Eleanor MILLS
With over-50s at high risk of redundancy, Eleanor Mills says her own topple from the top inspired a new start-up to help others
The hands of the clock tick round, but time has stopped. It’s all white noise. The boss and the head of HR are sat at a desk. There is a discreet box of tissues. It’s THAT meeting. The rumblings about job losses are true. It’s you. Panic. The mortgage. The overdraft. Your life!
The head of HR is talking legalese, passing pieces of papers with numbers on them. The chair is still there, but you are falling. It’s physical, in your gut. Like being in a car crash. The mind freezes. It’s the moment your brain will return and return to, in dreams, in low moments, when “if onlys” gnaw at your mind.
Data from the Office for National Statistics, published last week, showed unemployment in 50- to 64-year-olds is up 50 per cent – from 2.7 per cent to 4.1 per cent in the last lockdown. If you’re 50 and being made redundant then you may well have been in your job for a long time.
I’d done 23 years as a national newspaper executive and I loved it. It wasn’t just my living but my life. I’d poured love and energy into my work, the job’s needs trumping almost everything. My mum used to warn me: “The graveyards are full of indispensable executives.” But I’d been so driven.
Then suddenly: gone. The stuffy office. The awkward looks. My banging heart. All that passion and time reduced to a disposable line on a finance spreadsheet. In the immediate aftermath I floundered. I went home and binge-watched The Crown; blanking out thought. I felt raw, naked. I’d worn a big velvet cloak of status for two decades, now it was gone. Who was I without it? Where did the job end and I begin – what was my identity now?
And just at that point, I got Covid. It was terrifying. I was lying in bed shivering as Boris was taken to intensive care. Two weeks later, I emerged weak and shaken; I was about to turn 50 and I felt every second of my half-century.
It was the first lockdown. I went to meet an old friend in the scruffy park behind my house. We sat on a bench in the sunshine and drank Pimms out of a tin. It was midday. On a Monday. “How are you?” she said. I tried to say “fine”.
Instead, I wept and hiccupped and it all spilt out. I’d lost the career I’d had since my twenties. My kids were going off to uni and an empty nest beckoned just when I was going to be around more. I felt sad and guilty and old and lost. She gave me an illegal hug and said: “Change is difficult.” It is such a tiny phrase, but to me it was a lifeline.
She had given me permission to find this tough. It was a relief to admit how bad I felt. Too often, well-meaning friends and family had said “You’ll bounce back, don’t worry!” or “You’re bound to fall on your feet.” But that sent me into a spiral of “how?” And currently, it is unlikely to be true.
Charities last week described 50-plus workers as at risk of “being on the scrap heap”, and the numbers of discrimination cases brought against employers on the grounds of age is on the rise. When I went through my dark times last summer, I was stunned by how little there was available to help get midlifers back on track. This week, the Government promised to look at new schemes.
But when I tried searching online for midlife crisis or midlife career change I either got stories about men with balding pates and Ferraris leaving their wives, or ended up on job sites where everything is online and no one ever gets back to you. What I wanted was a map, inspirational stories, experts to guide me out of the swamp of doom.
As the weeks passed and the sun shone I began to cheer up. I hung out with my teenage girls, who were home and around because of lockdown. I swam outside in lakes and ponds and went for long daily walks with my husband. I found the switch from extreme busyness – hundreds of emails, a schedule packed with meetings and calls – to nothing, hard.
I felt like I had extra limbs that weren’t being used; I realised I was addicted to busyness. I began to meditate and found it calming. For the first time ever I spent time cooking slowly or listening to music.
I spent hours talking to friends, family, former colleagues and found many of them were having a tough time in midlife, too. Tales of divorce, bereavement and redundancy were rife. The fourfold increase in eating disorders among teens during lockdown had taken its toll on many. Others had elderly or dying parents.
All talked about how difficult it was to find the right kind of expert advice.
I’ve always loved President Obama’s line about being the kind of change you want to see in the world. Rather than moaning that there was nothing out there to help midlifers get back on the horse and find their next act, I decided to create it.
My platform, noon.org.uk, has experts to advise on midlife pinch points and inspirational stories of transformation. We also run retreats and events. I called this new community Noon because if, like Major Tom or the Duke of Edinburgh, many of us are going to live till we are a hundred, then 50 is only the middle. Long lives mean we will all have to get used to reinventing ourselves. Many times.
It is grim when life suddenly shifts under our feet and everything that was familiar is ripped away. It is like a death. There is a before and an after. A dividing line. But despite, or maybe because of, going through the heartache, my life has had a prune.
I’ve hit the restart button and can truthfully say I have never been happier; I love being a Founder at 50.
Though agony at the time, being thrust into a new stage did me good; I have become the person I am supposed to be. As Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path, wrote: “Loss sets you free. In the empty void it leaves, anything can happen.”