Last week, I found myself, on a night away for work, crying alone in PizzaExpress. It was unlike me really; I am jolly most of the time these days: HRT and sobriety have seen to that. I know what triggered it; hours earlier I’d called my 21-year-old son for a chat. He lives in Manchester now, where he’s doing his Master’s.

“Hi Mum, is it important?” he said, sweetly but distracted. “Because I’m kind of cooking my tea.”

“Oh right. No, not important,” I said, trying not to notice that a few days earlier he’d been kind of rushing out to the pub quiz.

“Also, are you missing me or something? Because this is the fourth time you’ve called me this week.”

Of course, I’m delighted that he’s too happy and too busy to speak to his mother, it’s exactly how it should be, but there, sitting alone in a low-lit PizzaExpress on a drizzly October evening like some kind of Hopper painting, I could hardly swallow my Romana thin-crust for the lump in my throat. I was suddenly overcome with this wave of grief. A mourning for a time that is gone. And I thought, wow, what a turnaround: they go from wanting all your attention, to you wanting theirs in a heartbeat, leaving a void where being needed used to be. It’s the storyline beneath all the romance in The Summer I Turned Pretty: a mother who spends years at the centre of her children’s lives, until one day they don’t need her there.

I messaged my wise friend L, who also happens, luckily for me, to be a counsellor. “What do I do with this feeling?” I said. “Like, how do I fill this void?”

“Well, you fill it with you,” she said. “You spend time deciding what’s next for you in this incredibly short life we have, so that when he comes back, you are bright and vibrant.” (Not weeping in PizzaExpress.)

Literally, in an instant, the void shifted from this empty space to something I was being invited to fill. Even better, I knew how to do that. I don’t mean practically, in terms of knowing what hobbies to take up, career moves or trips to take. I mean that on a cellular, soul level, I realised I knew how to fill me up, emotionally: what made me happy and what didn’t; what sapped my energy and what didn’t; who I wanted in my life and how to nurture those relationships. These were things I did not know when I was 30, or even 40, and have only come to know with experience, something that does not just arrive in midlife but has to be earned, through decades of navigating feelings and relationships, learning to listen to and trust your gut instinct; years of living in your own body and learning what it tells you. This felt like a revelation, I’d go as far as to say a spiritual experience (or that might have been the ginger spiced cake and ice cream I’d ordered!), and my revelation was this: in my fifties, I may be experiencing loss, but I am not lost, like I was when I was younger.

Loss seems to be a running theme. The fact is, there are lots of friends I could have called in PizzaExpress who would have understood exactly how I felt, as they are right where I am in terms of the empty nest, and yet I didn’t want to bother most of them as they have far bigger fish to fry. These are intense times with strong currents and shifting tides. Or put another way: “God, the shit that’s going on for us at the moment feels next level,” a friend of mine said after a recent lunch out with other female friends. Talk about being dealt your midlife cards… this was the flush: elderly, ill parents, divorce, teens with mental health issues, our own health issues… and underpinning all these worries, when I thought about it, was loss. Why did nobody tell us about the loss? Of people, yes, but also of feelings: love in a marriage, confidence, closeness with your kids… If you’re lucky enough to escape all of these, then there’s always the loss of the jawline to contend with.

Our lives are more different than ever before: not just in terms of the tough times we’re going through, how some have lost parents or even spouses, but other things, more positive things. Some people are suddenly hugely wealthy having inherited money or gone mortgage-free, while others are worried they have no pension or savings. Some are scaling down work to go on incredible trips; some are getting Botox, even grandchildren… and it feels like there is absolutely no manual or brand guidelines for midlife, because everyone’s brand of it is so wildly different. The similarities are fewer. For me, this means an even bigger urge for belonging, for anchoring in my friendships, for bonding in that common experience of the void.

L has a slightly different take:

“I feel like now there’s very little similarity between anyone. I am dancing to the beat of my own drum for the first time in my life. I’ve brought the kids up, I’ve done the jobs that fit around family and now I’m doing the job I love, for me. When you have young kids, you can’t always choose; you sort of have to get on with people in the same boat. Now I choose who I want in my life.”

I absolutely love that, I tell her. I feel like I am experiencing both: dancing to the beat of my own drum, whilst simultaneously feeling closer to my friends who are all doing the same. Because the fallout from the void, whatever form that takes in your life, is that we’re all finding inspiring ways to fill it, galvanised by our wisdom but also this sense of urgency, because we can no longer ignore that there is probably more time behind us than in front.

“I feel like running out of time is an impetus to think and to organise,” says L. “To curate life exactly how we want it.”

I personally feel this sense of sisterhood and huge admiration for my midlife friends, learning how to navigate these uncharted territories and fill the void in whatever way feels right for them. There’s this go-girl-ness when someone announces, having never had a spiritual bone in their body, that they’re now training to become a Reiki teacher, or that they’re in a relationship with someone half their age, or they’ve decided to get a sleeve tattoo or turn religious. Like, whatever works, whatever fills your cup. There’s less of the judgement that came when we were younger, with the insecurities and vanities of youth to contend with; that icky competition. We’re not judging or competing because we know these new directions come from a place of self-knowledge and authenticity, not from a need to impress anyone. We don’t care about that anymore. That's also the other storyline in The Summer I Turned Pretty: two best friends who raised their children side by side, and held each other up as the children grew away.

When I interviewed [Andi Osho](https://theallbright.com/stories/midlife/power-years/the-shit-show-is-over-andi-osho-at-53/ ) recently, I told her about a definition of wisdom I’d come across and loved: “judging rightly”. I’ve thought about it ever since, because it speaks to the feeling I had there in PizzaExpress, that I know my own mind more than ever. There are not fewer problems or sadnesses to contend with as life goes on, quite the contrary, but when they come, I have the tools to deal with them.

When I ask L about wisdom, she says: “I feel like it has crept up on me. I don’t think of myself as ‘wise’, but lately, people have commented I have some wise words to say. It feels lovely, but also new and scary, but I think we have to own it.”

When I stepped out of PizzaExpress into the Oxford mizzle that evening, it was dark, but I felt light. In an hour or so, I’d gone from feeling grief-stricken to full of possibility about filling this new gap in my life, armed with those two newly bestowed superpowers that we can only earn through living: wisdom and urgency. Let’s Go! I thought.