Becoming an Empty Nester: Identity, Loss, and Labels

In less than a year, my son is going to turn 18, graduate from high school, and either go off to university or take a gap year to travel.

In less than a year, I’m going to become an empty nester and the responsibilities I’ve had to raise my boy, to care for him, guide him, and financially support him will be officially over. But, of course, my house, my checkbook, and my ability to cook and do laundry will always be open and available to him whenever he needs it.

Unless he’s 30, unemployed, and still living at home. Then we’ll have to have a chat, LOL.

Becoming an empty nester is not arriving suddenly. It’s unfolding slowly, quietly, in moments I didn’t expect—packing lunches for the last time, noticing the silence after a door closes, realizing how much of my identity has been shaped around motherhood.

This season carries both anticipation and grief, and I find myself standing in the in-between, learning how to hold joy and loss at the same time as life after kids begins to take shape.

As I watch the roll out this empty nest transition in slow motion, I notice how quickly we reach for labels to explain who we are.

Mother. Caregiver. The one who shows up.

When children leave home, those labels loosen, and the quiet that follows can feel unsettling.

Life after kids leave home asks new questions—ones I’m still learning to answer. Who am I when the roles that once defined me begin to soften? And what might emerge if I allow myself the space to listen?

So, whether he leaves for the dorms or the open road, I’m facing a reshuffling of what it means to be me. I’m not losing the “mom” label, of course, but I’m adding “empty nester” and “all alone” to the list of titles that define me.

That got me thinking more deeply about labels and all I’ve learned about them since my Dark Night six years ago.

Why Labels Shape Our Identity

How many labels do I use to define myself? Mother (of course), daughter, friend, woman, Canadian, American, employee, co-worker, scientist, blogger, middle-ager, homeowner, etc., etc. Most of these are pretty abstract and not a single one fully captures the complexities of who I truly am.

But we use labels frequently and unconsciously, patching them together like we need a container to hold who we are and define our purpose in life. It’s like we don’t exist in any measurable way unless we have them.

Loss of a Label Can Lead to a Painful Identity Crisis

And when one of our labels gets torn away, it can leave a gaping hole in our “container” that we gush through as though losing ourselves and all sense of our perceived place in the world. One of the first times I really experienced this was in 2006, when my father passed away.

As I grappled with my grief, I felt like a huge chunk of myself was missing. I felt like I was free falling and couldn’t understand why I felt so personally lost.

As I explored that feeling in the months that followed his passing, I started to realize that I didn’t know who I was without his presence in my life. Who was I if I wasn’t my dad’s daughter? And since he epitomized for me my roots in the deep woods of Northern Ontario, I felt my connection to the place of my birth missing, too.

Separate from the grief, the pain of my identity crisis took a year to soften and fade as I filled in the gaps in my labels with others, but it was a tough experience. To gain that first understanding of how closely entwined my self-identity is with the things and people in my life was very eye-opening, to say the least.

The Very Nature of Life is One of Impermanence.

Since then, I’ve come to believe that this is a big part of why we suffer so much.

A divorce tears away the label “wife”.
A lost job tears away the labels “employee”, “entrepreneur”, etc.
The loss of a loved one tears away “mother”, “daughter”, “niece”, “granddaughter”, and more.

Since the very nature of life is one of impermanence, are we at the mercy of this pain as our labels and definitions get constantly lost and gained through life’s ebbs and flows?

A year or so after my Dark Night, as I was actively working to rebuild my life and myself following a period of great loss (marriage, jobs, relationships), I stumbled upon one of my greatest spiritual teachers, Jeffrey Allen. He hosts a couple of masterclasses on MindValley, an online platform for programs and community dedicated to self-improvement, spiritual evolution, and wellness.

In his masterclass called Duality, Jeffrey talks about labels and with his teachings, I began to fully understand the impact they have on my life.

As an analogy, he said labels and core beliefs are like sticky notes that we stick on the outside of our energetic bodies or auras, which extend outside the boundaries of our physical ones. The labels and core beliefs act as filters as much as they act as containers for our perceived purposes and places in life.

When we identify too closely with them, we can become rigid and set in our ways, so much so that they start to act like fences, barriers, and chains.

In other words, they can become unwitting prisons. For example, maybe we become afraid to express ourselves or try new things because we (or others) think a “mother” or “wife” would never act that way or try those things.

So, there’s inherent danger in the labels, and our interpretations of them, that we choose to decorate ourselves with.

And let’s not ignore the fact that many of the labels we carry are placed on us by others and by a society that loves to sort people according to one characteristic or another. These can be the most damaging because they can be words that really limit us, like “shy”, “overweight”, “ugly”, “old”, etc.

If we identify with these words placed on us, we can unconsciously start to shape our actions and our lives around them, thereby giving them truth. If someone is called shy, might they believe it enough to be too timid to take chances or speak out for themselves?

More prisons.

We Reject Anything That Doesn’t Jive With Our Labels

And all external information has to filter through our labels and core beliefs to get to us. These filters can sometimes twist and shape truth and reality into bastardized versions by the time we receive them. This is how we can all experience the same event but have wildly different interpretations of it.

Just look at how people from different political affiliations interpret the same facts. It’s a quirk of the human condition that we reject and reshape everything that doesn’t jive with our labels and core beliefs so that we can feel right and justified in them.

That’s why it can be so devastating when one of them is torn away. We have to somehow make sense of a reality that seems new and we’re forced to then question the validity of our other labels and core beliefs, which shakes our very foundations.

While working through the Duality masterclass, I did an exercise to shine a spotlight on these labels I have for myself.

I took a piece of paper and wrote down every single label that I could think of to call myself. I even included all the labels that I thought others might call me. As I looked at the supposed sum total of me, I realized how still so much of me remained undefined.

Then I started to ask myself, who am I without these? How would I survive if some of the bigger ones were torn away? Would I suffer a complete loss of self-identity?

I mulled the answers over and then I asked myself, what kind of person do I really want to become? Which labels had to go in support of that and which new ones did I want to add?

These were transformative questions.

Since I was dedicated to dropping all labels and core beliefs that no longer served me, I diligently followed Jeffrey Allen’s suggestions for giving each one a critical eye and then for dealing with the emotional and mental fall-out when I decided one had to go.

Turns out, it’s hard on the system to pull out a brick from your very foundation!

Redefining What It Means To Be Me

After taking Jeffrey’s masterclasses and working daily with the material, I picked up a book called A Course in Mastering Alchemy: Tools to Shift, Transform, and Ascend by Jim Self (a teacher of Jeffrey Allen’s) and Roxane Burnett. In that book, I learned about The Seven Living Words.

If you could wear seven labels knowingly and with intention, what would they be? If you had a vision of the person you wanted to be, what seven words would encapsulate that vision?

Words, according to Self and Burnett, carry power and vibration. And since like attracts like, these seven words should pack a punch, so as to bring to us more things and experiences that resonate with those words.

So, I sat down and crafted my seven living words. They’ve morphed over time but currently, they are “grounded”, “present”, “protected”, “peaceful”, “open-hearted”, “wise”, and “enlightened”.

Now during my daily meditation practice, I pay homage to my seven living words after I run through the energy tools I learned from Jeffrey and before I settle into the body of the meditation. They help lay a foundation for the space I want to hold in my practice and shape me into the person I want to be.

What I’ve learned through all of this is that it’s not entirely possible to do away with labels.

However, it’s important to make sure we know which ones we carry and how each one frees and limits us.

We should be conscious about the ones we choose to keep and remain active in dropping ones that stop holding relevance. The more practice we get with dropping old labels and core beliefs, the easier each transformation becomes and the more open we are to seeing facts and information as they truly are.

Labels Can Be Dangerous and Dehumanizing

I’d be remiss in this post if I didn’t take a minute to draw attention to the way we use labels to pigeonhole and define others. We do this, I think, so that we can make sense of them without fully knowing who they are. These kinds of labels can be dangerous and dehumanizing, allowing us to ignore that a real person is under the labels we slap on them.

What do you think of when you hear the words “gay”, “trans”, “homeless”, “foreigner”, or “immigrant”? To minimize the entirety of a person to one small word means that we can make snap judgements and decisions about them without digging deeper to the people they are beneath.

And since your judgements are shaped by your “filters”, was your knee-jerk response to these words kind or…not so kind?

If they were not so kind, might you (and the world) benefit from dropping some of the labels and core beliefs that sourced your feelings? Loving kindness is always the answer and it’s so much more pleasant to feel than hatred and prejudice.

Reframing Loss as Transformation

So, the key take away of the post today is that labels can be extremely powerful and should be handled with intention and care. As I grapple with my shifting self-identity and personal cross-roads, I think I want to consciously choose how I enter this next phase of my life.

Becoming an empty nester isn’t about loss alone — it’s about redefining who I am and choosing how I step into this next chapter with intention.

Becoming an empty nester is not something to rush through or fix. It is a tender unfolding, one that asks for patience, honesty, and a great deal of self-compassion. If you find yourself grieving what was while standing uncertainly at the edge of what comes next, know that you are not doing it wrong.

This season holds room for both sorrow and possibility, for remembering who you have been and slowly discovering who you are becoming. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You only have to stay present, and trust that even in the quiet, something meaningful is still taking shape.

Now, if you’ve read my earlier posts, you might see that I’m a person who marks milestones with bold plans and grand ceremonies. To kick off this new phase of my life, I’ve decided to take myself off to France for 6 weeks starting in September of 2026 to trace the paths of my ancestors, a life-long dream.

Instead of sitting at home grieving for the loss of my current place in my son’s life, I’m going to embrace my new freedom, my new life, and my new self!

And while I’m at it, I’m going to add jetsetter, adventurer, wild woman, and freedom-seeker to my long list of labels, LOL.

Let the adventures begin!