The Identity Curse: How Women Lose Themselves (And How to Find Her Again)
By Kathleen Perkins | The Feminist Unicorns | feminist_unicorns.com
You used to know exactly who you were. Not in some abstract, philosophical way—but in the bone-deep, felt sense. You knew what made you laugh. You knew what you wanted to wear, what music to play, what risks were worth taking. You had opinions that weren't hedged with apologies. You took up space. You were loud when you wanted to be. You were you.
Then something shifted. It wasn't sudden. It was gradual—a sparkle leak so slow you almost didn't notice it happening. A comment here, a correction there. A raised eyebrow. A subtle message that your loudness was too much, your ambition was selfish, your body was wrong, your joy was frivolous. That you should be smaller, quieter, more palatable. That your job was to make other people comfortable, even if it meant making yourself disappear. And so you did. You learned to dim your light. To soften your edges. To perform the role of "good woman" so convincingly that one day you looked in the mirror and couldn't quite recognize the person looking back. All of the suppression is how you were tamed by the Identity Curse. It's not a personal failure. It's not because you're weak or broken or didn't try hard enough to "be yourself." It's because you were systematically taught to betray yourself—and you were very, very good at learning the lesson. The Identity Curse is one of the most insidious of all the curses we navigate as women over 35. And if you're feeling lost, invisible, or like a dimmed-down version of who you used to be, this post is for you.
What the Identity Curse Actually Is
The Identity Curse is about knowing who you were, and grieving the distance between that woman and the one sitting here now - that feeling of lost sense of self. The Identity Curse is the result of decades spent internalizing messages that your authentic self was too much: too loud, too opinionated, too sexual, too ambitious, too angry, too messy, too real. It's the slow erosion of your sense of self that happens when you spend your entire adult life prioritizing other people's comfort over your own truth.
It shows up as:
- The constant editing: You're always filtering yourself—your words, your laugh, your desires, your opinions—before they leave your mouth. You've become an expert at saying what people want to hear instead of what's actually true. You can't remember the last time you said something without first running it through three mental filters: Is this nice? Is this helpful? Will this make someone uncomfortable?
- The invisible woman syndrome: You're high-functioning on the outside—you show up, you do your job, you take care of people, you're reliable. But nobody really sees you. Not because you're unnoticeable, but because you've become an expert at being the supporting character in everyone else's story. Your own story stopped mattering somewhere along the way.
- The identity diffusion: When someone asks you what you want, you draw a blank. Not because you're indecisive, but because you've spent so long wanting what other people need that you've lost touch with your own wanting. You don't know what music you like anymore. You don't know what you'd choose to wear if nobody was watching. You don't know if you're angry or just tired. You don't know what you actually believe because you've spent so long saying what you're supposed to believe.
- The deep, quiet exhaustion: This is the thing that brings most of my clients to coaching. They're not burnt out from doing too much. They're burnt out from being someone they're not. From performing femininity, agreeability, and smallness all day long, day after day. From holding themselves in. From never letting anyone see the real, feral, unapologetic version of who they actually are.
- The grief: And underneath all of this—underneath the exhaustion and the invisibility and the constant editing—there's grief. Grief for the woman you were before the taming took over. Grief for the parts of yourself you had to sacrifice in order to survive. Grief for the years spent small. The Identity Curse tells you this is just what happens when you grow up. That you're supposed to become less wild, less selfish, less visible. That maturity means softening your edges and learning to play nice. But that's not what happened. You didn't mature. You were tamed.
How the Taming Happens
The Identity Curse doesn't arrive as a sudden blow. It's more like a thousand small cuts—most of them so small you don't even notice them bleeding. It starts early. In childhood, you learned that your body wasn't quite right, your opinions weren't asked for (or appreciated), your loudness was met with correction. Maybe your mother taught you to be quiet so your father could speak. Maybe your teachers praised you for being "well-behaved" instead of brilliant. Maybe you learned that being a "good girl" meant being invisible—and that visibility meant danger. Then came adolescence, and suddenly your body became public property. Comments about your appearance. Warnings about your sexuality. The message that your power (your literal physical power) was something to be ashamed of, controlled, managed. That your sexuality existed for other people's consumption, not your own pleasure.
Then adulthood. The workplace where your ambition was called "aggressive." The relationships where your needs were always secondary. The culture that told you that being a woman meant being soft, available, self-sacrificing. That your value came from what you could give, not who you were. And slowly, year by year, you became smaller. Not because you chose to. But because every system you moved through—family, school, work, relationships, culture—was designed to domesticate you. To turn you from a feral, whole human into a "good woman." A nice woman. A manageable woman. By the time you hit 35 or so, the taming is so complete that you don't even remember there was another option. The identity you built that kept you safe, made you likeable, and helped you survive has become a prison you didn't realize you were living in.
The Cost of the Identity Curse
Here's what I've learned: the Identity Curse doesn't just make you feel lost. It costs you everything.
- It costs you your voice. When you've spent decades editing yourself, you stop knowing what you actually think. You become a repository of other people's opinions, other people's needs, other people's versions of who you should be. And the tragedy is that by the time you realize this has happened, you've convinced yourself that this version of you (the edited, filtered, diminished version) is who you actually are.
- It costs you your pleasure. The Goblin—that internalized inner critic shaped by the curses—has a thousand messages about what you're allowed to enjoy. Your sexuality is shameful. Your ambition is selfish. Your rest is laziness. Your joy is frivolous. Your body is wrong. So you stop allowing yourself pleasure. You stop dancing alone in your kitchen. You stop buying the expensive coffee. You stop taking risks. You become numb to your own life.
- It costs you your relationships. When you're not being yourself, the people around you can't actually know you. They fall in love with the performance, not the person. They appreciate your reliability without seeing your brilliance. They benefit from your self-sacrifice without ever having to reciprocate. And you end up feeling profoundly alone while surrounded by people.
- It costs you your health. The body keeps score. Years of holding yourself in, of suppressing your anger, of contorting yourself to fit into spaces too small for you lands in your nervous system as chronic tension. It shows up as autoimmune disease, as digestive issues, as anxiety, as the bone-deep exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix. Because you're not just tired. You're tired from being someone you're not.
- It costs you your time. You only get one life. And if you spend decades as a dimmed-down version of yourself, waiting for permission to be loud, waiting for someone to notice you, waiting for the right moment to take up space, then you will spend decades waiting. The right moment never comes. Because the right moment was always now. The Identity Curse is costly in ways both visible and invisible.
But here's the truth: the cost of staying tamed is far higher than the cost of going feral.
The Feral Unicorn Framework
So how do you find her again? How do you excavate the woman you were before the taming got loud? This is where the Feral Unicorn framework comes in. It's a way of understanding what happened to you—and a roadmap for becoming undomesticated. The framework is built on one core truth: **You are not broken. You were tamed.** This reframe is everything. Because if you're broken, that means the problem is you. It means you need to be fixed. It means you need to work harder, try harder, become smaller and quieter and more manageable so that you fit into the spaces that were never designed for you. But if you were tamed, that means the problem is the system. The patriarchy. Capitalism. Diet culture. The "good woman" script. The hustle hex. These systems were designed to diminish you. And you internalized their messages so completely that you made yourself small without anyone having to force you. Once you understand this—once you externalize the problem—everything changes. Because you can't dismantle a system by being a better victim. You dismantle it by refusing to cooperate with it.
What Happens When You Stop Going Along
Here's what I want you to know, before you decide whether this is for you: Going feral is not easy. The curses didn't get loud because they're not effective. They got loud because they work. They keep you safe. They keep you loved (or at least, they keep people from leaving). They keep you from the vulnerability of being fully seen. When you start raising the horn and collecting your sequins and designing your feral life, some things will get harder before they get better. Some relationships will shift. Some people will be uncomfortable. The Goblin will get very loud, trying to convince you to go back to the way things were. But here's what also happens: You start to recognize yourself in the mirror. You wake up and your body doesn't feel like a prison anymore. You say something true in a meeting and nobody dies. You set a boundary and people respect you more, not less. You wear the thing and feel like yourself instead of a costume. You take up space and discover you're not actually that threatening. You stop waiting for permission and start making your own decisions. You realize that the version of you that other people preferred was a whisper, and you are actually a song. You stop performing femininity and start practicing freedom. You go feral. Not reckless, but untamed. Not selfish, but unapologetic. Not cruel, but honest. Not loud for loudness's sake, but loud because you have something to say and you're done waiting for someone to invite you to speak. This is what it means to find her again. The woman you were before the taming. The woman who still exists inside you, waiting.
My 12-session coaching program Find Her Again is specifically designed to help women over 35 excavate who they were before the taming got loud, and who they want to become now. We work through the curses together. We introduce you to the Feral Unicorn framework. We rebuild your relationship with yourself, your body, your voice, and your life. And we do it all with the understanding that you are not broken, you were just tamed. And you're ready to come home. The woman you're looking for isn't gone. She's in there. Waiting for you to remember that you're allowed to be fully, unapologetically yourself.
She's ready to go feral. Are you?
Feminist Unicorns is a coaching practice for women who are done being tamed. Follow us @feminist_unicorns for weekly content on the confidence curses, the Feral Unicorn framework, and the work of going feral again.Book now to schedule your intro call (it's free!)
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