I grew up on a diet of potato waffles and ‘you can only do your best’, spoken with calm reassurance and supplemented by proper camping trips, precarious rope swings across streams, and mud pies with my sister on the back lawn.
I was thinking back to those times when I found some childhood photos recently. Do you remember when we took photos and actually printed them out?
I’ve got loads of them. Family albums lying almost forgotten at the back of bookcases. And shoe boxes filled with photo envelopes, the ones that came with little pockets for the negatives, in case you wanted to reprint them again.
I really enjoy looking through them. Even though it is kind of strange to observe myself, from so many years ago. When life and growing up were all so pristine new, yet I had no idea it could feel otherwise.
I hear my clients talk about wanting to go back to who they were. Not just picking up old hobbies, or making time for previous interests, but who they were. They often talk about when life felt more simple, fewer expectations, less pressure, easier, in a way that midlife just, isn’t.
I get that. I can relate.
I do wonder though, if this sort of wistful regression, as well as (very understandably) pining for the apparent simplicity of life pre-menopause – is it also a yearning for all the versions of ourselves we have been and can never be, again?
I’ve described this before as a kind of grief for the past, even if your todays are generally good days.
I do also recognise that the changes we each go through, are exactly what delivers us new versions of ourselves, to see different opportunities and make new choices.
Without it, I would be stuck, stagnant even. The same version of myself across each decade of life. I wouldn’t choose that, definitely not.
“I’m so tired” has been a common starter for ten in many of my coaching sessions with midlife women, over the last ten years. When we really dig into it though, it’s not just physical tiredness.
Tiredness and exhaustion are not just symptoms of pushing on regardless, for way too long. They’re also signs of feeling stuck, sometimes frozen in overwhelm, rumination, worry. Tired of a situation or state of mind, not just physically tired from it.
We do, truly, need change.
If midlife and menopause were delivered to us via email, I really think the subject line in your inbox would be ‘Change, in epic proportions’. And the subheading would say: ‘btw it’s not all bad’.
‘Change, in epic proportions’, is one thing for me, and another for you, and we’re both going to celebrate and commiserate on different things.
Opening up my photo album again, the young girl looking back at me has no idea what’s coming next.
Her dreams and aspirations have long since faded, replaced with new ideas, plot twists and pivots, over and over.
But she is still with me and that’s okay. It is because of her, that I am who I am, now.
The further into midlife I grow, the more I’m able to acknowledge that feeling joy and meaning and contentment is not about trying to go back to the times when I last felt those things.
I don’t need to be a past version of myself, to be truly happy, now.
Where I want my effort to go, is in seeing opportunity through a window of change. Some of it welcome, some of it in my control, some of it not at all. All of it happening anyway.
It’s okay to lament the past but I owe it to myself to keep making room for new decisions, new versions of myself to come forwards.
Who I am in at each turning point, that’s where my attention needs to be.
If you recognise that something needs to change for you, but you’re just not sure what, (or you do and that’s the problem ‘cos it feels overwhelming), then get in touch here. Let’s chat about it.
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We are available to all women, at any stage of their midlife and menopause journey.
