What happens when the life you built suddenly no longer fits?

And how do you learn to love a body, a future, and an identity that look nothing like what you once imagined?

In this episode of the Clean Your Toilet Podcast, Cheryl Miles, founder of Miles Nixon Media and author (“Smitten in the Kitchen, 60 Recipes for Love”) sits down with Benjamin Byrne, content creator The Smiling Afro, for a conversation about reinvention, aging, grief, and the tender shadows that shape our relationships with ourselves and others.

Cheryl spent 16 years in broadcasting, a world where youth, energy, and visibility are currency. Walking away from that career forced her into a new season of life, one where identity had to be rebuilt from the inside out. Alongside this transition came the physical and emotional realities of perimenopause and menopause, experiences often shrouded in silence and stigma. Cheryl opens up about navigating shifting hormones, fluctuating energy, and a changing sense of self-worth in a world that can make aging women feel invisible.

But the shadows run deeper. Cheryl’s journey through late marriage, IVF, miscarriage, and the grief of unrealised motherhood reshaped her understanding of love and lineage. She speaks gently about learning to hold both acceptance and sorrow, and how her marriage evolved through these seasons of loss and longing. Her story reveals how relationships transform not just through joy, but through the courage to confront what cannot be controlled.

This episode explores what it means to redefine strength, to reclaim visibility, and to honour the body and life you have today, not the one you expected to have. Cheryl shows how aging can become an act of empowerment, and how love can deepen when you stop measuring your life against milestones you never reached.

If you’ve ever:

— Faced a major life transition that asked you to let go of who you were

— Struggled with a changing body or sense of identity

— Carried silent grief about paths that didn’t unfold

— Questioned your relevance or visibility as you age

— Longed to find meaning beyond traditional markers of success…

This episode is your reminder that reinvention takes courage and integration of parts you have not seen or accepted.

And sometimes, the shadows of what didn’t happen illuminate the journey of who you’ve grown to be.

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