At forty, my husband and I walked away from a life we’d built over decades. We weren’t running toward a dream. We were walking out of the rubble of one.
For most of our adult lives, we were part of a ministry. To me, it was our community, our family, my identity. But after the fracture of a deeply trusted relationship, I began spiraling. I couldn’t seem to surface. And instead of being a place of healing, the church environment only perpetuated the loss.
I was unraveling. This became clear to me when my husband went away to a conference, and for the first time in our married life, I didn’t want him to come home. Not because I didn’t love him. Not because I didn’t want to be his wife. But because I knew where he had been.
I knew who he’d spoken to, the kind of language that would’ve been used, the narrative likely repeated, and all I could do was either stay quiet and pretend it didn’t matter, or open the conversation and risk being flooded by the pain it would unearth.
I didn’t want to navigate that impossible space again. In my heart, I just wanted distance from the version of life he was still able to walk in, which meant, painfully, wanting distance from him too. And so, after an honest conversation, we decided to leave.
Leaving meant walking away from what we thought was our calling. It meant saying goodbye to financial security, predictability, and the life we knew. We started again with three kids, little money, and no map. Midlife did not begin as a gentle pivot. It was a freefall.
The Identity Collapse No One Prepares You For
There’s something uniquely disorienting about starting again at forty. You’ve already lived a whole life, or at least it feels that way. You’ve made sacrifices. Spent time, money, energy building something.
And then, unwillingly, the story you’ve been telling no longer fits. And as I discovered, without that story, I didn’t know how to introduce myself, even to myself.
That was the moment I began, out of a need to be alright, to pull the pain out of my chest and set it beside me. I didn’t have the language for it then, but later I’d learn it was called externalisation.
Externalisation means the problem is not you. It’s something you’re experiencing. When you place it outside yourself, you create space to see it more clearly and respond with compassion. I hadn’t failed. I hadn’t fallen apart. The life I had known had ended, and I was standing in the in-between.
Listening is Imperative
People love to say, “Just start fresh,” but at forty, it doesn’t land the same way it might have at twenty. I didn’t have the energy or the luxury of starting from zero. We had bills, teenagers, tired hearts and bodies.
I didn’t want inspiration. I needed truth. And because of what we’d been through, truth felt slippery, impossible to hold.
The only way forward was to get quiet and listen for what was still alive beneath the grief. What still mattered. What still moved me.
This is called double listening. It means not only listening to the pain so it can be processed, but also noticing the values hiding beneath it.
What did my heartbreak reveal about what mattered most to me? Authenticity. Creativity. Freedom.
Those values had always been there, and with starting over, they were simply looking for a new way to live through me.
A Few Traps Best Avoided
Starting over at forty comes with its own set of pitfalls. Here are a few worth sidestepping:
* Don’t compare yourself to peers who’ve had a seemingly straight path. They absolutely didn’t, and you’re not behind.
* Don’t rush to reinvent yourself just to feel useful. Clarity takes time. It’s okay to do what you need to do to survive, to feed your kids, pay the bills, and keep things steady, even if it’s not your dream job for a while. My husband did exactly that. He tried different roles, took what he could, so our family could stay afloat and so I had the space to navigate the wreckage of what was going on inside me.
* Don’t cling to your old identity out of fear. I know how tempting it is to hold tight to the roles and routines that once gave you a sense of purpose, especially when everything feels uncertain. But starting over means making room for who you’re becoming. That often means life might feel a little empty for a while. Quiet. Ordinary. Uncertain.
The Truth About Starting Again
Here’s what I’d tell you if you were sitting across from me, coffee in hand, whispering that you don’t know where to begin.
1. You don’t need a five-year plan. You need a compass.
I stopped trying to plan my way forward and started using what narrative coaches call future authoring.
Future authoring is about shifting focus from what you think you should achieve to imagining a future that aligns with your core values. It’s less about ticking off goals and more about envisioning a life that feels meaningful, then letting those values guide your next steps, even if they’re small or uncertain.
Instead of asking, “What should I do next?” I began asking, “What kind of life feels true to who I am now?”
That question didn’t give me a five-year plan, but it gave me a place to begin.
2. You can’t heal in a story that’s too small for you.
Pain has a way of telling us we’re not good enough, not wanted, not worth understanding, or only worthy of contempt. That’s the old story.
Healing begins when you rewrite the narrative. When you stop seeing change as the fallout offailure or mistreatment, and start seeing it as a sign that the life you were living was no longer in alignment with who you truly are.
3. You’re not who you were, and that’s okay.
For a while after leaving my old life, I gripped tight to old versions of myself like they were proof I’d mattered. This was simply fear, and the need to be sure of something. Anything. When everything familiar had fallen away.
I clung to who I used to be because I didn’t yet trust who I was becoming. Letting go felt like erasing myself. But over time, I began to see it differently. The past wasn’t something to hold anymore. It was something to honour, and then release.
Changing direction in midlife requires us to honour the past, no matter how painful. Honouring the past looks like telling the truth about what happened without rewriting it to make others more comfortable.
It means acknowledging the joy and the damage, the growth and the cost. It means thanking the version of you who got through it, even if she was messy, even if she stumbled or wasmisunderstood, even if she hurt others along the way without meaning to.
4. It Is Both Beautiful and Necessary
Starting again in midlife breaks something open. It’s not gentle. It often comes with loss, disorientation, and the ache of having to let go of everything that once made you feel sure of who you were.
But alongside the unraveling is something strangely beautiful. The realisation that you are allowed to live more than one life in a lifetime. That there are versions of you still waiting to be known.You begin to see that the life you built before, even if it mattered deeply, was not the final word.
There is necessity in the shift, in the shedding, in the quiet becoming. You grieve what was.
It’s painful, yes. Challenging, absolutely. But it’s also a chance to become someone new. Someone you’ve never been before. Someone who may not have surfaced if everything had stayed the same. And that is quietly exhilarating.
