How to Start Living Your Life: Stop Waiting

If you’re waiting for your husband to retire, your schedule to clear, or the timing to feel right to reinvent your life, this is for you. You may find yourself saying: “I’m waiting for X or Y or Z to start traveling, set-up that new business, or embark on that new hobby.” The X, Y, or Z may be “when my husband works less or retires, my grown kids quit needing me so much, or when I’ve done more research.” Read on and learn how to start living your life. The key? Stop waiting.

Why women in midlife keep waiting for the right time

You’re capable, thoughtful, and ready. In theory. But you’re waiting. Waiting for the calendar to clear, the timing to feel right, the fog of transition to lift.

You tell people you’re keeping busy. You are. But walking the dog to fill time, waiting to be needed by kids, or wishing your partner worked less isn’t a path to building something that feels uniquely you. In fact, this is easily the most common midlife trap; we outsource the starting gun.

The identity gap nobody talks about

Here’s what actually happens in midlife, particularly for women who’ve spent decades in service to others. We’ve served everything from kids, to careers, to households, to aging parents.

The roles change. The structure shifts. And underneath the busyness, there’s a gap where a clear sense of self used to be.

That gap is uncomfortable. So we do what humans do: we attach. We attach our next chapter to someone else’s timeline. We wait for a retirement date, a grandchild’s schedule, a partner’s decision. We tell ourselves we’re being flexible, supportive, patient.

But often, what we’re actually being is afraid.

Afraid that what we want might not be worth wanting. Afraid to start something we might not finish. Afraid (and this is the one we rarely say out loud), that we don’t actually know who we are without our roles.

Why we wait to start our life: the deeper pattern

We need to start looking at transition as opportunity. Getting to make the conscious decision to reinvent ourselves during midlife is actually a good thing. It gives us “agency,” or the sense that we are in control of our life. In turn, this is a strong predictor of wellbeing during any transition.

We’ve all heard that life satisfaction drops in our 40’s. Perhaps more interesting is that researchers find it begins to climb, precipitously after that time. This very thing we fear, this shift to becoming who we really are is the very reason we see a rise in satisfaction. When we come into our own and begin leading a life that feels true to who we are, our happiness rises.

Starting our new life is a gift

Choosing to reinvent ourself is actually a gift. We’re probably all familiar with the disarray of having to reinvent ourself after “disruption.” This can be job loss, death of a loved one, health issues, or any number of things. This kind of reinvention can be a far rockier road. Disruption is not a choice; purposeful reinvention is.

Whether our reinvention is by choice or triggered by disruption, we still often reach for the familiar path. We cling to relationships, caregiving roles, other people’s needs. Not because we’re weak, but because those things have always been the structure of our days.

Purposeful reinvention requires something different: turning the attention inward. Asking what you want, not what’s needed. Intentionally building your own life, not because you’ve finished everything else, but because it is your work.

Three Women I Keep Thinking About

I want to tell you about three women. These are all people I know, but the patterns are universal enough that you’ll recognize them.

The woman waiting for his retirement

Her kids are grown, most of them married. She tells herself they still need her to the point she can’t really start her own thing. And then there’s her husband. He hit his career groove very recently and has a newfound enthusiasm to keep working. Past when he said he’d probably retire.

So, she’s waiting. Waiting to be needed by her kids. Waiting for her husband to cut back or stop working. She wants to travel more, take more lazy weekend car trips. Explore the city they live in. She frames it as wanting company, wanting a travel partner, wanting them to figure out this new chapter together.

And all of that is true. But underneath it is something harder to face: she hasn’t built anything for herself yet, and his retirement would give her permission to keep not doing it. Two people figuring it out together sounds less lonely than one person figuring it out alone.

The problem is that waiting for someone else’s timeline doesn’t fill your own days. Even more importantly, it doesn’t help you find your own true purpose. It just defers the question.

The woman whose son doesn’t see her

This second woman’s youngest son just told her she’s going to be a grandmother. She is genuinely thrilled. This is not about her not wanting to be a grandmother. But in the same conversation, a quick, effortless assumption is made by her son: he moves straight to which days she’d be available to babysit this new grandbaby, once or twice a week, or whenever she’s needed.

Nobody asked. It was simply assumed she’d take on part-time daycare.

While taking care of a grandchild sounds genuinely amazing to my friend, the assumption has her at a bit of a loss. She doesn’t feel seen by her son. He doesn’t see that while he knows her as a mother, her impending grandmother role is not the same thing. This is not her path; it’s her son’s.

She hasn’t been seeing herself as a grandmother-in-waiting. Instead, she feels her time in the neutral zone has been interrupted. This is the space where she’s no longer who she was but she’s not yet who she’s becoming. And moving out of the neutral zone can take time.

Have we created this or did it just happen?

Many of us have created this space for ourselves in the eyes of others. We’ve been so good at what we do/have done, that we’ve carved our role in stone to those around us.

When the impending grandmother said she might not be able to babysit on a regular schedule (she had a few plans of her own), her son’s look was one of utter surprise. And confusion. And then irritation.

He didn’t see the self she’s been piecing back together after decades of being needed in a particular way. He saw the role, not the person inside it.

This can be one of the true challenges of midlife: the people who love us most sometimes can’t see us changing. We’ve always been a constant and they assume that’s simply who we are. All we are.

The woman who built something before she was ready

I’ll be honest, the third woman is me.

A few years ago, I started Lifeticity. Not because the timing was perfect or because I had a clear roadmap or because I had it all figured out. Some back-to-back health issues meant I needed to make a career pivot and while I didn’t really feel ready to take the leap, I decided it might be now or never.

I’d been waiting to start something like this for a long time. I don’t exactly know what I was waiting for. But I decided to stop waiting.

There’s only one way to get started living your life

I’ve learned so much from building this platform and I have one main takeaway: you cannot think your way to clarity. You have to build your way there. You have to try something, commit to something that is genuinely yours, and not in service of anyone else’s life, and definitely not contingent on anyone else’s timeline.

Fear of failure is very real. And I had no idea if I could actually do this thing. And while it may not be growing at the speed-of-light pace I’d like, I see growth every single week. Sometimes that’s subscriber numbers, sometimes it’s revenue, sometimes it’s a new platform or tool I finally figure out. Much of the time it’s just the satisfaction I gain from having jumped in, floundered about a bit, and kept building something I care about.

The life you love doesn’t appear when the conditions are finally right. You need to create it. And that process just may need to begin before you feel fully ready. Insight: you may never feel fully ready.

A Small Practice: The Waiting Audit

If any of this resonates, here’s a place to start. Get a piece of paper and answer these three questions honestly:

• What am I waiting for before I start living the way I actually want to live?

• Whose timeline am I on?

• If that thing never happened (if the retirement date moved, if the grandchild needed less than expected, if the conditions never got perfect), what would I do?

The answers will tell you something true about where you are. And the third question, especially, will often reveal what you actually want. It strips away the permission structure and leaves only the desire.

That desire is worth something. It’s worth building toward. It’s worth starting now.

If you’re in the middle of this, figuring out what your life looks like when it’s truly yours, you’re in exactly the right place. We’re in this together.