Permission to Need

A Love Letter from Passage 8 - The Softening

Dear Midlife Woman,

I want to tell you about something that happens throughout our midlife years and beyond that isn’t talked about nearly enough, if at all. I call it the Softening.

It’s the eighth passage in Sacred Passages. Unlike the others, it doesn’t belong to a single season or any specific age range. It actually moves through all of them. It is available in any passage and at any point. Most women don’t recognize it at first, and most of us, myself included, resist and rebel against it until we understand it. That usually happens when something stops us cold.

That moment often arrives when we realize we have been managing ourselves for everyone else’s comfort for so long we have forgotten what our own comfort feels like. We come to a place where something in us awakens and we try to resolve it by continuing to be who we’ve been. The good wife. The compliant daughter. The corporate soldier. The helpful mother, parent, friend, or colleague.

But it cannot be resolved in that old state of being. Simply put, we are no longer that version of ourselves and often we are in some liminal space between who we have been and who we are becoming. And that is freaking uncomfortable. In that discomfort, you are invited to soften. Yes. Soften.

Not push through. Not to do more or try harder to keep the status quo. But to soften into this very moment of discomfort with compassion.

You see, my loves, every other passage we move through in midlife asks something active of you. To unravel. To burn. Awaken. Initiate. The Softening asks something that sounds simple and is anything but.

It asks you to stop.

Stop striving. Stop pretending. Stop morphing. Stop pleasing.

And tend to yourself.

For women like us, who have spent our whole lives in motion — producing, caretaking, performing, holding it all together — that is the hardest thing imaginable. It is also the most revolutionary.

A Personal Story

In my late forties, night sweats arrived. I rarely had a hot flash during the day. But at night, my body would be on fire from the inside out. So intense that my husband could feel the heat radiating from me across the bed. My doctor suggested a low dose of HRT. After a month or so, I was sleeping better and waking less often soaked in my own heat.

I mentioned to my husband that I was feeling a bit better.

His response was immediate. Oh good, then we can start having sex again. No pause. No tenderness. No curiosity. No wonder about what my body was moving through. No compassion for any of it. Just relief that the inconvenience to him might be over.

I continued HRT for about eight months. Then I stopped.

I didn’t stop because the night sweats were gone. But because somewhere in those eight months, something had clarified. I stopped because I wanted to let my body move through this natural process without intervention. I was done managing my own biology for someone else’s comfort.

I didn’t care that I wasn’t having sex. He didn’t seem to care about anything else. And I was done pretending otherwise.

This was one of the first real acts of softening for me. An act of tenderness. Tenderness toward a body that was asking for something I had never quite allowed myself to give it.

Permission to need.

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know then: my body was not betraying me. It never was.

My body was showing me exactly where I had been betraying myself.

The disinterest in sex wasn’t a malfunction. It was information. When the only place of connection in a marriage is physical, and what you are starving for is something deeper — real intimacy, real tenderness, being truly known — the body stops cooperating. Not out of spite. Out of wisdom.

But I couldn’t hear that yet. Because I had never really learned that I was allowed to need things.

I came from women who appeared to have no needs. Whether that was strength or silence I couldn’t always tell, but the message was clear. You don’t ask. You don’t require. You manage. You endure. And you do not make your needs someone else’s problem.

So, when my body started asking loudly and unmistakably, in the middle of the night with the heat of a thousand suns, I didn’t know how to listen. I reached for intervention instead. Because that’s what we do. We fix. We push through. We find a way to keep functioning for everyone else.

Initially there was a lot of shame underneath all of this, but it wasn’t just about not wanting sex. It was about needing a compassionate partner and not trusting myself enough to ask for that. Not believing I deserved it. Not even being sure, after a lifetime of centering others, what I actually needed at all.

We are taught to be everything for everyone and nothing for ourselves.

The conditioning works, until it doesn’t. Until one day, your body, your heart, your whole exhausted self rises up and says, I don’t want to do this anymore. And I won’t.

That moment is not a breakdown. It is the Softening beginning.

Whatever it is you’re pushing through right now — physical changes that frighten you, emotions you’ve never let yourself feel, a relationship that has gone hollow, a life that fits everyone else’s needs but your own — the invitation is the same.

What if you softened into what you actually need?

This is not about abandoning the people you love. And it most definitely is not about having to justify or explain your needs. The Softening is not about becoming an island and isolating yourself either.

It’s about honoring yourself. Filling yourself first. You know, putting on your oxygen mask before helping others. It’s about letting go of a life of obligation, of performance, and loving and caring for the woman you actually are. Sovereign. Embodied. Alive.

When you find your way back to yourself, truly back — not the managed, enduring, needs-nothing version of yourself — the love you have for others becomes something different. Genuine. Sustainable. Given from overflow rather than depletion.

You cannot pour from a body that has been on fire for years with no one asking how you feel.

I want to say something about the man in this story. Something that became available to me only after I’d found my way back to myself.

Today, I can feel his uncertainty. Possibly shame even, at not being able to sustain the intimacy between us and not having the language for what was happening. The fear that lived underneath what looked like insensitivity.

He believed what he believed — about what a marriage should look like, about what I should need, about what he could offer — and those beliefs weren’t serving either of us. But they were his, and they were real, and they came from somewhere too.

I have genuine compassion for him now. Not because I have forgotten what it cost me. But because self-compassion, it turns out, makes room for something larger. When you finally stop abandoning yourself, you can see others more clearly. Not through the fog of your own unmet needs, but as they actually are. Uncertain. Human. Doing the best they know how.

That clarity doesn’t come before the Softening. It comes within it and after it.

The Softening is not passivity. It is not giving up on yourself. It is the courage to truly face yourself — and for the first time perhaps, be there for yourself.

It is the bravest, most countercultural thing a midlife woman can do in a world that has profited from her compliance for decades.

Tend to yourself, my love. Not someday. Now.

Your body has been asking for a long time.

It’s time to answer.

With love,
Elaine

Paid subscribers to Her Own Authority receive An Introduction to Sacred Passages — a guide to help you identify which passage you’re in and what it’s asking of you — along with free admission to the inaugural Sacred Passages Gathering, September 23rd, the eve of the Autumnal Equinox. A live, intimate circle. Women in the passages, together. If you feel the pull, trust it.

This gathering is also where the fall Immersion begins to take shape — for the women who want to keep tending together past one evening. More on that soon.