Growing up and what no one tells you or midlife is messy

When I was a younger woman, I used to be a fan of making lists and having a plan for my life. Somehow believing that if I could reduce my life down to a neat and orderly checklist that I would stay on task and that I was actually an adult, but life often does not stay on task. It’s why the dirty secret of adulthood is that the mythical midlife crisis is a very real thing for many of us but rarely does it involve sports cars. Instead the older I get and I suspect I am not the only one, I find myself questioning the whys and wondering who the hell am I?

Being the overachiever that I am, my crisis of sorts started a few years ago, a few months before my 38th birthday. It’s been a rocky journey and I fully expected that since I started the process early, that I would be able to wrap it up early and get back on track with this being an adult thing. Of course the universe is laughing at me and my silly assumptions. It turns out that living itself is the journey and like all journeys, it has the good, the bad and the ugly.

The problem with thinking that we have this adult thing figured out is that sometimes we tap into parts of our being that we never knew were there and once we find them…what the hell do you do with this knowledge? When we read books like Eat, Pray, Love the idea of blowing up our lives to find our true self sounds romantic but down here in my corner of the world, the bills still need to be paid, the laundry needs to be washed and dinner needs to be cooked.

Finding out who you are is one thing but actually changing a life that is familiar and comfortable to go into the unknown is a lot harder. Sometimes the devil you know is truly more comforting than the one you don’t know but in the end the call to live authentically is hard to ignore but the question is do we answer that call or let it go into the void known as voicemail?

Clearly this messy, mucky stuff was left out of my how to be an adult manual. But here is hoping that your adult manual has all the chapters.  

 

 

2 thoughts on “Growing up and what no one tells you or midlife is messy”

  1. All the chapters… but many pages that are blank. 🙂
    Here’s to your journey and the following chapters.
    Cheers!
    And thank you, as always, for sharing.

  2. I wonder if we have too much of an either or view of the world. Live authentically tends to be translated into not having a job and living in the moment, while working to pay the bills tends to be equated with drudgery and unhappieness, our untrue selves. First of course, wouldn’t it be great not to worry about the bills? But I bet there are plenty of people who don’t have to work, who don’t feel they are living their authentic lives. Why cant we be our true selves whle working hard and raising our families?

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