Rebuilding from the Ground Up: What to Do When Everything Feels Like It’s Falling Apart

Melanie Mishler (: 00:25

Hello, my love. Welcome back. I'm so glad you're here with me today. I'm so glad I'm here with you today because I know it's been a hot minute since I've been releasing podcast episodes regularly. In fact, well, it's been more than a hot minute. It's been three whole months. The entirety of quarter three was like hit or miss. It was up and down. There was so much going on in my world. And sometimes you just have to step back.

and really kind of evaluate and focus on other things. And so that's what I did for the entirety of quarter three. But today is October 1st and I can't tell you how fucking excited I am to be moving into quarter

quarter four to be moving into the fall into the winter

and just into the finality of: 2025

And I'm actually back in Belize right now, which is interesting because for those of you who caught a couple of the episodes this summer, was supposed to be spending my summer here at our home in Belize, but about a week after arriving in July, I abruptly left and I went back to my California home

And I spent my summer in California. and honestly, there was a lot of transition happening. I wasn't sure if I was going to be moving to Belize anymore. I'm still unsure about it. but here I am back in Belize and it's actually been very, very sweet. I'm here alone.

My husband's not here and it's strange because usually when I'm in Belize, my husband's here, we're here together. So it's interesting to be here alone for sure. But I'm really excited to kind of have this time and space to be in my home here and see if this is something that I still want. Because, you know, like I say all the time, desires change

and my desires are evolving. so tomorrow I'm actually going on a four day yoga retreat deep, deep in the jungle. It's a yoga and Mayan healing retreat with my teacher and my Mayan healer. And I'm so excited to just go off grid to completely detach, get in nature and just go inward and be quiet.

So that's what I'm here doing. But in the meantime, I've been on our property and the monkeys have been here. There's a cute little baby monkey and the humidity is loving my skin. And I'm remembering how much I love our land here, how much I love, ⁓ love this slow pace of life. It's definitely so different than the States.

Anyway, I totally digress with Belize stuff. let's get on to today's episode, which is about foundations. And when I say foundations, I mean like the foundations of homes and buildings, and then also like the foundations of our life, what we're built on, what holds us up and what happens when our foundations start to crack. So in my meditation this morning, I got this visual of my friends who many years ago they had

eve it was built in the early: 1800

And the truth is, I say this a lot, especially as we're moving into the next level of our lives. Sometimes everything has to fall apart so that it can be rebuilt in a more beautiful and structurally stable way. Sometimes the life we built, it starts to crumble and it's not because we did something wrong.

or because we're failing, but because the foundation it was built on wasn't strong enough to begin with. Maybe we didn't know better. Maybe ⁓ the foundation served us for some time, but now it can't hold what we're meant to become.

I want you to think about this. If you're over 40, the chances are the habits, beliefs, like the way you relate to the world and the way you show up in relationships and show up in your life. These habits and beliefs were formed decades ago. Many of them when we were in childhood. And for most of us, especially as Gen Xers, I'm telling you, as Gen Xers, we got it good, but.

We just weren't given the tools to build healthy foundations. And I want to be clear. This is not because our parents fucked up. But it's because they didn't have the tools. It was just a completely different time back then. There was no internet. There was no TikTok therapy channels. People weren't talking about...

trauma or recovery or their feelings. was no one talking about self-love or healthy boundaries. And honestly, most of the people I knew, myself included, were latchkey kids, right? were just kind of figuring things out on our own for the most part and just trial and error and sheer grit and tenacity. That's kind of how

me and a lot of the other Gen X women that I know grew up. And so we kind of learn by default and many of us have those same patterns, that same foundation from childhood or early adulthood because we haven't taken time to examine it

I want you to think about this and I'm going to keep with this house metaphor because I just love it so much. you start with a foundation for a tiny little house, a tiny little starter home in your 20s. And then over the next four decades, you just keep adding on, ⁓ adding on stories to this house. Just keep on going up and going up and making it bigger and taller and bigger and bigger.

without ever checking the structural integrity of the foundation. If you do that, eventually it's gonna be like a Jenga tower, right?

and you're gonna have a house that's not very stable. And that's where many people find themselves when they hit their 40s and 50s. it can show up in our life in many different ways. It can show up as anxiety, identity crisis, relationship issues, midlife crisis is a big one, low grade depression. It can show up in all kinds of ways. Because what happens is when our foundations cracked,

Whether it's a foundation in your house or in your life, it starts to show. always right away, but slowly it'll start to show. A crack here, maybe a shifting tile there. Maybe you'll notice that you're stressed out all the time or snapping at your kids or maybe you're checking out with alcohol or over scrolling or over shopping.

Whatever the drug of choice is to check out of life, right? There are all these little signs of something deeper going on.

when that starts to happen, most people do one of three things. Option one, they start patching, right? They slap some spackle on the cracks, they glue the tiles back on, they repaint. Instead of being real and facing what's actually going on underneath, we kind of double down and work on keeping the image alive. And that might be.

posting pretty Instagram stories, pretending everything's fine. And you can maybe keep that up for a while. And some of us will do this for years, myself included. I am raising my hand here. Some of us, some people do it their entire lives, just kind of spackling over that same, those same cracks, trying to hold everything together, making it look okay on the outside and hustling to maintain the illusion. But deep down,

God, that's just exhausting because you know it's not really getting fixed. You know you're always in repair mode. You're always one step ahead of the next crop, right? Always kind of hustling to hold things together. And honestly, just thinking about that, it's fucking exhausting me right now. So option two is you can let your house just kind of fall into disrepair, right? You can be like, fuck it.

stop hatching, stop pretending, stop trying, let the walls come down, just let things go. And I actually, see this all the time when I'm down here in Belize. So, you know, it's a third world country and it's very quite common to just drive down the street and see a home that's completely falling apart. It's unsafe, uninhabitable and

and they've just kind of let it go. and the parallel here is in our life, this can be getting stuck in burnout or depression or addiction, or just kind of letting our life go into disrepair and but let's say that that same house that's in disrepair, it just eventually falls down, right?

You've still got a choice. You can take that same crack foundation and you can build on it again. You can build a new house, same foundation. And what happens? The same problems, the same patterns and outcomes keep happening, right? And that looks like you get a different job, but you have the same burnout. You get a different partner. You have the same wounds, the same fights, the same bullshit. You get a different life, same dissatisfaction. Because the issue was never the job or the partner or

house, it was a foundation. we see ourselves. It's what we believe. It's the unconscious choices that we're making in our lives again and again. That's the issue. Not everyone else. It's not the stuff outside of us.

And then the third option, and this is the most difficult option of all, and this is what my friends did when they were restoring their beautiful, beautiful historic home. And this is a one that really shifts You have to fix the foundation. So what my friends did when they had this issue is they had an engineer come over and he evaluated and he looked and he saw what was going on.

And then they literally had to hire this company that lifted the entire home up off the foundation. And then they had to completely fix all the cracks and all of the things that was wrong with it. And then they lowered back down the house and it was a big job. It was expensive, but it fixed the issue.

and my love, this is a real work. It's uncomfortable. It's messy. It's the deep work of healing and rewiring and telling the truth and facing the parts of ourself that we've been avoiding. And that not just happen in one like journaling session or one weekend workshop or one coaching session. This takes radical self responsibility. It takes radical self.

honesty and self compassion. I mean, think about how much work it was to lift that entire home up and the foundation and then put it back down. It was inconvenient. It costs time and energy and emotions, but it's the only way to build something real is to do this in our own lives. It's to really, really examine our beliefs, our outdated beliefs, our,

values how we're actually showing up in the world and who we actually want to be versus how we've been showing up.

of a metaphor, but I saw it all in my meditation today and I'm like, is a really, really powerful lesson for me.

And I'm hoping that it might speak to you too.

So I want to offer you this. If you were in a season where it feels like things are cracking or things are coming to the surface, then that's good because it might be time to kind of dig down and just to examine what's really going on. It might be time to rebuild. And here's the thing. You don't have to do that alone. You can bring in help just like my friends brought in help, right? They didn't fix that foundation on their own. And so

In our lives, what that looks like is bringing in a therapist, a coach, a mentor, someone who can hold the vision of what you're becoming, of who you're becoming while you do the work. It's really, really essential to be able to have someone who can hold that vision for you until you can hold it for yourself.

Just a quick note here, because I do get asked this a lot. People will ask, what's the difference between therapy and coaching?

And the short answer is very often therapy will look back. It's going to be looking back at what caused your wound. While coaching is looking forward, it's looking at where you want to go and what tools do you need right now to get where you want to go. Honestly, I have both in my life and I believe deeply in both. There are four different reasons, different purposes.

And I recommend having both because they're just so different.

but if you're ready to stop patching those cracks and you're ready to start rebuilding something new or really fixing the issue, then that's really where coaching comes in. And that's what I do with my clients.

That's the work I live for

because we all have amazing and unlimited untapped potential inside of us.

but we won't get there if we keep doing the same things, we keep self-sabotaging in the same So I invite you, if you don't have a coach in your life, find one. Find someone who can support you as you move into your next level self. It's really, really important.

Alright my love, that's what I'm going leave you with today. If this landed, please share it with someone you

And if you're ready to lift up your house and do the deep work, you know where to find me. I'm always here to support. and I would love to be your guide through this. But until next time, my love, keep manifesting an epic life.