After severely burning out from years of hard-charging toward some utopian version of myself, I began to unravel the threads one by one to discover who it was underneath. It hasn’t been an easy ride by any means, as I’ve transformed in fits and starts and sometimes only in response to life events that have forced my hand. 

During your forties, you start to experience what is referred to in astrology as your “mid-life transits” or what is more commonly referred to as your “mid-life crisis.” It’s a time when life events can shake you up to make sure you are on the right path. It’s the mid-point in your life journey where you start to feel your mortality and ask yourself, “Is this really what I want from my life?” 

The big transit that can set you off in a completely new direction is your Uranus Opposition, which happens in your mid-forties. Mine was spurred into action when my dad died and I moved to Austin, Texas from New York City. I was only able to make this move because I had started my own business and landed my first client during this transition. That client was a godsend for me and allowed me the space I needed to start this journey. But this was only the beginning. 

Right after our move, my child started to experience severe gender dysphoria. As I was figuring out how I fit into the world, my child showed me a mirror that revealed the contradiction of who I thought I was and who I really was deep down. That journey has been ongoing, but it was a revealing insight at the time. I have always felt uncomfortably different and I’ve alternately embraced that difference and wanted to erase that difference. As the fourth child of nine kids brought up in a chaotic evangelical family who moved a lot, I remember simply wanting to fit in. When I didn’t fit in, I embraced the rebel crowd. But I never quite fit in there either. To be honest, I’ve never felt comfortable anywhere. So here was a child, my child, showing me that I needed to do some work to embrace these uncomfortable parts of myself. 

During this time, I rediscovered my spiritual roots but from a deeper and less dogmatic perspective. I quit drinking and started a daily meditation practice. I found healing by exploring various self-discovery tools like the enneagram, astrology, and human design. These tools helped me discover and accept things about myself that I hadn’t been able to achieve after years of therapy. I sincerely wished my therapists would have used them as it would have saved me years of struggle. 

But what many spiritual modalities teach and I have found to be true is that this journey is a spiral and you can cycle back again and again deeper each time. That is if you stay on a dedicated path toward consciousness. I am starting year seven of this journey, almost to my Chiron return, which marks an important milestone in astrology, when one has the opportunity to shift into a healed healer. 

The myth is that we each come into life inheriting a generational wound that lives in our memory cells. This means we can’t intellectualize or articulate this wound until the themes start to resurface loudly during our mid-life transits. During this time, we are granted the opportunity to face what comes up within us so that we can heal the wound and at the same time embrace the wisdom of our generational inheritance. 

This journey isn’t linear and there isn’t necessarily a destination to achieve. I’m letting that part of my life go now, embarking on a commitment to being fully present to who I am right this second, no outer achievements necessary. Simply acceptance and love of my spirit, complete and whole as I am, every step of the way.