Monthly Archives: September 2019

3 Shocking Things about Women Falling Apart in Midlife (and what we can do about it).

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The more I learn and research about midlife, the more surprised I am that we still keep think we are the only ones going through this.

While what we go through is very personal, we are not the first ones, and won’t be the last, to experience the absolute panic, anxiety and even depression that midlife can bring not to mention the physical symptoms that can take us hostage and turn us into someone we ourselves don’t understand.

Here are 3 things that are shocking about falling apart in midlife:

  1. The oldest members of the Millennials (of Gen Y) generational group are now 38. This means they will be experiencing perimenopausal symptoms themselves within the next 5 years. Weren’t we just talking about how these gals were invading our workplace and how we didn’t understand them? Now, in a few years we will finally be on the upside of the bottom of the U-curve of life as they are blissfully sliding down into it. They will soon be blogging about how they don’t know what’s hitting them and will be looking for all the advice and answers that we are seeking now, all while spending a majority of their time in the workplace. And with women working longer, chances are many of us, if we are working women, will still be here too. In fact, by 2024 the Bureau of Labor and Statistics predicts that the women over 45 will make up 45.4% of the US labor force (it was 43.82% in 2016) compared to 43.2% of men over 45. One study in Scotland showed that out of 3,649 working women, 63% said menopause was treated as a joke at work. And yet, 8 out of 10 women will have some menopausal indicators, which don’t just happen at home. So, we need to prepare the workforce to be better for this next generation, and for those of us sticking around, than we found it. We need to be making sure that our employers know we are here (and we are because every year 1,300,000 women in the US enter menopause) and that we are just as dedicated and talented as we ever were and with support, we will continue to thrive in our careers. For example, better access temperature controls, options to adjust or have flexible schedules to address fatigue and other disruptive symptoms, better access to alternative treatments through healthcare (acupuncture, wellness programs, etc.), more workplace support networks for women of all ages and workplace education to remove stigma with policies that reinforce it all could go a long way to ensure a woman can remain self-confident and connected during what, for many, is the height of their careers.
  2. In nineteenth century asylums, the ‘cause of admittance’ for most women over forty was listed as ‘change of life’ or ‘suppressed menstruation’.  Yeah, middle aged women have been thought of as ‘crazy’ for a long time. Does midlife make us crazy? Probably not totally crazy, but our hormones do act like they have an all access pass to Six Flags, are all over the place on wild rides, leaving us to sometimes feel out of control looking for the nearest trash can. In midlife, we also get sick of putting up with a lot of crap. We get tired of holding things in, being polite and going along to get along. We realize we have spent a whole lot of time taking care of and nurturing others and while this may have filled our hearts with joy while doing it, for a lot of us we realize that we ourselves are in need of some nurturing and we have some serious catching up to do. This sense of urgency coupled with a body that seems to have betrayed even the best of us and left us invisible in a culture obsessed with youth and perfection has also left us pissed off. Armed with an attitude and a hot flash, we can be dangerous. What can we do about being still labeled today as ‘crazy’? Ignore it and don’t hold back, be who you are and embrace the new found psychic energy that is emerging. We have a power surge like no other time in our lives. It’s time to tell the world to get the hell out of our way and let us do our thing.
  3. Human middle aged females are evolutionary outliers. Only a few species enjoy long post-menopausal lives and we are one of them. Killer whales, Beluga whales and Narwals share the same fate. We are truly in magical company at this point in our lives. In her book, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, Darcey Steinke talks about how inspired she was to learn this and discusses the theory that this:

“probably evolved in human communities for the same reason as in whale communities: because around 50, women get so smart and knowledgeable that they’re more valuable to their communities as leaders than as breeders.”

https://crosscut.com/2019/07/what-orcas-can-teach-humans-about-menopause-and-matriarchs?fbclid=IwAR2B8BHPE5XMOYScK6W8KnY1kOANt8GtL-2ZZaPvAJ3cJcvOr3ibOS4H0V0

Knowing that there may just be a divine evolutionary plan for women in midlife can offer us a life raft in the sea of chaos. If leadership is the byproduct being created in all of this, then we really do have stuff to do – it’s in our DNA. With so many of us entering arguably the most powerful time in our life, this can create a great sense of community, hope and focus to the generalized, unspecified urgency we may be feeling. So what can you do about it? Think about the type of leader you are meant to be. Leadership requires authenticity, midlife is here to take us down our own, unique path in which to find the skills and perspective that only we have. What is yours and what can you do with it from here on out?

As we experience midlife, it is easy to think we are the first to feel out of control, cast off and not taken seriously. Yet each generation has experienced midlife in it’s own way with it’s own reactions, narrative and solutions. This just happens to be ours. We are in a most amazing time for women right now and for middle aged women, our time has come.

Take some time today to appreciate just where you are in life and what you can do with this new space you stand in. You are the hero you have been waiting for.

image: unsplash.com Matthieu Stern

roadblock

Old feelings getting in the way

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Did you ever start something and know it was the right thing to do, the right direction or even just the right time and then something stops you? So often we feel the urgency of to release something inside of us and we recognize the authenticity it holds, but like a vivid dream, once you pull it out in the daylight it often seems foolish and unrealistic.

Letting our old feelings get in the way of our emerging selves is a one step forward and two step back approach that is not only confusing but exhausting; stamping out the slightest spark by pouring doubt and fear all over it.

Sometimes it takes a few tries for our creative energy to get enough momentum to break through. While failing is one thing we all try to avoid, avoiding to start is a worse fate. Drowning out the music that is rising within you is poison no matter what way you look at it. When old feelings arise, they generally appear to be friends, but is really just misery and it’s gang looking for company to take out, help you forget the present but tell you they told you so and that, from now on, you should all stick together. Don’t listen to them. Thank them for their concern and care and let them go or you will be forever stuck paying the bill.

If you have a dream but keep hearing the same message playing, stop and ask yourself why? Are there limiting family beliefs that play like a record in your background noise? Is there a past hurt that you have experienced that feels too familiar in the present and therefore becomes a road block to trying again? Are you just scared of failure? Success? Neither?

When I finally started writing, I was scared I would fail and I was even more terrified I would succeed. Guess what? I neither succeeded nor failed. Nothing really happened. I put my stuff out there to crickets. Surprised by this, I realized I had not prepared for indifference. The world had not spat in my face and no one congratulated me on a job well done. I just put it out there and there it was. That was a whole new unsettling experience. It was only then I realized that my feelings and beliefs about who I was were so self-centered and wrong, but by believing them, I stopped growing like a goldfish in a small bowl. And with no new growth, I was stagnant. In stagnation, not only could I not move, I couldn’t set any type of goal because I saw no way forward. I finally understood that my new goal shouldn’t be for either success or failure it should be for simple agility and movement towards being authentically me. All this time I was thinking I would fail, I never thought I would just move forward. But by moving forward I was able to battle my dragons better because I didn’t die and the sun still rose and as I did, slowly it was the old feelings and thoughts that started to appear silly in the light and not the emerging self.

Today, see what emerges. Trust it and nourish it. Know the old feelings and beliefs are ways to keep you safe, but in a way that is not letting you grow at all. Thank the old beliefs for being there but ask them to sit and stay. Reach instead for growth. So often when we fear failure, we become paralyzed, but what is failure? Ask yourself that. Embrace the possibility of failure and success as just landscapes in the movement. Today, step out there. The world is waiting to see what emerges.

Photo credit: Unsplash.com Matthew Hamilton

The 3 Ps of Midlife Movement Towards New Goals

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As we hit middle age, we get into this grey area – we are the ones with ever increasing seniority in the room, we may be coming up on work anniversaries with two digits and may have mastered many of the tricks of our trade, many of us while raising families, but we are still not quite near the age where we can start daydreaming of spending winters in Miami and summers in Cape Cod.

It is precisely at this time that midlife angst may tap us on the shoulder. Perhaps we have grown bored with the industry that we have been in for so long, or we feel that we ourselves have become stale or that other unearthed passions exist and have begun pecking at the eggshell trying to hatch.

This was the situation I found myself in a few years ago. I was in my early 40s and had been at the same job for 15 years. I was surrounded with caring people who really watched me grow up, some attended my wedding and one coworker was the first visitor to hold my hours old baby girl. I raised my family and life went along, until I starting feeling restless. I could not describe it or even justify it – it was just that I was…bored. The tasks of the day to day operations became somewhat tedious, even the celebrations became repeats of years past. I made a very difficult decision to leave and venture out on my own.

What I have learned is that a little goal setting goes a long way in midlife.

Plan Ahead.

Before making a move from where you are, think about when you plan on or want to retire. What does your ideal future look like? What is your retirement strategy? If you don’t have one, this is the time to start ironing one out, even if it is not perfect – time is still on your side. If you need assistance with this, get it. A good CPA is really worth their weight in gold.

My husband knew how miserable I was and so we sat down and looked at what we could do. What we decided was that if I quit, we could afford a gap year – one where I tried starting my own business – we could swing it for one year and then if nothing took off, I could find a job. This was a perfect time for me to do it because we could make up the year later on if we needed to and I could finally lean in to a dream of mine.

This did take planning though: insurance, spending money, vacations, etc. all needed to be discussed upfront and agreed upon so neither felt blindsided later down the road. When things didn’t go so well, I did get another job but one that was in a different arena that challenged me, kept me fresh and allowed me to keep things going on the side, steadily building my passions so I didn’t feel so cut off from myself.

Find Your Passion.

Listen to your heart and make it a priority to find your passion. You may have already found it in your current job, if so, fantastic. You may find that it is time to step out of what you have been doing and either return to school or change paths. You also may find that a shift of thinking from your day to day work being your secondary gig and what you do on the side becomes what you light up for. It is the difference between being in “real life” versus being “really alive”. Sometimes we don’t need to quit our day jobs to move on the things that make our soul sing.

Midlife provides a very specific space for us to question who we our, what our purpose and passion is and what we want to do with the rest of our working career, and with the rest of our magnificently little time on this planet. It is in this sacred time that we can find a 2.0 version of ourselves just waiting to be unveiled.

Think about what you loved to do as a child, is there anything that you can return to and pick up that sense of passion and excitement you had then? I wrote when I was a child and it brought me great joy, but one harsh critique from a teacher in the 7th grade stopped me writing dead in my tracks until now. Can I make a living from it? Not now, but I can start there and see where it takes me. I can reawaken that part of me that had no limitations or belief that I would fail and rekindle that flame. Who knows where this will go, but I tell you I feel a heck of a lot better mentally and emotionally. And a hell more alive.

When setting your midlife goals, make sure your passion is front and center. We can create goals that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic -or Relevant- and Timely) to work towards what we want, but without passion they are just maps to a place that we might not want to visit. Start with creating goals from your passion place and work outwards from there, otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure or an indifference to the results. Who cares if you sell 20 widgets if your soul screams to write poetry. Start with setting a goal of writing every day and your widget selling will naturally become better. Why? Because YOU become better.

Push Yourself Past the Fear.

When we mine our souls and find that precious gem of passion, our first instinct might be to hide it away and only show it to those we deem deserving. Never to anyone who might want to take it away or show us a prettier gem that makes ours not as special as we thought it to be. But this is the time we need to push past that instinct. So many of us are waiting until we perfect that story or quit our job or until we are confident. Reality check: those things might never happen. We all have to start before we think we are ready. We have to look at what we are hiding from, behind and for and ask ourselves why are we waiting? Midlife can give us the courage to push past the fear of failure and of being judged and lean in to our own magic.

I started my FB page on midlife with guns blazin’ – I was willing to put myself out there and thought I was doing great until I got a negative review and someone called the page “boring”. I was so hurt by that – didn’t they see my courageousness, my vulnerability, my honesty as something to be admired? No, they saw it as a boring FB page. When I sat with it I realized that I didn’t die, no one was rushed to the emergency room and the sun rose the next day. My first reaction was to stop being so honest and vulnerable, but for what? One person’s opinion? I decided that it was my fear that was the drug of paralysis, not one negative comment that from another’s perspective may have been total truth. I realized that I wasn’t putting myself out there for others, it was for me – for that voice in me that calls to me from deep inside to write and tell what I know in my own voice. If others didn’t get that then, oh well.

Today, what can you do to push past the fear and take a step towards what you want? Sit down and start to Plan – think about what is calling you and how you can create the time and space to at least give it expression. It may not mean quitting tomorrow, but maybe it means going to an open mic, a poetry slam, getting up early to write, registering for that class (and showing up!), taking steps to self-publish, finally sitting down to create. Honor that in yourself. Start with your passion and work outwards and push past the fear that will be the worst troll that you could have following you. Let the angst of midlife be your muse and your hourglass. Embrace who you are and the contribution that only you can give the world. We are all waiting.