Reaching midlife as a Christian woman (avoid having a crisis and embrace saying goodbye to youth)

Hannah Wickens shares some of her own experience of reaching her forties, and suggests some ways we can reframe the future as a place of hope rather than sad decline.

Psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques first coined the phrase ‘midlife crisis’ in 1965, in response to his own existential questioning of life, citing a society-wide proclivity toward cognitive decline and lack of physical prowess, in approaching the mortality mark. Mid-life became synonymous with erratic behaviour - a permissive cover to stifle insecurity and fear.

Whether it be perimenopause or a lack of applause around life achievement or groans of fading beauty, there is plenty to mourn in unrealised childhood aspirations, with a feeling of life slipping away and the reality of unremitting body alterations.