Who am I now?

Thoughts on midlife identity, a mammogram, a text I didn't want to get, and the question midlife won't let me postpone anymore.

Yesterday I got my mammogram.

I have always been nervous about these. Not the discomfort, but the looking.

Because I carry a story around with me that is part of my identity since I was 16 and started running: that I am strong, that I will always be the badass athlete, that I am, on my best days, a little bit invincible. It’s part of how I view myself and have for many decades.

So there I stood, placing part of my body on a machine built to look inside it…to either confirm my story or change it. That’s what the nerves actually are, when I’m honest. Not fear of the machine.

Fear for the story.

Fear that the story will not align with my reality.

While I was writing this, a message came through on my phone, which was sitting next to me. The husband of a friend of ours here on the island had passed away, and she was letting me know.

It takes me aback every time.

Not because death is surprising, but because of how reliably we live as if it will wait for us. We plan. We prepare. We save the trip, the conversation, the version of our life we’ve been meaning to start for the perfect time. I get it. Me too.

The neutral zone

Change is what happens to you. Transition is what happens inside you. And every real transition has three parts: an ending, a new beginning, and between them a long, disorienting middle. There’s a name for this middle place - a therapist named William Bridges called it the neutral zone"

Not the old life.

Not yet the new one.

Just the crossing.

Most of us try to sprint through the neutral zone because it’s uncomfortable there. But Bridges’ insight, and everything I’ve seen in the therapy room, confirms it is that the neutral zone is where the actual work happens. It’s the only place identity gets renegotiated. You can’t skip it. You can only refuse to learn from it.

At the moment, I am quite literally living in the neutral zone.

Mid-50s. A private practice gone remote. A life that fits into a suitcase and a backpack, in a rented furnished apartment in Madeira, Portugal. Still working, but not as much. Not ready to retire. Somewhere in the middle of the bridge between the identity that organized my life for decades and the one I’m building on purpose.

And here is the confession: I’m a therapist. I help people take exactly these first steps back to themselves. And I still found myself in new territory with my own identity, surprised by the shifting sands this lifestyle caused to surface.

Who am I now, as the layers of responsibility start to shed?

Who am I now in a body that has quietly renegotiated its own terms? (That one gets its own article soon. Stay tuned.)

Who am I now, learning a new language and a new culture and weaving them into everything I was before?

Answering my own questions

This year, I started asking myself the same kind of questions I ask the women I work with. Precise ones, in a deliberate order, the kind that don’t let you skip the uncomfortable parts. Two of them wouldn’t let go of me.

What future did you assume you’d have that isn’t going to happen? Say it plainly.

I assumed my life would look like my parents’. As an adult, I tried to hold on as tightly as I could to my dad’s philosophies in life. I also tried to emulate my childhood home with a farmhouse we remodeled with a big garden in the woods near a pond to be a place my children would want to come back to. I tried to recreate what I had as a child for my own children. But that life started to feel tight. It didn’t align with my growing desires to travel, explore, and grow in ways that kinda scared and excited me. The kids were busy with their own young lives ( as they should be), and there was an itch to do something different, big, maybe a bit unhinged… but certainly not what I had ever thought my life would look like at this stage and age. I never dreamed my divorce would happen, and now the holidays look different. I never planned on not having my mom and dad with me now.

My parents passed away too soon. The perfect time never came for them.

What are you tired of being good at?

Being busy. I have been excellent at always doing something, and my worth is tied precariously to my productivity and the value I give to others. Portugal is teaching me to be worse at it. To slow down with my morning coffee. To sleep when my body asks. To lift heavier in the gym and go lighter on the calendar. To let this backdrop, this generous, beautiful country, actually seep into me, which is something I could not have allowed anywhere else, in any faster life or in a too-tight but beautiful farmhouse in Illinois.

These years ask us to let go of some things, remember others, and learn new ones.

What I built in the middle of the bridge

Those two questions in italics above? They’re not rhetorical, and they’re not random.

They are two of fifty I have been working through recently.

Over the past few weeks, and before I wrote The Bridge Years article, I’ve been journaling and removing layers of my identity. Sometimes people assume I don’t continue to do this kind of deeper work. But I do. I see myself as a work in progress in the middle of my own midlife pivot and life redesign. It is why I started this Substack, actually, to share my own journey of what this leap into the unknown in my 50s and questioning the narrative of convention is revealing in me.

So, yes, I do continue having these kinds of conversations with myself. And I figured you do too.

So I built a tool I have been using - a structured way to walk this crossing, built the way clinical work is built: the hard questions, in the right order, with no permission to skip the uncomfortable ones.

Next week I’ll show you the whole thing properly, but this is an introduction to the first steps that help me build a bridge to a deeper understanding of who I am now, squarely in my 50s.

For now, if the question “Who am I now?” has been sitting in your chest too, whether it arrived through a mammogram, a quiet house, a marriage running on old terms, or just an ordinary Tuesday that no longer fits, you can start today. I pulled ten prompts from the deck, two from each phase, free:

[DOWNLOAD FIRST STEPS — FREE] https://jadabutler.gumroad.com/l/thefirststeps

In the meantime, I am still in the neutral zone right there with you.

The results of the mammogram aren’t back yet.

I’m still waiting, which means I’m writing to you from inside the neutral zone in every sense: between countries, between identities, between the question and the answer.

But here is what standing at that machine gave me, whatever the envelope says: the story I’m keeping is not the invincible one. The story I’m keeping is the one I’m writing on purpose, in the middle of the bridge, with the ocean out the window and the day unfolding, not at the perfect time.

Now.

I’ll see you on the trail.

— Jada