Aging and Finding Your Purpose

Isn’t life weird? You spend the first twenty-five years of your life trying to find your purpose. After you’ve had your career, sowed some oats, and raised your family, you may find you are back to searching for a purpose once again because you are aging.

Fired as a Parent

You’ve raised your children to be capable and independent adults. You see them walk across the stage to collect their diploma or go out the door to join the military. While you might feel pride, you also feel a sense of loss. Your brain may be able to reason that your job as a parent is never really done, but your heart can’t help but feel fired from the most precious job you’ve ever had.

It’s every parent’s goal to raise children who can not only survive but thrive when they leave the nest, but those yearnings for simpler, more everyday moments don’t just disappear on your child’s eighteenth birthday.

Your purpose as a parent has not ended, but your relationship with your adult child certainly changes as they mature. It’s important to realize that even though your role in their life has changed, you can still be an important part of it. You can support your adult child through the various stages of their lives, offering prayer and emotional support. You can offer practical help through your advice and the life hacks you have learned from experience.

Don’t believe that your input into your adult child’s life is no longer relevant just because they move out of the house or embark on their own independent journey.

Career Shifts as You are Aging

Sometimes aging means finding new career opportunities and saying goodbye to old ones. If you have been in a physically demanding position, you might find it difficult to continue in your familiar role as your body ages. Likewise, like anyone else, your job could end suddenly or unexpectedly. If in search of a new position, the task can be frustrating and overwhelming for anyone, but it is often even more difficult for older adults.

Just because you are no longer able to do your job doesn’t mean you’re not valuable and relevant. You may need to wiggle out of your comfort zone to pursue other career paths, but it doesn’t mean that you no longer have purpose or meaning.

Feeling Invisible

In a society that is hyper-focused on youth, older adults can often feel invisible. While being noticed, heard, and valued based on your youthful looks, high energy levels, and enthusiasm isn’t a purpose in itself, these attributes do help you feel fulfilled. Opportunities are often geared toward young people who have energy and physical strength. Sometimes, as you age and your skin begins to wrinkle, you may feel like you wear an invisibility suit.

You may be used to walking into a room, turning heads, and being noticed. Age might rob you of that superpower, and that can feel uncomfortable or demoralizing. While the ego loves to be stroked, recognize that some of this attention and admiration was based solely on shallow superficial characteristics and doesn’t reflect your true value.

The superpower you used to harness, the ability to make an entrance or talk yourself out of a speeding ticket with a wink and smile, may have disappeared. However, your new superpower of being invisible comes with a few perks of its own. If you blend into a crowd, you are able to gain trust from people around you, and that alone can lead you to a higher purpose.

Finding Support When Aging

While you may feel lonely and purposeless in this ageing process, you certainly are not. There are many people in your situation who feel they lack purpose because of their age. Likewise, there are many ways for you to counter this experience and reaffirm or reestablish your purpose. It’s a fresh new beginning, after all these years of growing older, wiser, and more mature.

You may need some help to get there, however. Reaching out to a professional Christian therapist can help. They can guide you through your changing roles, mourning the changes that come with aging, and getting excited about what this chapter of life uniquely brings.

Your Christian therapist will lovingly point you back to your real purpose. You are a child of the King who has molded and made you into the person you are today to fulfill His purpose for your life. Regardless of the grey in your hair or the wrinkles on your face or the loss of your former life, God is not done with you yet. He has plans to help and not harm you and to give you a new purpose in life.

Contact our office today at Texas Christian Counseling, Frisco if you are ready to begin this journey with a therapist in Frisco, Texas. We can arrange an appointment with one of the Christian counselors in Frisco.