My Midlife Story

For years, I solved outer mysteries — as a scientist, educator, and global project leader. I knew how to hold complexity, lead teams, and translate vision into action. I knew how to perform alignment.

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But something had begun to shift, quietly, long before I had language for it.

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At 45, I was laid off during a merger. Perimenopause had already begun. The systems I’d navigated for decades suddenly felt misaligned. Something in me was no longer willing to override discomfort.

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The rupture wasn't just professional. It was physical, emotional, existential. My body became the teacher. Focusing and spiritual companioning became the compass. And slowly, a new role emerged, not strategic, not performative, but deeply attuned.

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I didn't plan to work with midlife's in-between places.

The work found me through lived experience.

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Illness, perimenopause, and later Long Covid stripped away the strategies that had carried me for years. Frozen shoulder. Food intolerances. Sleep disruption. Brain fog. Fatigue. I could no longer outrun my body. I had to learn how to stay with what was happening instead of pushing through it.

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Focusing met me in that disoriented terrain. It taught me how to listen without fixing, how to stay present without collapsing, how to relate to the parts of me I had exiled. What began as body-based emotional regulation unfolded into something deeper, a kind of prayer without a name, a quiet relational awareness.

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As I found my footing, clients began arriving in their own liminal spaces, menopause, burnout, grief, career shifts, identity unraveling. Together, we learned to listen without rushing, label without pathologizing, and navigate with honesty and grace.

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Menopause stopped being a medical inconvenience or cultural punchline. It became a rite of passage, a place of clarity, power, and individuation. Not easy, but meaningful.

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That story continues writing itself. At 56, learning I am neurodivergent didn't change all the trauma that had happened. It explained it. As estrogen waned, so did its neuroprotective properties, and what had been quietly compensated for decades came into view. Mild dyslexia, high sensitivity, and several signs of mild autism. Only barely visible, because I had spent decades mastering the mask. To realize that nothing had been wrong with me all those decades was an enormous relief, and cleared up skin issues and anxiety in no time. With this hidden layer of aging revealed, I am excited that I can now live more authentically. And I am proud to be quirky, unconventional and neurodiverse, well aware of the stigma and the not knowing by the majority of the neurotypical public that autism wears many faces, and is generally late diagnosed in women in menopause.

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This is the terrain I walk with others now: the in‑between places where the old map no longer works, and a new one hasn’t formed yet.

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​A version of my midlife story was published in 2025 in Presence, the journal of Spiritual Directors International (SDI). Read the SDI publication (PDF):

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