Starting Over at 46 Wasn’t the Plan
At 46, I lost my job and returned to Bulgaria after more than two decades in the United States. Now I’m rebuilding my life and starting a business while recovering my health. Here’s what starting over looks like when you’re still figuring it out.
Dani
9/18/20263 min read
At 46, I lost the job I had expected to keep until retirement.
I had been teaching Bulgarian to American diplomats at the U.S. State Department. After more than two decades in the United States, I thought I knew what the next part of my life would look like. I had already been through divorce and years of serious health problems. Keeping my job through all of that had given me some sense of stability.
Then my contract ended. My health insurance went with it, and eventually, so did my home.
By December, I was back in Bulgaria, living with my parents and trying to figure out what I could do next.
It’s tempting to turn that into a neat story about reinvention. The woman loses everything, discovers her purpose, and builds a wonderful new life. Preferably with good lighting.
I’m still in the middle of mine.
Recovery has taken longer than I would like. I’m building a business while rebuilding my health, and some days I have more confidence in that decision than others. What I do know is that judging myself for having to start over doesn’t help me decide what to do next.
For a while, those two things were difficult to separate.
I could look at the facts of my situation and understand how I had ended up there. But emotionally, being back at my parents’ apartment at 46 felt very different from explaining a series of events. I had built an independent life in another country. Now I needed help.
There is grief in that. You can be grateful to have somewhere to go and still be devastated that you need to go there.
That’s why I struggle with advice that makes every loss sound like a breakthrough. Sometimes a job was meaningful, and you wanted to keep it. Illness can take away things you genuinely loved. You don’t have to decide your old life was wrong for you before you’re allowed to build another one.
I wanted parts of mine back. Accepting that they were gone took time.
Eventually, though, I had to work with the situation I actually had. My health affected how much I could do. Money mattered. Any plans I made needed to account for both, even when I wished I could move faster.
That changed the questions I was asking.
Instead of trying to work out how to get my whole life back on track, I started looking at what I could realistically build from where I was. I began writing on Substack because it was the lowest-energy format I could manage at the time. Writing gave me a way to begin while I was still figuring things out.
My work experience mattered, too. Losing my job hadn’t erased everything I knew about teaching, researching problems, or helping people understand something complicated. Those skills were still useful. Finding a different way to use them would take work, but I had something to work with.
The harder part was accepting that experience wouldn’t protect me from uncertainty. I could make thoughtful decisions and still get things wrong. Starting a business came with risks of its own, especially when I had less room for an expensive mistake.
So when I think of starting over as a strategy, that’s what I mean: making decisions based on my circumstances, checking my assumptions, and being willing to change direction when something doesn’t work.
It’s less exciting than a dramatic reinvention. It also gives me something to do on an ordinary Tuesday.
If you’re starting over in midlife, you may be grieving a future you thought was settled. Perhaps you’re embarrassed about needing support, or exhausted by the number of decisions waiting for you. A motivational quote probably won’t do much for any of that.
You might need time to recover before you can make a bigger move. Your next step could be temporary work, learning a skill, or investigating an idea before committing your savings to it. What makes sense will depend on your life.
I’m still working out what makes sense for mine. At 46, I had to begin again under circumstances I would never have chosen. I can acknowledge how much that hurt and still take responsibility for what I do next.
For now, that means building carefully enough that my health and my finances have a say in the plan.
