As my daughter entered her tween stage (ages 9 to 12), I realized I didn’t know how to treat her, not a child anymore and not quite an adolescent yet. At times, she acted like an adolescent, yelling at every instruction I gave her; yet she still came to my room and kissed on my cheek, completely unprompted. She was in a liminal phase between childhood and adolescence.
The life stage between the age 30 and 45 seems equivalent to this tween phase in adulthood. Generally termed as “middle age”, we are expected to know what we ought to do for our career and life. Way past early adulthood, we cannot be “immature” nor “naive” anymore. Although labeled as middle age, we don’t feel quite “established” or “wise enough” yet to claim full maturity. It also feels too early to expect a midlife crisis. We are in a liminal space in our adulthood to midlife.
Whether it’s tween or this unnamed adulthood between the age 30 and 45, we suck at being in these liminal stages of life.
Nine years ago when I felt the sense of uneasiness growing in my mind like cancer around my thirty seventh birthday, I didn’t know what to do. Knowing that I was no longer twenty something and I couldn’t be having a midlife crisis yet, I just oscillated between ‘I shouldn’t feel this way; I should have my shi* together.’ and ‘What’s wrong with me?’
It was confusing like hell. Having consumed all the old strategies and tactics to get me out of this funk, I had to part ways from the familiar methods and approach in a completely different way. This experience became a seed for my first book, The Placeholder: The Place to Go to Create a Noble Work.
What is a placeholder? A placeholder is a symbol, word, or piece of text used to temporarily hold the place of an actual item or data in a document, where content is yet to be provided or finalized.
The “Placeholder” phase in life serves the same purpose. It’s the phase of our life we enter to experiment new ideas because the old scripts and manuals no longer serve us or we don’t feel connected to it anymore.
This may apply to relationships, work, lifestyle, and communities we belong to. Particularly for work, it calls for a different kind of change. The change with our work in the Placeholder is not something we find and strive to fit into. Rather, it’s a totally new approach we create that fits us.
As the tween stage is like an induction to adolescence, this Placeholder stage is the liminal adulthood that introduces us to the midlife. We are called to pause what we’ve been doing, reflect and warm up to the idea of breaking apart from old patterns. Then start trying completely new ideas. This is a necessary step for us, if we want to coagulate the midlife chrysalis as Chip suggests, rather than crash into midlife crisis.
By simply acknowledging that we are entering a significant metamorphic process in our adulthood, we stop berating ourselves. Instead, we practice gliding into this alchemical and metamorphic process with curiosity, creativity, and courage from the perspectives of an anthropologist, designer, and mad scientist. Then we can finally feel at ease and at peace with every transition to come.
What else could be more gratifying than being able to go through change with ease and peace in life? As the psychologist Carl Rogers wrote, “The good life is a process, not a state of being,” this is how we can live a good life.
-Miroo
Miroo Kim is the author of The Placeholder: The Place to Go to Create Your Noble Work. She is also the founder & CEO of People+Culture, offering offsites, workshops and coaching for organizational well-being of startups and tech companies.