I wanted to tell the truth Mhmm. About what my life felt like. Couple months before my fiftieth birthday and it was the second wave of Omicron, but I still came down with COVID. And I got it really hard. It got really quiet there for a couple of days. I had this feeling of, like, how did I get here? How did this how is this my life? I'm Erin Keating, and I am the founder of Hatter Than Ever. We are a company that makes hot stuff for women 40.
There is no map for us as women in our forties, fifties, and sixties. There has never been a generation of women as successful as we are. But no one was talking about pleasure. No one was talking about laughter. No one was talking about joy. No one was talking about self expression, saying the truth. All of that became possible because I had this open space in my life to reinvent. And pleasure isn't just sex. Yeah. No. Pleasure is about letting yourself experience the world through your senses.
The first thing I always encourage people to do is Hey, everybody. Quick break at our episode to talk to you about our sponsor, My Libido Doc. One of the things that we truly believe is that great sex is available to everyone, but we just have to learn how. So head over to our site to get your free copy of our ebook, Five Steps to Mind Blowing Orgasms and Romance.
Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sex life around, rev up your engines, and fall in deeper love and passion with yourself and your partner. So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you will find that ebook there for download. Now back to our show. Hi, lovers. Hi, lovebirds. Welcome back to another episode on the lounge. I'm your host, doctor Diane. And as you just heard, I have an amazing guest, a new friend of mine, Aaron Keating, and we are talking about what happens at midlife.
Like, what happens where so many people so many people talk about midlife crises, right, but it doesn't have to be a crisis. I think midlife is a point in time where people start asking questions and, you know, kind of go into the unknown around what is this part of our life supposed to look look like? What is our purpose? What is even supposed to feel like? Right? Our needs, our wants, our preferences, our desires, so many things change at this point.
So I have an expert for you guys today to chat about that, and we're gonna start by welcoming her and hearing. She's a really, really beautiful and also intense story of how she got into her work.
So welcome, Erin. Thank you so much for being here, and let's start by just telling us a little bit about the process that you went through with getting sick, with everything, you know, you've told me offline where you really decided to, you know, reinvent yourself and say, what does this next part of your life, you know, look like? Will you tell us about that? Absolutely. Well, thank you, doctor Diane. I'm so happy to be here, and anything with the word libido in the title is for me. You know?
That's part of my midlife reawakening. You know, I, I was a bit of a, like, prep school rebel in my twenties. You know, I had I had sort of been a good girl and done all the things right that you're supposed to do. I got good grades. I went to the right college. I, I launched a career in my twenties, but I was also sort of artistic and creative. And, I was so excited to be an adult. Right?
I was so excited in my twenties to be an adult, and I really gave myself time to sort of explore what what excited me and what moved me. And I was a writer performer. I thought I was gonna be on Saturday Night Live. Like, that was my big dream. And, you know, as my twenties went by, I found that it was challenging to reconcile my artistic and kind of countercultural aspirations with, the idea of being a grown up.
And like a lot of people, and especially women, I started to make decisions that would lead me toward a capital a adult life. Yeah. Right? So, I sort of pivoted from being a writer performer and, producing shows in Downtown New York. I'd like to say I spent fifteen years in a basement theater.
You know, I really earned my chops that would lend themselves to a career in television, and that is what I ended up doing as I sort of headed into looking for a career with a capital c. And so in my late twenties, early thirties, I started my career. And then in my mid thirties, I started looking for a spouse because I knew I wanted to have kids. So then I had the career, and I had the husband, and then I did fertility treatments, and then I got a pair of twins, fourteen years ago.
And, I started to build this life that looked like the kind of life that I was raised to want. Was it the life that I really truly wanted? No. I wanted a more bohemian existence. I wanted, not to actually ever have to get married, but to love someone so much that we were just renewing our commitment to each other every day in in deed and in action. But I married someone who wanted to get married. So I was like, okay.
And I, instead of sticking down the artist path, became a producer and an executive because I wanted to make a living. And sort of by a thousand cuts, I think a lot of us sort of go from our youthful ideals, our our, artistic inclinations, our more freewheeling, expressive selves, because we're trying to figure out how to get all the things that, you know, our mothers promised us that we could have everything, that we could have it all. And so I started to build that life.
And then in my forties, I was like, wow. I've been striving for so long. Now I actually started to have the career, and I had the kids, and I wanted to live into the promise of my own success. But as time went on, I realized that the marriage that I was in was not the marriage I wanted to be in, and that the career had a very, very high cost. But I had bought a house, and, you know, I had, I had a nanny to pay, and I had a title to fulfill, and I had a role to play in my in my domestic life.
And I was really, like I I picture it as, like, just you know, it's like a plate of pancakes just, like, stacking up, stack up. And then I'm the waitress who's, like, walking around going, I hope this doesn't all fall over. You know? And I say waitress because I'm in service of everyone else. Right? And those pancakes are not really for me. They're for the people in my life or for the structures that I'm serving.
And about, six months before, maybe a couple months before my fiftieth birthday, I was working from home. We were, just getting through COVID, through the pandemic, and it was the second wave of Omicron. I was vaccinated, and, but I still came down with COVID. And I got it really hard. And I thought, well, this is just like a bad flu. I'm just gonna work through it.
So I was still on conference calls, and I was still on Zooms, and I was still doing all the things that I was supposed to do, hacking up a lung, going on mute. And eventually, it got so bad that I, needed to check myself into the hospital. And I got to the hospital, and they were like, right this way. We don't understand why you have this so bad, but, you need to come here, and you need to stay here. And so I spent a long weekend at UCLA Hospital.
And, you know, they they they wheeled me in a wheelchair down to the end of a long haul into a private room. And I thought to myself, oh my god. This is like a hotel. Like, here I am. It's quiet. I had an excuse finally not to be responsive to work. No one could ask me for anything. All the demands that had been pushing me to work while I was sick, to run my household while I was sick, to you know, you have little kids, like, they're the demands are intense, You know?
And it got really quiet there for a couple of days. And my room started to fill up with flowers and and well wishes from people, and the biggest bouquet was for my work. And that is a metaphor that will stick with me for the rest of my life. Like, those were the people who cared the most about whether or not I got well. And, they hooked me up to all the IVs. They gave me all the drugs. I started to get better. I started to just think my own thoughts in the quiet of that room.
And when I came time to leave the hospital, my now ex husband, he had had a really hard time managing the kids for two or three days without me. Yeah. And I think he had gone into a bit of a spin, thinking about what his life would be like if I was no longer there, and he was pissed. He was pissed. You know, sometimes men have, like, two gears, angry and horny. Not a lie. We had gotten to the place where we had one gear, and that was not horny.
Yeah. And so I left the hospital to so much anger from my ex about me suddenly being unavailable for the tasks that I had signed on onto, you know, the the the plate of pancakes that he expected to be served in his life. And I had this feeling of, like, how did I get here? Yeah. How did this how is this my life? I had never had a brush with mortality. I had never been sick. I am not a morbid person. I don't think about death. I don't think about illness.
I think about, like, what can I get done, and how can I accomplish my goals, and how can I make sure that people in my life are taken care of, and that everybody likes me? Like, you know, those were the things that were my concerns. And I started to really feel the feelings that I had been pushing down. And I started to acknowledge some truths that I had not been willing to acknowledge.
The first being the marriage was no longer working, and that we had taken vows that he had wanted us to take, that in sickness and in health, and this was the in sickness part, and he wasn't able to show up for me in the way that I needed to be shown up for. I needed to be cared for Yeah. Instead of being the one doing all the caring. And when those tables were turned and things were inverted, it didn't work. And so we decided to go to couples therapy. I turned 50 within that period.
Yeah. And six months later, he moved out. And six months after that, I got laid off for my big fancy corporate job. Wow. A lot of messages coming in so many ways. Everything happened in sequence so fast. Yeah. And I was left with a blank slate for my life. And I had a little bit of money in the bank, and I thought to myself, what do I wanna do? Who do I wanna be? And the first thing that occurred for me is that I was obsessed with podcasts, and I wanted to reclaim my own voice.
And I had been licensing my voices to corporations for twenty years. I had been making them tons of money. I had been really been evangelizing in service of these corporate missions that I believed in, that I was on board with, that I was being paid for. But given my own choice, I wanted to tell the truth Mhmm. About what my life felt like. Because I suspected that I was not alone in this generation of women who did everything right, who climbed the escalator.
And then I got to the top of the escalator, and I looked around, and there was nothing. There is no map for us as women in our forties, fifties, and sixties. There has never been a generation of women as successful as we are. There literally in the history of planet Earth, there has not been a more capable, educated, professionally accomplished, doing the work on ourselves, evolving, you know, generation of women.
And I was, like, looking around and seeing lots of stuff about menopause, lots of stuff about elder care, lots of stuff about how you can fix your body and fix this and fix that, but no one was talking about pleasure. No one was talking about laughter. No one was talking about joy. No one was talking about self expression, saying the truth. Like, we've been shouldering these burdens for so long. We have been carrying our companies, our families, our marriages.
And I think a lot of us are in a similar boat as I am, which is as the estrogen started to drop, which happens to all of us in our forties, and my kids stopped needing me every second of every day. Now they're 14. You know? They're not they don't have the needs they had. Yeah. When I first started thinking, could probably get out of this marriage. That would probably be good for me. When they were five, that was when I started having those thoughts. But there was no way.
They were too little, and I didn't wanna be a single mom. And then suddenly, like, all of that became possible because I had this open space in my life to reinvent. And I am in it. I am not on the other side of reinvention. And I'm not sure I ever will be, and I'm not sure any of us ever will be.
But, you know, one of the first things I wanted to do was reclaim my voice, so I started interviewing incredible women who had experienced similar pivots in their lives or who had expertise about things that I was curious about.
I started, talking about relationships and love and dating and sex, and I started talking about career reinvention and, identity and how from, you know, overloving and overextending yourself and how to create boundaries and all the things that I need, those were the conversations I wanted to have. And women started to respond and say thank you for being honest, for being straightforward, for being vulnerable. I am not an expert. I am on the journey.
I'm just more deeply invested in these conversations and bringing them to other people as they're happening. And I'm sharing honest too. And and being honest. And being honest, which I think is really hard. Yeah. Well, even I mean, it's such a great story. Right? I feel like it's so relatable for so many women.
And, you know, when we're talking about this this thing around, like, okay, being really honest, like, that point when you're in the hospital and you're actually saying, like, what do I wanna do? Like, how have you found in conversations with other people? Like, have you found any ways that or any, like, similar patterns of helping women actually get really honest with themselves with that question?
Because I I feel like we're not oftentimes led or even told it's okay as women to really get honest with ourselves around what do we want, and everything has this attachment around, like, but I should be this, and I should be this, and and it's the list of shoulds. Right?
Yep. So do you have anything that you've seen come up with, you know, people you've interviewed with your own experience to, like, help women actually start with that place of getting deeply honest with themselves of what do I actually want my life to look like? I think, you know, there's a 12 step saying, we grow at the speed of pain. And I really believe that it's hard to make massive personal change if you are not suffering enough. But how much is enough? Right? So Hey, everybody.
Quick break out our episode to talk to you about our sponsor, My Libido Doc. One of the things that we truly believe is that great sex is available to everyone, but we just have to learn how. So head over to our site to get your free copy of our ebook, Five Steps to Mind Blowing Orgasms and Romance. Get the quick and easy tips to turn your sex life around, rev up your engines, and fall in deeper love and passion with yourself and your partner.
So if you just go to mysexdoc.com, you will find that ebook there for download. Now back to our show. The first thing I always encourage people to do is write. You know, just get a pen and a piece of paper and check-in with yourself and write, if I'm being honest, and then take it from there. Yeah. We all have things that we feel like if we admit them to ourselves, we either have to live with that truth and not change, or we have to change.
Yeah. Change is uncomfortable, And we are taught not to be uncomfortable, to to avoid uncomfortable feelings, to avoid awkward conversations. We are also taught to throw ourselves under the bus and sacrifice ourselves for the status quo and for, you know, keeping the plates spinning. And if you are suffering enough in one area of your life or another, like, for me, the starting place was sex. I had not had sex for ten years, and I was headed into menopause. I was getting, night sweats.
I would wake up with, like, wet thighs. How disgusting. I mean, really? It has to be wet thighs? Thanks. Why? Well, why there?
Yeah. I was not able to even bring myself to an orgasm, like and I had been very orgasmic and very sexual when I entered my marriage, you know, but through attrition and through, things that eroded the trust in the relationship and through oversensitivity, and and everybody being so touchy about everything, me included, you know, this the intimacy part of our lives, like the physical intimacy part dwindled to nothing.
And for me, that had been such an incredibly important way of being in my body and being connected to myself, that that was the first thing I wanted to get back. And so really, like, getting honest with, like, actually, this is super important to me, was the first step on my journey of, you know, reinventing for right now how I do relationships, how I do sex, how I how I engage with my body, how I live in my own skin.
And I, I have a friend I made through the podcast named doctor Juliana Hauser, who said to me in one of my interviews, if you can find your agency in the bedroom, you can find your agency in the rest of your life. And if you can find your agency in the rest of your life, you can find your agency in the bedroom.
That these things, this being able to ask for what you need to prioritize your own pleasure and your own experience and your own skin and your own connectedness and how you wanna be connected with somebody else in intimate moments. Like, I was so hungry to get that back Yeah. That that was where I started.
And, I it's been a wild it's been a wild adventure for the last three years, you know, that has included lovers and boyfriends and online doms and all kinds of things that, that have made me feel like I am back to being myself, and I'm connected to the vital, sexy woman that I was when I got on that escalator, you know? Yeah. And and if I can do it, if I can reconnect with myself, and then use that juice to fuel the rest of my life, other women can do it too. I am not extraordinary in this way.
Well, I love your story, and I do think you are extraordinary from a standpoint of everything you've, like, like, committed to. Right? Like Yeah. A major commitment to say, hey. I'm going to want my life to be different, and I'm actually going to show up. And I think I think it's important to celebrate the, you know, extraordinary in all of us. And I know there's I appreciate that. I'm not saying I'm not awesome. I'm just saying, like, what I am doing is available to Go to everybody.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. I I do know that, like, there are women listening to because I to this, and I hear this in my own work that women get to a certain point and they're like, well, pleasure is not that important to me anymore, I don't need to engage in sex, and I think this happens a lot around, you know, the forties, the fifties, I think it happens due to a lot of different reasons, some of it is menopause, some of it is, I think people just get to a point where
it's just like going through the motions and we're doing all the shoulds and It's the sex they're having. It's not sex in general. Right. And and that's why I think there's a level of that or the sex they're not having. Right. Right? So I was so disassociated from myself. I was ahead with no body. I mean, I really was walking around like, the only valuable things in my life come from my neck up. Right? Like, the important things I can handle with my brain.
So then what do you say then to, like, to because I think that's a very common thing. Right? We get so much in almost this, like, masculine version of the feminine, which Mhmm. Is super linear. It's solving problems. It's not in our head and not in our bodies, and we just start to lose that connection in this process to our femininity, to our pleasure, to our joy, our laughter, all these things you named earlier. Mhmm. So what do you say then?
Like, if somebody like do you talk to women ever in, like, your work where it's like somebody is I've just decided that that's no longer important to me. Pleasure is no longer important to me or sex is no longer important to me. Do you have any, like, messages for anybody that's kind of in that mindset of, hey, this is just not for me anymore? Sure. I mean, I think the first question is, has it ever been good? Yeah. Right?
Because if because if you've never felt if you've never had great orgasms, if you've never felt, like, just that honey dripping through your veins feeling of, like, good, sexy vibes and good, you know, oxytocin, like, then I don't understand what you would want to go back to if there's nothing to go back to. Right? It is available to us, though, and the pleasure is so good for us. I had, doctor Nan Wise on my podcast I love her.
Who, you know, studied the relationship between the brain and sexuality. And if you're a person who's made motivated by health, like, you light up those pleasure centers in your brain, you are working on your longevity, you are working on your well-being, you are working on your cognitive skills. And, you know, if you if you're a person who's like, well, you know, that's the