Let's Talk About The Midlife Unraveling

I’ve been feeling different in the past few years. There has been one internal shift, big question and hard decision after another to contend with. I’m thinking more deeply about what I want to do with my life, and who I want to surround myself with.

I’m referring to the midlife unravelling. Notice how I specifically didn’t use the term 'midlife crisis'? That’s because, for many of us, the experience of reaching our 40s and beyond is less about crisis and more about unravelling—a gentle peeling back of the layers we've built over the years. 

The term 'midlife crisis' often carries a negative connotation, suggesting disarray and upheaval. But what if we view it through a different lens? To me, the term 'unravelling' seems to better capture this phase—it's an inevitable shedding of old defences and identities that no longer serve us, and an invitation to step into our true selves.

One of the gifts of these midlife years is the wisdom to recognise that we have a choice—we can rethink, redefine, and reimagine what our futures holds. Yes, it's an ongoing work in progress with no definite answers, but isn’t that liberating in its own way? 

Here's what I've settled on: I want to grow continuously and cherish each version of myself. This time isn't just about enduring change but embracing it with open arms and an open heart. 

So, if you're also navigating this midlife unravelling, remember, you're not alone. This evolution is an opportunity for transformation, and within it lies the potential for profound personal growth.

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Transcript

0:26

Hello, beautiful mama. Thank you for joining me and welcome back to the show. As always, I'm so grateful that you've made the choice to listen in today. And I hope today's conversation is helpful for you around the topic of the midlife unraveling and your note. I'm purposely not choosing the words midlife crisis because I think midlife unraveling is so much better. It's a bit of a thing for me in my world at the moment, and has been for a little while. And I wonder if it is for you as well. What do you think about it? Do you think it's a thing? Do you think it's just made up? Do you think it only happens to some people and not others? And what image are you holding in your mind around it? I feel like from the movies or TV, we may have this image of Maybe a 50ish year old man buying a Harley Davidson and deciding he's going to travel around Australia. What does that picture look like us as women and as mothers? Is midlife crisis a dirty word? Does it have a negative connotation? And this will be different for each of us. So let's have a chat about it. I got the term midlife unraveling from Brene Brown. big fan of Brene Brown. She is a researcher around topics like shame and vulnerability and emotions. And her work is incredible. It's paved the way for so many better conversations, I believe. And I'm going to share a description of what the midlife unraveling is in her words in a moment. I did a bit of looking online around what is a midlife crisis and There are different descriptions, but from one website it said the midlife crisis is a shift in identity that sometimes affects middle aged adults between 40 and 60. People tend to re evaluate their lives and confront their own mortality. It can significantly affect relationships and careers. I was interested to note that in the definition it said sometimes affects and on some websites I noticed there was mentioned that it's something that affects some people, but not others. and is it just a construct that we've created in our society? Interesting. Brene's description, which I came across watching an interview of hers, and then I went to look on her website and found a blog about it, which I was interested in. She says, Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unravelling. By definition you can't control or manage an unravelling. You can't cure the midlife unravelling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments and alpha parenting of our 30s cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect. Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close and whispers in your ear I'm not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing, these coping mechanisms that you've developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you're still searching and you're more lost than ever. I Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can't leave the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It's time to show up and be seen. I feel like this sort of sums up. My experience in let's just say the past 18 months. So I'm 43. I turned 43 in June. I'm recording this in early October 2024. And I feel like I've had a series of events or things that have come one after the other. And force me to face stuff, which. I thought was like a midlife crisis. Brene says as well. If you look at each midlife event as a random stand alone struggle, you might be lured into believing you're only up against a small constellation of crises. The truth is that the midlife unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low grade anxiety and depression, quiet desperation and an insidious loss of control. By low grade, quiet and insidious, I mean it's enough to make you crazy, but seldom enough for people on the outside to validate the struggle or offer you help and respite. It's the dangerous kind of suffering, the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is okay. Oh, wow. And you know what? I feel like this comes in quite close succession after Just getting through the identity shift of motherhood. Depending on what age you are when you have your children, It may be different for you, but my fourth child was born when I was 37. So I feel like I've just come out of the baby days and gone straight into midlife unraveling, uh, which I'm like, this is not fair. This is so not fair. I've just got past the identity shift of motherhood and become more okay with that and this new version of myself. And now I've got to kind of adapt to this other new version of myself. But do you know what? It's not going to ever change. We are always going to be evolving and growing and becoming this new version of ourselves. I hope right up until we go, that is my wish is that I do continue to grow and change. It's just keeping up with it and being okay with it and loving myself anyway. I think I have this idea that in this midlife unraveling phase, that. I'm going to kind of get to all the answers and then I'm going to be okay for the rest of my life. But I just don't think it's going to be the case. I, as I said, I think, and hope that I will continue to evolve and grow and that I'll be adapting to the next version of myself and loving her right through to when I'm 120. But I have to admit, when you look at the stats of what our expected, our life expectancy is in the Western world. It actually is pretty sobering to think I actually might be halfway through. At the same time, it's really exciting because we get to take all of what we've done, all of what we've learned, all of what we've experienced, and use it for the next 40 years or 40 ish years. But that doesn't come without its challenges. And I guess, if I can leave you with anything from this podcast, it's that we once again have the power and the choice to decide what image we hold in our subconscious mind of this aging process and how we want to spend the rest of our days and how we want to be. when we are in our older years and how we want to perceive it, how we want to think about it, how we want to talk about it. It's all up to us. And we have conscious ability to decide that and we can be mindful of it. So, you know, this work, it's always messy and uncomfortable and hard and there's slaps in the face and there's hard things we have to face. There's hard choices and there's new realities. There's all sorts of things that keep popping up that we have to deal with. again, sometimes I think, gee, this just, can you just ease up, please? Like, do I really, I don't really want to deal with all this, but it's the way it is. And we are blessed as females. And this is just what we have to contend with. So I just want to have a chat about a couple of things that I feel like I've faced. in the last probably 18 months that are new, different and causing me to just look at some new things and face them. One of them is aging and how I feel about aging. What do I think about it? How do I talk about it? What's the language I use around it? I honestly don't feel like my age, even though I've had some challenges in my body in the last 12 months that have made me feel my age at times. I think body wise, maybe yes, but mind and spirit, no. I sometimes still look at my children who are aged six, eight, eight, and 10 and think, Oh my gosh, I don't even feel like I should be your mother. Like, I still feel so young and I don't even know if I'm qualified for this job. But, and then I look in the mirror and my body is getting a bit saggier and there's wrinkles and I've got weight around my middle that I don't know how it got there or why it's staying there. There's cellulite, things are just different and I go, wow, gosh. One of my boys said to me the other day, Mom, no offense, um, don't take this the wrong way, but you are looking older than some of the women your age and not as fit. And I was like, Oh, thanks bud. Yep. Thanks. Thanks for that. Really, uh, really appreciate it. Uh, wasn't also thinking those same things myself and I'll get to the body image stuff in a moment, but this whole concept of aging, it feels, I feel like I'm really not, uh, in unison with it yet. It's like, I'm looking at someone else in the mirror and I don't quite match it. Maybe it always feels that way. Maybe you always feel like that. I'm not sure. What I do want to be conscious of is how I think and talk about aging, because I think we, uh, can trick ourselves up. I think we can create, I think we create our own reality and whilst we can't stop the clock, we can certainly control how we feel. And talking about saying things like, Oh geez, you know, everything goes downhill when you get to 40 or everything turns to 40. Maybe there's some truth in it at times, but it's not helpful. It's not a helpful way to speak. It's not a helpful way to think about it or talk about it because it sets up a negative vibration in our body, um, which affects how we feel, affects what we put out, what we attract back to us. So I just want to encourage you to be really mindful about how you think and talk about aging and talk about your appearance. just start to take notice of how you speak and think about it. body image is a big deal for me. has been and is right now. I've a few health challenges in the past 12 months. Again, this is a real new thing for someone who's not really had physical health challenges other than, I've had some mental health challenges, but not physical so much, but then to have two knee surgeries and a gallbladder removal in the space of 10 months and more recently some heart stuff going on that doesn't appear to be serious, but needed looking into. It's been the first time in my life where I feel like I'm, my body has let me down it's always been so reliable, my body. And I'm so proud of it for the children it produced for the way it's carried me all my life for the adventures we've had. And then in the, in the past 12 months, it's been like, wow, I don't feel like I'm a part of it. I feel like it's doing its own thing separate to me, including, um, carrying weight in parts of my body that were never there before, which. is maybe part of perimenopause. It's also about how I'd taken care of myself, and that's a whole new thing as well, that I'm experiencing. It's different as we age things that were not so important before and now important like protein and muscle can maintaining muscle mass and ways of looking after ourselves that weren't as important when we were in our thirties when we were younger, which I was still thinking I could just keep taking care of myself the way I always did before children and it would be fine. It's different, and learning to love ourselves no matter where we are at on that journey or on the scales. That personally is a real challenge for. Maybe you as well and being okay with it and accepting that it may never be how it was. I feel like I'm talking about motherhood and identity. It's, it's just feels so similar. It's, it's this evolution of self and we, as we grow out of and into ourselves over and over again. Some other things that I feel like I'm facing in this midlife unraveling is my parents aging and my children getting older. I'm still blessed to have both of my parents and to have healthy beautiful children and for which I'm very grateful. It is confronting seeing them age and watching your children grow up day by day, year by year. Asking all the hard questions as well. honestly feel like I've gone through every part of my life within myself and gone, Is this still what I want? What do I really want? That seems to be what you think of when you think of the midlife crisis is, is actually just putting it all out on the table and going, Wow, if I'm halfway through. my life, what do I want for the next 40? And is it the same as the first 40 or more? and what changes do I want to make? So there's some harsh, hard, things to evaluate. And I feel like I have done that going, what do I choose? Do I still choose my partner? Is he or she still the one I choose? And is this still the relationship that I want to be in? And then looking at other relationships, family, friends, connections with people from the past, who is it that I really want to hold on to and what is it that I want to let go of? I think we start to get more aware of how precious time and energy is and of our values and of hopefully our self worth and our self esteem and recognize that we are so precious and time is so precious and that we get to choose. You start to think about what do I really want? How do I do all the things I want? How do I fit them in? Have I been sacrificing? Am I truly going after what it is I want? Also, healing from trauma or old wounds that may be in a, in the first phase of our lives, we were just numbing or escaping or not even aware of. And then we get to this phase and we start to, all this stuff starts to come up. Maybe some of it was already coming up through your mothering, but it's like you can't hide from it anymore. And you want to leave your most authentic self. And to do that requires going through the healing, doing the inner work, deciding that you don't want to F around anymore. And that I want to drop the mask and the performing. And if you're someone like me, a recovering people, pleaser and perfectionist, just wanting to just be okay with messiness and imperfectness and just being your true self. So there's a, you know, there's all that work stuff going on as well. I said earlier, stuff new things with health that weren't there before in thirties and twenties. So. Again, this midlife crisis period, which they say is between 40 and 60. Some of these things might be later for you. I'm, I'm talking about the early forties just because I feel like I went straight into the midlife unraveling after I hit 40. Also the change in identity. So labels, the things that you've always identified with new roles in the community, in your family, in your business, in your work that, Maybe a different to what you used to have, or you starting to see yourself in a different way, or you're starting to notice that some things aren't in alignment for you anymore, or that you're moving away from them. That can be so confronting. and again, if you are someone who maybe is coinciding the end of creating your family with your early forties, I think You are managing that identity shift of motherhood as well as maybe going into this midlife unraveling phase where It's like again that feeling of who am I what am I doing? is what I used to do what I still want to do So it can be quite, you know confronting and you can struggle with that And searching for self love and self acceptance, maybe that journey never ends. I hope it does. I hope it does for all of us that we do reach that point of pure self love and self acceptance. But I suspect for most of us, it is, it is a journey and an evolution ongoing. those are the things that for me, in my experience are, you know, on the table in this midlife unraveling and moving through them, and I'm not saying it's a hard slog or a hard struggle all the time, but they have been things I've needed to face and to examine and to play with, and none of them are solved. They are all an ongoing work in progress, and that's okay. I kind of feel like it's a good thing and a necessary thing and an important thing. to ask yourself the hard questions and say, do you know what is how things are, how I want them to be maybe not for the next 40 years, but at least for the next few years or five years or 10 years and get clear on that. What do I want my future to look like? who do I want to be? And what is she thinking and feeling and doing? And what does she look like? How can I be the healthiest, best version of myself? And we might not know all the answers, we know all the steps or all the how, but have in our power, the ability to get clear on that picture. So that's my midlife unraveling conversation for today, beautiful ladies. I hope it's been enjoyable or thought provoking or helpful for you. I just want you to walk away from this episode knowing that even if it feels like just one slap in the face after the other or one, you know, difficult thing after the other. there is a positive spin on it. Um, and that is that all of this is growth. It is all evolution and we always have choice sending you lots of love and look forward to chatting with you again on the next episode. Bye for now.