Edel Coffey: Life can get pretty real by the time you hit your forties
Sarah Michelle Gellar arrives at the premiere of new film The Air I Breathe at the Arclight Theatre, Los Angeles.
I was surprised to see a familiar face from the past when I sat down to watch the film Do Revenge last weekend. I recognised the actress, but she was out of context, not brandishing a stake to slay vampires or dressed in a school uniform as queen bee of a preppy college, but rather outfitted in mature shades of beige biscuit and the even more mature fabric choice of linen.
Her face was softened by time but she was still recognisable as Sarah Michelle Gellar, better known to my generation from her title role in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Gellar took a break of several years from acting to be with her young family and is now back on our screens, ready to start what she referred to in a recent interview as her ‘adult career’.
By using the term ‘adult career’ Gellar was not only referring to the fact that she has been acting since she was a child in the 1980s so has had both a child and an adult career, but also to the fact that now, as a grown woman, a wife and a mother, she has a different perspective on career, the work environment and ambition.
It struck me as interesting, particularly as a lot of people my age (I am a year younger than Gellar), seem to be reassessing and reappraising their own work lives. And it’s not just related to the post-pandemic great resignation or the trend of quiet quitting. Much of it is simply to do with that old chestnut — the mid-life crisis.
I started an ‘adult career’ of my own a couple of years ago, following what I realise now was a period of huge reassessment and re-evaluation. After many years of procrastinating, ignoring and assuming it would magically happen one day, I finally sat down and wrote the novel I had always wanted to write. I don’t think it’s any surprise that I only got around to it later in life, just as I was turning 40, just as my mother became gravely ill, and just after I had children, and the speed of my life seemed to have been switched to the warp setting.
It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that many of us begin our ‘adult careers’ in our forties. A lot of things happen to focus the mind. By the time we reach our forties, we’ve usually experienced a thing or two, suffered some real losses in love, and many of us will even have lost loved ones to the inevitable cycles of life and death. We may even have experienced our own brushes with illness, health scares and ageing, pushing up against the limitations of our bodies, the realities of our mortality.
Life can get pretty real by the time you hit your forties. It’s no wonder we start appraising just how much of our time we want to spend working and the kind of work we want to do. According to an article in this month’s Red magazine, many women are recalibrating their relationship with ambition, not only in the context of ageing and post-pandemic life, but also in the context of a capitalist, misogynistic working world not built with women’s (or anyone’s) best interests at heart.
I see it in many of my own female friends who work in high-powered, high-paid jobs. Many of them have set themselves time limits to get in and get out, planning to move out of unforgiving corporate roles and into more enjoyable public sector jobs once the mortgage is paid off.
Carl Jung said there is a second half of life that starts from the age of around 35 or 40 and intensifies as we grow older.
This period is supposed to be a period of self-realisation and psychological rebirth, so it’s interesting that it coincides with the age where people seem to reappraise what it is they want from their lives and their careers.
But accepting that you are in the ‘second half’ as Jung called it, needn’t be a depressing acceptance of decline. It can in fact give you renewed energy and motivation to recognise that time is limited. I think the second half of life has a lot of advantages, not least of which are a solid sense of confidence in ourselves, empowerment, and a fair bit of wisdom gained through hard knocks and experience, and also an awareness that the greatest satisfactions of our lives, the happiest periods to date, may not have had anything to do with career successes or financial gains.
The good thing about being this age is we know ourselves very well, and if we care to look, we can begin to see patterns to our behaviours over decades, and we can even address and disrupt the negative patterns we find.
I’m glad to have embarked on my ‘adult career’, and am hoping that there will still be much joy to be taken from the everyday and the extraordinary in my ‘second half’. But it’s worth remembering that while we know ourselves so much better by the time we reach the second half of life, we still don’t know where our story will lead yet and that’s something to look forward to — the stories that have yet to be written.
