Are we there yet?
Ten things I learned (so far) on my midlife reinvention road trip
Five years ago today, I said “I’m leaving.” Life-changing words, regardless of the circumstance.
If you’ve been following my story, you know I worked in the technology sector for nearly 30 years—starting as an administrative assistant and ending as a senior marketing manager. There wasn’t a day in those 30 years—whether I loved my job or hated it—that I didn’t think about what might have been.
At age 56, I jumped from what felt like a moving train.
And that, my friends, is what this reinvention road trip is all about. Leaving took courage. What came next was even scarier—in ways that I didn’t expect.
Ten signs on my road to reinvention
We’ve been on this twisty, rocky road together for ten weeks—the destination still unknown. I’ve been sending postcards from my midlife journey and will continue, but I thought this would be an excellent time to review the questions and lessons I’ve gathered so far.
Maybe I shouldn’t have hired the first life coach I found online. I wanted plans and accountability. She called herself a life wizard. But then she asked the magic question. How can you write your next chapter when you don’t know what it is?
The life wizard sounded a lot like Morpheus from The Matrix when she said, You already know your path, you just haven’t seen it yet.
My social media overflowed with reinventing midlife women fulfilling their destiny as vineyard owners, chefs, or #vanlife world travelers. Shouldn’t my path be clear.? Then again, how could I see what might have been without first locating myself?
How could I find myself and my purpose without a map? That’s why I hired a coach. But over time, I remembered with every choice I’d ever made, I drew a map of myself. I only needed to connect the dots.
Several weeks into our coaching sessions, I still made lists—action items, goals, and tasks. It’s how I managed my projects at the office. It’s worked for me for decades, I protested. The wizard waved her wand again. But does this work management style serve YOU?
Trusting my intuition is hard. How can I trust my thinking after having made poor choices? Is my heart trustworthy after being exposed and broken so many times? As for my body, I still haven’t forgiven it for peri-menopause.
Enter Oprah. In a flashback to my 40s, I read O Magazine’s “easy-does-it guide to finding your purpose,” but really, how do we ever know? Fortunately, I kept the quote from a sidebar written by
: ”We make mistakes, we move from our course, we falter, flounder, and may suffer remorse, rebellion, or a sense of defeat. We seem to lose our way. But no matter! If we keep our little flame alive—our first feeling of enthusiasm for who we are without the influence or intervention of others—we will prevail.”The life wizard had me write letters to myself from the future. Dear me, Thank you for working hard and building my savings account. But maybe you could have done more. And sooner. Turns out “future-me” was a bit passive-aggressive.
Another look back to when I dropped out of college to marry a Coast Guardsman. I was lost and eager to be rescued. Forty years later, I was asking the same questions about my future—who am I? What do I want to be? This time, however, I would rescue myself.
I greet my saboteur like I’m Taylor Swift. “Hi, I’m the problem.” I find it hard to believe that I’m the one holding me back, but I knew I had to change. Perhaps that tenacious planner wasn’t who I was meant to be but who I’d had to become.
And now that you’re all caught up, I hope you’ll continue the ride with me. In the following postcard, I revisit my 7-year-old self. Buckle up!
Catherine
The maps of life are hard to read.