Edge of Real Podcast | Midlife Identity and Rediscovery
Helping you remember you’re not lost, you’re on the edge of something real.
Edge of Real is a podcast for women who are waking up later in life - and realizing they’re ready for something more.
Hosted by Kristin Hamilton, this is a space for rediscovery beyond the roles, rules, and expectations that never quite fit. Part soft rebellion, part spiritual journal, Edge of Real invites you into the honest, often messy process of unbecoming what you’re not… so you can remember who you really are.
Each week, I invite you into my own re-becoming - sharing stories, spiritual insights, personal permission slips, and real-time reflections from the messy, beautiful middle. I discover and discuss soul-level tools for returning to what’s real - exploring self-discovery beyond the titles, timelines, and expectations that never quite fit. As one woman, shedding and shifting in real time - I offer encouragement, reflection, and permission to evolve on your own terms.
Whether you’re standing at a threshold, questioning what’s real, or craving something deeper… this is for you.
Because the edge isn’t the end.
It’s the becoming.
Edge of Real Podcast | Midlife Identity and Rediscovery
#1. Paper Dolls and the Real Girl
Ever have that uncomfortable feeling that you've tucked away parts of yourself to please others? You're not alone. In this revealing episode, I share the two pivotal moments that cracked me open and ultimately birthed this podcast.
First, a breakthrough therapy session where I realized my true self wasn't lost at all, just carefully hidden away for safekeeping. Then, the strange way Pinocchio's question "Am I a real boy?" haunted me for over a year, highlighting how I'd become more wooden puppet than living woman. This wasn't imposter syndrome, it was deeper - what I call "soul amnesia." After decades of adapting, performing, and prioritizing others, I'd simply forgotten how to be me.
The journey back to authenticity doesn't require becoming someone new - just returning to someone true. Drawing from my experience as a personal growth coach, I share the practical tools that help me and my clients reconnect: personalized meditation, affirmations that rewire beliefs, subliminals that bypass resistance, gratitude journaling with scripting, movement practices, and reflective prompts that bring awareness to buried feelings. These approaches help navigate common midlife challenges like identity loss, purpose questions, and decision paralysis.
Whether you're feeling disconnected or simply sensing there's more to life than your current experience, this episode offers both validation and a roadmap home to yourself. Because remember: you're not late, you're right on time. And the edge isn't the end, it's the becoming.
🦋 Would you like help walking through these steps, or with accountability, or deeper dives into these topics? Interested in learning more about working 1:1 with me to transform your life in your rediscovery? Schedule a free Discovery call with me here: https://stan.store/edgeofreal
🎧 Follow Edge of Real on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And share this episode with a friend who you would like to help.
✨ Find me on Instagram @edgeofrealpodcast
📌 Leave a review, then email us a screenshot at edgeofrealpodcast@gmail.com and we will send you a beautiful free digital journal to help you work through some of your thoughts and get some clarity about what you truly want out of your life.
📹 Photo by Rob Merritt – used with permission.
🎵 Theme Music: Home by Vlad Gluschenko @vladest_art — Home
License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: ...
Welcome to Edge of Real. I'm your host, kristin Hamilton. This is a podcast for women waking up later in life, rediscovering themselves beyond roles, rules and expectations, and realizing they are ready for something more. Each week, we explore rebecoming, where identity shifts, truth rises and we return to our true selves, helping you remember you're not lost. You're on the edge of something real. Welcome to the Edge of Real podcast. Today's episode I think I'm going to call Paper Dolls and the Real Girl.
Kristin:I'm sharing two pivotal moments that cracked me open and led to the creation of this podcast. You'll hear a thought that haunted me for over a year and how a single moment in therapy reminded me that I hadn't lost the real me. I just tucked her away for safekeeping and, as a coach, you know, I got to end with some of the practical tools and actionable steps that I use and recommend to women who are also finding their way back to their true selves. So let's begin with a little story. I was sitting in therapy trying to explain oh, that was my kitty. He's just saying hi. So, anyway, I'm sitting in therapy trying to explain to my therapist who I used to be before. I was this meek, flat, unsure woman who was curled up on her couch. I wanted her to know how I felt before the heaviness, before the self-shrinking, before I became a paper doll, changing shape to meet the moment to please others. Before the complicated, sometimes beautiful and sometimes toxic relationship that spanned decades. Before the heartbreak of separation, divorce and single parenting. Before all this self-sabotage and the proving and doubting, I'm describing to her this past version of me, who is light and playful, and unfiltered and free. And as I talk I start to come alive. I am out of the corner of the couch, I'm sitting on the edge of my seat, my therapist is leaning in and she sees me, and what she sees is a woman who is strong and capable and just full of life.
Kristin:And then I say something that shifts everything for me. I say it's like there's this little seed inside my chest, like I hid her there, this carefree, laughing, full of magic version of me. And even though I buried her, I didn't kill her, I kept her safe just in case. And as soon as I said that, I knew it was true, this is something I often see in my clients that realization that their true selves was never actually lost, just hidden. And once you see that, it is impossible to unsee, nor do you want to See. Over time, I had slowly just diminished. Some parts of me were stripped away in big moments and others just flaked off quietly. It's like during the snap in Avengers Endgame right, like that's how I picture it this gorgeous free spirit that I was just slowly disintegrating and floating away till there's just this little tiny seed left. And I buried that little seed deep, deep, deep, where no one could get to it. But that seed, the essence, remained waiting. That realization planted the mission for me, but truthfully, I let that seed continue to stay buried for a while. I kept coaching others to find themselves, yet I stayed on autopilot within myself, until now this podcast is me choosing to water that seed. It's a reclamation and maybe, hopefully, it sparks one in you too, and maybe, hopefully, it sparks one in you too.
Kristin:Here's the second moment that changed things. It's weird, but it stuck For about a year. A random line from Pinocchio kept popping into my head. Am I a real boy? It would show up at these strange times while talking to my friends and other amazing women and I'd feel this disconnect, like they were living these full color lives while I was this black and white sketch, or like I was made of wood and strings and performance, like I was just watching life rather than living it. But here's the thing it wasn't imposter syndrome. I have confidence, I know I'm competent, I know I'm good at what I do and I know I'm worthy of good things in life. But this feeling, it was deeper than that, like soul amnesia. I'd spent so many years prioritizing others and working, caregiving, adapting, being the person that I thought I was supposed to be, but I'd just forgotten how to be me. And yet, just like I tell my clients, I can now see that that thought wasn't weakness. It was a flare, a call to come home to myself. And if you've ever felt like you were just going through the motions, like you are not quite real, you are not alone and you are definitely not broken. You're just overdue for remembering.
Kristin:So here's the truth that I keep returning to. We don't become real by doing everything right. We already are real. That is one of the few things we are actually entitled to. We are worthy, we are enough, we are real. And when we remember who we were before the world told us who we should be, we feel that right. Reclaiming the real you isn't about becoming someone new. It's about becoming someone true, and we know who that is. Because we kept her safe all along, because that is what we do as women we keep those we love safe. And that little seed in my chest that is not a relic of the past. That's my truth. That's me.
Kristin:I had rewired my brain away from the true me to get stuck in those thought patterns I'd carried for the last few decades. So now I will rewire them again. You know, maybe I am someone who laughs too loud and, yep, I can be a little awkward at parties, but I also chase my dreams relentlessly. I refuse to keep apologizing for what I want. That version of me deserves space. My mantra right now is something I heard from Boss Babe how good can I let this get? Isn't that amazing? It reminds me that I am the one who gets to decide. I don't want to just survive, I want to live wide awake. And if you're listening, I think maybe you do too.
Kristin:So as a personal growth coach, I know that tools matter, so I'm going to give you a few of the ones that I am using right now to reconnect and reawaken within myself. The first one I'd like to mention is meditation. This is something that has become very, very important in my life. It's taken me a few years, but I now meditate on an almost daily basis, and I have worked and worked within myself to come up with a method that works for me. I know that meditation is very difficult for some people. Many of the women that I work with have a really hard time with it, and I completely understand that, and I have been there. I know that feeling. So I have come up with my own method that works for me. I've shared it with a few people and it has worked for them, and we take what works for us and we leave what doesn't, and that's exactly why there are so many different paths to the same end, and that's exactly why there are so many different paths to the same end. I will likely share this guided version with you at some point.
Kristin:Another tool that I'm using is affirmations. Science shows that repetition rewires beliefs and thought patterns, and that's exactly what affirmations are. They are a positive spin. They are a way to tell yourself what you want and how you feel, and as we repeat them, our thoughts rewire and our beliefs follow our thoughts and all of a sudden, we are believing. What was once just an affirmation has now become a belief. There is real power in words.
Kristin:The next tool that I'm going to mention is subliminals. This kind of goes along with affirmations. Basically, subliminals are affirmations that are layered under calming music. Typically, you cannot hear them and you just pick them up within your subliminal, within your subconscious. They bypass the conscious resistance and reprogram the subconscious through this thought repetition and they disrupt the negative thought patterns. This is something that I'm only started using, probably within the last month or so. I truly can feel it working already. There are certain things that I've resisted for many years and I find myself less resistant of them, and these are the exact things that I've been listening to subliminals for.
Kristin:One thing that I want to mention with subliminals is you will find them all over YouTube. Please, please, use a source that you trust. The whole thing with subliminals is you will find them all over YouTube. Please, please, use a source that you trust. The whole thing with subliminals is you cannot hear what is being said. Your subconscious picks it up, but you can't actually physically hear it, so you want to make sure that you trust the person who has made the subliminal and is saying the things that you can't hear.
Kristin:I use an app that's called Manifest it. Now, I don't have any affiliation with this. I just use it personally myself and I love it. It's made by a woman named Stephanie Keith. I listen to her podcast. I completely trust the work that she does, and so I use the subliminals within that app.
Kristin:The next tool I'm going to mention is a gratitude journal, and along with my gratitude journal, I also do scripting. Let me break those down a little bit. Every night, before I go to bed, I write 10 things that I am grateful for. I write what it is that I'm grateful for and I write why. This is often just a brain dump for me. I'm not thinking long and hard about anything that needs to be super meaningful. Sometimes I write down I'm grateful for strawberries because they're delicious. Sometimes I write down things much deeper than that.
Kristin:The point is to get yourself into the vibration of gratitude, get yourself into an ability to amplify what you're feeling, amplify what's working and then call in more. This has to do with vibration. This has to do with the law of attraction. This has to do with just feeling good, just straight up. Feeling good, the better we feel we send out a higher vibration and that's what comes back to us. You send out good, you get back good. It's the law of attraction. It's a proven scientific law of nature law of attraction. It's a proven scientific law of nature.
Kristin:Along with the gratitude, I do something that's called scripting, and scripting is when you write what you want to be true, so you write. For example, you might write about this amazing day you had and you didn't actually have this day. You're writing more from the this is my perfect day, but you're putting it in present tense Again. You're putting out into the universe this is what I want, this is what I'm calling in, this is how I want to live my life. And when you are vibrating at a high frequency, the universe says, oh, look at that, she's living this life and everything happens. So with the scripting, I usually, of my 10 things that I write in my gratitude journal each night, usually about two of them or so are things that haven't happened yet. And I stress yet. When I include the scripting in my gratitude, my subconscious doesn't know the difference between what I'm currently grateful for that's actually happened, between what I'm currently grateful for that actually happened and what I'm currently grateful for that hasn't actually happened. My subconscious doesn't know the difference, and so it works to make sure that it's all happening.
Kristin:I have two other tools that I'm using that I'd like to talk about. One is, just straight up, movement. Yes, movement is a way toward personal growth, whether it's walking, whether it's using a rowing machine, like I've been doing lately, whether it's, you know, going outside and playing with your grandkids, movement is important. It helps the energy flow and helps us on that path toward making change. The last tool that I'm going to mention today is journaling.
Kristin:Journaling is my go-to tool for clarity and awareness. I have been journaling kind of off and on for my whole life, pretty much since I could write. In the last couple of years I've developed 12 core prompts that have really provided clarity and gotten me to the awareness and the heightened place of action that I now find myself. Journaling is really good for bringing thoughts into the light, and once we are aware of the thoughts, we can live and act more consciously. We can explore some of these feelings that many of us are feeling at this time of life, such as loss of identity, spiritual numbness, fear of starting over that's a big one Lack of purpose, disconnection, decision paralysis another really big one right now, at our time of life. Journaling helps to bring our thoughts into awareness, and only from awareness can we take action. So we will dive deeper into all of these and more in future episodes, into all of these and more in future episodes. But for now, just know that there are so many ways back to yourself, and we will discover and discuss them here together.
Kristin:If you want support or questions answered in the meantime, go ahead and DM me anytime on Instagram at edgeofrealpodcast. Before we go, I want to leave you with a reflective prompt. If you are a journaler, fabulous journal away. If you're not, maybe you'd like to try it. If you're not quite ready to try journaling, just mull it over, let it bounce around in your brain and think about it. The prompt is is there a part of you that you tucked away for safekeeping, and what would happen if you let her out again? So thank you for spending this time with me. Remember you are not late, you're right on time and the edge, it's not the end, it's the becoming.
Kristin:If this podcast makes you feel something, please follow or subscribe to Edge of Real. Following this podcast helps you because you'll never miss an episode, and it helps us because it will help me reach more like-minded people who really need to hear these conversations. This is the most important thing for the growth of this podcast. While you're there, I'd be truly grateful if you'd be willing to share an episode you feel connected to with a friend. I appreciate your support more than you know. I would love to send you my beautiful 12-prompt journal completely free, as a gift. All I ask is you leave us a review of this podcast because it really supports our growth. Ask is you leave us a review of this podcast because it really supports our growth.
Kristin:This is my digital journal with the 12 prompts I have used to get crystal clear on what I truly want out of the rest of my life and how I'm getting there. Spending time with these questions will get you from discontent and lost to well on your way to rediscovering your true self and the beginning action steps toward finally living your best life. It's one of my favorite tools and I will unlock access for you for free when you leave us a review. How easy is that? All you have to do is leave your review, take a screenshot of it and email it to me at edgeofrealpodcast at gmailcom, and then I'll send you access to the gorgeous journal that will help you drop into your truth, reconnect with the you you were always meant to be and remind you that you're not lost. You're on the edge of something real. I'm already looking forward to our time together next week. Love you, bye-bye.
