The mother’s lament hints at the awkwardness of adolescence—the way young adults are poised precariously between childhood and maturity, a time when none of their clothes fit anymore.
Middlescence is the adult version of adolescence, a life stage when we’re going through emotional, physical, hormonal, and identity transitions. While adolescents struggle with fitting into their clothes, middlescents are challenged by ill-fitting roles. Teenagers need to find new attire, mid-lifers need to spark new desires.
I’m a big fan of Connie Zweig’s work, especially her book “The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul.” She articulates how this era when nothing seems to fit, is the perfect time to move from role to soul:
“We all have the opportunity to radically reinvent and reimagine the process of aging for ourselves. And I don’t mean merely doing more or doing differently. I don’t use “reinvention” in the way that many experts do—from the outside in. That’s the topic of most books about aging. Rather, my emphasis is on the internal, less familiar terrain of soul—those subtle yearnings that appear in images and fantasies, the ways we respond or fear to respond to those messengers, and the symbolic meanings we glean from them. As we learn the psychological and spiritual practices in this book, we discover how to orient to our inner worlds, deepen our self-knowledge, and reimagine age for ourselves, eventually shifting from denial to awareness, from self-rejection to self-acceptance, from obligation to flow, from holding on to letting go, from distraction to presence. Even from role to soul. The result: a newfound freedom from the constraints of past roles and identities, an emerging sense of becoming who you were always meant to be, and a profound gratitude for the way that your life unfolded.”
-Chip