There comes a quiet moment in midlife—a reckoning, a soft ache that sits beneath the surface of busy lives. It's not always dramatic. Sometimes it arrives like a sigh you didn’t know you were holding. But when it comes, it brings with it a flood of emotion: grief, sadness, even anger. And for many, it’s disorienting.
It is disorienting because many of these emotions get couple and mixed up together so it can feel really overwhelming when we are triggered.
This midlife grief we often feel doesn’t always have a name. It isn’t always tied to a death, a divorce, or a specific loss. It’s the grief of a life lived in service to someone else’s expectations. A life shaped by what your parents hoped for you, what culture told you success should look like, or what you thought you should want.
In your twenties, you made plans. You built dreams based on a vision of the world that was handed to you. You worked hard, ticked boxes, created a life. And maybe from the outside, it looked like you “made it.” But at some point—often in your forties or fifties—you wake up and feel the soul knocking.
And it doesn’t always knock gently.
Sometimes it arrives as a sudden wave of sadness or emptiness that you can’t explain. Other times it shows up as restlessness, irritability, or a low-grade resentment toward your life or those closest to you. It might look like a deep craving for freedom—a need to break out of your current life structure—which can get projected outward in dramatic ways: affairs, spontaneous spending, quitting jobs impulsively, or fantasising about starting over somewhere far away.
You might feel like you’re coming undone. But what’s really happening is that something deeper is trying to come through.
This is the soul’s call. It’s asking you to return to the essence of who you are beneath the roles, the responsibilities, and the expectations. Come back to the truth of who you are and it is asking you, what wants to be expressed through you.
And with that call comes a kind of heartbreak.
Heartbreak that you didn’t listen to the whisper of your own longings when you were younger. Heartbreak that you silenced your true self to belong, to be responsible, to be good. There’s sadness for the years that were spent climbing a ladder that wasn’t even leaning against the right wall. Or maybe you got close to the top of the ladder and realised there is nothing there for you , it’s not the place you want to be. There’s grief for all the parts of you that went underground just to survive.
Sometimes, that grief turns to anger. Anger that no one taught you to trust your inner voice. Anger that you betrayed yourself to meet others’ expectations. And sometimes, it turns inward—an ache of self-blame, of “Why didn’t I know better?”
But here’s the truth: you couldn’t have known better. The conditions weren’t there. You did what you needed to do with the tools you had. And now, something new is emerging.
Midlife is not just a crisis. It’s a rite of passage.
It’s a threshold between who you have been and who you are becoming. And every threshold requires a letting go. This is why grief walks alongside transformation—it clears the ground. It softens us. It prepares us to live a life that is more aligned, more honest, and more intimate with our soul.
This grief is not something to fix or rush through. It’s something to be honoured. It’s sacred.
Because on the other side of it is a new kind of freedom. The freedom to stop performing. To stop striving. To live in deeper integrity. To choose from the inside out.
In this second half of life, something quieter but more enduring begins to take root: a life built on your truth; not the one you inherited, but the one you are here to live. Your are free to be the most authentic expression of yourself and it takes time to grow into those shoes because you have been avoiding those shoes for a while to stay safe, to survive, to get the love your old self wanted.
Grief is the crucible that will allow you to transform into your true self, to let go of all the masks you have had on for many years. One of the hardest things to do is to learn to feel the grief in your body and let it express because so many of us have cut ourselves off from our grief. We are terrified if we lay down and let it flow we may never get up again.
You see this is not just an exercise in thinking about our emotions; it is somatic. You have to learn to feel safe to feel the grief in your body so that it will flow and sometimes you might need some help to do this.
Grief is your friend.
The tears of our grief are the fluid that helps us keep on learning, growing and changing.
When we make space for grief, we are not falling apart—we are making room. Room for new life. Room for truth. Room for becoming.
Because on the other side of grief is a new kind of freedom. The freedom to stop performing. To stop striving. To live in deeper integrity. To choose from the inside out.
The freedom to be your true self.