Remember the image we had of mid-life crisis when we were young?

Men with receding hairlines in red convertibles speeding around with a much-younger, blonde woman in the passenger seat? That image always seemed so funny, so cliché, so… foreign.

And then we grew up.

At 45 I now understand what it means to be mid-life. I realize that the “men-in-sports cars” portrayal is about as representative as the sex-crazed, “cougars” portrayed on television. Mostly, I understand what it means to look in the mirror and not always recognize the face that looks back at me, but generally willing to accept the scars, wrinkles and gray hairs as outward signs of inner growth, wisdom, grace.

Which has me wondering, why do we call it “mid-life crisis?” Why not mid-life commemoration?

Mid-life has been on my mind a lot lately, and I’ve been talking about this whole idea with friends, family and clients. You know what doesn’t come up? Sports cars. Neither does sex with younger men. Or wrinkles. You know what does come up? Living. Purpose. Dreams, family, friends, love, joy, health, vitality.

Seems we are re-defining mid-life from crisis to opportunity. From past to future. From dried up to just-getting-started.

The new mid-life.

Which has me wondering, why don’t we call it mid-life opportunity?

A wonderful woman asked me recently, “how did you HEAL after breast cancer?” I told her I put my faith in the medical community to cure me; not what she was looking for. So I told her I found great comfort from local support groups; that didn’t work either.

I was troubled when I couldn’t answer that question in a way that satisfied her, so I’ve been mulling it over in my mind ever since.

Out of the blue: last night while reading “How to Find Your Own North Star” by my fave, Martha Beck, I felt an incredible sense of clarity from her discussion about “essential self” versus “social self.” You get it right? Our essential self is who we really are. Our social self is who we’ve learned to become in order to succeed in life. In pursuit of success, we stifle our essential self and cultivate our social self. True, yet rare, success is when our essential self and our social self are aligned. In the book, Dr. Beck provides a short questionnaire to help us determine whether or not our essential self and social self are aligned. I was 100%.

I realized that my responses would have been different had I been asked pre-breast cancer – stuck in a chaotic, political nightmare that I called my job. And even the great jobs that I held earlier in my career as a college administrator and teacher. Breast cancer changed a LOT of things for me, as it does for most of the survivors that I meet. We don’t quite know how to express it to non-cancer survivors, but we understand each other.

So last night when I considered the congruency between my essential and social selves, and when I reflect on how so much of that happened through/by/during/after breast cancer, I truly believe that cancer gave me permission (orders, really) to honor my essential self. On a particularly gloomy Wednesday in October, my essential self stood up and said, “no more” to the job that wasn’t working and “let’s go” to the dream that lay ahead. The dream that started out as childhood play; that came as a crystal-clear vision on a walk after my sister died; that greeted me with open arms when I was ready to honor my essential self. The rest is b.Well history!

How did I heal from breast cancer? I came home to my essential self.