When the Control Machine Runs Out of Things to Run

When you have no team, no kid at home, and no marriage, the Type A energy has to go somewhere. Mine came for me.

No team. No kid in the house. No marriage. The intensity that built everything had to go somewhere.

It came for me.

I’m 55 in August, and I’ve spent the last few years quietly learning what happens when a Type A operator runs out of legitimate things to control. I used to run a company with a hundred employees.

I came home to a daughter who needed dinner and rides and someone to be there. I was married for most of my adult life. There was always a person, a project, a payroll, a problem. Always something that needed me to put my hand on it and keep it moving.

Then, one by one, the things I was responsible for went away. The team (I became a solopreneur), The marriage. The oldest daughter married. The youngest daughter to college. The dating world I tried briefly and walked back out of.

And it was just me.

The Operating System

I built a business on a vibe of growth.

If something stops growing, it really haunts me. I’ve walked away from platforms, whole income streams, and businesses that stopped growing. Anything degenerative gets cut, because I refuse to feed something that’s dying with energy I could be feeding something alive.

To be fair, sometimes I let them lay dormant and bring them back later. And that’s OK. But if it’s getting my energy, and going backwards, I usually move on.

That growth vibe built me a multi-six-figure solo operation. It built me freedom. It built me a life where the income runs without me, where I get to wake up slowly, where I’m leaving for Ireland alone in September because nobody’s stopping me.

It was also the rule I tried, quietly and for years, to run on my own body.

You can probably already see why that didn’t work.

Six People in My Family, Six Ways to Age

I have three siblings, a mother who’s 75, and a grandmother I was close to. Six people. Six entirely different relationships with getting older.

My grandmother was a polisher. She would not leave the house without makeup, and she lived to nearly 90 looking like the best version of herself in every room.

My mother is a complainer. So she is open with how much she doesn’t like the aging process. She does not feel old on the inside, she does not want to be old, and she does not want to be respected as an elder. Don’t even try to put her in room with the people her age. Because she doesn’t see herself that way, although she also doesn’t try to optimize her appearance like my Grandmother did.

My older brother is more optimistic about aging. He thinks he’s 30. He knows his knees disagree. He doesn’t care. He spend no time in the idea that is “older”.

My younger brother almost never talks about it.

My sister, eleven months younger than me, is in full acceptance — gray hair, every wrinkle earned, fine with whatever the mirror shows.

And then there’s me. I fight all of it.

I’m the only one of us doing this. Not the polishing. Not the complaint. Not the denial. Not the acceptance. I fight. I try to control it. And until recently I didn’t understand why.

Turning 30

The first time the fight showed itself I was 30 years old.

I was the most depressed I have ever been in my entire life. Not because anything was wrong. Because of a number.

I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to acknowledge the day. My then-boyfriend of 9-years (the law almost already had us married so I count it all) made me get up because he had planned a surprise party I didn’t know about and proposed that same night.

There’s a picture from that day where I’m smiling, and inside that smile is a woman who genuinely believed her best years had just ended.

I am now nearly twice that age, and I want to reach through the photo and shake her.

But here’s the part I have to be honest about. She wasn’t entirely wrong. Thirty is, biologically, when the body starts the slow turn. It’s where every health metric is measured against.

It is, in a real way, the top of the mountain. Anyone who tells you age is just a number is selling you something. Age is a number, and it has meaning, and pretending it doesn’t is its own form of dishonesty.

What I didn’t understand at 30 was that the actual problem wasn’t the number. The actual problem was the operating system.