They Thought I Was Unraveling. I Was Finally Finding Courage.
I was sitting in my teenage bedroom, watching my two cats settle into their new surroundings. They'd made the journey with me from my rented flat in Essex back to my parents' house in London. I was 35. This wasn't the plan.
Somehow I’d ended up as a divorced, debt-ridden woman in a corporate job that was slowly suffocating her. And I wasn’t sure how any of it had happened.
The Life That Was Killing Me
Before my early midlife crisis, I’d had everything lined up the way it was supposed to be. The husband everyone approved of. The respectable job. The expected trajectory. I even took vitamins to prepare my body for the family I was supposed to want.
There was only one problem. I didn’t want any of it.
What I wanted was to feel seen in my own life. I wanted to write the words I longed to read. I wanted to pick up a camera and see if I could capture the snapshots forever playing in my mind. I wanted to travel to places I never thought I'd see, and risk failure, and not having all the answers.
Instead, I stayed where I thought I belonged, doing what was expected, and getting approval from people whose opinions shouldn't have mattered as much as they did.
Until the tipping point came and my carefully constructed reality came crashing down like a building blasted with dynamite.
The surprise was that I was the one who lit the fuse. I walked away from My Perfect Life because I couldn't stand being in it any longer. That's what happens when we ignore our truth. It finds a way to surface.
The Even Messier Part
I wish I could tell you that I immediately walked into a wonderful liberating next chapter. Instead, I embarked upon a decade of too much wine, way too many cigarettes, and an uncanny ability to choose unsuitable men who only saw me spiral further.
But beneath all of that, I still had those heartfelt yearnings and whispers of want. The small bashful dream that maybe, just maybe, there was something more for me.
I stopped drinking so much wine. I stopped sleeping with men who didn't deserve me. (I held onto the cigarettes for a few years longer - old habits die hard.)
My dreams of writing, traveling, and taking photos of things that made me feel alive persisted. But so did my reality of debt, divorce, and the belief that the corporate world was where success was and maybe I just needed to try harder to fit in.
So I kept trying. And I kept failing.
Eventually, I gave notice on my rented flat. And that was how I found myself back in my teenage bedroom.
Remembering Who I Was
Living with my parents in my thirties brought up all kinds of emotions. But it gave me an opportunity to pay off my debt and step away from the cycle of scarcity. My family thought I was getting back on my feet so I could rebuild The Right Life - properly this time.
But once again, that wasn’t what I wanted.
I paid off my debt and I saved up some money. And then I surprised everyone by announcing I was going to India for six months.
Friends thought I’d become that clichéd woman who was running off to find herself. But that wasn’t what I was doing. I was trying to remember myself. Remember who I was before all the rubble of This Is What Matters in Life had piled up around me.
My trip was illuminating in a number of ways. To my dismay, I discovered that some things do indeed travel with you, and changing location doesn’t magically change the past. But I also realized that I’d been carrying around a whole lot of baggage. And there was a lot of it that I could finally set down.
When I returned home, I had no job, no savings, and once again I was living with my parents. My teenage bedroom now felt like it was mocking me.
The temptation to return to The Right Life was always there. But so was the knowledge that I'd die in it.
I was dating again. A good man. Perfectly fine. Perfectly acceptable. Perfectly stifling.
I'm going to die anyway, I thought. Perhaps I could live a little first?
I ended the perfectly acceptable relationship. I bought a camera and I began taking photographs that meant something to me. I decided to stop using my married name but I didn't want my maiden name either, so I chose a whole new name and legally changed it by deed poll.
People thought I was unraveling.
It's almost laughable because I'd been unraveling for years when I was checking all the expected boxes. But because it was the societally approved version of coming undone, it was somehow okay. Now I was finally finding the courage to carve out the life I wanted. If I was unraveling then it felt pretty amazing.
Learning to Trust Myself
It’s not easy to tune out of the world’s expectations or judgments and tune into your own inner knowing. The knowing you’ve likely been conditioned to turn away from your whole life. I call it “the story beneath the story”. The story that can change a life, or save a life.
Tuning into, and trusting, my own story saved me. It saw me move across a continent. Begin two businesses. Marry a man who could match my spirit. Center creativity in my life instead of suppressing it. Get more courageous with each passing year and achieve goals I never thought were possible for me.
Truth and courage are baked into my life now. I get called "brave" often. Sometimes, I remember the woman I once was and how unimaginable this life would have been to her.
But then I remember she did imagine it. She had a breath of a dream and took shaky steps towards it. She failed and messed up on many parts of the journey. There were difficult days and long nights.
But she did it. And even when things felt impossible, it was her life and she could breathe in it.
What I Want You to Know
I'm not suggesting you need to go to another country or change your name to live your own story. (Although I'm absolutely cheering you on if you do!)
But I am saying that your life is not something to show up in half-heartedly. It's not something that offered you a window of opportunity a few decades ago and has now firmly closed.
Society doesn't get to determine or dictate it.
If the idea of creating meaningful change terrifies you, then hi. Me, too. But fear doesn't have to be a barrier.
I don't believe in fearlessness, but I refuse to let fear stand in my way. As Georgia O'Keeffe so beautifully said: "I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
We can age afraid and stuck, or we can age courageously and with purpose. Either way, we're aging.
Living the Story You Want
I recently decided to take some more of my “story beneath the story” experiences and put them together in a way that might be helpful for others. That’s how Aging Courageously: A Guide to Goal Setting & Purposeful Living came to be born.
It’s a 5 day audio course comprised of story telling, heart-centered practices, meditations, and practical tools to help you achieve goals at any age. Because I’m damned if we’re going to drown out our dreams just so we can live lives that suck the soul from us.
I want you to know that the best of everything has not passed. There is new joy to experience. There are still an abundance of firsts to delight in, and we do not have to stay in our tidy little lives, not daring to rock the boat or go for our dreams because it might upset some societal sensibilities that say precisely nothing about the truth of our lives and what it means to fully live them.
It’s never too late to live yours.
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