Starting Again After 50: What Do You Do When the Old Life Is Gone?

There are plenty of big moments when your life changes. A marriage ends, you retire, you move house, you lose a job, the children leave home or somebody you love is no longer there.

Those are the moments everybody notices. People ask how you're doing, friends phone, family check in, and there are usually enough decisions to make and practical problems to sort out to keep your mind occupied.

Then eventually things settle down. The phone doesn't ring quite as often, most of the practical problems have been dealt with and everybody else gets back to their own lives.

That's when you discover the part nobody really warned you about.

You've still got to live yours.

The Big Decision Is Often the Easy Part

That probably sounds strange. When my own life changed around the time I retired at 50, some of the decisions felt enormous. Accepting that my marriage wasn't going where I'd expected it to go was difficult, and deciding that I was still going to travel rather than abandon the retirement I'd worked towards wasn't easy either.

But once those decisions were made, something much more ordinary followed: Tuesday morning, then Wednesday, then another weekend.

Life doesn't conveniently roll the credits because you've reached the end of an important chapter. You wake up the next morning and need something to do, and that's where I think starting again really begins — not with the dramatic decision, but with the ordinary days afterwards.

You Need More Than Something to Fill the Time

I was fortunate in some ways. I'd spent much of my working life away from home, so being in my own company wasn't completely foreign to me. I could go into a bar on my own, watch football, talk to whoever happened to be there and generally entertain myself without needing somebody beside me every minute of the day.

Music helped enormously too. Give me somewhere with karaoke and I'm unlikely to sit quietly in the corner contemplating the meaning of life for very long.

But there's a difference between being busy and having a life. You can fill every hour of every day and still feel as though something is missing, and I think I did that at times.

Go somewhere, have a beer, watch football, sing a few songs, talk to people and go home. There was nothing particularly wrong with any of it, and some of those days were bloody good fun. But eventually I realised that keeping yourself occupied isn't quite the same as moving forward.

Don't Throw Away the Person You Already Are

When people talk about starting again, it can sound as though you're supposed to reinvent yourself. New life, new you.

I've never particularly liked that idea. What's wrong with the old you?

I'd spent fifty years becoming Billy. I wasn't about to suddenly start wearing linen trousers, doing yoga at sunrise and pretending I'd discovered myself on a mountain. I still liked football, music, a beer, talking rubbish with friends and singing songs I'd probably sung a thousand times before.

Those things weren't baggage from my old life. They were part of me.

I think that's important when you're rebuilding after a major change. You don't have to throw everything away. Keep the bits that still make you smile, the people who still matter and the interests that still make you want to get out of the house.

Then build from there.

Learn the Difference Between Being Alone and Being Lonely

This one took me longer.

Being alone isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are advantages. Nobody asks what you want for dinner and then tells you they don't fancy that. The television remote stays exactly where you left it, and if you decide at two o'clock in the afternoon that you're going somewhere, you can simply go.

There is freedom in that, but loneliness is different. Loneliness can happen in a room full of people, and I experienced plenty of that.

I could spend a day surrounded by friends, laughing, talking and enjoying myself, then go home at night and suddenly become very aware that there was nobody else there. Those were often the difficult hours, and for a while I probably tried to avoid them rather than understand them.

Eventually I learned that you can't fill every quiet moment with noise. Sometimes you've got to become comfortable sitting with yourself. That doesn't mean deciding you want to be alone forever; it simply means learning that your own company isn't something you need to escape from.

Give Tomorrow Something to Look Forward To

One thing that helped me enormously was having something ahead of me. It didn't need to be life-changing: a football match, somebody coming to visit, a flight I'd booked or a place I hadn't seen before. Even deciding where I was going next gave me something to think about other than where I'd been.

That's one reason planning became important to me. When the future you've expected disappears, it's very easy to spend all your time examining the past. What happened? Why did it happen? Could I have done something differently? What if?

You can spend years asking those questions and still never get an answer that changes anything.

Planning something, however small, forces you to start thinking forward again. You don't need the next ten years mapped out. Sometimes next Tuesday will do.

Don't Mistake a Bad Day for a Bad Life

This is something I wish I'd understood much earlier. Starting again isn't a straight line. You can have three good weeks and then wake up one morning feeling as though you've gone backwards six months.

A song comes on, you find an old photograph, somebody mentions a place or a memory simply arrives without being invited. Suddenly you're back there.

I used to think those moments meant I wasn't getting anywhere. They don't. They mean you're human.

Eventually I stopped judging my entire life by whichever mood I happened to wake up in that morning. A bad day is a bad day. Sometimes it's two, occasionally it's a bloody week, but it doesn't automatically mean you've made the wrong decision or that the future is hopeless.

Tomorrow gets another turn.

You Don't Have to Prove Anything

There's another trap when you're starting again later in life: wanting everybody to see that you're doing brilliantly.

You're travelling, having fun and everything is absolutely fine. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting both.

There were periods of my life when the bloke everybody saw laughing, singing and buying the next round wasn't necessarily the same bloke who went home later. I've learned since that you don't owe anybody a performance.

You don't need to prove that leaving was the right decision, that you're happier than your ex or that somehow you've won the separation. You just need to build a life you actually want to live.

That takes longer, but it's worth considerably more.

Starting Again Is Mostly Ordinary

I'm 63 now, and when I look back at the years since I first had to start rebuilding my life, the things that eventually mattered weren't usually the dramatic ones. They were ordinary: meeting people, going places, music, friendships, learning to enjoy my own company, making plans and changing those plans when life changed again.

Slowly, I discovered that the future didn't need to look anything like the one I'd originally imagined for it still to be worth having.

Today I live in Tobago with Ann-Marie. If you'd shown the 50-year-old version of me a photograph of my life now, I wouldn't have had the faintest bloody idea how I was going to get there.

And that's probably the point.

If you're starting again after 50 — or 60, for that matter — you don't need to rebuild your entire life this afternoon. Find something that makes tomorrow worth getting up for, keep the things that still make you you, let go of the things you can no longer change and allow yourself the occasional bad day without deciding everything is falling apart.

Then keep moving.

You might not know exactly where you're going yet. Neither did I, and perhaps you don't need to.

— Billy