From Caregiver to Creator: Debbie Weiss on Finding Yourself After 50
What happens when you spend 40 years putting everyone else first, and then wake up one day and realise you have no idea who you are anymore?
That's the question at the heart of Episode 60 of On the Spectrum with Sonia, where host Sonia Krishna Chand sits down with author, speaker, and podcast host Debbie Weiss.
It's a conversation about caregiving, grief, identity, and — ultimately — reinvention. And if you've ever felt like your life has been shaped more by circumstances than by choice, Debbie's story might be exactly what you need to hear.
Table of Contents
A Life Defined by Caregiving
The Anger Nobody Talked About
The Wake-Up Call at 50
Small Steps, Big Shifts
What Self-Care Actually Means
Writing Through Grief
The Sprinkle Effect
The Creativity That Was Always There
What You Can Take Away
A Life Defined by Caregiving
Debbie Weiss's caregiving journey began at 17 years old, when her father suffered a stroke and was left permanently disabled. He survived, but for the next 30 years, Debbie was his primary caregiver. While her peers were living carefree lives in their twenties, she was learning what Medicaid was, navigating disability systems, and shouldering a level of responsibility most people don't encounter until midlife.
Then came her oldest son, diagnosed on the autism spectrum at age two. As Sonia — herself an autistic adult and neurodivergent mental health expert — understands deeply, caregiving for a neurologically different child is its own particular kind of advocacy. It demands not just love, but constant vigilance, research, and fighting for your child in systems that were never designed with them in mind.
Then came her husband: depression, anxiety, physical illness, and eventually a terminal blood disease that took his life just six months after diagnosis.
Layer upon layer, for more than four decades, Debbie's life was structured around the needs of others.
The Anger Nobody Talked About
Here's the part caregivers rarely say out loud: it can make you angry. Not at the people you love — Debbie was clear that she never blamed her father, her son, or her husband. But at the situation. At the unfairness of it. At the life you watch others living while you are perpetually in crisis mode.
"I kept looking at other people, comparing myself," Debbie shares in the episode, "and thinking, why me? It just seemed like I kept facing one big challenge after another that other people around me were not facing."
Year after year, that resentment built. She was exhausted and overwhelmed, waking up every morning and running through a list of who needed what before she'd even had a cup of coffee. She worked. She parented. She caregiving. She had no list for herself, because she was not on the list at all.
This is the part where many people reading this will recognise themselves. And this is exactly why this conversation is so worth listening to.
If you are a caregiver, or have ever been one, Episode 60 of On the Spectrum with Sonia is essential listening.
The Wake-Up Call at 50
The turning point came on a birthday weekend trip Debbie's friends insisted she take. At dinner one evening, someone asked a simple question around the table: "What are your hopes and dreams for the future?"
Debbie was stumped. She had hopes and dreams for her children. But for herself? At 50? She genuinely could not answer. She felt, as she puts it, that her story was already written.
"They all kind of looked at me," she recalls, "because the other three all had hopes and dreams. And that was the moment — the catalyst — that something's gotta give."
When she got home, she started paying attention. She began to recognise something she had never had a name for before: a victim mindset. Not a dramatic, visible victimhood, but the quiet everyday kind — the deep-seated belief that her life had been led by circumstances, not by her. That she had no real choices. That the hand she'd been dealt had written her story for her.
"When you blame circumstances or people for the outcome of your life, you are giving them your power," she says. "I didn't understand that — but that's what I was doing."
This realisation, she is careful to say, was not about self-blame. It was about reclaiming agency. There is a significant difference between the two.
Small Steps, Big Shifts
One of the most practically useful parts of this episode is how Debbie describes actually changing. Not through one dramatic moment of resolve, but through something much more accessible: embarrassingly small goals.
She wanted to lose weight — 100 pounds overweight at 50, having yo-yo dieted her entire life. This time, she gave herself one goal only: show up to the Weight Watchers meeting once a week. Not lose a certain amount. Not exercise a certain number of days. Just show up.
"I didn't lose weight at first," she says. "But it didn't matter, because in my mind I was achieving my goal."
Over three and a half years, she lost 90 pounds. Not through a stricter plan or a harder target, but through the complete opposite — a gentler one. And when she saw what had shifted, she asked herself a question that changed everything: if my mindset could change what has been the biggest struggle of my life, what else could it change?
The answer, as she eventually discovered, was everything.
Listen to the full conversation with Debbie Weiss - On the Spectrum with Sonia
What Self-Care Actually Means
There is a section of this episode that deserves its own essay, and it's the conversation about self-care. Not the wellness-industry version — the massages, the bubble baths — but the real version, which is often far more ordinary and far more radical.
For Debbie, the most meaningful form of self-care was learning to say no. She was, at her busiest, the treasurer of three different organisations simultaneously. She couldn't refuse because someone needed her, because it wouldn't take that long, because what kind of person says no?
The kind of person who survives, it turns out.
She started protecting three mornings a week for exercise. Her family pushed back. She held the line. "In the beginning there were growing pains," she says. "They got used to it. Everybody got used to it."
Self-care, as both Debbie and Sonia explore in this conversation, looks different for everyone. It might be journaling, meditating, praying, reading, or knitting. The specifics are less important than the underlying principle: that your needs are legitimate, that they belong on the list, and that meeting them makes you more present for everyone else — not less.
"When I did care for myself," Debbie reflects, "I showed up as such a better person for all of my loved ones."
This is the conversation Sonia has with clients in her emotion coaching work too — helping neurodivergent adults understand their emotional needs, recognise what depletes and restores them, and build a life that is sustainable rather than simply survivable.
If that work resonates with you, you can explore emotion coaching with Sonia here
Writing Through Grief
Debbie never intended to be a writer. She was a CPA. Then an insurance agent. She was, by her own cheerful admission, the student who checked the course syllabus specifically to make sure there were no papers before enrolling.
But people kept telling her: you need to get your story out. And somewhere in her fifties, she found a program for first-time authors — and enrolled, improbably, at the exact same moment her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Her therapist, when Debbie expressed doubt about whether she could manage it, offered advice that sounds deceptively simple: "Who cares if you miss a week? Who cares if you don't do the homework?"
It was permission for imperfection. It was also permission to begin.
Debbie wrote in hospital waiting rooms. She woke at five in the morning to write before her husband stirred. She wrote through one of the hardest seasons of her life — and that, her therapist had been right, was the point. The writing gave her something to look forward to. Something that was only hers.
"It saved me," she says.
She finished her memoir, On Second Thought, Maybe I Can, in the months after her husband died. It is a book about all of it — the childhood in which she developed her earliest limiting beliefs, the decades of caregiving and loss, and the painstaking, nonlinear process of becoming someone new.
You can get On Second Thought, Maybe I Can on Amazon or at debbierweiss.com
The Sprinkle Effect
After the memoir came out, readers loved it but kept asking the same question: "Okay, but what exactly did you do?" That question became her second book, The Sprinkle Effect.
The idea is exactly what it sounds like. Small, consistent sprinkles of intentional practice — perspective-taking, mindset shifts, curiosity, resilience, joy — worked into daily life over time. Not an overhaul. Not a complete reinvention from Monday. Sprinkles.
Each chapter tells a personal story, explores one of these practices, and ends with exercises and a journal prompt — because Debbie knows, from personal experience, that reading something and actually doing something with it are very different things. "You can read a million books," she says, "but unless you take the time to really apply it to your own life, it's going to sit on a shelf."
The formula she found most transformative comes from Jack Canfield's The Success Principles: E + R = O. Event plus Response equals Outcome. For most of her life, Debbie had been living as though E = O — as though the event alone determined everything, with no room for her own response to matter. Understanding that she had a role to play in the outcome was the equation that shifted her life.
The Sprinkle Effect is available on Amazon or at debbierweiss.com
The Creativity That Was Always There
One of the most joyful exchanges in this episode comes near the end, when Debbie talks about who she has become. A card deck. A gratitude journal. A free-form writing journal. A children's book series in development. All from a woman who, not long ago, insisted with total conviction that she did not have a creative bone in her body.
"And then all of a sudden," she says, laughing, "my brain just exploded. And all these ideas just keep coming."
Sonia names it precisely: "I think creativity is in us. But too often we think in order to be creative, you had to be really good at something — art, singing, the triple threat. But there's so much more to creativity than what people realise."
Debbie's story is proof of that. Creativity isn't a talent you either have or you don't. It's something that emerges when you finally give yourself the conditions to discover it — often later than expected, and usually when you least feel ready.
What You Can Take Away
Debbie Weiss is 62 years old. She has buried a father and a husband. She has raised children, one of whom navigates the world very differently from most. She has spent most of her adult life in service to other people. And she has also, somehow, written two books, launched a podcast, built a product line, and found — late, unexpectedly, completely — a part of herself she never knew existed.
If her story teaches anything, it's this: you are not too old, too overwhelmed, or too far behind. The second half of your life can look radically different from the first. But only if you decide it can.
"I'm 62 now," she says simply. "And it's a journey I'll continue on until I take my last breath."
Listen to the full conversation with Debbie Weiss on Episode 60 of On the Spectrum with Sonia
To find Debbie's books, podcast, and resources, visit debbierwiss.com and make sure to include the R, otherwise you'll end up on a realtor's website in California.
On the Spectrum with Sonia is a podcast hosted by Sonia Krishna Chand, adult autism and neurodivergent mental health expert.