Sara’s View of Life with Sara Troy. On air from April 28th

I’m your host, Sara Troy, and this is my fifth decade in the series of seven shows reflecting on my seventy-one years of life. Each episode looks at one decade, and this one is my forties into my fifties. If you want the wider life story, with more of the detail and perspective, that lives in my book, Sara’s Self-Discovery to Soul Living. But today, I want to share what this decade truly felt like, because my forties were a very tumultuous time, yet also the beginning of my liberation.

When I turned forty, we had a restaurant, but we simply could not sustain it. I had three children at home, and although I was only meant to work lunches, I ended up working evenings as well. Between the business, the partnership, the demands of family life, and the stress of trying to hold everything together, it became too much. We stepped away from the restaurant, and I went back to being at home full-time with the children, which in many ways was exactly where I needed to be. My children needed me, and I was always the mother who made home the gathering place. There was tea, biscuits, food after school, friends around the table, and usually one more child staying for supper than I expected. By then my children were in their teens, and anyone who has lived through teenagers knows that those years can be a roller coaster all of their own.

But while I was trying to be that constant for everyone else, my marriage was unravelling. From the outside, we looked like a happy family. People saw the surface, and they believed the surface. They did not see the emotional depletion happening behind closed doors. My husband never physically struck me, but he had a way of browbeating and draining the life out of me. I used to say it was like the Dementors in Harry Potter, sucking everything out until there was very little left the next day. I found myself constantly bracing for what mood would come home through the door. My mother used to say she could tell what kind of evening it would be by the way my father drove up the driveway, and I understood that all too well. I was living that same uncertainty.

This was the decade where loneliness truly settled in. Not the loneliness of being physically alone, but the far deeper loneliness of feeling unseen, unheard, and unsupported while surrounded by people. I was the one others came to for help, for insight, for support, for care. I was reading for people, counselling people, helping wherever I could. But I had no one I felt I could truly lean on. I was the help. And when the one who is always helping needs help, very few people know how to respond. So I retreated inward. I switched off in order to survive. There was still a genuine Sara there on the outside, but inwardly my soul and spirit had pulled back for protection.

And yet, in the midst of all that darkness, something began to stir. At forty-six, we got our first computer. It was the old dial-up era, when if someone picked up the phone, the internet died. But that computer brought something back to life in me. I started writing articles for my brother’s magazine, and for the first time in a long while, I realized I had a voice. Yes, he corrected my spelling and grammar, and thank goodness for that, but I insisted that he not correct my voice. I may be dyslexic and ADD, but the way I speak to people, the way I write from the heart, that mattered. And people responded. One article I wrote even helped save a woman’s marriage, because she recognized herself in it and chose to reconnect with her husband instead of escaping into fantasy. That was a revelation to me. Something I wrote mattered. My voice mattered. Sara mattered.

Still, the outer chaos did not stop. I was running the household, caring for three teenagers, volunteering at school, picking up the pieces of whatever crisis came next, and trying to keep everyone fed, clothed, and emotionally afloat. Financially, I was trapped. I had no real independence and had to ask for money for groceries, petrol, and whatever the children needed. If I wanted something for myself, I found it secondhand or on discount and worked it into the grocery budget. Every attempt to step into something independent seemed to collapse under the weight of family demands or circumstance. So there I was, trying to hold it all together while slowly disappearing inside it.

Then came the house fire. That alone could have broken us. We had already gone through a terrible renovation with people who took our money and left us in a half-finished, unsafe home. Then one night I heard something, jumped out of bed, and looked out the window just as flames shot up outside. I slammed the window shut in time. Had I not reacted in that moment, the curtains would have gone up and the fire would have raced through the house. We got everyone out, but the trauma of what followed was immense. We were moved from place to place while the house was rebuilt, and once again, I was the one dealing with the insurance people, the rebuilding, the replacing, the decisions, the daily management of it all. Every single day, I was there, handling what needed to be handled, while still trying to mother my children through it.

Around that same time, my body began to break down in a way I could no longer ignore. In 1997, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, though I had likely already been living with it for some time. Not much was understood about it then. All I knew was that my body was in pain, my energy was collapsing, and my health was becoming one more thing I had to carry. Looking back, it was the great cosmic warning. It was life telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I could not continue living the way I was living. The stress, the suppression, the loneliness, the emotional abuse, the responsibility, the fear, the constant depletion, it was all taking a profound toll.

What was so difficult was that I thought I was protecting the children by staying. I thought if I could just absorb it myself and get them through school, then I could leave later. But they were feeling it too. They were living in the same house, breathing in the same repression, watching the same tensions, and being shaped by it all. I know now that the last years of that decade were hard on them, and I carry sorrow for not being able to be stronger for them. I was trying. I truly was. But by then I had so little left to give. I was depleted in every sense.

And yet, this was also the beginning of self-discovery. Spiritual work I had done earlier in that decade had already started to clear some of the inner walls I had carried for years, and I began asking the deeper questions. Who is Sara now? What is mine, and what has simply been imposed upon me? What am I here to do? What kind of life is this, if I am vanishing inside it? The more I began to reawaken to myself, the more conflict intensified, because what had once been controlled was starting to rise again. And when I finally asked for a divorce, just before my fiftieth birthday, the answer I got told me everything: that a spiritual woman had taken away the control he had over me. My answer was simple. That is exactly why I want the divorce.

So this fifth decade was the decade of survival, loneliness, awakening, illness, and the beginning of reclaiming myself. It was ugly at times. It was exhausting. It aged me. It wounded me. It forced me inward. But it also brought me to the threshold of my own return. It was the beginning of the self-discovery that would define everything that came next.

And that is why I encourage you to do your own decades. Write them. Speak them. Record them. Share them with family, or leave them behind as part of your legacy. Because when we revisit what we have lived through, we begin to see the courage we had, the resilience we found, and the strength that brought us to where we are today. Our decades matter. Our stories matter. And in sharing them, we not only understand ourselves more deeply, we give others permission to understand their own lives as well.

Until next time, when we step into the next decade, bye for now.

AMAZON

FIND ALL SEVEN DECADES HERE

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