Midlife Mojo ASAP!

Eve Rodsky (00:00:00) - The idea of having space to yourself where you're not a parent, a partner, and or a professional is like a unicorn. It is. It doesn't exist.

*Sarah Milken * (00:00:13) - Hey peeps, welcome to the Flexible Neurotic Podcast. I'm your host, doctor Sarah Millican. Yeah, you heard that right. I'm a real PhD doctor. Long, long ago, like last fucking year, I was sitting in the midlife funk wondering, was this it for me? That day, I realized I needed to get off my ass and start my midlife remix. I dusted off my PhD, wiped the menopause sweat off my forehead, grabbed my golden shit shovel, and started digging deep to all my midlife bitches. It's not just luck, coffee, and hormones that get you through your midlife remix. It's action steps. Let's do this. Hi peeps, it's me, Doctor Sarah Milken with the Golden Nugget mini Sode of the Flexible Neurotic Podcast, where I go back to some of my best episodes and remind us of some of the fabulous and important golden nuggets that we dug up and may have forgotten with the midlife brain.

*Sarah Milken * (00:01:13) - Yeah, you heard me right. I'm going into my midlife library and bringing you golden nuggets about midlife motivation, empty nesting, health, wellness, all the things flexible, neurotic style. Okay, so today is a golden nugget special because it's all about getting out of the midlife waiting room off the fucking hamster wheel and into a space that can ignite that midlife spark. In something referred to as unicorn Space. Today, we are revisiting a conversation with New York Times best selling author and speaker Eve Radtke. Her newest book is called Find Your Unicorn Space Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too Busy World. This book is a step by step guide on how to find your thing in midlife, and how to show up for yourself in the world. I know it sounds amazing and probably impractical, but trust me, it's totally practical and can happen for all of us. It really is. Thank you, Eve, for giving us this midlife RVers guide that we are all craving, because this is what I was basically wishing for on Amazon Prime.

*Sarah Milken * (00:02:23) - I wanted this delivered to me, a thing for me and only me. Not for my husband, not for my kids, but like a thing for me. So this is literally a step by step guide on reclaiming your creative space in a too busy world. I mean, you don't have to be a Pinterest expert. You don't have to be a collage maker, and you don't have to be a major like Forbes 400 entrepreneur. You don't want to miss this episode, Eve talks about all of her research on cultivating creativity and framing what she calls our unicorn space. This episode was packed with juicy midlife motivation and inspiration. To make sure you get all of the juice, you can go back to the full episode called Finding Your Midlife Thing a step by step Plan. And if you love this episode and the longer one and you want more of Eve, you can check out her book, It's So, So Good. And her first book, too. I mean, it's basically all over Reese Witherspoon's book club because it's one of her fave.

*Sarah Milken * (00:03:26) - My original episode was called You Don't Have to Do It All to Have It All. Of course, I'll link them both in the show notes. So let's get into the.

Eve Rodsky (00:03:34) - Episode and my data. I've been studying how people allocate their time within family systems, whether it's single parents, LGBTQIA couples, heteronormative couples. But regardless of the family structure, I've been looking at how people spend their time, especially women actually in a demographic where their kids were in fourth grade or higher, which was interesting, said to me, I wouldn't even know what to do with that newfound time. So what was the point of fair play if I've already lost my identity, which you talk about all the time, and they hadn't found you and had done a reinvention yet, so that was an incredibly alarming to me. I started to hear that around 2012. And then now this is 11 years later, a decade later, and I didn't stop hearing that. And there were three things that were really alarming me. Women were telling me one, that they didn't feel that they deserved a permission to be unavailable from their roles.

*Sarah Milken * (00:04:29) - Still, one of my favorite quotes from our episode together.

Eve Rodsky (00:04:31) - 100%, and I want to just reiterate that for people who haven't heard our first episode, that this idea that I'm a parent, I'm a partner, I'm a professional, that can mean working for pay or being a stay at home parent on repeat. But if I want to be an accordion player, I want to jump into the Atlantic Ocean as a polar bear. That time is not afforded to me and it's a waste of time. And then the two other things I heard were, even if I use time for myself, I have incredible guilt and shame when I use that time. And then the third thing that was super alarming were especially women telling me that even if they felt that they. You deserve the permission to be unavailable. And they didn't have guilt and shame. They still didn't have a vocabulary to ask for what they needed. That's what we're tackling in Find Your Unicorn Space. It was a lot. It was a lot of data and it was really triggering.

Eve Rodsky (00:05:23) - And actually these themes were just American themes. We heard these themes in 17 countries, even in the Nordic countries, where we think they're doing things so much better with the division of labor. So I had to really unpack what was happening.

*Sarah Milken * (00:05:35) - And I think what's so interesting about that is that we all look at extra time differently, and I want to go through all of these different iterations of it. Some people call it passion, some people call it a hobby and you define it unicorn space. What is the definition of unicorn space?

Eve Rodsky (00:05:54) - Well, I think it's really important actually, that it had a new name. And I'll tell you why. Because you just mentioned two words that are often used for time spent on ourselves. We haven't even gone to self-care, which often we've talked about is can be commodified wellness and you're trying to bring people like to true what real self-care is. But on top of that, when you hear someone say, do you find your passion? What's so weird about that word and what my sort of data revealed about what people felt about that word was that it felt too big, and also it felt too static, like there was just one.

Eve Rodsky (00:06:26) - And we were supposed to sort of uncover it and like maybe like a lotto scratchcard or something like that, and it's just going to be there for us or like an oracle. And so that word really was not helpful in my research when I did my qualitative research with women. And then the other word that was really not helpful was the word hobby, because one of the number one things it connoted for people was in frequency. So what unicorn space is, right? This idea of taking up space, it's called unicorn space. Not because I believe in like cupcakes or rainbows.

*Sarah Milken * (00:06:57) - Hahahahaha. I was going to say why the unicorn Eve.

Eve Rodsky (00:07:01) - I know, right? I mean it feels like your seven year old and target, but the reason why I like that term was because the idea of having space to yourself where you're not a parent, a partner, and or a professional is like a unicorn. It doesn't fucking exist.

*Sarah Milken * (00:07:16) - And we need to make it fucking exist.

Eve Rodsky (00:07:17) - Exactly. And we have conjured unicorns back in our culture, and they're mythical and they're magical.

Eve Rodsky (00:07:23) - And so I want some of that combination of the consistent interest in your own life that's really this antidote to burnout that I was able to uncover in my research. It's really a consistent interest in your own life is all I can tell you. And that gift of unicorn space, which is this idea of space to be consistently interested in your own life, is not a walk around the block. It's not a drink with a friend. I wish I could tell you it was. And it's really not even a girls weekend once a year. It's this harder work that really took a whole book to unpack.

*Sarah Milken * (00:07:53) - I know, and that is a dense book. But what's beautiful about it is that it has so much packed in there, but it's laid out so generously. If that's a word and it simplifies it, it takes all of this research and all of this information and makes it so easy to sort of take away the nuggets from and I obviously love the way you did it. Now with unicorn Space, I mean, in your research, like when you use that term were men like, what are you talking about? Is my wife going to walk around with like a robe with a headband on?

Eve Rodsky (00:08:27) - Well, I think it's really funny because men as well aren't that interesting in midlife either.

Eve Rodsky (00:08:33) - They're right. I mean, maybe they feel that they figured it out with they maybe.

*Sarah Milken * (00:08:38) - Golf or bought a car.

Eve Rodsky (00:08:39) - Or. Yeah, but I think we've all this is a really win win proposition for any family structure. Because whether it's a single parent and their children or whether it's a woman who's married to men and she's been saddled with all the unpaid labor of the home, this idea that we can get independent space from each other, we don't have to do everything together and that we become unavailable again, like when we were first dating. You don't text your person right back. You sort of try to create a little bit of mystery, but I think that mystery sort of fades. It fades into our roles, and then we end up two terms in the word cloud that came up associated with midlife. And I think we've talked about this in episode one that were incredibly alarming to me when I spoke to women, like I said, especially that demographic of women whose first kid was in fourth grade.

Eve Rodsky (00:09:25) - So ten years of being a parent, the word cloud that came up was overwhelm and erasure, and I know I felt that, too. I didn't set out to be an expert on the gender division of labor. Is there. As you know, this wasn't like something I ever even thought about. But I did know, like.

*Sarah Milken * (00:09:41) - You got a degree in how. Right? Yes.

Eve Rodsky (00:09:44) - No, no, none of us do. But I think what I did recognize was that I had really big dreams. And we want those really big dreams for our daughters. Like, I went to Harvard Law School thinking I was going to be president of the United States and a senator at the same time, because you could legislate during the day and issue executive orders at night. And I was going to still be a dancer in flight, Air Force One into the iconic Madison Square Garden.

*Sarah Milken * (00:10:08) - Why not? Yeah.

Eve Rodsky (00:10:09) - And so. Those, like smashing of those glass ceilings, was something that was not even a question in my mind.

Eve Rodsky (00:10:16) - And then you cut to when. So this was I graduated in 2002. So this would be 2011. So. Right. You cut to a decade later. And the only thing I'm smashing really is like peas, right. For toddler. There's so many hurdles allowing us any free time and space of our choosing that it is mythical and magical. It feels so far away. And so this book is really trying to say you deserve a permission to be unavailable from your roles. You deserve to have that time without guilt and shame. You deserve to be able to use your voice to ask for what you need. And then good things happen when you do that.

*Sarah Milken * (00:10:51) - That's it, that's it. You just nailed it, right? That's what we're all looking for in midlife. I mean, it's so interesting. When I look at my life now, I'm like, okay, who was I? Who am I right now? And who do I want to be and who am I right now has changed over the years.

*Sarah Milken * (00:11:10) - It's like you're a mom of a toddler, and now I'm a mom of a kid who's going off to college and a daughter who's 16 and has her own car. So my identity has sort of shifted. It's like I'm not the primary point person in their lives anymore. I've kind of moved to like consultant management role, but it definitely shakes you a little bit because your relevance day to day, for at least for me, was so tied to what my children were doing minute to minute. And now that they're older, they're becomes this greater space, which you, like you said, is such a gift. Yet so many women like me when I got the midlife itches are like, okay, well, that's great, I have all this fucking time. But now I don't even know what to do with it. And I don't know, like what other people are going to think. Like, if I take up tennis, is someone going to think that I don't have any big goals in my life? And there's so much judgment packed into this.

*Sarah Milken * (00:12:10) - It's inner mean girl judgment of ourselves, but it's also our perception of like kind of the external peanut gallery. What did you dig up in all of this?

Eve Rodsky (00:12:20) - We sort of internalized these external, like you said, these external values of success. And on top of that, I think we had something weird happen in the past ten years, this obsession with being happy. There was happiness this and happiness books here, and even the happiness experts that I love and interviewed for Unicorn Space. They feel like their work has been misconstrued because the goal of mental health there, whether it's in middle life or it's for our kids, is not to say to ourselves or to our kids, I just want you to be happy. That's actually a really troublesome and problematic thing to say to your kids and to yourself. And in fact, that actually becomes a mean girl thing to say to yourself because it's actually sociopathic to be happy all the time. There's lots of things that fill me with rage. So what I realized after talking a very wonderful mental health experts for unicorn space and the beauty of talking to these mental health experts when we were sort of uncovering this like fallacy around happiness, was that the true definition of mental health is to have the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time, and the ability and strength to weather it.

Eve Rodsky (00:13:26) - Unicorn space is the ability and strength to weather it. It doesn't mean I'm protecting you from the quick fix of instant happiness or the rains, but what I'm saying is I can give you an umbrella.

*Sarah Milken * (00:13:37) - Explain how the unicorn space acts as a resilience umbrella for midlife women in the clunking clunk of life.

Eve Rodsky (00:13:45) - This idea that we've been normalized for women to numb ourselves through midlife is what, again, why? I love your work so much, Sara. Right. Because if you don't have the Flexible Neurotic podcast, or you're a really good friend to people to sort of bring them through these themes, what else do we have if we don't have these, as you said, these resilience umbrellas, what we have is we have hedonist coping mechanisms which are not healthy, and our kids have them too. Right. It's emotional eating for me. Or again, it's the mommy juice, the two glasses of wine.

*Sarah Milken * (00:14:17) - Yeah, I mean, we're all domain chasing.

Eve Rodsky (00:14:19) - Exactly. So this is a better way to chase dopamine because a it's like cheaper actually over time if you need to save money, it's cheaper.

Eve Rodsky (00:14:29) - But what's so beautiful about this type of chase of serotonin, dopamine, whatever we need in our brains is that really, truly when you combine meaning and purpose together, which is a unicorn space? Like I said to you earlier, it's not hedonist well-being. It's not mommy juice. It's not edibles. It's not even a walk around the block, which is important. Those are the building blocks. This is a different type of umbrella. The resilience umbrella here is combining a feeling of happiness is a clue, not the end goal. When you do a unicorn space, happiness has its place, but not as the end goal, as a clue.

*Sarah Milken * (00:15:05) - Hey peeps, it's me again. Okay, that conversation was such a good reminder. Life can get so crazy, and it's important to remember to come back to your unicorn space. And maybe you just have to find that unicorn space, or you already had it, but you forgot about it. You didn't have time for it. You were raising kids. It's time to prioritize you and finding that thing or things that make you feel like getting out of fucking bed in the morning.

*Sarah Milken * (00:15:31) - Eve defines unicorn space as the time we spend on ourselves. She refers to this as real self-care, not a manicure pedicure. It's the thing that, like, gets you up in the morning that we're all kind of missing when we are kind of dwindling on our midlife mojo. It's not as simple as a yoga class or a lunch with a friend, although those are glimmers in our week and add to obviously our purpose, our meaning in life. Unicorn space is a sacred space that you create for you. This is a space where you spend time on what truly fuels you, whatever that is pickleball, book writing, whatever. This could be a passion or a hobby. Although Eve is mindful of using those terms because she's found through her research that they can be triggering. For some, this is a space where you are not a partner, a parent, a professional, a mom of this or that. Your special unicorn space hobby doesn't need to bring in an income, it just needs to be something that makes you feel good and gets you into that flow state.

*Sarah Milken * (00:16:35) - It's a unicorn and it doesn't fucking exist yet, right? That's why this is the space that we are creating for ourselves. We can't buy it. We have to create it. It's work, but it's so worth it and so important. As I always say, hard and good peeps, we all know that my husband has 55 different hobbies, so he's doing great in the unicorn space department. I thought my new hobby was going to be cooking, but I've done it twice. But that doesn't mean it's over for me, so I'm not sure yet. But I'm always trying to protect my unicorn space like innovation time of where I'm thinking about it and doing it. And obviously my podcast is a huge part of my unicorn space. I love the time that I get to spend researching different topics, preparing to meet new guests, and that's the part of it that makes it all feel worth it to me. That's my flow state. Mid lifers. Don't worry about digging through your old notes from all this insanely amazing information we got today.

*Sarah Milken * (00:17:35) - You can go to my website, dot the flexible neurotic.com and search everybody. And there is a full set of show notes. And you can listen to the full length episode there to stay tuned for more golden nuggets that you probably forgot in the midst of midlife parenting, teens becoming or maybe already are an empty nest or careering. In so many other things, there are three things you can do. First, subscribe to the fucking podcast. Second, share it with some friends who might like midlife shit. And third, write an Apple review. Writing reviews is really annoying. It's an extra step, but guess what? It really helps the podcast grow. You think your little review won't matter, but it does. You all matter to me. DM me. You know, I always respond. Oh, and of course, follow my Instagram at the flexible, neurotic duh love you talk to.