Jill Thomas is a rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who believes life takes her where she needs to go, no matter the roundabout path.
Today, as I ramble, I'm pondering everything in this world that makes me feel the most comfortable in my own skin. I am a chameleon. I nurtured an ability to blend in because I've always powerfully craved a sense of belonging.
I parse my life into stages, blocks of time, and experiences with discrete beginnings and endings, the before so thoroughly complete it barely leeches into what follows. I've been a bullied middle schooler, a popular high school party animal, a trendy urbanite, a preppy college sorority girl, a Save the Trees environmentalist, a West Coast restaurateur, and a private jet-setting marketing executive.
I've lived and then shed these identities one and all. I don't regret my ability to change my spots. Still, as I enter mid-life, I feel a powerful pull to find my true self in this incongruous amalgamation of identities. I'm craving the discovery of "the real me," if such a thing exists.
Perhaps I'm a cliché, and craving self-discovery is a common symptom of the existential anxieties inherent in mid-life. After all, it's a time when we must face restricted possibilities alongside our pending mortality.
Either way, I plan to have another 30 years on this planet and want to spend them living my best life. To do so, I need to know myself a little better.
Meanwhile, the internet fills my brain with insecurity-inducing and conflicting advice about mid-life potential. It constantly reminds me that I am declining in every way possible while inundating me with the myth of a mid-life transformation.
This myth tells us that we can still be anything we want at any age with the necessary vision and willpower. Still, this myth fails the test of my everyday experience. I feel like my mid-life dreams are better anchored in my well-earned abilities and life experiences.
For me, the myth of mid-life transformation breeds anxiety. It leaves me facing down my various struggles while feeling inadequate for not living up to the idea that the world remains my oyster.
It also leaves me feeling wrong about my waning ambition. I never thought I would want to stop working, but now I increasingly covet a life with fewer obligations. I find myself craving retirement, whatever that means.
The upside of mid-life is we have decades of experience under our belts. We've experienced many crises that have allowed us to discover our strengths. We can better put our problems into perspective and search for solutions more calmly.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow argues that in mid-life, we move from deficiency motivations to growth motivations. Deficiency motivations are fed by lack. For example, people with no food will be consumed by finding nourishment. Those who lack self-esteem will be driven to prove their worth. By contrast, growth motivations are fed by the human need to realize our full potential.
In mid-life, we have more potential to move from deficiency to growth because we have more space and time for self-discovery. We no longer have the pressures to get high grades, land our first job, find a life partner, arrive at such-and-such a position by age 30, and so on. I am watching my kids go through this and do not envy the strain and anxiety it puts on them.
Unlike them, I no longer feel an urgency to build a life, and I have tasted the freedom that self-knowledge creates and am craving more. This leaves me pondering what makes me feel genuinely comfortable in my skin and how I might become my true self.
So, I wrote a list of things I like and don't in my journal. I review the list weekly and strive to spend more time on the things I like and less time on the others. It's a tiny first step to figuring out who I am and want to be.
I would love to hear about your mid-life transformation in the comments!
READ MORE > JT's Tales From The Trail, Rambler Cafe Blog.
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