Word Snapper Articles

Have You Outgrown Your Life?

By Lesley Cordero

I am looking out the window somewhere else altogether. I am not interested in anything that my friends are saying, and I am yearning for someone to say something that has some meaning for me. A friend later said that she had never seen anyone so disengaged. I feel totally alienated and adrift from my own life and the people in it. What is wrong with me? I am usually the life of the party, is this just turning 50 angst?

Looking back at this memory, I realize that I simply had outgrown my life. Let’s look at the evidence:

1. My friends were boring me and I had started distancing myself from them by not accepting social invitations.

2. I had been cycling through a continuous string of new interests much to my family’s amusement.

3. I had gone prematurely grey and was overweight and didn’t look at all in the mirror how I looked in my mind.

4. I had been downsized once more from a leadership position and was feeling underutilized at work.

5. I was a few years from retirement and was looking to do something else.

I remember sitting in a dark movie theatre watching the remake of the Thomas Crown Affair and there is a scene where the lead characters take off in a glider and soar over the valley below. A voice pops in my head at that moment and says, “I want a bigger life”. All right I’ve outgrown the life I have been living which includes being a wife, mother, full time teacher, daughter, sister and friend. I’m ready for a transformation but into what?

So the process of transformation begins. Perhaps, like me, you are just unsatisfied with a number of things in your life or perhaps you’ve experienced a major jarring event such as a death, divorce or firing. Change is in the wind and there is nothing you can do about it.