Last year, I had a moment I know many of you have had.
I sat on my sofa running through the everyday to-do list: the endless things around the house, getting my oldest ready for college, scheduling everyone’s doctors’ appointments and dealing with the insurance company, and preparing for new volunteer leadership roles.
Photo courtesy of Raina Shah
But then my mind, of its own will, moved onto the bigger things — my aging parents, my marriage, my career, and a pending biopsy. (Thankfully, it was benign.)
I was overwhelmed. And I started to cry.
By most measures, I’m one of the most blessedly un-alone people in the world. I have an enormous, in-your-face-because-we-love-each-other family, lifelong friends, and a trusted, loyal inner circle.
And yet, in that moment, I felt completely alone.
Later, I started thinking about how many women in my generation carry this same weight — each of us feeling like we’re the only ones. We were raised to put our heads down and deal with life. And we do. Often silently.
Professionally, I know that our silence has consequences. Since the pandemic, Gen X women have reported the steepest decline in wellbeing and the sharpest rise in loneliness of any cohort — in the U.S. and abroad.* Because we rarely talk openly about our lives, we’re rarely talked about in culture or truly understood as consumers.
We’re overlooked.
But, personally, I’ve seen how quickly a room of Gen X women relaxes when someone finally talks honestly about what’s going on. And how we can spark change when we do speak.
So I created Gen X, Unmuted.
A dedicated space where Gen X women can speak openly and honestly about what’s really going on in their lives — where we’re understood, and where our collective voices can help the world better see who we are.
Because if we want to change how we feel and how we’re seen, the first step is simple:
We take ourselves off mute. Together.
