You’re between 40 and 60 and lately you’ve beem asking yourself if you are really happy. Prior to this you may have been too busy to think about being happy or fulfilled but suddenly you realize you aren’t—happy that is. It could come slowly with a few inner rumblings that increase over several months or even years but a friend of mine said that she was feeling as if “I got dropped on my head”.
At first you think you are depressed but you aren’t sure why. Midlife musings and questions can certainly trigger feelings of loss, sadness and confusion (and can lead to more serious depression if the issues aren’t acknowledged and worked through). There’s generally a landmark of some kind that gets things rolling—a big birthday, kids leaving for college, moving out, marrying, a job transfer, or a job you are afraid to leave but know you have to and the big one—a divorce.
And then you read something or someone suggests that you are going through a “midlife crisis”.Why is it that midlife gets such a bad rap and every possible “symptom” is cause for the “crisis”? The early psychotherapists (crazy as some of them were) defined midlife as a normal, healthy stage of human development and held that men and women at midlife express previously suppressed aspects of personality—my personal translation of this is that we (particularly women) stop being what others expect and start trying to figure out what is authentic and real for ourselves.
Midlife isn’t a “crisis” — it’s a wonderful opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to find freedom in being and begin to create a new world that is up to us to imagine. Think about this; We are smarter at 45 then we were at 25. We may not move as fast but we know how, when and if we should move. And if we don’t know how to do something, we are smart enough and secure enough to ask for directions. At 40, 50, 60 and even at 70 and 80, we have a lot of life to live—we just have to commit ourselves to living it. It could take some time to discover what that life is but once the kids are gone, the mortgage nearly paid off and the college bills on a payment plan, it’s a new life and it’s waiting.
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