Today’s Question For Your Uncommon Evolution: What is one rule about adulthood you no longer believe?
Turning 40 didn’t make me feel old. It made me feel suspicious.
Suspicious of what I had been led to believe would be important by now. Suspicious of the timelines I complied with, suspicious of the goals I met, suspicious of the success I achieved, and suspicious of some of the objectives I had spent years assuming were mine, since I have kept on target so long. By 40, one should be feeling content and accomplished, preferably grateful and hydrated, and have both a 5-year plan and a good moisturizer. One should also have a well-defined idea of who they are, have a booming career, have good relationships with their family and friends and feel…that awful word…”settled.”
Instead, I found myself looking around at parts of my life and thinking, wait. Do I actually want this? And I don’t think I am alone in that, especially among women of color who have spent the first half of their lives becoming very good at building lives that are safe, respectable, stable, and impressive, sometimes before we ever really stopped to ask whether those lives also felt like ours.
Turning 40 as a Woman of Color Can Feel More Like an Audit Than a Crisis
The phrase “midlife crisis” has always sounded a little theatrical to me, because it makes you imagine someone buying a sports car, having an affair, or moving to Ibiza after watching one documentary about freedom. What 40 has felt like to me is much quieter and much more annoying than that. It feels like an audit, where all of a sudden you start reviewing things you have not questioned in years simply because they had been working well enough, or because you had spent so much time and effort building them that reconsidering them felt almost disloyal.
What still fits? What am I still doing because I actually want to do it? What am I doing because I am good at it? What am I doing because other people expect me to? What am I doing because 27-year-old me made a decision and apparently nobody has reviewed the file since? Those questions can be deeply destabilizing because from the outside, your life may look completely fine. Maybe more than fine. Maybe you have the degree, the job, the house, the relationship, the savings, the professional credibility, the reputation, the ability to solve problems before anyone else has even realized there is a problem, and still there is this quieter voice underneath all of it asking whether the life you built still belongs to you.
That question can feel almost offensive when you have worked so hard for everything you have, and that is part of why it can take so long to admit that the problem is not that your life is bad. The problem may simply be that you have changed enough that the life you built for an earlier version of yourself no longer fits in exactly the same way.
Success Can Start Looking Different at 40
One of the strangest things about getting older is realizing that some of the things you once chased with absolute conviction begin to lose their shine. Titles, prestige, being the busiest person in the room, being the one who can handle everything, being admired for how much you can carry. At 25, those things can feel like proof that you’re becoming someone, and there is something intoxicating about being rewarded for your competence, your ambition, your willingness to work harder, and your ability to keep producing under pressure.
At 40, you may start wondering why becoming someone required being exhausted all the time, or why being impressive became such a central measure of whether you were doing life correctly.
I don’t think ambition disappears. At least for me, it didn’t, and hasn’t. It feels more like ambition gets pickier. I still want things. I still care about growth. I still care about doing meaningful work, building something, earning money, having freedom, and being proud of my life. I just care less about goals that only make sense from the outside, and I care more about whether the life attached to the goal is actually one I want to inhabit.
That shift can be especially complicated for women of color because achievement is not always just achievement. Sometimes it’s protection. Education can create safety. Money can create safety. Professional credibility can create safety. Being exceptional can create safety. Being indispensable can create safety. So deciding that you no longer want to organize your entire life around those things can feel almost reckless, even if you are not actually giving any of them up. You may simply be asking them to become part of your life instead of the entire architecture of it.
Your Body May Change at the Same Time Your Priorities Do
Then there is your body, which may start changing at the exact moment your tolerance for bullshit decreases.
Sleep changes. Energy changes. Your body starts responding differently to workouts, food, stress, alcohol, caffeine, life, gravity, Tuesday. And if you have spent decades being disciplined, capable, and able to force your body into compliance, it can be genuinely unsettling when that stops working the way it used to. There is a specific frustration in thinking, I know how to do this, and then realizing the rules may have changed while you were busy handling everything else.
But there is also something useful in that. Your body becomes harder to ignore. It becomes less willing to quietly absorb your stress, your overwork, your skipped meals, your bad sleep, your emotional labor, and your habit of pretending you are fine because technically nothing is on fire. You may have spent years treating your body like an employee whose job was to keep up with whatever schedule you imposed on it, and at 40 it may start becoming very clear that the relationship needs to be renegotiated.
Turning 40 as a Woman of Color Also Brings Unexpected Grief
There is also grief, which I definitely didn’t expect.
You can be ready for a new chapter and still feel grief for the person who built the old one. The woman who worked that hard. The woman who tolerated things because she thought she had to. The woman who chose the practical option. The woman who was so determined to become safe, successful, respected, financially secure, or independent that she never stopped to ask whether any of those things would eventually be enough.
I have a lot of tenderness for her because I don’t think she was wrong, and I don’t think she made bad choices. I think she made the best choices she could with the information she had and the world she was living in at the time. Sometimes growth isn’t about deciding your younger self was foolish or misguided. Sometimes it’s recognizing that she got you somewhere important, and that you are allowed to keep moving without making her wrong for having wanted what she wanted then.
That can be a hard thing to hold because we often want reinvention to feel clean. We want the old life to be obviously wrong and the new one to be obviously right. In reality, you can be grateful for what a version of your life gave you and still know that you don’t want to remain inside it forever.
Family and Cultural Expectations Also Change With Time
Family and cultural expectations also get weird around this age because somehow they can get both louder and quieter at the same time.
You may care less about what people think, which is great, but you also become more aware of how deeply some expectations were embedded in you long before you ever consciously chose them. What marriage is supposed to look like. What success is supposed to look like. How much money you should make. Whether you should have children. Whether you should want children. How close you should be to family. Whether changing careers means wasting your education. Whether wanting something different means you are ungrateful.
And the strangest part is that nobody even has to be actively enforcing these expectations anymore. Sometimes the voice in your head has been doing the job unsupervised for years, repeating rules that may have come from family, culture, school, religion, work, or simply watching which women were praised and which women were criticized.
That is one of the things I think people don’t talk about enough when they talk about midlife reinvention and why turning 40 as a woman of color can be so uniquely difficult. It is not always about becoming brave enough to do something new. Many of us have been brave our whole lives. Sometimes it’s about realizing how many invisible rules have been shaping your decisions and deciding whether you still agree with any of them, especially now that you’re old enough to know the difference between what keeps you safe and what keeps you small.
Friendships Change Like People Do
Friendships change too.
Some deepen. Some get easier. Some become more honest. Some disappear without much notice. Some remain technically intact while no longer feeling particularly nourishing, which is its own strange category because nothing dramatic happened, there was no fight, nobody did anything unforgivable, but you realize you’re keeping something alive mostly because it has existed for a long time.
I think by 40 there is less patience for relationships held together only by history, less interest in performing closeness, and less willingness to keep explaining why you are hurt to someone who seems committed to misunderstanding you. That doesn’t mean friendship becomes disposable. If anything, I think it becomes more precious because you become more aware of how rare it is to feel genuinely known by another adult, and maybe more willing to protect the relationships where you do.
There is also something humbling about realizing that not every relationship is meant to come with you forever, and that sometimes growing into yourself changes what kind of closeness feels possible. That can be sad without being tragic, and it can be freeing without needing to turn anyone into a villain.
You May Want a Different Life Even If the One You Built Is Good
And then there is maybe the hardest, saddest, most emotionally challenging part of all (at least, it was for me!), which is admitting that you may want a completely different life even if the one you built is objectively good.
Dissatisfaction is easier to understand when something is obviously wrong. A terrible job. A bad relationship. Financial instability. A crisis. But what happens when nothing is particularly wrong? What happens when the life you built is objectively successful and you still want something else?
That can create a special kind of guilt because you feel like you need a better reason. You want a dramatic explanation. You want to be able to point to something and say, see, this is why I am changing everything. But sometimes the reason is simply that you changed. Your priorities changed. Your tolerance changed. Your definition of success changed. Your body changed. Your nervous system changed. Your idea of what makes a life worth living changed.
That’s still a reason, and a really good reason at that, even if it’s not the kind of reason that makes everyone around you immediately nod and say, yes, of course, this is obviously the correct thing to do.
At 40, You May Stop Auditioning for Adulthood
I think one of the best things about turning 40 is realizing there is no panel of adults coming to evaluate whether you have done adulthood correctly.
No one is giving you extra credit because you stayed in the sensible career. No one is awarding points because your life looked impressive while you were quietly miserable. There is no final exam, and there is nobody arriving later to tell you whether you made the correct choices in the correct order.
You are the adult.
Which is both terrifying and extremely freeing because it means you can move, change careers, go back to school, make new friends, change the way your relationship works, become more serious about something everyone else thinks is frivolous, become less serious about something everyone else thinks is important, and build a life that makes less sense on paper and more sense to you.
That doesn’t mean every decision is easy or without consequences. It just means you are allowed to revise without waiting for some imaginary authority to give you permission first.
The Second Half of Life Can Be More Intentional
Maybe that is what turning 40 really feels like. Not arriving. Not suddenly becoming wise. Not finally having everything figured out.
It is more like becoming less willing to live by answers you never chose in the first place, and more willing to question things simply because they no longer feel true.
I don’t feel like I have arrived. If anything, I feel like I am questioning more than I ever have, but the questions feel different now. Less like, what am I supposed to do, and more like, what do I actually want, what kind of life do I want to wake up inside, and what am I willing to change now that I know I don’t get extra points for continuing something just because I once worked very hard to build it.
And for the first time, I am starting to think those may be the questions that matter most.
I love working with millennial women of color as they reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel authentic, intentional, and fully their own. I also genuinely love connecting with people and hearing their stories. If you want to share what this essay brought up for you, or if you’re a millennial woman of color who would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page or email me directly at anjali@uncommonevolution.com.
