And even more frightening is the prospect of getting it all wrong again. I thought that I was following my heart the last time I planned out my life, but somehow I ended up at a dead end, lost, hopeless, and emotionally dead. For the last 8 or so years, I have felt like I was just going through the motions. I finished my Ph.D. not so much because I particularly cared about it anymore, but because I had started it and couldn’t quit what I had started. I poured myself into my work even though I had no passion about it, because I that’s what I was “supposed” to do. And now, because I have felt what it is like to feel alive, the thought of “What if this is not it, either?” echoes in the back of my mind, sometimes inaudibly and other times so loudly that it’s all I can hear.
My experience is not unique. Many women go through a similar existential crisis when they reach their middle to late thirties. Some women panic because what they see in the mirror is completely at odds with what they see on TV, in the movies and in magazines. Other women “wake up” and realize that they have invested so much energy into their husbands or partners and/or their children that they realize that they have lost touch with who they are and what they want. Others still come to realize that they are stuck in a relationship or career that leaves them feeling absolutely dead.
While the basic choices, stay the same or make a change, seem obvious, they are not easy. There are risks to either choice. And for many women, the difficulty is heightened because any choice they make will reverberate through all the relationships that they are in. For example, if I am focused on and angst ridden about losing my looks and I hold on to that fear, I will poison myself by condemning my looks. If I change and accept my aging face and skin, I risk (or at least fear) losing my husband or partner to a younger, more attractive woman. It is this fear of risk that paralyzes many women, locking them into choices that they choose inadvertently by not choosing. And because they don’t recognize that they made a choice, they end up feeling all the more powerless.
It seems to me that the only way to avoid this complete sense of powerlessness is to consciously make a choice and to take ownership of that choice. In other words, in order to feel powerful, we must consciously take a risk. And hopefully, the risk pays off.
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