You and I Are Too Old to Believe That MidLife Should Be Easy: We're Giving Birth to Ourselves
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Life, mid-life and the courage to carve our own path
We all live out, unconsciously, reflexes assembled from the past.
-James Hollis
At some point, I went through mid-life. I may well still be there for all I know, that no-man’s land of middle-being. I spent part of it with a man who had a terrible temper, combined with an alcohol problem.
Not good memories. I’m sure there were many; I have a journal but it’s boxed up. Whatever bright or low spots from those two decades exists but certainly not top of mind. Was I that boring? Likely.
In so very many ways I didn’t even begin to shed my shoulds, as
wrote about recently, in a way that allowed me to tentatively start defining who I was, could and would be. That was still some years away, while in the meantime my shawl of shoulds was far more important than any real dream I might have had for a different life.
The above is from a 2010 photo shoot for the most recent ex. I was just miserable, wracked with eating disorders, had lost all my teeth, was battling so many demons. I don’t even know this person.
It’s quite something how a photo can make us look like we have our shit together, when in fact even our shit doesn’t have its shit together.
If you come from a culture where not having your shit together or experiencing mental health issues can be perceived as shameful, that adds another layer of challenge.
First-generation Asian writers like
speak to what they have to move through not only as unique individuals but those who also have to navigate cultural norms and expectations which make truth telling even more tricky.Midlife is a gift that rarely feels like a gift. I sleepwalked through most of mine, bumping into various trees and road signs and not seeing a damned thing but all the stupid shoulds that I had to live up to in order to be minimally acceptable.
Until late midlife, I honestly believed that if I looked a certain way, then my life would instantly be transformed. That’s part of what so many women are taught- it’s about the body and the beauty, all else will follow. In my case, nothing of the sort followed until I stopped following what society dictated.
It wasn’t until I was sixty, threw myself into the wild and got my faced carved and wrinkled by the sun and the wind and the sand that I began to feel beautiful.
We wander into adulthood with a backpack loaded with trauma and assumptions and a load of crap. We often have no clue we’re carrying.
Right about the time we are birthed out of middle age into our late fifties to early sixties, we are suddenly dubbed elderly. Life is all over, right about the time we finally find ourselves. Or at least, start to find ourselves.
Put another way, our value to the world is from about 21 to about 48 or so, just enough past puberty and just shy of the Big Awful Fifty, still largely under the thrall of what we’d been taught, and just starting to shake it off for good.
You and I are WAY Too Old to resent the muddle of midlife: it’s the gift we’ve long been asking for to redefine ourselves on our terms.
I remember little of those years; nothing stands out other than taking on skydiving. In truth, in being lost, I was in the process of finding myself, as certain things began to die.
For so many in late midlife, the demands on us, such as elderly or challenged parents or kids can mean that working on ourselves keeps getting swept aside for the immediate needs of others.
does a superb job of not only handling those issues but continuing to explore the hard questions of who we are as we age, as we caretake, as we trade time for experiences.Substack is full of such luminous writers. I find similar threads in much of their writing, a recognition of loss tinged with great sadness, and a recognition of hope in every dawn tinged with joy.
I found some writings on The Marginalian which speak to the importance of midlife, which might invite us to consider the passage into our true selves as one of our most profound.
Maria Popova this week selected some passages which I found to be particularly meaningful:
Symptoms of midlife distress are in fact to be welcomed, for they represent not only an instinctually-grounded self underneath the acquired personality but a powerful imperative for renewal… In effect, the person one has been is to be replaced by the person to be. The first must die… Such death and rebirth is not an end in itself; it is a passage. It is necessary to go through the Middle Passage to more clearly achieve one’s potential and to earn the vitality and wisdom of mature aging. Thus, the Middle Passage represents a summons from within to move from the provisional life to true adulthood, from the false self to authenticity.- James Hollis (author bolded)
and
The loss of hope that the outer will save us occasions the possibility that we shall have to save ourselves… Life has a way of dissolving projections and one must, amid the disappointment and desolation, begin to take on the responsibility for one’s own life… Only when one has acknowledged the deflation of the hopes and expectations of childhood and accepted direct responsibility for finding meaning for oneself, can the second adulthood begin. -James Hollis (author bolded)
It wasn’t until I was in Thailand in 2011, just shy of 58, that I finally ended my eating disorders. With that came a flood of time, opportunity, and a chance to remake myself, which followed in swift order.
None of it was easy. Death and birth are full of pain. Those passages were costly. Some of them ripped me open emotionally, but that let a lot of light in.
I am still full of pain, but today’s pain is more to do with the constant rebirthing of a new self. It’s uncomfortable, but I no longer fear the process as I used to. With transformation come options and opportunity.
What happened after sixty is still happening: a regular reckoning, challenging old ideas and habits, questioning what I’m still grasping from my youth and finding new meaning in getting older.
Freer. Lighter. Better.
As whatever minimal beauty I might have once had fades, that frees time, effort, worry and emotion. I still wonder what a wrinkle free-face might be like. What a tiny waistline might do for my confidence.
Truth? Not a damned thing. I had those things before and they got me unwanted attention. Not much else.
As the compulsion to be uber-skinny fades, that frees me to focus on strength, health and functional fitness, which will support my aging process.
Freer. Stronger. Better.
That’s what Hollis addresses as our second adulthood. The one we get to define. Live in full.
Not everyone embraces this, for youth has a powerful pull in a world which denigrates aging. But aging gives us a chance to become ourselves, with each day, each moment to start anew. A rebirth.
Let’s play.
Heartfelt thanks for hanging with me today. If you got value out of this please consider
If you know someone who is in the middle of the midlife muddle and this might help, please also consider
Either way, kind thanks for your attention and time. I wish you a joyous journey.
That glam shot for which you paid way too high a price: I've been there, as I know many women have. And we are besieged by such images everywhere we look -- without the backstory of the pain that underlies them. I look at that photo and smile, thinking of the other photo you recently shared with your readers, the one of you happily lolling in a elephant mud wallow in Thailand.
Julia, this is a beautiful reflection on growing wiser, more open, more able to give ourselves grace. Thank you for the shout out. I still struggle with the "shawl of shoulds." That sucker is heavy! This line, will stay with me though: " in being lost, I was in the process of finding myself"