Don’t Mourn the Loss of Something You Don’t Actually Want

It wasn’t what you wanted. It wasn’t what you needed. Let it go.

Vanessa Torre
5 min readAug 3, 2023
Photo by Randy Fath via Unsplash

Since I found myself smack dab in the middle of life, acting totally surprised like I didn’t see it coming at all, I found myself taking inventory of my life.

There have been more than a few nights where I found myself sitting and staring blankly at nothing and talking to a bottle of wine while knee-deep in a Joni Mitchell record and realizing my life was not exactly what 25-year-old me imagined.

If you would have asked 25-year-old me what I wanted in life, I would have told you the following: a hunky husband (shhh, let’s pretend it’s 1976, it’s fine), a house with a white picket fence, barbecues with all the neighbors, and a successful and high-paying job.

This was the end all, be all for 25-year-old me. I bought the white, American woman’s dream hook, line, and sinker. And then midlife hit. It was a reckoning.

This is not my beautiful life.

When you realize your life is absolutely nothing like what you thought it would be there is some reconciliation that needs to be done. In this, you have two choices:

  1. Cry, wail, and gnash your teeth while raising a fist to the sky, cursing the powers…

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Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com