Your Midlife Crisis Is Not a Crisis. It Is a Beginning.
Personal reflections and research on the midlife crisis, for women who feel lost.
The more I live and the more I research, the more I come to understand that “crisis” might not be the best term to describe the seasonal changes most of us tend to go through in our midlife. I would rather call it the opposite: the turning point. I love the term “unravelling” (as Brené Brown calls it), and Brown is clear that unravelling is not breakdown. It is the moment when the armor we have been wearing for years (and that has been “preventing you from growing into your gifts”) finally starts to come off.
My own favourite term is “awakening.” It is the moment when the foundations of what was started shaking and changing and making space for what could be or what comes next. It is the season when one finally has space to think more deeply about herself, often accompanied with the urge to return home to herself.
While we see all these fancy slogans out there about midlife, “reinvention,” “rebranding,” I want to be clear that at no time do I aim to diminish the impact this season can have on an individual. There is a percentage of people who do not navigate the changes well, and who do not have the support they need for what comes next.
The Weight of This Season Is Real
It is in this season when many profoundly impactful life events occur. In the first part of our adult lives we take care of our children; in the second part we become empty nesters. We are sandwiched between generations, often taking care of our elderly parents at the same time. Careers end, change shape, or quietly stop making sense. Death and illness of loved ones, divorce and separation after decades of holding it together often occurs in this period. And last but not least, our mental and physical health starts changing.
Many prominent psychologists have spoken about this season in their work. Sigmund Freud was convinced that everybody was driven by the fear of death in this season. Carl Jung found midlife to be the season of individuation, a time for self-actualization and increased self-awareness. Erik Erikson saw the midlife season as the time when people started to be concerned about generativity, with the question of how they could give their contribution (their legacy) to the coming generations.
The truth is, this season can be scary.
After decades of holding it together and doing the right thing, things become softer. The structures and contexts that once held grip on us and dictated what we had to do, parental expectations, school and professional ambitions, societal norms, start to matter less. We have come this far. We have studied, we have achieved, we built a family, we tried to be good citizens. We did it all, or most of it.
Suddenly what was so relevant and so important starts shifting. Life starts changing. We start changing. And one day we wake up in this spot of restlessness.
I have been reading research to find language to these feelings and this season. A 2024 study by Eriksson and Frisén found that midlife challenges destabilize, in their own words, “the roles and assumptions that previously served as one’s identity foundations.” The things we built our sense of self around begin to loosen. Not because we failed, but because we grew.
The Story of Yourself Is Being Rewritten
Psychologists who study identity across a lifetime have something to say about this moment. Your identity is not a fixed thing you either have or do not have. It is an ongoing, internalized story, one you are always in the process of revising. Midlife is the moment when many of us realize, often uncomfortably, that the story we have been telling was written (or strongly influenced) by someone else, or by a younger version of ourselves who did not yet know what she would come to know.
A 2025 research by Deshmukh and Sharma about career transition and meaning-making in midlife names three things that tend to happen during this transition: re-evaluating life purpose, redefining success, and integrating past experiences. Each of these sound simple at first sight. In practice, they are part of the quiet, often invisible work of becoming.
It does not really matter whether our change is triggered by external events or by internal pressures and dissatisfaction. Here we are, and we have to choose our way forward.
Redefining Success Is an Identity Question in Disguise
I wrote a blog post in 2021 about redefining success on your own terms. I was 39 at the time, and I thought I had something figured out. I had already lived through enough of my own contradictions to know that my original definition of success, the corner office, the corporate career I grew up imagining, was not mine. I had built an entrepreneurial life instead. I had moved from a vibrant capital city to a small village by the ocean. I had made choices that confused people around me and made complete sense to me.
Reading it now, five years later, I can see something I could not see then. I was not finishing the process. I was just beginning it. Five years later I am back to the vibrant capital city, I am redefining my relationship with hospitality business, and I am back to university to study psychology (none of what I imagined back in 2021).
Redefining success is not a one-time revision. It is a continuous one. And when you arrive in your forties having already done it once, having made the brave choices and built something that looked nothing like the template, and you still feel this quiet restlessness, this sense that something still does not quite fit, it is not because you did the revision wrong. It is because identity work does not end, but instead it deepens.
From Compromised Self to True Self
A study by Smit and Malik, published in 2026, followed six midlife women who had done exactly this: left careers that looked successful from the outside but felt empty on the inside. What they described was not dramatic suffering but years of slow erosion. Financial security, social recognition, the respect of their peers. All real things. And underneath all of it, a growing sense of misalignment between who they were required to be and who they actually were.
The turning points were rarely planned. Divorce, menopause, bereavement got mentioned. A pandemic that stripped everything down to what actually mattered. One woman in the study said: “If I’m lucky, I have another 40 years to live. I didn’t know the what nor the how, but I knew I wouldn’t continue the same path.”
What is extraordinary about this research is not the disruption. It is what came after. These women described a process of “coming home to myself.” Not a dramatic transformation but a gradual return. A clearer understanding of what they actually valued, underneath the performance. A sense of coherence, perhaps for the first time in years.
A separate study by Denyer and Rowson (2022) on career change adds something important to this picture. What made these transitions possible was not certainty about the future, but something simpler and deeper: knowing who you are and what genuinely matters to you. When you have that, the uncertainty becomes navigable, because identity becomes the anchor. One of their participants, after years of searching, said something the authors highlighted and I find meaningful and beautiful: “I’ve finally, I’ve got my expression.”
That is what we are actually moving toward. Not a new version of external success. The expression of who we really are.
See It As a Beginning
Once you have arrived at that season when things start losing the shape that always felt familiar, do not lose hope. There is more to come. This is not the end. It is the beginning. It is the beginning of your next version. It will not happen overnight, and your identity is not shifting from one day to the next. But you will find your way.
Until arriving at midlife we all have a vision for how we imagine the second half to look. We have hopes and dreams and plans based on our experiences and beliefs, based on the stories we live. But life changes. Circumstances change. People change. We change. And this means that also our vision for the future will have to change. What once held true might not be true anymore, and what once felt impossible can now become possible.
A new vision likely needs a new identity too. Our identity is formed based on our experiences, beliefs and the stories we keep telling ourselves over and over. We make decisions based on that identity we know so well. But to build a new, bold vision, we need to challenge our comfort zone and work toward who we want to become.
This is where neuroscience offers something practical. By practising new ways of thinking and seeing things, these new ways will gradually become familiar to us and eventually integrate into our identity. The brain is not fixed, and apparently, neither are you.
How you narrate your difficult experiences shapes your wellbeing in the years that follow is reflected through most of these studies. Women who come to see this period as meaningful, not only painful, report significantly higher life satisfaction. It is worth keeping in mind that the work of making sense of what is happening to you is not wasted time and effort. The disruption and the feeling of not knowing are both real. And somewhere inside all of it, a new story is forming.
You are not losing yourself. You are finding a version of yourself that could not have existed before this moment.
Love,
C
If this resonates with you, I would love to hear what it brings up. I work as a midlife identity coach with smart, ambitious women who feel lost. You can find more of my writing here or reach out directly.
References
Brown, B. (2018, May 24). The midlife unraveling. Brené Brown. https://brenebrown.com/articles/2018/05/24/the-midlife-unraveling/
Denyer, K., & Rowson, T. S. (2022). “I’ve finally got my expression”: The anchoring role of identity in changing from an organisation-based career to a protean career path. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2022.2045570
Eriksson, L., & Frisén, A. (2024). Facing challenging experiences in life: Narrative identity development processes and associations with wellbeing during the transition to midlife. Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 24(1), 16–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/15283488.2023.2258152
Smit, M., & Malik, S. (2026). Purpose-led career change and well-being: The experience of midlife women. Journal of Career Development, 53(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/08948453261437095
