16/04/2026
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Nobody prepares you for the strangeness of becoming yourself at fifty. You might have assumed the work was already done, that by now you'd know who you were and what you wanted. But then the structures fall away, one by one. The children leave, or the marriage ends, or your mother dies, or the job that defined you for decades is suddenly over, and there you are, standing in the middle of your own life, not sure what to do next. Mary Lou Judd Carpenter calls this a repeat of adolescence, and the comparison is more accurate than it first appears.
Adolescence, after all, is the first time you have to become yourself without a script. The body changes, the social rules shift, and you feel conspicuously awkward in ways you can't hide. Most people get through it by copying the people around them, and eventually something clicks into place. But what happens when it comes around again at fifty? There's no one to copy. The women ahead of you didn't face the same conditions, and the women behind you are still in the thick of it. Mary Catherine Bateson, the anthropologist who spent her career studying how women compose their lives, noticed that women's lives have never followed the predictable stages that men's careers once did. Women interrupt themselves, combine things and start again. The improvisational quality that might look like failure from the outside is actually the shape of a life that had to be made up as it went along.
At fourteen, you didn't know what you wanted because you'd never wanted things freely before. At fifty, you don't know what you want because you've spent decades attuning yourself to other people's needs. The wanting muscle has atrophied. You can walk into a bookshop and not know what to buy because no one else needs you to buy anything. You can have a free Saturday and feel anxious rather than relieved. The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written about how hard it is to want things and how wanting itself is a skill we don't often get to practice. In "Missing Out," he suggests that we're all amateurs at our own desires, always guessing at what we might need without ever quite knowing. At fifty, that amateurishness can feel like failure because everyone else seems to have figured it out. But maybe they haven't and maybe the awkwardness is what learning feels like.
The adolescent body was embarrassing because it changed without warning and without permission. The fifty-something body does the same thing, often more brutally. The face you've known all your life starts looking back at you differently. The energy you used to take for granted becomes something you have to manage. Then there’s the menopause. Carpenter is right that we haven't been trained for this, but I think the lack of training goes deeper than just the physical. We haven't been trained to want things that don't benefit other people. The woman who spent thirty years putting her own needs last doesn't suddenly know how to put them first and might not even know what her needs are, apart from the constant beat of everyone else's. And when the beat stops, when the house empties or the job ends or the caring duties finally lift, there's silence. And many of us don't know how to fill it.
Carpenter says women are becoming empowered and finding more freedom, and that's true in ways it wasn't true for earlier generations. But freedom only works if you know what to do with it. A teenager who's been given permission to go out doesn't immediately know where she wants to go. She might end up in the wrong place, with the wrong people, for years, before she figures it out. And we might too. The awkwardness of mid-life freedom is part of the process. The trying and failing and trying again. The starting a painting class and quitting after three weeks. The thinking about leaving and then staying or the lying awake at night with a strange new feeling that might be possibility or might be dread, and not being sure which.
What Carpenter identifies, is that discomfort doesn't mean something has gone wrong. The adolescent didn't know she was becoming herself at the time. She just felt awkward and hungry and confused. Looking back, she can see it was growth. Maybe we'll look back too, eventually, and see that the not-knowing was the beginning of something. But right now, in the middle of it, it just feels like flailing. And perhaps that's all right. Perhaps the flailing is the work. We might not know where we're going yet. That might be the point.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
