Hi, I'm Kristin
Hi, friends. This is the Honestly Kristin Podcast, the honest, sometimes ridiculous business of being a woman in this stretch of life. We discuss the things that ache, the stuff that is just absurd, and the friends that join us along the way. I'm Kristin Palm Kane, and I am glad that you are here.
If you're listening to this, somebody you trust probably sent it to you, or maybe you stumbled onto it on a night when you couldn't sleep in the middle of the night and you went looking for someone who isn't perfect online and sounds like they've actually been somewhere trying to build something instead of being perfect at it.
Either way. I'm glad you're here because I'm not perfect. In fact, I cried over a website last week. Not because something tragic happened, not because I lost the entire website, but because the page I was trying to build wouldn't load the way I wanted it to. And I'd been at it for six hours and I'm building a business by myself.
And at some point my eyes started to blur and I was sitting there in the kitchen at 10 o'clock at night and I cried over a website. So if you came here looking for someone who has it all figured out, I'm probably not your girl. If you came here looking for someone who has lived inside a life that looked great from the outside.
But somehow felt wrong from the inside and walked through it instead of around it, and is now figuring out what the next chapter looks like in real time. That's me. I think we might be on the same page.
Here's the short version of who I am. I'm a certified life coach. I'm a travel advisor with Fora travel, and before any of that, I had what most people would call a perfectly nice life. I had a long marriage, a beautiful home, two sons, and the kind of life that if you saw it on Instagram, you'd assume the woman inside it was happy.
I wasn't. I was going through the motions of a life I had built one good decision at a time, except a lot of those good decisions weren't actually mine. They were decisions I made to keep someone else comfortable. I had made myself smaller and smaller for years quieter, more agreeable, more accommodating.
The smaller I got. The less he saw me. I'll get into all of that in the next episode because it deserves well, more than I can give you right now. But for now, here's what happened. On the other side of it, the marriage didn't end the way I thought marriages ended. It didn't unravel slowly, it didn't drift.
Or at least it didn't unravel or drift in any way that I noticed. .
It ended in one sentence on what was otherwise an ordinary day. He said the thing, and what I thought was my life was suddenly not my life anymore. What I learned later, and I mean later, was that he had been quietly preparing to leave for a long time while I was making decisions in support of a man I thought was in this with me.
He was somewhere else already. I just didn't know it yet, and after he told me he didn't wanna be married anymore, I lost most of what I thought defined me. The marriage, the house, the role, the version of myself I had spent two decades building. When all of that was gone, I had to sit in the wreckage and ask a question I had been avoiding for a long time.
What do I actually want my life to look like? Not what looks right, not what makes sense from the outside, not what would make my family proud or my friends impressed. What do I actually want? I'm still answering that question, and this podcast is part of how I'm answering it.
It turns out when he left, I still had to hold the family together. I still had to figure out how to make life work for my kids and for our friends, and for just life in general. I had to do the grocery shopping and I had to do all of the things that I always did. I just had to do it. Completely alone and scared and not knowing what the next five minutes was gonna look like, let alone what the next five years were gonna [00:04:00] look like.
I don't know how I got through that and I have a lot of friends and family to thank for it. And there will be many stories about them in the coming weeks, but right now I just want you to know that I did get through it. I did manage to get past that wreckage, to get past that awful first day and figure out what came next because I had to, I didn't have any other choice.
That's just how life works. And so now five years removed from that awful day, I can look back and say, I'm happier, I'm doing better. And I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to say that, but now I know that I can and I am. So what does my day look like now? Well, I bought a house. I have a home for my kids.
They're adults, but they still spend a lot of time here. I am working a day job while at the same time building businesses and figuring out new technologies. I hadn't worked in technology for a long time, and now I'm trying to build a business with websites and emails and all kinds of information that I haven't had to learn in a long time.
But I'm learning it and I'm enjoying it, and I'm doing it for me, not for corporate America. And while I had a great time when I was in corporate America, I'm glad I'm not there anymore. I'm glad I'm doing this now. I'm building something called Roam with Kristin, which is my travel business. I have Thrive with Kristin, which is my coaching business, and I have this podcast, honestly, Kristin, and it's all things that I have over the course of my life wanted to do and didn't do because I didn't have the space or the support or just the belief in myself to get it done.
And now I do. And it took my life falling apart for me to realize I could do this. So the point isn't me trying to tell you how busy I am and how great I am at getting through this because, well, I am busy, but I'm not great at it. I'm having a lot of trouble and I'm figuring things out, but I'm still in the middle of it.
And for every success I have, there were 15 mistakes before it that helped me get there and helped me learn. And there were a dozen friends that picked me up along the way, and family that picked me up along the way. So now when I cry over my website at 10 o'clock at night because I just can't figure it out, I'm okay with that.
And I'll figure it out. And there's always gonna be someone who can help me. So when I tell you I understand what you're going through, that I get what you're going through, it's because I'm literally going through it now. I'm not at some other end. I'm not at the end of my story. I'm going through it now, and I think that's probably where a lot of you are.
And that's who this podcast is for. It's for the woman who has the life she was supposed to want and is quietly not okay inside of it. The woman who scrolls through her own pictures and wonders why she can't feel what the picture looks like she feels. The woman who tells herself she should be grateful and then feels worse because now she's failing at gratitude on top of everything else.
And it's for the woman who has tried things, she's read the books, she's gone on the retreat. She's figured out a morning routine and the Instagram coach who promised her abundance to delivered a worksheet, it's for the woman who is too smart for slogans and too tired to pull herself up by her bootstraps.
Who knows the difference between depth and the performance of depth and who is not going to be charmed into a transformation by someone who hasn't actually been there?
I have been somewhere and I'm certified to guide other women through it, and I'm going to talk about it the way I would talk about it sitting across from you at my kitchen table with a glass of wine, honestly.
I almost didn't make this podcast. I really hought, why would anyone want to listen to what I have to say? And then I realized they don't have to listen. You can turn it off if you don't want to. But in talking to my friends and in talking to other people as I'm going through this journey, I realized there are a lot of people like me out there.
There are a lot of people who are living the lives they've always thought they would be living and for some reason they aren't as happy as they thought they'd be, or there was some choice they made that they wished they hadn't, or some choice that was made on their behalf that they wish hadn't happened, but they had no control over it.
Maybe it's a divorce. Maybe it's a job loss. Maybe it's a sick family member. There's always something in life that's gonna set you back, and if you aren't happy in the life that you're living, it's harder to get through those things. So I realized it doesn't matter if people don't wanna listen to me. The ones who do will find me, and hopefully I can help them and hopefully we can talk to each other and learn from each other and just laugh with each other because nothing makes me feel better than a night out with my girlfriends.
Laughing and talking and just realizing that we're not alone in this, and I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to get here. I'm in my fifties and I am just now realizing that this is what I should have been doing all along, and I didn't believe in myself, and I didn't trust myself, and I let other people's opinions, or at least what I thought were their opinions, guide me to get here, and I shouldn't have done that.
And I hope that by having these conversations. We can all help each other make the decisions that we should be making for ourselves. So I'm doing the thing I almost didn't do, which is going to be a recurring theme around here, because I almost always overthink a decision. [00:10:00] If there's a decision to be made, I'm gonna think of every single way it could go wrong and forget to think about all of the ways it could go right.
And I am really working hard to try and fix that, and that's what this is for, to hold us accountable, to hold myself accountable, and to help people along the way.
And I'll tell you what this podcast is not. It's not going to be me telling you what to do. I'm not gonna give you some five step framework to find yourself. And in 20 minutes, your life is gonna be perfect. I'm not gonna make you wake up at 4:00 AM to do journaling or promise you that on the other side of this, your life will be unrecognizable in the best way possible.
I'm a coach, but I'm not a miracle worker. I'm the kind of coach that sat in my car in a parking lot one day and I admitted out loud to myself that I didn't know who I was anymore, and I wanted to figure that out. And that's how I became a coach. So what this podcast is, it's a place where I'm gonna tell the truth about the gap [00:11:00] between how my life looked, how it felt, and how I'm trying to fix that, how I'm trying to live the life that I want to live, to be happy in the life that I'm living.
There are gonna be a lot of funny stories along the way because I do a lot of dumb things and make a lot of mistakes. But we're gonna name those things. We're gonna name the things that you've been thinking about, but not saying, and where you don't have to perform gratitude or growth or healing. Where it's okay to say I'm exhausted and I don't know why.
And to have someone on the other end of it say, yeah, me too. Here's what I did about it and how it helped me. And maybe it will help you, maybe it won't, but at least we can laugh about it along the way.
I will tell you my stories. Some of them are old, some of them happened last week, some of them are still happening as I'm recording this. I'll tell you about my friends, the ones who are walking through their own versions of this with me. I'm not gonna make up conversations or invent people. Everything you hear, everything that I tell you is something that [00:12:00] I either lived or I am living or a friend told me about.
I'll be honest about my mistakes, including the ones I'm making right now in real time while I sit here pretending to know what I'm doing on a podcast.
I couldn't even figure out how to get my microphone to work. That was a good 15 minutes of trying to figure things out. The kind of things that make me want to scream because I hate not being able to figure out technology. I used to be good at it. Now I am turning into my parents and my kids have to help me and well, no one wants to admit they're getting that old, but here I am and I'm navigating health insurance.
That's not something I've ever really had to do before because corporate America took care of it. But now I don't have corporate America anymore, and I have to figure out, are my doctors in network? Are my prescriptions covered. Do I have to make decisions about what I can and can't take and what doctors I see and don't see?
Because I don't know how the healthcare [00:13:00] marketplace works. So these are the things that I'm figuring out in real time that I'm making mistakes about that make me wanna scream and cry, but also make really funny stories when I'm out with my friends. Just the other day, I have a rental property where the water heater broke one day and the very next day while the HVAC company was there fixing the water heater, they had to fix and replace the HVAC unit because that broke the very next day.
These are the crazy things that happen in my life and that make me wanna cry, and that were things that I never had to do on my own because I always had a partner in my life and now I'm doing them on my own, but the good part about this is I learned how to do them on my own. I wish I had learned how to do them on my own 30 years ago, but you're never too old.
It's never too late, and you're gonna hear about all of the mistakes I've made.
So that's where we're starting. Over the next couple of episodes, I'll introduce myself to you a little bit more. I'll get into a pattern that ran underneath my whole adult life until I finally saw it. I'll tell you about a trip that I took with my girlfriends that reminded me what was still possible in my life.
They're both real stories. They both still ache a little bit. But I think they're also both gonna feel pretty familiar, and especially if you've been quietly carrying something like this on your own for a while. And if I'd said anything today that made you feel like somebody finally said it out loud, please hit follow.
Tell a friend, send it to her at 11 at night when she texts you that she's fine. And you both know that she isn't. But today I just want you to know that this is here, that I am here the next time you're sitting at your kitchen at 10 o'clock crying over something as silly as a website or a health insurance form, or the sentence that you didn't say at dinner and wish you had, you've got a friend on the other end who gets it.
You've been listening to Honestly Kristin. If any of this sounded like you, follow the show. Send it to the friend that you thought about while listening. Everything else is at honestlykristin.com. I'll see you next week.
