Are you revelling in your midlife complexity?
Celebrating your varied versions
Midlife is all about revelling in your complexity. It’s the key to ageing powerfully (which I’ve written about before, here.)
We often think that the joy to life is finding simplicity: that if we can just figure out the most effective way to keep a house clean, juggle career, home, parents and a bit of self-sanity, eat all the right food and make all the right moves we’ll be a lean, mean, youth-defying machine, and lead a simple, satisfying life.
But midlife is exactly when we should be revelling in our complexity, expanding our twists and turns, not straightening out the road ahead.
Early life is like a funnel… we start off wide and wondrous exploring our intricacies and interests, taking detours and dalliances, trying things on for size. But as we slowly progress through school, contort to family expectations and values, refine our career and desperation for social acceptability, we funnel ourselves down narrower and narrower paths until we are funnelled into one sort of life with a stable structure and the life of ladder ascension, one rung at a time.
But midlife becomes a time when you can start to call bullshit on that. When you can decide the ludicrous ladder is only leading to more stress and strain, or you want to shift the entire wall your ladder is leaning against. It’s when you want to retrieve all parts of yourself, expand and explore and extrapolate who you are from the laddering, madding crowd.
What I am loving about being 54 is the realisation over the last few years, that I can rebel the constraints and revel in the convolutions of being many things at once.
I can love dressing up to feel smart and stylish and I can just love slouching around in a skanky pair of shorts not washing for three days, walking the beaches in Donegal. I am fully both these women and many versions in between.
We often think we have to fit into one version of ourselves.
But one of the glories of midlife is understanding that you have many versions of yourself and it’s really important to feed and nourish and pander to all of them.
So many times when I’m coaching a woman in my work as The Midlife Coach and she expresses some form of frustration or confusion about who she is and how she feels she wants to be, I can see a wistfulness on her face yearning for how she feels deep inside she is or wants to be, but will say things like “I’m not the kind of person who…..” Or she tells me she has an urge, or feels a call to something but thinks that she can’t pursue that because it doesn’t fit with the most dominant version of herself. And I help her expand her internal horizons to find and foster and flourish in a variety of versions of herself.
I’m on holiday at the moment in Donegal and it’s amazing how quickly here I become one of the versions of myself that I love most… so absorbed with the expansive sky and drawn to the sand and sea I feel like I must have been a mermaid in a previous life. I shed layers of my main life like skin exfoliated from my feet on my relentless beach walks, my hair and lungs and skin salty and wild.
My brother brought my dad for a visit this time, and the other night he put on a slide show of our family from 1968. My poor daughters lost the will to live by about 1994 but I was enthralled watching the many versions of me: the versions from my family, versions with my new family as a mum, versions of the windy roads of my careers and experiences. The version of me today all wrapped up in successes and failures of those versions, and I hope to explore many more versions of myself yet. Ones as I keep growing and evolving, new ages and stages, learnings and leanings, explorations and exfoliations of self-limiting beliefs and constraints.
When I coach a woman who is entering a new stage of life, either kicking or screaming in pain or loss, or rushing forward with joy and impatience, we pull at the threads of her life to see what versions she wants to resurrect, invest in, or explore so that she can weave the next fabric of her life based on her varied versions not just the funnelled niche.
Watching the slideshow I could see so many threads of my life still playing out… adventures, travel, writing, teaching: revelling in my complexity, I now understand that simplicity is not refining yourself down to one version, but accepting all of those things are versions of me.
As a motivational and educational speaker, I love the version of me standing on a stage, feeling vibrant with knowledge and passion, sharing my work to help make women’s lives better, thriving on the attention of an audience, the bigger the better. It is such an important part of me. Yet, equally I love the version of me standing very much alone on a beach in the far west of Donegal, at the edge of the world, vibrant with the knowledge and passion of understanding that I am part of this magnificent world and nature and the only audience is the lap of the sea.
Both stages are ones on which I thrive, alive and alert. And I need both of them. If I just choose one of those versions, I would be a much lesser person. If I only stood on the public stage, I would burn out and be exhausted. If I only stood on the beach alone, I would diminish. It is only by accessing all of the versions of the funky party girl, the loner, the stage-seeker, the selfish adventurer, the selfless, loving mother, the independent warrior woman, all of the versions of me, am I fully me.
I have written before here in an essay called Are you living and AND life or an OR life? about the extraordinary power of using ‘and’. In my coaching, it is everything. We often come through the funnel of life using ‘or’ as our guide… it is here or there, I am this or that, I have to choose one or the other. And my job as a coach is to help someone explore the simple complexity of and.
By midlife, your versions are varied and entangled. Finding the fun versions, the adventurous versions, the carefree and careless versions, the playful rather than just the practical (a woman can be both), accessing the versions that may not run the days but will add deep richness to your life.
What are your versions and how can you weave them more fully into your complex, varied, wondrous self? I’d love to know how you feel about living more varied versions of yourself, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)
And please take a moment to like and share if you enjoyed it!
If you’d like some help exploring your various versions, I have a mini masterclass (a 15 minute video and worksheet) to help you explore and develop core versions of yourself each day to form your Midlife Daily 5. All the details are here.
And / or you can join me on a Happier Habits Adventure starting 9th September for 4 weeks, where I will give you really practical tools to be more proactive in connecting yourself and exploring those versions that need more attention. All the details are here.
If you’re a paid subscriber let me know if you’re interested and I’ll give you a 10% discount code. Just email me at alana@alanakirk.com
If you’d like to take a moment to check in on your life to see how you can manage things differently or stop ghosting yourself, you can book a one hour 1:1 Discovery Coaching Session with me where you get to think about you, how to manage this life you are living, and invest some time and thought on you. Radical idea that, is it? To invest some time and thought on you? Details are here.
Paid subscribers get a 10% discount - just email me at alana@alanakirk.com
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