Over the recent years, I must admit to feeling a particular kind of disorientation. I might look broadly competent from the outside, I am functioning and getting things done, but I really don’t feel like I used to. Do you feel the same?
Why Middle Age Hits Women So Hard
The tiredness sneaks into my eyelids and my bones, deeper than I believed was possible before. My bulls!t radar is on full power and I can get seriously ruffled by things that once bounced right off me. After over 25 years of my own personal development journey, at first this felt like a set back, a regression, that there was something wrong with me. How wrong could I have been?!
It appears that what was ‘wrong’ with me, was reaching my mid 40s!
Yes, my body no longer behaves reliably, it talks to me, by giving me feelings of aches and pains, and gives me ‘feedback’ each and every day. There’s also just no way that I can just over-ride feelings of resistance or fatigue anymore, I have to listen and I have to stop.
But, these events have felt scary!! I wondered if I was becoming less capable?
This Isn’t Decline, It’s an Identity Shift
Our modern culture is extraordinarily poor at helping women interpret this phase of life compassionately or even intelligently.
We frame ageing almost entirely as decline. We can be perceived as less attractive or energetic and much less resilient. I can see why so many of us women experience perfectly normal middle-age changes as a personal failure.
Many women, when they arrive at their middle years, they do not arrive at all well rested, supported or deeply connected to themselves. Instead they are in the midst of their 40s feeling hyper-responsible and having pushed through exhaustion for years and years. They usually have been managing multi-generational relationships, being emotionally literate for entire families and at work. Plus, having to remain capable long after their nervous system started asking for another way. The physical changes that happen in middle age remove the ‘hormonal buffering’ that have scaffolded those capabilities for decades. Then that scaffolding starts to collapse and fall…
The shifts in our hormones and our psychology bring a differing perspective.
When our hormone levels fluctuate and decline we begin to see… what is draining us, what feels fake, just how much pressure we put on ourselves and how little rest we ever truly allowed ourselves.
Middle age is not the advent of the collapse of your capability, you are still utterly capable of stuff, but it can be the collapse of an identity built around perpetual output. In place of that old identity, a deeper sense of groundedness can be nurtured to emerge.
So, here’s a few questions to ask yourself to explore your perspective.
A mindset shift that can change the experience of these middle years.
1. Stop asking – ‘Why can’t I cope like I used to?’ Instead we can ask ourselves ‘What does always trying to cope cost me?’
Many of us might romanticise their younger selves because they could ‘handle more.’ But often what we handled was chronic stress, over-riding our own emotions, over-giving, exhaustion normalised as ambition and self-abandonment disguised as commitment to the cause.
Middle age frequently makes the body less willing to pay that price, this has been frustrating to me as I now see that part of my identity was built around endurance. I have a black belt in martial arts, I chose physicaly demanding jobs for years and always competed against the boys, when I was younger.
Now, my goal is actually to live well, not to overcome!
Three Questions to Reframe Your Middle Years
What am I no longer willing to endure?
What used to feel normal that now feels costly?
How could this change be enriching rather than limiting?
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