Are You in a Midlife Crisis or a Semicolon Season?

Why the most powerful thing you can do right now is pause.

Period (.)

Some chapters end with a period. That doesn’t mean the story is over.

It happened on a Tuesday.

I was mid-breakdown in aisle 7 of Staples, clutching a pack of gel pens like they were emotional support animals, when I saw it, on a poster above the clearance shelf:

“Life is a semicolon; not a period.”

I laughed. Out loud. In public. Alone.
And that’s when everything changed.

Up until that point, I lived like a period.

Full stop. Finish the task.

Check the box. Move on.

I was a recovering perfectionist, addicted to productivity crack and overly invested in sentence structure as a metaphor for life.

You know the type: color-coded Google Calendar, breathless ambition, a knack for ending things cleanly.

I wanted clarity. Closure. Completion.

Ellipsis (...)

When life trails off, let it. The next line begins when you're ready.

Then life, being the cheeky editor it is, introduced chaos:
A breakup, a layoff, and a surprise diagnosis, all in one month.

My clean sentences got hijacked by commas of confusion and ellipses of existential dread…

Suddenly, the idea of a neat, final period felt violent.

Semicolon (;)

This could’ve ended; but it didn’t.

I didn’t want a full stop anymore.
I wanted pause with possibility.

Space to breathe and continue.

I wanted to become... a semicolon.

Why?

Because a semicolon says: This could’ve ended, but it didn’t.

It whispers resilience. It winks at reinvention.

Comma (,)

Take a breath. Life continues after the pause.

But becoming a semicolon is harder than it looks.

First, you have to stop pretending you’re a bullet point.

Then, you have to survive all the commas: grief, guilt, gaslighting.

People kept asking, “What’s next?”

And I’d respond, “I’m in a semicolon season.”

Which they thought meant “midlife crisis,” but really meant: I’m still here.

Colon (:)

What comes next might just surprise you:

One night, I was about to quit writing—again.
The blinking cursor mocked me like a judgmental ex.

So I made a deal with myself:
No perfect paragraphs. No profound conclusions.

Just... one sentence.
And I ended it with a semicolon:

Not to be clever.
But because I was not done.

Parentheses ( )

(Not everything needs to be loud to matter.)

Since then, my life’s become a wild punctuation party.

Some days I’m an exclamation mark (!) too enthusiastic for my own good.
Other days, a set of parentheses (whispering soft truths to myself).

I’ve learned to dance with dashes (—) and befriend the ellipsis (…).

But mostly, I’m a semicolon; gracefully unfinished.

Underscore (_)

Still becoming. Still becoming. Still becoming.

I didn’t get the closure I once craved.
But I got something better:

A pause that honors the chaos.
A breath before the next clause.

And permission to write a life that’s messy, layered, and still in motion.

No bow. No final chapter. Just an underscore for what’s still becoming.

Ampersand (&)

You are allowed to be both healing & growing, breaking & blooming.

We all have semicolon moments.

The heartbreak that taught you how to rebuild.
The diagnosis that made you redefine what thriving means.
The project that flopped—and still opened a better door.

Life is punctuation.

Messy, imperfect, full of edits.

And: it continues.

Question Mark (?)

What if this isn't the end, but the middle of a better sentence?

So if you're dangling mid-sentence,
if your life feels like a draft with too many edits

don’t rush to wrap it up.

Maybe you’re just at the semicolon;

And the next line is still being written.

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