It is 3 am. You are awake again, unsettled and restless for no reason that you can name. In the early morning darkness, you reach for comfort and familiarity, but none comes. What is in its place is an odd inner displacement that you don’t know what to do with.
You have been holding it together for everyone for a long time. Your family, your work, your friends. You are the capable one. The strong one. The one who has her shit together. But something fundamental is shifting on the inside. Only you know.
The roles that once fit like your second skin now feel ill-fitting and claustrophobic. You look in the mirror and barely recognise the woman staring back.
Your mind says, I am falling apart. Your soul says, no, not falling apart. Divinely re-arranged. My love, listen to me carefully. You are not falling apart. You are being lovingly dismantled by your own soul.
What you are experiencing is a sacred crisis, soul rebellion. Your body, your psyche, your soul, they are staging a magnificent coup against everything that has kept you small, silent, and disconnected. Every system in your being is rising up and saying “no more.” This is a breakdown. That will ultimately lead to your glorious rise.
If you say “yes” to it.
What is really happening in midlife?
We live in a culture that punishes and shames women for coming undone.
From the moment you could understand language, you have been taught to hold it together. To accommodate. To observe what was needed for you to gain love and approval.
You became an expert in managing everyone’s emotions, whilst burying your own so deep you eventually forgot they even existed. You sacrificed yourself quietly and called it love, called it duty, called it being a good woman. A strong woman. And good, strong women do not crumble, they do not unravel, they do not grieve, and they certainly do not rage.
But when the seismic dissolution of midlife comes, when the foundations you have carefully built your entire life upon begin to crack, you panic. You think that surely something is catastrophically wrong. And that wrong thing, well, it must be you. The medical establishment is only too happy to confirm this.
They tell you that you are hormonally deficient, that your body is malfunctioning, that your symptoms need managing. And the message is brutally clear, you are a problem that needs to be solved. The wellness industry packages it differently, of course, but the message is fundamentally the same.
The relentless drive to sell you supplements and meditation apps, all designed to help you “get through” to help you “feel like yourself again.” As if the goal is to go backwards.
