If you only knew me from my TikTok content, you’d have no idea I spent over 20 years as a communications leader.

And that’s not an accident exactly, but it’s not a strategy either.

It’s just that “read your audience” is real, and TikTok gives me something that corporate America or LinkedIn never truly have: permission to be completely free.

To say the quiet parts out loud. To talk about what it truly feels like to be a midlife woman who, on paper, has accomplished a lot, and is now in the very messy, very public process of figuring out the second half of her life.

Not just for herself. For every woman going through the same thing who has no language for it yet. Who feels alone in it. Unseen by it. Maybe even a little desperate because of it.

I am that woman.

And I’m also the person who spent two decades helping some of the largest organizations in the country find their voice. Those two things used to feel like they lived in separate rooms. Lately, I’ve been noticing they share virtual walls.

Stay with me.

In communications, the most common problem I encounter is not bad or not enough messaging, or a branding problem. It is a gap problem. The gap between what an organization projects to the world and what is actually happening inside. Between the press release and the break room. Between the values on the website and the culture in the hallway.

My job is to close that gap. Or at least to name it honestly enough that the organization can start doing the work of closing it themselves.

Midlife reinvention? Same gap. Different characters.

Because what nobody tells us about building a life that looks successful from the outside, is that at some point, the outside and the inside stop matching. You’ve hit the markers. The title, the salary, the LinkedIn profile that reads like a highlight reel. And somewhere underneath all of it, quietly, you’ve been drifting from yourself. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just slowly, in the way that busyness allows.

And then one day—or one or two decades—later, you look up and realize the story you’ve been telling the world no longer matches the one you’re living every day.

And I’m here to tell you, from the trenches, after leaving my successful corporate career two years ago to finally start listening to my heart, you’re not in crisis and you’re not imagining it all.

The solution isn’t a rebrand or to start selling digital courses online (though if that works for you, go get your bag, girl!). It isn’t a pivot or a reinvention strategy or a five-step framework, though lord knows the internet will sell you all of those. The solution is the same one I’ve applied in boardrooms and crisis communications and culture transformations: you must find language for what’s real before you can build anything true.

You must close the gap.

That’s what I’m doing here. That’s what I’m doing on TikTok, and in these essays, and in every conversation I’m brave enough to start. Finding language for the things midlife women are living but haven’t been given words for yet. The grief that comes with ambition. The exhaustion of being competent and invisible at the same time. The strange courage it takes to want something new when everyone around you thinks you should be satisfied.

I spent 20 years giving organizations their voice back. I’m not done with that work. I’ve just expanded the client list.

And if any part of this feels relatable to you—if you recognize yourself somewhere in this gap— I want to hear about it. Because the most powerful thing I’ve learned in communications and in midlife is the same: you are almost never as alone in it as you think.

I’m Erika Matallana. Communications strategist, founder, and the woman making sense of midlife out loud, so you don’t have to do it alone. If this feels like you, I hope you come back, and share it with someone who needs it, too.

Find me on TikTok @nobodytoldushq, and on LinkedIn.

I started my corporate career in the United States twenty-one years ago with very few expectations and a lot of confidence. I was young and educated. I had talent. I truly believed that would be enough.

My immigrant story doesn’t look like the ones you see in the news or in the movies. I didn’t come here running from poverty or violence. I didn’t arrive chasing some version of the American dream I’d constructed from the outside. I met my husband in a fateful moment, and we built our lives together here. Simple as that. Or so I thought.

What I didn’t know—what nobody thought to tell me—was what was waiting for me when I walked into my first professional role. Not a welcome. Not an even playing field. What I found was a landscape built almost entirely by white men with big egos and, as it turned out, even bigger biases. And I, a Latina with an accent, was about to spend the next two decades navigating it.

So, I showed up anyway.

I showed up to the rooms where I was the only one. The meetings where someone talked over me and then received credit for repeating what I’d just said. The performance reviews where I was told I was “not ready” or “too passionate.” Feedback I watched walk right past my male colleagues without leaving a mark. The moments where I had to decide, in real time, how much of myself I could afford to bring into the room without making everyone else uncomfortable.

I showed up and I climbed. All the way to the top of the ladder I was never supposed to reach.

I learned to modulate my accent. To soften my edges. To laugh at the right moments and stay quiet at others. To translate not just language but myself— constantly, exhaustingly—into something the room could receive without flinching. I got very good at it. So good that for a long time, I mistook it for success.

What I didn’t see, not until much later, was what all of that performing was costing me.

The bill came twenty years in, and it didn’t arrive as a single moment. It arrived as a body that was done. A mind that had run out of bandwidth for pretending. A kind of burnout so complete it wasn’t just professional; it was existential. I had spent so long managing other people’s comfort with my presence that I had stopped being present in my own life.

And when I finally stopped and looked around, I found something that scared me more than any difficult room I’d ever walked into.

I didn’t know who I was anymore.

My job, my title, the feeling of being accepted in places where I was never truly seen, that had become my identity. I had climbed so hard and so long that I’d left myself somewhere at the bottom of the ladder and kept going without her. When the title was gone and the calendar was empty and nobody needed me to perform anything, I had no idea what was underneath.

That’s the thing nobody told me. Not my bosses, not the leadership books, not the women who came before me who were too busy surviving their own climb to turn around and say: hey, watch out for this part.

The room wasn’t designed for me. I knew that walking in. What I didn’t know was that spending twenty years redesigning yourself to fit it would one day leave you standing outside every room, including the ones inside yourself, with no idea how to get back in.

I’m still finding my way back. That’s what this newsletter is about.

Not the highlight reel. Not the redemption arc tied up neatly at the end. The actual, messy, sometimes embarrassing, often clarifying work of figuring out who you are when you’re not performing for anyone.

If you’ve ever felt successful on paper and unrecognizable to yourself, you’re in the right place. And no, it’s not just you.

Nobody told us. But we can tell each other.

Erika

Find me on TikTok @nobodytoldushq2

I believed him until I sat alone in my car afterward.

The doctor was very nice about it. That’s the part that still gets me.

He smiled while he said it, which I think was meant to be reassuring, and he used the word “normal” four times in three sentences. I’ve since learned that’s often medical shorthand for: we’re done talking about this now.

I had come in with a list. Not a dramatic list. A practical one.

Sleep disruption. Brain fog that wasn’t quite brain fog but something more like… lag.
A body that felt like it was running a different operating system than the one I’d installed.

He ordered some labs, mentioned that these things “happen as we get older,” and sent me on my way with a pamphlet I’m fairly certain was designed in 2001.

I sat in my car for a while. Not crying. Not angry.

Just trying to figure out what word I would use if someone called me right then and asked how it went.

I didn’t have one.

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We have an entire vocabulary for the transitions that get witnessed.

Pregnancy comes with a language so robust it has its own publishing industry. The transition is named, tracked, celebrated, and accommodated. People make space for it because they have a word for it.

Perimenopause and Menopause technically have a word, too.

But it carries so much cultural sediment, so many decades of euphemisms and punchlines, that it mostly functions as a conversation ender.

You say it.
People nod.
The subject changes.

And then there’s everything in between.

The years that aren’t quite either thing. The perimenopause that might last two years or ten.

The identity negotiation happening simultaneously in your career, your relationships, and your tolerance for nonsense, which for many women drops precipitously around forty-three.

The grief that shows up without a clear object.

The strange experience of being more yourself than you’ve ever been while also not recognizing yourself at all.

Nobody has a good word for that.

I remember looking at the steering wheel, still holding the pamphlet he’d handed me.

The paper felt thin. The advice felt thinner. I kept thinking there should be a word for this. What I felt in that parking lot wasn’t frustration with my doctor specifically.

It was something closer to loneliness.

The particular loneliness of having a real experience that the world around you hasn’t decided to take seriously yet.

I’ve talked to enough women to know I’m not alone in this.

We all have slightly different words for it, which is its own kind of evidence. When everyone is reaching for language independently and arriving at something different, it usually means the word doesn’t exist yet.

So I’m not going to name it today. I want to sit with the gap a little longer.

But I do want to ask you this:

What would your word be?

Not the clinical one.

The one you’d use in that parking lot, trying to explain to someone who loves you exactly what just happened and why it’s bigger than it sounds.

Tell me in the comments. I’m curious what language other women would use. I have a feeling we’re all carrying slightly different versions of the same word.

Maybe the first step in naming something is admitting we’ve been living it quietly for years.

Nobody Told Us is a newsletter about the experiences women in midlife were never handed language for. If this resonated, forward it to someone who would understand immediately.

I used to nod along like I knew exactly what that meant. I had a career, responsibilities, goals, a calendar that looked important and a life that made sense on paper. So naturally, I assumed that must be it. Purpose is supposed to feel demanding, right? Heavy sometimes. A little exhausting. Worth it in the end.

But the past 18 months have revealed something uncomfortable.

What I called purpose for the past 20 years may have been my need to prove something. To others, yes, but mostly to myself.

Proof that I was capable, that I deserved opportunities, that the sacrifices meant something and weren’t just life happening to me.

And now I’m 44, sitting in the most disorienting season I’ve ever lived through, trying to answer questions that sound simple and feel impossible.

Who am I when I’m not performing competence?
What do I actually want to spend my energy on?
Do I even want a “thing” right now?

Because there is nothing poetic about self-discovery when the bills are still very real.

You wake up reflective, but the mortgage still drafts at midnight. You want to be intentional, but your brain starts whispering the old rules before coffee: you should be producing, you should be earning, you should be busy. Not because there’s something urgent to do, but because busyness has always been the fastest way to feel worthy.

And those habits are strong. Years of tying your value to productivity don’t quietly exit just because you’ve had an emotional realization. They show up disguised as responsibility. As discipline. As practicality.

So, I find myself in this strange tension.

I’m not ready to fully commit to the next thing just to calm my anxiety. But I also don’t get the luxury of pausing life while I figure it out. I want whatever I do next to actually help people in a real way and not just be another role I perform well enough to keep the machine moving.

That’s harder than I expected.

Because for the first time in my life, I’m not asking what I’m good at, what makes sense, or even what I could succeed in. I’m asking what feels honest. And honesty moves slower than ambition.

I have come to accept that this season is less about finding a purpose and more about separating my identity from my output.

If you, too, are in a moment where you feel unmotivated, confused, or strangely resistant to jumping into the next opportunity, maybe you’re not lost or crazy. Maybe you’re finally trying to choose instead of reacting.

I’m starting to think purpose isn’t something you find once, but something that only shows up after you stop trying to prove you deserve it.

Cheering for us,

Erika

Don’t give me that look. I know you have. And yes, men, I see you, too. I’m fully aware of the shapewear industry made just for you.

But if you’re reading this, thinking, Erika, what does this have to do with anything?
Stay with me.

Being anything other than part of the majority in a space often feels like wearing Spanx all day long.

From the outside, everything looks fine. You look put together. Polished. Confident, even. No one can tell what’s happening underneath.

But inside, you’re uncomfortable. Restricted. Hyper-aware of your body, your tone, your words. You sit a little straighter. You laugh at the right moments. You choose your phrases carefully. You hold your breath without realizing it.

And the moment you get home, the very first thing you want to do is rip that thing off and finally exhale.

That, my friends, is called assimilation.

The Spanx analogy is the closest, most relatable way I can describe what it feels like to try to fit into environments that were never built with you in mind.

Assimilation isn’t always loud or necessarily forced. No one hands you a rulebook. Instead, you learn by watching. By noticing what gets rewarded. By observing who gets labeled as “difficult,” “too much,” or “not quite the right fit.”

So you learn to adjust.

To work (obsessively) on softening your accent.
To “translate” yourself in real time.
To make yourself smaller in some places and sharper in others.
To become incredibly good at reading the room.

I’ve spent years doing this as a Latina immigrant living and working in the South. Years of being grateful and working extra hard for opportunities while also quietly contorting myself to stay acceptable inside them. Years of learning when (and how) to speak and when silence was safer. Years of understanding that success required not just competence, but comfort, for everyone else but never for me.

On paper, it worked. I built a solid career. I earned trust. I checked all the right boxes.

But what I didn’t realize until recently is that living like that day after day does something to you.

Because wearing shapewear occasionally is one thing. Wearing it every single day, for years, is another. Eventually, it stops being uncomfortable and starts being numbing. You forget what it feels like to fully breathe. You forget what your natural posture even is.

This is a different type of burnout that nobody talks about, and no one ever warned me of.

I would tell myself I was tired. Overworked. Overextended. And sometimes that was true. But what I was actually exhausted by wasn’t the work itself. It was the constant self-monitoring. The emotional labor. The micro and macro aggressions. The overexplaining. The quiet performance of belonging.

I didn’t know then, but I was grieving in real time.

Grieving the version of myself that thought this level of effort would eventually lead to ease. The belief that if I just kept adapting, I’d finally arrive somewhere safe. Grieving for the energy I spent managing myself instead of BEING myself.

There’s a particular kind of grief that shows up when you realize you can’t keep wearing the shapewear forever.

Your body tells you first. Tight shoulders. Shallow breathing. A constant sense of irritation or sadness you can’t quite explain. Then your spirit follows. You start questioning things you used to accept without thinking. You notice the cost more clearly. You realize you don’t want to keep living like this.

This moment is deeply unsettling, especially for women who have been praised their entire lives for being adaptable, resilient, and hard workers.

Because letting go of assimilation feels risky. It feels exposed. It feels like stepping into a room without armor.

But what I’ve learned is that feeling this discomfort doesn’t mean you failed or made the wrong choices, or that you’re ungrateful, dramatic or hard to please.

It means you’ve outgrown the shape you were squeezing yourself into.

Somewhere between exhaustion and clarity, many of us reach a point where we can no longer pretend that the discomfort is just “part of the deal.”

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is take off the shapewear and sit with what it reveals. Even if you don’t yet know what comes next. Even if it feels awkward at first.

Many of us are quietly undoing years of holding it in. Learning how to breathe again. Learning how to stand in our natural shape.

And that, I’m learning, is where real belonging begins

This shouldn’t affect you.

You’re fine.
You’re safe.
This isn’t about you.

After all, I’m a U.S. citizen. I’ve paid my taxes. I’ve contributed my talent, my time, my energy. I’ve built a solid, successful, 20-year career.

I did everything I was told to do.

And yet, none of that seems to matter when my ethnicity walks into the room before I do.

You know what having a successful 20-year career under your belt as an immigrant in today’s America means?

Not nearly as much as we were told it would.

And before anyone rushes to label this as dramatic, let me be clear: This isn’t victimhood or outrage for clicks.

This is lived experience.

I know exactly what some people are thinking as they read this.

“Erika, I wouldn’t say this out loud.”
“This could hurt your career.”
“This is risky.”

You’re probably right. But I can’t think of a bigger risk right now than being a Latina in the United States at a time when my very existence is treated as something unwelcome and controversial.

I can’t, in good conscience, keep pretending I don’t see the elephant in the room. I can’t keep showing up as if nothing has changed when everything has.

Professionally, I’ve felt it in ways I wasn’t prepared for.

I went from being in demand to feeling invisible. From being sought out to feeling sidelined. From trusted expert to “we’ll let you know.”

Same experience. Same resume. Same track record.

Different climate.

And that kind of whiplash messes with you. With your confidence. It makes you question things you never had to question before.

Did my career actually mean something? Was it ever enough? Or was my seat at the table always conditional?

What makes this heavier is the unspoken expectation to stay quiet about it. To not make anyone uncomfortable. To keep things “professional.”

I’ve spent most of my adult life navigating rooms where I had to be exceptional just to be tolerated. Where my accent was “interesting” until it wasn’t. Where my presence was welcomed as long as it stayed convenient.

I genuinely believed that hard work, time, success, and contribution would eventually buy me stability. That at some point I’d feel settled. Secure. Past this.

Instead, here I am, asking questions I never thought I’d be asking at this stage of my career.

Where do I go from here?
What does reinvention look like when it’s not aspirational, but necessary?
How do you keep believing in yourself when the ground shifts under your feet without warning?

I don’t have a neat ending. I’m not writing this from the other side of anything. I’m writing from the middle of it. I’m writing because I need a place to tell the truth while I’m still living it.

But pretending this isn’t happening feels like lying to myself. And silence, at this point, feels heavier than honesty.

So this is me saying it out loud. I see what’s happening. I feel it. And I refuse to gaslight myself into thinking it’s not real. Because it very much is.

And please, don’t tell me this is about “politics.” If you still believe this is about politics, how’s the weather up there in that comfy bubble you live in?

You don’t have to agree with me. But if any part of this resonates with even one person, if it makes someone feel less alone, then it has been worth it.

I don’t write to convince. I write to name what too many people are carrying quietly. If this resonated, you’re welcome here.


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Thanks for reading.
I write about career, identity, and what it looks like to rebuild a sense of self when the rules change mid-game.

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