I’m staring 35 in the face. Sunday. I’m not too psyched about it. And mostly I am tired of people saying to me: “No way are you middle aged! You aren’t going to die at 70!” Hello, people, middle-age is a range, not the actual midpoint of your life. There is no question whatsoever that I am in midlife. That’s okay, by the way. Let’s not pretend otherwise is all I’m saying.
It was in this mindset that I read Brene Brown’s blog post today about the midlife journey. It rang every single bell that there is in my head (and that’s a lot – picture a carillon of church bells). Brene says it far better than I ever could. And wow it is lovely to have somebody express and articlate the things that have been swarming around my thoughts.
I’m going to quote Brene’s excerpt in its entirety – it’s long but every single word is both salient and resonant. Read it, any of you who are, like me, wondering what exactly this vague sense of an earthquake inside yourself is about. I am so grateful for Brene’s elegant words and thoughtful description of things that make so much sense to me: the notion that the very coping strategies that helped me get here are actually blocking my progress now, the idea that eventually I have to let go of the pleasing and figure out what I actually want, the identification of the most toxic kind of suffering being that that allows us to act as though all is fine.
An excerpt from Wholehearted: Adventures in Growing Up, Falling Apart and Finding Joy
Copyright © 2009 Brené Brown
Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.
By definition, you can’t control or manage an unraveling. You can’t cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect.
Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:
It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. The time has come to let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are.
If you look at each midlife “event” as a random, stand-alone struggle, you might be lured into believing you’re only up against a small constellation of “crises.” The truth is that the midlife unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low-grade anxiety and depression, quiet desperation, and an insidious loss of control. By low-grade, quiet, and insidious, I mean it’s enough to make you crazy, but seldom enough for people on the outside to validate the struggle or offer you help and respite. It’s the dangerous kind of suffering – the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is OK.
We go to work and unload the dishwasher and love our families and get our hair cut. Everything looks pretty normal on the outside. But on the inside we’re barely holding it together. We want to reach out, but judgment (the currency of the midlife realm) holds us back. It’s a terrible case of cognitive dissonance – the psychologically painful process of trying to hold two competing truths in a mind that was engineered to constantly reduce conflict and minimize dissention (e.g., I’m falling apart and need to slow down and ask for help. Only needy, flaky, unstable people fall apart and ask for help).
It’s human nature and brain biology to do whatever it takes to resolve cognitive dissonance – lie, cheat, rationalize, justify, ignore (if you need examples, look toward Washington, D.C. or Wall Street). For most of us midlifers, this is where our expertise in managing perception bites us on the ass. We are torn between desperately wanting everyone to see our struggle so that we can stop pretending, and desperately doing whatever it takes to make sure no one ever sees anything except what we’ve edited and approved for display.
What bubbles up from this internal turmoil is fantasy. We might glance over at a shabby motel while we’re driving down the highway and think, I’ll just check in and stay there until they come looking for me. Then they’ll know I’m crazy. Or maybe we’re standing in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher when we suddenly find ourselves holding up a glass and wondering, “Would my husband and kids take this struggle more seriously if I just started hurling all this shit through the window?”
Most of us opt out of the dramatic displays. We’d have to arrange to let the dog out and have the kids picked up before we checked into the lonely roadside motel. We’d spend hours cleaning up glass and apologizing for our “bad choices” to our temper tantrum-prone toddlers. It just wouldn’t be worth it, so most of us just push through until “crazy” is no longer a voluntary fantasy.
Many scholars have proposed that the struggle at midlife is about the fear that comes with our first true glimpse of mortality. Again, wishful thinking. Midlife is not about the fear of death. Midlife is death. Tearing down the walls that we spent our entire life building is death. Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you’re going down, and after that there are only two choices: staying down or enduring rebirth.
It’s a painful irony that the very things that may have kept us safe growing up ultimately get in the way of our becoming the parents, partners, and/or people that we want to be.
Maybe, like me, you are the perfect pleaser and performer, and now all of that perfection and rule following is suffocating. Or maybe anger and lashing out kept people at a safe distance and now the distance has turned into intolerable loneliness. There are also the folks who grew up taking care of everyone else because they had no choice. Their death is having to letting go of the caretaking, and their rebirth is learning how to take care of themselves (and work through the push-back that always comes with setting new boundaries).
Whatever the issue, it seems as if we spend the first half of our lives shutting down feelings to stop the hurt, and the second half trying to open everything back up to heal the hurt.
Sometimes when the “tear the walls down and submit to death” thing overwhelms me, I find it easier to think about midlife as midlove. After a decade of research on shame, authenticity, and belonging, I’m convinced that loving ourselves is the most difficult and courageous thing we’ll ever do. Maybe we’ve been given a finite amount of time to find that self-love, and midlife is the halfway mark. It’s time to let go of the shame and fear and embrace love. Time to fish or cut bait.