The Midlife Edit

It never met you. It didn't raise you. It doesn't know your name. And it still had an opinion about who you should become — your body, your ambition, exactly how much room you're allowed to take up. In Episode 2 of Ghostwriters, Jen goes after the second ghostwriter: The Culture.

Jen traces three decades of a very specific kind of noise — 80s and 90s beauty standards, a rotating cast of diet trends, the jump from magazines and MTV to Instagram at 6am — and the moment a "you're edging toward irrelevant" thought showed up uninvited on her 43rd birthday, uninvited and unrequested. She gets into the "have it all" myth (and her hot take that maybe you can't, and that's okay), a farmer's-market moment with her mother-in-law that turned into an unplanned thesis statement, and the house she and her husband are selling after five years of blending their family — and why gratitude and wanting something more can live in the same body.

The episode closes with this week's tool: catching a "should" mid-sentence and asking one very simple, very necessary question — says who?

• Quick catch-up: the "one-hit wonder" callback and a recap of Episode 1's family roles (black sheep, golden child, peacemaker, parentified kid, invisible one)
• Introducing The Culture as the second ghostwriter — never met you, still has notes
• Growing up a girl in the 80s and 90s: magazines, MTV, and the phrase "she looks great for her age"
• The Body Script: three decades of diet culture and why the goalposts keep moving on purpose
• Turning 43 and catching the "edging toward irrelevant" thought she never invited
• The farmer's market moment with her mother-in-law — "is this shirt too young for me?"
• The shift from magazines-with-an-off-switch to a phone that never turns off, and comparing your real life to someone else's highlight reel
• The "have it all" checklist, and why "having it all" quietly became "doing it all" — plus Nikki Miller's question from Jen's moms' group: "where do you get your energy?"
• Hitting midlife: packing up the house, the move to be closer to the city and her stepkids' school, and the question "is this it?"
• The Anti-Aging Industrial Complex
• The Culture Inside Your Head — what it means when the ghostwriter doesn't even need to be in the room anymore
• This week's tool: the "says who?" exercise for taking the pen back
• What's next in the series: The Relationship (Episode 3)

• "That's the weird thing about culture. It never asked us. It just started writing."
• "Would you still want it if nobody else could see you? That's a very different question."
• "Culture doesn't just give you the standard. It moves the standard. So you can never actually arrive."
• "Culture may have gotten the pen early. But it doesn't get to write the ending."

• The Edit Room (Facebook community)
• The Backstage Pass newsletter (Sunday sends)
• Episode 81: Ghostwriters, Episode 1: The Family
• Episode 75: Hold the Pen
• Episode 77: The Ghostwriters

Who wrote the story you're currently living? Not you — probably someone else. In this first episode of a brand new series, Jen introduces Ghostwriters: the five recurring authors — The Family, The Culture, The Relationship, The Caregiver, and The Job — who script women's lives without their consent.

Episode 1 starts where it all begins: The Family. Jen breaks down the roles we get cast into before we're old enough to audition for another part — the black sheep, the golden child, the peacemaker, the parentified kid, the invisible one — and gets personal about her own role growing up. She also opens up about going quiet for a couple weeks (work travel, turning 43, selling the house) and why the pause turned into this series.

This episode explores how childhood roles quietly follow us into adulthood — into our marriages, our businesses, our friendships — and offers a simple, non-dramatic way to start noticing where the pen changed hands.

• Why Jen went quiet the last few weeks (travel, her 43rd birthday, selling the house)
• The origin of the "Hold the Pen" framework (Episode 75)
• Introducing the Ghostwriters series and its five recurring "authors"
• The Family as the first ghostwriter — born into a role, not cast in one
• The Black Sheep: why it's often a strategy, not a personality
• Other family roles: The Golden Child, The Peacemaker, The Parentified Kid, The Invisible One
• How these roles show up in adulthood — work, marriage, business, friendships
• A simple two-question exercise for noticing whose "voice" is really driving a decision
• What's next in the series: The Culture (Episode 2)

• "Somewhere along the way, I forgot I was allowed to hold the pen."
• "It's not always a personality. Sometimes it's a strategy."
• "None of this is a character flaw, friends. It's just an old script still running in the background decades after the original cast had changed."
• "You don't have to rewrite the whole story. You just have to notice whose handwriting is on the page."

Subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. Join The Edit Room to share which role you recognized yourself in.

Recorded from a hotel room in San Antonio after a 2:45am wake-up and a 5am flight — thirty minutes from skipping the week entirely before deciding she couldn't. This week's episode was supposed to open the Ghostwriters series, but instead Jen gets honest about burnout, perimenopause, and the exhaustion of a summer that included Mason's 21st birthday celebrations, stepkids' packed activity schedules, building two careers, and — as of this weekend — putting the house on the market.

The core of the episode: One-Hit Wonders. Jen unpacks how the music industry (and culture at large) reduces artists — especially women like Joan Osborne, Meredith Brooks, Tracy Bonham, and Fiona Apple — to a single song regardless of the depth of their catalog, and draws the parallel to how women get flattened into one defining moment: the wedding, the baby, the breakdown, the comeback. She gets vulnerable about rumination, not listening back to her own episodes out of anxiety, and refusing to let this podcast — or herself — become a one-hit wonder.

Video is taking a short break while the house is on the market. Audio isn't going anywhere. The Ghostwriters series starts next week with Episode 1: The Family.

00:03 — Cold open: hotel room, San Antonio, almost skipped this week 01:15 — Why the Ghostwriters series got bumped 02:07 — Burnout, letting things slide, going quiet on social 04:05 — The full plate: Mason's 21st, stepkids, house on the market 05:30 — One-Hit Wonders: the setup 07:58 — Culture picks the single — and so do we 10:08 — Getting vulnerable: rumination, the deep cuts 12:30 — Why she recorded anyway 14:09 — Close: what's next + Edit Room callout

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Audra Phelps grew up Mormon, married in the temple at 20, and spent the next decade doing everything right — and doing everything she was told. On today's episode she and Jen skip the standard "growing up in the church" recap and go straight for the good stuff: the moment she realized she didn't even like the apple pie she'd been baking every Thanksgiving for her husband, and what came unraveling after it.

This is the second stop in Jen's Hold the Pen series — and Audra, without any prompting, uses the exact word "ghostwriter" to describe what religion did to her story. Turns out you don't need to have grown up Mormon to recognize every second of this conversation.

In this episode:

• What a "good" Mormon wife and mother looked like on paper — and how little choice was actually built into it (00:32)
• Ten years of quiet doubt, and what that looked like day to day, including the anxiety and panic attacks Audra didn't understand at the time (09:00)
• The "alphabet exodus" — how a move overseas to Kazakhstan gave her the physical distance to start questioning everything (12:25)
• The pie story. Thanksgiving, eight years after leaving the church, standing in her kitchen resenting a dessert she didn't even like — and realizing she had no idea what her own favorite pie was (17:52)
• Why leaving isn't the same as being free, and the loneliness that showed up right alongside it (26:06)
• Telling her parents — the hardest conversation, harder than telling her husband (29:54)
• Building a family mission statement with her kids instead of handing them a new script to replace the old one (33:06)
• The coaching program that saved her marriage — and the question underneath it: does today's Audra still choose the same husband? (38:30)
• What NLP coaching actually is, explained in plain English (50:07)
• Why so many women leaving high-control situations land in MLMs, and how Audra helps women rebuild financial independence from zero (52:45)
• The invisible rules Audra still catches herself following, eleven years out (56:39)
• This week's Edit In / Edit Out

Edit In / Edit Out
Jen is editing in trusting herself to make the decision, and editing out cleaning her baseboards before guests come over. Audra is editing in doing something for herself before she opens her laptop, and editing out worrying about the dishes in the sink.

Special offer from Audra:
Audra is offering Midlife Edit listeners 50% off their first one-on-one coaching session. Head to mamaaudra.com/oneonone to book a free consult and see if it's a fit — just mention PODCAST on your call to get the discount. This is open to any woman navigating a faith transition after leaving a high-control organization, not just women leaving Mormonism.

Connect with Audra Phelps
Instagram: @mamaaudraofficial
Website: mamaaudra.com

Tiktok: @mamaaudra

Facebook: Mama Audra

Youtube: Mama Audra

Before Lauren Tetenbaum was the therapist and author everyone wants to talk to about menopause, she spent fifteen years as someone else's voice — literally. As an immigration attorney, she represented abuse and asylum survivors in cases where the stakes were life and death. She fought for parental leave policy at a time when asking for it made her a problem. And somewhere in the middle of writing everyone else's story, she started asking who was writing hers.

This is the conversation before the book — reinvention, imposter syndrome, and what it actually costs to hold someone else's pen for a decade and a half before you pick up your own.

In this episode:

• Fifteen years as an immigration attorney representing abuse and asylum survivors
• What it felt like being someone else's voice when the stakes were life or death
• Fighting for parental leave policy — twice — and the pushback she got from other women
• The pivot from lawyer to therapist, and what each reinvention cost her versus what it gave back
• Imposter syndrome as a gendered experience, and what she tells clients who are questioning a leap
• The "ghostwriters" of her own life — career identity, unsupportive bosses, and letting go of voices she didn't actually respect
• This week's Edit In / Edit Out
• Her book pick for the summer and what's on her Y2K playlist

Guest links:

• Book: millennialmenopause.com
• Practice: thecounselor.com
• Instagram: @thecounselor
  

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A Hold the Pen Story — Follow-up to Episode 75

A few weeks ago, Jen told you to hold the pen. This week, she's naming who's actually been holding it.

The pen doesn't get handed over all at once — it's passed quietly, decision by decision, season by season, until one day you look down and realize the handwriting isn't yours. In this episode, Jen breaks down the five ghostwriters that show up again and again in midlife: the family, the culture, the relationship, the caregiver, and the job. None of them are villains. But if you're going to take the pen back, you have to know who's been writing.

This is the trailer for a whole season — each ghostwriter gets its own full episode in the months ahead.

[00:08] Recap — why "Hold the Pen" struck a nerve, and the question everyone kept asking back: who's actually been holding it?

[04:56] Ghostwriter #1: The Family — inherited opinions, the quiet filter of "what will they think," and why belonging can feel conditional even inside your own home.

[06:42] Chasing approval vs. rebelling for attention — and the moment Jen realized she was trying to earn belonging instead of asking why it felt conditional in the first place.

[10:45] Ghostwriter #2: Culture — the invisible contract women sign without realizing it, and why it's the hardest ghostwriter to challenge because it just sounds like common sense.

[13:09] Ghostwriter #3: The Relationship — the difference between healthy compromise and quiet erasure, and the real test: does your partnership have room for two authors instead of one editor?

[16:33] Ghostwriter #4: The Caregiver — motherhood, stepmotherhood, and caring for aging parents. Why caregiving convinces us that self-erasure and love are the same thing.

[20:21] Ghostwriter #5: The Job — how productivity quietly becomes identity, and why rest starts to feel like something you have to earn.

[24:08] What's coming this season — a full episode dedicated to each ghostwriter: the family, the culture, the relationship, the caregiver, and the job.

[25:52] Housekeeping — The Edit Box giveaway extended through July 31, winner announced August 1, plus how to get involved with The Backstage Pass newsletter and The Edit Room.

"None of these ghostwriters are villains. Most of the time, they were simply the closest hand to hold when we were young, or too busy, or too overwhelmed, or too tired to hold the pen ourselves."

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Terry Tateossian's life reads like three different biographies stitched together — refugee at 11, tech entrepreneur through the dot-com boom, Forbes contributor and 40 Under 40 founder running a 40-person agency, and now a health and mindset coach after her own body forced a reckoning. Jen and Terry talk about what it actually felt like fleeing communist Bulgaria as a kid, why Terry never internalized being "the only woman in the room" as a disadvantage, the uncomfortable truth about women undermining other women at work, and the eighty-pound weight gain and undiagnosed perimenopause that finally slowed her down. It's a conversation about immigration, ambition, burnout, and what it means to stop measuring your worth by a number on a scale.

In this episode:

• Fleeing Bulgaria at 11 and the 30-day asylum interrogation in Austria
• Landing at JFK in 1989 and learning five languages in a refugee housing complex
• Becoming a "40 Under 40" tech founder during the dot-com boom
• Why Terry never saw being a woman in tech as a disadvantage — and the surprising place she actually faced pushback
• The real conversation about women undermining other women in the workplace
• Burnout, an 80-pound weight gain, and perimenopause hitting at 37 with zero warning
• Two ER visits she thought were heart attacks
• Walking away from the business she built to rebuild her health instead
• Why "paper thin" isn't the goal — the case for strength, muscle, and resilience over a number on the scale
• Terry's retreats and coaching work with 700+ women
• Her take on AI music (and why she started making her own)

Guest links:

• Website: houseofrose.com
• Instagram: @howgoodcanitget
• Facebook: How Good Can It Get

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When was the last time you made a decision nobody else influenced? Not your husband, your kids, your job, or your therapist...just you. This week, Jen shares the story behind a line that came out of nowhere on July 4th and cracked open something bigger: the difference between a permission question and a desire question, and why so many of us stopped noticing we'd handed our pen to someone else.

This isn't about losing yourself. It's about the thousand small, reasonable-sounding moments that add up to someone else authoring your story — and how to get the pen back.

In this episode:

• The question Jen couldn't shake, and why she couldn't answer it either
• The line that came out of nowhere on July 4th at 9:52pm: "Somewhere along the way I forgot I was allowed to hold the pen"
• Why handing off decisions isn't a personal failure — it's biology plus conditioning
• The real difference between asking "what do I want" and asking "am I allowed"
• A simple one-week challenge: before every decision, ask "Would I still choose this if nobody else's opinion existed?"
• Why "The Edit" was never just a content format

This week's challenge: Try the pen test. Before you make any decision — big or small — ask yourself if you'd still choose it with no one else's opinion in the room. Just notice. Don't change anything yet.

The Edit Box Giveaway (enter by July 15, winner announced July 16):

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This week starts with a mirror. Jen catches her own reflection mid-morning-routine and doesn't recognize the woman looking back - not because she looks older, but because she looks unedited. That moment cracks open two things Jen's been sitting with: why women apologize for wanting more in midlife, and what it means when you stop recognizing yourself.

She names the "guilt tax" that comes with every role - wife, mom, stepmom, employee - and the double standard that lets a 25-year-old be called "driven" for the exact thing that gets a woman in her 40s, 50s, or 60s met with judgment. She gets specific about the particular bullshit stepmoms face when they dare to say it's hard. And she addresses the tension head-on: how does "I want more" square with last week's Edit Room post about editing OUT chasing the goalpost? (Spoiler: both things are true. Receiving and reaching aren't opposites.)

This one traces the guilt back to its root - the eldest daughter conditioning, the quiet training to disappear - and lands on Jen's own permission piece: she's done apologizing for wanting this show to be big.

In this episode:

• The "guilt tax" on wanting more in every role women carry
• The double standard between ambition at 25 vs. ambition in midlife
• Why stepmoms get told "you knew what you signed up for" — and why that's wrong
• Reconciling "let it be enough" with "I still want more"
• Where the guilt was actually learned (hint: it's generational)
• The mirror moment, the editor-in-chief metaphor, and what it means to stop cutting yourself from your own story

This week's question for the Edit Room:
What's the one thing you're done apologizing for, starting right now?

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What if what everyone calls a midlife crisis is actually a return to yourself?

In this episode of The Midlife Edit, Jen sits down with entrepreneur, Harvard graduate, endurance athlete, and joy-seeker Nicole Canole for a deeply honest conversation about achievement, worthiness, grief, reinvention, and learning to receive.

Nicole shares how losing her father to suicide shaped her relationship with success, why accomplishments never fully silenced the voice telling her she wasn't enough, and how climbing literal mountains taught her that the hardest battles are the ones happening inside.

Together, Jen and Nicole talk about overachievement, imposter syndrome, GLP-1s and weight loss, learning to fuel your body, giving up alcohol, finding community through music festivals, and why turning forty isn't about having a crisis—it's about finding joy again.

Because maybe we're not falling apart.

Maybe we're finally free.

• Why "midlife crisis" might actually be rediscovering yourself
• Growing up with worthiness wounds and learning to heal
• Losing a parent to suicide and the lasting impact of grief
• Harvard, success, and why achievements don't always feel like enough
• The truth about motivation and why nobody can do the work for you
• The emotional gap between knowing and doing
• What climbing mountains taught Nicole about life and control
• Weight loss, GLP-1s, and learning to fuel your body instead of punish it
• Giving up alcohol and finding joy without it
• Music festivals, rave culture, and the power of community
• Learning to receive instead of constantly proving yourself
• Why failure can be a better teacher than success
• What's next for Nicole and her mission to help others find their worth

Instagram: @nicole.canole,

@east_and_ivy

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