How to ace life’s Second Act . ..admityou CAN’T have it all!

Join the post-50 sexual revolution. Beat burnout. And don’t worry about what you see in the mirror. Here in her midlife manifesto, ex-Cosmopolitan editor LORRAINE CANDY reveals . . .

REMEMbEr melancholy ria, played by Wendy Craig, from the TV sitcom butterflies in the late 1970s? One day in my late 40s, I woke up and found I’d turned into her. Minus the ‘will she, won’t she’ affair with dashing businessman Leonard.

All of a sudden I felt overwhelmed by my life. Sometimes, I would be gripped by an inexplicable rage at the small regularity of things. The same biscuit tin staring at me from the same shelf every day; the same shopping list at the same supermarket each week.

And sometimes, out of the blue, I couldn’t summon the energy to care about anything. I just wanted to ‘drip’ around the house all day, like a sad midlife goth. Taking clean laundry slowly up and down the stairs. Answering emails with one word. Out of the blue I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t remember anything and I was exhausted all the time.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ I kept muttering under my breath, just like my increasingly independent daughters, who said the same thing to me every time I appeared, in that brutally dismissive way of teenage girls.

And yet, in all my WhatsApp friendship groups, other women were saying it, too — experiencing the same confusion, the

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life. MAYA ANGELOU

same midlife sense of loss and a looming identity crisis.

What was wrong with us?

I have built my whole career as a journalist on understanding the lives of the women of Generation X. As editor of Cosmopolitan and Elle, in the newspaper features I’ve written and commissioned, and in the podcast I now co-host, Postcards From Midlife, I have examined, discussed and forensically investigated