When Midlife Meets Immigration

I had spent years building the life I believed was right for me, raising a family and pursuing a career. Then I found myself looking at that life and wondering why it no longer felt like mine. How could something I had put so much into feel so unfamiliar?

For some of us, this unease begins in our late thirties or forties. It may arrive slowly, as a mixture of fatigue, anxiety, sadness, and occasionally despair. We may struggle to explain it, especially when our lives still look perfectly reasonable from the outside.

If we stay with these feelings long enough, we may begin to hear the questions beneath them:

• What have I built my life around? Do I want the next ten, twenty, or thirty years to look like this?
• Are there things I may never get to do? Is there still time for what matters to me?
• What will my life look like when my children leave home, or when my parents are no longer here?
• Who am I in this changing body? Can I still feel attractive and desirable?

If these questions resonate with you, you may be going through a midlife crisis. We often try to push these thoughts and feelings aside, because allowing them in means facing uncertainty: What do I want instead? And what do I do with the life I have already built?

There may also be grief we are reluctant to face: for possibilities that have narrowed, for versions of ourselves we may never become, and for the future we once assumed we would have. Even changes we welcome can involve losing something.

My own midlife crisis started early, and it has been anything but quiet. Between thirty and forty, I got divorced, left a career in law to become a Gestalt therapist, and moved from Russia to Israel. Building a new life from scratch is quite literally what I have been doing.

My move to Israel was fairly sudden. I left Russia because of its war against Ukraine, to find myself later living through another war in Israel. The uncertainty I was experiencing inside became inseparable from the uncertainty around me.

I wanted to figure everything out as soon as possible and rebuild my life quickly. My schedule was packed with courses, work projects, dates, and workouts – anything that helped me avoid noticing how lost I felt and made me feel productive. But the more I rushed and fell back on old patterns out of anxiety, the more exhausted and disconnected from myself I became.

Working with clients and supporting them through crises, relationship difficulties, emigration and other challanges I see how anxiety, fear, and deep beliefs can make it difficult for people to recognize their own wants and needs, leading them to make choices that do not suit them, again and again. Being a therapist does not make me immune to this pattern, but deepens self-awareness.

Therefore very soon I recognized that I was running from myself. I had to acknowledge that I was in a hole, too, and that the first thing I needed to do was stop digging. I needed to pause and try to understand what was happening to me and what mattered to me now.

Truly listening to ourselves means making room for sadness, lost and contradictory wishes. It also takes enough inner steadiness to stay with uncertainty without rushing into decisions simply to make it go away.

I still do not have a plan for the next thirty years. But I am learning to notice what deserves more space in my life now, what is wearing me down, and which relationships I want to give more attention to. These are smaller questions, and their answers help me make choices.

Whether we are navigating midlife, immigration, or another personal crisis, we may find ourselves reconsidering our priorities and asking a difficult question: What truly matters to me now? When the life we have built no longer feels right, it takes time to understand what needs to change. We deserve to be gentle with ourselves while we find out.