What can't you do at this age?

Let me tell you.......

Everyone has bad days.

Most women will agree that we can all have bad hair days.  (I watch my teens struggle to have straight hair when it’s curly, have wavy hair when it’s straight, and forever non-greasy hair despite being teens and always having greasy hair, and I can’t bear to tell them they’ll be having bad days for the rest of their lives, except if they go full warrior woman like Elizabeth Gilbert and shave it off). 

Anyhoo. 

Bad hair days. Bad cramps days. Peri-menopausal bad rage days. Screaming Heeby Jeeby days.  Bad hangover days.  Bad resentment-it’s-all-on-me days. 

That’s normal. That’s life. 

Then there are the bad years.  

The years that never seem to start, and the ones that never seem to end. 

The years that change us, the years that age us, the years we can barely remember but can never forget. 

That’s pretty normal too. That’s life for those of us who are not zen monks. 

And then, for some of us, there are the bad decades.  The periods that fly by in busyness or nothingness that we wake up and look in the mirror wondering where the last ten years went. 

I certainly had my decade of disaster and distress and disappointment and all the D’s:  Derangement. Disillusionment. Depression.  Five years of forming a family, trying for babies, losing babies, having babies, loving babies, never sleeping. I had a four day break before my mum had a devastating stroke days after being at the birth of my youngest daughter; a stroke that left her paralysed and brain damaged, needing 24 hour care, catapulting me into my ‘sandwich years’, sandwiched between care of my mum and dad and my small children for the next five years. And then my husband left. Yeah that was a decade and a half. 

Many of those experiences are normal though. They are part of the merry-go-round of midlife. But that doesn’t mean it’s normal to feel so disconnected you’ve started to ghost yourself.  The overwhelm is not, should not, or needs to be the normal experience for women. 

I’ve said it before, and I’l say it again: women in midlife are the busiest, and least supported, cohort of society.  We aren’t overwhelmed because we are incompetent, lazy or not actually the superwoman we are told we’re supposed to be (with glossy lips).  We simply need more help to do what we need to do. Just for starters: 

• More support around our hormonal health and journey. 

• More support in the workplace to factor in the chaotic trajectory of a woman’s physical life as well as her roles as major care giver on multiple levels, alongside main home-manager. 

• More support in terms of managing our psychological and emotional needs as we navigate this transition from patriarchy to equity, and deal with all the bullshit out-dated societal expectations and unrealistic standards thrown our way. 

And if we can learn to ask for the help, rather than drown in the bad days then we have a chance to take advantage of this unique, extended, full-of-possibility midlife.

Because there are also really good days. 

Really transformative years. 

Really enriching decades. 

Years ago, I met an old crinkly-eyed man in Vietnam while I was backpacking round SE Asia. We were playing chess and I just felt like I was in the presence of wisdom. He likely thought he was in the presence of a right eejit.  Or more likely a precious, unenlightened, ignoramus.  But anyhow, I was 26 and still had a lot to learn. 

I must have said something ridiculously unaware like I really liked the easy vibe of the country. I may or may not have started the sentence with ‘hey man.”

He looked at me with those old wise eyes that kindly didn’t roll when I spoke, and smiled. “That’s the difference between you in the West and us in the East. In the West you are brought up to believe you deserve happiness. That if you work hard and be kind you somehow deserve a good and perfect life. Here in the East, we are brought up to believe life is life. You deserve nothing.  If happiness comes your way, embrace it as it likely won’t last. If sorrow comes your way, hold on as it likely won’t last. Life is for living, either way.”

I never forgot that conversation. 

It really helped me when I was going through my tough decade. 

I’ve written this before in this newsletter, and in my book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter that we are the generations of women right noto redefine what age means. 

The old pseudo-posturing that younger is still better is outdated because we are redefining midlife like never before.

40 is not the new 30; it’s the new 40, redefined, reformed, redesigned. 

50 is not the new 20; it’s the new 50, the most beautiful and healthy 50 in history.

60 is not the new 40; it’s the new 60, a total reinvention. Literally. Not even a hundred years ago life expectancy for women was 57.9.

And 70? A whole new age. 

Here’s the thing about the bad days. They are a normal part of life, but the overwhelm is not.   Brené Brown is talking a lot at the moment in her podcast about the impact of the human scale.  The overwhelm and the expectations and the marathon days are not normal and we should be fighting that with every bone in our HRT-enriched bodies. (I write here about knowing the water you are swimming in.)

But bad days? Yes. Bad years? Also, yes, Bad decades, perhaps. 

But here’s what is also true. Good days. Better years. Redefining decades. 

Often when I’m working with a client, they focus on the bad days, years and decades.  Of course they do. They think it’s become their normal. The ‘new normal’ as the phrase goes.  They too believe it is perfectly normal and acceptable to have totally lost themselves in the mire of midlife, being all things to all people, and feeling “guilty” being anything to themselves. (I literally spoke with a new client yesterday.  She was more or less single-handedly raising a family of four children, while her husband worked on the farm he loved. She also worked, so essentially had two full time jobs. Funnily enough she was burnt out, resentful, and at the end of her tether, and yet still used the word “guilty” when she talked about wanting to go sea swimming on occasion.)

And I have to remind them - and myself - that the bad days go and the good days are possible.   And what’s even more important is that we have years now that could not have been imagined. 

Our lives are constantly evolving and becoming.

Your 40’s is not too old to go back to college, to find love, to go solo travelling, change job.

Your 50’s is only the beginning of a whole new stage of life. A beginning of adventure perhaps. Or of purpose. It’s now a decade where you can start a business, leave a marriage, go travelling, step off the corporate ladder and open a bakery, quit people pleasing and take up self-care.

Your 60’s is a new opportunity to live life on your terms. Go for the big job. Write a book. Go part-time and take up golf.

(These are all things me, my friends or my clients have done.)

Ten years ago, this was the worst year of my life, at the end of the worst decade. Now I’m living a life I love (not saying it’s not hard and someone miraculously does the laundry, but I’ve become someone and landed in a place I could not have imagined back then.)

To counter the question many women silently whisper to themselves through the prism of that outdated narrative “what can’t I do now I’m this age,” I love to ask a more relevant question: “what can I not do?”

The answer is very little.

There is nothing you can’t desire that isn’t your right to fight for.  The bad days aren’t there to diminish our worth or make failures of us. They are a part of life. If we can get out from under the overwhelm, we’ll have a lot less of them. And the good days are there to be lived too. 

Either way, bad day or good, I’m with the wise, crinkly-eyed man from Vietnam: life is for living.

I’d love to know how you think about what you cna do now at whatever age you are, 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 to take a moment to check in on your life to see how you can do to have more good days, 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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For my paid subscribers I’m including a coaching model below to help you address the overwhelm as a place rather than a state so you can see where you might be able to get yourself out of a bad day quicker.