The Bridge Years

Nobody warns you that your 50s could feel like a second adolescence - confusing, electric, overdue.

I used to look at fifty-year-olds and think they were old.

I remember this clearly, which is inconvenient, because I am now squarely in my fifties and I feel like a teenager… restless in the best way, curious about everything, a little reckless with my plans. The difference is that this time, I come equipped with wisdom I paid full price for. The hard knocks, it turns out, were the tuition.

But there’s no name for this phase that fits perfectly.

Midlife Awakening.

Midlife Arrival.

Midlife Crisis.

I align more with “awakening “ and “arrival” as defining this time of life transition; I don’t like the term midlife crisis, due to the negative connotation of the word crisis.

Midlife is not a crisis in a negative sense, but this time in life can feel like a crisis if we are not prepared for it, and most of us are not.

Here is how the term crisis breaks down across different contexts:

• The Literal Definition: A crucial stage or turning point in the course of anything; a situation that has reached a critical phase.

• The Etymology: It comes from the Greek word krisis, which uniquely means “decision” or “judgment.” Historically, it wasn’t just about panic; it was about reaching a crossroads where a choice must be made.

• Psychological Context: A temporary state of upset and disorganization, characterized mainly by an individual’s inability to cope with a particular situation using customary methods of problem-solving.

The crisis term that is often used is partially because it sometimes feels like someone snuck up on us, punched us in the gut, and then gave us a big kiss… confusion over what is happening.

Add this to menopause, and it’s a powder keg ready to blow.

But…

It is part of our developmental journey.

This is the crossroads we cannot ignore, and with it, it often brings clarity to some aspects of life and confusion to others.

It can feel like an upset to our psyche because our old ways of being are loosening and falling away (which is good), but it can feel disorienting and freeing simultaneously.

Electric.

Overdue.

There is a bridge that must be crossed in some sense, or rather, the way I see it, built with new tools, values, and beliefs from what this stage of life asks of us.

For many of us, this is perhaps the first time since adolescence that we can ask how we want to build the next season of life.

That’s the first thing I noticed when I sat down to write. What we call this phase of midlife transformation is less important than the fact that it naturally occurs in our development; we just don’t see it coming for what it is.

Photo by Michael Heuser on Unsplash

At sixteen, everyone knew what I was: an adolescent, mid-metamorphosis, granted a cultural permission slip to be unfinished. To sew “some wild oats” was expected. To be given a pass when you are self-serving, egocentric, and risk-taking is also expected.

At fifty-something, standing between the working life I built and whatever comes after it, the language runs out. The retirement industry has tried. My husband and I watch those retirement shows - the ones with the whiteboards and the withdrawal rates - and the planners have a term for this stretch: the go-go years. The decade or so when your health is strong, your calendar is loosening, and you can still leap before the slow-go and no-go years arrive.

They named the years. They measured the wrong thing.

The go-go framework measures how far your legs and your dollars can carry you. It says nothing about who is doing the traveling. And that, I’ve come to believe, is the question this decade is actually asking, not can you still go, but who goes?

The moratorium nobody sanctions

Here is what I wish someone had told me: what’s happening in midlife is not pre-retirement. It’s a second adolescence, and psychology has known this shape for decades; we just never applied the map to people with reading glasses.

In the 1960s, the psychologist James Marcia, building on Erik Erikson’s work, studied how adolescents form identity. He found that the healthiest path runs through a stage he called moratorium - a sanctioned season of exploration before commitment.

You try on selves.

You question the script you were handed.

You loosen your grip on who you were told to be before you decide who you’ll become.

The teenagers who skipped this stage, who adopted the identity their family or culture assigned, Marcia called foreclosed. Their identities looked stable from the outside. They just weren’t chosen.

Read that again from the far side of fifty.

Most of us foreclosed, at least partially.

We had to.

There were children to raise, careers to cultivate, and mortgages that did not care about our shelved passions. We took on the roles, the profession, the parenting, the responsible adult, and the roles worked. They built good lives. But they were assigned as much as chosen, and somewhere in the fifties, the assignments start expiring. The kids are grown. The career has crested or shifted. And the self underneath the roles clears its throat and says: My turn.

Adolescence is the only identity moratorium our culture grants.

A gap year at eighteen is charming.

A gap year at fifty-five reads as crisis, or indulgence, or the word we fear most: selfish….

Which is why so many of us stall here, feeling the pull toward passion and curiosity but waiting for permission that is never coming. There is no committee. There is no certificate of deservingness issued at a particular net worth or a particular birthday.

I spent longer than I’d like to admit trying to feel deserving of easing my foot off the gas of the scripted life as if deserving were a destination. It isn’t. The permission slip is one you write yourself.

The in-between problem

But here is the danger, and I say this with both of my clinical hats on: you cannot leap directly from one identity to the next. There is always an in-between, and the in-between is where people get stuck, but it is also where we build the bridge.

William Bridges, yes, that is really his name, spent his career studying transitions. His central insight: every transition has three parts. An ending. A new beginning. And between them, what he called the neutral zone - the uncomfortable middle where the old identity has stopped working but the new one hasn’t formed. Bridges argued that we are terrible at this middle part. We want to jump from ending straight to beginning, to skip the wobbly stretch where we don’t know how to answer “so, what do you do?”

The hardest part of leaving a role isn’t the leaving. It’s the vacuum afterward, when you are no longer the old thing and not yet anything else. If you’ve ever watched someone retire with a full portfolio and an empty calendar, you’ve seen the vacuum. The research is sobering: a strong sense of purpose is associated with better cognitive health and even lower mortality. Purpose is not a luxury item. It is load-bearing.

This is the drop-off I fear more than any market correction, the abyss that opens when we stop introducing ourselves by our roles and discover there was nothing else holding the introduction up.

We don’t need a leap.

We need a bridge.

Building it while standing on it

The retirement world already uses bridge language …bridge jobs, bridge income… but notice what their bridge is made of: money. Everyone plans the financial bridge.

Almost no one builds the identity bridge. And it’s the second one that determines whether you land on the far side or fall into the vacuum.

The identity bridge is built from different bricks: the passion project you start while you’re still working. The side hustle that has nothing to do with your resume. The language class, the training plan, the essay, the thing you do badly at first in public. Each one is a small answer to who goes?… that doesn’t depend on your title.

They look like hobbies or passions.

They are infrastructure.

And here is the strange, unadvertised part: you build this bridge while standing on it.

Nobody hands you blueprints.

You lay a brick, test your weight, lay another.

Some bricks crumble, the venture that fizzles, the passion that turns out to be borrowed. That’s not failure; that’s the moratorium doing its job. Adolescents get to try on selves and discard them.

So do we.

At age 50, or 60, or 70…for as long as the moratorium dictates.

The woman on the bridge

I should tell you where I’m writing this from, because it’s relevant.

I live in Portugal at the moment on a visa that names me, in official government language, a digital nomad. I remember filling out the paperwork and pausing at the word.

Nomad.

A term that implies movement, impermanence, a loosening of the tether between a person and a place, and realizing that a government agency had named my developmental stage before I had.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about giving up a fixed address: a house is not just shelter. It’s an identity subsidy. Live in one town for thirty years, and the place answers half of “who are you?” for free - you’re the woman on that street, from that practice, whose kids went to that school. Remove the address, and every one of those props falls away, and you’re left holding the question directly.

The nomad doesn’t just cross the in-between. The nomad lives there. I have, in effect, taken up residence on the bridge.

No permanent home. Two suitcases and a bike. And as soon as my husband’s visa arrives in the mail, we can do a bit more exploring of the world.

And I think by doing so, this is what is forcing the moratorium in the most profound way in my life.

The anthropologist Victor Turner had a word for this territory: liminality, from the Latin for threshold.

In the rites of passage he studied, the initiate is deliberately removed from the village - taken out of their old social position into a state he described as betwixt and between. The removal isn’t incidental to the transformation. It’s the mechanism. You cannot become someone new inside the geography of your old self, where every object and routine recites the old identity back to you.

I find it oddly comforting that the word itself agrees.

Nomad comes from the Greek nomas — roaming in search of pasture.

The original nomads were not lost. They were following what feeds them.

When I learned this, I felt it in my bones.

To move to what you feel nourished by.

That is the whole point.

In essence, the midlife transformation process requires us to all be nomads in spirit.

The bridge years do not require a plane ticket, however.

I am simply a visible version of what every woman on this threshold is doing invisibly, loosening her grip on the address, the role, the script, and discovering that none of them were what held her up.

She was.

The dismantling I get done for me at every border crossing, you can do at your own kitchen table. It just takes a bit more intention.

Changing roads.

I’ve taken my foot off the gas of the scripted life, yes. But only because I’m accelerating onto a road of my own design.

That’s the bridge years: the sanctioned-by-no-one, self-permissioned second adolescence, when your legs are still strong enough for the leap, and your wisdom is finally deep enough to choose the direction.

The crossroads where you must decide how you will live the second half of your life.

Leading with purpose, curiosity, passion, and moving towards what feeds you.

A gap year that might last a decade.

A moratorium with better judgment.

A construction project you conduct in midair.

The bricks are in your hands. The permission slip has your own signature on it.

Start laying.

---

XO,

Jada

…………………………………

>Leave a comment and tell me where you are on your journey of self-excavation and your midlife moratorium rebuild…

*I am always looking to build something that might help you if it’s been a while since you asked yourself these questions. Let me know what you struggle with the most. For more tools and resources that I have already built to assist you on your midlife journey, take a peak on my website here

P.S. Thank you, as always, for sharing space with me today. Send this to someone who might need a reminder that it’s okay to let go of old ways of being to redesign their second half of life.

P.P.S. If this resonated for you and you’re ready for more self-exploration and deepening your love for yourself as you design your rich, nourishing, and adventure-filled next chapter, I would love to have you here! Follow along for more!