The Netflix show Queen Charlotte is a one-season spin-off of the popular Bridgerton series that tells the backstory of the young Queen Charlotte and how she came to be the force that she is in the Bridgerton story.
It also tells the backstory of Lady Danbury, who is the Queen’s close confidant. Lady Danbury is a “dowager,” a widow, and the Queen Charlotte series shows us how she came to be such at a young age.
We see the young Lady Danbury suffering in her marriage to a much older man. When he eventually dies, she immediately feels a sense of freedom. That freedom soon changes to a sense of despair.
In a poignant scene after the funeral for her late husband, her maid finds her drinking port wine at 4 in the morning — fully dressed in her petticoats and formal dress.
Lady Danbury confides to her maid that she doesn’t even like the port wine, but it was a favorite of her husband. She goes on to explain how she was promised to this man when she was only 3 years old, and everything she learned was to prepare her for her marriage to him. She learned to love his favorite colors and his favorite foods. She learned to play his favorite songs on the piano.
Her entire life was centered around his needs, to the point that she “doesn’t know how to breathe air that he has not exhaled.”
She lived her whole life for him, suffered in misery through her marriage waiting for him to die so she could have freedom, and once she obtained it, she had no idea who she was.
The feeling is one that is common to anyone who has ever lived most of their life for a singular purpose.
Professional athletes often go through this existential crisis after they retire from competition: they spent their lives training for a specific sport to compete at the highest level, and when they’re finished, they have to discover who they are without the thing that defined them.
People who spend their entire careers in one role have a similar crisis when they retire.
Women who’ve spent years raising their kids often have this crisis when their youngest kids leave home.
Even if you’ve had multiple jobs and careers, stepping away from a certain way of life to shift gears can invite a similar existential crisis.
We are not meant to be the same person for all seasons of our lives. Reinvention is a part of life — a necessary tool for growth and evolution.
But that doesn’t mean it always comes easily.
The grief at what you leave behind is real — even if you didn’t like all of it.
To truly reinvent yourself, the grief must be acknowledged and honored.
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