Fighting and Flowing with the Current of Midlife
ARE YOU ON THE RIVER OF REGRET OR STREAM OF SATISFACTION?
Midlife is like a rushing river that threatens to sweep us away as we’re flooded with many of the toughest decisions of our lives: Do I give up on my entrepreneurial dreams? Is it too late to switch careers? Do I event want to be married? Do I want to have kids? How do a manage the many demands of caring for my kids and my parents? How can I afford it all?
On International Women’s Day, I think about how far we midlife women have come…and how far we have to go. The “you can be anything” messages of our youth contrast the stark realities of today: struggles to find a partner, get pregnant, save enough for retirement, own a home. When these so-called success markers of “having it all” remain elusive, despite our best efforts, “you can be anything” quickly turns to “you’re a failure” precisely when we most need “you matter” courage.
As a single, kid-free, non-homeowning 41-year-old woman, you might suspect I’d know this feeling all too well. And I do. Not because I currently relegate myself to the “fail” pile (even though that was the response from a guy on Match after my initial email to him). But because I sure used to…before I learned the power of self-acceptance as a practice that creates a flowing stream of midlife satisfaction when the surge of demands seek to create a dam. I’ll share a bit about my self-acceptance journey, with the hope that you may recognize yourself in such experiences and enjoy the calm within the current.
Early in my life, I discovered there was a part of me that turned against myself when something unfortunate happened that I perceived to be my fault--perhaps a misstep or something that felt like a failure. The first time this became painfully obvious was when I was 7 and excluded from a birthday celebration with my three closest friends. I didn’t know what I’d done to be excluded but I sure felt like a failure.
My spirit was crushed. And there was a little voice telling me, “Even your so-called best friends don’t really like you.” I took my negative feelings, and threw them back at myself.
From this experience, I had two important discoveries:
First, I was determined to design my life to avoid such “failures” at all costs. Enter people-pleasing.
Second, I had a mean-spirited internal voice that emerged in difficult situations, usually with some form of punishment. This voice spoke to me in a way that I could never imagine speaking to another person, yet it lived inside me and had the potential to turn on me if things didn’t go well.
As the years passed, I started to recognize this inner voice as a type of sub-personality (some people call it “the inner critic” or “the judge” or “Statler & Waldorf”…I call her “Mavis”) that seemed to have its own life. It would become active and vocal when something seemingly went wrong. This critical voice would even pop in my ear over small and insignificant things--like having a poor day at the plate during a fastpitch game--and then I would have to endure a couple hours of listening to it berate me. “Really?” I thought, “Over something like this? You’ve (I’ve) got to be kidding me.”
With time and practice, I began to take this voice less and less seriously— with the realization that it was so out of step with the actual magnitude of my experiences.
Through a lot of inner work--both on the meditation cushion and on the therapy couch cushion-- this voice began to lose its power. I could still hear it--look it’s PESKY--but it was no longer in charge of me. I developed other capacities, too: namely, the ability to accept myself and to be kind to myself.
In time, I became curious about this voice’s origin and purpose: What function might it be serving? What were the emotions, and the accompanying physical sensations, that lay waiting for me underneath the voice? Could I turn toward those feelings with openness and curiosity?
I also became intensely curious about other people’s experiences with self-criticism and self-judgment. How was it that some people made mistakes and viewed the entire experience as a learning opportunity? How could I become more like those types of people?
Parallel to my own growing curiosity about self-acceptance (and training in the science of a meaningful life), I began working with people as a director of wellbeing, a meditation teacher, and eventually a health and life coach. In private sessions, people share their innermost struggles with me. What strikes me over and over is how hard people are on themselves, how negative self-talk is more the norm than the exception. So often, people come to me with an overlay of self-judgment when they’re in the midst of a difficult experience. Again and again, I hear people say some version of, “I’m suffering in this way, and I feel like I’m a terrible person because I’m suffering in this way.” When I say it out loud, it sounds terrible and wrong, doesn’t it?
From these conversations, I see that people judge themselves for all manner of things:
Being too fat or too thin
Being too verbal or not verbal enough
Being closed-hearted or too open and porous
Their past--if only this or that had or hadn’t happened
Their sexual orientation or lack of sexual orientation
Being too old, too this, or too that, for not being “enough” of something or other
And people endlessly compare themselves to other people and mythic ideals, with internalized voices of judgment about everything that they are and that they aren’t.
I’ve also seen how self-judgment keeps people from taking risks. It often feels like a lid that people use to keep themselves safe, small, contained, and under-potentiated. And it’s painful to see how sensitive, good-hearted human beings often focus on what they supposedly lack instead of their beauty, strength, possibility, and power to create.
I started to see “unconditional self-acceptance”--being kind to ourselves no matter what is happening in our lives--as an immensely powerful life skill that most of us haven’t been taught. I started to see that being kind to ourselves is actually a human capacity that changes everything. Every. Thing. It changes how we treat ourselves day to day, how we take risks, how we love, how we create, and how we make space for what seems “unacceptable” in others.
As I’ve explored this all, I’ve come to see being kind to ourselves as an advanced practice because many who’ve been on a path of personal growth for decades--people who had been meditating or in therapy for years--still find it quite challenging to treat themselves with kindness when confronted with certain situations.
Naturally, I’ve sought to learn more about what makes self-acceptance so difficult for so many and, more importantly, how we can develop this capacity widely and broadly, individually and collectively, as a way to release waves and waves of kindness. I sought to take self-acceptance out of the realm of advanced practice and make it self-accessible. My work with midlifers is born out of this inquiry…and it’s an honor to serve in this way.
There’s a lot to learn about self-acceptance that can be intensely and immediately helpful: accepting the part of ourselves that isn’t self-accepting (woah right?), understanding how our brains are wired to look for what’s wrong, and learning to immediately respond and talk to ourselves more purposefully. Self-acceptance is also the practice that can help us face up to our lives as they really are, to release the expectations we had for ourselves when we were younger, and to create a support system throughout the midlife muck.
While midlife may present us with some of the most difficult decisions of our lives—with surges of regret…and rage…and resentment—self-acceptance is the practice that helps us stop fighting the current of midlife and instead flow with it in ways that produce immense satisfaction.
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