I’m turning the tables today and hoping that instead of me writing to you, you will write to me again. As I mentioned in Friday’s post, I’ve spent the last week poring over your replies to the question I asked you about midlife bumps in the road a little while ago. I’ve read, categorised and made notes on every single account – and the experiences you’ve shared have rocked my world.
My goodness midlife women have a lot to deal with and there are some of you in particular who will stay in my thoughts because you’ve been through so much, often feeling very alone. I’m glad that some of you said you found it therapeutic being able to speak anonymously and express your true thoughts and feelings. It’s incredibly valuable for me to have that level of openness so thank you and I really do hope it gave you a bit of a release. I just want to stress again that everything is completely anonymous – a few of you felt you were easily identifiable from the information you shared so please be assured that it’s absolutely safe. I’m good at keeping confidences and will be very careful with the information that you’ve taken the time, thought, energy and emotion to share. Oh and please don’t worry about age. Personally I think midlife is a feeling not an age bracket – your responses are every bit as valuable if you’re in your 80s or 90s and your perspective too.
I realise that some of you hadn’t spotted me saying that a publisher has approached me about a book and that I’m going to give it a go. It’s very important to me that I don’t say I’ll definitely do it because I put huge pressure on myself not to fail at things so for now I’m going to start writing to see what comes out. At the very worst, I’ll have a collection of fantastic blog posts ready for years to come!
However reading through everything you had to say about bumps in the road confirmed to me that there is a book that really needs to be written, based on broader experience than just mine alone. We really do reach uncharted territory when we hit midlife in our 40s – there just isn’t any kind of life map from that stage onwards and it must have been lonely for women in previous generations. What is becoming apparent as I annotate everything you’ve told me is that despite there being so many individual experiences, they fall into common silos. So it seems that there are seven or eight horsewomen of the midlife apocalypse – and I wouldn’t have been able to identify them as clearly as I have without your shared confidences.
If I do manage to write this book it won’t be mine, it’ll be ours – by midlifers for midlifers. Hopefully it will make us and the generations below us feel less alone at this stage of life. I’m going to keep on asking for your input as we go along and I’ll try to keep the questions easy to respond to. Today I have a burning topic that I’d like to drill down into because there was a word that popped up time and time again in your last set of answers and yet because it wasn’t the focus of the question, you didn’t expand on it.
It was regret.
So today I have a new question for you. Please give me as much detail as you feel able to, honestly I’m happy to read it, it helps me to understand the feelings behind the thoughts. I’m also going to repeat my last question below, just in case you didn’t have a chance to answer – it would be great to push the number of responses past 1,000 which makes it a very good sample size. By the way it doesn’t matter if you didn’t join in with the last question, you can still take part with this one – everybody’s input is valuable.
I’m so grateful for your help and I’ll just say once again that everything’s anonymous and everything is useful. Have a great weekend and I’ll be back next Friday with a longer midlife lately post. Until then, here’s the original question, just in case you missed it.
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