The Woman You Didn't See Coming

She showed up without fanfare. Just one day I looked in the mirror ... not with the old mix of criticism and mild disappointment ... but with something closer to recognition. Looking at my 68-year-old face, I saw the me I recognized. Oh. There you are.

I don't know exactly when it happened. That's the thing about becoming. It rarely arrives on my schedule.

What I do know is that the woman looking back had been through some things. Lost people she couldn't afford to lose. Made decisions she's not proud of. Wandered, genuinely and sometimes dangerously, from the thread of who she was. My particular path through midlife included real darkness ... the kind that may not look like a crisis from the outside but absolutely is one on the inside. I want you to understand that, because I clearly said it in my last blog, and I won't pretend it was simply a period of reflection. It wasn't.

But that's mine. Yours might look completely different.

Here is what I've come to understand: the questioning that happens in this season of life ... the reviewing, the re-examining, the sitting with hard questions about who you are and what you actually want ... that is work. Real work. It doesn't require a rock bottom to be valid. Some women move through it with more clarity than chaos, more curiosity than crisis. Both paths lead somewhere true for you, if you let them.

What I want to talk about today is where that work can lead…what's possible on the other side of the asking.

I call myself a crone now. And it’s not as a joke ... but as a statement of fact, and as a point of pride. The word has been stripped of its power for so long, used as shorthand for something spent or irrelevant. But its older meaning is a woman who has moved through the seasons of her life and arrived at a place with hard-won knowledge…as a woman who knows things...and has earned her perspective.

That's what I feel like. And I'm not willing to underplay that.

I know who I am now in a way I simply didn't at 35 or 45. It’s not because I've stopped changing ... I haven't, and I hope I never do ... but because I've stopped being frightened of the question. 

I follow my intuition the first time now. I've finally learned to trust the thing that was right all along. I give myself credit for what I know. That took an embarrassingly long time, but here we are.

I've also discovered, or maybe rediscovered, what genuinely matters to me.

I am a connector. Fiercely. The people I love, I love without reservation ... and that has only gotten more true with age, not less. I find joy in things I used to blow past when I was moving too fast to notice: a good cup of coffee or tea before the day starts, the particular quality of light on a winter afternoon, a conversation that feeds my soul. My creativity ... the writing, the painting, the way I think about my home ... gives me something that busyness never did. I'm open to more. That openness feels like one of the better surprises of this chapter.

I hold my spiritual faith close. It is not separate from who I am ... it is load-bearing. It's what keeps me steady when things are not.

And I've learned to laugh at myself. Genuinely, not because I’m embarrassed. Nothing takes the edge off a hard moment like being able to find the absurdity in it. I don't take myself as seriously as I used to, and my goodness, what a relief that is.

Some of the physical changes are harder to come to terms with. I'll be honest about that. There are mornings when my body feels less like home than it used to, and I'm still learning to extend to it the same grace I'm learning to extend to everything else. I'm not done with that particular lesson. But I'm working on it.

What I've mostly stopped doing is waiting. Waiting to feel ready, waiting for the right time, waiting to be a finished version of myself before I let myself take up space. I understand now that I will never be finished ... and I mean that as something freeing, not frightening. 

There is always more to uncover. More to let go of. More to try. I will be somewhere in that process until my last breath, and that ... truly ... is one of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning. I love a good treasure hunt!

The woman I didn't see coming is not who I expected. She is softer in some places, sharper in others. More at ease in her own company. Less interested in performing ANYTHING for ANYONE. She is still very much in progress.

But she is, unmistakably, herself.

If you're somewhere in the middle of this ... somewhere between who you were and whoever you're becoming ... I want you to know that what's on the other side of the asking is worth it.  I’m not saying you’ll be finished or have undying certainty. But a kind of settled knowing that is better than certainty ever was.

She's already in there. The question is how you find her.

Love is ALL there is,

Diana