Midlife is when the Darkness comes Knocking

There is a Latin word ipseity (ip-see-uh-tee) that means the core essence of who we are. Our innermost self, unborrowed and unmasked. The part of us that existed before the roles, the expectations, before who we needed to become to find belonging. Midlife calls us back to that self whether we are ready or not.

For most women the first half of our life is spent building careers, relationships, families, status...our identity. We learn how to be useful, needed and how to hold everything together and make it look, at least from the outside, easy. We become the capable one, the caregiver, the professional, the good girl. We grows into the woman who continues to perform even when no one was watching.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all this something changes.

The hormonal and cellular shifts of midlife have a way of surfacing everything we have been holding down. The bone-deep exhaustion, the grief of our unlived lives, autoimmune illnesses and those of parts of ourselves we ignored, exiled or didn't think were worth keeping.

Some hardly notice the changes. They use whatever they can to cling on to the older version of themselves. And then sometimes it comes as an illness or the end of a relationship. For most of us it's a restlessness that won't be reasoned away. A sense that the life we carefully constructed no longer fits. The structures that defined us, that we built around our old identity no longer hold any allure, are no longer sustainable.

Carl Jung called this enantiodromia, it is when what we have suppressed for too long turns and demands to be heard. The psyche must be brought into balance. What has been held down will surface and what has been ignored will find it's voice. From inside, it feels like we are falling apart.

This is our darkness.

It can literally bring us to our knees. It did me. A perfect storm - arthritis, chronic illness, untreated neurodivergence, single motherhood, self-employment, commuting globally, all at once. I endured years of misdiagnoses and gaslighting from the medical profession and therapists. It was a profoundly lonely time.

What carried me through was a to stop fighting the darkness and begin to listen to what it was asking of me.

The women I work with arrive here in different ways. They are intelligent, capable, often high-achieving and they are exhausted by the effort of being all of those things. They feel lost. They feel invisible. They have lost what makes them feel alive.

Midlife is their initiation. The darkness that comes knocking is not the enemy. It is the force that strips away what is no longer essential. It is an invitation to Ipseity. The self that was always there. Waiting, with patience for this moment. The return. Not to the illusion, that woman is gone. To something older, the immovable part of who you are.