After 23 years of living together, two wonderful children, and my first husband working abroad all week, everything seemed perfect.

And then everything fell apart.

The question nobody asks

The marital crisis of my thirties confronted me with something no book had prepared me for.

One evening, in that large cold house, I found myself alone with a question I had been avoiding for years : who am I outside of what I do for others ?

Mother. Wife. Assistant. Organiser. Family logistics manager.

I had been all of those things with a great deal of love. But somewhere between Niort, London, Montreal, and the return to France, I had lost the thread of myself.

Answers arrive where you are not looking

A psychologist lent me an ear. She helped me out of depression and helped me rebuild my confidence. She was the one who got me back on my feet.

But it was a Qi Gong class in a small village in central France that gave me something else, a way of inhabiting my body, of synchronising my breath with my movement, of returning to myself through practice.

I was so at ease that I became an impromptu teacher a few months later. It was exactly what I needed, unplanned.

What reconstruction taught me

My thirties did not teach me to avoid crises. They taught me how to cross them.

I learned that identity is not built in the easy moments but in the cracks, in the uncomfortable questions, the sleepless nights, the new beginnings.

We said nothing to the children about the marital crisis. We still had the same love for them. And we chose to stay, not out of habit, but out of conscious choice.

That is perhaps the hardest lesson of my thirties : love is not a feeling that arrives. It is a choice you make, again and again.

What that decade left me with

A Qi Gong practice that never left me. A rebuilt self-confidence, stronger than the original. And the certainty that the decades that break us are also the ones that define us.

This is what I write about in Volume 4 of The Strawberry Wisdom, the thirties, the decade when you truly find yourself, often despite yourself.

This week's question

Which crisis of your thirties helped you find yourself the most, and what did you discover about yourself in the cracks ?

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Elisabeth Court, known as Babette
Author of The Strawberry Wisdom