Ep 104: The Woman Nobody Sees

Transcript

Three in five. Yeah. Nearly three in five Americans say no one truly knows them. Not three in five lonely people. Not three in five isolated people. Three in five Americans, period. People with full lives, full calendars, full houses. people who very outwardly are connected.

And researchers recently identified the group that is most likely to experience both high levels of connection and high levels of loneliness at the same time. You guessed it, young educated women. Surrounded and unknown.

Maybe that lands somewhere with you today. Maybe you’ve never heard that language for it. You just knew something was missing, a quiet ache, and you didn’t have a name for it because your life looks full from the outside. You show up, you give, you lead, you love, and yet there’s a version of you that almost no one has met.

Not because you’re hiding, though sometimes, as we’ll talk about, you are, but because somewhere in the accumulation of all the roles that you carry, all the ways that you show up for everyone else, the woman underneath all these roles got quiet, got small, got lost in plain sight. Well, this is your episode, my beloved

Hey there. Welcome to Mom to Mom Mentoring. This is the podcast for the Christian mom who is ready to go deep and stay there. Every week, we gather for some soul-nourishing wisdom, real conversation, and the kind of truth that doesn’t just inspire you on a Tuesday and disappear by Thursday. This is truth that settles in, truth that stays with you, truth that lingers and whispers through the quiet recesses of your soul.

I’m your host, Misty Hughes. I’m an ICF-certified life coach, a mentor, a mom of four amazing adult children that I raised and launched into the world, which is its own kind of miracle and offers its own kind of grief at the same time, depending on the day. For over 25 years, I’ve walked alongside Christian women who are high capacity, deeply faithful, and quietly aching for something they can’t always name.

I help these women go from that space of overwhelm into the place of peace, from performing in their lives to actually living their lives through what I call my Rhythm of Life framework. I teach what I’ve lived, every single word of it. And today, I’m going to share some of that story with you. Here I am in my Monday regalia doing laundry, exercising, got my hat on, no shower kind of day.

If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see what [00:04:00] I mean. But I’m here with you, fully seen and ready to be known by you. Now, before we get into the episode, I want to share something with you and make sure that you know about my Becoming cohort. It’s a 12-week group coaching experience, and something remarkable happens that I didn’t fully anticipate when I designed it.

Women find each other. They become known, real community, women who show up as strangers and leave as an inner circle. Now, if what we’re talking about today in this episode lands somewhere tender with you, the cohort might be exactly what you’ve been waiting for. You can get on the wait list for the next cohort at mistyhughes.com/cohort.

I will always put the link for that in the show notes. And if you’re not a part of the Facebook community, Christian Moms in Business and Ministry, I would like to invite you to come find us. It’s a beautiful place to be known a little bit more.

It’s also in the show notes. Now, today’s episode is called The Woman, The Mom that Nobody Sees. And I wanna tell you a story before we get into the teaching part of the ex- episode because this is real life, and I suspect that at least one of these examples that I’m going to share has happened or is happening to you right where you are

For years, I led a thriving, beautiful nonprofit for single mothers. I was consistently on stage sharing my story, offering hope, equipping and empowering women who were in the thick of some of the hardest seasons of their lives. Beloved, it was real work. It was real joy. It was sacred to my heart. I gave it everything I had, blood, sweat, and a whole lot of tears, crying with the women as I heard their sorrow and their stories.

Well, during that season, which I loved and cherished, I had this growing awareness. It wasn’t something that hit me like a ton of bricks. It was something that I became increasingly aware of, and I want to be really careful as I share this because the women in my life during that time, and many of them are still in my life right now, our relationship has transformed over the years, and I adore them.

What we shared in that season of my leadership of this nonprofit, it was real. The connection, it was real. The community was life-giving, and it was real. But there was a difference between being known for what I chose to share and being deeply known On the stage, in conversations, I chose what I wanted to reveal.

I chose which parts of my story served the moment, opened heart, built bridges, and it worked. Women felt close to me, intimate. They knew me, or so it felt until the day that I woke up and I [00:08:00] realized a lot of these women, they feel like they know me. But is anyone actually really seeing me? No one is pursuing my heart.

No one is investing their time into knowing me the way I long to know them, and I hope I’m getting to know them. Now, I want to share that this was a part of the role I was in. This was a part of the season that I was in, and it was a part of the season that they were in as they were getting healed and restored and as God was evolving and transforming their story from ashes to beauty.

And I had the immense privilege and honor and gift of God to walk with so many women during these seasons of transformation. But as I was awakened to this reality of who am I known by, I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t bitter. I was just aware. No one had done anything wrong. As I said, it was the reality of the seasons of life that everybody was in.

And when it was time, God began to lift that veil from my own heart. You see, public intimacy and personal intimacy, they’re not the same thing. The stage is a beautiful place to give and to pour out. It is not a safe place to receive. And I had been giving so long, and I loved it, that I didn’t notice the receiving had stopped

Fast forward 2025, 2024. I had been married for five years, and if you’ve been single for 22 years before you get married as an adult raising children, you might understand that becoming a wife is essentially a full-time job, or it was for me, on top of every other full-time job that you already have. But I was all in, completely absorbed in learning what it meant to share a life with someone after decades of building a life alone.

And then as we came out of COVID, as we found our own rhythm in our marriage, life began to slow down. There began to be space to breathe, and when I breathed, I felt it. Uh-oh, a hole, a place in my soul that was empty in a way that I hadn’t noticed while I was working so hard to learn about this new role I was in.

I wasn’t unsupported. I wasn’t unloved. But I woke up one day suddenly aware that I felt Unknown. And that no one was really pursuing my heart. That the women around me, oh, wonderful women, they knew my wins. They celebrated with me, but they didn’t know my wounds. So I did what I do. I got curious. I did a friendship audit.

And if you would like more [00:12:00] information about this friendship audit that I’m going to talk about, I have a whole series on friendship. It’s episode 59 to episode 64. Yeah. And it is, a five-part deep dive into women’s friendships, and I have many tools available to walk you along this friendship audit and developing deeper intimacies with the women that are in your life or even how to pursue women’s friendships in a healthy, whole way.

In my friendship audit, I drew three circles. The first one was the celebration circle. Why not, right? This is my party people. They show up for my birthdays. They cheer my wins. They love being around you. They are not fake. They are real, and let me tell you, these friends are super important.

They just can’t carry everything. The second circle is your community circle. These are women that you do life with adjacent to. You serve together. You see each other regularly. You’re friendly, and you know each other, but the relationship, it lives in the context of this community that you’re in, whether it’s church or school or, or sports, whatever it is.

You take away the context, and that friendship most likely will fade into the background. Then there’s the core friendships. These are the friends that know your full story. These are the friends that pursue your heart. When you’re not showing up on a text stream or when you’ve gone silent, they are the ones that are like, “Hey, what’s up?”

These are the friends that show up for the mess, not just the milestone. So I looked at my circles. Celebration circle, mm, full. Community circle, yeah, full and growing. Core circle, mm. I thought, who are my carry the mat friends? Because you see, I had been in a major life transition. I had literally physically moved away from

The women that I had ran with that had become core friends in one season of life and so I found myself and thought, no wonder I feel this hole. And then I had to ask God a really hard question. Is it me? I read books, I researched, I got curious instead of defensive, and what I found was both sobering and a little bit relieving. It’s not just me. It wasn’t speaking of a personal failure.

Harvard researchers found that over half of mothers with young children report serious loneliness. So if there are 10 of you listening to this podcast, five of you statistically will report that you feel that serious ache of loneliness. And here’s the kicker. The Surgeon General of the United States declared that loneliness is a national epidemic.

Nearly three in five Americans say, “No one truly knows me.” It’s a [00:16:00] cultural moment. It’s a collective ache, and it requires an intentional response because belonging, real belonging, does not happen by accident, and we are created for real, authentic belonging. It has to be chosen, planted, and tended. Now, remember, if you want to go deeper into this, I did this five-episode series on friendships.

I will make sure I put the link to the episodes as well as the free resources in the show notes. Trust me, it’s worth every minute of listening. Now, let’s get into the next, because underneath both of those stories, the stage and the audit is something I want to name for you today, something that I think is at the root of so many capable, faithful, loving women who are living unknown.

You see, nobody loses herself all at once. And that’s the part that maybe we don’t warn you about. And I’m here today to help you understand this as your friend and as your mom mentor. You see,

there’s no dramatic movement, no before and after. It’s a gradual, quiet, roll by roll, season by season, The accumulation of a thousand small surrenders, each one reasonable on its own. She became mom, and mom is always on. Mom doesn’t get tired or confused or unsure. Heck, mom doesn’t even get sick. Mom always has the answers. Mom holds the space. She keeps the peace. She became the strong one, and the strong one, she doesn’t need anything.

The strong one is the one everyone else leans on,

Which means that she learned early and she learned well that her needs make other people, mm, uncomfortable, so she just stopped naming them.

She became the leader, the helper, the minister, the one who always shows up, the one who has the answer. And every one of those identities, they’re real. Every one is important. Every one is good and necessary, and every one of those identities carry a piece of who she is.

But here’s what happens when you stack enough of those good identities on top of each other without tending to what’s underneath. The woman underneath, she disappears. Not dramatically, not with a breakdown or crisis, though sometimes it does come to that. She just gets quieter, smaller. She stops being asked what she wants because everyone assumes she’s fine.

She stops saying what she feels because the role she occupies doesn’t have room for her feelings or what she needs. She performs her life so consistently, so capably, that eventually she performs it on herself and forgets that there was ever anything underneath that performance. [00:20:00] That woman that nobody sees isn’t dramatic about it.

She doesn’t announce it. She just keeps showing up, keeps giving, keeps holding things together. Heck, most of the time she’s not even aware that she’s disappeared or lost until the quiet hits. And beloved, I have been diving deep, especially in my cohort, with this idea of rest, silence, stillness. And busy moms, they sometimes are afraid of that because this is where the quiet hits.

Maybe it’s in a car alone, driving home from something where she was wonderful and capable and utterly herself. She had a great time helping, serving, doing what she loves to do, and she sits in the driveway and suddenly she can’t move. Maybe it hits on a Saturday morning when the house is still for a moment, and she realizes, “I don’t know what I actually enjoy.”

not what’s productive, not what I need, but what I enjoy. Maybe it hits in the exact way it hit me as a whole, an empty place in this woman’s soul that she didn’t notice while she was running and going. And when she finally stopped long enough to breathe

There it was. Psalm 139, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.” You see, the God who sees you fully is the starting place for seeing yourself.

But here is a tender truth I would like for you to hold onto. Hold it in the palm of your hands like that tender sapling. You have become unknown to yourself, and the journey back, it begins with being honest about that

Now before you go, “Oh, Misty, no, or shut me off keep listening because there’s a distinction I want to make for you. I think it might help you name something you’ve been living with but maybe haven’t had the language for. Okay, there is a distinction between being known for something and being known Being known for your reputation, your resume, your role.

I’m mom. I’m a business owner. Even what you love to do. I love to work out. I love to cook. I bake sourdough bread. this is what people say about you when you leave the room. It’s real, but it lives on the surface. Oh, she’s always there for you. She’s so kind. She’s compassionate. She’s the life of the party, whatever that is.

Those are truths about who you are, but it’s being known for what you do or how you live your life. Now, just being known, that’s inside, in your interior, your fears, your failures, your hopes, your dreams, your real questions at [00:24:00] 2:00 AM in the morning when everything else is quiet, your unguarded moments.

What happens when someone asks you, “How are you really?” And you actually take time to think about it and tell them. It’s what makes you laugh, what makes you cry. High capacity women are almost universally known for something. It’s how you move through the world. You’re identified by your output, by the way you show up, your leadership, your gift.

People are drawn to you, inspired by you. People are helped by you. And if I can be completely honest with you, it is also how high capacity women often hide. Because, beloved, when you’re known for something, you never have to really know yourself. Your role fills the space. The gift fills the room, and no one thinks to look at the woman underneath because the woman on top, she’s so impressively present.

I live this. On the stage leading the ministry, I was known, and many times in the rooms I show up to in today, I’m known for what I bring into that space by hundreds of women. Women felt close to me then. They called me friend, and the connection was real. Let me say that again because I mean it. The connection was real.

I wasn’t performing a lie. I was giving them genuine pieces of myself, but they were the pieces I chose, curated, shaped for a moment, the parts that built bridges and open hearts and served the women that I truly loved and cherished. And there was nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with that until it becomes the only mode that you live in, until that giving mode you’ve been living for so long you don’t know how to receive,

until the stage, the room, the business, the role becomes not just where you serve But where you hide. I sat with a young friend once who was searching for herself, her people, her purpose, and I asked her, “What is one question that you wish people asked you?” She paused. She simply said, “How are you really?”

That’s it. We’re created to be known. When is the last time someone stopped and asked you how you were really? And you paused, and you gave them the truth. Not the polished version, not the faith-forward version where everything is hard, but hey, God is good. The actual truth. If you’re struggling to remember, hey, that’s not a c- character flaw.

That is information. That’s your soul telling you something important about which circle the people around you are actually in Okay, here’s what I did after the friendship audit. First, [00:28:00] I asked God that hard question, “Is it me, Lord?”

Not in a self-condemning way, not in a way that spirals into shame, but genuinely, openly, “God, is there something in me that is keeping people at a distance? Am I guarding myself against authentic friendships? Am I the one holding the door closed? Am I so capable, so self-sufficient, so put together on the outside that I’ve made it impossible for anyone to even find the door in the first place?”

And let me tell you, there is a lot of truth to the questions that I asked. It’s a brave question, and it deserves sitting with and discovering the real answer.

Second, I did the audit. I drew the three circles. I took time and I filled them in honestly. I came at it without judging myself. Don’t judge what you find. Just see it and then ask God the question, “Who are you inviting me to move toward?” Just sit with that. Pray about it genuinely. Be open to the answer being someone you didn’t expect.

Then slowly, no guarantee of harvest, start planting seeds. Be vulnerable. Risk being misunderstood. Invite others into the space. You cannot be known without being seen, and being seen requires letting someone close enough to actually look. The last part, that’s the part that costs you something because somewhere along the way, most of us learn that being seen is dangerous, that when people see the real you, the uncertain, the unfinished, the unpolished you, they leave or judge or use it against you.

And so we have perfected the performance and called it strength, but it’s not strength. It’s self-protection, and it’s costing you the very thing that your soul is created for and that your soul needs the most.

Let me give you a couple scripture to ponder as you go through this process. Genesis 2:18, “It is not good for man, for human, for mankind to be alone.” God said that before the fall, before sin entered the picture. In the garden when everything was still whole, He looked at the human and He said, “Mm, it’s not good for aloneness.”

And it was never His intention or His design. Being unknown was never intended for you. You were made for being known. John 15:15, Jesus says, “I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know what the master’s business is. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father, I have made known to you.”

[00:32:00] Friends. Jesus called them friends. The God of the universe, the Holy One, chose the word friend to describe what He wanted, the kind of relationship He wanted with the people He loved. Jesus is not standing at a distance from you. He’s not watching you perform from across the room, impressed by your output.

He is not waiting for you to have it all together before He moves close. He is pursuing your heart right now in this moment with everything He has. Everything we’ve talked about today, the circles, the audit, the slow disappearing act, the difference between being known for and known, all of it rests on this foundation.

Before any human ever pursued your heart, before any friend ever sat across the table from you and said or indicated, “I see you,” before any inner circle formed or any seed was planted, you were searched and you were known. Psalm one thirty-nine. I’d like to invite you to sit with me in it.

Verses one through four. You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit down and you know when I rise. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways

See there? It says, “All my ways.” Not the polished ones, not the staged ones, all of your ways. The God who spoke the galaxies into existence, the Holy One, the maker of heaven and Earth, the one whose names the angels cry, “Holy, holy, holy,” He has made Himself familiar with all of your ways. He knows your going out.

He knows when you lie down. He knows the things you are going to say before they’re even formed in your mouth. He’s not surprised by you. He’s not disappointed by what He finds when He searches you, because He searched you, and He stayed. He knows you, and He calls you His, and He calls you by name. David writes a few verses later, “For You created my inmost being.

You knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Your inmost being, the part nobody sees, the part you may not even be familiar with, the part you barely let yourself look at, the part that has been quiet and still and small and performing for so long, it’s almost forgotten there. I think of the Horton Hears a Who and the little people in Whoville.

They’re so small, so quiet. Nobody hears. Nobody sees. You see, God knows that part. He knit it together with His own hands. [00:36:00] He is your maker, with intention, with care, with love, and He has never once looked away from it. You are not unknown. You’re not invisible. You are not the woman that nobody sees. You are the woman that the Creator of the universe sees so completely, so intimately, so wonderfully, that He counts the hairs on your head.

He catches your tears, and He knows the plans that He has for you, plans for a future and hope. Everything else, we work with Him. We build together every circle, every friendship, every brave act of letting someone in is actually all just a downstream from being known by God first and foremost. Because when you are known by God, truly known, when you let Him in, not just theologically affirmed, but when you have that down deep in my soul knowing that He knows you, it changes how you are able to receive love from other people.

It changes how much you need their approval. It changes how much of a risk you are willing to take to let someone close because your worth is no longer based on their evaluation. You can be seen fully, really, messily seen Because the one whose opinion really matters most has already looked at everything and said, “Mine, known, loved, beautiful friend.”

Before there was a stage, before there was a role, before there was a title, a calling, a circle of any kind, you were known. Psalm 139:1, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.” Not known for, not known as. Known fully, completely, without performance, without pretense.

The God who spoke into– the God who spoke the universe into existence, he looked at you and he said, “Hey, I know her. I created her.” Before you did anything, you were worth knowing. Before you built anything worth talking about, before you showed up as bright and vivacious and beautiful and lovely, before you built that business, before you became mom, before you became daughter, before any of this God knew you and he stayed.

He calls you his. This truth is the ground that you stand on. This is where the whole conversation begins and where it ends. Not in the friendship audit, not in the inner circle, not in finally finding the women who pursue your heart, though all of that really matters, and all of that is worth pursuing.

But it begins here with the Holy One who knows you by name, You see, beloved, it always begins with him.

God made you. He [00:40:00] created you. He formed you. He knit you together because he wanted you. He desired you, and he has never stopped seeing you, You cannot be unknown by the one who made you. So I wanna ask you, can you let that be the foundation?

Let everything else, let it all be built on that rock-solid truth. after getting your footing on that truth, I would encourage you to draw those three circles and fill them in honestly and sit with the question, not anxiously, but just openly, “God, who are you inviting me to move closer to?”

It’s not a grand gesture, not a complete overhaul of your social life, who’s out, who’s in, just one name, one seed, one small act of brave. if you did that audit and you find your inner circle empty, like mine was, or nearly empty, I want you to know it is not a verdict of your worth.

It is an invitation, an invitation to let God do something new And I wanna remind you that that’s what the Becoming cohort is all about. It’s what it’s for. It’s not just the framework, not just the coaching, but the community. giving God the space to do something new.

If that’s what your soul is hungry for, come find us. The wait list is open. And don’t forget about the Facebook community. The link for that is in the show notes, and it’s a sweet space to belong. If you haven’t yet, subscribe and share this one with a woman in your life who has been showing up for everyone else for so long that she possibly has forgotten what it feels like, to be on the receiving end.

You know who she is. Next week, we’re gonna dive even a little bit deeper into this series. And if today’s episode did stir something in you, I think you’ll want to be here. Just hit subscribe so you do not miss it. Now, before I let you go, I wanna close the way I always do. But today, I wanna say it with this in mind.

The woman who has been unseen, unknown, invisible, in plain sight, she was never invisible to God. Not once, not ever. When you shine with the radiance of Christ living fully and freely in you and through you as who He created you to be, when you shine from that place of being known and transparent before your maker, you give others permission to shine, too.

And sometimes that shine does not start with being seen by the world, but with finally believing that the God who made you has been seeing you all along. Don’t stop shining, mama. I’m Mista Hughes. You’ve been listening to Mom to Mom Mentoring. Now, go shine.

🔗‍️ LINKS MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

BECOMING Group Coaching Cohort

Christian Women in Business & Ministry Facebook Group

𓆩♡𓆪 Flourish In Friendship Podcast Series
Ep 59: https://mistyhughes.com/how-to-grow-longtime-friendships-that-last/
Ep 60: https://mistyhughes.com/rediscovering-womens-friendships-in-a-disconnected-world/
Ep 61: https://mistyhughes.com/ep-61-lonely-but-not-alone-in-building-christ-centered-friendships-that-last/
Ep 62: https://mistyhughes.com/ep-62-moms-can-find-their-way-through-loneliness-by-understanding-this/
Ep 64: https://mistyhughes.com/ep-64-how-to-cultivate-authentic-friendships-even-when-it-feels-risky/

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