I turned 54 yesterday. Birthdays seem like the perfect time to take stock of your life, for no matter when they fall in the year, they are the start of your personal new year. It’s a time to stop and celebrate being you. Only this year, I didn’t much feel like celebrating me. I’ve spent most of the last year spinning in a mid-life crisis, not at all sure what my place in the world is anymore. I’ve had a huge lapse in my self-confidence, the likes of which I’m pretty sure I haven’t gone through since high school and my teen angst days. It’s unnerving to say the least. It’s not *just* this empty nesting and menopause business that’s had me spinning, although they are both still factors. It’s been three years since Edie girl went off to college. You’d think I’d have figured out by now what I want to do with myself now that I don’t have to focus on being a mom all the time and yet here I am.

I quit my job without a plan last spring. Yes, I know I was very excited about that job and that I felt like I had finally found my career path. But sometimes things are too good to be true and this was the case. There’s no polite way to say that a work environment is toxic and this one was incredibly so. A good bit of my current crisis of confidence is the lingering effects of that job – coworkers as well as my supervisor telling me on a regularly basis that no one liked me, sometimes even calling me snarky nicknames. My skills, particularly my writing, were repeatedly derided (no doubt a significant factor in my feeling like I’d lost my writing voice). I started a job search months before I left but planned to just leave with or without a job once it was warm enough to work in my garden. My mental health was far more important than a paycheck. And in the six months since I’ve quit, the ratio of responses to resumes I’ve sent out hasn’t helped my feeling of being worthless outside of my house. It’s like I’ve been shouting into the void every time I send a resume out.

This is not to say I haven’t had responses and interviews, I have. Just not at a rate that was a good reflection of how much effort I was putting into my job search. And there were zero offers. Meanwhile, I found ways to stay busy, as I always do. I may not have a traditional career, but it would seem over the years of my dabbling in writing, teaching and pickling, I’ve developed a reputation. And that reputation has led to some bigger projects here recently, which in turn has had me put the more formal job search on hold. I’d say the universe heard me whispering what I really wanted to do when I grew up and decided to make it happen, but really, it wasn’t the universe, it was my friends who just saw me for me. All of the current opportunities I have in my lap came through friends. The people who see me, who see my potential and talents and decided to point me in a direction they thought I needed to go. Which is actually the direction I wanted to head, but I was afraid to speak it out loud. Afraid of failing. Afraid of letting my family down by doing what I wanted instead of doing what it took to pay the bills.

I’ve hesitated to really put all of this out there – it feels incredibly personal, sometimes too raw to share. After all, the internet is a giant billboard that never forgets, so it’s best to keep certain things to yourself. But I find there’s much that we as women need to talk about and don’t, particularly as we get to this stage of life where we seem to become invisible. I always thought I was too big, too loud, too much everything to become of those women who felt ignored and invisible and yet it still happened to me. It wasn’t that my family and friends didn’t see me, it’s that the world at large stopped seeing me. I had become yet another overweight, middle-aged woman with nothing to offer society now that I wasn’t running school fundraisers or carpools. I was told I should stick with being a secretary, the lowest rung on every office ladder and certainly the one least respected and compensated. I knew I was capable of far more than that – perhaps why I worked part time for decades. It didn’t just give me time to be a mom, it also gave me the time to do the things that brought me joy. I need to be creative, it’s just part of who I am, but for years, I took jobs that didn’t need or allow those skills. I kept my creativity separate.

But in this year of Barbie, in which someone finally admits out loud how impossible it is to be a woman, I’ve realized I need to stop selling myself short. I also need to stop trying to fit into someone else’s box of what they think I should be. I might not be a financial success, but I’m great at building community. The pickling classes I taught this past summer were a testament to that (of course, I’m also really good at pickling and teaching), not to mention the wealth of friends I have who have been pointing me in the direction they all seem to think I should go. Recognizing my wealth of friends isn’t new – I am perpetually grateful to have found my people in life and every few years something happens that really drives that home. Unlike other years, there hasn’t been one big event that’s made me realize how incredibly fortunate I am to have people I have in my corner, it’s been a slow, steady drip of them, each one of them bit by bit replacing my confidence in myself, reminding me that I am indeed, a person with talents and skills worth utilizing. A person who has worth. A person that people like.

Of course, my husband has been telling me this all along – but you know, he’s my husband. He’s supposed to tell me these things. Without his support, I wouldn’t have taken that leap of faith to quit my job without a plan (beyond working in the garden), nor would I be pursuing some of the opportunities I’m currently going after.

And so, this is 54. After months (years, really) of trying to figure out my latest reinvention, it’s occurred to me that I should just embrace who I already am and lean into that as hard as I can. I’m teaching kids how to cook and writing and pickling and working a little retail, which sounds like a lot and some days it is, but mostly it just keeps me busy doing things I’m good at and things I like.

53 was a rough year, one of those necessary, messy, ‘growth’ years. Apparently, we need to have them every now and again. 54 is on tap to continue that growth trend, but I think I at least found the path I want to travel this year. I even got myself some new headshots recently (thanks to the always fantastic Jen Fariello) because new projects, new me called for them.

Daisy may not have appreciated being roped into some of them, so I’ll never be one of those writers with a serene looking dog in my headshot, but the stink eye definitely adds a little something, doesn’t it?