What Turning 50 Is Making Me Grieve

What Turning 50 Is Making Me Grieve

I’m turning 50 and I keep having this weird feeling that life went by while I was busy living it. I know that sounds obvious because of course life goes by while we’re living it, but 50 is making me look backwards in a way I haven’t before, and some of what I see makes me sad. I stayed in relationships too long waiting for people to change. I made myself smaller than I needed to be and held myself back professionally at times. There were years when I was so focused on keeping connection, keeping things together, or hoping something would eventually become different that I barely stopped to ask myself what I wanted.

Seeing Old Patterns Differently

I understand some of that now in ways I didn’t then. Attachment gives me language for it, and psychodynamically there is also the idea of repetition: how we can find ourselves returning to versions of something familiar and hoping, often without realizing it, for a different ending. It makes sense to me now, but it certainly didn’t while I was living it. Part of what I’m grieving as I turn 50 isn’t only the relationships or the time I spent in them, but how little I understood myself then. There is something painful about finally seeing a pattern clearly when you can’t go back and live those years again.

I try not to turn that into beating myself up because that doesn’t get me anywhere either. I was doing what I knew how to do at the time. I was trying to love people, belong and make things work. I still wish I had trusted myself sooner, taken up more space in my own life and understood earlier that making myself smaller wasn’t going to make a relationship safer or make somebody else capable of meeting me differently.

Grief, Regret and the People Who Aren’t Here

There are other regrets that feel harder because the people involved are no longer here. Two of my close friends died, one in 2016 and another in 2021, and my dad died in 2021. Birthdays haven’t really felt the same to me since Stephanie died. I have people in my life now whom I love, so it isn’t about being alone, but certain relationships occupy their own place and nobody simply replaces them. Turning 50 without those people here is bringing that home in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Grieving a Complicated Relationship With a Parent

My relationship with my dad was complicated because he was a complicated man, and grief doesn’t magically simplify a relationship after someone dies. If anything, it can leave you holding all of it at once: love, anger, disappointment, attachment and the things that were never repaired. He had been sick for a long time and, looking back, I can see how much anticipatory grief I was carrying. I dealt with a lot of it by staying busy. I was working and doing my psychotherapy training, and somehow I kept behaving as though there would be more time. He died before he got to see me graduate.

I regret not spending more time with him. Psychodynamically, I can understand some of my avoidance now as a way of protecting myself from something I knew was coming and couldn’t control. Attachment makes sense of another part of it too. We don’t stop needing or loving people just because the relationship is difficult. Understanding that gives me more compassion for myself, but it doesn’t erase the regret. I also understand relational repair differently because of this. While someone is alive there is still the possibility of another conversation, another attempt, another way of showing up. Death changes that. The relationship doesn’t disappear from our internal world, but repair has to take a different form, and I’m still figuring out what that means for me.

Friendships, Belonging and Protecting My Energy

Coming more into myself has changed how I relate to people now too. I have less energy for relationships that feel like maintenance for the sake of maintenance, and there are times when I simply don’t respond to texts or keep a conversation going because I don’t have it in me. I’ve let some relationships quietly fall away. Part of me wants fewer, more meaningful connections, but I also know belonging doesn’t happen by accident. Connection asks something of me too. As my body and hormones change and my energy feels less predictable, I don’t always have much left socially, and friendships can suffer because of that. I’m still trying to work out the difference between protecting my energy and withdrawing too much from the people who matter.

Aging, My Body and Impermanence

Then there is the whole other experience of turning 50, which is my body apparently deciding it would also like to participate in this existential crisis. My body is changing whether I have approved these changes or not, and my nervous system seems to require more care than it used to, which feels slightly unfair given the amount of work I have already put into it. I can laugh about that and still admit that aging makes me anxious.

Spirituality has been part of my life for a long time, including years of studying Zen, so impermanence isn’t exactly a new concept for me. Apparently understanding it and actually being okay with it are two different things. It feels very different when people you love are gone, your body is changing and you’re suddenly wondering where the last twenty years went.

What I Understand Differently at 50

All of this has influenced the therapist I’ve become, although I don’t want to make that sound more profound than it is. I’m drawn to the places where people know something but aren’t quite ready to know it fully yet: the relationship we keep hoping will change, the grief we stay busy to avoid, the ways we hold ourselves back because taking up more space feels risky. I understand those places clinically, but I’ve lived in some of them too, and that changes how I sit with them. I don’t feel especially wise about turning 50. Mostly I feel aware of time, regret, grief, the people who aren’t here, the relationships I still have, and how much I’m still trying to understand about myself. That’s where I am with it right now.

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