Self-discovery in the WTF season

That strange time of life in which we, somehow, make meaning when nothing making sense.

Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash

We were sitting on the coffee shop patio, tilting our chairs into the March sun, when she told me what it was like. “Now that I’ve turned 40," my friend announced, “I don’t give a fu<k.” She laughed, and I laughed awkwardly with her, surprised by the candor from someone whose manner was usually more reserved.

“That must be nice,” I blurted, since I was still giving out plenty of fu<ks at that point. But I was only 39 1/2.

She leaned back into the cool, metal chair, a fresh-born confidence on her face. “Now that I am in mid-life,” she continued, “I am just way more selective about who I allow to be in my life.” Maybe this was a moment of shared wisdom, a preview of the freedom that was ahead for me too, but she lost me before she finished her sentence. Midlife? Is that where we are?

I hadn’t thought of 40 as midlife before.

I found myself simultaneously compelled by my friend’s nascent liberation and repelled by her characterization of our life stage. I was unprepared to consider myself midlife, and I planned to resist. Midlife was 10 years in the future, right? It was an arbitrary timeline, sure, but I’d already committed to it. I needed more time to steel myself to face what must be faced at that ominous halfway point.

But apparently, I discovered, I was already there. The time was now, ready or not.

Graciously, my life had been preparing me - I just didn’t know what to look for.

There were the yarns of gray, sprouting in stripes along the left side of my head. Course and wily, they offered up a middle finger to whatever hairstyle I attempted for the day.

There was the slow creep of weight around my middle, along with the creep of the numbers on the scale, that I’d always been able to banish with week-long bread fast. But now would not budge.

Then there was the Category 5 rage that pulled me straight out to sea, a cumulative, unresolved anger I could no longer smile through. It finally landed me that year on a therapist’s couch.

Indeed, these are all the classic signs of midlife - the body rebelling, the heart convulsing, the rules breaking. All milestones visible to those who knew the path, but invisible to me, a new sojourner along this fork in this road.

I didn’t expect midlife to come so quickly. I didn’t expect it to drop me into the middle of a jungle of uncertainty, disappointment and regret.

I expected to know more at this point, to have more career clarity, more financial security. I expected to have locked some things down, and yet here I was, with most of my life floating shapeless circles above my head, refusing to land.

And maybe that’s the most quintessential way I can describe midlife. It’s not what you expect. Whatever you are anticipating, it is not that.

I’ve been calling it the WTF season, the feeling you have when something unexpected whips across your view in plain daylight, and you have to look twice to be sure you’re seeing it correctly.

It’s the feeling of outright indignation that life refuses to honor your certificate, the one you earned by playing by the rules with your health, your finances, your spirituality, your relationships.

It’s the rage at God, the world, mostly yourself, that you have gotten yourself into a familiar mess for the millionth time, but you still don’t know how to prevent it next time.

The only response is WTF!

And yet, to hope things will improve, that the clouds will clear and life will make sense someday is the purview of the young. When you no longer expect these things, or you at least begin to question the theory of life’s trajectory as upward and to the right, then you are ready for midlife. For the WTF season.

I’ve approached my WTF season with approximately the same emotion mix as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross sketches out in her grief process for navigating terminal illness: shock and denial, check. Bargaining, sort of, if panicked life evaluation and pre-40 bucket list-making count. Sadness, yes, but the undefined kind. Anger, check, in every variant. Acceptance? Maybe. On some days.

The longer I wade into the rapids of the WTF season, I find a new and unexpected watery terrain, and maybe I will call them The Stills. It’s water calm enough, moments still enough to allow me a glimpse at my own reflection. I don’t recognize myself at first, but that turns out to be the gift. The surprise at who I am now becomes the opportunity to find out who I have become.

The WTF season is the ultimate invitation to curiosity, to an open-heartedness toward myself, the people around me, the world. It’s living with a new humility that there is a distinct likelihood that I do not know WTF, maybe about anything.

It’s the opportunity to learn what the world really is, that the rules you made up to survive your 20s and 30s are not actually rules - they were perhaps only rails you’ve outgrown. Or maybe even bars in which you were imprisoned.

Either way, the next version of you is taking shape, in gritty, blurry view at first, but look long enough and you’ll see: the face looking back at you is the one who survived the rapids and the storms and somehow landed herself in the still water for a while.

I think this was the wisdom my friend wanted to share with me on the patio a few years ago. She could only point the way toward a path I would take on my own.