MIDLIFE REFLECTIONS Midlife is a teacher disguised as chaos. And she doesn't give a shit whether you're ready.
- May 4
- 3 min read
This week we're doing something a little different here at Moolife.
This week is all about midlife reflections.
Not the polished, gift-wrapped, everything-happens-for-a-reason version. The real version. The one with some mess and some fury and some hard-won truth in it. The kind of reflections that only become possible when you've been through enough to finally see clearly.
All week I'll be sharing what midlife has taught me — about myself, about the life I lived, about the woman I'm still becoming. And I'm starting where it feels most honest. With me. With my story. With what I would have told my younger self if I'd had the chance.
Some of it is tender. Some of it still makes me angry. All of it is true.
Here we go.
They told me I was a non-achiever.
They moved me out of mainstream education without a single conversation that included my actual opinion on the matter. Put me in a private school that was all academia and no creativity. Measured me against a standard I was never designed to meet. And I — because I was young and I trusted the adults in the room — believed them.
I believed them for years.
Here's what they got catastrophically wrong.
I was not a non-achiever. I was a creative, chaotic, lateral-thinking, deeply feeling human being in a system that only knew how to measure one type of intelligence. And mine wasn't that type. So they called it failure. And I carried that verdict around like it was fact for longer than I care to admit.
It was not fact. It was their limitation dressed up as my problem.
I would have been a brilliant artist. I know this. I know it without question. If someone had looked at the actual me — not the exam-result me, not the sit-down-and-focus me — and given me space to make things, I would have made extraordinary things.
I still will. Watch me.
I would have believed in myself sooner. I would have moved away sooner — stopped carrying responsibility for everyone else's lives like it was my job to hold the whole world together before I was allowed to live in it. I would have had children. I had that in me and I didn't trust myself enough to go toward it.
And then Grace arrived in my life. Not from my body. From something better — from choice, from love, from the kind of family that finds you rather than the kind you're born into. And she is magnificent. And I am so completely, stupidly glad she is here.
Midlife gave me all of this. Not gently. Not kindly. But it gave it to me.
The clarity that I was never the problem.
The certainty that the people who measured me and found me lacking were measuring the wrong things, and because I had heard it so many times, so was I.
If you are in a never-ending cycle that makes you unhappy and tired, and it no longer serves your own cyclic rhythm, then you need to get out of it.
The absolute refusal — and finally, at this age, with everything I now know — I will not let anyone else define what achieving looks like for me.
I guarantee that you will feel better, be better, be happier when your circumstances change, and that is an exhausting thought, that to begin with might make you feel drained. We feel like we don’t have control when we do. Our mind and our body belong to us, and once you start to make those changes, life will feel very different and you will be so much happier. You own your own frequency.
I built Moolife. I run the Reckoning Room. I have a community of women who say the quiet part out loud. I have Nick and Grace and Presley the cockerpoo and a life that is entirely, unapologetically mine.
Non-achiever.
Tell me another one.
Women who refuse to suffer politely live here.
Missy Moo x
Come back tomorrow — I'll be sharing this week's midlife truth, and on Wednesday I have a loud question for you that I want you to actually sit with. This week is going to be a good one.
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