If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...?” the answer’s NO, and The Uplifters will prove it to you. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives. I’m your host, Aransas Savas, and I’ve spent the last 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching. Last week we explored fulfillment in midlife.
This week we’re exploring what gets in the way of fulfillment. Our guest is Faye McCray.
Listen to this episode if...
You’ve spent years being excellent at something that stopped feeling like you
You’re carrying the weight of everyone else’s idea of who you should be
You’re afraid that letting go of your title means losing your value entirely
You have whole sides of yourself you haven’t let out in the open since childhood
I had to stop believing that I needed validation to move forward. I had to learn to trust myself—and to quiet the voices around me long enough to hear my own.
Who are you, really? Like, really, really?
“Who are you, really?” is a hard question for many of us to answer because, since we were little girls, we’ve been taught to whittle away at ourselves, to sculpt some ideal version of girlhood and then womanhood that helps us fit in.
Research from The Confidence Code for Girls by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman found that girls were also found to be rewarded more by teachers and parents when they exhibited people-pleasing behavior. We learned early on that staying quiet, following instructions, and not asserting opinions was a more acceptable path. We learned that certain parts of us are acceptable and other parts should be hidden in the background. So we started editing ourselves.
Faye McCray started her career as a federal attorney. She was the first lawyer in her family. She had a “curated identity” with the right degree, title, suits, and professional presence. Then a government furlough sent everyone home and she started thinking about the parts of herself she’d set aside when she chose her career.
What she found, when she started writing in her off hours, was herself. “I was giggling while I was writing,” she says. A whole other world was opening up, one that she’d never let herself entertain because the lawyer title had become so impressive so quickly. She was meeting people she found fascinating. She wasn’t overthinking how she was showing up. “It felt natural to who I was.”
She didn’t quit law to become a writer. She became more than a lawyer, and became more Faye.
Today she is the founder and CEO of Culture&Quill, chief communications officer at the National Conference of Bar Examiners, a speaker at South by Southwest and Aspen Ideas, a TEDx speaker, and the author of the forthcoming “More Than Your Job,” out June 2027.
Research into midlife transitions helps explain why this expansion gets so urgent in our 40s and 50s. Developmental psychologists call it identity certainty: we begin to know ourselves more clearly, and that self-knowledge makes the gap between who we’ve been performing and who we actually are harder and harder to ignore.
5 Ways Faye McCray Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:
Follow the giggling. Joy is data. Faye didn’t make a strategic plan to become a journalist. She noticed where she felt like herself, and she followed it. Ask yourself not where you think you should find joy, but where it’s actually showing up right now.
Call it a pilot. Everything scary becomes survivable when you frame it as an experiment. You’re not launching a new career. You’re trying something. Low stakes, real learning, no performance required.
Name the grief. Letting go of an identity you worked hard to build is a real loss, even when you’re ready to go. Faye let herself feel it and understand it, because “you can’t busy it away or work it off.”
Negotiate your job title as hard as you negotiate your salary. One of the most tactical insights in this episode: if your title is so specific it can only live in one context, you’ve painted yourself into a corner. Build portability in from the start. Your next chapter will thank you.
Expand your identity before you need to. Faye didn’t wait for a crisis to start writing. She started building other streams of herself, and income, while she still had stability. By the time she made the full leap, she already had proof she could do it.
Lift Her Up
Subscribe to Faye’s Substack, where she’s exploring the ideas at the heart of her forthcoming book. Find her everywhere at @heyfayemccray. And put “More Than Your Job: Four Practices for Keeping Your Identity Bigger Than Your Career” on your list for June 2027.
