Done Being Last

The Tired That Sleep Doesn’t Fix

Some exhaustion doesn’t care how many hours you get.

It lives in the woman who holds everything together. The reliable one. The one who can’t lie down until every person in her life is handled.

And when she finally does lie down, her body keeps watch anyway.

My first podcast guest is sleep expert Josey Hull, and we left the bedtime routine talk at the door.

We talked about why rest feels unsafe when you’ve spent your life being counted on. What all-day vigilance does to the body at night. Why guilt arrives the second you stop. And the one thing Josey wants every woman running on empty to hear.

You can reach Josey Hull at on Facebook - Josey Hull Coaching or on Instagram

Josey’s Free Gift to Everyone listening is 3 Resets for the Tired but Wired

Free Guide: 3 Resets for the Tired but Wired

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

After the holidays. After work calms down. Most of us have a someday plan for choosing ourselves. In this episode I do the honest math on what waiting costs, and why life won't clear a space for this.

Choose Yourself Circle starts this coming Monday!

Subscribe to my paid tier to join the circle.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Have you ever known exactly what you wanted… and then changed your mind because someone else had an opinion?

Maybe you said yes when you wanted to say no. Put your plans on hold because someone needed you. Or spent so long being the reliable, responsible one that putting yourself last barely registers anymore.

In this episode of Done Being Last, we’re looking at 10 signs you may be abandoning yourself without even realizing it.

We’ll explore what happens when you:

* Change your mind because someone else is disappointed

* Need a “good enough” reason to do something for yourself

* Dismiss your feelings before you understand them

* Over-explain your decisions because you want approval

* Feel resentful but keep volunteering for more

* Don’t know what you want until you know what everyone else wants

* Struggle to receive help

* Feel guilty when you stop being useful

* Keep postponing the life you want

* Wonder who you’d be if people didn’t need you so much

And here’s the bigger question: What happens when you stop automatically putting yourself at the bottom of the list?

This episode isn’t about blaming yourself. These patterns often developed because being capable, helpful and dependable worked for you.

But being there for everyone else shouldn’t require leaving yourself out.

Change starts by noticing the moment you’re about to abandon what you want, need or feel — and giving yourself the chance to make a different choice.

A question to take with you:Which of these signs felt the most familiar?

And if you’re thinking, “Okay, I see the pattern… but how do I actually change it?” — that’s exactly what we’ll be working on inside my Choose Yourself Circle.

It’s a three-week live circle for women who are ready to stop putting themselves last and start practising what it means to choose themselves in real life.

We start November 2nd.

I’m also inviting 5 women into the circle as a gift from me. Two have already said yes.

If you want in, send me a message and let me know.

You’ve spent enough time making room for everyone else.

It’s time to make room for you, too.

To join the Choose Yourself Circle simply subscribe to my paid tier or learn more CLICK THIS LINK.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You understood your pattern perfectly, then did it anyway the next morning? In this episode I talk about why insight alone hasn’t changed it, why self-abandonment lives in the body, and what does help: practice, again and again, with people beside you.

Choose Yourself, my 3-week live circle, starts Monday, November 2nd. Monday lessons, Wednesday circles, and a small room of women practicing this together.

This Circle lives in my paid tier on Substack.

Everything is here: https://pages.carolinamauti.com/home-3233

Save your seat here: https://carolinamauti.substack.com/subscribe

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I was reading a novel last week and had to set it down.

The author wrote about a woman that was describing her mother. And the daughter wrote about her like she was fragile. Like a woman who couldn’t manage an ordinary day. She was afraid to let her mother drive.

I kept reading, waiting for the reason. An illness. A fall. Something.

There wasn’t one. She was simply in her early sixties. Healthy. Sharp. Still driving her own car. And somewhere along the way, the story had decided that was enough to make her small.

That sat in my chest for days.

The story we were handed

So many of us grew up with this script. We reach a certain age, and the world starts to shrink around you. Fewer invitations. More assumptions. People talking a little slower or a little louder. Help offered before it’s asked for.

And the part that gets me is how many women start to believe it.

They hand over the keys before anyone asks. They say “oh, I’m too old for that” about things they still want. I’m too old to start my own business. They let other people decide what they can handle.

Well-meaning family and friends start weighing in on how she should dress. How she should act. What’s “appropriate” now for her age. When did that become someone else’s decision?

What I see in my work

The women I work with are in their forties, fifties and sixties. Most of them spent decades as the one everyone could count on. The organizer. The fixer. The one who said yes before the question was finished.

Then the kids leave. Or the career shifts. Or the body changes. And there’s a pause. The old roles loosen their grip.

The world calls that moment decline.

I call it the door opening.

What looks like slowing down from the outside is often a woman coming home to herself. She stops performing. She stops checking every choice against everyone else’s comfort. She starts noticing what she wants. For lunch. For her Saturday. For the next twenty years.

That’s a homecoming.

What really shrinks a woman

What shrinks a woman is the habit of putting herself last. Age just gets the blame.

Forty years of self-abandonment can look a lot like getting old. Hesitation. Tiredness. Letting someone else drive. “I’ll just let him handle it.” The body follows the story it’s been told.

But a pattern is a pattern. It was learned, and it can change. At 45. At 62. At 75.

A different page

I keep picturing that mother on a different page. Keys in her hand. Window down. Heading somewhere she chose, for no one’s reason but her own.

She was never the problem. The story about her was.

So, sit with these questions for a minute:

Where have I let someone else decide what I’m capable of?What did I stop doing because it made someone else nervous?What would I choose if I believed my best years were still ahead?

Come choose yourself with us

This is the work we do inside the Choose Yourself Circle.

It’s a space for women who are done being last. Done shrinking to fit someone else’s idea of who they should be at this age. Inside, we look at the patterns that keep us small and practice choosing differently, one real moment at a time. Members also get access to my workshops inside the paid tier.

The Circle lives in my paid Substack, and right now the yearly membership is at a special limited-time price.

Your best years aren’t behind you. Come find them with us.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It doesn’t mean you stop caring about people. It means you start including yourself in the decisions you make.

In this video, I’m talking about what changes when you begin choosing yourself from catching the automatic yes to trusting yourself enough to stand by your decisions, even when someone else isn’t happy about them.

This is the work we’ll be doing inside the Choose Yourself Circle. Not just learning what to do differently, but putting into practise what is learned in your everyday life.

Another aha moment is great but you need to start doing things differently.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You don’t need to become someone new. You need to stop abandoning the woman you already are.

If you’re ready to start choosing yourself then join me in the paid tier and we begin Choose Yourself Circle on November 2nd.

Done Being Last is a podcast for high-achieving women over 40 who are ready to stop putting themselves at the bottom of their own list.

Coming last is a habit.Habits were learned.They can be unlearned.

New episode every week. Hit subscribe and you won’t miss it.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Hi everyone,

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how you became the person who handles everything while secretly feeling disconnected from what you actually want, this one is for you.

Registration for Interrupt Yourself is officially open. I’m talking about the shift from high-functioning self-abandonment to actually coming home to yourself.

Watch the video above, and if this resonates, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And if you’re ready to step off the exhaustion treadmill, you can find all the details to join us below.

Sending support,

Carolina

Save your seat by clicking on the button below.

If you’ve ever read a book about boundaries, tried a script, done the journalling, understood the pattern intellectually — and then found yourself doing it again anyway — this episode is for you.

Because the thing I want to say first is this: it’s not because you didn’t try hard enough. It’s not because you lack willpower or self-awareness or the right information.

It’s because the tools were aimed at the wrong thing.

FOUR REASONS THE SCRIPTS KEEP FAILING

Most of the advice out there for women who over-give, people-please, and say yes when they mean no — it targets behaviour. It gives you language. It teaches you to set a boundary, to say the thing, to hold the line.

And it keeps failing. Not because the advice is wrong, exactly. But because of four problems.

The first one: wrong target. The tools are aimed at the behaviour. The pattern lives in the nervous system. Those are not the same address.

The second: wrong timing. By the time you’re thinking about setting a boundary, the pattern has already fired. The yes is already on its way out of your mouth. You’re not making a decision in that moment — you’re completing a reflex.

The third: wrong tool. Awareness does not override a nervous system response. You cannot think your way out of a physiological reaction. Knowing better does not produce doing better. If it did, none of us would still be here.

The fourth: wrong level. Surface changes cannot reach a pattern that was built decades ago, at the root. You can put new behaviour on top of an old structure all you like. The structure remains.

Knowing better does not produce doing better. If it did, none of us would still be here.

WHERE IT ACTUALLY COMES FROM

So if it’s not a knowledge problem, and not a willpower problem — what is it?

What we call people-pleasing, over-giving, difficulty saying no, and constantly putting yourself last often have the same root: self-abandonment.

That’s the thing I most want you to hear in this episode, and to really let land. Not as a concept. As something that is true about your specific history.

At some point — probably when you were very young — your system learned that being needed was safer than being yourself. That love felt conditional on being easy, being good, being manageable. That conflict was dangerous. That being too much had consequences.

So you adapted. You learned to read the room. You learned to anticipate needs before they were spoken. You learned to adjust before anyone asked you to. You became exceptionally good at being who other people needed you to be. The problem is that somewhere along the way, you stopped asking who you needed to be for yourself.

And it worked. That’s the part that gets missed in conversations like this. The adaptation worked. It kept you connected. It kept you safe. Your nervous system did exactly what it was supposed to do with the information it had.

THE MISREAD

The pattern is still trying to protect you. But what once protected you is now costing you your energy, your clarity, your confidence, and your connection to yourself.

It doesn’t know you’re no longer that younger version of yourself who needed those strategies to feel safe. It’s still running the same program — still reading a moment of tension or disapproval as danger, still reaching for the old response that once kept you safe.

You are not failing. You are operating from a pattern that once protected you. And now it’s time to decide whether that pattern still gets to lead your life.

But you can’t teach a nervous system something new by thinking at it. You teach it through experience. Through new evidence. Through tiny, repeated moments where you do something different and survive.

THE ONE PRACTICE THIS WEEK

I’m not going to give you a tool to use yet. That comes next episode.

This week, the only practice is to notice.

Not change. Not fix. Not perform differently.

Just — when the pattern moves through you, say quietly to yourself:

There it is.

There is the moment I leave myself.

That’s it. Just see it.

Don’t make it mean anything. Don’t judge it. Don’t try to do it differently in the moment.

Just let it be real.

Because you can’t change a pattern you haven’t learned to see.

And you can’t return to yourself until you recognize the places you’ve been leaving yourself.

As mentioned, I’m hosting a 3-Day Workshop called Interrupt Yourself. Register below.