A Midlife Woman’s 4^½ Step Guide To Understanding What Clips Our Wings

Shame, Fear, and Ultimately Flying Above It All

You know the awful feeling. You’re about to do something you’ve been longing to try—maybe it’s going to a local Zumba class, maybe you’re walking into the room of one of those “Paint and Pinot” meet-ups, maybe you’re finally ready to try out for the church choir—and your heart is racing. Your hands are clammy. You sit in your car and consider driving back home. What if I make a fool of myself? What if people laugh at me? What if I’m no good at painting, and everyone else is? The negative speak is loud and it is relentless.

I remember going to my first college class as a non-traditional student. (Non-traditional is academic speak for “this person is old.”) As I drove to school childish voices threw a tantrum in my head. You don’t have to do this. Nobody will blame you for changing your mind. You know you will look like an idiot among all those younger students. Everything about learning has changed—except YOU! When I arrived on campus, it was all I could do to muster the courage to walk through the door and into the next chapter of my life.

Why are we so worried about being less than perfect in everything we do?

Well, in a nutshell, it has a lot to do with our entanglement with shame and fear. Shame has been around a loooooong time. In 43 B.C. Publius Syrus wrote, “To feel shame is a sort of slavery.” 43 B.C.!

(A Book I Recommend When Questions About Midlife Arrive)

Here Are Four Views On Shame And Fear To Help Us Understand The Root Of Our Blocks.

(To be followed by the “1/2”…a lovely poem.)

1. Vicki Underland-Rosow writes in her book, Shame, Spiritual Suicide (Waterford Publications, Shorewood, MN):

“Shame is used to control people. It begins in the cradle and continues for many people until death.” (p. 35) She goes on to say:

“Interrogation in Western cultures begins long before the teenage years when the parent, through endless questions, puts a barrier (in most cases most unwittingly, I believe) between her or himself and the child. Questions often serve as a means of extracting data, which the other may not divulge if not asked. Children are quick to learn that questions may signal the beginning of a shame experience if the parent is unhappy with the answers provided. As protection, some children learn to lie, avoid, or manipulate so as not to be caught by their parent’s disapproval. For some, this process continues throughout life with the individual or group doing whatever is deemed necessary not to expose whatever might be disapproved.” (p. 39)

2. Anne Lamott on shame:

“I have these secret pangs of shame about being single like I wasn’t good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I’d told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can’t get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can’t even pretend that you have, you shouldn’t show up. You should stay home because it’s hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should, at least, have the decency to feel ashamed.

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.”

3. An excerpt from The Bustle, 8 Ways Men Don’t Realize They Are Subtly Shaming Women by Lara Rutherford-Morrison:

In our culture, one of the most common and severe ways one can insult a man is to tell him that he’s acting like a girl — that he’s weak, emotional, prissy, or feminine. That kind of attitude is incredibly damaging to men and boys, holding them to a standard of culturally constructed masculinity that punishes any type of deviation. Too often, men are told that their worth depends on how well they can conform to masculine ideals and that stereotypically “feminine” behaviors, therefore, devalue them.

As harmful as these standards are to men and boys, they are also detrimental to women, because they are premised on the idea that to be a woman or to be like a woman is to automatically be lesser and wrong. When women see men shaming other men for being feminine, they too are being told that femaleness is a marker of shame. Of course, it’s not only men who do this — our culture as a whole shames men who are perceived as “unmanly.” This is a form of misogyny that harms everyone, male and female.

4. An excerpt from a transcript On Being with Krista Tippet and Brene Brown:

TIPPETT: I also see an upside of aging. When I see people aging badly in a sad way, it seems to me that the common denominator is they have not faced their demons and they just get smaller. It’s like they just get eaten alive from the inside. And that’s about being vulnerable and, you know, claiming what’s gone wrong and the imperfection. But there’s a way in which getting older, especially kind of getting into your 40s, you know, it kind of pushes you to finally do this if you haven’t done it. You know, that’s in your story. I just wonder if you think that, you know, this is something we can lean into almost as a gift.

BROWN: No. I think what you’re describing is what I have found as a very critical developmental milestone for us. You know, some people call it the midlife crisis. You know, I call it the midlife unraveling. I think there is a place and time in our lives where we realize that growing up, when we felt pain, when we felt small, when we felt unseen, we constructed walls and moats and we protected ourselves and we shut down parts of ourselves. Then I think this happens in midlife where we realize, oh, God, to be the person we want to be, to be the partner, to be the parent, we have to take down everything we put up that was supposed to be keeping us safe.

4^1/2. A poem that Ed Gandia, posted in his newsletter. It was written by Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet and playwright:

“Come to the edge,” he said.

“We can’t, we’re afraid!” they responded.

“Come to the edge,” he said.

“We can’t, We will fall!” they responded.

“Come to the edge,” he said.

And so they came.