The Sunday morning I rewatched The Secret

This Sunday morning, I woke up in a funk I couldn’t breathe away.

So you blame the usual suspects — the holy trinity of midlife. Perimenopause. The state of the world. And the particular exhaustion of being the reliable one for one too many years in a row.

Add to that: post-travel blues. Two good friends who moved away. And an insane number of hours spent hunting for an estrogen patch like it’s a controlled substance. And, yes, the World Cup is ending today, so that distraction is over.

It’s been feeling like life has been happening to me. Like my only job was to brace and absorb the friction.

So I did what any grounded, ten-years-in breathwork facilitator does in a moment of quiet desperation. I stayed in bed. I turned on the TV. I scrolled for fifteen minutes. And I landed on The Secret.

Yes, that documentary. (Is it a documentary?)

When that movie came out in the mid-2000s, it felt flashy and cheesy. Visualize the hot husband. The dream house. The surprise check in the mail. A cosmic shopping list. Ask the universe nicely and it Amazon-Primes your desires to the porch.

But watching it this morning, through midlife eyes, I didn’t see a tool for getting more stuff. I saw a mirror. And a reminder of something I’ve forgotten.

I am in control of so much more than I’ve been acting like.

Now, let me be clear about the limits, because I’m not about to hand you toxic positivity. I cannot, in fact, manifest an estrogen patch. (Although on last week’s new moon I totally wrote that down.) That’s a supply chain, a pharmacy, and a broken system, and no amount of high-vibe focus is going to fix it. Some things are genuinely not your fault and not yours to think your way out of.

But here’s the part that landed.

When you’re the one everyone relies on, your focus lives outward. You track the calendars. You catch the dropped balls. You scan, constantly, for what everyone else needs.

And where your attention goes, your nervous system follows. You stay braced. Low-grade sympathetic activation, all day, waiting for a break no one is actually planning to give you.

You become the manager of your own life instead of the one living it. A bystander in your own body.

And here’s the quiet cost. If all your focus goes to how heavy the load is and how much everyone needs you to carry it, you keep building exactly that. You keep instructing everyone around you: I’ve got it. So they let you.

That’s not the universe. That’s your nervous system, doing precisely what you’ve trained it to do.

I hear a version of this from almost every client I sit with. Women who are admired by everyone and held by no one. The strong one. The capable one. The one who’s fine. They can co-regulate a whole room of other people’s feelings and haven’t exhaled fully in years.

Rewatching The Secret was the jolt I needed today. I’m not trapped by midlife, or my hormones, or my responsibilities. My turn doesn’t just arrive. I have to claim it.

If you’ve been stuck in your own funk lately, feeling like living proof that everyone else’s life is working, consider this your reminder too. You get to decide what you consent to carry.

So let me ask you the thing I asked myself this morning, still in bed, coffee going cold: what have you been carrying that was never actually yours to hold?

You’re allowed to put it down.

xo Ana

P.S. This is exactly why our next live session is happening Tuesday, July 28 — Breathwork for Breakthrough: Tired of Doing It Alone. We’ll look at what being “the strong one” has actually cost us, and use gentle somatic breathwork to help our nervous systems stop bracing and finally stand down. If you’re tired of being admired by everyone but held by no one, come get off the clock. [Link to join — free for members of The Collective]