Purpose Changes Its Clothes

At twenty-five, I was absolutely certain I had a purpose, and I was wrong about nearly all of it.

I could have told you then, with real conviction, what I was for. I had the plan, the qualifications, and the sense of being on my way. What I could not have told you, because I would not have survived knowing it — is that much of what I called purpose was a survival strategy in a very good coat. The girl who learned early that she was the one who gets left had grown into a woman who intended to be so useful, so qualified and so necessary that leaving her would be plainly irrational.

That is not a purpose. That is a defence with a career plan.

And yet. I want to be careful here, because the fashionable move at my age is to look back at your ambitious younger self with amused pity, and I refuse to do it. That woman built things. The proving got me qualified. The hypervigilance made me a therapist. The refusal to be dispensable is the reason there is anything here at all. Early purpose is not fake. It is scaffolding, and you do not sneer at scaffolding just because the building is up.

But scaffolding is meant to come down. That is what nobody tells you.

Here is the shape I have watched, in my own life and in several hundred women's, and I offer it as a description rather than a map.

In our twenties and thirties, purpose is mostly about building a self. Becoming someone. Getting qualified, getting hired, getting chosen, getting through. It is loud, exhausting, and almost entirely about establishing that you exist and deserve the space you occupy. Everything is a verb.

In our forties and fifties, if we are lucky and if life has been rude to us at least once, something turns. Purpose stops being about building the self and starts being about spending it. You have accumulated capability. Now the question is what it is for, and who gets it. This is the decade when women start companies, leave marriages, retrain, go back to university. I did my Degree as an adult student, sitting in seminars with people young enough to be my children, which was humbling in ways I will write about another time. From the outside, it looks like reinvention. From the inside, it is usually just honesty arriving late.

And then a third thing begins, and this is the one I am living in now and can only report from the middle of. Purpose stops being about spending the self and starts being about handing it on. Transmission. You start caring less about doing the work and more about whether the work will still be there when you are not. You find yourself watching a younger woman do a thing badly and not wanting to take it off her. You start telling people the truth about how you did it, including the parts that were luck and the parts that were fear. My mother's death put me in the matriarch's seat, and along with the grief came this: the family's stories now live in me, and if I do not tell them, nobody will, and telling them is now a job.

Twenties: prove. Fifties: spend. Elderhood: hand on and bless.

Now the part I actually want to write about, because the tidy three-act version above is missing what hurts.

Between every one of those seasons is a bereavement that nobody sends flowers for.

A purpose that ends is a death. It doesn't look like one, so nobody brings a casserole. The woman whose last child leaves home. The nurse who retires after thirty-eight years and finds that the thing that got her out of bed took her identity with it. The dancer whose knees go. The woman who cared for her mother for nine years and is now, at the funeral, quietly terrified, not only because her mother is gone, but because at four o'clock this afternoon there is nothing she is required for. She will not say that out loud. She may not even let herself think it. But it is there.

We have a whole vocabulary for grieving people. We have almost nothing for grieving a purpose, so women do it silently and then wonder why they feel so flat in a life everyone keeps telling them is enviably free.

And into that silence, right on cue, arrives the cheerful advice. Find a hobby. Take up bridge. Enjoy your freedom, you've earned it. All of which lands on a woman in purpose-grief roughly the way "there'll be other babies" lands on a miscarriage.

So let me say the unfashionable thing plainly. If you have lost your purpose —to retirement, to redundancy, to a body that changed the terms, to children who grew up exactly as you raised them to—you are not being ungrateful. You are bereaved. It deserves the dignity of that word, and the time that word implies. You are allowed a season of not knowing what you are for. I would go further: I think that season is compulsory, and that the women who skip it by immediately filling the calendar are usually the ones who end up flattest at seventy.

Because here is what I have watched happen on the other side of that season, over and over, in women who were brave enough to sit in the not-knowing.

The purpose does not come back. Something else arrives instead, smaller, stranger, and far better fitted. The headmistress who becomes the one everyone in the street tells their troubles to. The executive who ends up running the community garden and describes it, without irony, as the most important work of her life. The woman who spent forty years being competent and discovers, at sixty-eight, that her real gift is noticing people. None of them found their old purpose. They were reassigned.

You are not running out of purpose. You are being reassigned — and the new posting always looks like a demotion until you arrive and find out what it actually is.

Twenty-five-year-old me would have been appalled by my current life. Less title, less proving, less armour. She wouldn't have understood that this isn't a smaller life; it is the same life with the scaffolding taken down, so you can finally see the building.

Next Sunday, the last letter of the month —and the one I have been circling all September: what happens when the purpose stops being yours alone, when other people join it, and your job quietly shifts from doing the work to holding the vision.

With love,

Faith

What did you call purpose in your twenties — and what do you think it really was? And if a purpose has ended for you recently, did anyone let you call it a loss? I would love to hear in the comments.

Three phrases a day. That is the whole ritual, and it has moved me more than any gym session ever has.

This month I have been sitting in Dr Stephanie Burns' Vibrant to the Finish Line series, and one idea from her teaching has lodged itself in me: learning something new isn't a luxury of youth; it is how we keep the lights on in an ageing brain. So I chose the thing I have circled for most of my life. Ijaw — my mother's tongue, and mine by birthright, even though I never learned to speak it.

I started where any child would. Emine Tari emi — I love you. Ti ba ra? — how are you? Seri Dei — Good morning. I say them out loud in the kitchen, badly, with the kettle as my only witness. And somewhere between the mispronunciations, something tender happens. I hear Mummy's cadence underneath my own, the way she greeted the day, the way she said the very words I am only now learning to say back to her.

It turns out the fastest way to build a new pathway in the brain can also be the quickest way home.