Death and major illness sit at one end. These are undeniably the most painful. The death of a child or spouse, regardless of age. The death of a parent. When someone we love dies, the world stops. How long it stops depends on any number of factors, but there’s no denying it stops.

Major illness, our own, or someone we love, is also at the end of this continuum. It changes our lives in profound, unexpected ways.

So does divorce. It may have been a long time in the coming or it may have come out of the blue. In either case, it may feel traumatic at first and eventually freeing. Or it may always feel one or the other. Again, it depends on factors particular to those individuals.

Empty nest and retirement sit at the other end of the continuum. We tend to think of both events as “good,” but that may not be how we feel about them initially.

The struggle is very real the moment we watch our 18-year-olds walk out the door and head off into the world. The first evening, then the days, weeks, and months that follow can feel hollow and empty. No loud voices at the table, clean rooms, less laundry. Just you or just you and a significant other wondering what’s next. Your hearts torn apart, leaving a wound you feel might never heal.

The same is true for retirement. It’s an event many people look forward to for years. In fact, in the last few years leading up to retirement, you may feel so ready to get out there you can’t imagine any better life. Then you retire, and many will wonder who they are now without their titles, without full calendars. They will realize the majority of their friends were work-related, and after the first week of retirement, they’ve moved on. And, the following Tuesday, you wake up fretting about how to spend your day.

I’ve Lived Every Point on This Continuum

I’m 65. I’ve experienced every one of these wounds over the course of my life. The death of a spouse at 25. A divorce at 28. Two children off to college. Death of both parents. Cancer. Forced retirement.

You’ve likely experienced all of these, or at least several in your own lifetime.

In my early thirties, I desperately tried to avoid the pain that childhood losses, a death, and a divorce brought. It took me five years to realize I had to walk through the fire; there was no way to go around.

When I retired last year, the door closed on thirty-plus years of a professional life I was proud to have created. It didn’t initially feel freeing. In the first few months, I felt immense sadness. It took me a bit of time to get to the freeing part.

I’m there now. I feel freer than I’ve ever felt. But I know there will be more wounds in my future. Such is life.

Turning the Page

Which brings me to Turning the Page, the first pillar in my Life After 60 Compass. In a nutshell, this pillar is about embracing transitions and learning the art of letting go to make space for what is next in our lives. It’s the courageous act of acknowledging one chapter so that another can begin.

When we experience a wound, whether through the loss of a loved one, the end of a marriage, or leaving a job, marking the moment helps our mind accept the change.

Turning the page allows us an opportunity to honor the event. Many people create personal rituals that help mark the transition from their past to their future. Although I firmly believe this process can’t be forced or rushed. It can only be done when you’re ready. For me, I’ve found this mostly comes with time. And, the deeper the wound, the longer it may take.

Seven years after the death of my first husband and five years after my divorce, I marked the transition by hauling a large garbage can into my bedroom one spring Saturday morning and tearing up every journal I’d written in. I would read a few lines, flip through the pages. Sit down on the bed for a while. Cry as I ripped the pages out one by one. There was good stuff in there. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was marking the transition. And the relief I felt after all was said and done was amazing. I was now ready to move on with my life.

Recently, I’ve found retirement to be much less painful than my previous wounds. But the first Monday morning after my last day at work felt odd. I had no idea what I was going to do. Yes, I had prepared for my eventual retirement, but this was a forced retirement, so it felt different. I was angry. I was hurt. I cried. But over a few months, I could finally acknowledge my accomplishments and honor the good work I did for 30 years. It’s been a process. It’s always a process.

Years ago, when I was single, a girlfriend and I came up with the acronym AFOG. It stood for Another F-ing Opportunity for Growth. AFOG.

Turning Points, Not Endings

Also, I’ve come to believe these events are more like turning points rather than a complete ending. They still need to be recognized and honored for what they gave us, before we can reclaim our power to shape what comes next in our lives.

Turning the Page isn’t the moment the wound occurs. It’s the decision to acknowledge what was before you know what comes next.

I’m not talking about denial here. You can’t pretend the wound didn’t happen. At the same time, you don’t want to stay on the grief loop forever. Some people do, of course, but they are really never able to turn the page. It’s more emotionally healthy to acknowledge a wound occurred AND you turned the page.

For some of your wounds, people may question your right to grieve. They may dismiss it as not relevant, not worthy of sadness or grief. Examples are like grieving the death of an ex-spouse, the death of a pet, or a miscarriage. Well, this is B.S. These are absolutely wounds, and the grief is called disenfranchised grief, a term coined by psychologist Kenneth Doka. And just like regular grief, it needs to be acknowledged in some way before you can completely move on.

If You’re Standing Here Now

If you find yourself here, consider ways you can mark the moment. Again, it will depend on the depth of the wound. It doesn’t always require shredding your journals, but if that helps, then do it.  After I had cancer, I carried a small, silver token with me that read, “Courage to Hope.” And it helped me move on to the next chapter.

Fortunately, I didn’t need five years of therapy to turn the page after retirement. I did need time. Some people say it takes at least a year to turn the page after retirement. I’ve learned others may require more or less time.

If you’re still in the mid-wound right now, that’s okay. There’s no need to hurry the process. And, possibly, the more you try to hurry it, the longer it may take you. And, as I learned years ago, there is usually no way around the pain. You’ve just got to walk through it. I always tell people to be gentle and kind to themselves. This is a process. And a grieving process takes time.

The next pillar in the Life After 60 Compass is Exploring New Paths. I’m not going to be so bold as to say you must have completed Turning the Page before you can move on. I think it’s possible, maybe even helpful, to work the two together. Only you will really know whether that’s possible given where you are in the transition process.

Thanks for taking the time to open the article and give it a read or skim. Whatever works for you is good with me. In any case, I hope you found this helpful. Until next time….Sheila

Let’s take the five brutal (I’m sure there’s more) truths of life after 60.

#1. We are nearer to the date of our death than we are to the date of our birth. True? Yes of course. It would be foolish to think otherwise.

#2. Friends will start dying. Yes, that’s true as well. My mother was what I’d call a servant leader. She baked casseroles for all the church funeral dinners until one day. She said I can’t do this anymore, too many of my friends are dying. I didn’t really understand then, but I certainly do now.

#3. We will encounter death more than in our 20s. Yes. By our 60s, we will face 10 to 15 times the annual mortality risk we had in your 20s.

#4. Our health is likely to decline. After 60, chronic disease diseases cross a threshold. Heart, disease, cancer, and stroke are the top three diseases of accumulated cellular damage.

#5. Our adult kids don’t want our stuff. Millennials and Gen Z adults report lower attachment to physical items. Our kids prioritize experiences over accumulation. And besides, they have their own stuff to deal with.

I’m sure most of us can agree on these five brutal truth after 60. But here’s the thing: we can choose to focus on the liberating truths of life after 60.

#1. Rest is a choice, not a reward. I know this is a tough one, especially for women. We worked hard for 40 years and much of the time rest wasn’t an option. And now that we have the time, we feel guilty for resting. This requires us to adopt a new mindset about resting.

#2. No is a complete sentence. Boy, this one is hard too. Again, more frequently for women. We grew up believing that when we said no to a friend, it made us a bad person. But it doesn’t. Noah is a complete sentence and it’s OK to say out loud as often as we need to.

#3. After 60 is a whole new chapter. Wow, I felt so much better about aging when I realized I had wonderful options when I turned 60. I had choices about how to live this chapter of my life. No more long goodbyes! Now, it’s my Long Hello!

#4. We get to define what matters most. In fact, we are creating our legacy. And I don’t mean financially we can take the culmination of our lived experience, and offer it back to the world as a gift. Our wisdom has value!

#5 Not knowing what’s next is freedom. Can it be a bit scary? Sure. But it can also be an exciting time. It’s here that I think we can learn more about how to live in the present moment. It’s all we’ve got!

The journey after 60 is not a single destination, but a recurring cycle of growth and renewal. We can choose to focus only on the brutal truth of aging, or we can acknowledge them and choose to focus on what liberates us. The choice is ours.

In the 3 years after my retirement, I worked as a consultant. And I found this time to be exciting and engaging because organizations wanted me for my years of knowledge and expertise. I got to identify what was wrong and develop a plan for fixing the problems, that someone else then came in and fixed. I was able to devote much of my time to high level, strategic thinking, which I loved.

But then I was asked to return to my former organization in a new position. It was nice to feel needed and wanted by a place I’d given nearly every working adult year of my life to. They gave me a prestigious title and asked me to achieve high-level goals for the organization, which I did. I quickly reignited friendships with colleagues I had worked with for years. All of us working together to build a brighter future. I felt fulfilled.

Then in five minutes, it was gone. One very short conversation with new leadership left me and several others unemployed. My termination was sudden and unexpected. I walked away sad, angry, and disappointed, not so much about losing my job, but by the way in which it was done. There wasn’t even a thank you.

And now, I truly was retired from any work that had occupied the last 30+ years of my life. I wasn’t moving back to a consultant role. I was done with academic medicine. It was time for moving on.

While my termination was abrupt, I had known for a few years that my time in academia was coming to an end and I had subtly begun to plan what my life might look like when that page turned.

For me, this meant finding something that would replace the intellectual vitality I'd lost with my job, but I also wanted to reignite the creative vitality I'd given up years ago to perform an administrative role.

I struggled the first few months with my identity. The first Monday after my job terminated, I woke up wondering, “Who am I now that I’m no longer the dean of faculty?” I looked through my electronic calendar for the week. It was empty. Not one appointment. I’d also lost my email privileges, so who was I going to hear from. Would I matter to anyone anymore? These were heavy questions for a Monday morning. And I really had no immediate answers.

The Identity Cliff

An Identity Cliff shares three core features:

1. First, there is a Structural Collapse of some kind, usually in changes to your daily calendar, your routines, and how you spend your time. This aligns closely with Marie Jahoda’s classic research on the vital psychological need for institutional time structure.

2. Second, there is a Loss of Shorthand, where you use a title to explain your value to the world. The social currency of a title is what sociologists call a high-salience identity marker. When it is stripped away, you are left without an easy way to explain your value.

3. Finally, there is a Purpose Vacuum, wherein you may experience an existential void in the narrative that dictated your focus and what got you out of bed in the morning.

I experienced all of these simultaneously. And, if you’re reading this, it’s highly likely you’ve already found yourself on the precipice of an Identity Cliff, and like me, you may not have known what to call it.

I also learned there is an Identity Cliff for nearly every major life role transition: divorce, major illness, death of a spouse, empty nest, retirement etc.

My recent experience left me being at risk for the retirement Identity Cliff. The people at most risk here tends to be 1) doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and other executives who hold a prestigious title; 2) persons who thrive on building and crushing goals. Think Type A and workaholic personalities; 3) people who rely primarily on colleagues for their social interactions; 4) teachers, nurses, and other types of helping roles; or 5) people who are suddenly and unexpectedly forced to retire or leave. It is this last category that affected me the most, but honestly, I probably had a foot in each.

Not everyone will feel like they are standing on an Identity Cliff when they retire. But every woman will feel this at some point in her life after the loss of a role that has defined her for years.

In my own recent experience, I saw physicians and PhD researchers age in their office chairs and labs. Many loved their work but at the same time they had no idea who they were without their titles, roles, and white coats. I thought I was different, but here’s what I learned from my experience: knowing a page is turning and actually feeling it turn are two very different things.

And let me say this. It doesn’t matter how prepared you think you are mentally for retirement, for the kids to leave home, to give up being a caretaker, etc., you can never be fully prepared. In 5 minutes, I lost the container that had organized my curiosity, my purpose, my sense of contribution for 30+ years. That was a lot to lose before lunch.

So what are we to do when an Identity Cliff pops up in front of us?

Because it will. Usually multiple times in our lives. My experience is that at first I feel like giving up. I simply want to stop caring. And, personally, I think it’s okay to allow ourselves to wallow around in the muck for a bit. I think it’s part of the cathartic process. It’s just not a good idea to stay there indefinitely.

For me that meant staying in my pajamas long past 10 am, sobbing intermittently, watching Netflix during the day, and mindlessly scrolling until my brain felt fried. But after a few weeks, my gut said it was time to pull myself together and get back to work.

Whatever the cause for your personal Identity Cliff, you will typically feel disoriented, grief stricken, and anxious. All of which is completely normal.

When you find yourself standing on the Identity Cliff, remember, this is not failure, not weakness, and not poor planning on your part. It’s a natural psychological response to navigating a landscape where the old you has shape shifted, forcing you to rebuild a new sense of self.

Three Places to Start

If you find yourself on the Identity Cliff, here are three writing exercises that can help you head back to safer, more solid ground.

1. Write one sentence that describes you with no title in it. Not dean, not teacher, not mother, not wife, not daughter, and so forth. It doesn’t need to be a good sentence, just a true one. You can also list the core human traits your job required to do it well. Strip away the specific industry, sport, or family context.

2. Add one thing to your calendar to do that interests you. This is helpful if one day with nothing to do feels like a relief, but you get antsy by Thursday.

3. Commit to trying something new for 30 days. It must be completely unrelated to your past identity/role.

As you probably know by now, I'm a big fan of taking the Long Hello approach to this part of our lives. So yes, the retirement, the death, the illness, the divorce…anything that puts us on the Identity Cliff can absolutely feel like a punch in the gut. And when this happens I want you to hang there for a bit, then get your butt up and get back to living the Long Hello.

— Sheila

P.S. I love the TV shows, Shrinking with Harrison Ford who plays a psychologist, Paul, and, Hacks, with Jean Smart who portrays Deborah Vance, a female comedian. Both characters are afraid of becoming irrelevant when they can no longer be the person they’ve been for most of their adult lives. Both shows do a good job walking us through what standing on an Identity Cliff looks and feels like. I highly recommend watching both series if you want to understand this concept a bit more.

This podcast is where I figure out that chapter out loud, sourced straight from the conversations I have with women in my Instagram comments every week. No co-host, no script pretending I have it all worked out. Just one woman who spent almost 30 years in academic medicine, and is now spending this decade proving that 60 isn’t a decline, but it may require a Compass.

Aging boldly, relationships after reinvention, travel with no permission needed, and the slow work of becoming who you actually are. New episodes drop weekly.

A 2022 study in JAMA reported that 92% of adults between 50 and 64, and 96% of adults between 65 and 80, routinely experience some form of ageism every day.

And this ageism has us maintaining deeply held beliefs that withdrawing from life as we age is the normal thing to do. But, it’s a lie. And it’s a lie that keeps getting perpetuated, so I had to ask myself, who benefits here?

Who Profits From “Too Old”

Well, pharmaceutical companies certainly do. Companies like Merck and Pfizer profit heavily from the “too old” lie by framing aging as an inevitable process of physical and mental decay that requires drug management rather than lifestyle adaptation or skill acquisition. It truly is a brilliant marketing strategy. The commercials sell the solution, such as a vibrant life, while the wider societal lie is busy manufacturing the need for it.

Similarly, the anti-aging and wellness companies benefit from maintaining this lie. Companies make a profit by framing aging as a disease or a state of decline that can only be delayed using expensive products.

And, of course, it happens all the time in corporations. They want you to believe the lie that you’re too old to learn new technology and unable to adapt to a new environment. Hoping you’ll retire or move on out so they can hire someone younger for less money.

We keep believing the myth because, in some ways, it lets us off the hook. It lets us say I’m too old to learn social media, I’m too old to learn French, I’m too old to hike in Europe. And then we don’t have to do it, because we have an excuse, and it’s an excuse almost no one will call us out on.

The Year I Believed I Was Old

When I turned 57, I got extremely anxious about turning 60. It was the first time in my life when I truly believed I was old.

I was born when my two siblings were nearly adults, so I grew up around and gravitated toward older people. For years, I was the youngster in our group of friends, until they started dying, divorcing, or moving on.

And then one day, when I was 57, it dawned on me: I was no longer the youngest. Not only did I believe I was old at 57, I believed that when I turned 60, I’d be wheeled into some parking lot to sit out my remaining years. I thought 60 was the beginning of my Long Goodbye. And I’ll tell you, it depressed the hell out of me.

For several years, I struggled with this idea of being old and useless. And I know I’m not the only woman who has. I hear from women on Instagram all the time who’ve also felt they were too old to explore new experiences.

But between 57 and 60, I decided I could choose the Long Goodbye, or its opposite, The Long Hello. The choice was mine.

Choosing The Long Hello

In choosing the Long Hello, we are not fading out of the picture; we are developing into it. Kind of like a photograph does while the film is being processed. It’s also not a farewell stretched across decades, but an intentional introduction to yourself stretched across decades. It’s the place where you are holding the pen to write your own script for a modern retirement.

Which brings me to the Life After 60 Compass^TM, and the concept of vitality. The journey we begin after age 60 can be a continuing and recurring cycle of growth and renewal, if we want it to be. And, I knew this is what I wanted; not a life destined for the parking lot.

Over the last eight years, I built a framework to help you and me understand how to navigate this chapter. I call it the Life After 60 Compass^TM, and it’s built on five pillars, woven together by five areas of vitality: relational, physical, intellectual, creative, and purposeful.

This framework has profoundly changed how I see life after 60 and how I move through this chapter of life. And, I believe it’s available to anyone who has reached this stage of life.

Is it possible to live out the rest of your life and never think about the Compass, or vitality, or what benefits it might offer you? Sure, it is. But that means you’re likely living on autopilot, and my experience with autopilot, much like flying a plane, is that you surrender your power and allow your environment, routine, and past conditioning to dictate your daily reality. In the context of women approaching 60, autopilot is the exact mechanism that can drive you straight off the “Identity Cliff.”

I’ll walk through all five pillars of the Compass and exactly what the Identity Cliff is, and how to see it coming before it takes you by surprise in Thursday’s first episode of The Long Hello podcast.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this post.

Sheila

It’s not a word that most of us use daily, and we hardly ever see it written except on supplement labels. We explored what the word really means for those of us over 60 and suggested it is not the version we see selling on Instagram. And, I hope, built something that is a bit more true in its place.

I introduced the five dimensions. We talked about what it looks like when they’re working together and what it feels like when they’ve gone missing. We talked about the fear, the specific, rational, completely understandable fear of not knowing who you are when the thing that organized your identity is suddenly gone. We talked about the women who are thriving in hard times and the ones who aren’t, and why the difference usually has nothing to do with a person’s circumstances.

And on Monday of this week, I asked you to do some self reflection with a series of questions for each of the five dimensions. I hope you saw the article and spent a few minutes doing your own soul searching around the vitality in your life.

If you took the inventory on Monday and one or more of the dimensions made you stop and think, “Hey, what’s going on here?” then good. That’s giving you information about vitality aspects you need to work on.

In August, we’re going somewhere I’ve been working up to all month. We’re going to talk about what it actually feels like to close the door on a chapter that defined you: wife, mother, employee, daughter, sister etc.

I’m not talking about where you step into something new. I’m talking about the part right before that. I think of it as the in-between phase of transition. It’s the morning you wake up, and the thing that organized your entire sense of self is gone, and whatever is going to be the new thing hasn’t arrived yet.

I know that place from personal experience. I’ve lived in it multiple times. Through the loss of a spouse, death of a brother, death of a mother, a cancer diagnosis, and loss of a beloved job I held for 30+ years.

I’m not going to tell you it’s easy. I’m not going to dress it up in the language of transformation and rebirth and all the ways that grief can eventually become something else.

I’m more the truthteller type even when what I’m saying may be difficult for you to hear. But I will also tell you why I think the in-between, as uncomfortable as it is, might be the most important place in our life’s journey.

The page is turning. Are you ready for it?

— Sheila

You may have read about these dimensions in my previous posts and even given it some thought. Or perhaps you took the online vitality assessment tool I shared last week on an Instagram Story. Or maybe this is all brand new information to you.

In any case, here’s what I want to suggest for this week. Take 30 minutes to sit with each of the 5 dimensions of vitality I outline below and reflect on the question prompts. There are no right answers, only honest ones if you are honest with yourself. So, grab a piece of paper and a pen and let’s dive in!

The 5 Dimensions of Vitality

Purposeful Vitality: This is what gives your days meaning

• When did you last feel like what you were doing genuinely mattered; not what you were supposed to do, not what was expected, but what actually mattered to you?

• What would you do more of tomorrow if no one was watching and nothing was required of you?

• Is there something you’ve been telling yourself you’ll get to later that is actually important to you right now?

Purposeful vitality isn’t about having a grand mission. It’s about the small, daily sense that your time is being spent on what matters most. If that feeling is absent, notice when it was last present. That’s something worth investigating a bit more.

Intellectual Vitality: This is what brings your curiosity alive

• When did you last feel genuinely surprised by something you didn’t know existed?

• What are you currently curious about that you haven’t had the time or given yourself permission to pursue?

• What questions are you carrying that don’t have answers yet? And are you actually looking for the answers, or just carrying around the questions?

Intellectual vitality doesn’t require a degree program or a book club or a formal commitment. It requires one honest question you’re actually pursuing. If you can’t think of one right now, that’s worth being aware of.

Creative Vitality: This is your need to make and express yourself

• When did you last make something, like write, cook, garden, photograph, build, sew, draw, arrange, just for yourself, with no audience and no outcome required?

• Is there a creative impulse you’ve been ignoring? What would happen if you gave it one afternoon this week?

• If you had to describe your creative life right now in one word, what would it be?

Creative vitality is the one most women ignore until one day we look up, and notice it’s gone. Whatever you create doesn’t have to be good. And, you don’t have to finish it. It just needs to be yours.

Physical Vitality: This is your lived in physical body

• How would you describe your relationship with your body right now? Are you inhabiting it or just occupying it?

• When did you last feel good in your body? Not just okay, but actually good?

• What is your body asking for right now that you keep postponing?

Physical vitality after 60 is not about what your body used to do. It is about the quality of your relationship with the body you are living in right now. We know that the relationship with our body can improve at any age, in any condition, if you’re willing to listen.

Relational Vitality: This reflects the depth of your connections with others

• Who in your life knows who you are right now? Not who you were, not who they hope you’ll be, but who you actually are in this chapter.

• Is there a relationship you’ve been meaning to tend to? Perhaps a call you’ve been meaning to make or a conversation you’ve been putting off.

• What would your closest relationships feel like if they were exactly what you needed them to be? How far is that from where they are now?

Relational vitality is maybe the quietest loss of all after we reach age 60. It doesn’t look like conflict. It looks like being surrounded by people and you still feeling unknown.

After you’ve completed the self reflection, what did you notice? Which dimension felt the most alive as you read through it? Which one made you look away? That’s your inventory.

Most of us walk out of this exercise knowing one thing we didn’t know going in or knowing something we already knew but hadn’t said out loud yet. You don’t need all five dimensions humming at once. You just need to know which one is asking for your attention.

If you haven’t taken the online vitality assessment (Beta version), you can take it here: Vitality Assessment

It takes less than three minutes and will help you dive a bit deeper on each of these 5 dimensions.

— Sheila

She should have retired at 68. She knew it. Her colleagues knew it. Her body was telling her, loudly, in ways she was too skilled to ignore.

She is still practicing.

When I asked her once what was keeping her, she said something I’ve thought about a lot.

“I don’t know how to be anyone else.”

That wasn’t unique to her.

I spent thirty years in academic medicine watching brilliant, accomplished women and men do the same thing, aging in their chairs and in their labs, some until they could hardly walk anymore. Not because they loved the work. Not because they couldn’t afford to stop. Not because they hadn’t thought about what came next.

Because they were afraid.

And the fear had almost nothing to do with the work itself.

It had to do with the answer to a question most of them had never had to ask before: Who am I when this is over?

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about that fear.

It isn’t weakness. It isn’t ingratitude. It isn’t even resistance to change.

It’s a completely rational response to a very real loss.

When you’ve spent thirty or forty years in a career that organized your identity, that told you who you were every single morning, that gave you a community, a purpose, a place to put your intelligence and your ambition and your care, leaving that is not a simple administrative transition.

It’s an identity reckoning.

The title was never just a word on a door. It was the container that held your sense of self. And most of us, walking toward the end of that chapter, know this somewhere in the body even when we don’t know it in the mind.

We’re not afraid of retirement. We’re afraid of the blank space where our identity used to live.

I should tell you: I thought I was different.

I had two years of preparation. A plan. A vision. This channel, this newsletter, a folder full of ideas for what came next. I had done everything you’re supposed to do to make this transition gracefully.

And still, when the moment came, the fear arrived right alongside the preparation.

Not the dramatic, paralyzing fear of someone who hadn’t planned. A quieter, more unsettling version. The fear that all the preparation in the world couldn’t fully answer, the question my physician colleague couldn’t answer either.

Who am I now?

The difference is I had somewhere to take that question. Not everyone does.

The women I’ve watched navigate this most gracefully are not the ones who weren’t afraid.

They’re the ones who let the fear say what it actually meant.

Not, I can’t leave. But I don’t know yet who I am on the other side.

And then they got curious about that instead of terrified by it.

The fear, it turns out, is not a stop sign. It’s information. It’s telling you that the next chapter is going to ask you to know yourself in a way your career never required.

That is harder than it sounds. And it is also, I promise you, more interesting.

I’m not going to tell you the fear goes away entirely. Mine hasn’t.

But it has changed. It has become less like a wall and more like a question I’m living into. Less like something trying to keep me from moving forward and more like evidence that what I’m doing actually matters to me, in a way that a title never quite did.

If you’re standing at the threshold of this chapter or you’ve already stepped through it and the fear followed you in, I want you to know something.

You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re doing the hardest, most honest version of it.

The question, “Who am I now?” is not a problem to be solved.

It’s a door.

— Sheila

Launch something. Pivot hard. Find your passion and chase it with the energy of someone half your age. The language is always about fire, the kind of burning, transforming, rising from the ashes of the person you used to be.

It’s compelling. I understand the appeal. It’s a bit of who I am now.

But I’ve been thinking about the women for whom that narrative lands like an obligation rather than an invitation. The ones who read about dramatic second acts and feel, quietly, like they’re already doing this chapter wrong.

I want to talk to those women today.

Here’s what nobody in the reinvention industry is saying clearly enough:

Transformation is one way through this chapter. It is not the only way.

In fact, for most women I know, those who spent decades at full capacity, giving enormously, and building something real, the last thing they need is another high-performance project. What they need is something quieter and more honest.

Not fire.

Alignment.

The question isn’t what should I transform into? The question is, “What have I always been that I finally have time to listen to?”

Those are entirely different questions. And they lead to entirely different chapters.

The woman who burns it all down makes for a compelling story. She’s the one who appears on podcasts and writes the book and launches the thing at 63 and makes everyone feel slightly exhausted and slightly inspired at the same time.

That woman is real. That chapter is valid.

But so is the woman who doesn’t burn anything.

Who looks at what she’s built, the relationships, the wisdom, the deep knowledge of herself that only comes from decades of living, and says: I don’t need to start over.

Who trades the calendar full of other people’s needs for a life that finally has some room in it. Who discovers that what she wants at 65 is not a new identity but a truer one. Who finds that vitality, for her, looks less like acceleration and more like arrival.

That woman doesn’t get the podcast episode. But she is living just as fully.

I want to say something specific to the woman who is caregiving right now, or managing a health reality that shapes what this chapter can hold. Or living with financial constraints that make the reinvention narrative feel not just irrelevant but insulting.

The fire metaphor was never for you.

But vitality is.

Not the full, five-dimensions-firing, everything-aligned version. The quieter version. The version that says: today I protected one small thing that is entirely mine. One walk. One book. One conversation that reminded me I still exist outside of what I do for other people.

That is not a lesser vitality.

That is vitality that has learned what matters.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to step into this chapter with intention rather than drama.

It doesn’t require burning anything. It requires noticing what’s already there.

The curiosity that survived thirty years of meetings. The relationships that held through everything. The creative impulse that got postponed for decades and is now, finally, tapping on the door again. The body that has been patient longer than it should have had to be.

You don’t have to burn down the life you built to build the life you want.

You just have to look at what’s already there, honestly, without performing, and decide what comes with you.

The page is turning. You get to choose what you bring to the next one.

Not everything. Not nothing.

Just the things that are actually, genuinely, unmistakably yours.

— Sheila

Let’s start with the number, because it’s the one that stopped me.

Becca Levy, a researcher at Yale, followed a group of older adults for more than two decades. She found that people who held positive beliefs about their own aging lived, on average, about seven and a half years longer than the people who held negative ones.

Not seven and a half better months. Seven and a half years.

And here is the part that should make all of us sit down: those beliefs are instilled early. Long before they apply to us. We absorb them in childhood and carry them, unexamined, into a decade we haven’t reached yet. And then we arrive at 60 already knowing the verdict.

The finding isn’t that cheerfulness cures anything. The finding is that what you believe about being 65 determines whether you take the walk. Whether you make the appointment. Whether you say yes to the thing, learn the thing, call the friend, or start the project on a Tuesday when nobody’s watching. It determines what your body is asked to do, and how often, and whether it’s asked at all.

The story gets into your muscles. It always does.

Nobody Handed Me a Script. I Just Started Reciting It.

Nobody sits you down at 60 and tells you to get smaller.

You absorb it. From the “humorous” birthday cards about knee jokes and being over the hill. From the commercials where women our age exist mostly to look concerned about their joints. From the word still, like in you’re still working? still traveling? still doing that? A word that quietly implies you should have stopped by now.

And then, at some point, you start saying it yourself.

That ship has sailed. At my age. Not for me anymore.

I’ve said all three. Lightly. The way you’d make a joke about your knees. And nobody in the room corrected me, because what I’d said wasn’t strange. It was the weather.

That’s how the most consequential belief of your life gets held: not as a belief at all, but as a fact about the atmosphere.

And No One Has Written the Correction

Look at what publishing has decided our lives at 60 are worth.

A woman’s 40s got the reinvention treatment…Untamed, a whole shelf of books about becoming yourself. Her 50s got chronicled as a medical event, and rightly so: Why We Can’t Sleep named perimenopause out loud, and a million women finally felt seen and heard.

And the 60s?

The 60s got logistics. Downsizing. Medicare enrollment. “Over 60” as a vague content bucket that begins at 60 and ends at 95, as if a woman of 65 and a woman of 91 are having the same week (although I do know some very spry 91-year-olds!).

There is no Untamed for this decade. There is no defining, culturally resonant book that stands up and says: this is a beginning.

Forty million American women. No book that names their experience as an arrival.

Social media hasn’t done any better. There’s plenty of content about our faces, our clothes, our workouts, and I’m not sneering at any of it; I like a good moisturizer as much as the next woman. But almost nobody is talking about the soul of this decade. The identity that dissolved when the role ended. The friendships that quietly went missing. The marriage that has to be renegotiated now that you’re both home at two in the afternoon.

Nobody’s naming it. So the silence gets filled by the only story on offer. The one that says this is the long goodbye.

What I’m Not Going to Tell You

I won’t pretend aging isn’t real. I’m getting older every day, and so are you, and my right shoulder has opinions now that it did not have in 1998.

And the long goodbye is real, too. It can come for any one of us. There is no green powder, no crossword, no morning walk that buys you a guarantee. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

So this isn’t a piece about outrunning anything.

It’s a piece about the enormous difference between a goodbye that comes for you and a goodbye you volunteer for.

One of those is a disease. The other is a habit.

Aging is not negotiable. How we age is far more negotiable than we’ve been told.

The Long Hello

So here’s the other story. The one that’s been available the whole time, sitting right there next to the first one.

The Long Hello.

Not a farewell stretched across decades, but an introduction stretched across decades. Not a slow exit. A slow arrival. We are not fading out of the picture. We are still developing into it.

And I want to be precise, because precision is the point: this is a choice, not a discovery. I didn’t find new evidence that changed my mind. I looked at two stories that were both available to me and chose the one I could actually live with for as long as I get to.

That last part isn’t a hedge. It’s the deal. None of us knows how long the hello lasts, which is exactly why you’d want to be living one.

Here’s what it asks of you once you’ve picked it.

1. Arriving is slow, and slow is the point.

Think of a photograph coming up in a darkroom. The image isn’t added to the paper. It was always there, latent in the chemistry, waiting for enough time to pass and the right conditions. You can’t rush it. Pull the print too early you get a ghost. Leave it in, and the thing you were actually looking at finally emerges.

That’s this decade. You’re not becoming someone new. You’re becoming legible.

There’s no single door you walk through. What happens is a bit stranger: you stop losing sleep over something you used to lose sleep over. You say a sentence at 65 you’d have swallowed at 45. You start something badly, on a Tuesday, with nobody watching.

Years, not moments. That’s not a delay. That’s the process.

2. Carry the ache and go anyway.

Before I say what this is, let me say what it is not.

This is not “push through.”

Push-through is a young woman’s religion. It assumes the pain is temporary, that effort is always available on request, and that a body can be out-argued if you’re disciplined enough about it. Some of us know better. There are conditions that do not negotiate, that don’t care about your attitude, that take the day whether or not you consented to it. I am not going to stand in front of a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, or MS, or a heart that’s already been repaired once, and imply she is one mindset away from a better Tuesday.

So here is the principle, and I need you to read the clause in the middle, because the clause in the middle is the entire thing:

You don’t wait for the pain to pass before you live. You acknowledge it: the aches, the losses, the hard mornings and you move forward anyway, in whatever ways you can that day. Not despite the difficulty. Alongside it.

In whatever ways you can that day.

Some days that’s a flight to Lisbon. Some days it’s the phone call you’ve been avoiding for a month. Some days it is ten minutes in a chair in the sun with a book, and that is not the consolation prize. That is the whole practice, fully executed.

Because the and was never about how much you get done.

It’s about who’s holding the pen.

My hip hurts, but maybe I’ll walk. That’s a negotiation. That’s a woman asking her body for permission it may not grant.

My hip hurts, and today I’m calling my sister. Same body. Same pain. Different narrator.

The ache is real. It gets a seat at the table. It gets accommodations, medication, rest, whatever it actually requires, and it does not get to write the story of who you are. That’s the line. That’s the only line I’m drawing.

You can live inside it flat on your back on a flare day with the curtains closed. What none of us can do, the one move that ends the hello, is hand over the pen and call it acceptance.

I’m not a relentless optimist, and you should be suspicious of anyone selling you that. I’m a realistic optimist. The hard thing is real. It stays. And I’m going anyway, in whatever way today allows. That’s an integrated life, not the absence of the difficulty, but the refusal to let it hold the pen.

3. A belief needs a body. That body is vitality.

Last week, I wrote about five distinct dimensions of vitality: purposeful vitality, intellectual vitality, creative vitality, physical vitality, and relational vitality. We usually have 2 or 3 of these in check and need to work on the others. I believe that if we are to embrace and enjoy The Long Hello, we need to have these 5 dimensions working in harmony.

Hear me clearly, though: I don’t think vitality buys you more time. It determines what is inside the time you get.

The claim is not that it saves you. The claim is that it’s the difference between a decade you have and a decade you inhabit.

And it is not one thing. That’s the mistake nearly everyone makes. They hear “vitality” and picture a treadmill. Your body’s in there, yes. So is your mind. So is what you make, who you’re bound to, and what any of it is for. Take one away and the hello gets quieter. Take two and it starts to sound like a goodbye you volunteered for.

I’m going to spend the rest of this year taking them apart with you, one at a time.

The Path

You don’t need a five-year plan. You need three things this week.

Catch yourself saying “still.” Every time it comes out of your own mouth, notice who taught it to you. It wasn’t you.

Find one “but” and turn it into an “and.” I’d love to, but I’m 65. Say it again with an and and listen to what happens. It stops being an excuse and becomes a fact you’re walking past.

Name the ship you said had sailed. The class, the trip, the project, the conversation you keep not having. Write it down. You don’t have to book it today. You just have to stop saying it left without you.

The Close

Forty million of us are walking around with a belief we never agreed to, absorbed before we were thirty, about a decade we hadn’t reached yet.

It’s costing us years. It’s costing us Tuesdays. And the correction hasn’t been written, because nobody thought this decade was worth the paper.

So we’ll have to say it ourselves, and say it loudly, and say it until it’s ordinary:

We have to stop believing our best years are behind us.

Not because it’s a nice thing to say on a Sunday. Because it isn’t true and because we’re the ones who keep saying it and because a story no one repeats eventually stops being told!

We are not the last act. We’re the part where the picture finally comes up.

Take your time. You’re just getting here.

— Sheila

I’m Sheila Crow, PhD. Thirty years in academic medicine, and I’ve spent the years since figuring it out after 60, mostly out loud, occasionally with my husband Brad’s unsolicited commentary.

Last week, I told you about the two dimensions I lost when my title disappeared in a five-minute conversation: my sense of purpose and my intellectual life. I know I’m not alone in that experience. Many of you have your own version of that conversation. Your own Tuesday when something went quiet within you. What I want to do today is give you the language to name it.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: the why behind not feeling like yourself, the one that sits just below the surface of a life that looks fine from the outside, comes down to one of five things.

I’ve been thinking about the term vitality as having five distinct dimensions. Not five levels. Five kinds.

Each one is a different aspect of what it means to feel fully alive. And most of us, most of the time, have some of them thriving and one or two that have gone dark.

When we don’t have names for the dimensions, we can’t find the ones we’ve lost. We just know we feel off. Muted. Like a photograph that’s slightly out of focus.

I find naming things helps me, so let me give you the five of them.

Purposeful Vitality The meaning behind your days

This is the dimension that answers the most fundamental question of this chapter: what are my days actually for? Not in a philosophical sense. In a practical, Tuesday-morning sense. What gives your days shape and direction? What makes you want to get up and get started?

For most high-achieving women, purposeful vitality lived inside our work for decades. Our careers had built-in purpose, like patients needing us, students counting on us, institutions we were building, and problems worth solving. We didn’t have to go looking for meaning. For many of us, we found it was written into our job description.

When the work ends, this kind of purposeful vitality doesn’t automatically transfer. It’s more like it evaporates. And we’re left with the question we haven’t had to answer since we were very young: what am I actually here to do now or next?

Purposeful vitality is strong when your days feel pointed at something. When you have things to look forward to that aren’t just appointments. When you feel useful — not to an institution, but to something that genuinely matters to you.

It has gone quiet when Monday feels indistinguishable from Friday, and when you’re busy but not engaged. When you’re moving through your days without feeling like any of it quite matters.

When did you last feel like what you were doing really mattered? Not what you were supposed to do. What actually mattered to you.

Intellectual Vitality The aliveness of your curiosity

This one surprised me most when I lost it. I didn’t think of myself as someone whose intellectual life depended on my job. I was a curious person. I read widely. I was interested in ideas for their own sake.

What I didn’t realize is how much of my intellectual life had been scaffolded by my work. The questions it generated. The problems that were worth thinking through. The conversations with people who challenged me and expected me to challenge them back.

Without that scaffolding, I found myself with plenty of curiosity and initially, nowhere to direct it. It was kind of like a river without its banks.

Intellectual vitality is strong when you’re in the middle of learning something that genuinely excites you; when you have questions that you’re actively pursuing; when conversations leave you thinking rather than just tired; when you read something and feel the particular pleasure of a mind that feels stretched.

Your intellectual vitality has gone quiet when you realize you’ve stopped being surprised by things. When you can’t remember the last time something changed how you think. When your mind feels like it’s running on routine rather than curiosity.

What would you learn right now if there were no reason other than wanting to know?

Creative Vitality Your need to make and express

This is the most underestimated dimension for women who have spent their careers in service professions.

Medicine, education, administration, caregiving — these are not professions that typically center your creative expression. They center your competence, your judgment, and your skill in service to someone else.

This means a lot of high-achieving women arrive at this chapter having spent thirty years being very good at things without spending much time making things that feel entirely like theirs.

Creative vitality isn’t about being an artist. It’s about the fundamental human need to make something — write something, grow something, build something, cook something, photograph something — that came from you. Not from a job description. Not for someone else’s benefit. Just yours.

It is strong when you have an outlet that feels like self-expression rather than productivity, when you’re making something for the pleasure of making rather than for the outcome.

It has gone quiet when your days are full of consumption like scrolling, watching, reading about other people’s making…and empty of your own.

What did you make as a child that you’ve stopped making?

Physical Vitality The body you live in now

I want to be careful here, because this is the dimension most likely to feel discouraging for women over 60.

Physical vitality isn’t about what your body could do at 40. It’s not about fitness goals or step counts or what you weigh. It’s about the relationship you have with the body you’re actually living in right now, at this age, in this season.

There’s a lot of body shifting that goes on between 40 and 60, which we won’t talk about here. But I know for certain that after 60, the relationship I had with my body shifted even more. I’ve found my body asks for different things. It protests more loudly when ignored. It needs more recovery, more intention, more patience than it once did. And the women I know who have the strongest physical vitality in this chapter are not the ones with the most energy or the fewest complaints.

They’re the ones who have stopped fighting their body and started listening to it instead, kind of like you might a good friend.

Physical vitality is strong when you feel reasonably at home in your body. When you’re moving in ways that feel good rather than obligatory. When you’re caring for your physical self with some intention, not perfection, just intention.

Your physical vitality goes silent when you avoid listening to your body. Postponing the thing it’s asking for; getting through the day rather than inhabiting it.

What does your body ask for that you keep postponing?

Relational Vitality The depth of your connections

This is not how many people are in your life. It’s how many of them actually know you.

This distinction matters more after 60 than at any other point in our lives. The social structures that created connections earlier in our lives…workplaces, school communities, and parenting circles have dissolved. What we’re left with are the relationships we’ve intentionally built and maintained.

Some of those relationships are deep and nourishing. Some are polite and surface-level and quietly exhausting. Some are with people who knew who we used to be and haven’t updated their picture of us. And some — the ones worth protecting — are with people who see us clearly, exactly as we are right now. I bet you know who those people are. I do.

Relational vitality isn’t about a full calendar. It’s about having people in your life who know you — not who you were, but who you are becoming.

It is strong when your most important relationships feel genuinely nourishing. When you feel known rather than just liked. When your connection feels like restoration rather than performance.

It has gone quiet when you’re lonely inside a full life; when your conversations stay on the surface; when you can’t remember the last time you told someone the truth about how you’re actually doing.

Who in your life really knows you — not who you were, but who you are right now?

Take a moment with these five. Not to score yourself. Not to diagnose anything or make a plan, just to notice.

Most of us are strong in two or three of these dimensions and have one or two that have gone quiet, sometimes suddenly, sometimes so gradually we missed it until the absence became impossible to ignore.

The one that has gone the quietest for you isn’t broken. It isn’t lost. It’s waiting for you to find it again.

Next week, I’ll give you something that helps you see your full vitality picture — all five dimensions at once. But until then, I have one question for you in the comments:

Which of these five dimensions do you feel most strongly right now — and which one has gone the quietest?

Warmly,

Sheila

It implies a stage. An audience. A performance that began, paused at intermission, and is now ready to resume bigger, bolder, and more dramatic than the first.

I’ve been watching the second-act industry grow for years. The books, the podcasts, the Instagram accounts are all building on the same premise: that when your first chapter ends, the natural response is to charge toward the next one. Reinvent. Reimagine. Roar.

And for some women, that’s exactly right.

But I’ve been thinking about the women for whom it isn’t.

The woman who spent forty years in a hospital, a classroom, an office, a home. Who gave her best hours to her work, her children, her parents, and her marriage. Who showed up when she was tired, stayed late when she shouldn’t have, said yes when every cell in her body wanted to say no.

She doesn’t want a second act.

She wants a Tuesday with nowhere to be.

She wants to read until noon. To have a conversation that doesn’t begin with an agenda. To feel the particular relief of a day that belongs entirely to her, not because she’s earned it, which she has, but because she finally, finally wants it.

There is nothing wrong with this woman.

But the second-act industry would have her believe otherwise.

Here’s the assumption buried in all of that reinvention messaging: that more is the answer. That if your first chapter was defined by doing, your second chapter should be defined by doing differently, but still doing, still producing, and still performing.

What if you’re just done performing?

I want to offer a different word. Not act. Not chapter. Not reinvention.

Alignment.

Vitality — real, lasting, multidimensional vitality — isn’t about what you’re doing. It’s about whether what you’re doing feels like you. Whether the life you’re living is one you actually chose, rather than one that happened to you while you were busy keeping up.

For some women, alignment is launching something new: a business, a platform, a creative practice that never had room before.

For others, alignment looks like a garden: a quiet morning, a friendship finally given the time it deserves, a body finally being listened to instead of pushed through.

Both are vitality. One is not more vital than the other.

I spent thirty years in academic medicine. I watched brilliant, dedicated women run themselves into the ground in service of institutions that didn’t always notice. And I watched some of them retire and immediately fill the space with more commitments, more projects, more reasons to be needed.

Not because they wanted to, but because they didn’t know how to stop.

The second-act messaging gave them permission to keep going. What I want to offer is something different.

Permission to stop.

Permission to let this chapter be quieter than the last one. Not as a consolation prize, but as a conscious choice. A form of vitality that doesn’t announce itself on a podcast or a carousel post. That doesn’t need an audience.

That just feels, finally, like yours.

This month I’m going to unpack what vitality actually looks like — across five dimensions, in real life, for women at every point in this chapter.

Some of those dimensions will feel energizing. Some will feel like permission to rest.

Either way, I’m not going to tell you what yours should look like.

That’s the whole point.

— Sheila

My title was on my door. My email signature. My business cards. It was the answer to “so what do you do?” at every dinner party, conference, and professional gathering for decades.

And then, in the span of five minutes, it was gone.

New leadership. A restructuring. A conversation that was probably harder for them to have than they let on. I walked out of that office feeling three things I hadn’t fully anticipated: sad, angry, and deeply disappointed. Not just about losing the role, but about how I lost it.

This wasn’t the retirement exit I had imagined.

Here’s what I didn’t tell anyone that day: I had seen it coming. Not the five-minute conversation, but the turning. I had spent almost two years quietly preparing for what came next. Thinking, planning, building. I had already started a growing Instagram channel.

So why did it still knock the wind out of me?

Because knowing a page is turning and actually feeling it turn are two very different things.

I didn’t know how much of myself I had stored in that title.

It wasn’t just a job. It was the answer to a question. The thing on the door. The signature at the bottom of every email. The word that preceded my name in every introduction for thirty years.

I knew better than to believe I was my title. I’d spent thirty years in academic medicine watching brilliant physicians learn this lesson the hard way…aging in their chairs and in their labs, some until they could hardly walk anymore. Not because they necessarily loved the work anymore, but because they didn’t know who they were without it.

I thought I was different.

I had a plan. I had a vision. I had two years of preparation and an IG post ready to go.

And still, when the moment actually came, the disbelief arrived right alongside the preparation. Wait. What just happened here? I was no longer wanted or needed. There wasn’t even a thank you.

What I lost that Tuesday wasn’t just a role. I lost the container that had organized my curiosity, my purpose, my sense of contribution. Two things went quiet at once — my sense of purpose and my intellectual life and I hadn’t seen either one coming.

For the first time in thirty years, I had no meetings on Monday morning. No agenda. No one waiting for my input. The curiosity that had organized my entire professional life had nowhere to land. And for the first time in as long as I could remember, I couldn’t answer the question I’d been answering every morning for three decades: what am I here to do today?

It was a hollow feeling I’ve spent the last year learning what to call it.

Now, I know this is not everyone’s story.

Some of you are exhaling right now. You handed in your title and felt your shoulders drop for the first time in decades. The relief was real and right. You poured yourself out for years, and this chapter is what you earned.

Some of you are managing realities that shape what this chapter can hold — health challenges, financial constraints, caregiving that didn’t pause when you did. Your version looks different. That’s not a lesser version. It’s yours.

Some of you didn’t choose the timing. The chapter ended before you were ready. Or you’re watching it approach with more dread than anticipation.

All of these are true. All of these are the beginning of the same question.

The question is this: What does it mean to feel alive in this next chapter of our lives?

Not energized. Not productive. Not busy.

Alive.

I’ve been sitting with the word “vitality” for a while now. It’s not one that most of us use naturally. The truth is you’re more likely to find it on a supplement label than in a real conversation. But underneath the wellness-industry noise, there’s something worth reclaiming here.

Vitality isn’t energy. Vitality is alignment. It’s what happens when several dimensions of your life are working together in a way that feels like you.

Think of it like an orchestra. You can have a brilliant violinist. But if the brass section has gone quiet, something feels off, even if you can’t name why. That’s what misaligned vitality feels like. Something is missing. You feel the absence even when you can’t locate it.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand. Vitality isn’t one thing. It’s at least five.

There’s the vitality that comes from days that mean something — purposeful vitality. There’s the vitality of an active, curious mind — intellectual vitality. There’s what happens when you’re making or expressing something that feels like yours — creative vitality. There’s the relationship your body has with being alive — physical vitality. And there’s the depth of your connections with the people who matter — relational vitality.

Most of us walk into this chapter with two or three of these thriving. One or two have gone quiet — sometimes suddenly, sometimes so gradually we didn’t notice until we felt the absence.

The morning I walked out of that office, I lost two of them at once.

That’s a lot to lose before lunch.

This month, I’m going to unpack all five: what each one looks like in real life, how you recognize when one has gone quiet, and what it means to tend to it intentionally.

But I want to start here with you.

Of those five dimensions — purposeful, intellectual, creative, physical, relational — which one do you think has gone the quietest for you right now?

You don’t have to have a certain answer. Just let the question sit.

It has a way of showing you things when you stop trying quite so hard to see them.

— Sheila

What I didn’t expect was the question she actually asked.

Are you doing what you want to do? Are you living your life the way you want, not the way someone else wants?

Every visit. Same question. For five years.

The first time she asked, I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I was a cancer patient in a follow-up appointment. I was expecting to talk about my body, not my choices. But she kept asking, visit after visit, and eventually I understood what she was really saying.

She had watched enough people face the end of their lives to know something most of us spend decades avoiding: the things that haunt us aren’t usually the things we did. They’re the things we didn’t do.

Researchers have confirmed what my oncologist already knew.

In a foundational study from Cornell University, psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found a clear pattern across decades of research: in the short term, people tend to regret their mistakes. But in the long run, when life is drawing to a close, regrets are almost always about missed opportunities. Paths not taken. Things left unsaid. Risks never attempted.

Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse who spent years with patients in their final weeks, documented the five most common regrets she heard. The most frequent, by far: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

And from palliative care research in Norway, one finding stopped me cold: the thing dying patients described as the very worst was having to die while carrying unresolved conflicts with the people they loved. Not a career left unfinished. Not a trip never taken. Unresolved relationships. Things left unsaid.

I had seen that kind of regret up close before cancer entered my own life.

Late in my father’s life, he talked about wanting to visit his brother in another state. He mentioned it more than once. My mother wasn’t anxious to make the trip, and my father wouldn’t go without her. So they didn’t go.

My father died. And my mother carried that regret for the rest of her life.

Not his regret. Hers. She was the one left to live with it.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. How the things we put off don’t simply disappear when time runs out…sometimes they transfer. The person left behind holds them. My mother didn’t just grieve my father. She grieved the trip they never took, the brother he never got to see, the thing she could have made happen and didn’t.

That’s a particular kind of weight. And it lives a long time.

My oncologist’s question planted a seed that my mother’s regret had quietly prepared the soil for.

I started asking myself, regularly and deliberately: If I don’t do this — if I don’t say this — could I live with that?

It sounds simple, but it isn’t always. Some days the answer is easy. Of course I can live without doing that. Move on. Other days, the question has real weight. It makes me pause before I let a hard conversation slide by. Before I talk myself out of something I actually want. Before I choose comfortable over true.

It’s not a perfect system. I still have regrets. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’ve solved the problem of being human. But I believe the practice has helped me minimize the accumulation. I’m more intentional. More honest with myself about what I actually want versus what I think I should want.

And at 65, having had cancer, having sat in that oncologist’s office more times than I care to count, I’ve stopped treating someday as a real timeline.

Here’s what I’m curious about.

The research tells me what people regret in the abstract — in studies, in hospice interviews, in surveys. But I want to know what you are sitting with right now.

Women over 60 carry a particular set of experiences. We grew up in a time when the expectations were loud and specific. Many of us shaped our lives around what we were supposed to want — and are only now, in this chapter, beginning to ask what we actually want.

So I’m asking.

Do you regret not finishing your education? Marrying too young or staying too long? A creative life you set aside for practical reasons that made sense at the time? Years spent worrying about things that never happened? Friendships you let drift? Things you never said to people who are gone now?

I’m not asking to open old wounds. I’m asking because I think naming what we carry is the first step toward deciding whether we’re still going to carry it.

I genuinely believe that much of what we regret we can still do something about. Not all of it. But more than we think.

Tell me in the comments. What do you regret? And what, if anything, are you doing about it?

Not a birthday. A verdict.

I had always loved my birthdays, but somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the idea that 60 was where you went to wait for the inevitable. Like pulling into a parking lot, turning off the engine, and sitting there while life finished happening to other people, and I waited to die.

Turns out I had been tricked. And I didn’t even know it.

The Lie Was Quiet

Nobody sat me down and told me my 60s would be a waiting room. It was subtler than that.

It was the birthday cards that made jokes about decline. The magazine ads that celebrated women my age only if they “didn’t look their age.” The movies where women over 60 existed mostly in the background — grandmothers, side characters, women whose stories had already been told.

Research confirms what many of us felt but couldn’t name. Society is far harder on women when it comes to aging. Men who go gray are distinguished. Men who slow down are wise. Women who do the same become invisible. The cultural messaging aimed at women begins compounding in our late 40s and by 60 it has been running quietly in the background for over a decade, shaping how we see ourselves whether we realize it or not.

The result? We arrived at 60 already convinced the best was behind us.

It wasn’t a dramatic lie. It was a thousand quiet ones. And we believed them because we didn’t have enough evidence yet to know better.

What the Research Actually Says

Here’s what’s interesting: the psychology tells a completely different story.

Researchers have identified what they call the U-shaped happiness curve. It’s been documented in over 70 countries. Happiness dips in midlife, typically somewhere in our 40s and early 50s, and then rises again steadily into our 60s and beyond.

The reason matters. In our 20s and 30s, we chase ambition. In our 40s and 50s, we juggle responsibility. But something shifts in our 60s. We stop chasing external markers and start chasing meaning. We care less about impressing people and more about actually enjoying our lives. We stop taking ourselves so seriously, not because we’ve given up, but because we’ve finally accumulated enough perspective to know what deserves our energy and what doesn’t.

Psychologists describe the 60s as the decade where wisdom, freedom, and perspective finally converge. The good news is that this time in our lives is not the beginning of a decline. It’s the beginning of emotional mastery.

And yet we were handed a story that said otherwise.

There’s a Word for What’s Actually Happening

I want to introduce a concept that I think captures what so many of us are experiencing in our 60s, even if we haven’t had language for it yet.

Discovery.

Not reinvention, unless that’s what you are looking for. Not recovery, though some of that too. It’s discovery: the act of finding something that was always there, waiting to be seen.

Because here’s the truth I’ve come to understand at 65: your 60s aren’t about becoming someone new. They’re about uncovering who you actually were all along; the parts of yourself you set aside because life got full, because other people’s needs were louder than your own, because the world told you what a woman your age was supposed to want, and you were too busy to argue.

Those parts didn’t disappear. They waited.

Discovery means going back for them. It means noticing what lights you up now that nobody is grading you on it, or conducting a performance review. It means following a thread of curiosity without needing it to lead somewhere productive. It means asking — maybe for the first time — what do I actually want? Not what does my family need, not what does my career require, not what does society expect of a woman my age. What do I want?

That question isn’t self-indulgent. At 60-something, it is long overdue.

Discovery Is Countercultural

I want to be honest about something. Discovery at this stage of life isn’t always easy or welcome because it requires pushing back against a story that’s been running a long time.

When you start following your own curiosity at 62 or 65 or 68, you will sometimes feel the pull of old messaging. The voice that asks whether it’s too late, whether it’s too selfish, whether you should be settling instead of starting. That voice isn’t wisdom. It’s the waiting room talking.

The research is clear that how we think about our own aging directly shapes how we experience it. Women who internalize the negative cultural narrative about being over 60 have measurably worse outcomes — in health, in cognitive function, in overall wellbeing. Women who reject that narrative and actively engage in growth, curiosity, and self-direction will do significantly better.

In other words, discovery isn’t just emotionally satisfying. It’s protective.

Choosing to see your 60s as a decade of finding rather than fading isn’t denial. It’s one of the most evidence-based decisions you can make.

What I’ve Found So Far

I’m 65. I’m still in the middle of my own discovery — which is exactly the point.

I’ve found that I’m braver than I thought. That I care far less about being liked than I used to, and far more about being honest. That the parts of myself I neglected for decades — the curious ones, the creative ones, the ones that wanted to say things out loud — were never gone. They were just patiently waiting for me to come to my senses.

I’ve also found that I’m not alone in any of this. The comments and messages I receive from women navigating their 60s tell the same story over and over: I thought I was the only one who felt this way.

You’re not.

We were all handed the same lie. And we’re all figuring out, together, that it was never true.

The parking lot was never the destination.

You were always meant to keep driving.

This is what figuring it out after 60 actually looks like. Not arriving somewhere, but finally giving yourself permission to go.

If this resonated, share it with a woman who needs to hear it. And if you’re in the middle of your own discovery, I’d love to know: what have you found?

This blog is the honest answer to that question. Me, figuring it out. In real time. With you.

I’m not writing from the other side of anything. I’m right here in the middle of it, navigating retirement, relationships, travel, health, and the particular experience of being a woman over 60 in a world that hasn’t quite figured out what to do with us yet.

Which brings me to today.

The List That Started a Conversation

A few weeks ago, I posted a short video on Instagram sharing a list I called The Unspoken Rules for Women Over 60. I expected a few hundred people to watch it.

Over a million did.

The comments, and there were over 92,000 of them, told me something I already suspected but needed to see confirmed at scale: we are hungry for this conversation. Women over 60 are not lost. We are not fading. We are not quietly waiting for something to end.

We are figuring it out. And we need each other to do it.

If you haven’t seen the original list, I want to share it with you here because this is your home base now, and you should have it.

The Unspoken Rules for Women Over 60

1. Shoes Matter: Comfort is queen, but style is still your loyal subject.

2. Sleep is Sacred: Stop sacrificing it for the sake of others.

3. Saying No is a Superpower: You don’t owe everyone your time or energy.

4. Time is Your Most Precious Commodity: Spend it with people who fill your cup.

5. Travel Your Way: Whether grand or quiet, travel should nourish your spirit. Don’t wait for someday.

6. Marriage is a Garden, Not a Cemetery: Nurture it, prune it, enjoy the blooms.

7. Aging Bodies are Beautiful Stories: They’ve carried you through life. Treat them with kindness and humor.

8. Choose Your People Wisely: Surround yourself with those who see your light.

9. Live Without Apology: You are enough, exactly as you are.

10. Embrace Your Wisdom: It’s not about knowing everything, but understanding what truly matters.

11. Declutter Ruthlessly: Your home, your schedule, your mind.

12. Learn Something New Every Day: Keep your mind agile and your spirit curious.

13. Hydration is Your Friend: Seriously. Drink more water.

14. Joy is Non-Negotiable: Seek it, create it, revel in it.

15. Forgiveness is Freedom: Forgive others, and more importantly, forgive yourself.

16. Your Voice Has Power: Speak your truth and don’t let anyone silence you.

17. Invest in Experiences, Not Just Things: Collect moments, not dust collectors.

18. Self-Care Isn’t Selfish, It’s Essential: You can’t pour from an empty pitcher.

19. Celebrate Your Age: It’s a badge of honor and a testament to your resilience.

20. Live Unapologetically: This is your time. Live it fully, boldly, authentically.

These aren’t new ideas. Most of us know them somewhere in our heads.

The problem is we keep forgetting them in our hearts, where it actually matters.

That’s why this list exists. Not to teach you something new. To remind you of what you already know.

And today I want to add one more.

Rule 21: You Must Be Your Own Healthcare Advocate

Twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

I went through extended pelvic radiation and chemotherapy. It was brutal. And it was long. And I came out the other side grateful to be alive and determined to move forward, which I did.

About five years after treatment, things started to change. Bowel issues. Bladder issues. The kind that silently erodes your quality of life in ways that are hard to talk about and even harder to explain to a doctor in a ten-minute appointment.

For fifteen years, I saw physicians. Academic physicians. Gastroenterologists at respected institutions. Every one of them landed in the same place: Must be IBS. Irritable bowel syndrome. The diagnosis that means we’re not sure, but here’s a label.

Nobody, not one GI specialist, not one oncologist, ever suggested it might be related to my pancreas.

The CT Scan I Almost Didn’t Read

A few weeks ago, I came home from Italy with a lower bowel infection and ended up in the emergency room. They did a CT scan. Found the infection. Sent me home with antibiotics.

I reviewed the scan report myself once it was uploaded to my electronic medical record.

Buried in the report, listed as an incidental finding were four words:

Pancreas is severely atrophied.

I didn’t freak out, but I started researching. What I found stopped me cold.

Pancreatic exocrine insufficiency, the condition that results from a severely atrophied pancreas, can cause exactly the bowel symptoms I had been living with for fifteen years. It is a known, documented, late effect of extended pelvic radiation.

And there is a treatment. It’s called Creon. It’s a pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy that essentially does the job the pancreas can no longer do on its own.

I found this. In a CT scan report. After fifteen years of being told it was IBS.

This Isn’t Just My Story

I want to be careful here because I have deep respect for the physicians I’ve worked with over the years. Many of them are brilliant, dedicated people working inside a healthcare system that is under enormous pressure. This is not about blame.

But it is about reality.

The reality is that our healthcare system in the United States does not always connect the dots between the treatment we received decades ago and the symptoms we are living with today. Radiation oncology, gastroenterology, and primary care don’t always talk to each other. And patients, especially women in the Boomer generation and to an extent Gen X, have been taught to defer.

Our mothers’ generation trusted the doctor completely. Whatever he said — and it was almost always he — was the final word, even when he was wrong. We watched that. Some of us lived that.

We are a different generation. And we have to act like it.

A Note to Anyone Who Has Had Extended Pelvic Radiation

If you or someone you love has a history of extended pelvic radiation — for cervical cancer, prostate cancer, rectal cancer, or any other condition — and you are living with unexplained bowel symptoms, please ask your physician about pancreatic exocrine insufficiency.

Ask for a CT scan if you haven’t had one recently. Read the report yourself. Look for the words pancreatic atrophy.

I am not a physician. I am not giving medical advice. I am a woman who found something in a scan report that fifteen years of specialist appointments didn’t consider, and I think you deserve to know that this connection exists.

Share this with your doctor. Share it with someone you love who has been through radiation treatment. This is the kind of information that changes lives quietly, in the margins of a radiology report, if someone thinks to look.

What We Can Do Right Now

We cannot single-handedly fix the healthcare system. I know that. You know that.

But here is what we can do:

Read your own reports. Every CT scan, every MRI, every lab result — request a copy and read it. You don’t need a medical degree to notice something that doesn’t sound right. And, if you don’t understand it, ask.

Research your symptoms. Not to replace your physician, but to arrive at appointments informed. There is a difference between Dr. Google panic and thoughtful, targeted research. Learn that difference.

Ask better questions. Could this be related to my history of radiation? Have you considered X? What else could this be? Push gently and persistently until you feel heard.

Get a second opinion. Always. Without guilt.

Document everything. Dates, symptoms, what you were told, what changed. A clear timeline is one of the most powerful tools you can bring to a medical appointment.

Trust your body. You have lived in it for six decades. When something feels wrong, something is wrong. Don’t let anyone talk you out of what you know.

Rule 21

You must be your own healthcare advocate — always, and without apology.

Not because your doctors don’t care. Many of them do, deeply.

But because no one will ever know your body, your history, or your life the way you do. And in a system that is stretched and siloed and moving fast, the person most likely to connect the dots is you.

Our mothers trusted the system completely.

We trust it, and we verify.

Your Turn

I’m starting Creon this week. I don’t know yet whether it will make a difference. But for the first time in fifteen years, I feel genuinely hopeful about something changing.

And that hope came from reading four words in a scan report and deciding they were worth following up on.

Here’s my question for you today:

Do you have a healthcare advocacy story? A moment when you pushed back, asked the question nobody asked, or found something the system missed?

Tell me in the comments. I want to hear it.

And while you’re here — I’d also love to know: what would your Rule 21 be?

Not healthcare necessarily. Any rule. The one that belongs on this list that I haven’t named yet.

This list was never meant to be finished by one person.

If you’re new to this community and haven’t grabbed the original list of 20 Unspoken Rules for Women Over 60, you can grab it now.

I’m also figuring it out on YouTube at @SheilaCrowPhD and on Instagram at @travelwiththecrows. I hope you will come find me there too.

Warmly, Sheila

You should volunteer.

And I understand why.

It sounds meaningful. Generous. Purposeful. For some people, it may be exactly the right fit.

But when I first retired, I didn’t want to volunteer.

Not because volunteering is a bad thing. Not because I don’t care. And not because I have nothing to offer.

What I felt was something I suspect a lot of women feel and don’t say out loud.

After decades of working, helping, managing, caregiving, showing up, and being responsible, what I wanted first was not another commitment.

What I wanted was space.

I think one reason this advice comes so quickly is because we think retirement should look purposeful. And for women, that often runs especially deep. Many of us have spent a lifetime being valued for how much we do, how much we give, and how useful we are to other people. So of course we carry that mindset into retirement. We assume this next phase should also be visibly meaningful.

That’s why volunteering gets offered up so quickly. It checks all the boxes. It sounds admirable. It makes sense from the outside.

But retirement is not just a scheduling change. For many women, it is an identity shift.

And identity shifts are not always easy or neat.

Sometimes what you need first is not a new place to be useful. Sometimes what you need first is time to hear yourself think.

This was certainly true for me. I missed giving myself time to process what was happening, who I was, and where I wanted to go in the next 5 years.

We all need time to notice what we want. Time to sit in the quiet without rushing to fill it. Time to let one version of ourselves end before we immediately build the next.

I think this is where guilt can creep in.

If you don’t want to volunteer right away, you may wonder whether you’re being selfish. Or lazy. Or ungrateful. You may question whether you’re “doing retirement right.”

But, let’s be really clear…not wanting to volunteer right away is not selfish.

It may simply mean you’re adjusting to a major life transition.

It may mean you’re tired of always being needed.

It may mean you want this next season of life to come from something more honest than pressure or expectation.

You may volunteer later. Or, you may not. That is not really the point.

The point is that retirement is personal.

What fits one woman beautifully may feel heavy to another.

So, if you’ve recently retired and the suggestion to volunteer feels like too much right now, I want you to hear this:

Nothing is wrong with you.

You are allowed to take the advice that helps and leave the rest.

You are allowed to not be ready.

And you are allowed to figure out what this next chapter looks like on your own timeline.

According to every census bureau and marketing firm on the planet, we are the same thing: Baby Boomers. But if you sit us down in the same room, it becomes clear very quickly that we grew up in different centuries.

Her childhood was defined by post-war optimism, the rigid safety of the 1950s, and a world that still had “rules.” By the time the cultural earthquake of the late 60s arrived, she was already an adult with a map.

I, on the other hand, was a child of the 70s. I was the precursor to the “latchkey kid.” I grew up with the grit of a world that was already starting to shake. I remember the rotary phone, yes—but I also remember the Atari, the Walkman, and the realization that the “maps” our parents gave us were being redrawn in real-time.

We are Generation Jones. We are the Bridge. We have the analog heart and the digital soul. And right now, we are facing a collective identity crisis.

The “Standard” Script

Society has a very specific script for women hitting their 60s. It’s a script written in pastels and hushed tones. It’s about “winding down,” “retiring” (which literally means to withdraw), and becoming a background character in the lives of our children or our former careers.

It’s a script that tells us our “data collection” phase is over.

But when I look at the women in my circle—women with PhDs, women who have survived recessions and reinventions, women who have more energy at 64 than they did at 24—that script feels like a lie.

I recently heard Jamie Lee Curtis (a fellow 1958 Joneser) ask the only two questions that matter: “If not now, when? If not me, who?”

That hit me like a ton of bricks. If we aren’t the ones defining what “Active Wisdom” looks like, then who is? A 25-year-old marketing executive who thinks 60 is a walk-in tub and a knitting hobby?

The Great Edit

I’ve decided that I’m not “restructuring” my life. That sounds too much like a corporate HR meeting.

Instead, I am Refining.

Being “Not Done” doesn’t mean I’m joining the hustle culture. I’m 60; I’m too wise for the rat race. Refining is about the “Great Edit.” It’s about looking at 60 years of accumulated data and deciding what stays and what goes.

It’s about slowing down enough to actually pay attention. It’s traveling because we want to see the world, not just check a box. It’s having the “Honesty and Heart” to tell the truth about our relationships, our bodies, and our ambitions.

It’s about realizing that we aren’t “holding on” to our relevance. We are the most adaptable, resilient people in the room. We are the Bridge.

We’re Not Done

We’re going to talk about the “Active Wisdom” of the Bridge. We’re going to talk about travel, life lessons, and the beautiful, gritty reality of being an “Unfinished Woman.”

I’m keeping the PhD and the 60 years of data. I’m losing the fear of being “too much.” Because the truth is, we’re just getting to the part where we finally know what we’re doing.

And I, for one, am not done yet.

Not all at once. But enough that you start to notice it.

Kids leave home. Retirement moves from “someday” to “somewhere on the horizon.” Your parents age. You age.

And underneath all of it is a subtle realization:

Time is no longer abstract. It’s finite.

There’s no slowing it down. No rewinding.

So the question becomes: What do I want to do with the years I have left?

Why I Created the Midlife Vitality Cycle™

I didn’t set out to create a framework.

I was trying to find my own footing in my 50s.

Midlife didn’t feel like a crisis. But it didn’t feel simple either.

Some days felt full and expansive. Other days felt disorienting, like I was supposed to know what came next, but didn’t.

I kept thinking: There has to be a way to make sense of this stage of life.

The idea for the Midlife Vitality Cycle™ grew out of that search.

It was loosely inspired by work I used earlier in my career, but what I needed now was different.

Not a productivity model. Not a checklist.

A way to understand how we move through this stage of life, again and again.

Why Midlife Needs a Different Kind of Model

Midlife isn’t one thing.

It’s not a crisis. It’s not a steady climb into wisdom either.

It’s both.

Some days feel like everything is opening up. Other days feel like everything is shifting underneath you.

And without some kind of orientation, it’s easy to drift.

You stop reaching. You stop questioning. You start defaulting to disengagement.

Vitality at the Center

At the center of this cycle is one word:

Vitality.

Not hustle. Not productivity.

Vitality.

It’s the feeling of being alive in your own life.

• Having energy for the things that matter

• Staying mentally and emotionally engaged

• Feeling connected to yourself, to others, to what’s ahead

Vitality doesn’t mean everything is easy.

It means you’re still in it.

Still curious. Still participating. Still becoming.

And here’s what I’ve come to believe:

Vitality isn’t something you find. It’s something you build and return to over time.

The Eight Stages of the Midlife Vitality Cycle™

This is a cycle, not a straight line.

You don’t move through these stages once.

You revisit them. You move between them. You sometimes live in more than one at the same time.

That’s the point.

Here are the eight stages:

Discovery — Getting curious again. Trying things. Asking, What interests me now? Growth — Learning, building, expanding your capabilities and your health. Transitions — Navigating changes in identity, work, family, or direction. Reorientation — Stepping back and asking, Is this still the life I want? Renewal — Restoring your energy—physically, emotionally, mentally. Connection — Deepening relationships and creating meaningful community. Contribution — Sharing what you know. Offering your time, your wisdom, your presence. Legacy — Considering what you leave behind—not just materially, but relationally and emotionally.

Every stage feeds the same outcome:

Staying engaged with your life.

What Changes Over Time

Different stages tend to come forward at different times.

In your 40s and early 50s, Discovery and Growth often take the lead.

In your mid-50s and 60s, Renewal, Re-Orientation, and Connection become more important.

Later, Contribution and Legacy start to carry more weight.

But here’s what the cycle reminds us:

Nothing is locked to your age.

You can rediscover yourself at 65. You can build something new at 70.

You are always somewhere in the cycle.

Why This Matters

Because midlife isn’t just a logistical transition.

It’s an identity transition.

And if you don’t actively engage with it, it’s easy to slowly step back from your own life without realizing it.

The Midlife Vitality Cycle™ is simply a way to stay oriented.

Not a formula. Not a prescription.

A way to come back to yourself, again and again.

A Simple Reflection

If you pause for a moment, you probably already know where you are.

• Are you in Discovery, trying something new?

• In Renewal, rebuilding after a hard season?

• In Re-Orientation, questioning what still fits?

• Or beginning to think about Legacy in a deeper way?

You don’t need to have it all figured out.

You just need to stay engaged.

Aging is inevitable. Disengagement is not.

And vitality?

It’s still available to you. At every stage. At every return.

✨ If this resonated, share it with someone else navigating midlife. And if you see yourself somewhere in the cycle, I’d love to hear where you are!