When I turned 40, I wondered if I’d have a midlife crisis, but then nothing happened. Then I turned 41, and it hit.

I suddenly felt like I’d spent my whole life being dictated by what other people thought I should do, what they expected from me, or what they thought “someone in my position” should do.

In my mind, this came with a feeling of being boxed in. And the crazy part was that I was allowing other people to box me in. So the overwhelming feeling that came to me was:

“Get out of other people’s boxes.”

Or, more accurately, the boxes I had let them put me in.

Everything about me started to feel beige. My jeans-and-a-t-shirt routine. Stay-at-home mom. College graduate, but with a kind of lame degree in Liberal Studies.

When my kids were little, I felt so much accomplishment by helping them through school and life. Their wins were my wins. There were always problems to solve and things to learn to help them become themselves. It felt great.

As they became teenagers, it dawned on me that their accomplishments were their own, and I no longer had much of a part in them. It was all part of their own stories.

In the same vein, I realized that while I am a proud member of a military family, my life was no different no matter where we lived. Same routines. Same schedule.

My husband had a cool job, and because of that we have lived all over the world. But day to day, he would go to work, and I’d stay home and make dinner. I might be doing it in Italy, Côte d’Ivoire, Germany, or the States, but aside from the location, life was basically the same.

Dinner on the table by 6 every night.

Forever.

And it no longer felt like enough.

I took stock of my life.  The good, the bad, and the ugly. I decided that the only opinion that mattered about my life was my own.

The first thing that changed was the way I dress. I still wear jeans and a t-shirt when I want to, but I’m more often in brightly colored skirts and wearing fun accessories, like a mesh top over my shirt or an angler fish necklace.

The second thing that changed was my desire to be skinny. That was rooted in peer pressure and believing everything I grew up with in the 90s and early 2000s. I got back in photos without losing weight first, and I stopped holding myself back because of my size.

The third change is that I went from mocking influencers I saw in the wild to working toward becoming one of them. Now, I’m not a lifestyle influencer, but I decided to really go for it on social media.

The fourth thing is that there will be more changes to make, more pivots, and I need to watch for them.

I’ll do that by noticing when I start feeling boxed in again, and then I’ll get back out of that box, just like I did a few years ago.

Are you stuck in a box?