We’re honoured to share an excerpt from Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife.

In Halfway Home, Christina Myers offers us a series of witty and warm personal essays on the journey to midlife. From early milestones like a first bra to the challenges of menopause, she examines how societal expectations — including those around bodies, beauty, and gender roles — shape our sense of identity and self, and questions how we might redefine them in this stage of life. 

As we navigate the shifting landscape of modern midlife, Myers reminds us that while the path ahead may feel uncertain, we’re not walking it alone.
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Excerpt from Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife
‍By Christina Myers

Afterword: The Other Side of the Forest

The thing about a long journey is that everything you bring with you for the trip will change, and sometimes fall apart, as you go. The soles of your shoes wear thin, the wagon wheel breaks, you run out of matches. Along the way, you acquire new tools and supplies, through necessity or luck. You come across a beehive dripping honey, and take some with you for the road. You realize you need a bigger wagon, or none at all. The axe that has become dull needs sharpening, or you trade it for a new one.

You change, too. Your legs get stronger day by day. You learn to recognize the sounds in the forest, which noises to ignore and which require caution. You figure out when to rest and when to keep going. And just as you decide you finally know the lay of the land, the geography changes: You head up into the mountains, or drop down into a valley. Food gets scarce, or plentiful. The weather turns when you’re least expecting it.
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Nothing stays the same. And nothing can be predicted with any accuracy. There’s no alternative but to keep going, knowing that some of what you have, and some of what you know, will be useful on the road ahead—and some of it will mean nothing at all, or may even slow you down if you don’t leave it behind.

You’ll cross paths with people who have already been where you’re going and they’ll have advice—or warnings— that may or may not be wise or real or necessary. Take everything with gratitude, grace, and a grain of salt. You might, if you’re lucky, come across fellow travellers heading in the same direction, and a few of these, the best ones, will make good companions for the trip.

Either way, you’ll know more in the middle of the journey than you did at the beginning—and you’ll also know that whatever is ahead, you’ll have to learn it, solve it, figure it out, and get through it, just as you have until now: one step at a time.

I have glimpses of what’s on the other side of the forest, what’s around the next big bend in the trail, on the other side of that peak. But I’ve learned there’s no such thing as a map that is finished.

And the map of this journey—of life, and how to navigate it—will be a work in progress for the rest of my days, as it is for each of us. Most of the path ahead will be a mystery, until it’s not.

I do know one thing for sure now though: the more you share your map, and others share theirs with you–– filling in the blanks for each other, describing the valley you’ve already been through, the field they passed by–– the easier the path will be for both of you. The best way, maybe the only way, to get to the other side of the forest is together.

We’re halfway home, my friends, but we are not alone.

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Excerpted with permission from Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife by Christina Myers. ©2024 Christina Myers. Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com