The Woman Who Refuses to be Haunted

I have lived long enough to be haunted by several versions of myself.

There is the woman who was absolutely certain she knew what she wanted. The woman who made elaborate plans around things she no longer desires. The woman who loved people she would now cross the street to avoid. The woman who tolerated things that would have her present-day counterpart reaching for her handbag and politely excusing herself before the appetizers arrived.

I have some affection for these women.

A few of them were spectacularly foolish. Some were wonderfully brave. Others were doing their level best with terrible information and an unfortunate amount of confidence.

I don't particularly want any of them back.

Yet there is a curious expectation that we should remain loyal to our former selves. That a decision made at twenty-seven should carry some authority at fifty-eight. That the dreams we once announced publicly must be pursued indefinitely, even after we've privately lost all interest.

We are encouraged to honor our commitments, stay true to ourselves, finish what we started, and maintain some recognizable continuity between the people we were and the people we are.

Which sounds terribly noble until you consider how much of a woman's life can disappear into the maintenance of decisions she no longer wants to live with.

I think we should be permitted to change our minds rather extravagantly.

Perhaps even scandalously.

Some ghosts are terribly demanding.

Not all hauntings arrive rattling chains.

Some arrive in the form of a career you spent fifteen years building and now cannot bear to discuss at dinner.

Some look like friendships maintained entirely by history, with neither party particularly enjoying the other's company anymore.

Some are the family roles you were assigned before you were old enough to object. The responsible daughter.

The accommodating wife. The endlessly available mother. The agreeable woman who could always be counted on to understand.

Some arrive in your own handwriting.

A journal from 2004. A list of goals. A carefully articulated vision of the future that now reads like correspondence from a distant relative.

You recognize the handwriting, but you cannot quite remember what possessed her.

And still, some part of you feels obligated to make good on her promises.

We are remarkably willing to allow other people to evolve. We can acknowledge that our children have grown, that our friends have changed, that lovers become strangers, that entire cultures revise their understanding of what constitutes a good life.

But when it comes to ourselves, we often behave as though personal evolution requires a signed affidavit and the approval of everyone who knew us previously.

We explain ourselves.

We justify our departures.

We rehearse the reasons we're no longer interested in the things we once wanted, as though an entirely reasonable adult might otherwise accuse us of fraud.

Imagine the freedom of simply saying, "Oh, I don't want that anymore."

And then ordering dessert.

The trouble with being a woman of your word

I believe in integrity. I believe in keeping promises. I believe a person's word should mean something.

I also believe that integrity has been used to keep a great many women imprisoned inside lives they have outgrown.

There is a difference between honoring an obligation to another person and treating every preference you have ever expressed as a legally binding contract.

The woman you were at thirty-five may have genuinely wanted a particular life.

She may have wanted the enormous house, the prestigious title, the carefully orchestrated holidays, the marriage that looked a certain way, the respectable ambitions, the schedule that left exactly forty-seven minutes a week for spontaneous joy.

She wasn't necessarily wrong.

She was thirty-five.

She knew what she knew.

She wanted what she wanted.

She had not yet read the books you have read, survived the things you have survived, tasted the things you have tasted, or discovered how extraordinarily pleasant it can be to spend an afternoon doing precisely what you please.

She was entitled to her ambitions.

You are entitled to yours.

If yours happen to involve a smaller house, a larger passport, an entirely different kind of love, afternoons in museums, fewer obligations, more extravagant dinners, or an unexpected obsession with learning Italian, I cannot see why she should get a vote.

The dead do not get to run the household.

Neither should our former selves.

Nostalgia is not always your friend.

I enjoy nostalgia in moderation.

A beautiful old photograph. A song that brings back a summer. The particular smell of a place where something wonderful once happened.

I am less enthusiastic about nostalgia as a governing philosophy.

Nostalgia has a marvelous talent for editing out the parts that made us miserable.

We remember the romance and forget the anxiety. We remember the excitement and forget the exhaustion. We remember the woman who could accomplish twelve things before breakfast and overlook the fact that she was quietly furious most of the time.

Sometimes we miss a previous version of ourselves because we genuinely loved being her.

Sometimes we miss her because we have forgotten what it cost.

And sometimes we mistake familiarity for belonging.

A life can be familiar long after it has stopped being ours.

I think this is particularly treacherous for women who have been praised for their competence.

We become very good at carrying things. Households. Relationships. Businesses. Family traditions. Other people's emotional weather.

Eventually the carrying becomes part of our identity.

We are the women who can manage it.

Then one perfectly ordinary Tuesday, we discover that we no longer want to.

Not because we have become incapable.

Not because we are having some spectacular psychological crisis.

But because we have developed an interest in what life might feel like if we put some of it down.

This can be a deeply inconvenient revelation.

Especially for the people who have grown accustomed to watching us carry everything.

You don't have to make a ceremony out of every departure.

There is an entire industry devoted to making women process their lives.

Every transition must be unpacked. Every ending must be honored. Every old belief must be examined, challenged, rewritten, and integrated.

I am not opposed to reflection. I have spent a great deal of my life examining the peculiar machinery of being human.

But I don't believe every change requires a six-week journey into the emotional underworld.

Sometimes you are simply finished.

Sometimes the dress no longer fits, the friendship no longer nourishes you, the dream no longer excites you, or the role you once performed so beautifully has become tedious beyond endurance.

You may understand exactly why.

You may have no idea.

Either way, you are allowed to leave.

There is something almost comical about the amount of evidence women feel compelled to produce before giving themselves permission to want something different.

We assemble arguments. We consult experts. We make lists. We anticipate objections.

We are preparing a legal defense for the crime of having changed.

And the jury, more often than not, is entirely imaginary.

What if you didn't need a verdict?

What if being alive, curious, and in possession of your own mind were sufficient?

There is still so much life to be lived.

I find it peculiar that we treat middle age as the season in which a woman should become increasingly settled.

By this point, she is apparently supposed to know herself, understand her limitations, appreciate her blessings, and stop causing unnecessary commotion.

What a dreadful waste of accumulated experience.

I would argue that a woman who has lived five or six decades has finally gathered enough information to become truly interesting.

She has watched things fall apart and discovered that the world continued turning.

She has mistaken admiration for love, duty for purpose, and exhaustion for virtue.

She has been wrong about people. Wrong about herself. Wrong about what would make her happy.

She has survived embarrassment.

Perhaps even public embarrassment, which is particularly liberating once you discover it does not actually kill you.

She has learned that many of the rules governing respectable female behavior were invented by people with interests quite different from her own.

And she has begun to suspect that she might enjoy the remainder of her life considerably more if she stopped obeying them.

Why on earth would this be the moment to become less adventurous?

Why should a woman with decades of experience become more predictable rather than less?

I would like to see more women become gloriously difficult to categorize.

Women who change careers at sixty-three. Women who take lovers, learn languages, develop peculiar artistic obsessions, move to unfamiliar cities, or begin wearing clothes their daughters consider entirely inappropriate.

Women who become scholars of obscure subjects.

Women who disappear into beautiful gardens with a stack of novels and refuse to answer their telephones.

Women who decide that the second half of life deserves more imagination than the first.

Not because they are desperately trying to recover their youth.

Because they have finally acquired the experience to enjoy their freedom.

Let her rest.

There are things I would like to tell the women I used to be.

I would tell some of them to worry less.

I would tell others to leave sooner.

I would tell one or two to stop explaining themselves to people who were committed to misunderstanding them.

I would probably tell several to buy the shoes.

But I would not ask them to return.

They have done their work.

They carried me here, sometimes gracefully and sometimes in a magnificent state of confusion.

I can be grateful for them without continuing to live according to their preferences.

I can remember their loves without resurrecting their relationships.

I can appreciate their courage without repeating their battles.

I can forgive their mistakes without devoting the rest of my life to correcting them.

And I can let their dreams remain beautifully, perfectly unfinished.

There is a particular kind of peace in understanding that your past does not need to be repaired into a coherent story.

It happened.

It mattered.

It shaped you.

And now you get to do something else.

Perhaps something entirely unexpected.

Perhaps something deliciously irresponsible, by the standards of the woman you used to be.

Perhaps something that would have scandalized her.

I rather hope so.

After all, it is Halloween.

Let the ghosts have their evening.

Just don't give them the keys to the house.

If you are ready to build a life that reflects the woman you are now, rather than the woman you once promised to be, this is the work I do.

My private coaching practice is a place for women who want more freedom, more pleasure, and a life that feels unmistakably their own. We work with the real things: boundaries, identities, decisions, relationships, commitments, and the beautiful, occasionally uncomfortable business of living differently.



Private coaching is $650 per month and includes four sessions, with support between sessions.

You are welcome to reach out. There is still so much life to be lived.