Hailey had hosted her family’s Christmas celebration since she and her wife had moved into their house almost two decades ago. She can’t remember when she had offered to take it over from her mom, and she’s not sure she actually did. It was more like people started showing up on her doorstep with green bean casserole and bundles of wrapped gifts.
But this year, she told me, she was done. She’d been thinking about backing out for years, but could never muster the courage to throw such a wrench in tradition. Her kids loved running around the house with their cousins and her siblings each had their cozy corners to hang. She herself loved the wafting smell of sweet ham and pecan pie, but she was just so tired by the time guests even arrived. And by the time they left, scanning around at the piles of dishes and strewn wrapping paper, she often wanted to cry.
She’d already blown up once in the family group chat as people talked about what time to arrive. No one had asked her when she’d like them – they had just started explaining what was best for them. She just couldn’t do it anymore. And so she’d sent a harsh text saying that Christmas at her house was canceled.
Her brother had sent a reply that read, “Okay….. Midlife crisis much?” With a laughing face emoji.
After recovering her phone from having thrown it, Hailey felt immediately guilty. Maybe it was a midlife crisis. She’d always been happy to host Christmas and Fourth of July and almost every other family gathering. She’d spearheaded the family trips and coordinated the birthday celebrations. She liked organizing and hosting, she thought. But then, she paused.
Did she like orchestrating everything? She thought she did, but she was also realizing at this moment that she wasn’t sure she’d ever really thought about it. It had become such a familiar refrain – “Hailey is the planner!” – that she genuinely hadn’t questioned it.
Her mind drifted back to her days growing up. She remembered helping her mom busily straighten the house the day before guests were coming. They spent hours preparing desserts. She could hear her mom on the phone, assigning each person something to bring. She had remembered enjoying this time with her mom, but she realized as she thought more about it, what she’d actually wanted was for her mom to stop and to play with her. She had fantasized about curling up in bed while her mom read her Anne of Green Gables. She’d longed for that, but in its absence she settled for being her helper.
After years of assisting in the organizing of things, Hailey was pretty good at it. So when she was having a hard time making friends around middle school, Hailey realized something important. If she planned the party, she couldn’t be left off the guest list. She coordinated sleepovers, planned roller skating outings, and made a birthday cake for each friend. Everyone seemed wowed by her organizational skills and hospitality. When they would periodically thank her, she’d respond, “Oh, I just love to do it!”
Several decades later, she wasn’t so sure. She’d recently been wondering if she was in fact an introvert, for one. She’d also begun to recognize how difficult it actually was to coordinate things. She did it often, but the effort it required had her considering ADHD. And then there was the ever-growing stack of books piled up her nightstand, waiting for her to put down her laptop and finally start reading them.
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You’ve probably seen at some point the demoralizing graph of how happiness proceeds over the lifespan. The vertical axis on this famous graph is our degree of happiness, and the horizontal axis is the decades of our lives. The graph is a distinct U shape. It tells us that happiness starts out high in youth and swerves downward, hitting a low point in midlife. Less demoralizing is the fact that it makes a significant upward swing as we get into older age, even surpassing our satisfaction in youth. But there’s still that bottom of the U-shaped curve.
There are all kinds of intuitive reasons that midlife captures the bottom of the curve. People are often in the thick of raising kids (needy, yet distant teens especially!), grinding away at careers, developing aches and pains, and holding the heavy weight of caregiving and cultural pressure to succeed. And quite interestingly, there are also likely biological reasons for the dip given that other mammals like apes and orangutans experience the same midlife U-shaped curve.
This happiness drop-off has leant itself to our culture’s midlife crisis narrative. We’ve come to think about this season as a particularly hard one, and one that spurs some of us to do things that are outside of our character. We become dissatisfied in our relationship. We question our professional ambitions. We paint our bedroom a radical new color. Have we changed? Have we lost it? The crisis narrative frames these impulses toward change as deviations from the steady, true self – ‘crazy’ blips or, for women, hormonally-driven erraticness.
Having worked with women in this season for years, having studied it, and having begun to navigate it myself, I don’t think these changes are evidence that we’ve lost our way. I wonder, instead, if we’re beginning to find it. What we call a midlife crisis may actually be the crisis of an identity that was never entirely ours to begin with.
What if the happiness on the left side of the graph that characterizes our youth is a fundamentally different kind of happiness from that on the right in our later life? The happiness of youth centers around approval, belonging, achievement, and meeting expectations. Later, our values bend toward congruence, freedom, and wholeness. What if midlife represents the painful period of recalibration of what actually comprises that happiness?
More fundamentally, what if midlife is a kind of molting of an outer shell that has kept us safe and initially satisfied, but that no longer fits? What if it’s a period of reckoning, unraveling, rebuilding? I’ve come to be convinced that it is – that there is a profound and inescapable task to midlife. It may not be the happiest period of our lives, but what if that’s okay? It may just be the most transformative.
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Understanding the transformation of midlife requires an understanding of the way that we become who we think we are, which often starts much earlier. Hailey, like all of us, was born with some particular temperamental traits – a genetic core that determined, for example, how sensitive she is to sensory input and what her biological rhythms are. She was also born with two very fundamental needs – one for authenticity and one for attachment.
These needs are wired into us as humans, as psychiatrist Gabor Maté has explained. The need for authenticity is the drive to know, experience, and express what’s true about you; everything from “I’m hungry,” to “I don’t like the way that feels to me.” The need for attachment is the drive to stay connected to the people who will care for and support you.
What inevitably happens in early life in both big and small ways is that our authenticity needs come into conflict with our attachment needs. Somewhere along the way, we learn that we need to off-load at least some of the authenticity needs in service of keeping our caregivers close. That might look like not being able to express anger because it makes dad uncomfortable and retreat. It might look like not being able to make joyful messes because it makes mom overwhelmed and tense. Our caregivers not staying connected is certain death for a helpless mammal, so we will choose attachment needs every time over authenticity.
How does this all relate to who we become? Well, the authentic parts of ourselves that we repeatedly need to shove down or not express become what Carl Jung and others have called our shadow parts. (For a soft introduction to shadow work, read this.) Our shadow parts often get disowned by us because we’ve recognized, early on and often unconsciously, that they are not convenient or celebrated. Hailey learned, before she could have ever named it as such, that staying close to mom meant putting aside her desire for rest and play and instead being a big helper. She learned that bringing others close meant putting aside her desire to be pursued and instead always taking charge. The desires – for play, rest, being included – became her shadows.
Hailey then grew up practicing her strategies for organizing and taking charge over and over, getting a lot of positive reinforcement from others. It may not have been that she didn’t enjoy these things, but the reality was that they were incomplete. They weren’t sitting beside her need for play, rest, and being included, they were blotting them out. They had become a sort of hard outer skeleton that kept her moving through the world.
Fast forward finally to midlife, where we see things start to shift. Women often describe it as a time when they just can’t pretend anymore, when they just can’t hold it in in the same way, and it reminds me of the cicadas that we have here in my city. When they are ready to molt, they climb out of the darkness of the underground and attach to a tree while their old exoskeleton splits along the back.
Sometimes the splitting is softer and gradual, and sometimes it’s a more violent ripping open. The identity that once held us tucked seemingly safely inside is starting to fall away. As that happens, we get to start looking at the adaptations of our youth – all of the ways that we learned to preserve attachment, perhaps at the expense of some of our authenticity – and decide what we want to do with them. We get to examine our shadow parts and begin to welcome them back.
This is perhaps the best part – meeting our shadows. We start to discover in midlife, whether as a function of fluctuating hormones, changing relational dynamics, or just the season we’re in, so many of the emotions we’d disallowed ourselves, the desires we’d shunted, the interests we’d pushed aside. I know midlife women who have discovered everything from their love of painting to sexual kinks to the value of their rage. Things they hadn’t allowed themselves to consider or explore were now on the table.
And they just couldn’t lie anymore about who they were. They struggled with whether this was a new version of themselves, and if so, whether it was true and fair to the people around them. The reality is that our midlife awakening is often wholly inconvenient to those who have come to expect a particular version of us. It can be disorienting, and we can face a lot of pushback.
Others’ reactions are often paired with a certain fragility that we experience when we’re first exploring ourselves in midlife. The cicada coming forth from the exoskeleton is emerging soft and vulnerable, no other protection yet built around its frame. This tenderness calls for some kind of guarding, places where it can begin to explore without threat of being shut down. Those could be in therapy, community groups, or the pages of a sacred journal – or ideally all three.
And when allowed the space to begin to explore and embody this unguarded self, this self that is working to welcome home shadows, we start to ask different questions of ourselves. Jungian analyst James Hollis, who writes extensively and beautifully about midlife, tells us that we move from, “What is the world asking from me?” to “What now does the soul ask of me?”
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I believe there is a natural movement toward this kind of transformation, one that often grows louder in midlife. We don’t necessarily have to go looking for it. Sometimes it arrives in gentle waves, an accumulating sense that something no longer fits. Other times it comes as a tsunami, a fierce grace that dismantles the life we thought we knew.
There are ways, of course, that we can try to avoid it. We can cling to the parts of our identity that have kept us safest, continuing to reenact the same patterns we always have. We can bury our heads in the sand, refusing to notice that our skeleton is starting to crack. And we can spend years trying to squeeze ourselves back into a shape that no longer fits us.
It’s a sad and even dangerous thing to resist the midlife molting process. While we might think we’ll feel more secure inside the old skeleton, our authentic self cannot survive the stuckness of a structure that doesn’t fit for too long. Eventually, we must release the thing that once protected us.
Ultimately, midlife is calling on us to become more whole. The bottom of that U-shaped curve isn’t just representing the point when life gets most difficult. It’s representing the point where the identity we’re living in can no longer hold the person we’re becoming.
And on the other side of that point, we can look forward to a life of greater authenticity and wholeness – something less dependent on approval or safety or others’ judgments. We can host Christmas or not, understand the resentment we’d always brushed aside, take up painting or start a new job. We’ll frustrate some people, we’ll make mistakes, and it will all be in service of a life that is uniquely ours.
