The Age of the Female Mid-Life Crisis
Or, if you're feeling like you want to chuck your life in and start again, this newsletter is for you
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Do you ever wonder if perhaps you’re having a mid (or quarter) life crisis? Perhaps you sit at your desk each day and wonder how you ended up in a career you once loved but now can’t work up any enthusiasm for. Or maybe you’ve created a vision board all about the new life you plan to lead in Bali, just the second the kids are out of the house and you’ve won the lottery? Or maybe, you’re just over the daily small frustrations and humiliations that form part of being a woman in today’s world?
If this is you then I have some good news for you. Being in a place where you wonder if you should change careers, or try to figure out whether you should have kids alone, or daydream about ditching your partner and running off with the smiley barista from the local coffee shop, is exactly where you should be. You’re going through something called “individuation” and it’s actually very psychologically healthy.
Individuation is part of our psychological development. It’s largely attributed to Carl Jung but you can find a version of it in pretty much every culture or religion. In its most basic form, individuation is the process whereby we start to separate our individual desires from those we’ve been conditioned to accept. For example, most of us will have grown up in a culture which told us happiness was linked to finding a partner, settling down, getting a well-paying job, maybe buying a house and having some kids. When we’re young our desires tend to be closely linked to those around us, so we take on the narrative of our parents, culture and friends. As we get older, however, we start to question these desires. We start to ask ourself, is this really what I want?
Traditionally, the mid-life crisis was seen as a male event. Our generation is the first time that women have had the social and economic freedom to be able to pursue their own individuation. If having a roof over your head and not having to worry about how you’ll buy shoes for your kids means sticking with the life you’ve chosen, no matter how much it pains you, you’re not likely to go chasing those dreams. Plus, the cliche of the middle-aged man disappearing from the family home in the middle of the night only to re-emerge six months later on a motorbike with a girlfriend half his age, made individuation look like something pathetic and destructive. So it’s no wonder we’ve shied away from it.
The stereotype of individuation makes it look as though we have to choose our own happiness at the expense of other people. That we can only truly be free when we tear down all the walls we’ve created and leave everyone else standing in the rubble. This isn’t the case. In her book, Untamed, Glennon Doyle claims there is “no such thing as one way liberation”, ie when we stay trapped in a situation that is making us unhappy we’re almost certainly trapping others with us. We’ve all worked with someone who was a beloved member of the team but when they left we realised how much more opportunity there was for the rest of us. And we’ve all been in a relationship with someone who didn’t want to be there as much as we did, so we clung onto them until they finally left and we realised life was so much better without them.
Nor does individuation mean that we have to make drastic choices. We don’t have to file for divorce or do a Jerry Maguire impression to free ourselves. We just have to listen to what we really want and start to follow it. Do you feel like your job doesn’t challenge you? You could quit. Or you could start a night-class where you’re learning something completely new. Feel like motherhood has become your whole personality? You could ditch the kids and ride off into the sunset on your new motorbike. Or you could ask yourself, “what are the parts of my personality that I miss and what do I need to let go of to make space for them again?” Most of the time individuation is a process of culling and nurturing. You need to identify what is no longer serving you and put your attention on the things that bring joy.
While Jung felt that individuation was something that happened in middle-age, a process by which we rejected the conformity society had forced upon us, modern psychologists actually think it’s something we’re do our whole lives. From the moment we’re born, we’re assessing the world around us and deciding which part we want to assimilate with and which part we want to reject. Individuation happens when we rebel against our parents as teenagers or when we move to another part of the country. It happens when we decide that we can’t be bothered to hold our stomach in for that photo or that our botox habit is costing too much and we’d rather spend the money on a treehouse (for us, not the kids). Each time we choose to stop doing something we should do and instead do something we want to do, we’re practicing individuation.
And then there are points in our life where we’re ready to overthrow everything we think we’ve ever wanted. I’m reminded of a large consultancy who once told me they’d surveyed all the women who’d left just before or just after making partner. They’d wanted to know what caused these women to leave. Did they want more money? Were they looking for greater work/life balance? Had they left to look after children? (It was 2013, that question was still acceptable). It turned out that none of the consultancy’s assumptions were correct. Those women had left because they’d looked at the big office and large paycheque that came with the role of partner and thought, “is this it?”. They’d wanted a chance to make an impact, to change company policies, to address behaviours and build a new way of working. They’d wanted to bring a bit of themselves as individuals to the organisation and instead they were being paid to fall into line.
The feeling of wanting something more, of chasing the next stage of individuation, seems to be a theme amongst my friends at the moment. And it’s not surprising to me. We live in a time when selling your soul for a job that doesn’t pay enough to cover rent, let alone buy a house, makes no economic sense. We’ve moved to big cities for the excitement and energy, only to find that we still live an hour commute away from our friends and the idea of “community” now means a selection of people you follow on social media but never see in real life. We were brought up on the fairytale of true love solving all our problems only to find ourselves in a constant war over the domestic load.
If you’re looking at your life and wondering why it is that even though you’ve got what you wanted it doesn’t feel as you hoped it would, then you’re probably going through individuation. When I look back at me as a teenager I was, quite frankly, an idiot. It would be ridiculous if the life I had planned out for myself then really matched who I am today. When we’re honest with ourselves, individuation isn’t just something that happens, it’s something that has to happen. We have to reassess who we are, what we want and what makes us happy. It’s how we grow as humans. And if we don’t grow then we’re just stagnating and rotting.
So, if you’re worried that your current feeling of life not being quite what you hoped it would be is the start of a mid-life crisis, then congratulations - it is! And it’s also the start of something wonderful.
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I love this, it is exactly how I’m feeling at the moment and has come at totally the right moment. Thank you 🙏