Still Standing: A Week That Changed Everything

A guest post about the single week when a midlife woman's career, marriage, and health all collapsed simultaneously

This week at Midstack (our sister publication) I am hosting a series of co-writing sessions for midlife women. You are invited to join us!

Monday, May 4th at noon, Eastern

Tuesday, May 5th at 2 p.m. Eastern

Wednesday, May 6th at 1 p.m. Eastern

Friday, May 8th at noon, Eastern

Show up for one day of the week or every day.

Editor’s Note: This piece captures something we don't see enough in literary magazines: the messy, unpolished truth of a life falling apart in real time. Written in the same week everything in her midlife world seemed to collapse, this essay doesn't have the benefit of hindsight, craft, or distance. It's raw and urgent, written by someone who isn't a professional writer but needed to put words to the unthinkable.

There's an urgent kind of honesty that comes when someone writes not to create polished art, but to survive, and this essay has it. In a publication that often features work from experienced writers, I want to make space for this type of voice: the woman in the parking garage, the one still standing despite everything, the one who doesn't have answers yet but is brave enough to write anyway. Sometimes the most important stories remind us we're not alone in the hardest moments of midlife.

Have you had a day, a week, a month, a year when everything felt like it was crashing around you? Tell us about it in the comments. — Jessica

Everything disintegrated into fine particles in a single week. What I had been holding together so tightly, fell right out of my hands, and smashed onto the floor. The life I had built was gone, gone, gone.

For the past three years, my career had been on pause, waiting for decisions others were making about my future that I could not directly control. The decision about my job came on a chilly Monday afternoon. Less than a week later, I found out my marriage was falling apart. Two days after that, the doctor gave me some bad news about recent test results.

In between, life was not slowing down. Meals still needed to be planned and made. My teenage daughter had a laundry crisis — “NO SOCKS LEFT, MOM!” — because, while I was drowning in my own emotional mess, the basics were falling by the wayside.

No one prepared me to handle all of this. One might expect occasional bad news, hard times, but to have the very foundation of your life shaken this hard in less than a week, this was beyond me. I felt like I was taking a test that I had not studied for, and that I might not pass.

I am a strong woman. I work in the construction industry. To say it is a man’s world is a gross understatement. I thought I was tough, I thought I could handle anything given what it takes to survive in my work world. But these new realities quickly brought me to my knees.

It turns out that the work project I was leading would be taken over by someone else. Six years of hard work, gone in an instant. My leadership and knowledge were no longer needed. I still had a job, and income, but no certainty about when the actual work that fueled me, was going to start again. No details of my future beyond this decision were given. No reassurance in writing, just words across the zoom call screen telling me my job was safe, but there were no other answers at the moment.

I picked myself up. I kept going.

Until a few days later, a niggling suspicion that I had been ignoring for months got the better of me. My husband had run hot and cold for almost 9 months. One minute I felt I was the love of his life. The next, I was begging him to talk to me. I had no idea what was going on. So I lowered myself. I found his journal and I read the most recent entry. It was all about his feelings for another woman. An emotional affair with a co-worker, who he had said was just a friend. I stopped breathing for a moment and couldn’t read anymore.

Things hadn’t been good for a while, and this was the last straw. When he came home that night, I declared the marriage over. Separation. He was going to move out. He didn’t resist. Clearly, I was not worth fighting for.

Then, when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, my doctor told me in what I thought was a routine appointment, that my cholesterol is so high, I was a good candidate for a heart attack or stroke. She turned to me, her brown eyes full of compassion. She leaned in and said, we are both 47. We are no longer young anymore. We have to take care of ourselves. I am sending you to a cardiologist and you have to start statins immediately.

That’s right – 47 years old. Facing the prospects of starting over at work, because who can trust people that have been jerking you around about your job for three years? A husband that had been living in a fantasy world for nine months, neglecting my needs, while he imagined life with another woman, right under my nose. No soft place to land when the doctor tells you something serious, and so guess what, I get to deal with that too… all on my own.

After the doctor’s appointment, I broke down in my car, in a dirty parking garage, the only place I had enough privacy to let it all out. I didn’t care who saw me at that point.

I’m writing this essay the same week all of this happened to me. I don’t have any answers.

I do know that I am grateful I started therapy eight months ago, because I had the presence of mind to seek support instead of white knuckling my way through mid life decisions. To have someone in my corner has proved invaluable. To have invested in myself, and my mental health is the only reason I am still standing, I think.

Often friends, they try their very best, but in mid life, they are all juggling so much, they don’t have much capacity left for the troubles of others. My parents are gone. I’m estranged from my sister. A separation means that my in laws, who are really the only family I am close to, are no longer really my own.

So. Much. Loss.

I thought I was unfuckable. After going through a pandemic and early menopause at the same time, losing support networks, and working from home with a young child, truly, I thought I had seen the back of the midlife mess. I worked on myself. I went back to school to complete a certificate in Conflict Resolution. I considered career changes to solve my work problems, since the housing market tanked and new roles in my field were hard to come by. I had done the work, and I deserved a break, right?

I have to let go of that narrative after this week. Life is going to keep teaching me hard lessons. Avoidance is not a strategy for success. The only way forward is to walk across the hot coals and keep retaking this test over and over again.

A small olive branch was extended by my husband. He said he was sorry about the emotional affair. We started talking honestly for the first time in months. We agreed to counselling before calling it quits, for the sake of our daughter. Small wins. Maybe there is hope after all?

Because of my willingness to listen to him openly, and not keep the door shut maybe we have a chance of beginning again. Those conflict resolutions skills sure came in handy this week.

At work, I practiced radical acceptance. In two months, I was going to lose the project that kept me busy day after day. I started to think about it as an opportunity. If I wasn’t overwhelmed with work, maybe I would have more time with my daughter, who is growing up so fast. She has been lost in this shuffle of a career crisis and a crumbling marriage. To have a summer to spend just with her, would actually be a gift of a lifetime.

My health? That is going to take some work. There is no instant fix. But, since I am still standing, I may as well walk over to the pharmacy and pick up my prescription for statins and get the ball rolling. As for the laundry, it will just have to wait.

Julianna is not a professional writer. She felt compelled to take a chance and share her story with others. By day, Julianna is a wife, a mother, and a director for a housing development company, in Toronto, Canada. When time allows, she is a mixed media artist known as Paperworx Art on Substack and Instagram. Julianna uses her creative practice and platform to share insights into the issues that creatives commonly face, and this keeps her on track, and emotionally regulated, most of the time.

Do you have a story of your own to tell? Learn about our current call for submissions HERE.