Am I the Problem?
Rupture tends to arrive rudely.
It was late December, just over a week before Christmas.
And then, there it was, the pizza that broke me.
Trying to put an inadequate tea together, hold conversation with my family, load the washing machine, read the itinerary for the last few days of school. I took the pizza out of the oven, went to pick it up and it slid sideways off my spatula onto the floor.
I erupted. Swore loudly. Smashed the spatula against the worksurface. Burst into tears of rage, screaming at the pizza.
My partner, sat at the table with his feet up on a chair, looked at me with vindication.
“You’ve got a rage problem.”
I was conscious of my daughter in the sitting room, seven years old with ears tuning in.
Inside, I was screaming out for help. Outwardly I was gripping the edge of the worksurface until the pain in my wrists took precedence.
It’s a pizza.
What’s wrong with me?
Is it me? Do I have a rage problem?
Even now, I look back at that version of myself and want to go give her a huge hug. Sit her down on the chair, let her cry. Make my partner pick up the damaged tea. Hug our child and tell her Mummy’s just exhausted and the pizza was mean. Put some toast in the toaster, feed our daughter, and himself. Make me go to bed.
I want to tell myself that there was nothing wrong with me.
Even now, I struggle to grasp how deeply I believed that I was the problem.
Another part of me looks back on that night with gratitude.
I was standing on the edge of a problem I couldn’t fix.
A divide so great in what I thought I was building and what I was living, that it felt like a bottomless chasm. One that I’d been trying to walk around for years.
Staring at the pizza on the floor, I realised this problem was too big to walk around.
It was a rupture.
A crack in the story of my life.
I’d known it was there for a long time because rupture lurks on the horizon. It is messy. It’s emotionally ugly.
It’s 3am staring at the ceiling, breathless with the battle, tense with the fight.
Terrified of the consequences if we lose.
Patching up the damage day to day.
Rupture is the place we avoid, a place of reckoning.
In this essay, I’m going to show you why we fear rupture, and how it shows up in our lives.
Never thought I’d be grateful to a pizza.
But sometimes it is the smallest moments that actually give us the insight into the bigger patterns we can’t quite see.
Timing is everything. In this case, two specific things.
Firstly, I was about ten days away from my annual viral collapse. While I loved my years as a designer maker, one of the more dubious charms was the insane work schedule from September to Christmas, a period when my business workload would triple.
I would work about 16-18 hours a day. Every day from mid-October through to Christmas Eve. My hands would be crippled at night with carpal tunnel, my arms turning to lead and waking me. My brain was processing orders down to the smallest detail to fit in the schedule. Constantly watching my staff to avoid mistakes, which would throw the whole schedule back to the drawing board. I would wake at 4, work before the school run, do the school run, organise my staff and work furiously through to end of school, pick my kid up, drop her in front of the TV, work until tea-time. Back out to the workroom until bedtime. Bath and bed for my kid and then back out until past midnight. I’d creep into our darkened home and leave it barely four hours later.
It was beyond mad. It was inhuman. I did it for 24 years. Because I loved my work.
My partner did the same during harvest and haymaking. Except, when he was working those hours, it was ‘just normal farming’ and I’d be holding house, cooking and delivering food to the fields, solo-parenting our daughter all summer long.
When I did those hours, I still had to keep everything else together. The house, the cooking, the parenting. Even though they were some of the quietest months for a farmer. On top of it, managing the sulking that we couldn’t attend festive parties together.
I didn’t drop a pizza.
That pizza sabotaged the fragile thread holding my sanity together.
But the pizza came while we were still reeling.
It crashed to the floor only about a week or so after one of the biggest rows of our relationship.
A row where I really had been consumed with rage. Where I’d shouted, sworn, blamed. Begged for visibility at the highest decibel I could muster.
It was a strange feeling, hearing myself. Me, someone who prided myself on never getting angry, hoarse with an emotion that I couldn’t control.
On top of my work schedule, I’d been working for weeks to help prepare for a secret 40th birthday for one of his best friends. A secret that I’d even had to tell my partner I was keeping from him, because his paranoia was so great that I knew if he found out afterwards that I’d kept a secret, it would have been disastrous for us. So I’d said, weeks ago, ‘I’m keeping a secret. It’s a good secret. You’re going to love it, but I can’t tell you anything about it.’
I hadn’t been able to explain why, that it was a surprise party for his friend, and my partner had a history of ruining these exact surprises. Was notorious for it. Or that I’d been directly asked by his friend’s wife to help.
It had been weeks of emotional bullying. A relentless barrage of how he needed to know, that I was intentionally causing him stress, that he couldn’t trust me if he knew I was keeping secrets. Alongside every spare moment I didn’t have spent helping preparations. Not small level preparations. Big ones. Venue booking, catering, theme planning, decorating. All for free. Alongside the stress of my seasonal workload.
Two days before the party, the abuse became so intense that I broke.
I couldn’t stand being called a liar, called a cheat, called a manipulator. Even though I knew it was his paranoia, and that afterwards, he’d be ashamed. I was exhausted from being the emotional caretaker for this man with mental ill-health.
My pain came out in a vast eruption. My exhaustion of treading on eggshells. My hatred of being trapped in the middle helping his friend’s wife. My distress at how, after so many years together, he couldn’t trust me. My rage at the inequality of expectations in our life. My frustration at how he would ignore all my requests for help.
It became a micro-moment for everything that was wrong in our relationship.
And afterwards, instead of being heard, I was told, ‘You’ve got a rage problem. You need to do something about that.’
And for days I felt the guilt and failure. I’d let my anger get the better of me. What if our daughter had been there? What if she’d seen me like that? I would have stained her whole childhood.
I had to do better.
And yet, barely a week later, here it was again.
A broken pizza. Exhaustion. Overwhelm. Exploding anger. Indifference.
‘You’ve got a rage problem.’
And inside, solid, firm, non-negotiable, a voice said clear as day, while I gripped the worksurface until my swollen wrists were in agony, ‘this isn’t me.’
This isn’t me.
That tiny voice, spoken with such confidence wasn’t the start of rupture, it was the recognition that rupture was so vast, it was unfixable.
Midlife has a way of tripping us up as women.
Divorce.
Burnout.
Redundancy.
Empty nesting.
Ageing parents.
Menopause.
The morning mirror.
These moments are rupture. A tear in the story we have been busy building. Through which pour a host of uninvited emotions.
We set to, mentally repairing the rupture, pushing the emotions back into place. Otherwise we fear; catastrophe, failure, doom.
But within the Rewrite Philosophy, I see these ruptures not as catastrophes, but as plot pivots.
An invite from deep within ourselves to reconsider the story we are living.
The Rewrite Philosophy begins with the idea that our identity is a living story.
Much of that story is inherited long before we consciously choose it. I explore how these stories are written for us before we can write them for ourselves in Belief 2.
Most of these stories are not taught explicitly. They are absorbed quietly, seeping into our psyche at a subconscious level. We repeat these stories unconsciously for years, using them as the building blocks for our own stories.
Until something ruptures.
Like a character in a story, we reach a point where the path we were on suddenly feels far from sure. Even though we have been charging along it at full speed, fully invested. We trip, we stumble, we fall. And when we get up, nothing makes any sense.
It’s as though, inside us, a message is being spoken, but we no longer know how to hear it. While, outside, the message is very clear indeed.
We are the problem.
But what if we are not the problem?
Rupture isn’t specific to midlife, it can happen at any age in our lives, but midlife is a rich source of potential for it.
At any age from our early 40s to mid 50s, emotional confusion can expose the gap between the life we have built and the current version of our self still trying to emerge underneath it.
We may have spent decades building dreams that belonged to much younger versions of ourselves, only to discover that who we are now has very different desires indeed. But many other people’s stories now link to our own, and their smooth forward progress depends on our continuation.
At 20, changing direction primarily disrupts your story. At 48, your story may be structurally intertwined with children, partners, parents, careers, mortgages, friendships and communities. The stakes of re-authorship have changed drastically.
This is why so many women in midlife can feel simultaneously:
grateful and restless,
exhausted and ambitious,
lonely and overstimulated,
responsible and resentful,
capable and trapped,
devoted and angry,
complete and lost.
We feel the urgency for a shift, but also the weight of staying on course.
These plot pivots hit hard.
Emotional overwhelm, self-blame, confusion, fear, refusal. The 3am battle.
The emotions that are allowed, and those that aren’t.
For me that emotion was anger.
The one I had been told all my life that did not belong to me.
The one I had even convinced myself I didn’t need.
Until it began sitting in my stomach like a coiled serpent. I was angry when I woke up. Angry at the dinner table. Angry behind the wheel of my car. I was angry, with no way to feel it, because I’d had it removed as an option. I didn’t understand anger, I didn’t know why it was there, and I just wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
I’d push and squash it into the smallest fathomable corner of my being. I’d weigh it down with logic, and compassion, and an unbreakable ‘can-do’ attitude.
Until anger had to get all dressed up in her battle armour and come batter down the door of my ego. Humiliate me with how little I could control her. Terrify me with the consequences.
‘This isn’t me’ was the first moment when I listened.
When I began to know that the emotional cost of sustaining the story was the evidence that the story itself was failing.
I didn’t get an epiphany with that pizza.
I didn’t get insight or wisdom, or work out how to move forward. I didn’t understand how the past was playing out in my life. I certainly didn’t understand any of what now makes up the Rewrite Philosophy.
Rupture is not about those things.
It’s the emotional onslaught that we don’t want.
Rupture exposes truths we want to crawl away from. It asks that we pay attention, deep attention.
The kind of attention that we have stopped giving to ourselves.
It was in rupture that I realised, starkly, in terror, that I’d lost myself.
‘It’s not me.’
I was not this person.
I didn’t like this person.
But my behaviour was only part of the problem.
It was not evidence that I was the problem.
It wasn’t my job to fix myself to fit this story.
It was my opportunity to recognise that I couldn’t trust the story or myself anymore.
As I bent to pick up the pizza, my daughter came into the room to help me.
As I apologised to her for scaring her and gave her a big hug, I realised that continuing this story was going to lead me to a very damaged version of myself. A version I didn’t want her to remember me for.
Somehow, I needed to find a way back to myself.
Where next?
The Rewrite Philosophy
This essay explores Belief 4: Midlife rupture is the plot pivot that exposes false narratives.
What followed for me from my rupture is explored in Belief 5: Journaling creates narrative awareness, where I explore how writing helps us find a way back to ourselves.
From the Rewrite Bookshelf
The book I’d hand you immediately after finishing this essay is To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers.
It is a short, wonderfully weird book in the vein of Ursula K. Le Guin. A space quest philosophical treatise on the purpose of the journeys we make. Rupture is built into the weave of the words.
Rewrite Today
Meet me on the edge of change in my fortnightly free newsletter. In it, you’ll experience how I use journaling to deepen self-knowing and clarify life challenges.