Female And 50!!

After recently turning 50 my sister sent me this artcle. It is a great read. I can relate.

Title: The ‘middlepause’: what no one tells you about turning 50

Author: Marina Benjamin

Full Text & Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/the-middlepause-what-no-one-tells-you-about-turning-50/
The Internet, Online, 15/08/2019

Sample Text:
The transition from youth to middle age should be governed by a smoothly unfolding process; menopause, after all, is a gradual transition. It can last years and work its ways quietly. Women’s oestrogen levels decline in what feels like measured steps; the fuzziness can go on for such a long time it becomes the new norm. When change occurs this way, you adapt. Age will have crept up on you the way your parents seem suddenly old. The experience should feel like continuity….
For men, the midlife crisis, if it comes, is less about biology than society. If you manage your life well you can avoid it. In my conversations with women, it is the decisiveness and insistence of biology that is the trouble. We had assumed that ageing would move over us like a desert wind over dunes, bringing about a gentle shift in shape that would leave our essence intact. But for many women it hasn’t worked that way. Ageing has punched us in the face like a thug and it has been transfiguring…..
(good things too) In middle age I am discovering that I care less about what other people think. I care less about material things too – and about acquisition generally. I am less hungry and more content. Gradually, I am shedding ballast and gaining buoyancy. I have already experienced being the oldest person in the workplace, witness to the relentless forward thrust of younger colleagues. I wish them luck and bid them adieu….

There are other things I have gladly renounced besides the insatiable ambitions of youth. There is the quest for external markers of success, the wide playing field of sexual conquest, the idea that I will ever return to my peak fitness, the grievances I held against my parents for their inevitable failures, and more besides. I feel lighter for it. But also more grounded. My needs are leaner and my storehouse fuller. I trust my experience and expertise far more than I used to, and I better know my limitations. I’ve come by much of this as a result of working through grief, mining my myriad losses in order to reach a deeper bedrock of identity. And so against the diminishments of ageing that I have resented so sorely – the loss of vigour, organs, lustre; the loss of an unquestioning faith in possibility; the necessity of letting go of my former selves, some of them much-cherished – I can set the enrichment that derives from active renunciation: that monkish impulse that allows one to apprehend the more in less….

read full article online…