I’m 38 years old. Like many other people my age, reaching mid-life caused me to re-evaluate many things. For the first part of my life I followed the conventional path Western culture lays out for us. OK, it was done in my slightly off beat way but nevertheless, I am a responsible first born daughter, I was an above average student, went to university, got married, had two children, bought a house, work at a solid, cubicle farm job. For many years, I had my head down, sleepwalking, not questioning any of it, going to school, being a mother, working at my job, taking care of my house, trying to be a good wife, daughter and friend. But I was very unhappy, disconnected from how I felt, from my body, from who I am. And then something snapped inside me and I woke up.
I realized that I had unquestioningly accepted a path for my life but that I didn’t have to. Then I pulled my life down. My marriage ended, I moved away from the neighbourhood I spent most of my life in, quit school. I re-connected with myself and many of the things that matter to me. I lost weight, I pushed myself outside my comfort zone – learned to ski at 34 and skied down the Rocky Mountains, re-focused my time, re-defined my priorities. What I was happy with before I pulled my life down remains: my family, my friends and my children. I didn’t realize what I was going through was a typical mid-life experience. Later I read Gail Sheehy’s Passages and if anyone reading this post is sitting at mid-life surrounded by the rubble of your former life, this book provides tremendous consolation. Sheehy (borrowing from Erikson, Dabrowski, Coles and others), suggests that when people reach mid-life, we are necessarily at a cross roads. Some of us take stock of where we were are and decide we’re OK heading down the same path for the rest of our life. Those of us who realize we’re not heading the right direction can either make significant changes or keep marching down the familiar, unhappy road. Here’s the comforting part – Sheehy argues that those who need to make significant changes at mid-life and act on that need, are ultimately happier. If nothing else, I found Sheehy’s book reassuring as she described the 20’s as the decade of where many of us follow the ’shoulds’ of society and our 30’s as the decade we re-evaluate the decisions of our 20’s. (I would quote directly from the book but like many books I enjoy, it is no longer on my bookshelf as I have given it to a friend whom I hope will find it helpful). By the way, the book is culturally biased and Passages was written in 1976 and I expect some people will find it a little dated. However, since I committed to my children’s father at a young age (20) and had my children younger than most of my friends, as a modern day throw back, I found the life stages outlined by Sheehy 33 years ago still applied to me.
Do gifted adults experience mid-life differently than the rest of population? I have no empirical proof but my guess is yes. If we process and understand other things differently in general, than we would also experience mid-life differently. What would make a gifted adult experience at mid-life differently? We tend to process our emotions on steroids compared to the general population – faced with the questions that tend to come up with mid-life, a gifted adult is likely to consider them and feel them more intensely. Many gifted adults have already been wrestling with some of the issues that typically face people at mid-life, since they were children such as: the realization that our time on this planet is finite, the awareness that ultimately we are alone in this world, deciding what really matters to us in this life. Personally, my ingrained need to evolve, entelechy, came to the forefront. While I allowed this feeling to lay dormant for a while, I ultimately I needed to challenge the status quo and actively seek something better, not just in the outside world but inside myself. I was also influenced by my ability to predict the logical outcome of things – if I did not make a change in my life, I clearly understood that continuing as I was would only bring me more of the same and more unhappiness.
The one major area of my life that remains to be addressed is work. Learning about what it means to be a gifted adult has provided me with tremendous insight into why work has been a challenge for me. I created this website, in part, to better understand work as it relates to being a gifted adult as I have been unable to find much information about adult giftedness and careers.
So here I am at mid-life, seeking a work environment that feeds my brain, fit with the priorities in my life after having turned my life inside out and upside down. Did I hit a fork in the road mid-life because I’m gifted? Nope. Did my giftedness affect the decisions I made and how I felt? I think so.
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