The transition around 50 can touch far more than your body.

Sometimes it asks you to reconsider your relationships, your work, your priorities and the life you thought you were supposed to want.

Like many women, I went through a dark night of the soul around 50. Of course, when I was in the middle of it, I had no idea that other women were experiencing something similar. I didn’t recognise it as a transition or a threshold. I thought something had simply gone wrong with me and my life.

A lot had happened in the years leading up to that point. When I was 43, my mum suffered a severe stroke that left her paralysed and unable to speak or eat. She spent nearly three years in care before she died, and I was there with her almost every day. Watching someone you love suffer while being completely unable to change the situation is incredibly difficult.

When she eventually died, there was almost a sense of relief at first. I know that is uncomfortable to say, but there was relief that her suffering had ended and relief from the constant state of vigilance we had been living in. The grief came properly about six months later.

What I couldn’t see at the time was that while all of this had been happening, my own body had begun changing too. My attention had been so completely focused on my mum that I had missed the early signs of perimenopause.

When losing joy changes the questions you ask

By the time the grief arrived, I was deep in perimenopause without understanding what was happening. I know now that changes in mood and a loss of enjoyment can accompany this transition, but back then I had no context for any of it.

I simply knew that things didn’t taste the same anymore.

The life I had built wasn’t necessarily terrible. In many ways, it looked perfectly fine from the outside. But I couldn’t feel myself properly inside it. Things that had mattered deeply to me had become strangely flat. I was functioning, but I wasn’t really feeling alive.

Eventually, I walked out of my 25-year relationship. That decision became part of the wake-up call, although the bigger awakening came through the questions that followed. Some of those questions were asked by my former partner. Others slowly became impossible for me to avoid.

What did I actually want now?

What did I want my relationships to feel like? How did I want to work? Where did I want to live? How much stress was I still willing to accept as normal? What did freedom mean to me now? And perhaps most importantly, what would my life look like if I stopped organising it around what I had always done and started organising it around the woman I had become?

Almost everything that is now the foundation of my work began with those questions.

I started changing my life deliberately. I wanted meaningful relationships, more time, less stress, gratitude, more fun and more ease. I discovered Human Design. I invested in business coaching. I changed the way I worked and began building more freedom into my business so that I could be where I wanted to be in the world.

It wasn’t one dramatic reinvention. It was a series of choices that eventually became a complete pivot.

You may not need to burn it all down

Looking back, the thing I wish I had most was someone a little further along the path who could have helped me understand what was happening.

I had so much doubt. I questioned whether I was being irresponsible, selfish or unrealistic. I wondered whether I should simply be grateful for the life I already had and stop wanting something different. I didn’t understand yet that a life can have been right for you once and still become too small for the person you are becoming.

That lack of support became part of the reason I now work with Gen X women going through their own version of this transition.

Because around 50, change rarely stays neatly contained in one area. Your body changes and suddenly you start questioning how you work. Your tolerance for unequal relationships disappears. Your definition of success shifts. Things you spent decades striving for may no longer feel particularly meaningful. You may feel an enormous urge to simplify, change direction or burn the whole thing down.

Sometimes you really do need to make a big change. But often what you need first is enough space to hear what is actually trying to change.

If your business model suddenly feels wrong, if your old definition of success no longer fits, or you keep asking yourself what comes next, you are very welcome to explore that with me.

There are free and paid ways into my work, depending on what you need and where you are in the process.

Because sometimes the beginning of your next chapter isn’t a clear plan.

Sometimes it begins with finally admitting that the old one has ended.

With so much love & respect,

Sharonah x