You and I Are Too Old to Give Up: Thoughts on How to Midwife Your Midlife
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
That’s one hell of a promise, but I’m going to try here.
First, I am not going to offer advice to brilliant, funny, competent, capable men and women who are at critical junctures in their lives. I might pontificate a bit before I bitch-slap myself back into reality. Here goes.
A short while ago brand-new subscriber
of Creative Eldering wrote me this:I feel that our generation is reimagining and redefining aging. We dare to ask the questions: how does soul want to express in the world? How do we best create purpose and meaning? What do we love that wants our attention? I wish that there was another word that captured this phase in our life.
That one line…holy shit. Midlife is such a BORING term for years of massive upheaval, life rewiring and rewriting, and utter renewal while we are being remade.
It’s life’s sausage factory, that’s for damned sure.
What do we love that wants our attention?
WTF? What a great gauntlet.
This article shares some excellent pieces which caused me to think hard. It’s deeply personal to me: I AM these women. They are me.
While I’ve got some twenty years on all of them, thereabouts, their journeys mirror my own, and reading their words is deeply moving.
At any given point, we are at different stages on our arcs; some of us see things sooner, others take longer, some never reach “there” at all, wherever the hell that is, and it’s all good.
These essays allow us to validate our own questions, experiences and progress, or lack thereof, with a kinder hand.
Being kinder to ourselves is an essential part of that arc. As we begin to leave behind the self-recriminations of shame (Should Have Already Mastered Everything) and the trap of monumentally unfair expectations, life gets to be a hell of a lot more fun.
And isn’t that the whole point? Life doesn’t get easier. Never does. We get better at navigating it.
These are among the many people whose writing sears my soul in ways that drag me back into long-abandoned mental boondocks. I’ve been where they are now, and I feel with every inch of my being the pain and the sadness and sense of loss they feel.
Whether or not I have anything of wisdom (coughs) to offer is questionable; if anything, I just want to polish a few jewels for your appreciation.
We all walk the human path, and the implicit and explicit questions being asked here are universal, most particularly as we are shoved through the birth canal of our middle years.
I got this from
. Being a peripatetic mess myself, this was a gut punch:
This paragraph was a major slap:
More than anything however I am longing for belonging. I used to find that in expat communities. Just like an alcoholic can show up in any city and find belonging in a 12 Step meeting, I was part of a special modern tribe of nomads. In every city I could find my people.
I adored the adventure and the specialness of feeling more at home everywhere than anywhere. I belonged because I didn’t belong.
I belonged because I didn’t belong.
Maureen’s itchy feet are different from mine, but the underlying message here resonates deeply. I lived in Colorado for fifty years. During that time I was always traveling, always somewhere else, even living somewhere else but not releasing the Front Range.
Always away from the community that I should have been building. I was in love with not-belonging. I didn’t deserve to belong. That’s my (fake) story, and Maureen’s article invited me to look that lie in the face.
During those fifty years I managed to keep a home base in Denver while I moved to Australia, North Carolina, Spokane and plenty of other places. I was never really fully “there.”
In 2020, I pulled up stakes and made a difficult move to Eugene, OR, having sworn that THIS TIME I would integrate myself into the community. Oregon had other ideas; our governor kept us in Covid lockdown.
In June 2022 Covid and Medium ate my company and all my income but for disability. Instantly, and Maureen will relate, I put my house up for sale, began looking for a new country (Colombia almost won out), and sold everything but a couch, a desk and a computer.
The house Wouldn’t. Fucking. Sell. So there I was with a couch, no furniture, all my shit in boxes ready for Another Big Move.
The Universe said. …fuck you, you’re staying.
I was in my dream home, in a place I consider paradise (and yes, we have a huge homeless problem, all paradise has problems). I had put a for sale sign on my happy place. Silly me.
Since then, I’ve dug in roots. That commitment, to settle in, make the house mine from the ground up, commit to my neighbors and my community, has changed everything.
What moved me to move so often was the ridiculous belief that if people really knew me they wouldn’t like me much. Bet lots of you can relate.
Oh, the lies we tell ourselves.
“What if the move was a horrible mistake?”
The way I see it, we are always and forever precisely where we’re supposed to be. May not feel that way. I didn’t believe I deserved community so I acted in concert with those false beliefs.
No mistakes. We chose, we learn, we grow. If the Powers that Be want my aging ass to pick up and move again I’m sure those doors will swing open. But right now I am loving it here, for once, and the community is loving me back. That is a brand-new experience.
Which leads me to this piece by another terrific writer,
:
I read
’s heartfelt response to this piece, and given that I know something of her personal story, it made perfect sense. I went through similar years of extreme loneliness when I first moved to Oregon. Again, we were under strict Covid lockdown, so no gatherings at all. The only people I met were caregivers for various injuries and surgeries.Then I was housebound by those surgeries, which meant long months inside a house I’d not yet fully committed to, without even a dog, which Kristi rightfully said went a long way to save her life.
Loneliness isn’t a taboo. It’s a normal, powerful emotion that is a signpost to the heart. Loneliness tells us there’s work to be done.
Loneliness has a powerful purpose, if nothing else other than to allow us to walk the echoing halls of the soul and ask the hardest possible questions. Tough queries about our self-worth, our selves, our value to the world and whether or not any of it is worth it.
In some cases, we get to deal with extraordinary losses which have shredded our souls. I might get a hug three or four times a year; I know loneliness inside and out.
Too many of us are taught to suppress or deny genuine emotions, so that when they insist on rising, by the time they get so strong that we can no longer jam that genie back in the bottle, they threaten to overwhelm.
Loneliness, loss and grief invite us to sit with those feelings. Explore the layers and question ourselves and what we really truly want, what we care about. When we run from these powerful feelings, anesthetize ourselves or refuse to feel our legitimate, deep emotions, we delay our birth, our becoming.
My father began drinking young. As a result, he never matured. He was parenting with the emotional wherewithal of a teenager.
We need to stand with, embrace and be transformed by our authentic emotions. Those are the birth contractions moving us towards the person we are meant to be.
My deepest feelings terrified me for years. Not any more. Scary maybe, but these days they inform rather than punish. I fell out of love with loneliness when I realized that I was validating my father’s words:
“I brought up a loser.”
Everyone navigates this differently. What I find is that when I questioned my “rudder”- the feelings of low self-worth which led me to isolate myself even when I was well enough to get out and engage, I redirected.
I spent a lot of time being in love with being lonely because that’s precisely what I thought I deserved.
The only thing that matters is that you and I find where we belong, feel like we belong, and give back to others so that they know they belong.
Being alone is being all one. We are complete. Perhaps loneliness allows us to explore the lie that we are all alone, and discover how, in fact, we are indeed all one.
Which brings me to another brilliant writer who explores such issues along with the feelings of being a child of immigrant parents, which brings with it a whole other set of unfair expectations:
Louisa and other writers have been reading and sharing their observations about the book No Bad Parts. Inner child work, which I am doing with my own talk therapist (and no, this work really doesn’t stop) can be freeing but also confronting.
In my case, I am learning to intervene when my inner child is about get walloped by my father’s backhand for daring to speak truth.
If you read Louisa’s piece, you can see how her experience in many ways precisely mirrors that- the silencing we get from our parents, which teaches us to silence that inner child, and find her unworthy of a voice of her own.
Such powerful stuff. All of it needs to be addressed.
Midlife is when we truly begin to question our stories, so that a new story is written by a more authentic us.
Each of the above shares powerful themes which are interwoven. At midlife we are questioning, poking about for better answers, like a midwife invites us to PUSH PUSH PUSH.
This is what I mean when I say we are midwives to our midlives. Male or female, we are making ourselves over so that we can come into our own. That’s why I believe that sixty, which is arbitrary but a good general time, is when we begin to live the life we design for ourselves.
Not all of us do the work. Not all of us can. But these women are doing the work, as are many, many more of you whose material I read, appreciate, and wish I had the bandwidth to include.
If nothing else, Substack is a smorgasbord of insights. Each of these women touched something very important in me, reminding me of work that I have done and still need to do. That is the gift we offer each other.
Speak your truth, write your truth, live your truth. You never know when and how your words validate someone else, how they help the birthing process of another human eager to evolve into something else.
My heartfelt gratitude for the courage of so many to write. In writing, you create yourself. Let’s create our best selves. We are all midwives to each other here.
So please, PUSH PUSH PUSH.
Let’s play.
Thanks kindly for reading. I hope you got value and inspiration, and above all appreciate the quality of writing that we all have access to on Substack. Please consider
If you know someone who can use this article, please consider
I would like to re-frame the term Midlife (reminds me too much of negative connotations like Midlife crisis, etc).
It’s being in the Middle of Life, of Living.
With experience in our backpack and energy for the road ahead.
Julia, this is yet another tour de force in your vast and profound body of work. A friend of mine, who is in her 70s, always reminds me of the process of rebirth that I'm going through. Your term "midwife of midlife" is brilliant and really reflects how I feel as I go through this very tumultuous birthing process. I love even more the concept that we can all be midwives for one another here!
The discourses on belonging and loneliness, with your own experience and other writers' perspective, are so rich and deep. I have had similar sentiments about running away from what I belonged and of facing the vast empty space of loneliness. At midlife, crises brought me on my knees, and I was forced to stop running away from them... and from the shadows of my soul.
These are my favorite lines:
"We need to stand with, embrace and be transformed by our authentic emotions. Those are the birth contractions moving us towards the person we are meant to be."
"Midlife is when we truly begin to question our stories, so that a new story is written by a more authentic us."
"At midlife we are questioning, poking about for better answers, like a midwife invites us to PUSH PUSH PUSH."
Yes, yes, yes! Push, push, push!