The Power of Midlife Recalibration
on rebirth, renewal, and reinvention in our forties
I was recently interviewed for
, a Substack where women discuss their experience of middle age. I love talking about entering my forties, because it has coincided with growth, reinvention, and a total recalibration of who I am and what I want from my life.I’m currently 45. The last five years have brought massive upheaval to my life. Nothing about my life looks the same as it did when I hit forty.
In the past five years, I have:
Suffered through the pandemic, a crucible that ruined my marriage
Stopped ghostwriting and started writing in my own voice for the first time in two decades
Started this Substack
Discovered betrayal in my marriage
Did MDMA therapy to save my marriage
Left my marriage instead
Stayed single for two years
Wrote a memoir
Started dating
While all of that looks impressive, what is truly unfathomable is the transformation that has taken place inside of me.
The person I am today is unrecognizable to who I was at age 40.
Yes, a lot of this is due to MDMA therapy, which I wrote about here in part. I cover this therapy in detail in my memoir (which is still seeking a publisher), how it helped me evolve from the person I was (Cindy 1.0), which was adaptive for a time, into the person I am becoming (Cindy 2.0), who no longer wants to fawn and disappear. The current working subtitle is How MDMA Therapy Brought Me Back to Life.
I’m not sure if you tracked any of what happened last week with the blood moon and total eclipse and the 9-9-9 portal but I did. Mainly because I am now incredibly woo woo and always looking for meaning in the mundane. And also because Sunday, September 7, the day of the blood moon, happened to be my former wedding anniversary. So it felt significant that it was supposedly the end of a karmic cycle, a cosmic reset, a time to release what was weighing you down and harvest what you’d been growing. Then, on Tuesday, the 9-9-9 portal would open (September 9, 2025=9/9/9). It was a time to step fully into who you are becoming.
So Sunday, let go. On Tuesday, open the door to the next version of you.
Ever since I started dating in May, I have felt like I am in the chrysalis changing from one thing to another. And it is deeply uncomfortable. I don’t yet have wings. But I am no longer a caterpillar. I’m this in between thing that yes, sometimes just feels like a pile of goo.
I used this analogy in the interview. That for women, midlife is not a crisis but a chrysalis. A moment of transformation that allows them to realign with their selves, and stop living their lives solely for others.
“The midlife crisis for women is not a crisis but a chrysalis. It is a moment when we don’t act out but burrow in. To discover who we truly are. Sometimes for the very first time.”
Lately I’ve been coming to terms with the woman I was in my marriage. Examining how much I tolerated, and why. I look back and wonder: Where was my outrage? Where was my sense of self-protection? Where was my self?
Well, she was gone. She had been ghosted. I had not yet done MDMA therapy to resurrect her.
I don’t think every woman ghosts herself to the extent that I have, therefore not every woman requires psychedelics to get said self back. But we do lose ourselves along the way. And then we hit mid-life and realize we are tired of being invisible, to ourselves and to others. We decide its time to reset the terms.
ICYMI:
I wrote recently about how my divorce didn’t feel like a breakup. And it didn’t. But that’s because leaving a marriage takes so much focus and strength and stamina and forward momentum that you can’t grieve the end of the relationship or even the end of the family in real time. It would be too overwhelming and you wouldn’t be able to do it. To leave requires steadfast attention on what you are creating. You have no bandwidth to think about all you are leaving behind.
I did an Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy session recently and discovered a part of me that was still incredibly sad over the end of her marriage (read more on IFS therapy here and here). She had never been fully allowed to grieve. She was sitting in a heap on the floor in the kitchen of the house I left behind. She was gutted by the tragedy of the end of this family. This home that we’d built together, this house that we’d literally renovated room by room. The dance parties, the meals, the Christmases, the birthdays, the Easter egg hunts, they all happened here. In this house. This home! And she was like: I can’t leave this! How did you do this to us?
This is the strange thing about parts work. There are all these parts inside of us that want different things. So of course the part of me that knew I needed to leave, that had the strength to leave, was the one who was present during those years of leaving. And this part had gotten exiled. I had hidden her away because I couldn’t deal with her.
But she came back to me. She said: Cindy! We are sad! Please! Please! Recognize our sadness!
I am sad. I do miss that family of four even as I know I had to leave it. I’ve been trying to take the time to listen to this part of me. She wanted me to recall the good times, she wanted me to look back and collect those beautiful memories like shards of sea glass so we could always remember them. And she was right. There was just so much bad those last five years it was hard for me to remember the good. But of course there was good. There always is.1
But that doesn’t mean it was wrong to leave. Around the same time I was working with this part in my IFS therapy, I discovered a file folder I thought I’d lost. In it were some papers related to my marriage. One was a power point presentation my ex had made during our final months of couples therapy. I remembered him bringing this to our session and it was one of those moments when I think I knew I was done with my marriage even though I couldn’t really name it. It was supposed to help us determine if we could stay together. If we were aligned about what we each needed from this relationship.
(The rest of this post is paywalled due to its personal nature. Become a paid subscriber to discover how this power point presentation signaled I was done being a wife, the new part of me I’m trying to give more air, and the meaning behind my very first tattoo).