Moving Into The "Second Half" Of Life: The Soul’s Journey After My 20's
I am aware that I have only spent 29 years on earth, in human-earth time. I just crossed my 29th birthday. (I have personally changed my language around age and growing “older.” I am not “29 years old.” I have been alive for 29 years.)
Birthdays mark a capstone to one year and the beginning of a new one. This means that I have started my 30th year on earth. My 30th revolution around the sun, with many more to come.
The start of a new year, combined with my birthday is a sacred time for me. It’s a chance to do deep self-reflection and consider who I am becoming and who I feel called to me. It’s a time to meet with the captain, chart direction and steer the ship for the next leg of the journey.
Moving out of my twenties and in my thirties is a big deal for me. I hung onto the years of my 20’s like they were the holy grail, the trophy, the gold medal of my life. Truth be told, I wanted to be a massive success in my 20’s. Western society praises youth. When a young person is successful, aka. makes millions of dollars and is famous, he or she is pegged a “success.” I wanted that Success Badge attached to my identity.
As much as there were good intentions behind why I wanted to work in media, my motivations got mixed with other ego desires, and deep longings and soul wounds.
The Good Intentions
At the conscious level, I wanted to work in media to “change the world.” After getting caught in a body image war-of-the-soul at age 12, I decided I wanted to work in mass media because that would be the way I could change the world and spread positive messages. I thought I would “fight” the advertising industry.
I look back at that pivotal time in my life and I know that desire to work in media was a God-seed. That decision has affected the course of my entire life and will. I will probably work in media for the rest of my life because at a deep soul level, this feels like my greatest contribution, my greatest fulfillment.
The Shadow Motivations
At age 12, I was still in the process of becoming myself. I yearned for acceptance and love, and I was susceptible to the idea being sold in our culture that if I could be beautiful and famous, I would be accepted and loved.
At the subconscious level, this is what I wanted. I yearned to be on magazine covers. I wanted people to love me and tell me that I was valuable.
Living with Light and Shadow
This pattern of having conscious good intentions, but subconscious shadow motivation is something that I lived out for many years.
When I found my way onto the internet and started creating my first blogs in my early twenties, I still had good intentions. I had just started travelling and I found such wisdom and personal growth in the process that I wanted to share it with people. Underneath this good intention, I also felt sorely alone and posting online was an attempt to find community.
A similar thing happened when I discovered Periscope, a live-streaming app that gave me a certain measure of the fame and recognition I desired, at the shadow level. This mixture of light and shadow, good and bad, conscious and subconscious was also weaved into my entrepreneurial journey. My years spent desperately trying to be an online entrepreneur were so desperate because, at a core level, my success online determined how valuable I felt as human being. The more people who loved me online, the more I felt like I could love myself.
The internet was a place where I could, yes, make a positive impact on that conscious level, but I could also nurse my ego-needs subconsciously, the part of me that was an orphan looking for home.
Every time I posted online, I was projecting a self-image of who I wanted to be. It worked for some time, because I became the person I projected, but all the while, my shadow self kept growing. Over the years, I’ve become more and more aware of these shadow intentions and starting my 30th year on earth feels like a good time to transition into a new stage of life.
Life beyond the shadow
I sense that I am called to continue working in media. For the past few months, as I’ve gotten back into publishing blogs and video, I experienced a war between my ego and my soul, between the part of me that longed for acceptance and the part of me that created from a deeper inspiration. My ego was using these videos as a means to gather personal fame and recognition, while my soul encouraged me to keep creating because it was part of my life purpose.
This tug-of-war between my intentions created blog posts like this one where you see that I’m trying to move beyond jealousy, but clearly caught it in. That article is like getting over a little speed bump, but I hadn’t figured out if I was even holding my map write or going in the right direction.
I need to know how to hold this map of my life, so that I would be facing the right direction and moving towards the right goals. Over the last few weeks, this is what I have been processing. Combined with starting my 30th year, I knew it was time to let the old autumn leaves fall. There are certain mental habits and spiritual burdens I carried in my 20’s that I do not want to bring into my 30th. This lightens my load, but this doesn’t tell me how to move forward.
Travel Guides For The Next Stage
In my 20’s there were plenty of adults available to tell me how to live my life, but now at 29, who can I turn to? I don’t have any elders I see regularly and I’m good at asking for advice in person. I want to know how to continue living out my soul’s calling, with less and less of my shadow’s impact. How do I not care about the world’s standards of success and live out the life that is most meaningful to me? This is not exactly something you can just bring up over lunch at work.
Thankfully I’ve started to find my answer in this book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr. I’ve been eyeing this for some time, and popped open the audio book the other day. It contained what I needed to hear.
The Second Half of Life
I may only be 29, but I’m ready to start the second half of life. According to Richard, the first half is when we are very focused on survive, on making an identity for ourselves, what he calls a container for our lives. The second half is when we focus on filling the container with the right things. Here are some quotes from his book that paint a roadmap for the next leg of my journey.
“In the second half of life one has less and less need or interest in eliminating the negative or fearful, making again those old rash judgments, holding on to old hurts, or feeling any need to punish other people. Your superiority complexes have gradually departed in all directions. You do not fight these things anymore; they have just shown themselves too many times to be useless, ego based, counterproductive, and often entirely wrong. You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly. You have learned that most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself.” (118)
In the second half of life, it is good just to be part of the general dance. We do not have to stand out, make defining moves, or be better than anyone else on the dance floor. Life is more participatory than assertive, and there is no need for strong or further self-definition. (120)
I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. (121)
(Thanks to this site: http://spiritualpractice.ca/welcome/how-can-my-ageing-become-a-spiritual-practice/the-second-half-of-life/ for the quotes)
Quite simply, my desire and effort is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received.
Or, as I like to phrase this, “Life is a gift. What we do with it is my gift back.”
In these words, I feel like my soul is finding the planks on which to keep walking forward. I am actively in the process of shedding my old skin - the skin that was the shell of Anita Wing Lee and the shadow motivations that projected her into existence.
Becoming My Authentic Self
It’s clear to me that I will keep writing and making videos, but right now, my energy and intentions toward it are becoming ever more clarified. Every micro decision I made is based on, Is this what my soul is meant to be doing? If I’m forcing myself to write or make videos because I’m trying to get famous, I stop. I slow down and try to let those intentions die before I move forward. Or I’ll deliberately do something like publish content quietly so that God can bring whoever he wants to it, instead of me trying to push it out into the world to get insta-famous.
“Anita Wing Lee” will still exist but it will take time for her to become the full expression of Anita Lee - the who doesn’t care how many views my content gets or what comments I get back or how much money comes in.
When I started using Anita Wing Lee in 2014, it was because I knew that one day I’d write books and it works best when you have your author name URL. But it was also an act of self-assertion. I couldn’t be Anita Lee because there are a thousand other Anita Lee’s in the world. (Just try typing it into Google, and you’ll see.) I needed to be unique, so that I could be accepted and loved.
Now, I am letting my ego die. I am learning to love myself and to let God love me and to let that be the filling of my soul. I am taking care of the orphan inside me and letting her find a home, inside my heart and the heart of God.
This is work in progress. I’m already aware that it will take some years to be clarified, and there may often be remnants of my ego popping it’s head up when (if) I get awards or recognition, but I leaning into my soul more and more, so that when that day comes, I can laugh and be grateful for the grace that’s freed me of my ego.
Whereas before, I created because I wanted to make a positive impact and I wanted to get internet famous, now I will create only because it is my soul’s calling. I will create only if I sense God’s clear leading and I am filled with inspiration that is deep and oceanic.
I dance because there is life in me. It doesn’t matter if no one ever sees me dance, I’d still be a dance. So it is with life. I create, share, love and grow because it is the great gift of living.
