She described it to me like this: “Everyone in my house knows what time they have to leave, what they want to eat, what they need from me. Nobody knows what I want, because nobody has asked in eleven years. Including me.”
I have heard some version of that sentence in almost every session I have taken with mothers. Not from unhappy marriages or difficult families. From ordinary, functioning homes, where a woman has quietly become the infrastructure — always running, never noticed until something stops working.
If that is you, this piece is not going to tell you to wake up at 5 a.m. and be grateful. Let us talk about what is actually happening and what actually helps.
Three things you have probably been told that are not true
Myth 1: “Feeling this way means you are ungrateful”
This is the belief that keeps women silent longest. You have a home, a husband who is not unkind, healthy children — so what right do you have to feel empty?
Gratitude and emptiness are not opposites. You can be genuinely thankful for your family and still be missing yourself. Both are true at once, and treating the second as a moral failure is how women end up carrying it for a decade without mentioning it to anyone.
Myth 2: “It will pass once the children are older”
It usually does not. The women who tell me they feel invisible at forty-five are frequently the ones who told themselves at thirty that it would sort itself out after the exams, after the wedding, after the house was finished. The waiting is the problem, not the timing. Nothing arrives to give you back to yourself. You have to go and collect it.
Myth 3: “You need a big change”
A new job, a course, a business, a dramatic conversation with your husband. Big changes are frightening enough that most people never begin, and then read their own hesitation as proof that they are weak.
In my experience the sequence runs the other way. Small reclaimed things build the strength that makes big changes possible later.
What mindpower actually means
People hear “mindpower” and imagine positive thinking — repeating that everything is wonderful until you believe it. That is not it, and honestly, that approach fails most tired women within a week.
Mindpower is much plainer. It is the practice of noticing what your mind is telling you, checking whether it is accurate, and choosing your response instead of running the old one automatically. Your mind has been running the same few sentences for years — I am the only one who does anything here, there is no point saying anything, this is just my life now. Those sentences feel like observations. They are habits.
You are not tired because you are weak. You are tired because you have been carrying something without ever being allowed to put it down.
Rabeeba Vellangara
Five practices, fifteen minutes a day
Try these for two weeks before deciding whether they work. Not one day. Two weeks.
1. Name the feeling accurately
Most women arrive saying “I am stressed.” Stress is a container word; nothing can be done with it. Underneath it is usually something specific — lonely, unappreciated, bored, angry, frightened about money, grieving a version of your life that did not happen.
Once a day, finish this sentence honestly, on paper: Today I actually feel ________. Precision is the first relief. A named feeling can be worked with; a fog cannot.
2. Keep one thing that is only yours
Fifteen minutes a day that serve no one else and produce nothing useful. Reading, a walk, a language app, a plant, writing, sitting on the terrace doing nothing at all. The rule is that it must not be productive for the household. If it benefits the family, it does not count — you already have plenty of that.
This is the practice women resist hardest and thank me for most.
3. Ask for something specific, not for appreciation
“Nobody in this house values me” is a true feeling and a request nobody can act on. It invites defensiveness and ends in an argument you have had before.
Replace it with one small, concrete, doable ask. “On Saturday mornings I want two hours out of the house.” “I need you to handle dinner on Wednesdays.” Specific requests get met far more often than emotional appeals, and every request that gets met chips away at the invisibility.
4. Keep an evidence notebook
When you believe you are capable of nothing, your memory helpfully supplies only failures. So collect the other evidence deliberately. Each night write one line about something you handled that day — a difficult call, a child settled, a decision made, a problem solved before anyone noticed it existed.
After three weeks, read the whole thing at once. Most women are quietly shocked. That notebook is not motivation; it is data against a belief.
5. Use your own name again
Many women in our families go years being addressed only as somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter-in-law. It is affectionate, and it is also erasing.
Find one place where your own name is used. A class, a group, a friendship, a course, a piece of work. One room where you are the subject of the sentence rather than the relation.
A fair warning
When you begin taking up a little space, some people at home will be uncomfortable, and you will be tempted to read that discomfort as proof you were wrong. It is not. It is the normal friction of a system adjusting. Hold steady, stay warm, and do not withdraw the request.
And be patient with yourself. Fifteen minutes a day for two weeks is not going to transform your life. It is going to remind you that there is a person in there with preferences. That is the beginning of everything else.
If you would like to work on this with someone
This is the heart of what I do. My coaching runs as short, focused programmes — five or seven days, with a follow-up month afterwards so the changes actually hold. For women who want to go deeper, there is longer mentoring over two to three months.
If you recognised yourself anywhere in this, message or call me on WhatsApp at +91 88483 10988, or write to me here. You do not need to arrive with a plan. Being able to say “something is missing and I do not know what” is enough to begin.