep living.
For a lot of women, the unraveling doesn't look like a crisis. It looks like a Tuesday — full calendar, full house, and a low hum of this isn't quite right.
Sometimes the realization arrives all at once — a burnout, a health scare, the end of a relationship. More often, it's quieter. The career is moving. The family is cared for. Everyone who needs something can count on you to deliver it. And yet, somewhere beneath all that competence, there's a growing sense that the life you're living no longer feels entirely your own.
I know that feeling because I've lived it. Like so many working mothers, I got very good at juggling — daycare drop-offs timed around meetings, the clock-watching at the end of the day, the mental to-do list running underneath every conversation. I was proud of my career and grateful to be a mother. But for years, I believed success meant becoming exceptionally good at carrying more.
I don't think that's unusual. So many of us understand the pressure to perform, to anticipate what everyone else needs, to keep proving we're capable. Somewhere along the way, achievement gets tangled up with worthiness. We start to feel valuable because we're productive, needed, dependable — and we rarely stop long enough to ask what it's costing us.
That's what felt so familiar in my conversation with Jen Murtagh, co-founder of Maturn, who has spent much of her career studying how women move through work and its major transitions. Jen described one relentless chapter of motherhood: racing from the office to daycare, sushi passed into the backseat on the way to an activity, everyone finally down for the night — and still more work waiting. The details were hers. The feeling will be recognizable to almost anyone.
We have become remarkably skilled at making an unsustainable pace look normal.
The problem with balance
For decades, the proposed fix has been "work-life balance" — an idea Jen no longer finds useful. Balance assumes that if we organize ourselves well enough, we can distribute our attention evenly across career, children, health, relationships, aging parents, ourselves. When that equilibrium inevitably fails to hold, the failure feels personal.
But life was never static enough to balance. A newborn asks something different of us than a teenager does. Perimenopause reshapes energy, sleep, mood, our sense of ourselves. Parents age. Careers evolve. The life that fit beautifully five years ago may no longer fit the woman living it now.
Jen offers a different frame: alignment.
Not whether every part of life is getting equal attention, but whether how you're spending your time still reflects what matters to you now. Are you making choices as the person you are — or still executing a plan an earlier version of you wrote?
"I abandoned myself a lot"
Jen speaks candidly about her own reckoning. Divorce, motherhood, burnout, and eventually a heart diagnosis forced her to reconsider a pace she'd long accepted as normal. Her body, quite literally, demanded her attention. There's nothing romantic about being forced to confront the possibility that the way you've been living can't continue — but what emerged for Jen was a clear-eyed view of how often she'd overridden herself just to keep going.
"I abandoned myself a lot," she told me.
It's a sentence many women will recognize without ever having named it. Self-abandonment rarely looks dramatic. It looks like saying yes when everything in you wants to say no. Ignoring exhaustion because there's too much to do. Staying in something because leaving it would disappoint someone. Placing yourself last on a list you wrote yourself.
For high-achieving women, these patterns can be especially hard to see — because so much of the behavior gets rewarded. We're praised for being reliable. Careers advance because we push through. Families depend on our stamina. Ambition itself doesn't need to be the problem. The more revealing question is whether your achievement is an expression of who you are, or compensation for who you're afraid you're not.
That's where worthiness enters.
If some part of you believes value has to be earned, there will always be another milestone to chase — another promotion, another perfectly managed moment, another person's approval. The finish line keeps moving, because achievement was never built to answer that question in the first place.
A different premise
Jen described a shift toward making decisions from an entirely different starting point: Because I love and value myself...
Try finishing that sentence before your next decision. Because I love and value myself — what do I actually need right now? What am I willing to say no to? Does this still belong in my life?
The answers aren't always convenient. They tend to be honest.
Trusting what you already know
This is where intuition entered our conversation — and Jen's take on it cuts through the usual mysticism. "One hundred percent of your intuition is fully developed," she says. "Your ability to trust it isn't."
That lands differently for women who've spent a lifetime being rewarded for rationality, productivity, pushing through. Override your feelings long enough and eventually you stop hearing them clearly. The body tightens before you say yes to something you don't want. Exhaustion becomes background noise. Something feels off — but the calendar says keep going, so you do.
Jen's health scare gave this weight. She had to learn to treat her body as part of the conversation, not an obstacle to whatever needed to get done. That doesn't mean every feeling is an instruction, or that intuition replaces medical advice or good judgment. It means there's wisdom in noticing yourself before automatically overriding yourself.
Who are you underneath it all
Maybe that's why midlife becomes such a reckoning. The body changes. Children need us differently. The career that once defined us stops fitting quite the same way. The roles we've performed so well begin to loosen — just enough for a different question to surface:
Who am I, underneath all of this?
The freedom is in discovering that the answer doesn't require abandoning ambition, or family, or the life you've built. It may only require letting your definition of success evolve with you.
Alignment isn't the absence of goals. It doesn't mean stepping away from ambition or pretending accomplishment doesn't matter. It means letting achievement become an expression of who you are — rather than evidence of what you're worth. There's a real difference between pursuing something because you need it to prove your value, and pursuing it because it feels true.
The new measure
So many women reach a point where the old math stops working. More doesn't feel like more. Being needed by everyone leaves no room to know what you need. Success can still be success — and still require a new definition.
The question isn't how much more you can fit in. It's whether you recognize yourself inside the life you've built.
Maybe you're already asking. Maybe your life looks successful, and you're genuinely grateful for it, and something in how you're living it still feels ready to change. Maybe you're tired of being the person everyone relies on, and the old definition of success no longer fits — even if you haven't found its replacement yet.
There doesn't have to be an answer right now.
Noticing that something no longer feels right is often the beginning of finding what does.
A beautiful life isn't measured only by what we build, achieve, or accumulate. There's a quieter measure, and maybe a truer one: whether the way we're living feels honest to who we are now.
Maybe success, at this stage, is simply giving ourselves permission to find out.
To hear the full conversation with Jen Murtagh, listen to the Life is Beauty Full podcast on Spotify. And to contact Jen visit https://www.jenmurtagh.com.