Springing Into New Beginnings: A Midlife Journey
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Spring in the garden
It’s April, it’s spring (in the Northern Hemisphere), and it’s Easter weekend - a time for new beginnings. Nature is starting to awaken after a long and wet winter. The blossom on our weeping cherry tree is opening, bees are buzzing around the flowers of the spring bulbs, and we have a blue tit busy building a nest and laying eggs in our garden nest box. Last week also brought the Pink Full Moon, traditionally associated with renewal and fresh starts, which feels rather fitting.
Change is in the air, and just because I’m in midlife doesn’t mean that ripple of change can’t reach me. In fact, I am ensuring that it does.
Rebooting life and embracing change
My life is currently undergoing quite a reboot, and this blog is getting one too. It started out with a main focus on health and wellness, because my life had been focused for many years on ill health and loneliness. As my health improved, I wanted to document that progress and everything that was helping me to move forward. However, a wonderful side effect of improved health is a busier and fuller life. So I now have more to write about, but ironically less time to do it in!
Before becoming ill in 2009, I was a single mum of a child with a chronic illness. I was studying full-time at university and volunteering, although not all quite at the same time. Leaving my studies was the right decision for both my son and me at the time. But not getting my degree has also always been a big regret of mine, one that I intended to rectify one day. Getting ill delayed that much longer than I had planned, as studying simply wasn’t possible.
Until now…
Full circle — study, caring, and volunteering
Last week I signed up for a degree course with The Open University (OU), starting this autumn. This time it’s part-time and distance learning, much more flexible and manageable. I’m not just jumping into it cold though. Last October, I started an Arts and Languages Access module with the OU to test the water (well, my brain really!) and see if I could do it, cognitively and while managing my health and other commitments.
Life really has come full circle. I am an unpaid carer again, this time for my mum (my son is all grown up and, thanks to amazing new treatments, very well indeed), and I have recently started volunteering again. It turns out that I can just about juggle all of these things now, with careful time and energy management, and still achieve good marks on assignments.
I am thrilled!
This October I will begin my journey as an English Language and Literature undergraduate. Not the subjects I was studying all those years ago, but various things in the last year have made me realise just how much I love words, writing, and reading. Studying linguistics, poetry, and the spoken and written word during my Access module has truly excited me and lit a fire I had long since forgotten was there — passion!
Keeping Growing
Through this blog, I plan to document my journey as I juggle all of these responsibilities and exciting possibilities. Yes, my life may have come full circle, but I am older and wiser now, having learned so much, through life’s challenges, about how to care for myself as well as those I love. I know I won’t get everything right all of the time but, like spring itself, I plan to keep learning and growing.
If you’d like to know more about me and why I’m documenting this journey, you can read my About page.
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