Are You Conforming?

Image By Author - Me And The China Cabinet

On Wednesday evening, I ate a slice of pavlova. I sat with my little pastry fork at a table resplendent with Shloer and placemats and wondered why in spite of my already full stomach and aversion to that overly rich blend of meringue, cream and fruit, I was still politely eating it. I guess I was afraid not to. It was my mother’s birthday and she had made it for everyone else to enjoy. I was in her house, being her child. I realised I’d been politely swallowing pavlova my whole life. 

A few hours earlier, I had sat cross-legged on my cold hall floor looking through the photo albums I kept in a box in the dark. I was ever-so-slightly ashamed of the past I’d locked away. I started at album number one, a classic Boots navy imitation leather 6 x 4 gold-embossed one with slip in pockets. It started somewhere in the 1990s. The glue had dried up, the cover was falling off, the pockets were slipping out, there were gaps everywhere where favourite moments had been extracted, pinned to a noticeboard in my bedroom and eventually disappeared. I’d been asked to provide an image of myself when I was younger, to accompany a short piece about how much I had changed. I had certainly changed. Externally, I bore no resemblance to that teenage girl. I struggled to recognise myself. I wondered what was going on in her head, what her future hopes were. I had a natural perm when everyone else was paying for one at the hairdressers. I’d chopped it all off when I left school, acquired an adult-look, an old-fashioned bob minus-fringe that didn’t suit me. I picked the best photo I could find. There was no evidence that I had ever been glamorous nor possessed any semblance of style. The photo was more about a china cabinet than me. It seemed symbolic, that overwhelming presence of a mahogany china cabinet in the background, considering my greatest fear is inheriting one complete with a collection of Royal Doulton ladies and a selection of Aynsley jugs. “Who’s that?” asked my mother who was not eating any of her own pavlova when I stuck it in front of her face. “It’s me,” I said. She wasn’t convinced. From a distance, I could have been Brian May. I was already covering as much of my body as possible. I would become more and more covered, more and more invisible as I moved into my twenties. My baggy Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirt talked about saving trees. I didn’t remember ever being that interested in trees. I didn’t remember ever being that interesting.

I’d showed the piece I’d written about my younger self to my husband as we drank Guinness in a hotel lobby. It was a Tuesday. It felt ever so slightly rebellious. I tried not to feel guilty being so out of sync with societal norms. I’d talked in it about ticking off all the milestones - passing exams, going to university, getting a job, buying a house, finding a partner, being financially stable, having friends and settling in a church community and how despite achieving these measures of success, it had left me internally empty. I’d laboured on leaving my job but omitted the leaving the church bit. “You stopped short,” he said. He was right. I hadn’t told the whole story. The ‘why’ was far too complicated. I didn’t want to have lived a whole different life, I just didn’t want to have only ever conformed to one type of life. I regretted how much of a nice person I’d been, the dutiful persona I’d upheld. I was lovely, reliable, organised, contrite. For a quarter of a century, I’d done exactly what I was supposed to do. As Richard Rohr¹ explains, I had been a ‘loyal soldier’. “The voice of our loyal soldier gets us through the first half of life safely, teaching us to look both ways before we cross the street,” he says. It provides direction, boundaries, a conservative worldview, a respect for traditions. It is the voice of all our early authority figures. But at some point, in order to live life to its full potential, we need to discharge our loyal soldier. It can’t accompany us into the second half of life because it isn’t equipped to go there. We have to leave it, its rules, norms and standards behind. “When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self,” Rohr says. “But it is only the death of the false self and is often the birth of the soul. Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn”.

When I left everything I could and my husband congratulated himself on surviving the cull, I gave my experience many negative names – midlife crisis, peri-menopausal madness, identity crisis, crisis of purpose. It was all about crises. I rarely described it as a positive awakening. I had a desperate urge to re-invent myself – not a desire to be anything in particular, just an overwhelming yearning not to be the same as everyone else.

In her new book², Dr Julie Hannan, known as the ‘Midlife Crisis Doctor’ explains how this type of identity crisis can be prompted by a profound loss of things that used to be important in our younger years. She refers to this sense of bewilderment as liminality. Coming from the Latin word limen, it is the point at which change is inevitable. “If you are to be happy in the second half of your life,” she says, “what you need to do is slowly work to cut off the dead wood and free yourself to live more authentically”.

So, we need to let go of the loyal soldier, embrace the arrival of liminality and name this crossroads we come to. Harriet Minter³ describes the crossroads, this turning point, this critical juncture as individuation. “Individuation is the process whereby we start to separate our individual desires from those we’ve been conditioned to accept,” she explains. Most of us will have grown up in homes which told us our happiness would depend on settling down, securing that well-paid job, getting married, having kids. “When we’re young,” she says, “our desires tend to be closely linked to those around us, so we take on the narrative of our parents, culture and friends. As we get older, however, we start to question these desires. We start to ask ourself, is this really what I want?”. Attributed to Carl Jung, individuation commonly occurs in middle-age, when we have the maturity and the confidence to reject the conformity society has placed upon us but actually, we have enough free will to reject it at any stage in our lives. “Each time we choose to stop doing something we should do and instead do something we want to do, we’re practicing individuation,” she says.

Liminality is a natural process, says Dr Julia, a psychological milestone we can’t really avoid. It would be more worrying if it didn’t happen to us and sometimes all we need is a little help to navigate our way through it, some guidance on how to do it well without completely chucking our whole lives up in the air. We need to be able to walk that journey with others, tell others about it, because as Rohr highlights, we can often be part of institutions that are unwilling to let us go, including both our nuclear and our extended families. Even though it’s a journey we all need to go on, not all choose to go on it because it means giving up too much. “Some even appear to make it to the top,” says Rohr. “They did their survival dance but never got to the sacred dance”. As he explains, it takes a huge push, much self-doubt and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what their mum and dad always wanted them to be and do.

“Your mum’s life is a holiday now,” said my mother to my daughters. To her, fulfilling my pension matters more than fulfilling my passion. In her eyes, I am most definitely having a crisis. She doesn’t recognise who I am. I am not following the game-plan. I am failing to conform. She remains unconvinced by the choices I’ve made. But then, it’s not up to me to convince her.

I swallowed my last crumb of meringue. I put down my fork. “Do you want another slice of pavlova?” she said.

1. Richard Rohr Falling Upward.

2. Dr Julie Hannan The Midlife Crisis Handbook: Finding Direction in the Second Half of Life.

3. The Age of the Female Mid-Life Crisis