Crisis?

Mid-life crisis?

That dreaded feeling of letting yourself down, letting others down, family, colleagues, loved ones …letting yourself go…! A feeling of not knowing what you want out of life anymore or how to move forward when you think you should have it all figured out by now?

That sentence that goes around and around. ‘I should…’

I should … have it figured out. Be earning more. Be more confident. Be more successful. Be more popular, liked, wanted. It echoes as this lurking voice at the back of our minds, when we drop the kids off, when we scroll through Instagram, when we listen to our friend who seems to have it ‘all figured out’, when we hear the news of our colleague’s promotion.

Recently I found myself realising that I was experiencing those ‘mid-life’ crisis feelings and it left me feeling like I had failed myself, like I had really disappointed the younger version of myself. I hated to admit it and, in some ways, it was embarrassing to even recognise it for what it was. A lack of belief in myself, a lack of love for the version of who I am today and a lack of recognition of all that has happened to me to get me to where I am today.  I had somehow thought I should be something more or be somewhere else than what I was at ‘this stage’ of life. Whatever even is, ‘this stage’ anyway?

I think it is the idea that ‘this stage’ is where we tell ourselves we will feel confident in areas of life that matter, family, career, love etc and that we will have the answers to questions we once didn’t and that we will be assured of the future we want and how to get there.

However, here’s the thing. I don’t know anyone who has done anything that hasn’t felt unsure, questioned themselves, experienced imposter syndrome, feeling that they don’t have anything to bring to the table and don’t match up or that past feelings of confidence were perhaps unfounded or accurate. This is part of being human, but we shun it, we ignore it, and want to run away from it as we scoff and say… ‘they are having a ‘mid-life crisis’…as we grapple to try to hold our lives together and somehow kid that we ourselves have felt just like ‘them’.

The very words – ‘MID LIFE CRISIS’ is hardly affirming or complimentary, is it? It tends to drum up pictures of middle-aged men driving sports cars (nothing wrong with that) and women who have gone for that extra cosmetic procedure (again …nothing wrong with that). But I wonder if the issue is with how we view ‘these things’ instead and whether the actual ‘crisis’ going on is ignoring what’s going on in ourselves when we reach certain times, junctions, and life events in our lives. Perhaps the car, the new house, hobby, the new whatever it is, is in fact covering up our feelings of feeling like we are ‘lacking’ somehow. We somehow find that everyone is so intent on judging others that we don’t give space to what is happening in ourselves at a deep level.  Maybe the issue is what’s happening behind closed doors, in our minds, when no one is looking? Am I enough? Am I liked? Am I a failure? Did I mess up and get it wrong? Maybe I am a fraud, maybe I don’t have what it takes… etc. What would it mean to pause…and sit with how we feel about ourselves? Painful right?!

We have created this idea that success is when we feel confident about ourselves, others, and our future life all of the time instead of recognising that anything good that has ever happened and made any bit of difference to anyone often comes with the opposite of this.

What do I mean? Those negative feelings of feeling like maybe we have missed the point, the purpose, the career, and the self-doubt, self-sabotage, criticism of others to varying degrees or from ourselves, the feeling of being misunderstood, rejected, and criticized are in fact normal. Not nice. But normal. If we see them as ‘normal’, part of any transition, part of a good new thing, then perhaps we will let ourselves see, feel, be present in the challenge of the questions, doubts, difficulties of not having figured it out as well as we would have liked to. If we can turn up to these feelings, these conversations with ourselves, and we can be kind to ourselves… I wonder if the ‘mid-life crisis’ might in fact be a good thing.

Questions like ‘why don’t I know how to do this?’, ‘Why is this still so hard?’ ‘what do I want?’. ‘Where am I going?’. All these hard questions have the possibilities to help us see what the next thing might be for us if we are willing to be uncomfortable and see something we may not want to see or accept initially. Maybe right now the best thing is that I have a ‘mid-life crisis’ so I can ask the questions that matter most and find a way through to a chapter of my life that I am seeking on a deep level?

It doesn’t need to invalidate the older version of me, the things I have done, or somehow mean that how I turn up now is somewhat fake, not real, or different. But maybe that is the very thing. I am different. I am real… but real looks and feels different, and that is both okay and a good thing.

I have found myself in a place I didn’t think I would be in recently. Family life, career, etc., has felt different than I expected it to be. I initially thought this was bad. My (high) expectations on myself looked very different than I imagined in reality and somehow, I translated that as bad. Why? I think the ‘why’ is the valuable thing here to note. Why is it a problem to be somewhere you didn’t think you would be? Or for things to look different? Is that bad? If we start to see that somehow, we are less than we are, we are devaluing ourselves. We are not less than anything. We may feel that we haven’t made something work, done something we want, be in a place we expected or wanted, but as a human, we are not less than. If we measure ourselves as less than, we will never be enough, which ultimately means we won’t be more than we are now. Ever.

So, if you are feeling ‘less than’, as I often do... give that feeling some space, but it is not truth. It is important to recognise, but how we feel is often not totally as we are.

So, as a closing pondering – perhaps we need to have more crisis points that we can get more comfortable with and, in them, turn up for ourselves kindly, giving permission to be as we are but to not stay there.  I wonder if the question is, in fact, how do I embrace the feelings of crisis I am experiencing and how do I turn up for myself today in them? Maybe the question is why do I feel this way and what is that telling me that I need to hear?