Midlife Chance: Welcome to My New 25 - Part 2

A continuation of Midlife Crisis to Midlife Chance

Part 2 of 2: Rebirth, Freedom, and the Life That Is Finally, Entirely Mine

If you haven't read Part 1 yet, I'd suggest starting there — it sets the scene for everything that follows. But if you're already with me, you'll know that we left off at a phone call on a motorway, a song on the radio, and a love that two people couldn't quite reach each other with. This is where the story turns. This is where everything that was broken begins, slowly and sometimes painfully, to become something else entirely.

In 2019, I was in chemotherapy. In a way of having my own little social experiment, I chose to lose my hair. And something quite unexpected happened: I fell in love with my bald head. Those of you who knew me at the time will remember my excitement about the ease of life with no hair!

A receptionist at my breast surgeon's office, her name was Diane, looked at me one day and said that we only truly see the shape of a person's head twice: when they are born, and when the hair falls away. The moment she said it, something clicked wide open. Because that is exactly what was happening. I was being born again. The woman who had spent decades carrying inherited beliefs, playing roles, wearing different masks in different rooms, performing the version of herself that had been shaped by pain and expectation and an enmeshment with her father's unlived life - she was falling away with the hair. And underneath was something much more original.

My mother had given birth to my physical body. I was giving birth to my true self.

I won't pretend this was a gentle process. Cancer is not gentle. But grace can arrive in the most unlikely packaging, and it arrived for me in a treatment room in St John's Wood, in the words of a receptionist, in the mirror image of a brand-new person staring back at me.

And then came the night of the 23rd to the 24th of August 2019.

My father had died on the 23rd of August 2001. I hadn't planned anything for that day. But I woke in the night needing to use the bathroom - as one does - and found myself humming a melody without knowing why. It was Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O'Connor. My father had once asked me for that record as a birthday present. I played it on my phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-EF60neguk

And then I played The First Leaves of Autumn by the Fureys - another of his songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcPvwaoo43k

Sitting there in the quiet, something opened up in me. I understood, in the way you understand things at 3am when your defences are down and something larger than yourself is speaking, why he had wanted that song. He had never been able to say it while he was alive. But nothing compares to you was what he had been trying to say all along, in his armoured, deflecting, deeply loving way.

I wept. I was full of grief and joy at the same time, which is the particular combination that tends to mean something is true.

And then I counted. The 23rd of August 2019 was exactly 18 years since he had died.

In Germany, you become a legal adult at 18. He was setting me free. I felt it as clearly as I have ever felt anything: I was now free. Spiritually 18. Released from the rules and roles and inherited limitations that had structured my entire life, including the ones that had made me ill. Free to be only and entirely myself.

The rebirth the chemo had begun was being confirmed from the other side.

And then there is this, which I have never quite known what to do with, except hold it gently and let it mean what it means. In his final years, my father listened to one particular Chris de Burgh album repeatedly. It was called Beautiful Dreams - a collection of the classic songs of his own youth, the music he had grown up with and loved. He listened to it often, and quietly, in a way that was completely unlike the man who had spent decades mocking my devotion to that same artist. What he may not have known, or perhaps on some level did, is that Beautiful Dreams is also an album that contains Shine On. The song that sent me back to the phone to tell him I loved him. He spent his last months being comforted by the voice he had always ridiculed, and I think, now, that he was trying to say something he still didn't have the words for. He just borrowed someone else's.

London, late 1990s. My father took this picture. I stood still and waited, as I always did. He was already ill. My original 25.

Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, taught that human life unfolds in seven-year cycles. Each cycle carries its own quality, its own task, its own invitation for growth.

2019 was my spiritual 18th birthday. My new adulthood began.

It is now 2026. Seven years later. Which makes this my new 25.

And on the 11th of March 2026, without knowing it until a sleepless night a month later, I crossed another threshold: I outlived my father. I stepped into days he never had. Days that belong entirely to me, shaped by nothing except who I have chosen to become.

I find it quietly beautiful that it was the 11th. I was born on 11.11.1971. Elevens have always found me at the significant moments.

The lineage of limiting beliefs and illness that ran through my grandfather and my father and into my own body - I believe it is healing now. Not just for me. I believe that what is healed in the present is healed in all directions, for all those who came before, across all time. This is not wishful thinking. This is how energy works, in my understanding. The work I do, with myself, and with my clients, is never only personal. It is ancestral. It is a gift to every soul in the lineage who needed to survive long enough to bring me here, and who carried wounds they didn't have the tools or the freedom to address.

I may not leave my legacy through a child or through DNA. But I leave it through balance. Through healing. Through the fact that I am still here, still curious, still unfolding, with new energy and a new zest for life that frankly surprised even me.

The melanoma reminds me there is still work to do. I don't look away from that. But it sits alongside something else now, something that feels like genuine aliveness, like a woman who has arrived into herself after a very long journey, and is finally, finally ready to enjoy the view.

This Is My New 25

No baggage. No inherited script. No borrowed beliefs that were never mine to begin with.

Just my soul's intention. My passion. My value to share. My purpose to live.

MY LIFE. MY TIME. MY CHOICE. MY INDIVIDUALITY TO SHINE.

If any of this resonates with you, if you recognise something of your own lineage, your own armour, your own unlived life in these words - I would love to hear from you. The work I do creates space for exactly this kind of deep, real, transformative change. Not because I have read about it. Because I have lived it.

And I know how to hold that space, because I have been there.

With love and full presence,

Tanya

Did Part 1 or Part 2 resonate with you? I'd love to know which moment landed — leave a comment or come and find me. And if you feel ready to begin your own journey inward, you know where I am. 🌟

PS: Interestingly enough, Chris de Burgh also wrote a song about this topic, called The Words "I love You", which was released in 2004:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVQOAriI4To