My darling,
This letter is written for you, the one walking through the second half of life. It looks like you got here with a snap of your fingers. You don’t even know how the years have passed.
You feel a lot of changes. If you are like me and you are already in the 40 zone you understand what I mean by changes. I have women around me who have all kinds of dilemmas. Some have come a long way career-wise and seem to want something else, but they wouldn’t throw themselves out of financial stability, so they wait.
Others chose to stay home with the children and offer them their presence. Even so, adolescence is difficult.
Some have relationship problems and everywhere is talking about good and healthy relationships. Others don’t have such well-paid jobs, everywhere they talk about saving and they barely make ends meet from one month to the next. Some are lonely and the biological clock is ticking. Others try to have children and fail.
You feel so much pressure that you want to run away. Talking around with women of the same age, I realize that the feelings are the same, even if generated by different contexts.
Maybe you don’t get along with your teenage child anymore, even though you’ve listened to all the parenting advice possible, and even implemented some of it. However, your relationship with the teenager at home is creaky. You imagine yourself taking the hammer and hitting your phone, PlayStation, Nintendo, and everything else. Maybe that’s how he’ll hear you. You feel guilty for the thought too. Then you blame yourself. Surely you didn’t do something right to get here.
You were so focused on your career that now you can’t have a child. You think that if you had made other choices, things would have been different.
Or maybe all things are on your shoulders. You need to take care of the parents who have grown old, but also the children, and the husband seems to complete the number of children, instead of being a real support. And you wonder, who will take care of me when I get old? As you already know our children are not ours and we did not give them support in old age. So, all the more, you have to take care of your health to be able to manage.
Or maybe you didn’t manage to save as much as experts say you should have by this age, and you find out it’s going to be tough in retirement. So you didn’t do enough here either. And you haven’t even started that project that would have brought you so much joy and freedom.
Thoughts, lots of thoughts that 10 years ago you didn’t have. Sometimes you give in, drop to your knees, scream, and cry. It’s just a discharge of all the negative emotions, all the possibilities that you probably only accessed 0.1% of.
You have all these thoughts while you need to take care of everyone else, while you’re getting more and more tired, you have all these thoughts even though you wish you had more confidence in yourself, but you have more and more doubts. And what makes it even worse is that you realize these worries are valid. We may not have the number of children we dreamed of, we may never have that long-dreamed-of gym body, we may die alone, we may never achieve what we dreamed of we will achieve in our careers, our relationship with our partner may never improve, we may never save as much as we say we should so that we can have peace of mind in retirement, we may not never the perfect mothers in our imagination.
But in the meantime, you keep dreaming. What would it be like to start my dream project and leave the corporation? You answer before you get too far with the thought. “That would mean leaving the financial stability I have, plus health insurance. And I also have two children. I can not.” How about changing careers? Start over and be surrounded by 20-year-olds. What would it be like to go on a retreat? Who would pick up the kids from school?
You found out at 20, 25, 30 that you can do anything. You found out that you have a lot of choices that you can make. It also seems silly to you to complain, because there has never been a time in human history when as a woman you had the freedom to make so many choices. But choices don’t make life easier. Possibilities create pressure.
You have these thoughts as you look in the mirror and already see fine lines on your face. And dark circles. And lots of white threads. A kilogram or more extra. You ask yourself, what should I do? Plastic surgery? Diet? Do I paint or not? Many possibilities, and many choices to make.
Thoughts, dilemmas. At this age, the challenges are multiple, both physically and emotionally and socially.
It’s time to reassess where you are and accept it. Just like I said earlier, we may never achieve what we dreamed of for ourselves: the career, the perfect relationship like in the movies, the dream family, the dream savings, the world travel, the perfect body. This does not mean resigning. And then?
Not then, just now. Now breathe. Several times, until you manage to calm down and ask yourself the following questions:
- Where are you now? Real, with good and bad, with joys and disappointments.
- How can you accept where you are? What do you need to make peace with all the thoughts that go through your mind?
And if you find even more respite, I’ll leave you three tips from life design to help you:
- Evaluate what you leave behind.
- Review your personal and professional goals. What have you achieved so far and what do you want to achieve next?
- Identify the values. What are your core values? What is important to you at this stage of life?
- Check the routine.
- Do you have a routine? What gives you energy and what drags you down? How you can add energizing things to your daily routine.
- Start from where you are now.
- Be open to change and adaptable. Life can bring surprises and challenges, and the ability to adapt is essential to staying balanced and happy.
- Be willing to learn and curious. Each stage of life brings new lessons and opportunities for growth.
So don’t run away just yet. Stay, breathe, reassess. Then he goes on the conscious journey of the second part of life.
With love, Raluca ❤️
