On Midlife, Contentment, and the Permission to Love the Life You Actually Have
Last week a friend and I were sitting on the front porch taking in the flowers blooming in the circle, watching the bees and birds flit from one to the other. And she said, “I keep waiting to feel like I’ve arrived, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe I already have and just didn’t notice.”
I set my glass of limeade down. I looked at her.
Because somewhere along the way, most of us built a picture of what our lives were supposed to look like by now. The career, the house, the body, the marriage, the children, the travel, the savings account, the something. And the picture was so specific, so detailed, so particular that we forgot it was a sketch someone else drew for us before we even knew what we wanted.
And now here we are, fifty-something and living a life that may or may not look like that sketch. Not worse. Not less. Just different. And some of us keep squinting at it, trying to make it match, instead of looking at what is actually in front of us.
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The Sketch That Was Never Yours
I can tell you exactly what my life was supposed to look like. I was supposed to be living in Georgetown or a flat in Paris, working at some think tank or cultural institution, not married and no dogs, there wouldn’t have been time for them. I was going to have a library with a rolling ladder. I was going to speak three languages fluently instead of one and a half. I was going to be the kind of woman who had read all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past and wrote a book and attended diplomatic dinners.
Instead, I live in North Carolina. I married a man who reads Nelson DeMille and Stuart Woods instead of Proust. I have three dachshunds and a blog and a life that looks nothing like the sketch and suits me better than the sketch ever would have.
And I am happier than Georgetown-me ever would have been. I know this because I know myself now in a way I did not at twenty-five or even forty. The woman who was going to work at the think tank thought it would make her feel like she had arrived. The woman drinking chocolate listening to the dawn chorus and watching a new day arrive is not arriving anywhere. She is already here.
The Myth of Settling
Here is the thing nobody tells you about the word “settling.” It assumes that wanting what you have is a failure of ambition. That if you are content, it is only because you gave up on something better.
Settling is marrying someone you do not love because you are afraid to be alone. Staying in a career that empties you because you are afraid of what people will think. Accepting unkindness because you have forgotten you deserve better.
Choosing the life you have, on purpose, with your eyes open? That is something else entirely. Recognizing that the shape of your days is not a consolation prize but something you built, tended, fought for, rearranged, and loved into being? That is paying attention. That is the opposite of settling.
What It Looks Like to Stop Measuring
When you stop holding your life up against the sketch, the strangest thing happens. You start to see it.
You notice that the morning is actually beautiful. Not beautiful in theory, not beautiful because you should be grateful, but genuinely beautiful. The light coming through the kitchen window, illuminating that one wall and creating a glow. The dog curled in your lap while the world is still for a moment. The quiet of a house before anyone else is awake.
You notice that the friendships you have are real. Not the friendships you were supposed to have, the big glamorous circle, the dinner parties, the women who summer together. The actual friendships. The friend who texts you an article at six in the morning because she knows you will find it interesting. The one who brings soup when she hears your voice is tired. The one who has never once made you feel like you need to perform but loves you at your best and worst and all of your quirks.
You notice that your marriage, which does not look like the movies and never did, is yours. Warts and all, as they say, and you would not trade it.
When you stop measuring, you start seeing. And what you see is not less than the sketch. It is more. Just more in a way that nobody prepared you for.
Why This Matters Now
I think this matters especially at fifty, sixty, whenever you find yourself standing in the middle of your life realizing you are closer to the end of the story than the beginning of it. Not in a morbid way. In a clarifying way.
Because if you spend the next twenty or thirty years still chasing the sketch, you will miss this. The drinking chocolate. The peonies. The dog. The friend who said the truest thing anyone has said to you in a year.
For a long time, it was not the life I was measuring myself against. It was the degrees. The years of study, the work, the thing I had built and was so sure I knew how to use. When life went a different direction, I did not think: well, that did not work out. I thought: I am not enough. As though the worth of everything I had done could only be confirmed by the job that was supposed to follow it. As though the woman herself did not count unless the resume lined up.
It took me a long time to separate those two things. Neither one needed Georgetown to prove it.
The rolling ladder would have been nice. I am not going to lie. But this, right now? This is not the backup plan. This is the plan.
Permission, If You Need It
If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in it, then here is what I want to say to you.
You are allowed to love your life as it is. Not as it was supposed to be, not as it might become if you just tried a little harder. As it is, right now, today.
Stop apologizing for a small life, a quiet life, a life that would not make a very interesting movie. Most interesting movies are terrible to live inside of. You know this. And you are old enough now to stop measuring yourself against what impresses other people instead of what actually feels like you.
You can say: this is enough. Not because you have given up. Because you have finally, after all these years, looked up.
I finished my drink that afternoon and sat there for a few extra minutes, watching the birds at the birdbath and the pups sunning on the hot rocks of the drive. The house was quiet. And I thought about what my friend said, about arriving and not noticing, and I realized she was right. We have arrived. We just forgot to look around.
What would change for you if you stopped measuring your life against what it was supposed to look like? I am asking because I genuinely want to know.
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