Do Your Laundry on Sunday. Be a Renegade. — Identity, Purpose & Tilting Your Head After 50
Episode 12 of Wellness Me Up — Wellness Me Up Diary Entry with Transformational Life Coach Connelia Houston
Sometimes you don't need a push. You just need to tilt your head.
I did not expect to be this lit up by a conversation that somehow ended up including laundry. And yet here we are.
Connelia Houston zoomed into this conversation and within about four minutes I had sore cheeks from smiling and was reconsidering every rule I've ever followed without questioning why. She is pure joy wrapped in wisdom and I am so glad the “book of Face” brought us together.
Grab some Rocky Road ice cream and pull up a chair. This one is good.
🎧 Listen to the episode here:
→ YouTube
→ Spotify
The 2am Question Nobody Prepares You For
Connelia's daughter graduated from Duke University. Proud mom moment. Job done. And then Connelia woke up at 2am and asked God... okay what now? Is that it? Are you taking me up like Elijah or is there more to do?
That question — what do I do now that the thing I've been doing is done — is one of the most disorienting moments a woman can face. And nobody warns you it's coming.
It happens when the kids leave. When the career ends. When the marriage dissolves. When the parent dies. When the title you've been carrying for decades just... disappears. And suddenly you're standing there going who am I without this thing?
Connelia says women feel this gap so intensely because we are intentional in our living. We pour ourselves into the roles we take on. And when a role ends there's a real hole there. A real question. A real reckoning.
And that reckoning deserves to be taken seriously. Not rushed. Not fixed with a new to-do list. Just... acknowledged.
It Is Not a Problem That You Don't Know What to Do
This is the first thing Connelia does when a woman comes to her in that gap.
She slows her down. She says... it's okay that you don't know what to do. Nothing is wrong with you. It is not a problem that you don't know what to do.
And she said it three times. Deliberately. Because most of us need to hear it more than once before it actually lands.
So many of these women have been checking boxes their whole lives. They have had everything together. They have been the responsible one, the capable one, the one who figures it out. And now they're in a space where they genuinely don't know... and that feels like failure.
It isn't. It's just transition. And transition has a messy middle that needs to be acknowledged before anything else can happen.
Once you take that breath. Once you say okay this is where I am and that's allowed... then you can start looking at what feels complete and what feels incomplete. What's already a work of art that you can hang on the wall. And what still needs attention.
But you can't get there without the acknowledgement first.
Tilt Your Head
This is the moment in this episode that I keep coming back to.
Connelia was talking about how she helps women shift out of that stuck feeling. And she said the move isn't necessarily to push forward. It's to tilt your head.
Just slightly. To the side.
Your entire surroundings don't change. But that tiny shift in perspective gives you a completely different view of what's available to you. Suddenly you're not staring at the wall anymore. You're not looking into the abyss. You tilt... and now you can see a little sun. A little light. Some green. Some fresh air.
I jumped in with the game Boggle as the analogy and it just clicked perfectly. You can stare at those letters forever and see nothing. And then someone tilts the board just slightly and suddenly there are ten words you couldn't see before. They were always there. You just needed a different angle.
That's what Connelia does for the women she works with. She tilts the board. And suddenly the possibilities that were always there become visible.
I felt that one in my whole body.
You Are Not Alone. And There Is So Much More.
Two of the biggest surprises women have when they start working with Connelia are these.
First — they are not alone. Not even close. There are other women going through exactly this, who have come out the other side, who are out there living their thing and doing their stuff. The community piece is huge. Knowing you're not the first person to feel this way and you won't be the last is genuinely one of the most healing realizations available.
Second — there is so much more for them to do. Women in their fifties and sixties have this tendency to think okay someone else will pick this up now. But nobody can do what you can do. Nobody. And there is more of it for you to do and it is going to be fun.
Connelia told a story about a woman who spent her whole life cooking for everyone. Now she's retired, she has her own little baking business, she shows up to deliver her cakes and people invite her in and she's meeting people and she's living.
She's not on the couch with the Rocky Road anymore. She's out in the streets giving everybody cake.
I mean. Come on. That's the whole thing right there.
The WTF Wheel Question: A Belief About Wellness You Used to Hold That You Now Laugh At
Oh this one. This one was everything.
The WTF wheel landed on a belief about wellness you used to hold that you now laugh at. And Connelia went straight to laundry.
She grew up being told you cannot do laundry on Sundays. It was against God. Sunday was God's day. So you either got it done on Saturday, woke up early Monday, or bought new underwear on the way to work.
She held onto this rule for decades. Without ever questioning where it came from or who said it or whether it was actually true.
And then within the last ten months... she started doing laundry on Sundays. Any day she wants actually. And she throws everything in together — the whites, the colors, the towels, the jeans — all of it. Because her daughter informed her that if you just put it all in there it all comes out clean.
Reader. It does all come out clean.
And the reason this is a wellness conversation and not just a laundry conversation is this — how many rules are we carrying that were never actually ours? How many things are we not doing because somebody somewhere told us we weren't supposed to and we never stopped to ask why?
Connelia said doing laundry on Sunday felt freeing. Like genuinely freeing. And I believe her completely because I know that feeling.
We are renegades. That's what she said. That's what she teaches her women to be.
Be a renegade. Do your dirty laundry whenever you want. It's yours.
What Wellness Me Up Means to Connelia
A full body alignment. Mind body soul and spirit — which she defines as your identity, your presence, that essence of who you are that people feel when they're around you.
It's the good being poured into you. And the good you're pouring out. And all of it being in line with who you actually are so you can say yes. That's me. I feel good about that.
I said it at the end of this episode and I meant every word of it — when this gets out into the wild everybody's cheeks are going to be sore from smiling. Because that's just what happens when you spend an hour with Connelia Houston.
Oh and She's a Recovering Attorney
Connelia was an attorney for thirty years. Bankruptcy, real estate, wills, trusts, criminal defense. Everything except divorce — because she's been through it twice and she said she'd have a breakdown in the courtroom.
She kept seeing the same women over and over with the same kinds of things and she kept talking to them and helping them through it. And eventually she realized that was the work. That was what she was actually here to do.
The law career was the path that led her here. It's not over. It never was. It just tilted.
Want to work with Connelia? Connelia Houston is a transformational life coach for women navigating the gap — the empty nest, the retirement, the identity shift, the quiet question of what comes next. Recovering attorney. Twice divorced. And the most alive she's ever been.
There's a free five minute clarity reset on her website. It's not a sales pitch. It's just a breath and a reset. Go take it.
If this one made your cheeks sore... share it with a woman in your life who is staring at the gap and needs someone to tilt the board for her. And subscribe to Wellness Me Up wherever you listen.
🎧 Listen to the episode here:
→ YouTube
→ Spotify
