This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
At age twenty-five, I was finally able to rent a car on vacation. I remember thinking, this is it—the last real milestone. Our whole lives are organized around them: graduating from one grade and moving on to the next, getting our license, becoming a legal voter, then a legal bar-goer. Then it’s graduating from school, getting a job, maybe meeting a partner, and having kids for some. And then abruptly, the map ends. What happens after the final milestone on this pre-laid cultural path, but before retirement?
There is no navigation system for the decades in between.
I celebrated my forty-eighth birthday this year, inching ever-closer to half a century. On the same day, a social media post popped up in my feed letting me know that the most common age for a woman to end her life is between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four. Happy birthday to me.
The data, while often flattened into headlines, points to the truth, which is that midlife can be an especially psychologically vulnerable period for women. According to the CDC, females between ages forty and fifty-nine have the highest rate of depression of any age group in the United States.
Not every season of life feels the same—some years feel expansive, and others fall into the well-that-was-a-doozy category. Midlife, for many women, holds what my husband and I call “aging years” – not because they necessarily correspond with getting older chronologically, but because of the way they seem to speed up the aging process. “Aging years” are periods marked by stress, loss, and mounting responsibilities.
Sometimes, my friends and I are nostalgic for what we call our “wedding years,” that time in our twenties when life felt simpler: weekends filled with friends, our lives punctuated by celebrations and bursts of spontaneity.
So, I asked myself: What makes a wedding year (even sans the wedding)? When I think about those decades, I remember the joys of social connection, new experiences, goals to work towards, and a general sense of “aliveness.”
In an era filled with arranging family schedules, cooking, taking care of a home, and work responsibilities, it’s easy to move through the day on autopilot. There’s also fear sitting beside it all. The more I stay in my safe cocoon, the less empowered I feel to leave. Apprehension and exhaustion often win out over action. I wonder: In the midst of the responsibility and monotony, when does the actual living happen?
During midlife, joy rarely shows up on our doorstep as it did in our twenties and thirties when novelty and opportunity felt exponentially more accessible. The novelty that used to find us—a friend’s engagement to celebrate, a new city for someone’s bachelorette, a reason to dress up—is no longer knocking at our doors. Or at least, not in the same way.
Recently, my son expressed an interest in visiting Copenhagen after discovering it was one of the most skateboard-friendly cities in the world. As I often do, I said, “Sure, maybe one day.” But then something unexpected happened. I found myself researching skate parks in Copenhagen and fold-up scooters for adults. Within a week, I had booked it. Sure, it wasn’t the most practical or money-conscious move, but instead of “maybe someday,” I just wanted to say yes. It felt hopeful to reclaim some of that spontaneity, and it immediately empowered me to become more active in my joy-seeking.
If adventure and novelty are to be part of midlife, we have to make it happen. For me, that looks like a middle-aged woman scooting around Scandinavia with a slightly embarrassed teenager in tow. For another friend, it’s returning to grad school at age fifty-two. But reclaiming your wedding years can also look like saying yes to more social plans, embracing more time in nature, or taking a photography class at your local library. It’s not the size of the gesture, but the intentional shift from staying on autopilot to driving the car, the decision to go after your joy with the optimism of a twenty-two-year-old.
Sure, our surges of vitality may be in between loads of laundry or sending emails; they might even be in the midst of an aging year. But the wedding years weren’t exciting every day either. It’s not about constant thrill-seeking, but more about an orientation and openness that often shuts down as responsibilities mount. When the aging years press in and the map forward runs out, restlessness can be an invitation for change. It’s easy to get caught in “if only” thinking: if only we’d made different choices, if only circumstances had been different. But that mindset keeps us focused on what could have been rather than what is still possible. Sometimes, we can choose to say yes.
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