For Gen Ex women who are pausing, reflecting, questioning, wondering – what am I doing? How did I get here? Am I on the right path? Sometimes the only thing scarier than answering these questions is the thought of stepping off – or slightly to the left or right – and starting down a whole new path at 40 or 50 or 60.
Starting over at mid-(plus?) life?? The prospect can be terrifying to us Gen-Xers.
And if I’m starting over now at [43? 57? 61?] then what the heck have I wasted all of my time thus far doing?
These are normal, albeit unpleasant thoughts to have. The uncertainty sits in our gut like a lump of coal. And yet so many of us have had them. I’ve certainly had them.
The prospect of having wasted years is almost unfathomable.
But is it sufficiently unfathomable to keep us on an unhappy path? An over or underwhelming one? One in which our purpose feels totally absent?
For me the answer was no. So how did I get there? Did I just force myself to swallow a bitter pill?
Not really.
Instead I tried to focus on rebranding. What if, instead of wondering about years wasted, I was able to heed the sage advice delivered by Steve Jobs in his timeless commencement speech to Stanford’s class of 2005 in which he famously said:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. You have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
The first time I heard these words I thought they sounded lovely and smart. But they didn’t necessarily hit me in the part that needing hitting.
In fact, it took 10 years of sitting with those words playing on a tape (yep – Gen X) in the background before they really resonated where they needed to.
Sure, I had paved a way for myself in the corporate world. I’d spent years climbing a ladder I didn’t want to climb anymore.
But instead of letting myself believe I was putting all those years to waste, I remembered the wisdom in his words.
Those years were part of my journey. They laid a foundation that may not yet be visible to me – but they are an essential part of who am I and what I know and how I carry myself through the world.
Those years gave me insight and friends and experience and new ways of thinking and crafting and processing… and every single one of those attributes has been woven into the DNA of me.
This is my journey. And I will honor it as such. It will all make sense in the end.