Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife

Acknowledgments

There are a number of people who helped me on my journey to publishing this book. I ran a crowdfunding campaign through a literary agency to help drum up enough attention to attract a publisher, and none of this would have been possible without the support of my early readers.

Specifically, I would like to thank the following Silver Sponsors: Richard Schaeffer, Judy Parada, Deborah Haynes Brannon, and Dr. Saam Zarrabi of Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics. I would also like to thank the following readers for paying just a little bit extra with their preorder to help me on my way: Sharon Allen, Allan Michael Aquino, Betzi Barden, Amanda Berendsen, India Braddock, Carol Brock, Tamra Bubke, John Burke, Cheryl Charlton, Beth Crosby, Tanvi Dhooria, Sandra Gibbons, Michael and Freda Haynes, Dane Miller, Dr. Cindy Nelson, Brian Price, John Reasner, Rachel Richardson, Patricia Ryan, Becky Schroeder, Robert Sieger, Edyta Skiba, Meghan Stetzik, Michael Taysom, Aishling Tews, Vi Quach-Vu, Audra West and Mick Wist.

Beyond that, I wish to thank the healers in my life. Without their help, I do not believe I would still be here: Dr. Cindy Nelson, Dr. Anne Coleman,

Dr. Kenneth Brown, Dr. Richard Herrscher, Cheryl Leo, and Liz Mosesman.

A special note to Dr. Cindy Nelson: You’ve believed in me, you’ve helped me, you’ve encouraged me, you’ve healed me. I owe you so much gratitude for the impact you’ve had on my life. You mean more to me than words can express.

A special note to Dr. Anne Coleman: You’ve never stopped searching for answers. Your brilliance is a force to be reckoned with. What a gift you have! Thank you for all you do for people in this world, and for all you’ve done for me.

A special note to my husband, Jason: You are the light of my life. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. I love you, I respect you, I adore you, and I’m blessed by you. I’m grateful for every day we have together. Thank you for supporting me in this journey, and for healing parts of my soul. I’m a lucky girl to have found a true partner in life, and thank you for loving my (our) kitties!

Author’s Note

I started writing this book right after I fell off a health cliff, which lasted for more than four years and became one of the darkest periods of my rather traumatic life. I wrote it in spurts, in between varying levels of disability, in an effort to share lessons I thought I might be able to pass on to others. This was my fifth attempt at writing a book in more than a decade, but I knew it was the one I was finally meant to share.

When I was a schoolteacher for a brief period around age thirty, I found my favorite part of the job was relating to my students and sharing in their life struggles. Anything they’d experienced, I’d probably experienced too. And it was in this shared knowing that I felt the most like myself and like I was living an authentic life. I was able to use my hardships and trauma to help others, and I got my first glimpse of meaning for my existence when, previously, there had seemed to be none.

Many of my early writings were emotional vomits penned from a spiral of negativity and pain. This book was created in a different spirit—one of positivity, growth, and understanding. I wasn’t able to get there without first getting very sick, and I am grateful for my health challenges (with my hindsight goggles, of course!) because they finally helped me make that shift. I often talk about how we are all on a journey that sometimes doesn’t make sense until later, and this book finally gives some meaning to mine.

Thank you for your purchase, and I hope you enjoy my little take on life. These are my most personal stories and I tell them because I think others may see themselves in my experiences and perhaps will feel more empowered to embrace their life as it is—not as it could be, or as it might be. Today is all there is, and there is only one version of us out there. Embrace every day.

Moments

I feel like life is a series of moments, rather than one continuous stream of consciousness that snakes around boulders and over rocks, moving seamlessly down the way. Right now, my moment finds me sitting in the morning light with the sun streaming through my window. It hits the top of my dark wooden desk and reflects brightly toward me in a way that causes me to squint. Everything is quiet except for the occasional singing bird and the low whirr of cars that are speeding down a nearby highway.

I look up from my work to observe an older gentleman walking his dog under the naked winter trees outside my window. Behind me, I listen as my Maine Coon kitty darts around the apartment in his usual post-breakfast mania and my elderly white and orange one settles back down to sleep.

It’s just another moment in my life and it will be gone as quickly as it came. I’ll get up from my work soon and move on to the next moment in my day, and whether or not this hour of my life registers in my brain for the remainder of my time on earth is hard to say (although documenting it like this sure helps things along in that department). The fact is, we simply can’t store all of our moments in easily accessible parts of our brains; this is why we have pictures and journals and people to remind us of what happened and when.

r r r

When I was in college, early in the fall semester of my freshman year, I remember lying on my bed alone one afternoon and losing myself in thought and observation as I looked out the open window just above me. The air was still warm from summer, and a faint, humid breeze whispered past my skin. I remember my reclusive roommate was out somewhere doing something or other (probably trying to avoid me) and my suitemates were roaming the campus or in their room studying quietly (I wasn’t sure which). But there I was, stretched on top of the covers of my neatly made bed, staring up and out through the old window. It had panes that were crisscrossed by white wooden lines that were also speckled with peeling paint from decades long gone. I looked across the street at the neighboring dorm building, and then I looked upward at the flawlessly blue sky. And I decided to capture that moment in time, consciously, and to hold on to it forever.

I did this by saying to myself, as I surveyed every inch of my dorm room, something like:

Elizabeth, remember this moment. You’re young and you’re in your first year of college. This moment is here now and pretty soon it won’t be. And before you know it, it’ll be so far away, you’ll wonder what happened to the time. But as you get older, you can always think to yourself, I remember lying on that bed and capturing that one moment when I was nineteen years old … and holding on to it, always.

It was as if I were imprinting the words onto my soul that were necessary to immortalize that snapshot in time.

The funny thing is, it worked. That was twenty years ago and I still remember it in vivid detail like it was yesterday. I still remember the small room with the white walls and the tiny pedestal sink wedged between a pair of modest armoires and a bathroom door. I still remember the piece of gray carpet we’d picked up as a remnant from a local carpet store, and that we’d carted across town in one hundred-degree temperatures to use as a rug. I still remember my humble desk and chair, where I’d study and write my research papers, and where I’d use my bulky laptop to chat with my friend on this new thing called America Online (now known as AOL). I also still remember the long, rectangular, black and white TV with the tiny, six-inch screen and the travel handle, which I kept on the edge of the desk to watch at night sometimes, its long antenna reaching halfway to the ceiling and its dials letting me tune in to VHF or UHF.

Mostly, I still remember how it felt to be young and like the world was opening to me in a big horizon, like everything was brand new, like I was finally free, and like I had an entire life stretching beyond that dorm room, that window, that age of nineteen.

I must have been wise beyond my years because I somehow recognized that this moment, like all the others, would soon merge into all the rest. I also understood that I had the power to capture it and hold on to it if I so chose, simply by focusing intently and allowing everything to settle into a permanent place in my mind.

r r r

There have been many moments in my life between that one and now. But how many of them do I—or do we, in each of our unique lives—really remember? We always remember the important ones, like the day our cat died or the time we moved into an apartment with our new fiancé. We also remember those that weren’t life-changing but were still special in some way, like the time we walked around the neighborhood with our best friend, drinking from a bottle of champagne we’d wrapped in a brown paper bag. But then we remember other seemingly insignificant moments, like the time a cashier at the grocery store was particularly chipper, or the time we were driving down the service road and saw a hawk sitting on the street sign.

I think most of our moments get stuck somewhere inside of us, even though there are millions upon millions of them that we experience in our lifetimes. Because often they can be coaxed out with a photograph, or with a reminder from someone else, or with a journal entry. Or, these days, they’re beaten out of us by those Memories pop-ups on our social media feeds, which seem so often to be composed of things we’d like to forget.

As I’ve grown older, every time I’ve faced a difficult moment—a medical procedure, a job interview, a confrontation with someone I care about—I’ve tried to remind myself that it’s just another moment in my life. A blip on the radar, as one of my aunts once told me during a particularly difficult time in my life. It’ll come and go just like all the rest.

I sometimes ask myself questions too. Things like: Have I allowed myself to lose too much energy because of anticipation or regret? Or, Have I given more weight to this moment than is appropriate?

I also sometimes wonder if maybe we should let all of our moments stand as equals, rather than rating them or giving certain ones more weight than others. This doesn’t make a lot of sense when we think about joyous moments, because those seem to be automatically elevated in our consciousness. They’re part of the good stuff of life. But maybe it does make sense for the moments we perceive more negatively. So maybe it’s okay if we don’t dwell on what went wrong and instead move toward whatever the next moment may be. And maybe it’s okay if we decide to redirect our anxiety about something into a more positive activity we can do to get our minds off things, like taking a walk or baking some bread.

As I move further along in my life, I see that so many moments are lost forever because I didn’t record them. And in one sense, this is totally okay and probably the way life was meant to be. But in another, I wish I could remember more of them—if only to validate that I was here at all, because so much of my life is lived inside the walls of my home with only one other human and two cats as a witness.

And yet in a third sense, there are those memories (painful things, life errors, losses, embarrassments) I want to bury and never see again. I try to run away from those moments, but of course they stick the hardest, even though I don’t write them down or capture them in a photograph.

Maybe the selective memory is just part of the deal. Part of life. The good with the bad, the strong memories with those that have been forgotten. All of it making up the fabric of time that we experience in blips while we’re on this earth to do something more.

The Thing about

Vacations

There’s a song by Loverboy that talks about how we all work for the weekend. And isn’t that the truth? We spend our lives working and then reward ourselves with tiny bits of quiet: weekends, vacations, sleeping in (on occasion). We’ll rest when we’re dead … or when we retire, we think. (Although many of us don’t have the luxury of that dream anymore.)

I remember very clearly the moment I realized I’d fallen into this expected and pre-scripted rhythm of adulthood. I was at my then mother-in-law’s house on a Friday night, already changed out of my work clothes and leaning back in a beat-up chair. I’d just finished my first week at my first full-time corporate job at the tender age of twenty-three. I was paid, although not all that much, to get dressed in a skirt and pantyhose and then be held against my will in a cubicle for eight hours a day as a temp worker. That evening was my first-ever weekend’s respite. I sat in that beat-up chair in that beat-up house in quiet observation, listening to the sounds of traffic outside, watching the light in the window turn golden orange, and analyzing my current situation.

I was tired in a way I hadn’t experienced before—that was the first thing I noticed. My brother-in-law was playing a video game while my mother-in-law pulled dinner together in the next room—that was the second thing. Everyone seemed rather subdued and weary while all of this was happening—that was the third thing. And the fourth thing I noticed was a sort of collective sigh in the air as all of humanity was transitioning into the weekend, looking forward to the brief bit of time they could control.

This is what people do, I remember thinking to myself rather resolutely. We work all week long and then we just have the weekends. That’s how it’s going to be now. I’m doing what everyone else does.

My feelings about this were mixed at this early time in my life. I felt dismayed by the realization that I was now past the age where I could take a 2:00 p.m. class or sleep in on Fridays, but I was also rather stoic (and a little proud); I had finally joined the ranks of real adulthood after working so hard in college.

r r r

Now that I’m many more years into my journey, I can say that I’ve had periods of frustration about being so busy on a day-to-day basis, so strapped for time, so overextended and unable to meet all my obligations or do all my chores—or have any time to myself. This was especially true when I was a mother to a young child and working a full-time office job. I felt so isolated in my struggles because I had nobody to commiserate with, but these days I see how many other people go through these work-life balance difficulties too.

And I ask myself, how often do we feel this way and actually decide to do something about it? How often do we examine even the smallest ways in which we can take control of our spinning lives?

I asked myself these questions in my early thirties when I left my corporate job to try to forge my way as an independent. But my new career path opened up a whole other can of worms around financial security, stability, and a different form of exhaustion. So now I’m asking myself those same questions again as I try to merge two worlds—the world where I have a steady job and a steady paycheck, and the world where I really need some flexibility so I can have more time to take care of myself.

I think for some of us, the answer to regaining control is: I’m never going to do anything about my job situation (or, I can’t). For others, the answer is: sometimes I try to do something to improve my work-life balance. And still for others, the answer is: I’ll do something about it when I have a mental breakdown and finally call in sick, then schedule a vacation. I know it’s easy to get pulled back into the machine but I have to wonder, why do we live our lives this way, a solid wall of work with no quiet time in between?

As we all navigate survival in this world, which means having to work one or even two jobs, most of us try desperately to maintain some sort of balance between generating income and living life. One thing I’ve learned is if you think you can use your weekends as your sole method to recoup, you likely are mistaken.

Many of us pack our weekends so full of activity, they mirror our work weeks and are a poor excuse for a respite. I do think some of us are better at these things than others, though. People who are single and childless (like I was for a long time) are pros at winding down on the weekends because they often are forced to do so. There are no responsibilities pulling at them, nobody else is in the room, nothing is burned into their schedule. Sometimes they fill this time with unhealthy habits such as sleeping too much, consuming excess amounts of wine (guilty), or going out to nightclubs to let their troubles blend away into the smoke (also guilty). But that’s a story for another day.

For the most part, I would say single people and those without kids are more likely to do a better

job at taking regular vacations from the treadmill of life than the rest of us. They have more time to sit quietly with themselves. They also have more time to pursue hobbies that are of interest and that ignite passions within.

But you may be reading this thinking, I’m single and the last thing I want to be is single. I hate being single. I’m lonely, I’m unfulfilled, I’m isolated. And I get that. I do. Because I’ve been there … and it was probably the most depressing time in my life. But if we can get past the feelings of loneliness and transform them into action