Investing in the quality of your life?
You're her only hope
I turned 55 this week and honestly? I am 55 and feeling fabulous!
Although I’ve likely celebrated more birthdays than I will again, I don’t feel old, even though I’m older. I don’t feel worn away even if I do feel worn out sometimes. I don’t feel invisible because I am embracing the art of seeing myself.
Do you know what I feel? I feel fucking ready.
Ready for more. Ready for change. Ready for whatever I can create in this space I have left, and ready for what else is coming my way.
When my mum turned 55 she cried. I was a teenager with youthful zest dripping through my petulant pores, and so could not imagine what it could feel to be her age. My life was going to be about LIVING, not laundry. It was going to be full of ADVENTURE not endless meal production. It was going to be OUT THERE, not stuck ‘in here’ in domestic drudgery.
Here’s what I know now.
Stillness is as much an adventure as scaling a mountain.
Living has laundry alongside the loving, and laughing and losing and learning.
Out there is sometimes amazing and sometimes brutal, and in here is boring and also beautiful. (I just hung my laundry outside yesterday for the first time this year in a warm early-Spring sun with birds chirping and the promise of new buds peeping up around the place and it felt beautiful amid the boringness.)
But here’s the big difference. When my mum was 55, we were still deeper back in a patriarchal system that politely suggested women of a certain again step back from mainstream view. Having fulfilled their ‘main’ role as mother, nurturer and facilitator of other'‘s lives, it was time to retreat.
She didn’t feel old necessarily but society was telling her she was. It was a crueler time back then - one where women had one main role and when that was fulfilled, your relevance was retracted.
Today you get to decide your relevance - and in the work I do to help women find balance, direction and joy in their lives - this often starts with being relevant to yourself.
My life has had many curveballs ,and also many winding beautiful roads.
Just ten years ago, two weeks before my 45th birthday I discovered my husband was gay. An unhappy marriage was now a devastating dismantling of a family, with me seemingly being left to manage the ‘inside’ part of caring for kids for the majority of the time. We had just entered the 5th year of my mum’s 24 hour care after her stroke four days after my youngest baby was born had left her brain damaged and paralysed. She would be dying in my arms just months later. My life was a shit-show and I didn’t have a remote control to press fast forward out of it. I had to wade through it, and over these ten years I made decisions and choices that give me the quality of my life today. To ask for help, to get support, to invest in my health and fitness, to build my community, to fight for myself, to take a bet on myself and go back to college and start a new career, and to care for my girls and dad but not abandon myself.
That was the greatest investment in my today self I made - to learn to be relevant to myself too.
One of the reasons I do what I do is because when my mum was this age, she was disappeared from society. My life is so different. What I see in my own life, and with the wonderful women I coach, is that this age - and so many ages and stages - is always only the beginning, or a reset, or a new chance for change. We have an extra 20 years of life to be lived - but we have to invest in the quality of that extra life in a way our mother’s couldn’t.
We live in the most pressurised time and every day matters not just in terms of managing ourselves but managing our emotional energy.
At 55 I know that every decision, every intention, every action I take over the next year, two years, three years will impact on the quality of my life for the next 15/20 years.
That’s the same if you are 30 and chasing career and perhaps hoping to build a family, or 40 when you’re maybe hanging on by your fingernails juggling it all, or 50 and maybe facing lots of change, or 60 when you’re really having to redefine what you want the next stage to look and feel like (and the possibilities are now endless!).
My birthday gift to myself is recognising that every day I invest in myself now, will impact the quality of the rest of my life; the quality of my community, the quality of my friends and relationships, the quality of my health and fitness, the quality of my business, the quality of living life on my terms, pursuing the passions and purpose that I have.
I help women find the right balance between the potential and the pressure of this modern living because I know how fucking hard that can be. And it all starts with the quality of the relevance of your life to yourself.
I needed help to get here, and I will need help to go forward. Being relevant - to myself and then to others - will not be dictated by some external bullshit narrative. It will be in my hands: supporting myself when it feels hard, rejoicing in myself when it feels good, pushing myself when it feels uncomfortable, seeing myself when I feel disregarded, hearing myself when I feel smothered.
Because you and me are the generations of women who get to resist the retreat, and say “Fuck ageing gracefully - I’m going to age powerfully from every age.”
💪 💕
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Also…… 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 NEXT WORKSHOP NEWS 🌟 🌟 🌟 below.
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There is an online option on the 25th March and an in-person gathering in Dublin 6 on the 28th March….. all details are at https://www.themidlifecoach.org/overwhelm-session.
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My paid subscribers get a discount - email me at alana@alanakirk.com
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Happy Birthday Alana! In my 55th year, I moved to Vermont, decided to quit my job, and hired a life coach. That last one was a game-changer. Instead of striving to find what I should BE, I slowed down and found what I wanted to DO.