Things That Secretly Drain Your Spirit After 50 Unless You Change Them

The January after the holidays, I sat down at the kitchen table with my coffee and could not think of a single reason to get up. The grandkids had gone home. The tree was down. The house was clean. I had nothing to do and I was tired anyway. Not sleepy tired. Tired in the middle, where coffee does not reach.

Tom noticed before I did. He came in from the garage, looked at me, and said, “You have been sitting there an hour.” I told him I was fine. He said, “You keep saying that.” Then he went back out. That is Tom. He does not push. He just says the thing and lets it sit.

It sat with me for a week. I finally taped a sheet of paper inside the pantry door and wrote at the top, “Things that are wearing me out.” Over that winter and into spring I filled it in and crossed things off one at a time. Here are the ten that mattered most.

Saying yes when you mean no

The first thing on the list came from a phone call. A woman from church asked if I would run the spring bake sale again. I had done it for years. I did not want to do it. I said yes before she finished the sentence.

I hung up and felt my shoulders drop. Not with relief. With dread. I went to the pantry door and wrote, “Saying yes when I mean no.” Then I called her back. My hands actually shook. I told her I would bring two pies but I could not run the whole thing this year. She said, “Oh, that is fine, Linda.” That was it. Nobody died.

I had spent fifty years thinking a no would cost me something. Most of the time it costs nothing at all. The yes is what costs you, a little at a time, until you are sitting at a table with no reason to get up.

Here is what I learned. A fast yes to someone else is usually a slow no to yourself.

Keeping the news on all day

Tom likes the morning news. Somewhere along the way I started leaving it on after he went outside. Then I would check my phone at lunch. Then the evening news. Then the late news. I was not learning anything new by six o’clock. I was just hearing the same bad things said louder.

One afternoon our middle one called while the television was going. I realized I had been snapping at everyone for a week and could not say why. I turned the set off and the kitchen got so quiet I could hear the refrigerator hum. I stood there a minute. My jaw unclenched.

Now the news goes on at breakfast and off when the toast is done. If something big happens, somebody will tell me. The world does not need me standing guard over it in my slippers.

Here is what I learned. You can care about the world without letting it sit in your kitchen all day.

Carrying an old grudge around the house

There was a thing between me and my sister. It was old. It was about a Thanksgiving a long time ago, who said what, who did not help. I would not have called it a grudge. I would have called it “just how things are with her.”

But I noticed something that winter. Every time her name came up, I got tired. Not angry. Tired. Like I was picking up a box I had set down and carrying it to the next room, over and over.

I did not have a big talk with her. I am not built for big talks. I just called her on a Tuesday and asked about her garden. We talked for forty minutes about tomatoes. At the end she said, “This was nice.” I said it was. I set the box down and did not pick it up again.

A reader named Ruth E., 64, from Lincoln, Nebraska, wrote me something I have kept. She said she stayed mad at her brother for eleven years and then he died and she was still mad and had nobody to be mad at. She said the grudge did not leave when he did. It just lost its address.

Here is what I learned. A grudge is heavy and you are the only one carrying it.

Measuring your life against other people’s pictures

I joined the social media site to see pictures of the grandkids. That is what I told Tom. That is what I told myself. Within a month I was scrolling through it at night looking at other women my age on cruises, at weddings, in kitchens nicer than mine.

I would put the phone down and look at my own kitchen and feel something sour. The same kitchen I had loved for thirty years. Nothing had changed about it except that I had just looked at somebody else’s.

I did not quit the site. I just moved it off my phone and onto the computer in the spare room, where I have to go on purpose. I check it on Sunday nights to see the kids’ pictures. The rest of the week my kitchen looks fine.

Here is what I learned. Nobody posts a picture of the Tuesday they spent feeling like you do.

Treating sleep like something you earn

For thirty years I went to bed when the work was done. With three kids that meant late. After they left, the habit stayed and the work did not. I would stay up folding laundry that could wait, wiping counters that were clean, watching shows I did not care about. Then I would lie down at midnight and wake at five like always.

Tom goes to bed at ten. He always has. He used to call upstairs, “Coming?” and I would say, “In a minute.” Then I started saying it less because he had stopped asking.

One night in February I just went up with him. The dishwasher was not run. The counters had crumbs. I lay there feeling like a woman who had left the stove on. Nothing happened. In the morning the crumbs were still there and so was I, and I had slept seven hours for the first time in longer than I can remember.

Here is what I learned. Sleep is not a reward for finishing. It is the thing that lets you finish tomorrow.

Letting good friends go quiet

I have a friend I have known since our kids were in kindergarten. We used to talk every week. Then it was every month. Then I realized at the pantry door that I could not remember the last time we had talked. Six months, maybe. Nothing had happened. We had just both gotten quiet and each assumed the other was busy.

I called her. She picked up on the first ring and said, “I was just thinking about you.” People always say that. I think it is usually true.

We set a standing coffee now. Second Thursday of the month, same diner, same booth if we can get it. It is on the calendar in pen. It is the only thing on my calendar that nobody else put there.

Here is what I learned. Friendships after fifty do not end with a fight. They end with silence, and silence is easy to break.

Keeping things you do not want

The spare room was full of things I was keeping for the kids. Baby clothes. Trophies. A box of school papers from our oldest that nobody had opened since the Clinton administration. I told myself it was love. Some of it was. A lot of it was just not wanting to make a decision.

Every time I walked past that room I felt the weight of it. Not the stuff. The deciding. I had been putting off a hundred small choices and they had piled up into one heavy door I kept closed.

I called each of the kids. I said, “I have a box of your things. Do you want it or do you want me to deal with it?” Two of them said deal with it. One said send a few things and toss the rest. Nobody cried. Nobody was hurt. I had been guarding a museum that had no visitors.

Tom hauled four boxes to the curb and two to the church. The room has a reading chair in it now. I sit in it some afternoons. The door stays open.

Here is what I learned. Keeping something nobody wants is not love. It is just a decision you have not made yet.

Waiting by the phone for the kids

This one is hard to say out loud. After the youngest left, I built my days around when the kids might call. I would not start a project at four because somebody might phone at four. I would keep Sunday evening clear in case. I would carry the phone from room to room like a baby monitor.

They did call. Just not on my schedule. And every call I did not get felt like a small verdict on how much they needed me, which was not fair to them or to me. They have jobs and spouses and their own kitchen tables. I raised them to have those things.

In March I started calling them instead. Not to check in. Just to say something. I told our youngest about the pantry list and got laughed at, which was fair. I told our oldest about the reading chair. Short calls. Then I put the phone on the counter and went outside.

Here is what I learned. Waiting for someone to need you is a slow way to stop living your own day.

Talking to yourself like an enemy

I caught myself in the bathroom mirror one morning saying, out loud, “Well, look at you.” Not kindly. I would never say that to my sister. I would never say it to a friend. I said it to myself every day and had for years, usually about my neck or my hands or the fact that I needed the step stool now for the top shelf.

Tom came in while I was standing there and said, “Who are you talking to?” I said nobody. He said, “Be nice to her.” Then he left. He did not know how close he had landed.

I did not fix this one all at once. I am not sure anyone does. But I started catching the sentence halfway and changing the ending. “Well, look at you. You slept seven hours.” “Well, look at you. You called your sister.” It sounds silly. It works a little more every month.

Here is what I learned. You hear your own voice more than anyone else’s. It helps if that voice is on your side.

Having nothing on the calendar that is just for you

The last thing on the pantry door took me the longest to write because I did not know what it was. I only knew the shape of it. Every single thing on my calendar was for somebody else. Tom’s appointments. The kids’ visits. Church. The bake sale pies. Even the coffee with my friend was partly for her.

I had nothing to look forward to that belonged only to me. Not a hobby, not a class, not a trip, not even a book I was saving. My mother cooked from scratch every day of her life and I do not think she ever had a Tuesday that was hers. I had decided somewhere along the way that this was what good women did.

I signed up for a watercolor class at the community center. Wednesday mornings, six weeks. I was terrible at it. I went anyway. On the fourth Wednesday I painted a jar of pickles and it looked like a jar of pickles and I drove home grinning like a fool. Tom asked what happened. I said, “Pickles.” He nodded like that made sense.

A reader named Nancy K., 70, from Asheville, North Carolina, told me she took up the piano at sixty-eight. She said she plays badly and nobody listens and it is the best hour of her week. I believe her.

Here is what I learned. A life with nothing in it for you will drain you no matter how full it looks from the outside.

The pantry door is mostly crossed off now. I left the paper up. Tom asked if I wanted him to take it down and I said no, I like seeing it when I reach for the flour.

I am not a different woman than I was in January. I am the same one, just less tired. The house is still quiet. The kids still call when they call. But I sleep, and I paint bad pickles, and I say no sometimes, and my sister and I talk about tomatoes. It turns out the spirit does not drain all at once. It leaks, from ten small holes, and you can patch them one at a time with your own two hands.

What is the first thing you would write on your pantry door?