Power Years

As is typical in midlife, I’ve recently been adjusting to a shift in one of my cherished relationships. I kept asking myself how I might make it be more like how it was before, but I eventually realized that was the wrong question. When I shifted my question away from the outcome and toward what […]

Unmasked by Sarah Russell I shivered when I took them off, those masks of forty years — goodgirlgooddaughtergoodstudentgoodwifegoodmother goodgoodgood. I stood naked in a new day. Who was left? Could I find her? Would I love her? Would anyone? I set out to build a woman without masks. It took a while. I lost people […]

Midlife can be a period of profound self-discovery if you let it be. It’s also a time that has the potential to be creatively robust even if you’ve never thought of yourself as creative. I think for many, this call to creativity stems from a desire to make meaning and connections.  For some people, midlife […]

One summer, I was sitting alone on the dock at a cottage and looking around at the lake, the beach, and the landscaping on the property thinking about what made it so pleasing to my eyes. A single word popped into my head: layers. Layers add complexity, variety, depth, and interest. It’s how we express […]

A milestone birthday has a way of kicking up a LOT of questions. And turning 50 really gets those “Now what?” and “What’s next?” questions popping up like a game of whack-a-mole. You might try to knock them back in because they can feel scary and heavy, but they don’t need to. Take these companion […]

Midlife will disrupt the status quo. It’s like when a new person joins an organization and starts questioning things that have been that way for a long time. Stuff that has been accepted and that may have gone unnoticed or tolerated. And that’s why it can feel like a crisis because things seemed to have […]

To everyone who beats themselves up for not having “it all figured out” in midlife, here are five things I invite you to consider. 1. You have already figured out more than you could ever contain, carry, or categorize. Instead of beating yourself up for what you still don’t know or what still feels hard […]

I loved the book The Time Traveler’s Wife when it first came out in 2003. I don’t know if it still holds up and I’m not interested in reading it again and finding out it doesn’t.  However, the movie About Time I’ve watched multiple times and it always gets me. I even suffer through Rachel […]

Catching up with a friend through a couple of quick Instagram DMs, I ended my update by saying that I felt like my husband and I were surfing through recent changes in our world. I meant we were bracing for the next wave with some anticipation and alertness, knowing that right now, we need to […]

My mom sometimes reminds me of a story from when I was a late teen/early twenty-something. We were chatting about a kid we both knew, and she innocently said, “it will be interesting to see how she turns out.” In a tone more aggravated than she deserved, I answered, “when will you know that?” My […]