Today’s Question For Your Uncommon Evolution: What part of your life feels ready for a change?
The idea of “midlife reinvention” usually comes with a swift feeling of terror because for most of us, the word that usually follows midlife is “crisis.”
Sure, in most media we see the stereotypical old white man crisis – as a product of not knowing how to deal with his feelings, he buys an expensive sports car or blows up his marriage or both.
But that’s not the only type of midlife experience that exists. Women, especially women of color, also go through a period of transition around midlife that can come with a lot of emotional upheaval.
Many millennial women of color have now reached a certain age where we’re beginning to question our careers, our marriages, where we live, how we spend our time, or whether we want to keep living the same way. The underlying feeling is that something just isn’t quite right.
We’re also changing from a hormonal perspective – most of us aren’t told that perimenopause can’t start as early as your mid-to-late thirties and last for ten years or more. In fact, most of us aren’t really aware of anything that can come with perimenopause because women’s health is woefully underserved in the medical community (a topic for another day).
These types of changing feelings in midlife can be especially hard for women of color. We’ve been conditioned our whole lives to question our feelings. Are we just bored? Afraid of aging? Ungrateful? Unable to deal with our hormones? Are we making some impulsive decisions just to shake up a great life that we should be more thankful for?
We might question whether we just need a vacation. Or to just sit still, get some more therapy, and let the feeling “pass.”
The thing is though, for many millennial women of color in midlife, these aren’t feelings that will simply pass. We’re not, usually, having what’s thought of traditionally as a “crisis.”
More often, it’s that we’ve simply reached the point where we can no longer ignore that the life we built doesn’t work for us anymore. If it ever did in the first place.
For millennial women of color, this realization can be especially complicated because many of us spent the first half of our lives trying to feel safe. We got the degrees, pursued respectable careers, learned how to earn money, and made decisions that could be defended to our families and anyone else who wanted an explanation. We became practical because practicality mattered. Success was not always about fulfillment or self-expression. It was about financial security, making our parents proud, proving their sacrifices meant something, and becoming difficult to dismiss in workplaces and institutions that were not necessarily built with us in mind.
For some of us, success was also about making sure we would never have to depend on anyone.
So when that successful life stops feeling right, we are not only reconsidering a job, a city, or a particular way of living: we are reconsidering the entire strategy we used to protect ourselves.
That can be terrifying, especially when the strategy worked.
It is one thing to leave a life that has obviously failed. It is another thing to consider leaving one that gave you the income, title, reputation, stability, or sense of competence you worked incredibly hard to build.
Maybe you are still good at what you do. Maybe your family is proud of you. Maybe people hear your job title and assume you have made it.
Maybe you are also miserable.
Or perhaps miserable feels too dramatic. Maybe you are simply tired all the time, bored, irritable, disconnected from yourself, and regularly fantasizing about a life that looks nothing like the one you are currently maintaining. Nothing is falling apart. You just do not particularly want to keep doing it for another twenty years.
That may not sound like an emergency to anyone else, but eventually it starts to feel like one to you.
I think this is one of the reasons midlife reinvention looks different for women of color. We often do not feel entitled to change something simply because we no longer want it. We feel like we need a better reason. The job needs to become intolerable. The relationship needs to become clearly unhealthy. Our bodies need to stop cooperating. The burnout needs to become severe enough that other people agree a change is necessary.
Wanting something else does not feel sufficient.
And the moment we do want something else, we often begin cross-examining ourselves: Are you seriously going to give up that salary? Do you understand how many people would be grateful for this opportunity? What was the point of all that education? What are you going to tell your family? What if the new thing does not work? What if you make less money? What if everyone thinks you have lost your mind?
These are not ridiculous concerns.
Reinvention involves actual risk, and women of color do not all have the same room to absorb it. We may have children, aging parents, mortgages, student loans, health insurance needs, or family members who depend on us financially. We may not have inherited wealth or a safety net waiting beneath us.
That is why reinvention often does not look like dramatically quitting on a Tuesday and waking up on Wednesday as your true self.
It usually looks much less cinematic.
You may keep the job while taking classes at night. You may save money for two years before leaving. You may start a business on the side, get a few clients, lose some of them, wonder whether the whole thing was a terrible idea, and then try again. You may reduce your hours before resigning completely or build such a careful bridge toward the new life that, from the outside, it barely looks like reinvention at all.
But it is.
There is also the problem of becoming a beginner again.
By midlife, many women of color have become extremely good at what we do. We know how to prepare, solve problems, navigate difficult people, and perform under pressure. We have spent years building credibility, often in environments where we felt we had very little room to make mistakes.
Then reinvention asks us to enter a space where we do not know what we are doing.
At twenty-two, nobody expects you to have everything figured out. At forty-two, you may expect yourself to understand every room the moment you walk into it.
Instead, you are asking basic questions, learning a new industry, trying to find clients, building an audience, completing assignments, or sitting in a classroom with people who may be young enough to have no memory of life before smartphones.
You go from being the person everyone asks for help to the person who needs help.
That is humbling, and for those of us who built our identities around being competent, it can feel almost intolerable. It is also one of the reasons people remain in careers and lives they have outgrown. Competence is comfortable, even when the life around it is not.
Midlife reinvention may also require a different relationship with ambition.
A lot of women reach this stage and realize they are not less ambitious. They are simply less willing to suffer indiscriminately in the name of ambition.
They still want meaningful work. They still want to make money, sometimes a lot of it. They still want to build things, lead people, create something excellent, or become highly skilled in a new field.
They just may no longer want success badly enough to tolerate being miserable every day.
They may want control over their schedules, the ability to choose their clients, more time with their families, or enough energy left at the end of the day to recognize themselves. They may want to exercise, write, travel, rest, or simply sit in their own home without feeling that every quiet moment should be used to catch up on work.
That is not a lack of ambition.
It is a more honest version of ambition.
You are no longer willing to accept success in whatever form it is offered. You want success that does not require you to disappear inside it.
Of course, figuring out what that looks like can take a while. One of the most frustrating parts of midlife reinvention is that you may know exactly what you do not want long before you know what should replace it. You know you hate your job, but you do not know which career would feel better. You know you want more freedom, but you do not know how to create it without sacrificing the financial stability you spent years building. You know you need a change, but every possible change introduces a new problem.
That uncertainty can make you feel like you should do nothing until you have the perfect answer. Unfortunately, perfect answers are not usually available.
Sometimes the only way to learn what you want is to try things before you are certain. You take the class, start the small project, talk to someone doing the work you think you might want to do, offer the service, or spend more time in the place you imagine yourself living.
You experiment without requiring every experiment to become your new identity.
This can be difficult for high-achieving women because we would often prefer the new life to arrive with a complete strategic plan, several reassuring financial projections, and at least one respected person confirming that we are making the correct choice.
Sometimes that happens. Sometimes you are just taking the next reasonable step and hoping the path becomes clearer after that.
And there is grief in this process too, even when the change is wanted. You may grieve the identity you spent years building, the certainty of knowing what you do for a living, or the ease of explaining yourself at a dinner party. You may miss the salary, the status, the colleagues, or the feeling of being excellent at something. You may even grieve the younger version of yourself who wanted that life so badly.
None of that means the old life was a mistake.
I think we sometimes believe that, in order to justify changing direction, we have to declare everything that came before a waste. But the career may have served you well. The city may have been right for you then. The marriage may have contained real love. The life may have given you money, experience, relationships, confidence, and options that made the next one possible.
Something can have been right and still no longer be right. That is not inconsistency. It is what happens when a person continues to change, and more importantly, to grow, after their twenties. And that should be celebrated.
Midlife reinvention looks different for women of color because it often asks us to question things we were taught never to take lightly: stability, duty, achievement, respectability, and our responsibility to make other people’s sacrifices worthwhile. It asks us to consider that survival may no longer be the only goal.
That does not mean becoming reckless, pretending money does not matter, or blowing up your life because you had one unpleasant week. It means beginning to include yourself in the decisions.
You ask what you actually want, not only what is safe. You ask whether your version of success still makes sense. You ask what you might build if the next chapter did not have to look like the last one.
And then, usually, you proceed in a way that is much less dramatic than people imagine. You research, plan, save, experiment, panic, change your mind, take a step forward, become frightened, and occasionally take half a step back.
You keep going anyway.
Midlife reinvention for many millennial women of color may not necessarily about becoming a completely different person.
It may be about finally giving the woman you already are some influence over how she lives.
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.
