Realizing I Had Built My Identity Around Being Monica the Medium

For a long time, if you asked me who I was, I had an answer ready. I was Monica the Medium. Not just professionally, but personally, and if I’m honest, almost existentially.

Talking to dead people is what made me special, what made me successful, what gave my life a clear sense of purpose. For many years, I never questioned it. Why would I? My career was thriving, the opportunities kept growing, and people would often share with me that messages I delivered literally gave them the will to keep on living.

I felt deeply fulfilled. And in a lot of ways, I was living the dream I’d spent years building.

I had two seasons of a television show, a published book and oracle deck, a top-charting podcast in the Spirituality category, a thriving online course, sold-out Messages from Above events across the country, and an engaged audience. People often recognized me while out and about. Mediumship wasn’t just something I did. It was the thing people knew me for.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that somewhere along the way, I had stopped seeing mediumship as something I did and started seeing it as who I was. There’s a subtle difference between those two things, but it changes everything. Because when something becomes your identity, any change to it feels like a threat. You’re not just risking a job. You’re risking yourself.

Looking back, I think that’s part of why I stayed attached to certain versions of myself longer than I needed to. Not because they were wrong, and not because they weren’t meaningful, but because I couldn’t imagine who I would be without them. And if I’m being completely honest, part of me was terrified to find out.

The last four years forced me to confront that fear anyway. My mental health journey, my sobriety, my marriage falling apart, motherhood, my growing relationship with God and Jesus, the questions I started asking and the things I started caring about. Little by little, I began changing. The conversations I wanted to have were changing. The work that energized me was changing. The way I viewed success was changing. Even the things I prayed for were changing.

And yet every time I felt myself moving in a new direction, there was a voice in the back of my mind asking the same question: but what will people think? It’s going to devastate them if I walk away from what so many see as my life’s purpose. What so many people had longed for from me for years. (I had tens of thousands of people who would literally jump at the opportunity for a private reading, which is exactly what made the idea of stepping back feel so impossible.)

I also had another thought that was even harder to admit: that’s literally all I’m good for. I don’t matter unless I’m sharing my gift. Looking back, that belief breaks my heart, because no human being should have to earn their worth only by what they have to offer. And yet I know I’m not the only person who has felt that way.

It’s funny how often we stay in familiar spaces because we’re afraid of disappointing people we’ve never even met. I worried people would think I was abandoning my gift and the Spirit World, that they’d think I was confused, that they’d think I’d lost my way. (In fact, I literally received a message from someone telling me I sounded like a confused teenager.) But the reality was much simpler than that. I wasn’t losing myself. I was finding parts of myself that had been waiting patiently for me to notice them, parts that existed long before television, long before Instagram, long before “Monica the Medium.”

There have been times in my life where I believed clarity came before action. I thought you were supposed to know exactly who you were becoming before you let yourself start changing. What I’ve learned instead is that clarity often arrives after the first brave step. You don’t always get a five-year plan. Sometimes you just get a nudge, a quiet feeling, a sense that something no longer fits the way it once did. And then you have a choice: stay where it’s comfortable, or trust where you’re being led.

Lately, I’ve been choosing the second option more and more often. Not because it’s easier. It’s not. Some days it feels incredibly uncomfortable, even terrifying. There’s a deep grief that comes with outgrowing identities, even beautiful ones. There’s grief in closing chapters that once felt permanent, in becoming unfamiliar to people who only knew the older version of you, in taking a step back from something that brought you purpose and meaning and success even when you know it’s time.

But there’s also freedom. Freedom in realizing your worth was never tied to a title. Freedom in realizing you’re allowed to evolve. Freedom in realizing that the thing that once defined your life doesn’t have to define the rest of it.

Because the truth is, this isn’t just a story about mediumship. It’s about every version of ourselves we’ve ever outgrown.

Maybe you’re the stay-at-home mom whose children are becoming more independent, and you’re starting to wonder who you are outside of being needed every minute of the day. Maybe you’re the executive who spent years climbing the corporate ladder only to discover you’re standing at the top of a mountain you no longer want to be on. Maybe you’re the person leaving a marriage, a career, a church, a city, or a dream you once felt certain about. Maybe you’re someone who spent years becoming the person everyone else expected you to be, and are only now asking yourself what you actually want. The details may be different, but the feeling is often the same.

There’s a strange space that exists between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming, a space where the old identity no longer fits but the new one hasn’t fully formed yet. If you’ve ever found yourself there, you know how uncomfortable it can be.

Human beings love certainty. We love neat explanations and clearly defined paths. We want guarantees that if we let go of something familiar, something better will be waiting on the other side. But life rarely works that way. Most of the meaningful transitions I’ve experienced haven’t come with a roadmap. They’ve come with a whisper, a nudge, a persistent feeling I couldn’t ignore. And almost every time I’ve followed it, I’ve eventually discovered that what I thought I was losing was actually creating space for something deeper. Not always bigger, and not always more impressive, but more aligned.

When I look back on my life, the chapters that changed me most weren’t the ones I planned. They were the ones that forced me to surrender my timeline, my expectations, and sometimes even the identity I’d built my life around. At the time, those moments felt like endings. Looking back, they were invitations to become someone I couldn’t have become any other way.

I think that’s where I find myself today. Not at the end of the story, and not with all the answers, but standing in the doorway of a new chapter, learning to trust that God knows what He’s doing even when I don’t. I’m learning that faith sometimes looks less like certainty and more like willingness: a willingness to follow where I’m being led, to release what no longer fits, to become a new version of myself. To return to the woman I came here to be.

Look, you’d think as someone with intuitive abilities that I’d have my life all figured out. That I’d know exactly where I’m headed. But I don’t have every answer about where this next chapter is leading. In a lot of ways, I’m figuring it out as I go. What I do know is this: the older I get, the less interested I am in protecting an identity, a reputation, or a version of myself I’ve outgrown. I'm far more interested in becoming who God created me to be, even if that journey surprises people. Even if it surprises me.

And maybe that’s the invitation for all of us. Not to cling so tightly to the labels that once served us, or to build our entire sense of self around a role, a relationship, a career, or a title, but to remember that underneath all of those things is something deeper. Something that existed before the success, before the achievements, before the expectations, before the identity. A self that was worthy all along, one that doesn’t have to prove itself in order to matter, one that can evolve without being lost.

Because sometimes the most beautiful chapters of our lives begin the moment we’re willing to stop maintaining an identity that everyone else expects us to be and start becoming who we were created to be.

If you want to keep following my journey, be sure to visit my new website at monicaimani.com, where I'll be sharing more of what's next. Alongside this Substack, my Instagram (@monica.imani), and my upcoming podcast, my website has become the new home for this next chapter.