When New Middle Age Feels Like Becoming an Adult (All Over Again)
By: Nina Jervis
Tags: Midlife Women, New Middle Age, Mid Life Transition, Midlife, Middle Age

Taylor Smith at Unsplash.com

What kind of middle-aged woman am I going to be?

It started innocently enough.

I was clearing out my wardrobe, making room for my boyfriend to hang his clothes up.

(The story goes like this: after three months together, the coronavirus lockdown hit. We talked about whether to stay apart for a while, or throw everything at our relationship and see what stuck, and we chose the latter option. Luckily, what stuck was love…

…and crucially, the ability to tolerate each-other in a relatively small space we weren’t able to leave.)

I’m forty-three, so this wasn’t my first “living with someone else” rodeo. But it was almost a decade since I shared a wardrobe with another person, and it showed.

Slinky dresses, short skirts, and sparkly crop tops were hauled gainfully out of the yawning cavern into which they’d been stuffed and forgotten about, along with the sensible suits I’d sat behind corporate desks in, and the floaty chiffon dresses I wore to other people’s weddings.

I tried everything on before deciding whether to keep or ditch. As I stood barefoot in front of my full-length mirror, new body straining against old clothes, I saw something I wasn’t expecting.

I saw someone new.

I don’t mean just physically, although I’m vain enough to admit that some of the reflections made my soul cry fat, glistening tears. How had I not noticed that my body — the one I’d inhabited for my entire life; the one I thought I knew inside-out — had been subtly warping out of recognition?

But I also knew that even if those cloth relics had fitted, I wouldn’t have worn them, because they belonged to someone I no longer knew.

I’d thrown clothes out before, of course, and sometimes that was because they didn’t fit. It was never because I’d lost all connection with the person who’d once worn and enjoyed them.

The last time I felt like I’d lost my sense of self was just before I got divorced, at thirty-four. I looked in the mirror one fateful morning, and I hadn’t recognised the person looking back at me. I still remember how terrifying that was… but I also remember how determined I was to turn fear into hope. I took it for granted that I would succeed.

Hard Work and Hard Lessons

I think a woman’s thirties — maybe a man’s too, but I can’t speak for them because I’m not one — are characterised by hard work and hard lessons.

Those are the years in which, if you wanted one, you’ll probably have or be growing a family… they’re the years in which you might wade neck-deep into a career, or you decide that the work you did in your twenties doesn’t suit you anymore, so you pour all your energy into something else (I changed career to become a freelance writer when I was thirty-eight.)

At the end of your hard-working, hard-learning thirties, there can be a huge temptation to reward yourself with a triumphant, hey… I’ve got this.

I know I did. I celebrated my fortieth birthday thinking, “I look OK, I feel OK, and my God I’ve learned so fucking much. The world is mine! MINE, I tell you!”

But just three years later, I feel like I’m starting my life all over again.

You can call that a midlife crisis if you like, though I tend to think anyone who changes anything significant after around thirty-five gets accused of having one of those, regardless of what it actually is. I was accused when I left my marriage, and when I started working for myself…

…except they weren’t crises, they were just a result of me learning more about who I was, and who I wanted to be, and then propelling myself towards it.

There’s something dismissive and derogatory about the whole idea of ‘midlife crises’, which is why I prefer Brené Brown’s definition. She calls this form of rebirth the “midlife unraveling.”

“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.” Brené Brown

My Very Own Midlife Unravel(l)ing

When I turned forty-two, during the last pre-Covid summer, I spent the afternoon celebrating in my Dad’s garden, with my two younger sisters and their children. As often happens when we get together, we started telling stories about the past.

Dad’s always had a tendency to crowbar humour into his recollections of our early years, because that was around the time when my Mum decided to leave us all to it.

I don’t remember those chaotic times with any particular sense of hilarity, more gaping misery, but I also know that putting a funny spin on them is how Dad copes. So, I listen to him laugh at all the loss and all the weirdness, and I accept that that’s just the way it is.

Or at least, I used to.

On that afternoon, Dad recounted one of his favourite funny stories. It’s about our first big family holiday after Mum left… a story in which, aged seven or eight, I have a panic attack on the plane, and a pill is forced down my throat, and an unsmiling stewardess strong-arms me roughly into my seat and fastens the buckle so tight that I’m terrified I’ll stop breathing.

“It was hilarious…” Dad said, “the way you were running around that plane and screaming your head off… I had to rugby-tackle you to the floor at one point!”

Instead of laughing along as I’ve always done, an intense and surprising wave of sadness almost knocked me off my feet. I went home and I sobbed, not only because of that horrible story, but because my emotional coping mechanisms were starting to fail, and I didn’t know what I was going to replace them with. It felt like I was falling apart.

“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.” Brené Brown

It’s because of all this, that I believe entering midlife is like the original transition from child to adult. You’re becoming a new person, but you didn’t ask for that, and the whole process feels completely out of your control.

You don’t know what kind of new person you’ll end up becoming, or quite how you’ll get there. The sense of perfection you’ve always strived for is unravelling before your eyes, and your hormones keep zooming off on holidays to unknown places. And all you know for certain is that the familiar, relatively safe, almost friend-like person you thought you had a handle on, has gone.

But I also believe that acknowledging these strange new feelings, rather than swallowing them down, or numbing them with wine and TV, is the only way to get through the transition intact.

In my case, that meant taking a deep breath and asking Dad not to tell his funny stories about our early lives around me anymore, which was a conversation that went far better than I expected.

It meant calling my best friend after that hideous wardrobe clear-out, and talking to her about how unexpected and intense the whole thing had felt.

I thought she might tell me I was going mad, but it turned out she’d been having the same feelings of loss and fear about what kind of middle-aged woman she’s going to be, especially now her three kids have grown up and don’t need her quite as much. We chatted for hours, and we both felt a million times better.

“Ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.” David Bowie

However weird and intense all this feels now, I know there’s light glinting at the end of the transitional tunnel. For one thing, becoming a brand-new person means that fresh and exciting opportunities lie ahead, just as they did when you became an adult.

OK, so you probably can’t be “anything you want to be” in quite the same way as you could when vast swathes of your future were as yet unwritten. But you’re heading into this new phase armed with vital, hard-won insights into what you like, what you don’t, what you’ll do, and what you won’t.

If you can be brave enough to be honest about your feelings and your wobbles (in every sense!), and accept that you have never really been, or are ever going to be perfect…

…then after all that midlife unravel(l)ling can begin a time in which you become a genuine force to be reckoned with.