Hi. Chances are if you found this post, you’re wondering, am I in the matrix? Or am I just having the most confusing years of my life?
Welcome, friend. I’m speaking to you from the other side of the midlife crisis. (well.. 85% through).
How did I get here?
Like many people in their 30’s, I spent the beginning part happily married to a wonderful man, with a blossoming career and a quiet cabin out in the California desert. I had everything I thought I wanted: A beautiful partner, a beautiful property to call my own, a beautiful bank account.
But I still felt so unfulfilled, I started to call it my “beautiful prison”.
I had so few local friends, working a job that took me traveling multiple times a month and up late working until the wee morning several times a week. My ex was also in an outside sales job, so we rarely saw each other until we grew apart enough to get divorced.
I moved across the country from California to Colorado, buying a house in the middle of the pandemic. I dated a bunch of epic losers, wondering if I would ever be worthy of love again. Emotional abuse from a partner with mental illness presenting very acutely, the death of two close friends just months apart, and misogyny at work made my reality feel completely unstable. I was once excited to go into work every day; and I remember the day it crossed over to dread, and only grew from there. Eventually, the depression and anxiety from it all caught up to me, and I was let go. Through it all, I managed to stay sober.
I was so scared. What do I do? How was I going to get a job after this? Who was going to want to date someone with no income? I was grieving a marriage, and losing a team of almost 70 employees – people I really really care about and helped support their career. Thoughts spiraled and it took a VERY long time for me to accept all the rejection in every area of my life as redirection.
For the first time in my life, I had nothing to take care of, or save, or distract me from myself. I was alone.
Because of Visioning, I believe my “midlife crisis” was both better and worse than it could have been.
Why? Because most people do the easy thing – they stay in a miserable relationship, they work a job they’re totally over, they let their business take too much of their personal time.
Rarely do they stand up and say, It’s time to do the hard thing.
Visioning gets to the heart of what you really want, and that might require action.
I spent about 3 years watching my marriage crumble, getting separated, and then finishing the divorce outside of court with a private judge. It took another 3 months, once the pandemic hit, to decide I wanted to move to Colorado, sold my half of the California house and bought another one online with only a Facetime tour.
That period of my life was full of panic attacks, which I had never had before, uncontrollable sobbing throughout the entire day, in public places. the risk of losing my sobriety was always imminent and the rejection combined with uncertainty of my future made my anxiety skyrocket.
It sucked. But I knew it was the right thing to do, especially when I said to Lois, “I want to change the name from his name to just ‘partner' in my Vision“ and she said “Okay!” without any judgment. I knew in my heart that there might be a different name in that role at some point in the future.
Now I’m through the other side, and although I haven’t quite mastered the “passive income, retire early” part of my Vision, I’m actively working toward it and I’m happier than I’ve ever been because I did the work to make my desired future a reality.
What is a midlife crisis?
A midlife crisis is a period of transition that can occur in middle age, typically in the late 30s to early 50s, that is marked by confusing, apathetic terror about the uncertainty of the future in both your life and career.
It’s not necessarily marked by age, but more like – you’ve been out of alignment for so long, but tried to hang in there and make it work until it just didn’t anymore. And then you crave an immediate change of direction.
It’s almost like this chapter was a little bit too long, and all of a sudden you get go sick of it and turn the page and FINALLY it’s over.
But you have no idea where to go next or why.
You might question all of your life choices and accomplishments, feel restless or a desire to make significant changes in your life.
Or, you might be hitting your version of “rock bottom”.
It might come about from inside you; your desire to change your life in drastic ways so you can spend what’s left of it doing things that make you feel valuable and comfortable. It might be triggered by events such as losing your job, an empty nest, retirement, divorce, or any other host of traumatic circumstances.
Not everyone goes through a midlife crisis and some people may experience it differently than others. For me, I’d just done it all for too long. I was tired.
You’ll know in your heart if you’re going through one
You’ll know you’re going through a midlife crisis when your dissatisfaction for your current situation heightens your desire for change, and vice versa. Also called the equation for change, this basically is the inflection point where you are motivated enough to get up, change your life, and make it stick.
You landed on this page, didn’t you? If you:
Are struggling in your relationship; even having thoughts of other people.
Are depressed, sleep a lot, languish on the weekends and lost your joy for life, don’t socialize a lot.
Or, your behavior is erratically the opposite, going out all the time, pushing off responsibilities and making random and unnecessary purchases.
Your job is a total soul sucking exercise where you just dread coming into work.
Your work is impacted by something going on in your life: addiction, divorce, for example.
You lost your job due to your behavior; or due to an incompetent boss who led your company into a layoff situation and for that I am sorry.
Mental illness is presenting in your life for the first time or again and you’re struggling just in general. The pandemic was shit on a lot of us.
You just lack clarity on what to do, where to go from here, and how to create a Vision for your life.
Or, it could be a combination of these factors, or any other traumatic event going on in your life, that leads you to feel unsatisfied with it to the point where you’re just totally fed up with the status quo and your direction.
What direction?
What to do next
Talk to a therapist or counselor. I cannot emphasize this enough: therapy is for everyone, all the time. If your insurance pays for it, do it. The benefit of processing events with a neutral third party is so you can build your emotional and mental muscles to accept the things you cannot change and increase the control you have over your very next thought, feeling or action. This is the only way that stressful situations become less stressful over time – being able to observe what is happening and maintain control enough to respond, not react. I remember having very, very low patience at work.
Feel your feelings. Many days are going to be awful, and that’s okay. I laid on the bathroom floor for hours, struggling to breathe. I stared at a bottle of Buffalo Trace on the floor for an hour before I put it back in the cabinet and peeled myself up enough to crawl into bed and sob there. I’d sob in the shower, in the middle of meetings, in my garage, my closet, basically anywhere where I’d be doing something totally normal and mundane and be caught off guard by the fact that my life was going to completely change.
Practice gratitude. It’s not helpful to be told to be grateful. But practicing gratitude exercises can be known to strengthen neural pathways, making it easier to see the positive side of things throughout your day-to-day, compounding into a generally more optimistic attitude. Keep building this muscle when you can.
Join a support group for people going through a midlife crisis. I once went to a divorce support group in San Diego. It was a little cringy and very awk. But I did it, smiled through it, and I still have the little drawing pinned up to my fridge. Try something and see how it feels before writing it off. Just like yoga, it’s definitely fine to try something once!
Clarify your core values and Vision. Finding out what you truly want and deserve, even if it triggers the need for an uncomfortable action (believe me, going through the divorce process is one long series of awkward and terrifying and uncomfortable moves).
Stay connected. Call your friends and family. Write to them. Facebook them. Text them a random photo of your dog. Keeping in touch with the people you care about goes a long way in feeling supported and also remembering not to compare yourself to others. When you keep in touch, they’ll keep in touch with you too, and a random letter feels pretty great both to send and receive.
Getting clarity is worth it
I completed my five-year Vision through True North in April of 2019. I am 100% certain that because of that Vision, I was able to have a thread of hope to cling on to while I was in the throes of panic attacks and anxiety about what was going to become of my life. I had never lived alone before, and I had never been fired before. I was going to lose a lot of friends and pseudo family, a lake house, and a decade and a half of traditions, dreams, and partnership.
But when I read my Vision every week during that dark time, I had a little bit of hope. I would tell myself that I “will get through this moment” and eventually, one minute at a time, I did. My life on the other side of divorce is amazing – I live and play in a beautiful Colorado town and spend my days skiing and hiking with my two dogs. My girlfriends and I hit the hot springs weekly and I am living mortgage-free in a home I own.
“Knowing when to make hard decisions” is in my Vision. A year after I wrote that, I used my Vision as a guiding post to tell me that my life was not in alignment with what I truly wanted for myself. That’s how I confidently knew what decision to make.
I am a Vision of Success
I am living my Vision every day and I can safely say my midlife pivot put me in an exciting new chapter of my life: happily single, financially independent, socially connected and healthy. If I can get through a midlife crisis using Visioning, so can you.
