Soul Snacks 🌖

3 minute read

Dear Snackers,

As a younger woman, I feared my 40’s. The year I turned 40, though, I kind of felt on fire. I was like, “Wow, I don’t look old or feel old, my kids are healthy and gaining independence, my Instagram thing is going well, and I have a happy marriage—I’m stepping into my power.”

At some point in the last year, however, I began to feel a bit of that slump I feared about my 40’s. Despite my ability to joke and lean into silliness, there is a lot about life in your 40’s (particularly as I approach my mid 40’s) that seems to lack luminescence and, despite the absolute insanity of my 30’s while having babies and toddlers and going through my son’s cancer treatment, in some ways, my 40’s feel like even more of a grind. Whenever something starts to feel “off” for me in life, I typically start searching for the reason why. Maybe I can’t always fix it, but at least if I can identify the reason, I can understand it, and it will stop bogging me down. 

On a recent doom scroll, I came across the account of a woman who reads “soul contracts”. This is pretty “woo-woo”, so if you’re not into that shit, this won’t be of interest to you, but she spoke of the idea that between the ages of 42-49 we are going through our “soul embodiment” cycle, where we are supposed to embody the things we learned during our “soul awakening” cycle that takes place between the ages of 35-42. If things feel off, it is your soul calling you to address your purpose in life—actually, as I write this, it really doesn’t sound all that “woo-woo” at all, but more so, obvious that unresolved business continues to surface. In her description of that “slump”, if you will, it all boils down to if we’ve honored our souls. What I am about to say is definitely true for me, but I think is also true for a lot of women – we often abandon our souls to meet the approval of a patriarchal structure. Actually, I bet a lot of men abandon their souls for this same structure, too, it’s just that, overall, that structure has benefitted men more than women. 

I have had creative aspirations since the time I was pretty young, and I talk about this in my upcoming book, but I deserted a lot of my passions, not even allowing myself to take them seriously, in order to achieve more traditional, grounded goals. I wanted a family. I wanted, more than anything, to become a mom, and I feared that if I didn’t follow certain “rules”, the family life I wanted would have slipped away. Moving to LA after college to try my hand at comedy, for example, felt like taking a swan dive into a pool of non-traditional people, and at my core, I am rooted by family and tradition. Whether or not that stems from the outside or within remains unknown, though I will say, I’m certain I’d be lost today if I weren’t anchored by my family. Nonetheless, my inner passions eat away at me, because I feel I have so much more to uncover about myself, and I’d bet money that a lot of women can relate. 

It has been hard for me to fully honor my desire for creative growth because I am constantly tortured by the idea that I might not be able to give as much to my family if I do. My 40’s have represented an era that, while my kids are no longer as needy as baby and toddlers, my responsibilities as a mother continue to trump my soul’s desire to focus on my work—removing myself from tasks related to my kids in order to pursue further career goals feels impossible, and yet, my soul is nagging me for more. Do I wait until my kids don’t need me and risk losing momentum, or do I do it now? Will I regret losing some time with my children, or am I just beholden to a traditional societal construct? Maybe it’s both.

Acknowledging this scares me a little because it means I am getting ready to push my boundaries, and I don’t know if it is as simple “working mom guilt” or what, but allowing a structure that was never designed with my aspirations in mind to govern my choices is something I have started to examine deeper. I hope whoever reading this that feels similarly will also consider your “why”, and honor the parts of yourself that you may have neglected out of pressure, fear or guilt—your soul is more important than what society had in mind for you.

XO

-Caitlin

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