What If I Can’t Find My Passionate Calling?
By: Em Unravelling
Tags: Women, Self, Work, Feminism, Life

I’m at the basic, cliched point of life where it’s appropriate for me as a woman to try to find myself. I turned forty this year, and there’s a reason that particular birthday is a well known cultural milestone.

Everyone knows that somewhere between her mid-thirties and mid-forties an interesting woman will assess her life, decide if it’s working out to her satisfaction, and give it a huge dramatic overhaul if it isn’t. Look at Thelma and Louise. Look at Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love. There’s subconscious pressure on us, is what I’m saying.

These cultural messages admittedly do not come from nowhere. Women do feel more lost in midlife than in their younger years. I absolutely do. My nest’s emptying — the children who once clung to me and needed me for everything now come and go as they please, filling the house intermittently with their voices and presence and mess but not actually needing me for very much anymore.

I’m no longer young but I am not yet old. Swingeing life changes, of the badass brave sort, are still within my grasp. That’s the kicker and it’s what keeps bringing me up short.

Lots of things are still tantalisingly possible, like taking out a massive mortgage to buy a house in the mountains and open a yoga retreat, or signing up for interesting university degrees and having a total career change, or selling everything we own to buy a camper van and drive around Europe with no fixed agenda.

In recent months I’ve come gradually to realise that I’m being recommended and often following a lot of new accounts on Instagram. It happened without me really noticing. Fewer of my usual cooking, home decor, and fashion accounts; far more book recommendation accounts, poetry pages, and the pages of life coaches or bloggers who offer “midlife inspiration”.

I just don’t know how inspiring I’m really finding it.

In the same way that I would look around me in my 20s and see women “doing motherhood” better than I was, I now feel that there’s a nebulous, nameless pressure for women my age to prove their interesting worth by throwing themselves headfirst into new passions. By sticking up two fingers to convention and finding a new path. By getting angry and getting things done.

We are told in big ways and small ways that there’s so much more for us out there if we are brave enough to stand up and grab it. We just need to break the mould we’re accustomed to and know that we are enough. We need to look up, not ahead, and stop chasing the corporate dream because it’s actually a nightmare. Etc, etc, etc.

Thing is, I am coming to understand that I don’t particularly want to “leap off the hamster wheel” or to “ditch the nine to five”. I don’t love my job but I definitely don’t hate it, and without any overarching passion looming over me to suck me into an alternate career, why would I want to give up the role I’ve worked for twenty years to acquire?

It feels somehow shameful as a woman to admit I like the comfort of the money and the safety of the status. But I do. I do like those things. I like them even though I have no desire to climb further up my career ladder at the moment.

Of course, this is a gendered issue. (Surprise! Another one!). Because I am certain that men don’t have this pressure, not in the same way.

I do think they have some pressure. I think men can often feel very lost in midlife, just as women often do — why else do so many men leap into second marriages with women half their age, clawing desperately at the illusion of youth and paying for that desperation by spending their fifties in playgrounds or soft play centres, pushing toddlers on swings and feeling disproportionately relieved when no one describes them as “grandad” that day?

But we women are biologically (and thankfully!) forbidden from trying to take another bite of the family-life cherry in that way — we’re expected to display our youthful vigour and lust for life in other, more creative ways as we head into midlife. Unlike men, we can’t just start over at the procreation side of things whilst reaping the long-earned financial rewards of the same day job we’ve been doing all along.

No, we’ve got to fill the midlife void — if we don’t clamber to the top of our career game — with a side hustle. Or a new sport. Or a political cause we’ve now finally got time to get our teeth into. Or a whole new business. A whole new career, maybe in life coaching. Or the camper van thing.

Problem is, although I am casting about for more meaning in my life, I don’t have any yearning desire to give up the day job and learn to throw interesting pots or create macrame wall hangings to sell on Etsy. I’ve done crafts, thanks, and they always end in tears and a lot of swearing. And much as I love writing, and much as I need to write almost as viscerally as I need to read, I’ve got a little corner of the internet for that these days — so I’m good.

I want to drive around Europe in a van, of course I do. It’s beautiful countryside and the views will sustain my soul. But I’d rather hire the camper van and take a few weeks off work to do that trip; I want to then come home again and go back to work.

I’d like to learn a lot more about the intersection between politics and women’s studies, but I’d rather do that from a podcast that I can listen to while I go hiking, rather than sign up for yet another degree and sit yet more exams. I want to read poetry but I don’t want to dissect every poem.

But am I not settling, then, for half-measures? Should I not love my day job? Am I not wasting my time if it’s not spent pursuing a passion? Or if I am sticking with the day job, should I not be setting my sights on its higher rungs?

If this is the decade for me to find myself, I’m starting to worry that I’ve already found me and that there’s not as much to me as I thought there was.

But then again, maybe it’s just that I’m a woman, and comparison is built into my DNA so that “less than” is my default setting. I concentrate on what I haven’t done and what I could do, rather than what I have done and what I regularly do. Which feeds right back into the confidence gender gap.

Maybe that is the system we need to try to dismantle. Maybe starting to dismantle that system can be my midlife calling. (Alongside the day job).

And in the meantime, I might do a bit of an Instagram cull.