‘It was time to bring forth my desire to be in a relationship with a woman’

An excerpt of Midlife Emergence: Free Your Inner Fire by Jen Berlingo, MA, LPC, ATR

(from Introduction and Chapter 1)

The magma of truth

The year I was forty-one years old, I sensed a shift in my being. It was as though a tectonic process had taken over my solid, internal landscape, moving the plates of my identity enough to expose peeks at my molten core. Much like a dormant volcano, from the outside my life appeared stable, peaceful, and lush, but a fiery magma brewed deep within, yearning to see the light of day. I had kept this inner fire bound, as I was terrified of its capacity to obliterate my entire village.

At the time, I lived what many would consider to be a pretty sweet life. I was several years into working in my private psychotherapy practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. I lived in a sprawling, California ranch home with one of those large, trendy swan rafts floating in our backyard pool. Our inflatable swan was named Juno, after the Greek goddess of marriage. I was nestled into this life alongside my loving, generous, devoted husband, Craig, to whom I’d been married for fourteen years, our vibrant ten-year-old child, and two chatty, snuggly cats. I’d swat away dissatisfaction whenever it crept into my psyche, berating myself for not feeling grateful enough for this exquisite life. 

One spring day, while sitting salt-water-face to salt-water-face with Momma Ocean, listening to Ani DiFranco croon on my car stereo, I felt something hot start to crack my inner walls. For the past several months, I had become unbearably restless and inflamed, figuratively and literally, but I feared looking too deeply underneath because it might mean I would have to muster enough bravery to completely change my exquisitely beautiful life. In a prayer for courage, I breathed in the ocean air, trying to infuse my being with her powerful, feminine energy. I finally allowed silent sentences to escape the pit in my stomach and burn their way up through my heart and throat until I heard the words finally form in my mind. I whispered my secrets to the ocean because I knew she could hold them until I could set them all free. I confessed to her that it was time to bring forth my lifelong, unfulfilled desire to be in an intimate relationship with a woman. What was more difficult to (un)swallow was that the particular woman occupying my heart at the time was my best friend.

There was no turning away from the truth now. Seismic waves undulated in my belly that day at the ocean. Magma explodes when it comes into contact with seawater. For what might have been three minutes or three hours, I sat in silence, staring at the sea, bracing for what would happen when I spoke out loud what I knew I needed to speak. Tear-soaked, dirty haired, wild-eyed, and more awake than I had ever felt, I backed my car out of the parking lot and started down the winding road toward home.

Midlife crisis or emergence?

We begin the midlife period when we enter our forties. There, we find ourselves teetering between the first and second half of our lives. In 1950, psychologist Erik Erikson put forth his theory about the stages of psychosocial development. He says that beginning at age forty and lasting until our early sixties, we are presented with a conflict he calls “generativity versus stagnation.” This is a period in which we reevaluate our life’s purpose to be sure we are making the type of impact on the world that we would like. At this stage, the pull toward growth and generativity became so strong for me that I felt almost allergic to stagnation. For others, the steadiness stagnation offers may feel comfy and familiar. Many fall somewhere in between.

“Beginning at age forty and lasting until our early sixties, we are presented with a conflict Erik Erikson calls ‘generativity versus stagnation.’ This is a period in which we reevaluate our life’s purpose to be sure we are making the type of impact on the world that we would like.”

Jen Berlingo

Life’s midpoint offers us a shift in perspective from external approval-seeking to internal clarity. We may finally drop all the people-pleasing and focus on what feels most true. We go from having a youthful sense of immortality to the reality of having limited time left. This shift can create a sense of urgency around the changes we are called to make. At this time of life, it is common to feel a gap between the expectations we had for our lives and the reality we are living. We might feel misguided by dreams we’ve had, exhausted by working and caring for others, and trapped in careers and relationships. In midlife, when we feel we have hit a plateau in at least one area (career, parenting, etc.), we often find that space is cleared for personal pursuits. This openness can be a welcome (or daunting) invitation to become the authors of our lives—to simplify, differentiate, and deepen into self possession. This is a time when our quest for purpose can lead us toward a spiritual awakening, giving birth to profound integrity and courageous risk-taking.

Historically, the liminal space of this time of life has been called a midlife crisis, a term coined in 1965 by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques. The topic of the midlife crisis has been written about ever since, mostly centering the white, male experience. Based on my experiences of making the raw, inconvenient truth of who I am unapologetically visible in my forties, I know that midlife doesn’t need to be an emergency. Let them have their crisis. I much prefer to call this phase of adulthood a midlife emergence. The word emergence is defined as “the process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed” or “the process of coming into being, or of becoming important or prominent.” Other definitions include phrases like: “to appear,” “to become visible,” “to surface,” “to arise,” “to manifest oneself,” “to emanate.” The concept of emergence feels resonant with my personal experience of vulnerably unveiling what had previously been unseen.

In midlife, we go through a second individuation process. This time, it is more conscious than the first pass at adolescence. It compels us to stand in our center, unswayed by social norms. The stakes are higher, as we are more likely to be settled into long standing commitments, such as marriages, children, mortgages, or careers. Because of the lives we’ve created around us by the time we hit our forties, this passage has the potential to be quite disruptive. The second half of life can embolden us to step beyond the boundaries of the conventional identities advocated by our families, social groups, and culture to take the risk of truly becoming ourselves—even if it means seemingly jeopardizing connection, belonging, and acceptance.

As midlife is a natural period of self-reflection, many looked back over their years thus far and pined for the other lives they might have led. The women who come to see me for coaching and therapy yearn to peel back the adaptive, protective layers of identity they had formed early in life, wishing now to reveal their tender, powerful hearts. So many of my clients are “good girls” in recovery, having done all the “right” things, following our culture’s prescription of college to job to marriage to children, only to sit across from me with an unspecified emptiness. Some struggled to find meaning for the time that lies before them. A forty-two-year-old woman recently said to me, “I did have a plan for my life, up until right now.”

The impetus for a midlife transition can either be via our intentional choices (like deciding to change jobs, leave a marriage, or move to another location) or by way of a situation beyond our control triggering the transformation (such as experiencing the death of a loved one, being laid off, or receiving a medical diagnosis). Regardless of whether the changes we make are voluntary choices or involuntary happenings, the developmental stage of midlife provides us all with an opportunity for radical realignment to our true center. Midlife is a call toward honoring the hard-earned wisdom of our years and using that wisdom to deepen our self-acceptance and self-expression in the sacred time ahead.

Tune into the voice of your inner longing

Grab your journal, open a new document on your computer to type your responses, or simply jot your writing on scrap paper. You don’t need to be precious about it. Let it be easy.

Writing prompts to get you started:

• You know that thing you’ve been secretly mulling over? Maybe it’s a relationship. A job. A move. A creation. A beginning. An ending. A longing. . . . Call it up in your gut, your mind, your heart.
• Be still. Listen inwardly. What are the words you hear being whispered? Or maybe yours are being shouted. Write them down. Even if you have to write them in light pencil or invisible ink today, or even if you have to burn the paper after—write them anyway.
• What is the feeling arising just beneath or behind those words? Do you feel any sensations in your body? Have you noticed any symptoms in your throat? Your belly? The base of your spine? Describe what you feel.
• What is the one sentence you are most afraid to say to others? To yourself? Write it down. Say it out loud.
• Dig deeper. What aren’t you saying, even still? What aren’t you writing down? That is what is longing to be unearthed in midlife. (Pssst: You already know.)