Midlife Without Apology
Creating your luxury life... without the guilt
I slept until almost eleven today.
That is unusual for me. I don’t use an alarm most days anymore, only for the early Pilates class I like, and I’ll set one for that. But generally, now, I get up when my body says so.
It is one of the quieter perks of living six hours ahead of my clients in the U.S. The mornings are always mine. No one needs me yet. The day has not started asking.
And still - this is the part I’m almost embarrassed to admit - I am still adjusting to allowing myself this luxury of time. I lay there this morning, awake, rested, with nowhere to be, and I felt it: the small tug of a voice that said I should be up. That sleeping until eleven was lazy. That I had not yet done anything to deserve the morning I was lying in.
There is a name for that voice. Karen Horney called it the tyranny of the should - the internal whip we crack at ourselves toward some idealized version of who we’re supposed to be. Get up. Be productive. Earn it. And the guilt is the gap between the person lying in the warm bed and the person the should insists on. I know this clinically. I have spent years in therapy learning to hear that voice and not obey it. And it still gets up before I do.
This is the thing about turning down the volume in life by having fewer things that require attention, with the small buzz of energy each item demands. We sold or gave away most of our belongings to start this nomadic journey. There is a silence that settles in when there is no longer the noise and weight of “stuff”. The luxury of having less. It feels ironically luxurious to own so little. To not have so many of my things around me, asking for my attention, but to have more time and energy in their place… and I still struggle with guilt over having built a life that allows it.
A while ago, someone left a comment on one of my essays. Not everyone can do what we are doing, they said. It is a luxury to be able to sell everything and start over.
It felt like a bit of a snub, but there was also some truth in the comment.
I could not have done this with little kids. I could not have done this right after my divorce. I could not have done this when I was starting my own practice. I most certainly could not do this if my husband did not find the adventure as intriguing as I did. I could not have done this if I had an aging parent to take care of.
A break in life was needed for this opportunity- A “hole in the fence,” as my husband likes to say. We looked at the hole and then at each other, grabbed hands, and jumped.
We tend to associate the word luxury with money, but it is more than that.
The hole in the fence was fortuitous, but it takes more courage than money sometimes to make bold changes in life.
We have friends here who live only on a pension or social security. That’s it. And they make it work beautifully. We are both still working, so there is that.
I sat with that comment for days. Longer than it deserved, which bothered me. And I had to ask myself why a stranger’s sentence could lodge under my skin like that.
Here is what I came to. The comment didn’t create anything in me. It echoed something already there. The accuser online had power only because it spoke in the voice of an accuser I had lived with most of my life - the one who has always wondered, quietly, whether I am allowed to have this. The online stranger was a mirror. The sting wasn’t the comment. The sting was recognition.
Because underneath the must-be-nice shade was a question I have wrestled with for as long as I can remember: do I deserve a beautiful, full life? And am I allowed to enjoy it without apology?
So I decided to write about why it bothered me… a stranger judging me on my life. Perhaps this is something you have struggled with, too.
And what I came up with is that it wasn’t fortune or lots of money for us becoming nomads in our 50s while traveling as much as we can and working as much as necessary - it was a choice and the right timing. Not luck. Not resources falling from the sky. A choice to jump when the waters were still unknown and scary, the tide was high at the right time. It resembled how I walked, or jumped, into every hard thing in my life before.
By getting clear on my why and asking myself…
Would I regret not trying?
I am not lucky, and I am not special. I have been in labor and become a new mother with no idea what I was doing. I have finished marathons and Ironman races, one mile at a time. I homeschooled my children. I went through a divorce and found love again on the other side of it. I bought and sold homes. I started a business. I sold everything I owned and moved across an ocean. Every one of those was a walk into the unknown. Every decision came with fear. Every decision costs something. I don’t talk about the hard nearly enough.
This life. It was built, slowly, out of secondhand furniture, thrift-store finds, homemade everything, and the courage to let it all go to pursue bigger dreams while we saved for a future I wasn’t sure would come when the tides in life presented an opportunity to trust and jump once again into the unknown.
But the comment kept its grip for another reason, one that took me longer to find.
My father grew up with dirt floors. My mother did not have indoor plumbing until she was in high school. I come from people who survived. And there is a particular weight that gets passed down a line like that - a quiet, loyal sense that you are not allowed more ease than the people who raised you. That to rest, to soften, to lie in bed until eleven with the sun coming in, is somehow a betrayal of everyone who never could.
Therapists have a name for this, too. Survivor guilt. The sense that your good fortune is an offense against those who didn’t get it… that having more than the ones who came before is a kind of disloyalty. It doesn’t announce itself. It hides inside the should. It whispers that the only honest life is a hard one, and that comfort must be earned again every single day or it will be taken back.
For most of my life, some faithful part of me believed that. I kept the floors clean, so to speak, out of loyalty to the people who never had them.
My parents are gone now. I miss them every day. Having them here would be a luxury I no longer have, and that, more than anything, has rearranged what the word means to me. Because if luxury is time, and presence, and the people you love within reach, then I have already lost the most expensive thing there is. No house, no view, no slow morning will ever cost as much as that.
So I have started to let myself believe something my survival-trained body still resists: that I am allowed to be here. That honoring where I come from does not mean staying small inside it. That my parents, who knew exactly what scarcity felt like, would not want me to keep choosing it out of loyalty to them.
This is what I keep coming back to, in my own life and across the desk from the people I see in my practice. We judge ourselves relentlessly. We criticize ourselves to a fault. We interrogate our own joy as though it needs a permit. I know what it is to question whether you deserve to have something - to feel luxurious, to feel rich, to feel free, and maybe for the first time, truly in love with the life you are living.
Not because it is fancy. But maybe it is. Not because it is easy. But maybe, finally, it is.
And here is the quiet reframe I want to leave you with: most of what makes a life feel luxurious costs nothing at all.
Time. Freedom. Fresh air and sun on your face. A nap you don’t apologize for. Hot coffee on a cool morning. A soft blanket and a good book on a Sunday afternoon in the light. A long conversation with someone you love. A shared meal that no one rushes. I could go on. None of it is for sale, and all of it is the real thing, the part that the catalog version of luxury was only ever imitating.
A rich life is not the one that looks rich. It is the one that feels rich from the inside, on a Tuesday, with no one watching.
So if you have done the work, if you have come to know your own worth, and the cost of the path that got you here, and the sacrifices that littered it, please, for the love of all that is holy, do not let anyone, in person or in a comment box, make you question that you are allowed this.
Decide for yourself what a luxurious life means. Define it by what brings you joy, peace, the feeling of being loved, and the feeling of being free. It is not reserved for the people you imagine have enough money to make their dreams come true. It is for anyone. It is for all of us. It is for you.
And then pursue it, without apology, with everything you have.
Even if that means sleeping until eleven.
P.S. Thank you all for sharing space with me. I hope you always know your worth, your value, and that you deserve all the good things in life, always. Share this with someone who might need a reminder.
P.P.S. If this resonated for you, drop me a comment and share how you are living your luxurious life!
I would love to have you along for the journey!
XO-
Jada
I retired to Portugal 18 months ago after my husband died. I live on Social Security and a small annuity. People say things like, "Must be nice to retire to Europe. Wish I was rich." I'm not rich. In fact, one of the many reasons I moved to Portugal is because I couldn't afford to live in the U.S. any longer. Living in Portugal isn't as affordable as it was initially due to the devaluation of the dollar thanks to Trump and his tariffs, but I couldn't believe how expensive food was in the U.S. when I went back last fall to visit my family.
But beyond the difference in actually dollars and cents (and Euros), the cost to my sanity was too great in the U.S. Here, people value relationships over earning every possible dollar. Restaurants close in the middle of the day. People stop to have coffee with their friends on the sidewalk cafes. Life is more balanced. I live a simpler life here, because I decided I value freedom and experiences over things. If that's luxury, I'll take it.
Thank you so much for your article. It touched me deeply, especially what you shared about our loyalty to the suffering of the generations that came before us, and the quiet guilt that can arise when we want more from life or allow ourselves to enjoy its riches—however we may define them.
I feel very much the same. The true riches for me are slow, peaceful mornings, meaningful conversations, shared laughter and joy, and love above all.
One thing that has helped me release some of the burden I felt obliged to carry is a line that came to me during my own journey:
"I choose to live as the answer to your prayers, not the echo of your pain."
To me, it honours those who came before us and their struggle and endurance, while allowing us to receive the life they may have longed for but could not fully live themselves.