Be Your Own Change Guru: The Ultimate Women's Guide for Thriving at Midlife. Susan Paget
to me, I can rest assured that I’m not tossing and turning in the middle of the night because I have things on my mind. I’m tossing and turning because my body is changing (and to deal with the tossing and turning, I get up, I create and nap later…).
So when you read this book and you have a change in mind that you want to make, realize you’re not just working on one thing. You’re actually helping yourself move through life in a graceful and elegant way that affects everything. You can only imagine what happens if you take the opposite approach and don’t work on the things that aren’t right in your life. Actually, I choose NOT to imagine that and I’m betting that because you’re reading this book, you feel exactly the same way.
One of my heroes, Dr. Christiane Northrup, who I refer to many times in this book, is an advocate of the concept of creating wellness “upstream”. Examining issues “upstream” means getting to the bottom of everything that doesn’t work for us early in the piece, upstream from our personal river, whether it’s physical, mental, social or whatever. She says that the problem with medicine as we know it, and the way that the menopausal years have been dealt with up until now is that people and doctors don’t deal with issues until they are deep into the river system and it’s possibly too late.
This is our time to clean up our personal rivers. Right at the top.
Right now, you and I have the opportunity to create systems that are clean, beautiful, flowing and ultimately endless. And it’s all because we have chosen to be brave and make the change, during a cultural tipping point. We are the first generation of women over 40 who are demanding to live our lives upstream.
Susan Paget
Sydney, Australia 2013
Chapter 1. It’s Time For A Change
Are you ready to make a change?
Is there something that you’ve wanted to shift, maybe for years, maybe for your whole life, but for whatever reason, you’ve never been able to work out how to do it? Or does the idea of making change feel so overwhelming you secretly have hoped it would just go away?
Well, you’re not alone.
In fact, that’s how this book was born. It came from my own desire to make a big life change combined with the absolutely desperate feeling of having no idea of where to start.
Now this need for change wasn’t just an “out of the blue, let’s shake things up a little bit” type of change either. This was a deep need to make a shift that had been brewing inside me for years. I knew something wasn’t right and even worse was I had no idea how to find out what it was or how to take action and address it.
I guess there was a part of me that hoped somehow this mystery would magically resolve itself, that a person or situation would make it all go away. But that magic wand never appeared. Instead, because of forces of nature, I came to the realization that I was the one who was going to have to come to my own rescue. I was the one who would have to finally face up to my stuff.
And the catalyst?
That force of nature that would make me once and for all deal with something that had weighed me down for years was one of the major milestones in any woman’s life; whether I liked it or not, I was 47 years old and I had reached midlife.
Little did I know at the time but the seemingly sudden urgency to confront a challenge in your 40s is all part of the midlife process. It’s the stuff that the old cliché “midlife crisis” is made out of. For some of us this need for a life change can be exhilarating. For others, change at midlife can be confronting to your whole identity and scary as all hell.
And for others, the need to change at midlife is met with the old classic attitude of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
So, what was the change that I wanted to make?
I wanted to find my purpose. I wanted to know why I was on this planet. I wanted to make a difference and I had no idea how to do it. And in my late 40s, with three children at various stages of early adulthood, a strong marriage and a decent career, this need seemed completely insane.
Wasn’t it enough for me to be a mother? Wasn’t it enough for me to be a wife? Wasn’t it enough for me to be able to have a decent job?
But for some reason, at this key age, I started to twist the questions around trying to find answers. The more I thought about them, the more lost I got.
Who was I if I wasn’t a mother?
Who was I if I wasn’t a wife?
Who was I if I didn’t have my job as a way to label myself?
When I asked myself those big questions, I would come up blank. And I started to get very scared. I got scared because those questions were along the lines of the questioning I had asked myself my whole life, even as a little girl. I just couldn’t believe that any of us were put on earth to just be born, grow up, get married, have a career, get old, get sick and die. I couldn’t accept that that was all there is in life and I assumed, even as a young girl, that one day all would eventually unfold for me. Something would transpire which would let me know my reason for being on the planet and how I could make it a better place.
Now, this is a common thing isn’t it? Who doesn’t want to fulfill their purpose? Who doesn’t want to have a really big reason for being here and going through all the things that we go through?
So I went through my life with an expectation of a higher purpose. In some ways, many things fell into place perfectly. I married a wonderful man and we had three really great kids. While doing the mom thing I juggled a career in the media, first starting out as a writer and then moving into television as a researcher and eventually a producer.
While television producing can seem like a glamorous job (and admittedly, it did have its perks), I constantly found myself feeling unsatisfied and uncomfortable in the role. It seemed like I could never get into the perfect situation – either the people I worked with weren’t a match for me or the type of programs and work I had to do would make me question my ethics. It was like I was walking around in a suit that didn’t quite fit but it kind of looked okay so I just had to put up with it.
The dream that I had of one day doing something that made a difference hung over my head. My logic about it at the time was that something would happen. Some cool job would eventually come my way in the television industry that would really be my opportunity to do something special. But as time went on, the jobs I began taking seemed to completely contradict my core beliefs. The possibilities of doing something important with my vocation began to fade into the background. I’d all but given up.
To be honest, by the time I was in my mid 40s, I was too busy to even remember I had a dream. My three kids had turned into teenagers – and like most mothers who are working full time, even with the support of my husband, I was exhausted, burnt out and felt stretched to the limit.
But something else was happening.
I noticed I was feeling completely angry. And on edge. And anxious. I started to feel the physical signs of mini panic attacks. I went to my doctor for a check-up and she told me that everything was fine. None of it made sense. I had a regular yoga practice. I walked regularly. I ate well. But here I was, with my emotions starting to turn on me. I didn’t know what was going on!
So on one day off, when the house was quiet, I plopped on the couch and turned on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show. The theme of Oprah’s show was something along the lines of “IF YOU’RE A WOMAN OVER 35, YOU MUST WATCH THIS SHOW”.
Oprah’s program was dedicated to perimenopause, the hormonal transition that eventually leads to menopause. Her guest was Dr. Christiane Northrup, one of the pioneers of women’s health who explained that from as early as the late 30s on, but most commonly around the