WTF happened to you? Your Midlife Wake-up Call!

Scientists and neuroscientists have found that happiness hits rock bottom at age 47, but fear not! It goes back up as we get closer to 50. Midlife is often associated with having a crisis, but it's more like a midlife evaluation. 

• People's constructs and belief systems change as they get older, as do their perceptions of themselves and how others see them.
• Midlife is a time when people have had many experiences, jobs, and relationships, which shape them and offer different perspectives.
• It can be easy to lose oneself in the demands of life, but it is important to reclaim oneself to know where to go and how to show up for the next 40 years.

Transcript

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I have this damn adulting voice in my head chiming in on why I should, why I shouldn't, don't make waves, you should be grateful. It literally sounds like the Charlie Brown teacher voice. It's like wah wah wah. One of my goals is to turn that voice down, like way down. Realizing that by living that way, by listening to that voice, it was costing me so much. Only thing that I was doing was subscribing to what I should be. This is the 40 as fuck podcast, where we have worthwhile, real as fuck conversations about midlife. What you're gonna hear on this podcast is not the fluff you see scrolling Instagram, it's the messy parts of midlife. Because midlife feels a little different. I wouldn't say midlife is necessarily a crisis, but it's worth paying attention to. So if you are in the thick of it like I am, it does actually go up as we get closer to 50. I think we often associate midlife with having a crisis, and that's the term that's thrown around when we hit this stage of life. But to me, that in some way implies that I'm gonna go buy a red Corvette or something like that, and that's gonna make my life better. As I've gone through this part of my life, I think a better term instead of crisis is to say it's more of a midlife evaluation. Because when you think about it, the same constructs and belief systems that you had when you were 20 or even 30, those have probably changed. And really, even how we see ourselves now or looking and evaluating how others see us has probably changed in a pretty significant way as well. What's so great is that at this stage, we have had so many experiences and jobs, and we've had relationships that have flourished and some have failed. We've made a lot of decisions to this point. We've faced some challenges, we've probably made a lot of mistakes. Honestly, the list could go on and on and on. All of these aspects have really shaped us, and it's these aspects that have offered different perspectives of ourselves. And what I have found is they've probably very innocently molded us into this current version of ourselves. And if you're like me, you may not even be fully aware of who you are anymore because of all of that stuff that has gone on in the first 40 years. Because the demands that we've faced at this point, I think it's really easy to lose yourself in all that. But what's really hard is actually reclaiming yourself. That feels overwhelming and challenging. And I'm sure you've had that thought before, like, I don't even know who I am anymore. And that's really uncomfortable. But it's really impossible to know where you want to go or how you want to start showing up for the next 40 years of your life if you don't actually know where you are right now. And this is the realization that I actually had a couple years ago. I had this experience that really woke me up from a life that I was living that really didn't feel like me anymore. And it forced me to really sit in a lot of uncomfortableness and had to go through this period of realizing how much of what I was, I guess, holding on to wasn't serving me anymore. And these included beliefs about myself, reevaluating dreams and ambitions that I thought I really wanted, my health. And the most important thing that it forced me to do was look at how I treated myself, how I showed up and really gave myself to be seen in my life. If you're like me, growing up, I was always taught that if I worked really hard, which is what I've done, life would turn out great. And really, for the most part, I have had a really great life. And my work ethic of working really hard has served me really well. Of course, I am not exempt from having challenges and I've had ups and downs, but I am really lucky because I am surrounded by people that love me and I have a lot of people that I love. I have a roof over my head, I have a car, you name it. Like I really have kind of the quote unquote American dream life. And I'm really fully aware of my privilege and of this privilege. And so I don't take any of that for granted for a second. But it was in 2021 that I was hit really hard. And it's in that year that it just about crushed me. I was basically going along and doing the things that I had always done. We were just starting to come out of the pandemic. So the intensity of COVID had definitely started to ramp down. And I think collectively, we were all starting to breathe this kind of sigh of relief. I had just come off of this super stressful period where my business partner and I had just finished working with some incredible formulators and dermatologists as we created our own line of skincare products. And I was still working in copywriting and marketing, and I had a couple dream clients that I just absolutely love working for. And I was also on top of all of that, taking care of my family and really doing what parents always do. You know, we're always trying to absorb the stress and absorb the stress of our family and help meet their needs. And on top of all of that, like everybody else, you know, you just have regular life, you just have regular life. You've got bills and doctors and your house, just the normal stuff. Like that's what I've always done because that's what you're supposed to do. That's what I've been taught. I watched my parents do the exact same thing. It all felt really normal. But it wasn't until I had this really pivotal moment that I was really forced to stop and look around. So I'm gonna tell you what happened. And I know that I'm gonna make this sound really dramatic, but actually, it was really dramatic. So here is what happened. My family and I had just built this bonfire on our back patio, and we had roasted some marshmallows and just a typical afternoon, and one of my kids snapped a picture of me unknowingly. And I know that that doesn't sound really dramatic, but really stick with me because it was like if I could describe it, it was like that moment in Forrest Gump where he is running, running, running, running, and then all of a sudden he just stops. He stops running. And it was really kind of like that moment. It was really actually that dramatic. So here I am, I'm sitting on the patio, like, you know, it's a Sunday afternoon, and I get this picture airdropped to me from one of my kids, and I look at this picture, and it was me. I mean, it was me in that picture, but in that instance that I saw that picture, I wanted to look away because the woman that I was looking at, she she wasn't me. She was like this version of myself, but I didn't know her. Like I didn't know that version of myself. And it was honestly, it was really scary. It felt almost like this out-of-body experience because I realized in that split second that I had lost so much of myself, that I had been sacrificing for a life that I was quote unquote supposed to live. And I remember thinking in that moment, I thought to myself in that split second, and it literally was a split second, but I thought to myself, like, where is my light? Where's my light? Like, I used to be this free-spirited girl. And all I could see in this picture was this this kind of empty woman. She had like that girl had been replaced with to-do lists and tasks and goals and responsibilities and obligations and running around making sure everybody's needs were met. And I could see in that picture, I could see in that version of myself, I could see in her face that she'd stopped being vulnerable and she had pushed all of her own happiness down for everybody else's. And that realization for me in that split second is I understood that I didn't even feel seen anymore. I didn't feel known, even by me, not even by myself. And I know I'm talking in third person, which must be kind of confusing, but I'm talking that way because it really was this out-of-body experience. Because the person that I was looking at, she actually wasn't me. She was like this robotic, empty version of myself, this lost version of myself. And to be honest, I probably could have at that moment kept going. I think I could have probably stuffed down what I was feeling and ignored what I saw. I could have done that. All I could have pushed down the emptiness and the loneliness I felt. And when I say emptiness and loneliness, it wasn't necessarily for another person. It was the loneliness that I felt for myself. But for some reason, in that moment, I couldn't unsee what I saw. And I knew as if in this place, if I didn't make some changes, I was going to regret it. I had this all-encompassing, like full body knowing that I had to wake up and pay attention. It's like that voice in my head was like, girl, you are going to be 80 years old and you're going to say, damn, why didn't I not make these changes? It was that clear. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Daniel Pink, who wrote the book Power of Regret. I highly recommend it. But he found in some of his studies that our percentage of regrets of what we didn't do is more than double the regrets of what we actually do in our lives. So he found that basically from age 40 on, our regrets of inaction way outnumber our regrets of action. And that's kind of where I felt I was at that moment. Because before I had that realization from this photo, I was living a life that I had basically become totally numb to. I was 100% avoiding that feeling of being uncomfortable. I was just really going through the motions day after day. I won't say that I was totally miserable, but I don't think that I was really happy either. I was just in this place of inaction, staying comfortable. Exactly what Daniel Pink talks about. And I could see in that moment that my future did not include any more happiness if I didn't change something, if I didn't start moving the needle. There's this other really great idea, and I'm not actually sure who came up with it, but there's this idea called the region beta paradox, which is basically this idea, and I think that it's based on a study where they looked at people that had experienced horrific experiences. And they also looked at people that just experienced something, you know, kind of bad, not a big deal experience. And what they found is that the people that experienced something more horrific could more easily make positive changes to their life and effectively change the outcome than those of us that had experienced something that was just like moderately, if if even that, bad. We'll call it passable, something that was passable. I believe this is because we can stay numb to something that is just passable, because it's not actually horrific, but it isn't good either. But because it's passable, we can stay in this chasm of like comfortable complacency. You guys, life is so short. And in that moment, I realized I am at a place where I don't have time for that meteocracy, for that complacency anymore. I think we get so caught up, and I am so guilty of this, of getting caught up in the achievements and the status quo and really the hustle and the chase of our life. And it's all of that that really allows us to stay, keep coming to the soul-sucking jobs that we don't love, but we don't hate it either. We are able to attribute our anxiety and our depression, our general malaise to all of these external factors that we have going on. But when we do that, what we're really doing is we're not acknowledging what's really going on in our lives. We're not really feeling or being present to that. And by doing that, at least for me, we're shutting off our own emotions and our desires to stay in this comfortable place. That's what allows us to stay in those comfortable places because we can't feel what we're really feeling. Because if we really felt what we were feeling, we would be inspired to make change. There's an anonymous quote, and it goes like this The definition of hell is that your last day on earth, the person you are will meet the person that you could have become. For me, that is super powerful. And in that moment of seeing the photo, I realized that entire quote in its entirety, like I felt it. When I really saw myself and I felt the emotions, that's honestly when my world started to open up. I'm not gonna say it was comfortable. I'm not gonna say that it didn't feel overwhelming, but it is where my world started to open up. As I've gone through this process over the last couple of years, what I find is interesting is that the emotions that we are experiencing and we're experiencing them as that are they're bad. I think that thought, like, oh, I'm experiencing this emotion, oh, I'm having depression, oh, I'm having anxiety, that's where we get stuck in this overanalysis of the emotion itself. I think we we say to ourselves, and we've been taught this somewhere along the line, like, I shouldn't feel this way. That's our way of thinking. As I have experienced it, for me, a more productive way to approach this midlife period is really looking at what behaviors am I choosing in response to those feelings? Am I numbing out with substance or food or TV or social? Or am I running from a difficult conversation? Or am I using people pleasing to keep the peace in my life? But most importantly for me in this midlife stage is I think that we have to be able to look at the catalyst. What's causing these emotions? Why are we feeling that urge to numb out to escape our life? That becomes the biggest question. And for us in our mid-40s, I don't feel like enough people are actually talking about this, especially on social. What I find is when I talk to my friends, it is really clear that we're all experiencing various awarenesses and even awakenings. But if you are going through this journey, it does feel very lonely, especially as you start to look in the mirror at yourself. One reason that I don't think that we're talking a lot about this in more of a public way is because as a Gen Xer, one of the things that I have noticed is that we are pretty quiet when it comes to sharing on social or other platforms like podcasts. We are not so inclined to share what we're going through publicly. I heard somebody reference our generation and they called us the skeptical slackers because we do buck the system in many ways. And I don't think that we believe what we've been told. But to be honest, I'm actually jealous of generations like the Millennials in Gen Z because I would really like to see Gen X more represented because I feel that for me at least, there's this huge disconnect in our generation. As I've been going through this period of like deep evaluation in my mid-40s, there have been so many times that I wish there were accounts that I could follow and relate to. And it's a large reason why I am doing this podcast now. And I think that a large degree of why we are so reluctant to share really comes from how we were raised, because our parents generally taught us to be more understated publicly about our struggles. We were taught to present to the world as we wanted to be seen, not necessarily as we were. And that, I believe, really came from our parents' parents teaching them that anything out of sorts, anything that didn't look like the nuclear family, you're just supposed to sweep that under the rug. Sometimes when I talk about this, I actually reference it as the metaphorical Joneses. You know that saying, keeping up with the Joneses. In my mind, having gone through 40 years of various experiences, in my mind, I think that we could probably all agree that the Joneses are pretty fucking miserable at this point because portraying something that you want the world to see, but behind closed doors, you're totally different. That takes a lot of energy. And part of that Jones archetype is that we've all been told that we're supposed to sacrifice. Like this is what adulting is supposed to look like. But I think that is probably the most terrible advice. Why are we meant to basically settle at some point in our adult life? If you have kids, they are watching you. If you are living this life where you literally don't matter because you're not putting yourself first, or you're always putting their needs ahead of yours, or you're not making your health a priority, or your happiness isn't a priority, or your kids don't actually see you living and smiling and laughing and being playful. Like what message are we actually sending to them? When they see us abandon ourselves, we in turn are teaching them the same thing. Let me ask you this question that somebody else asked me. If you were a child watching yourself as an adult, would you want to grow up to be you? That's an important question to really think about. And I'm not sure how we got so stuck there. But one thing that I have noticed about myself is that I have this damn adulting voice in my head constantly, always chiming in on why I should, why I shouldn't, don't make waves, you should be grateful. It literally sounds like the Charlie Brown teacher voice. It's like wah, wah, wah. And in my midlife evaluation, one of my goals is to turn that voice down, like way down. I don't know if I can turn it off, but I'm gonna try. Because I'm realizing that by living that way, by listening to that adult voice, it was costing me so much. I wasn't loving myself. Only thing that I was doing was subscribing to what I should be, but not who I truly am. And the problem was, is I was so lost, I didn't even know who that was anymore. Because in all of that shuffle and grind of the first 40 years of my life and all the achievements and the blah, blah, blahs, I had really truly stopped loving myself. And loving yourself is hard. Loving yourself takes a lot of courage. I actually used to think that loving yourself took confidence, but it's not. Loving yourself actually takes being vulnerable, and vulnerability requires courage. And somewhere along the lines, loving ourselves took on the connotation of some sort of destination that we are supposed to get to. Loving yourself is often thrown around with working on ourselves. It's like we say to ourselves, when I find that relationship or I hit that income milestone, you know, you get the picture, those kinds of things. And I actually believed that for a really long time. I think that was my constant push for all of the achievements and kind of that hustle mentality. But I don't think that you ever get to that destination of loving yourself if that's your approach. Because what you're basically doing is you're dangling in a you're dangling a carrot of impossible perfectionism in order to reach that kind of mecca. But for me, what I've learned this year is that loving yourself means small acts of kindness towards yourself, making commitments to yourself that you actually keep, making changes where you need to, and honestly doing some really hard things and then repeating that process over and over and over again. Without the willingness to show courage and be vulnerable, that's where we end up sacrificing ourselves and we fit ourselves to be in this complacent, mediocre life. But when we flip that and we make our heart and our dreams and we show up in our lives in a healthy way, that actually becomes our North Star. That becomes our guiding light. And honestly, through that process, that's what teaches those around us and also teaches our kids and even ourselves that we are worth being seen, we're worth being known, and we're valued. We don't actually have to listen to that adult voice the way that we think we do. In my life, there were so many unsaid truths that I had been avoiding in order to stay comfortable in that complacent life. And it's actually not even that I was avoiding them. I had been like numbing myself out to them and flat out pretending that they weren't even there, even though that I knew that they were. And I kept having these repeated thoughts where I would think, if I just try a little bit harder, or if I just put in more effort in some way, those things that I had been avoiding, they were just gonna some way magically get better or disappear. And I kept going through the motions of that and working harder and doing more and being who other people needed me to be. But it's in that moment that I saw that picture of myself that I thought to myself, Sydney, you are just as responsible for the happiness that you're experiencing right now, which was very little, as well as the misery that you are continuing to choose to live in. And I do realize that misery sounds like it was really dire, but it was because there was this complete absence of myself in my own life. And I had let that happen. Like innocently, it had happened, but I couldn't allow it to continue that way. And I knew in that moment when I saw that picture of myself, I knew that to get back to myself or to really find myself again, the road wasn't going to be the same road that I had traveled to get to this point. If you're avoiding what's really going on in your life, like if you are really avoiding the misalignment of your life and you're not honoring in healthy ways, like really actually loving yourself because you matter, which kind of sounds like a 90s after school movie. But if you're not seeing yourself as worth it today, not six months from now, not 10 years from now, not when the kids are grown, but like actually today. Because we all know that six months will come and 10 years will come and nothing will change. Your kids will move out and nothing will change. It doesn't get better by working harder or sacrificing more or showing up more. It just doesn't, we have to start with where we're at right now. And that process is really hard. But I think an important question is how do you start this process? And I can only share what's been my process in all of this. For me, I'll be honest, there was a lot of shit in my life that was not working for me anymore. And a lot of it was external and there were many internal factors. But to make the changes, I really had to be willing to set some boundaries. What I realized about myself is that I was giving other people a lot of myself in order to protect their happiness rather than see my own worth. And we can talk more about this later, but I really had to evaluate where I was dumping my energy into others and then recognizing what was I protecting about myself by doing that. Let me ask you guys this question. If a family member or a friend was struggling, you would probably move heaven and earth for them. If they're going through something, it will motivate you to do incredible things for them. But for some reason, in this midlife stage, and I think that this happens at all stages of life, but I happen to be talking about midlife, we are subscribed to this idea that we should personally suffer. Because by stuffing our own needs or our happiness or our joy, in some way, that makes us a good person to our family. But we're not treating ourselves the same way that we would treat somebody else. And this was me to a core. I kind of saw my pain and my suffering as something that I just needed to overcome or ignore because I don't actually even know. I was a grown-up and this is how it was supposed to be. But I hear this repeated so much when I talk to other people. So many people are believing this exact lie. They believe that by not honoring their own needs, their own wants, their desires, that's actually part of adulting. That's settling. That's what we're supposed to do because we have families all of a sudden, because we have responsibilities, because, oh no, we have these obligations, but that's not true. And yet it was my excuse. And it's the worst lie that I think that I could have told myself. Now, I don't want to come off as I'm really enlightened and like I have all this stuff figured out and it's fantastic because I still have a ton of days where I feel really overwhelmed. And I also have a lot of places in my life where I feel like I'm not truly aligned. But I can tell you, having gone through this process to the point that I'm at right now, I'm experiencing more moments where I'm starting to see a bigger picture, where I'm starting to experience those moments where I'm actually feeling more connected to myself and I'm moving towards a life that actually feels like me again. And so this is the place that we start. These are the conversations that we have about midlife. Because now I think it's really our turn. And I hope that these conversations are the beginning of many. And honestly, if you are feeling like you've lost yourself, maybe this can be a place of comfort as you dive into that uncomfortableness. So that's the start. I hope you guys enjoyed this, and I look forward to many more midlife conversations.