Last month, we invited readers to take a short survey about some of the challenges, concerns, and joys of midlife. Amanda and I are dedicated to making sure we’re serving you well at this site with meaningful content. (Click here to learn about the Perennial Gen mission.)

More than 80 of you took the survey! Here’s a quick summary of what you had to say:

We had respondents from across the age spectrum, but nearly half were between 50-59.

We offered a cafeteria menu of positive and negative adjective choices in response to the question “How would you describe this time of your life?”. The top answer was “grateful”. Other positive words like “hopeful” and “optimistic” were also high vote-getters. There was a significant number of reported this stage of life left them lonely, worried, or confused, to be sure. We left space for people to add their own descriptors, and some of those included words like “tired”, “unsteady”, “undervalued”, and “in limbo”. One respondent told us this time of life was a mixed bag. Because we encouraged people to choose as many words as applied rather than requiring them to pick one or three, it seems a lot of our respondents felt the same way.

We invited people to tell us what the biggest challenge they’re facing right now in their lives. Here is a small sampling of what they told us:

  • Feeling like I don’t belong
  • Wanting to make my remaining years count for something
  • Preparing for my next steps professionally while launching my kids
  • My marriage
  • Declining health
  • Financial anxiety
  • Relationships with my adult children (Editor’s note: This is our theme for next month at the blog!)
  • Finding my purpose
  • Having faith in God when he no longer seems real

We also sought suggestions for topics you’d like to see addressed on this site. There were some AMAZING ideas including:

  • How to look back on your life
  • Fashion, our changing appearance, our changing bodies
  • Our relationship with the Church – finding a place now that our children are gone, feeling as though we’re done with Church, women in the Church, healing from Church
  • Midlife sexuality
  • Grief
  • Sandwich generation concerns, caregiving issues
  • Prodigal children
  • Singleness at midlife
  • Stages of faith and spiritual growth

We’ll be announcing our monthly theme list for 2018 soon. But please know that if you have a topic you’d like to address that doesn’t fit the monthly theme, hit us up anyway. We’re always looking for compelling content. Click here to find out how to connect with us.

The final question on our survey mentioned that we are considering putting together a one-day “in real life” gathering designed to make some space to prayerfully, honestly address some of the questions and issues midlife women are facing. The idea has garnered a lot of positive response. We’ll keep you posted as we work toward this goal.

A great big PerGen thank you to each of you who responded to the survey – and to all of you who are reading and sharing from our site.