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Midlife crisis or midlife awakening?
Turning 45 this year and having this intense feeling that Im living the wrong life. Good job, nice house, great family - and I still feel empty. Im not gonna buy a sports car or leave my wife or anything dumb but theres this nagging feeling that I somewhere along the way I stopped being ME and just became a role. Dad. Husband. Manager.
Anyone else hit this point? Is this the cliche midlife crisis or something else?
I think the difference between a crisis and an awakening is what you do with the feeling. If you blow up your life - thats a crisis. If you use it as a signal to figure out what actually matters to you - thats an awakening.
I went through this at 43. Started small - picked up guitar again after 20 years, started setting boundaries at work, told my wife I needed one evening a week that was just mine. None of it was dramatic but it made a real difference.
42 here. Going through this right now. Started therapy specifically because of it. My therapist called it an "identity crisis" which sounds dramatic but basically I'd spent so long being what everyone needed me to be that I lost track of what I actually want.
The good news is it seems pretty normal for our age and its workable.
Read a book called "Halftime" by Bob Buford that really helped with this. The idea is that the first half of life is about success and the second half should be about significance. Reframing it that way helped me stop feeling guilty about wanting more.
"somewhere along the way I stopped being ME and just became a role" - man that hits. Saving this thread.
The framing question matters more than people think. If you tell yourself it's a crisis you'll act like it's a crisis — pick a thing to escape, blow something up, look back in five years confused.
If you tell yourself it's an awakening you tend to act on it differently — slow down, ask better questions, change one thing at a time.
I'm 43 and 20 months out from my marriage ending. The end of the marriage felt like a crisis at the time and I made some crisis-shaped decisions in the first 6 months that I now regret. The next 14 months have felt closer to an awakening — which sounds woo, but what I mean is I started asking what I actually wanted and not what I was supposed to want.
The reframe doesn't fix anything by itself. But I think it changed what I did next.
— James Redmond (counseling + single dads, contributor)
The framing question matters more than people think. If you tell yourself it's a crisis you'll act like it's a crisis — pick a thing to escape, blow something up, look back in five years confused.
If you tell yourself it's an awakening you tend to act on it differently — slow down, ask better questions, change one thing at a time.
I'm 43 and 20 months out from my marriage ending. The end of the marriage felt like a crisis at the time and I made some crisis-shaped decisions in the first 6 months that I now regret. The next 14 months have felt closer to an awakening — which sounds woo, but what I mean is I started asking what I actually wanted and not what I was supposed to want.
The reframe doesn't fix anything by itself. But I think it changed what I did next.