On the portal: Midlife transition

A reference to "the portal" drew my attention. Yes, the midlife transition is like a portal. I read:

"Are You In the Portal?" It's a crisis, but it's an awakening. Anne Helen Petersen. Culture Study (Substack). Oct 22, 2023.

Petersen's mother said to her one day:

"'What are you now, 42?...I think that’s exactly when I started writing textbooks. I just had this huge creative surge.'

What an amazing way to reframe the energy I’ve been channeling this last year: energy to write another book, energy to figure out a Culture Study-related podcast, energy to dahlia farm. What if it wasn’t ambition pushing me forward….but a swell of creativity? And what if that swell of creativity was possible because I’ve become a whole lot less concerned with bullshit?"

Petersen read how Anja Tyson referred to "the weird spiritual / emotional / professional / transitional portal that women ages 37 to 45 are in." Then, Petersen says: "I became obsessed with this idea of a portal, and when I brought it up — on IG, but also in casual conversation — it seemed to resonate. Something was happening. Maiden-becomes-crone, sure. Destabilizing, yes. But it was also an experience of transformation, of refinement."

She spoke to Satya Byock, "a Jungian psychotherapist who specializes in younger patients going through transitions" and author of the book Quarterlife, who sees that, "within a Jungian framework, there’s a midlife passage," and "the experience is more intense if you’ve been heads-down — absorbed by parenting, by your career, by an illness, by something — for some time."

She also spoke to Claire Zulkey, author of the Evil Witches newsletter. "'Part of me thinks that I’ve gone through the portal,' she told me, 'but the part of me that’s paranoid and wise thinks: oh bitch you haven’t even begun to portal.'" If you're privileged to do so, you can redesign your life so you have more time for parenting, yet still, "it’s half boredom, half gratitude."

(I have felt that way about redesigning my life for an office career.)

Career coach Keren Eldad had her own experience at 36. It's just that something "sets you off the edge," as Eldad puts it. "It can be stagnation around your career, it can be kids going to elementary school or even college. It can be around physical changes..." Once you're set off, you're in an ongoing process of letting go of the past. What you feel about yourself and your life might be separate from what you feel about the new work you're doing. Eldad says: "Like, I am personally done, but this is not done. And that, you feel invigorated by. If you’re grieving what you’ve left behind, let yourself feel it. What you’re doing is gathering your strength, and there will be a point when the grieving ends."

Petersen concludes:

"There’s nothing magical about the portal. It can be painful and discombobulating and, as Claire Zulkey points out, sweaty. There’s certainly no guaranteed joy on the other end. I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to experience it or to understand its shape in your life. I don’t even think it’s gendered...It’s just a period of transition. You can lean into it, you can ignore it, you can understand it as a crisis or a transformation."

You should read her essay "Are You In the Portal?" for more of this.

'Your story is not just about you'

"...every story, including memoir as well as fiction, has a dual narrative responsibility. Your story is not just about you. It can’t be. And if you’re not yet sure what else it’s about, then you have work to do. ...every personal conflict echoes larger struggles. That’s what we mean when we talk about linking the personal to the universal."
— Aimee Liu, "Afong Moy’s ‘Astonishing Little Feet’," Medium, June 25, 2024

On community

"...without the support, direction, and accountability of our communities and cultural identities, we have no center, we have no soul. That fire that burns in the center of collective identity and lineage and culture is the mythic hearth, and those who protect, embody, and maintain that center for the community are our hearth-keepers.

* * *

But who maintains the norms, rules, and ways of that group? Who remembers the songs, the order of things, the rituals? Who passes that culture along, and to whom is it passed? How is the soul of our family/tribe/community protected and maintained and enacted and embodied by us who are the members? It is the warriors who defend this, but it is the hearth-keepers who preserve, hold, nurture, and teach. And that work is hard and constant work, and is worthy of respect too. Warriors will help us tear broken systems down and will protect us from those who would destroy our homes and lives and ways of being in the world; it is the hearth-keepers that are responsible for maintaining and creating the societies and homes and communities we actually want to live in, who will set and maintain and enforce and teach those ways of being. Hearth-keeping is revolutionary: it is how we will rebuild the world."

— Riverdevora. The revolutionary art of hearth-keeping. August 21, 2017.

Questions to guide a planned transition

Osi I. wrote:

"Here are a few points I reflected upon as I prepared to take my leaps. They might be helpful as you consider yours:

1. How important is it to take such a step? Will it change my life for the better?
2. What are the barriers, if any, to taking the leap? How can they be addressed, mitigated, overcome?
3. Can I just step out on faith to do what I know my spirit is calling me to do?
4. Will taking this leap add value/joy/peace/fulfillment to my life?
5. Will this leap help me and mine grow in unimaginable ways?
6. Will this leap save my life?
7. If I don’t take this leap, what will it cost me?"

— "I Left My 6 figure Job to Save My Life," Feb 25, 2024

I wrote of my midlife transition

Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption.