What happens when the thing you've been using to survive starts becoming the thing that's destroying you?

Joanne Kminsky knows what it means to keep functioning while everything underneath you is falling apart.

She lost her father young. She struggled with grief she didn't know how to process. She found ways to numb it. She kept working. Kept parenting. Kept moving.

From the outside, she was functioning.

Inside, something was very different.

Then one night, something happened with her daughter that forced Joanne to see what she could no longer look away from.

That moment changed the direction of her life.

In this conversation, Joanne and Michelle talk about grief, addiction, parenting, asking for help, and the identities we build around being the person who can handle everything.

They also go somewhere unexpected: into the classroom, the education system, and what happens when the work you once loved becomes a place where you can no longer recognize yourself.

Because sometimes the hardest part isn't knowing that something has to change.

It's admitting that you can't keep doing it this way.

This conversation is for anyone who's functioning on the outside while quietly knowing something has to give.

You don't have to know what comes next to know that this isn't working anymore.

If this conversation hit somewhere a little too close to home, don't just scroll past it join the Hot Mess Magic Community and keep the convo going.

Follow Hot Mess Magic wherever you listen to podcasts, and send this episode to the person who needs to hear it.

Because sometimes the conversation we need most is the one we keep avoiding.

Connect

Michelle - IG @michelleaburke

Joanne - FB @skypereadingtutor

This episode includes discussion of suicide, addiction, grief, and mental health struggles. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction or mental health, please reach out to a qualified mental health or addiction professional or a local crisis/support service. You don't have to figure it out alone.

You are not the same person you were at 10.

So why are you still wearing the mask you put on back then?

We’re in an eclipse window between the August 12 solar eclipse in Leo and the August 27–28 lunar eclipse in Pisces. And this episode came together while I was walking on the beach, completely different from what I planned to record.

Because maybe that’s the point.

We evolve. We change our minds. We outgrow things. And sometimes the identity that once protected us becomes the identity we can no longer live inside.

The good girl.

The strong one.

The successful one.

The easy one.

The one who keeps it together.

Which one are you still being?

And which one are you done wearing?

This is a beach walk and talk about identity, masks, evolution, and what happens when you finally see the parts of yourself you’ve been hiding.

Drop the facade. Own the mess. Remember who the fuck you are.

Hot Mess Magic is a podcast about the identities we build, the masks we wear, and what happens when we stop pretending.

New episodes every Friday.

The woman you judge might be the woman you understand.

We are quick to decide who someone is based on the role they play.

The stripper.

The executive.

The entrepreneur.

The woman who seems to have it all together.

The woman whose choices don't make sense to us.

But what if the story we've been told isn't the whole story?

In this conversation, Michelle sits down with Morgan Barkus, a former stripper who spent 13 years in the adult entertainment industry before becoming a confidence coach and entrepreneur.

What unfolds is not a conversation about stripping.

It's a conversation about identity, perception, confidence, and the masks we all learn to wear to survive.

Morgan shares what the industry taught her about boundaries, self-worth, rejection, sales, and the power of being seen for more than the role someone assumes you play.

Together, Michelle and Morgan challenge the beliefs we carry about empowerment, judgment, success, and what it means to truly own who you are.

Because sometimes the person we are quickest to judge is the person who has something important to teach us.

• Why the common narrative about women in the adult entertainment industry misses the deeper truth
• What 13 years as a stripper taught Morgan about confidence and resilience
• The surprising connection between stripping, entrepreneurship, and sales
• Why confidence has less to do with appearance and more to do with knowing your worth
• How rejection can become one of your greatest strengths
• Why being seen, heard, and understood is something everyone craves
• The difference between empowerment and simply adapting to survive
• How the roles we play can become mistaken for who we are

This conversation will challenge the assumptions you hold about other people—and maybe the assumptions you've been carrying about yourself.

Because the masks we judge in others are often the same masks we wear ourselves.

Connect

Michelle Burke

• IG - https://www.instagram.com/michelleaburke
• What Identity did you create to survive? - Find out here --> michelle-a-burke.kit.com/themask

Morgan Barkus

• IG - https://www.instagram.com/morganbarkus/
• Join the Club - https://www.morganbarkus.com/confidence-club

If this conversation made you stop and think, subscribe to Hot Mess Magic for honest conversations about identity, authenticity, and the hidden cost of the masks we wear to survive.

Share this episode with someone who's ready to question the stories they've been taught about confidence, success, and what it really means to be seen.

What happens when you stop trusting a part of yourself you once knew was powerful?

In this episode of Hot Mess Magic, Michelle Burke shares a deeply personal story about identity, self-trust, and what happens when we silence a part of ourselves because we’re afraid of how it will be perceived.

Michelle opens up about a chapter of her life she hasn’t talked about publicly in this way before — a time when she questioned herself, walked away from something that had been a major part of her identity, and had to confront what it meant to truly remember who she was.

Because sometimes the hardest thing to reclaim isn’t a dream, a goal, or a relationship.

It’s the parts of ourselves we decided weren’t safe to show.

In this episode, Michelle explores:

• The identities we build and what happens when they become who we are

• Why being judged or misunderstood can cause us to hide parts of ourselves

• The difference between protecting yourself and abandoning yourself

• How your nervous system can keep you safe while also keeping you stuck

• What it means to come back to yourself after losing your way

The question Michelle wants you to sit with:

What part of yourself have you abandoned because somewhere along the way it stopped feeling safe to be seen?

Because maybe the thing you’ve been hiding isn’t the thing that needs to disappear.

Maybe it’s the thing you’re meant to remember.

Join Michelle inside The Remembering — a space to drop the facade and reconnect with who you are underneath the identities, expectations, and stories you’ve carried.

Let’s remember who the fuck we are together. Join Here

There's a specific kind of person who gets hit by a car at 74 miles an hour, breaks most of their body, and thinks — okay, now I can shower and get back to the office.

Not because they're reckless. Because stillness started to feel like failure somewhere along the way. And producing became the only proof they were worth anything.

That's Jess Robbins.

Sixteen surgeries. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Addiction. All of it shoved into a box labeled deal with this later. Then she rebuilt. Got back to the top of a corporate career. Got the supplements and the water bottle and the genuine commitment to do it right this time.

Then she found herself on a cold basement floor, hating everything she'd built.

This is what burnout looks like in high achievers who never learned to stop — not a dramatic collapse, but a quiet, efficient rebuilding of the exact same thing that broke them. Same perfectionism. Same patterns. Same proof-of-worth machinery running in the background, unexamined.

Jess didn't just burn out. She healed like a hustler. And then she burned out again.

If you've ever survived something, rebuilt something, and had a quiet suspicion you rebuilt it wrong, this conversation will name what you already know.

In This Episode You'll Explore

• Why high achievers often rebuild the same cycle after hitting rock bottom
• What it looks like when someone heals with the same energy that burned them out
• Why stillness and rest feel like failure to people wired for production
• How a childhood moment of perfectionism can quietly run an entire adult life
• Why the people who are best at seeing patterns in others are often the last to see their own

Listener CTA

If this episode named something you've been carrying around without a word for it — follow the show so you don't miss what comes next. And if someone in your life would recognize themselves in this conversation, send it to them. Sometimes the most useful thing isn't advice. It's someone finally saying the thing out loud.

Connect with Michelle

Website: https://hotmessmagicemedia.com

Instagram: @michelleaburke

Speaking & Media Inquiries: CLICK HERE

Connect with Jess Robbins

Instagram:

Newsletter CTA

The newsletter is where this conversation keeps going between episodes — the stuff that doesn't fit in a caption and shouldn't. No tips. No hacks. No five steps to anything. Just more of the things people are thinking privately and pretending they're not. If that's your kind of mailing list, get on it at : https://michelle-a-burke.kit.com/hotmessmagic

Questions Answered In This Episode

Why does achieving more not make the feeling of not-enoughness stop?

Why do some people keep rebuilding the same patterns after their lives fall apart?

What does it feel like to be unable to stop even when your body is demanding it?

Why do high-functioning people struggle so much to ask for help?

What is the connection between perfectionism in childhood and burnout in adulthood?

It's the strongest because it does two jobs at once without compromising either. It matches the exact phrasing a person uses when they search this feeling at 11pm, so it's discoverable. And it sounds like Michelle — flat, direct, naming the thing instead of dressing it up. It promises recognition rather than a fix, which is the whole point. The original episode title, The Milestone Felt Like Nothing, is beautiful as the in-show line and works well as a subtitle, but "milestone" is a softer search term than "goal," and leading with the question pulls more curiosity and more search traffic.

You hit the thing. The number, the date, the title, the year you swore would feel like something. And then it came — and you felt almost nothing. A flat, confusing is that it? you didn't dare say out loud, because who feels empty at the thing they wanted?

In this solo episode, Michelle Burke sits inside that exact nothing. One year of Hot Mess Magic — a milestone she assumed would land like fireworks and instead landed like a Tuesday. What she found underneath wasn't gratitude or regret. It was a pattern. The wedding. The house. The job. The number on the scale. Every finish line you were promised would fix something, and quietly didn't.

This isn't about feeling more grateful. It's about the arrival fallacy nobody admits to, the gratitude we all perform for each other in the photo, and the question hiding under every milestone: what were you actually expecting it to fix?

You're not broken. You just believed the story. So did everyone smiling next to you.

Key Topics Covered

The arrival fallacy — why a milestone you ran toward for years can land like an ordinary Tuesday

The shame attached to anticlimax, and why "I felt nothing" gets quietly filed under ungrateful

Performing gratitude you don't actually feel, and the photo-smile everyone keeps up for everyone else

A year reframed as "the residue of not quitting" rather than a triumph — fifty-two arguments with yourself, won by a slim margin

The flatness at the finish line as information: the thing you quietly hired a goal to fix that a goal was never going to fix

CTA

If this put words to something you've been carrying around and not saying — that's the whole reason it exists. Follow Hot Mess Magic so you don't lose the thread. If you've got something real to say, leave a review; the honest ones are the ones worth reading. And if someone in your life smiled in the photo and felt the nothing too, send it to them. They'll know exactly what it's about.

Connect with Michelle

Website: https://hotmessmagicemedia.com

Instagram: @michelleaburke

Speaking & Media Inquiries: CLICK HERE

Newsletter CTA

The newsletter is where this conversation keeps going between episodes — the stuff that doesn't fit in a caption and shouldn't. No tips. No hacks. No five steps to anything. Just more of the things people are thinking privately and pretending they're not. If that's your kind of mailing list, get on it at : https://michelle-a-burke.kit.com/hotmessmagic

Surviving the thing isn't the end of the story. It's the start of a stranger one.

Soodabeh Mokry lived through what most people don't: a brutal attack at a student protest in Iran at nineteen, a coma, war, the loss of her brother, immigration, the discovery that her marriage was over the moment she landed in a new country, and a stretch dark enough that she questioned whether she wanted to keep going at all. Two kids. No map. No language for any of it.

But this conversation isn't really about the things she survived. It's about the question that showed up once she had — the one survivors aren't supposed to say out loud: why am I still here.

Because here's the part nobody warns you about. You make it through. You're supposed to feel saved. Instead you feel confused, flat, alone in a way that doesn't match how dramatic the story sounds when other people tell it back to you. Everyone wants the inspiring version. You're stuck with the actual one — the disorientation of being alive on the other side of something that should have ended you, and having no idea who you're supposed to be now.

You don't need a war to recognize this. Anyone who's come out the far side of a divorce, a loss, a year that took everything, knows the specific loneliness of carrying a story too big for the people around you to hold. Knows what it's like to be called strong when you feel like a stranger to yourself.

Soodabeh and Michelle get into the part the highlight reel skips. The numbness. The guilt of surviving when you're not even sure you wanted to. The exhausting pressure to perform gratitude. And the slow, unglamorous business of being a person again when the person you were is gone.

If you've felt broken, lost, abandoned, or stuck somewhere you can't see your way out of — or if you made it through the worst of it and quietly wondered why you don't feel rescued — this one will sit close.

No advice. No silver lining on a schedule. Just two people naming what's actually there.

Connect

Michelle: @michelleaburke

Show: @hotmessmagic

Soodabeh: @soodabehmokry

Join the Hot Mess Magic community: https://michelle-a-burke.kit.com/hotmessmagic

A 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify is the simplest way to help the right person find this.

This episode includes discussion of suicidal despair and trauma. It's based on personal experience and conversation and is not a substitute for therapy, diagnosis, or professional care. If you're struggling with your mental health or thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to a licensed professional or your local crisis line.

Someone asks how you're doing and you've said "good, busy" before they finish the sentence. It's automatic now. You've said it so many times you're not sure what's actually underneath it anymore.

This is a solo episode about the people who don't look like they're struggling. The ones who answer every email, show up to everything, remember the birthdays, carry the whole thing and feel nothing, or feel too much, or feel a kind of tired that sleep doesn't touch.

Burnout has a branding problem. We picture someone who's stopped working. But most burnout looks like competence. It looks like someone performing perfectly while quietly running on empty. That's the version nobody catches, because the entire point of high-functioning is that it keeps functioning.

Michelle gets into the part people don't say out loud: that pretending to be fine is its own full-time job. That maintaining the mask is more exhausting than whatever's behind it. That there's a specific loneliness in being the reliable one — the person everyone assumes is okay, precisely because you've gotten so good at making sure they assume it.

This one's about emotional exhaustion, emotional suppression, and the strange numbness that shows up after you've held too much for too long. About the distance between how your life looks and how it feels. About being told your whole life to manage your emotions, then wondering why you can't locate them anymore. About the difference between feelings that are technically valid and feelings that ever actually got to be felt.

If you're emotionally exhausted, mentally overwhelmed, numb, disconnected, lonely in a way that doesn't make sense given how full your life is, or just done performing fine for an audience that now includes yourself — this will probably land a little too close.

No advice. No five steps. Just the conversation you've been having in your head, out loud.

Mentioned in this episode: Gratitude Meditation: Grab it here

Loving Hot Mess Magic? A 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify helps the right people find it. Screenshot the episode and tag Michelle.

Instagram: @michelleaburke

This podcast is based on personal experience and conversation and is not a substitute for therapy, diagnosis, or professional medical advice. If you're struggling with your mental health, anxiety, depression, or thoughts of self-harm, please contact a licensed mental health professional or your local crisis support line.

If you've ever watered yourself down to make other people comfortable in your content, your relationships, your life. This episode is going to name exactly what that's been costing you.

Krysta Paffrath made a post about playing small. Not the vague, inspirational kind. The specific kind where you realize you've been creating content designed not to offend anyone, following every strategy you were taught, and somewhere in the process stopped sounding like yourself entirely.

In this conversation, Krysta and Michelle go to the place that usually stays off-mic. The grief of recognizing what the box cost you. The fear of being seen differently by people who knew the old version. The moment in your forties when you're done pretending. And what it actually feels like in your body when you are, and aren't, living like yourself.

Krysta is a podcast manager turned 500-hour certified yoga teacher who found that the missing piece for women entrepreneurs wasn't more strategy. It was a regulated nervous system. This conversation covers both — and neither one sounds like a wellness lecture.

There are tissues rolled up inside Michelle's yoga mat. That detail tells you everything about where this episode goes.

What You'll Hear In This Episode

• Why making yourself palatable is a pattern, not a personality — and how to tell the difference
• What it actually costs you to stay in a box that no longer fits
• Why your nervous system is running your business decisions more than your strategy is
• How to use stillness as a diagnostic tool — and what it reveals in the first five minutes
• Why "you are not a tree" might be the most useful thing you hear this week

Mentioned In This Episode

• The Hour of Nothing — Hot Mess Magic solo episode (linked in show notes)

Connect With Krysta

Instagram: @krystapaffrath

Threads: @krystapaffrath

Website: krystapaffrath.com

Connect With Michelle

Instagram: @michelleaburke

Resources & Links

Some links below are affiliate links. If you purchase through them I may earn a small commission at no cost to you — I only share things I actually use.

• Record your podcast with Riverside → https://riverside.sjv.io/hotmessmagic
• Mirco Journey - What reach for when I need to connect with my body → https://themicrojourney.com/?ref=mburke - Use MBURKE at checkout to get 20% off.
• CBD for Life — what I reach for when my nervous system is fried → Get 20% off https://imp.i295461.net/aOm1Gq

I'm So Effing Done: What Happens When You Stop Being Afraid of Your Own Power

You know that feeling when you can't pretend anymore? When everything that used to be tolerable just... isn't?

That's where this episode starts.

This week hit different. The kind of week where the emotional weight of everything — the fakeness, the sameness, the energy you've been handing out to people and platforms that don't deserve it — finally lands. And instead of pushing through it, Michelle sits in the done-ness. Names it. And asks the question nobody wants to answer:

Who would you be if you weren't afraid of your own power?

This isn't about burning your life down. It's about what happens when you stop performing a version of yourself that was always too small to begin with.

In this episode:

• Why "I'm so done" isn't a breakdown — it's a signal
• The Instagram unfollow spiral and what it's really about (hint: it's not social media)
• How we've all gotten stuck in the sound-the-same cycle — and what it costs
• The witch wound, the nervous system, and why owning your voice still feels dangerous in 2026
• What it means to hit a new bottom on the way to a next level
• The only two choices you have when the floor falls out

If you've been feeling emotionally exhausted, done with performing, or like you've hit a wall you didn't see coming — this one is for you.

This is Hot Mess Magic. The pattern was never the problem. Not seeing it is.

Follow Hot Mess Magic wherever you listen. If this episode hit something real, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

And yes — I'm still on Instagram. Come find me: @michelleaburke