This Time, I Made It to Midlife
I was texting with my friend recently about something happening in her family when a thought came through me so clearly.
I believe in past lives. I’ve actually remembered some of mine. And I suddenly thought, no wonder I’ve accumulated so much karmic trash to clean up. For much of human history, life was shorter and harder. Maybe I kept getting just old enough to accumulate some wisdom, but didn’t live long enough to do anything with it.
Stay with me, because whether you believe in past lives or not isn’t really the point. The thought opened up something much bigger for me about midlife and why so many of us seem to arrive here with so much stuff asking to be looked at.
Because there’s something we have now that we simply didn’t have when we were younger: experience, wisdom, discernment and access.
Think about the world most of us midlifers grew up in. There was no internet. There were no podcasts or social media. There wasn’t a coaching industry, so I couldn’t have aspired to be the coach and guide I am now.
There weren’t thousands of books, programs, methodologies, communities, therapists, teachers and guides available from a little device we carry around in our hands.
We were adults when email became mainstream. We were adults when mobile phones became mainstream. Hell, we were adults when “the cloud” became a thing. Our worlds were smaller, and so were our resources.
If you were struggling with something, you might have had a religious leader, a business mentor, an older family member or maybe a really wise friend. And some of those people were wonderful guides. Some of them were carrying around just as much unhealed shit as we were.
Younger generations have access to language, tools and support for understanding themselves that we couldn’t have imagined at their age. And I’m incredibly grateful that they do.
I watch younger people recognize family patterns, talk about nervous system regulation, question expectations, establish boundaries, go to therapy, explore who they are and reconsider what they’ve been taught at ages when many of us were still doing exactly what we thought we were supposed to do. We worked hard. Got married. Raised the kids. Built the career. Took care of everyone. Tried to be responsible, successful and good.
We were living inside expectations we hadn’t necessarily learned to question yet.
That doesn’t mean we weren’t growing. We were living the experiences that would eventually give us the wisdom to see things differently.
I think somewhere in our thirties, many of us start getting glimpses of it. Something doesn’t quite fit. Something we’ve always believed gets challenged. We recognize a pattern. We begin separating what we’ve been taught from what we’ve actually learned through living. Discernment starts getting stronger.
But we’re also often still right in the thick of it. Careers, children, relationships, mortgages, aging parents, responsibilities and expectations. We’re learning the lessons while simultaneously trying to keep the damn train on the tracks.
And this is where that original thought about past lives came back around for me. In those shorter lives, the opportunity to turn all of that experience into wisdom, healing and change was cut short.
But this time I made it to midlife.
I’ve lived enough life to have evidence. I’ve watched relationships work and not work. I’ve succeeded at things we thought would make me happy and discovered that sometimes they didn’t. I’ve disappointed people and survived it. I’ve been disappointed by people I trusted. I’ve made mistakes and recovered. I’ve lost things and rebuilt.
I’ve seen patterns repeat enough times that I can’t pretend I don’t see them anymore.
And now we have something the younger versions of ourselves didn’t: decades of lived experience combined with access to resources that simply weren’t available to most of us when we were becoming adults.
Maybe that’s part of what this stage of life is for. Not because we’re damaged and need to fix ourselves, but because we finally have enough lived experience to understand what we’re looking at. Enough wisdom to question what we’ve inherited. Enough discernment to decide what still belongs to us. Enough resources to help us work through what doesn’t. And enough time to do something with all of it.
Which brings us to one of my favorite stages of female development: the I Don’t Give a Flying Fuck What You Think of Me Era.
Watch out. 😂
Because there is something powerful about a woman who has lived long enough to know herself. Not the version of herself she constructed to be acceptable, or the roles she learned to perform, or the woman everyone else needed her to be. Herself.
And yes, I think age matters. There are things we can learn from a book or a teacher, and there are things we can only learn by living long enough to experience them for ourselves. And apparently hormones deciding they’ve had enough of everybody’s bullshit matter too.
Maybe younger generations will reach some of these realizations earlier because they have language and resources we didn’t have. I hope they do. I’m grateful they do. Because perhaps each generation doesn’t have to carry everything as long as the generation before it did.
And for those of us arriving at these realizations now, we’re right on time for us. We got here carrying the experiences that made this level of understanding possible.
Midlife isn’t simply the point when we look backward at everything we’ve accumulated. It may be the first time we can look at all of it and consciously decide what we’re taking with us into the next chapter, what we’re finally ready to leave behind, and what we want to do with the time we have ahead of us.
0
0 comments
This Time, I Made It to Midlife
powered by
skool.com/saj-shiftas-5297
For midlife women who’ve outgrown the life they built and are creating a life that feels like home.
Suggested communities
Powered by