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the midlife journey: an excerpt from wholehearted
In the midst of the remodel I've been working on manuscripts for The Gifts of Imperfection, an inspiration guide that will be published in April 2010, and Wholehearted, the story of of the 2007 breakdown spiritual awakening. Writing while they demolish a bathroom a few feet away has been good for me. Now I get this quote by Anne Lamott: “I used to not be able to work if there were dishes in the sink. Then I had a child and now I can work if there is a corpse in the sink. Because you’re always on borrowed time."
I'm also very excited about an event that I'm doing in September in Houston. The event is based on my research and my personal midlife experiences - "The Midlife Journey: Falling Apart, Growing Up, and Finding Joy." Tickets just went on sale Monday and there's limited seating remaining. If you live in Houston, join us!
To celebrate all this midlife goodness, I want to share an excerpt on midlife from the second chapter of Wholehearted. Enjoy!
An excerpt from Wholehearted: Adventures in Growing Up, Falling Apart and Finding Joy
Copyright © 2009 Brené Brown
Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.
By definition, you can’t control or manage an unraveling. You can’t cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect.
Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:
It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. The time has come to let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are.
If you look at each midlife “event” as a random, stand-alone struggle, you might be lured into believing you’re only up against a small constellation of “crises.” The truth is that the midlife unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low-grade anxiety and depression, quiet desperation, and an insidious loss of control. By low-grade, quiet, and insidious, I mean it’s enough to make you crazy, but seldom enough for people on the outside to validate the struggle or offer you help and respite. It’s the dangerous kind of suffering – the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is OK.
We go to work and unload the dishwasher and love our families and get our hair cut. Everything looks pretty normal on the outside. But on the inside we’re barely holding it together. We want to reach out, but judgment (the currency of the midlife realm) holds us back. It’s a terrible case of cognitive dissonance – the psychologically painful process of trying to hold two competing truths in a mind that was engineered to constantly reduce conflict and minimize dissention (e.g., I’m falling apart and need to slow down and ask for help. Only needy, flaky, unstable people fall apart and ask for help).
It’s human nature and brain biology to do whatever it takes to resolve cognitive dissonance – lie, cheat, rationalize, justify, ignore (if you need examples, look toward Washington, D.C. or Wall Street). For most of us midlifers, this is where our expertise in managing perception bites us on the ass. We are torn between desperately wanting everyone to see our struggle so that we can stop pretending, and desperately doing whatever it takes to make sure no one ever sees anything except what we’ve edited and approved for display.
What bubbles up from this internal turmoil is fantasy. We might glance over at a shabby motel while we’re driving down the highway and think, I’ll just check in and stay there until they come looking for me. Then they’ll know I’m crazy. Or maybe we’re standing in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher when we suddenly find ourselves holding up a glass and wondering, “Would my husband and kids take this struggle more seriously if I just started hurling all this shit through the window?”
Most of us opt out of the dramatic displays. We’d have to arrange to let the dog out and have the kids picked up before we checked into the lonely roadside motel. We’d spend hours cleaning up glass and apologizing for our “bad choices” to our temper tantrum-prone toddlers. It just wouldn’t be worth it, so most of us just push through until “crazy” is no longer a voluntary fantasy.
Many scholars have proposed that the struggle at midlife is about the fear that comes with our first true glimpse of mortality. Again, wishful thinking. Midlife is not about the fear of death. Midlife is death. Tearing down the walls that we spent our entire life building is death. Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you’re going down, and after that there are only two choices: staying down or enduring rebirth.
It’s a painful irony that the very things that may have kept us safe growing up ultimately get in the way of our becoming the parents, partners, and/or people that we want to be.
Maybe, like me, you are the perfect pleaser and performer, and now all of that perfection and rule following is suffocating. Or maybe anger and lashing out kept people at a safe distance and now the distance has turned into intolerable loneliness. There are also the folks who grew up taking care of everyone else because they had no choice. Their death is letting go of the caretaking, and their rebirth is learning how to take care of themselves (and work through the push-back that always comes with setting new boundaries).
Whatever the issue, it seems as if we spend the first half of our lives shutting down feelings to stop the hurt, and the second half trying to open everything back up to heal the hurt.
Sometimes when the “tear the walls down and submit to death” thing overwhelms me, I find it easier to think about midlife as midlove. After a decade of research on shame, authenticity, and belonging, I’m convinced that loving ourselves is the most difficult and courageous thing we’ll ever do. Maybe we’ve been given a finite amount of time to find that self-love, and midlife is the halfway mark. It’s time to let go of the shame and fear and embrace love. Time to fish or cut bait.
It's been so fun to work on both of these books. I'd love to know what you think!
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Reader Comments (88)
can't wait for the new book.
xoxo.
Every step of our life is a learning journey. Thank God.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh, how I wish this book had been around when I went through that process, feeling like the only person on earth whoever DID go through it..sigh..this is going to be a GREAT resource, and I have the idea that it'll help with the little deaths that keep on happening AFTER mid-life. Hip hip horray! I am so grateful for the internet...and the wonderful folks we can connect to through it!!! Can't wait for this book to come out!!!!!!!!!!!!
I got tears in my eyes reading this - it is so spot on with my own struggles (and fears). I think this is going to be a great book, Brene!
I do feel like I'm finally, really growing up. I still struggle but I can see progress as well now. I'm learning to accept all of me and no longer have a desire to be perfect or to eliminate the parts of myself that I disliked. I'm okay, as I am.
Mel
at a time when i feel gently held by a community of amazing women who share honestly and openly their experiences and wisdom.
i can't wait to read both of these new works!!!
YOU are a great blessing in my life.xo
I've been a longtime reader of your blog and often find myself both nodding and tearing up with the identification and grateful sense that oh, thank God, I am not alone. Today was no exception. I quoted you on my blog and hope that is okay. This is a gorgeous summary of so many of the things that I am feeling and struggling with right now. I need some help figuring out the HOW - particularly how to release the very walls and coping mechanisms that got me to where I am now but suddenly (or not so suddenly) seem to actually be in my way. But I keep hoping as long as I pay attention and keep thinking about it, I'll figure it out.
Thank you for being an incredibly wise and important guide on this journey.
Lindsey
www.adesignsovast.com
And as I read this, I thought of the, "Oof, ouch, ahhh!" that a wise woman once described. It applies.
thank you for this ... i am very much looking forward to reading this ... your honesty in your writing is incrediby powerful and compelling and thoughtful ...
This is exactly where I've been the last year. "The time has come to let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are."
I cannot wait for the book to come out.
Cheryl M.
I cannot wait to get my hands on this book.
What an amazing excerpt, you already have the wheels just a turning in my head as so many of these thoughts I feel already in my life. I am only 27, and already have felt overwhelmed and pressured with my life journey.
One passage in particular just totally related to how I feel. This one below:
It’s a painful irony that the very things that may have kept us safe growing up ultimately get in the way of our becoming the parents, partners, and/or people that we want to be.
I have been struggling with trying to be the person I am meant to become, that my heart and intuition are telling me to evolve into from others pressure, disapproval, or THEIR anxiety. Often I have found myself stopped dead in my tracks because of others constantly standing in my way telling me no, or giving me their disapproval. The real kicker is all this self guilt I place on myself after the fact. It's been a struggle. I am trying to find that balance of pleasing myself and being OK that others may not be happy with me or the choices I had made. But I guess in the end, their reaction to my actions is simply THIER CHOICE anyway. I must move on and keep growing. If they want to stay stuck in their fears/insecurities...that is their journey. I just do not want to miss out on anything anymore.
I just want to continue becoming.
I cannot wait for this book.
Thank you for sharing such an indepth glimpse with us.
You are so inspiring.
Thank you for making me feel OK.
Beautiful exerpt, I truly cannot wait to read the book...
Deb - love James Hollis' book too. I worked with him at the Houston Jung Center. I have this quote in the book,
“Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution is the idea of individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be – what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or especially, the easily intimidated, or the inflated ego. While revering the mystery of others, our individuation summons each of us to stand in the presence of our own mystery, and become more fully responsible for who we are in this journey we call our life.”
Also - Janie emailed and asked what the first chapter is about. I can't share too much, but here's the first paragraph of the first chapter:
"It was a nearly perfect day before the phone rang. By nearly perfect I mean somewhat normal. I had made it through the better part of an entire day without bursting into tears or questioning the meaning of my life. It all started out as a hopeful spring day."
Through your words, it feels incredibly good to be understood. At last.
What a special treat to share that chapter with us!
Oh to be more accepting ( of self )
and more honoring ( of self )
and less needing of others approval.
I can't escape this metamorphisis can I? I must listen and push thru
(albeit Grow). Thank God for the guiding lights from you and people like you who
have a wonderful way with words.
*I read all the comments, some had me laughing, while some had me going "I was
going to say that".
I can't wait to read the book (s).
Foreseeing
by Sharon Bryan
Middle age refers more
to landscape than to time:
it's as if you'd reached
the top of a hill
and could see all the way
to the end of your life,
so you know without a doubt
that it has an end—
not that it will have,
but that it does have,
if only in outline—
so for the first time
you can see your life whole,
beginning and end not far
from where you stand,
the horizon in the distance—
the view makes you weep,
but it also has the beauty
of symmetry, like the earth
seen from space: you can't help
but admire it from afar,
especially now, while it's simple
to re-enter whenever you choose,
lying down in your life,
waking up to it
just as you always have—
except that the details resonate
by virtue of being contained,
as your own words
coming back to you
define the landscape,
remind you that it won't go on
like this forever.
This is fabulous. Muchas gracias.
Personally, my knocking down right now involves me realizing that on the Myers-Briggs I was always a "high" T but only by design. Going through some personally issues I found out that naturally, I am an F and because of events in my life I was shutting down my feelings, not making decisions about things based on how I feel. That made me cold and now I want to reclaim my inner F but keep a splash of T. It's work, but I must say that your book and site is huge factor in that healing.
"There are also the folks who grew up taking care of everyone else because they had no choice. Their death is letting go of the caretaking, and their rebirth is learning how to take care of themselves (and work through the push-back that always comes with setting new boundaries)."
This is exactly to a T what I am going through right now. I have always been told I'm the oldest so I have to help out no questions asked, be a role model and was treated throughout my childhood as the third parent. I have just now since becoming pregnant with my second child have started to put up some boundaries. It is the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. The amount of guilt that goes along with this is unbelievable. But also the amount of anger b/c of the "push back" as you've said. I'm trying to remind myself these things take time and be patient with myself and my family. Oy vey!!
I really cannot wait for the book!
xoxo
I too have those fantasies of just leaving. On the rare occasion when I actually drive to work instead of riding my bike, I often think "What if I just keep going? Don't make the turn where I am supposed to? Would anyone notice? Could I just leave all the responsibility and turmoil behind?" Then I tell myself-"you know, if you were riding your bike you would be too lazy to go anywhere, so just go to work!" Ha Ha!
Definitely looking forward to reading this one! and a read along? have no idea how that works, but I'm in!
I enjoy this blog enormously, for your wisdom Brene and for the wisdom and hope shared in the comments by your readers.
PS I especially love the photo at the top of this post!