Your life. Day in and day out, you follow a routine. Maybe you wake up at the same time every morning, even on the weekend. Breakfast is a slice of buttered toast with marmalade, a boiled egg and two strips of bacon, washed down with a strong cup of Joe. You yawn and tell yourself you’re ready for the day, but if you dared to go deeper in thought, you’d admit to yourself that you’re stuck in a rut.

Life is one continuous loop of monotony. All those years ago, when you were a little girl daydreaming about what your life would be like when you grew up, it sure as hell wasn’t this.

What happened? Where did you lose yourself? Somewhere along the path of adulthood, you got sidetracked. Friends, lovers, enemies, jobs, hobbies, indiscretions – they all played a role in the unhinging of your life. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, steady unfurling of the life you thought you were living.

Life closed in on you?

You’re stuck. One day you were trudging along happily (really? happily?!?) and the next day the flicker was gone. Life closed in on you like a ton of boulders and weighed you down. Chances are — and this is a little tough love here — you have few people to blame besides yourself. But look, I’m not knocking you for it.

At one time or another, we’ve all lived some part of our lives for the consumption of someone else. And while we may have thought, “One of these days, I’m gonna…,” but we never managed to get past the “gonna” part. It became our pipe dream, the thing we told ourselves that would come about in time, except that time never came. Sure, the opportunity may have presented itself, but we let it quietly slip past as we watched those around us move on to bigger and better things in life. And we stayed put.

We stayed within the confines of our comfort zones. It was our safe space; the place in which we were intimately familiar. Stepping outside that place of comfort was out of the question. So we remained. And now?

Life is vanilla. Life is boring. Life is repetitive. Life is, well, sucking the life out of you.

So what do you plan to do about it?

Girl, it’s time to get off that hamster wheel, knock down those self-imposed walls, get out of that rut and live the life you really want to be living.

You’re a midlife+ woman. You’ve lived long enough to know what’s working for you and what isn’t. Perhaps you’re holding onto the past because it’s your security blanket. It’s what you know. But what if . . .

. . . you turned left instead of right?
. . . you went on vacation solo?
. . . you went jogging outside instead of lounging on the sofa all weekend?
. . . you don’t fail but you succeed?
. . . you thought about your needs first?
. . . you went back to school to get your master’s degree?
. . . you challenged your own beliefs?
. . . you faced your fears?
. . . you could look five years into the future? Would you like what you see?

Your “what if” isn’t tied to the past; it’s a conduit to your future. Is it time for you to get unstuck, to step outside your comfort zone and to rethink your future? If so, it might be time for you to do something good for yourself; it’s time to hit the midlife reset button.