It's Your Turn
A founding essay
My husband had just finished his speech.
Twenty years of service. Twenty years of moves, deployments, goodbyes, and starting over in cities where most of the time we didn’t know a soul. The guests had laughed and cried and laughed again. Now the room had gone quiet.
Four Navy service members stood in a line, each one representing a rank he had held. They passed a folded American flag from one set of hands to the next, slowly, deliberately. Until it reached my husband’s hands.
He walked it over to me. He kissed me. And then he said it quietly, just for me:
“I love you. And now it’s your turn.”
I held that flag and held myself together, and somewhere in my chest something exhaled that had been holding on for a very long time.
The Quiet Ache Nobody Talks About
You know that quiet ache of always being last on your own list? Most women I know have stopped naming it. They’ve just accepted it as the way things are.
Not your turn to be handled, fixed, managed, or shown up for. Just quietly, consistently not your turn. Not the center of your own life. Not the one asking what she actually wants.
For most of us, that moment of your turn hasn’t happened yet.
And if we’re being honest, we stopped expecting it to.
Twenty Years of Starting Over
I spent twenty years as a military spouse and a mother, and I worked the whole time. Every city we landed in, I found a way to contribute, to build something, to stay relevant in whatever world I’d been dropped into. Healthcare, business, community work. I adapted to each move like a chameleon, reinventing my professional self again and again because that’s what the life required.
I was good at all of it.
What I didn’t know was how to include myself in any of it.
I was living what I now call the Sacrifice Syndrome. Not dramatically. Not resentfully (most of the time). Just quietly, consistently putting myself at the bottom of the list until I forgot I was on it at all.
By the time my husband retired, I was capable and exhausted and quietly lost. I had no idea who I was outside of the roles I had been so faithfully playing. And I hadn’t slowed down long enough to notice.
That flag changed things. Not because someone gave me permission. But because I started to think I might be able to finally give it to myself.
What Your Body Already Knows
The exhaustion you feel isn’t a personal failing. It’s a pattern. A pattern of living outside yourself for so long that coming back feels unfamiliar. Strange. Maybe even a little selfish.
It isn’t selfish. It’s necessary.
And for many women, this season brings something else layered on top of all of it. The hormonal shifts of midlife arrive quietly and then all at once, disrupting sleep, flattening energy, making the body feel like unfamiliar territory. Nobody warned us it would feel like this. And somehow we’re still expected to keep the same pace, carry the same load, and smile through it.
Your body has been trying to tell you something. The fatigue that doesn’t lift even after sleep. The restlessness that shows up on Sunday evenings. The feeling of being off that you can’t quite explain to anyone because from the outside everything looks fine.
That feeling is not a problem to fix. It’s an invitation.
This Is What This Space Is For
This publication, this podcast, this work, all of it exists because of that moment in a Navy ceremony hall when I held a folded flag and finally understood that taking my turn wasn’t something I had to earn.
It was something I had to choose.
It’s Your Turn with Shari Biery is a space for women in midlife who are ready to make that choice. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But one honest moment at a time.
Every week I’ll be here with an essay, a conversation, a reflection, something real to sit with. Because I believe the women who find their way back to themselves don’t just change their own lives. They change the rooms they walk into and the lives of others.
You’ve been showing up for everyone else for a long time.
This is your turn.
If you’re not sure where to start, the Midlife Spark Quiz will help you see exactly where you are and what you need most right now. Take it at sharibiery.com/quiz.
And if something in this essay felt familiar, the book that started it all is waiting for you at
Listen to It's Your Turn, the Podcast
Each week I go deeper on these same conversations, creating space for new passion, purpose, and possibility in midlife. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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