Feeling adrift, discombobulated and discontent with midlife so far? This could be why…
Woman standing staring out across a body of water, looking longingly and lost.
Maybe you’ve lost touch with your ‘self’ ?
Maybe you’re struggling to find an identity for this time we call ‘midlife’ that feels aligned, authentic, desirable and fun?
Maybe you’re feeling stuck yearning to feel like you used to feel and longing for something ‘more’?
Lately I’ve been having some new reflections about this ‘stage’ of life.
And it has nothing to do with hormones (I don’t think).
It’s about how narrow our conversation is about the ‘middle years’ of adulthood, especially for women.
I’ve notice how horrified younger women seem to feel at even speaking the words ‘midlife’, and as a society we seem to be in a perpetual state of trying to resist, hold back the years, keep looking ‘young’.
What we tend to see and hear is all the hard stuff about getting older. Being the filling in a parenting our children/caring for our parents sandwich, with no ‘time’ for ourselves. Wrinkles, grey hair, and Menopause.
And this is of course all true - but this isn’t the whole picture.
It’s not ALL about the Menopause
Menopause is (rightly) being given prominence – it’s about time.
And don’t get me wrong, I am not about to say it doesn’t matter and that we should just put up and shut up (I’ve had the hot flushes, the moodiness, the feeling out of control of my emotions, the sleeplessness – the brain fog – all things that turned me into a moody B***H for a while).
BUT mid-life, whilst absolutely full of hormonal upheaval and change (menopause is after all essentially puberty in reverse), is a time when a TONNE of other things, some of them BIG, but not all bad & ugly, are ALSO happening.
And they throw up a lot of thoughts and feelings about what life is all about, who we are, what we REALLY want.
And this can feel unsettling.
Which brings me to an aspect of this whole journey into mid-life which is being much less talked about and that’s the necessary shift in our identify and our sense of ‘self’ in response to the myriad of Change and Transitions we have encountered.
Mid-life Change, Transitions & Loss of ‘Self’
Before we get into the nitty gritty, it’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge a key difference between ‘change’ and ‘transitions’, because it’s important to understanding why we find ourselves where we do.
And I like the way that William Bridges distinguishes between the two.
He describes change as something that happens to you. It’s an external event, and something that you may, or may not, agree with or desire.
Transition, on the other hand, is the internal process people go through to work through, come to terms with and accept the change psychologically and emotionally.
Change can happen very quickly.
Transitions can take a lot longer.
And this is important to understand because by the time we hit mid-life, we’ve encountered , and dealt with (on a practical level - often with extreme juggling and fire-fighting) a LOT of change.
We become parents, our children grow up and leave home with all the changes that involves, we move house, we get divorced, we deal with bereavement, relationships break, divorce, we deal with redundancy, changing jobs and careers, illness, shifting finances. And deal with them we do. These things happen, we make adjustments to the changes and we keep on living our lives day to day.
But just because we’ve dealt with the ‘change’ doesn’t mean that we’ve effectively made the transition.
Making the inner adjustment to a change emotionally and psychologically can be MUCH more difficult.
Transitions can often be incomplete even years later.
We often think that we’ve ‘moved on’ and accepted a change because they’ve happened, they’re in the past, and we’ve carried on, and adjusted. But if we haven’t gifted ourselves the time to reflect, to really connect with how those changes have affected us personally, inside, and to work through and process the meaning of these changes for us psychologically and emotionally.
And this leaves unfinished business which can come back to bite us when we’re not expecting it: the broken relationship that we though we’d moved on from, which happened YEARS ago, but which is somehow still causing us upset and irritation, or the lost confidence from the years we’ve devoted to work, and neglected our personal life, and now we want to put that right.
Feelings can keep popping up that get in the way of us truly moving forwards.
And it’s this, in my own personal experience and from the women I work with, that can leave us feeling stuck and adrift from where we think we ‘should’ be and where we truly want to be.
Mid-life is often that very time when we get reminded about this unfinished business. It’s a time when we are being nudged by more change, when we perhaps have more time and space to attend to the transitions that go with it, which may bring up unresolved things.
It’s also a time when our priorities are often changing and alongside it we’re naturally beginning to recognise that life is short. We’re seeing other people around us moving on, growing up, stepping into pastures new. We have experienced first hand the fragility and unpredictability of life, so we know that what we’re putting off until later, or tomorrow, we may not be lucky enough to get to - so we start to get dissatisfied that we’re not doing it NOW.
Which prompts us to reflect on who we are, and what we really want from life. Really, truly. For US.
And then in sneak those pesky unfinished transitions.
My Transitions
My first transition was from ‘all-in’ career person, trying to work out how I wanted to contribute to society and earn my way in a way that felt good and made a difference, to half-in/half-out. Half-work, half mum. Which left me feeling that I wasn’t doing anything particularly well.
Now I chose to be the primary carer in our family. And I wouldn’t change that for the world.
But does that mean I enjoyed every minute? NO!
Does that mean I don’t sometimes feel sad about the compromises I had to make for me personally, in terms of my ‘self’? No!
Did I have any time or energy to think and reflect about this transition? No way!! Would I have done things differently if I had? Maybe…
But like so many of us, I had an idea of what these years would entail, my plan.
But a load of other stuff jumped in…
I’ve coped with my mums terminal illness, with one of our best friends dying, becoming my version of a mother (one of the hardest and most undervalued jobs in our society), changing jobs, setting up a business, peri-menopause & menopause hitting before I was expecting it, my son changing schools from the one opposite our house to one in another nearby village because he was unhappy.
Transitions within transitions, transitions layered on transitions - (and some of them F-ing crappy imho!!!!).
And even though I am someone who spends time self-reflecting, tuning into my inner-self, in these years I mostly I just got on with it – responding to the things that needed to be done, and trying to be the person I needed to be for my child, my husband, my employer, my clients, my family, my friends.
In a nutshell - this tangle of life processes and demands take up most of our energy, headspace and time, it’s hard to find the space for that connection with our sense of self. We’re in reactive, fire-fighting mode – surging through life at a pretty pace – totally enjoying some of it, not so much some of the other bits, and on autopilot for the rest.
Everything has changed, but we haven’t kept up.
So, it’s no wonder that we can wake up one day feeling adrift and wondering “who the hell am I?”
The Missing Identity
Another difficulty I believe is that beyond menopause and ‘going wrinkly, grey & invisible’ we have no clear conceptualization of what it means to be in ‘middle adulthood’ in our society. Especially for women.
Men tend to have a more stable experience – they go through puberty, they start on the career ladder, and then they mostly just keep going – maybe becoming a family man along the way – but rarely does a man’s career path stop in the way a woman’s does. And he certainly doesn’t have to contend with the physiological changes of pregnancy and childbirth, nor is he as likely to bear the emotional, time and psychological burden of being the ‘primary’ carer.
As women, we move from child to young woman to mother and/or high flying career woman and then...
The next stop seems to be ‘menopause’ and then fast track to ‘old’.
(And, btw – this whole menopause thing – where we are generally having children a little later in life, often co-incides with our children going through puberty– a match made in some kind of sadistic heaven! – although it does encourage a bit more empathy perhaps!)
We have no strong, desirable role models for what an authentic woman looks like at this time of life. All the messaging we see is about ‘holding back’ or ‘reversing’ the signs of ageing – whether it’s filler to plump up our skin and hide the wrinkles or dye to cover the ever increasing expanse of grey on our heads – it’s all about staying ‘looking young’ for as loooong as possible.
In this no-womans’-land we might feel that we’ve become unfamiliar to ourselves, and a bit invisible to society because there are few strong, desirable and accessible role models for women in middle adulthood.
We know we’re not ‘young’ but we also know we’re not old. We’re ‘inbetween’.
And thus we enter a strange twighlight zone of lost-self and identify crisis – where we know deep down we’re not the person we used to be but we’re not quite ready to embrace the next stage (because its not actually clear what that IS, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be something we should want!).
So we joke about menopause and being ‘middle aged’ whilst also slapping on the hair dye and desperately trying to find a way ‘back’ to that younger version of our self, because we felt better then, and we can recognise her.
But in so doing we becoming increasingly lost and adrift from our sense of who we really are, NOW.
(often reflected in a corresponding wardrobe crisis in my own personal experience!).
BUT all is NOT lost!
I’m now at the other often talked about point of Middle Adulthood – facing the ‘Empty Nest’ transition.
Another double-edged sword of parenting, that can be quite problematic for some.
Personally, I’m ready, and not ready. I’m excited, and anxious – for him, and for me, and ‘us’. I’m feeling that my job is done, and that it’ll never be done. Grateful to have made it this far and successfully raised a kind and gorgeous human to adulthood, and sad that our ‘little man’ has grown, and we must ‘let go’ to let him fly. My role in life must change.
And that creates enormous opportunity.
I believe that midlife ends up being the time when it all comes to a head.
We reach a point where we suddenly gasp for air, and in that breath, sense the urge to finally finish off all those transitions that were started, and not quite finished.
To tie off the loose ends.
To properly complete the psychological and emotional processes underpinning the changes we’ve had to deal with, so they are processed, internalized and accepted.
And we see the opportunity to let go, move on, and begin our next phase, with intention, fully connected to an upgraded, authentic, mid-life version of our ‘self’.
The opportunity of mid-life
As the wise one, Winnie the Pooh, said “Life is a journey to be experienced, not a problem to be solved.”
Middle aged woman jumping with joy and zest on a path covered in dappled light from the sun shining through the trees running alongside each side of the path.
Let’s not stay stuck at a particular destination on that journey (i.e. the old version of you).
Let’s not try and make the Autumn the same as the Spring and Summer.
Instead, let’s get intentional about getting to know ourselves again, and start moving forward on our journey of life with a little skip in our step.
Let’s become the blazing, feisty femme of a certain age paving the way for all the younger women behind us who are looking for someone to show them an authentic way through the middle years that feels fun & exciting, audacious and colourful.
(And that’s got to be waaaay more fun than a face-lift?!!)
Are you with me?
You can start by asking yourself these questions:
What haven’t I let go of, that is niggling away in the background?
What are the feelings that I am struggling to let go of?
How could I see things differently?
And then give yourself some time to connect with, and work through those feelings from a place of curiosity. Perhaps journal your answers. The answers may not come quickly, that’s OK - just give yourself permission to take the time and to prioritise the space in your days and weeks to reflect, to contemplate and ponder, tuning out your mind, and listening to what your gut and heart are trying to tell you - (I find a quiet spot in a cosy corner, or a peaceful spot outside in nature helps the deep connection flow).
Until next time…
P.S …If you would like more nudges, tips, prompts and inspiration for navigating the middle years from the world of psychology and coaching with inspiration from mother nature (as well as a heads up when new blogs like this land, and other news) - you might like to get yourself on my e-mail list to receive my monthly gathering of Weekend Wisdom & midlife musings, with mini-musings in-between.