Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.
That’s the line that hit me with a wallop from Brene Brown’s blog post, The Midlife Unraveling.
To call it a crisis sounds like a car crash, intense and immediate, then you simply put your life back in order. But no, Brown counsels. It’s a slow burn.

Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:
I’m not screwing around. 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. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.
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.

I have been in a terrible car crash, and I’ve seen how the obvious physical damage, both to me and the car, brought people running. Onlookers called 911, EMTs tended my wounds and whisked me to the hospital.
No one calls 911 for you when you’re stewing in a sense that you’re not using your precious time on Earth wisely. So, as Brown says, you’ll probably try to pretend you’re OK.
Midlife re-evaluation can (and likely will) happen for anyone. But in addition to our stage in life bringing experience and perspective, women get the added component of big hormonal changes.

What if menopause gives us permission to say we’re not OK?

My insightful career coach Kim Ann Curtin, like Brene Brown, thinks of midlife crisis in different terms. She described it as a life crossroads.
For women, in particular, she said it’s a time when we start to put the focus back on our own needs, particularly for those who’ve spent years too busy being a mom to have time for themselves.
As our hormones stir up a storm in menopause, they force a reckoning, she said. If you let it, menopause gives you permission to feel anger and express needs you might have kept bottled up.
Julie Holland take a similar stand. I’m reading her book, “Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy.”
The underlying premise is that society tells us being emotional makes us weak, but it’s actually our superpower. It’s the source of our intuition, the fuel for our connections.
In a chapter titled, “Perimenopause: The storm before the calm,” Holland writes:

The most interesting thing about menopause is what happens after. Women come into their own. It’s a time of redefining and refining what it is we want to accomplish in our time left. …
Menopause is a time for pruning. It is our vision of the midlife crisis, where we weed out those who are “toxic,” prioritizing and further honing our mission, whatever it may be.

Part of what’s happening, she explains, is that “estrogen creates a veil of accommodation.” It puts us in a nurturing frame of mind so we’ll be caring, committed mothers. As estrogen declines in menopause, so does our willingness to tolerate BS.
So many of my friends are in some stage of the change that I frequently find myself in conversations about hot flashes, sleepless nights and weight gain.
What Curtin and Holland are inspiring me to do is to introduce a deeper conversation topic with menopausal friends: Beyond tending to the physical discomfort, how are your changing hormones giving you clarity about what you need most in your life?
Guys, you have a chance to ask the women in your life how the world looks different as their hormones change, then use that opening to share how you might feel differently than when you were in your 20s or 30s. We get the physical manifestation of reverse puberty, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t in an emotional transition, too.

About rebranding midlife crisis … maybe midlove?

If this all feels heavy and scary, it doesn’t have to be. It’s big, but it can ultimately be so beautiful.
Coming back to Brene Brown’s midlife piece, she says:

I find it easier to think about midlife as midlove. After two decades 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.

And Julie Holland writes:

I cling to one Gallup poll from 1998 that asked older women when they felt happiest and most fulfilled, and a slim majority chose the years between 50 and 65.

Our 80-something neighbor, Charles, gave us advice that John loves to quote: Your 40s, 50s and 60s are your prime of life.
That doesn’t sound like such a crisis, does it?

Related posts:

• Maybe it’s not a midlife crisis but the happiness U-curve instead
• Letting my gray hair show is an act of protest
• Following your bliss, taking a hero’s journey — inspired by Finding Joe
• Steve Jobs reflects on the meaning of death
• Measure your success by more than your title and pay
• We got to try retirement thanks to our neighbor, Charles