There are conversations that land in your spirit and stay there.
My recent dialogue with Dawn McMillan — psychotherapist, actor, director, and a woman who moves fluidly between mental health, performance, and cultural expression — was one of those conversations.
With degrees from Stanford and Northern Arizona University, Dawn brings both clinical skill and creative range to her work. She currently curates for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and serves as Director of Volunteers for Tucson Meet Yourself. Whether she’s in the therapy room, on a stage, or behind the scenes of cultural programming, her work centers on helping people reconnect with expression, aliveness, and presence.
And in our conversation, she said something that hit me right in the chest:
“The challenge we all have is it’s hard to see our own filters.”
Those filters — the beliefs, fears, scripts, and identities we inherited before we were even old enough to question them — shape how we move through life.
Most of them were formed before we were eight years old.
By midlife, those filters start to crack.
Not because we’re falling apart, but because we’re waking up.
We begin asking:
Who am I underneath the conditioning?
Who taught me these beliefs?
What do I actually want now?
This is the real work of midlife — the emotional and spiritual evolution that parallels the hormonal and physical changes I see every day in my patients.
Dawn reminded us that emotional maturity isn’t about becoming someone new.
It’s about peeling away everything that isn’t us — the “shoulds,” the survival strategies, the roles we outgrew, the perfectionism, the pressure, the quiet self-abandoning we learned to call normal.
This is what awakening looks like:
✨ Noticing your own cognitive biases
✨ Naming the stories you inherited
✨ Loosening the grip of old identities
✨ Reclaiming your truest, most sovereign self
✨ Returning to aliveness
Midlife isn’t a crisis.
It’s a homecoming.
Where to Find Dawn
If you felt the resonance of this conversation, you can explore more of Dawn’s work:
Instagram: @thedawnmcmillan
Work with Dawn, Subscribe to her Substack, and much more HERE!
Her offerings include psychotherapy, performance coaching, and expressive arts work that supports emotional maturation and self-reclamation.
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