The good, the bad and the ugly of making a radical change in midlife

I’m writing this on a plane to Maui, Hawaii where I have been spending the holidays for the past 40 years.

I’ll do that math for you; I’m 58

And, here we are.

The end of another year.

2025 marks five years since I first started the journey towards making a radical change in my life at the age of 54. My mom passed away at 64, and I remember sitting in my recently “remodeled just for me” office in 2020 reflecting. I felt stuck. Stagnant. Afraid of change. My kids had left the nest. Covid was a thing. And I was desperate to figure out why I was still in pain almost five months after my traumatic ski accident, even though the doctors had said I was ‘healed.”

Then I thought about my mom. “If I had just nine years left to live,” I thought, “is this how I wanted to spend it?” I knew then it was time to begin looking for a way to find more meaning in my life, even though I had achieved everything I thought was going to make me happy.

So then, here we are.

Five years later.

What parts of radical midlife reinvention have been good, and what have been bad? And what have been the ugliest moments in making a decision to live life rather than let life live me.

The Good…

Honestly, this list is pretty damn long. While I had travelled often before I began this reinvention, in the past five years everything we have experienced has been richer because I have been intentionally showing myself what I am capable of. Once I figured out my “Soul Map,” it guided me to experiences that are new and novel , involves connection to people I love, and nature. As a result, nearly every adventure has been curated in a way that feels like absolute magic.

A few highlights…

• I have visited 40 states with my husband and two cats in the RV we lived in for nearly a year. I have hiked miles and miles in some of the most glorious spots in America, visited National Parks and seen parts of the country I had dreamed of visiting.

• I have been able to explore living abroad twice, spending two months in both 2023 and 2024 in Sagres, Portugal.

• I have lived in Australia for 4 weeks, and decided I would live there in a heartbeat except that it doesn’t check the box in terms of being too far away from lots of places and people I love.

• I have been able to see my international family frequently, having visited them in both Europe and Oz, and hosting them in the US twice.

• I rafted down the Salmon River and lived 100 percent off the grid for 6 days and five nights.

• I kayaked the Colorado River ‘round Horshoe Bend in Arizona

• I am more healthy and fit than I have ever been. I learned how to cross country ski, snowshoe and got back to alpine skiing in 2024!

• We chose a home base that is our primary ‘destination of choice,’ which means every day feels like vacation, even though both hubby and I are working full-time.

But beyond this list of bucket list experiences, I think the most amazing part of reinventing myself has been realizing I am capable of things I never thought I could do. I had resisted change in so many areas of my life, clinging to people and things because I felt like my life was a game of Jenga; remove just one piece and the whole thing would come tumbling down.

The absolute best part of radical reinvention in midlife has been letting go of so many of the things I was attached to — things like the way I thought my business should look. The house and community I had lived in for 25 years. A certain lifestyle. Friends. Family relationships. Even my marriage had to change dramatically so that it could grow.

And above all, realizing all of this letting go was actually directing me to something much better.

Above all…

I learned I am not only willing to risk endings so I can experience new beginnings that are soul-aligned, but that I can no longer tolerate what is just 'good enough.’ And… that on the other side of this…is where the magic happens.

In short, I learned I can do hard shit. In real life this involved some pretty epic things I had never done before. Things like…

• Learning how to solve complex problems in my business rather than relying on people who I automatically assumed were smarter and more capable than me, including figuring out what is the true ‘soul’ of my business.

• Taking a more active role in my dad’s legacy business, even though I didn’t know anything about that industry.

• Making lots of difficult decisions again and again and again rather than avoiding them.

• Figuring out how to be a better leader, hire slow and fire fast.

• Meeting new people and making deep connections with new friends.

• Learning how to bake bread.

• To be absofuyckinglutelyresilient in pursuing my dreams, even when it seems impossible. Finally selling a traditionally published book to a big five publisher and being able to teach and write about midlife reinvention has been one of the biggest blessings of risking it all.

• Setting all sorts of new boundaries in my marriage, friendships and family relationships.

• Doing the fucking hard work of healing so many parts of myself and being more of what and who I am resulted in having a marriage that gets better and better every single day.

• I know what it now means to be in loving, reciprocal relationships of all sorts.

But to be real, being in the messy middle of it all was super hard.

The Bad…

I think the most challenging thing of all this midlife reinvention is living in the liminal space; the space between what was and what is becoming. I am a person who likes control. I thrive on solutions. Quick fixes. This journey has taught me to be patient AF and there were so many times where I felt like I had made the biggest mistakes of my life. I had regrets. I felt like I had failed. The lows were low. There were times when the lows were low and there were no highs for a very long time.

You see, when I decided to create the Radical Living Challenge as a framework and system to create change, I didn’t think it would be as challenging as it was. While I had watched shows like “Survivor” for years, longing for an adventure that would be so profound it would change me for life, and make me realize what I was made of, I didn’t think it would be that hard.

Most people don’t sign up for really hard shit in real life. Life just happens, and then we adults adult ourselves into dealing with whatever challenges we have to face. But I didn’t want to take a wait and see approach to living my life. I wanted to create and design it, on my terms.

And I had to figure out what those terms were. And that was some hard shit.

So in the spirit of being fair, here’s a list of the bad…

• I regretted selling my house so many times in the first year, that I literally cried about it many times. The day we moved out, I even called my real estate agent and asked if there were any ways to stop the transaction from happening.

• There was so much chaos in moving so many times before we even moved into the RV full-time (we had to move 8 times in six months) that we mistakenly didn’t plan how to efficiently handle the capital gains we made from selling the house. That was a very bad and expensive fuck up.

• We bought so much shit for the RV we didn’t end up needing and we planned on bringing way too much so that when we ultimately moved in, we had to get rid of things in a panic.

• I discovered shit in my business I had been subscribed too, paying for, and holding on to that had become literally useless. The extent of my fails as the CEO of my company that were revealed as I took it apart were painful. In the end, this is a good thing, but the process of breaking it down so that I could rebuild was a living hell.

• I blamed my husband for everything I could at many points during the last five years, and it absolutely put our marriage to the test. We argued, snapped, bickered and let each other down in lots of ways.

• Struggling with the emotional and financial highs and lows of building a new business and adapting to living a new lifestyle based on needs at the spiritual and material level.

In the end, I got exactly what I longed for. True transformation. And, I was grateful I had a process to follow, structures, frameworks and an amazing coach or two to help get me through the bad.

The Ugly…

I think the ugliest part of midlife reinvention has been the losses I have experienced. Losing certain friendships and certain family members has been tricky. But remembering that it’s not my job to correct other people’s impressions of me has been my life raft. It’s been also strange letting go of those ways of defining success and myself that permeate the space between my ears. Midlife is challengingAF because figuring out how to cherish the parts of my life that have ended while taking on brand new challenges is unsettling.

Reinventing myself at the level of identity still has me stopped in my tracks some days, especially when I’m feeling stuck. I’m also still learning how to find a way to express the parts of me that are ambitious while also honoring the parts of me that can no longer grind. And most recently, the question I am grappling with is how do I strive for a sense of healthy significance versus being driven by ego. And last, how do I feel present and satiated while also craving a fuller expression of myself in what else I want to experience and create in this lifetime.

I can’t speak for other women in midlife, but I can say that I can’t imagine having not created the Radical Living Challenge as a way of doing midlife. I feel rooted in who and what I am in more ways than I could have imagined.

I let go. And I have let things come in.

Including, you.

And for that I am very grateful.

So let’s raise the glass my new friends.

Here’s to all of us finding moments in our final two weeks of 2024 to live unscripted!!!!

Your Radical Pal,

Marni

PS Hubby and I walked down the hill the other night to check out the Drone Show at Steamboat Mountain and this is what we saw. Pretty cool, huh?!