Who Are You Really?

One of the great themes of midlife is the burning question, "What are you going to be?" Not the way it's meant in high school, when guidance counselors, parents, and well-meaning others pressure you to pick a path before you're even half-baked. The question in middle age assumes you have spent the first part of your life pursuing what you thought was the right path – or a reasonable facsimile - and have now come to question not only your choices but your culture, your world, and the depths of your being. In other words, the very meaning of existence. You're either coming to recognize that you've been sold a bill of goods and it's not made you happy, or you've gotten a whiff of your mortality and it's reckoning time.

But how do you answer the question when you discover that paths already taken only reveal who you were? You might do as others do. Midlife is a time of affairs and broken marriages and uncharacteristic behaviors. Stories abound of spouses finding themselves (and ditching their partners) after years of faithfulness, of sudden excursions into cosmetic surgery, foreign countries, interests long forgotten, and other symbols of youth. This course of action is a double-edged sword. It attempts to meet the soul's need to put the ego in a more rightful place, which is a beautiful and vital task of midlife development. But it can also throw lives into utter chaos. Most people cherish norms, agreements and obligations above struggles for personal growth.

The pressure to act during this time enormous. Choices are often premature. The alternative, to sit with the discomfort and explore what it's really trying to tell us, is also not cherished in our culture. We are groomed to think of time in microprocessed minutes, to assume that broken things must be fixed (and the sooner the better), to impose our Western will on the intelligent rhythms of nature. We have no socially sanctioned process, much less concept, of exploring midlife malaise, any more than we have such rites of passage for adolescence and elderhood.

This is why some of us feel we are being drawn and quartered in middle age – because psychospiritually, we are. The urgent voice of the nascent and true Self can barely be heard above the din of voices imploring us to not change. To complicate matters, one of those imploring voices is our own.

And yet, approached with intention and consciousness, this often intense time can yield rewards beyond imagination. Jungian analyst Murray Stein writes, "When the unconscious erupts at midlife, what first comes most strongly to the fore are rejected pieces of personality that were left undeveloped and cast aside sometime in the past, for one reason or another, in the rapid movement forward of personal history. Life still clings strongly to them. And actually the seeds of the future lie in these neglected figures, which now return and call for restoration and attention."

Who am I really? is a question for which the answers must be "lived into," to paraphrase the poet Rilke. Who are these neglected characters from our inner past? Last night, I dreamed my 80-year-old mother saw me painting on my hand. She looked reminiscent and sad. "A life in the arts," she murmured regretfully, "is not a bad thing." There's no question I put this part of myself aside after college, to meet the "necessities of life" as so many creative people must do. But that part I'm already conscious of. It's the other new voices that startle me: the one indignant at past and current suffering of certain fools; the other one who wants me to "brand" myself after all these years and present it to the world. Do I know what this is supposed to look like? Not really, not yet. It's an exploration. It's messy, it's a process, it's – well, it's half-baked, a return to the theme of adolescence.

In a sense, we get a do-over at midlife. It's almost like living out the fantasy of if only I knew then what I know now. It won't be perfect: our youthful bodies are gone, and practical worries can dominate our days. Avenues we'd hoped to travel may be re-routed through new parts of town. But one of the great joys of being off the map is the potential for discovery. If we are lucky, we become aware as we stumble and explore that despite our confusion, this mysterious life really does know what it's doing.