I went with my offspring last night to see the movie "Wanted" with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, and Morgan Freeman. In it a young man is beaten repeatedly when he fails to give an acceptable response to the question "why are you here?"

He has all kinds of answers. "I'm here to learn how to be an assassin," or something like that. "I'm here because you people came to me," he says, but I'm paraphrasing. Finally, after maybe the fourth beating he answers, "I'm here because I don't know who I am." The turning point.

I reflected, "Perhaps that's most of us. We're here taking a beating because we don't know who we are."

In my old life, not the one where I was married but the one during which I awakened and found myself going through a hellish divorce, I wrote something about how one day I realized my life was doing the Watusi and there was not much I could do to stop it. Back then I'd tell people that my husband had gone crazy. He was the one having a midlife crisis, not me, because men aren't in touch with their emotions and so they have crises when they start going bald or not being able to get it up. I am a woman having a health crisis, plain and simple, I'd tell myself, and that was causing me to re-evaluate my life.

I'd found out it was highly probable that I wouldn't live past age 52, that I was looking at a life-expectancy of 10 more years. I recall telling the husband back then that I needed time to think and to re-examine my priorities. He didn't get that news that you may be dying sooner than expected shakes a person up and asked the question, "Well, who's going to take care of me while you're examining your priorities?"

His question helped make one decision definite. Making a marriage work need not be one of the priorities under review. Still, the end of a 22-plus-year marriage is nothing to celebrate and when its end becomes a brutal court battle, your soul gives way.

Some of my early blog posts and Net writings sprang from pure rage. I wrote most of them at Confessions of a Jersey Goddess, which is no longer an active blog because I'm no longer in New Jersey nor have I been feeling very goddessy.

I had three Net personas back then. I was the WritingJunkie, Frillie the Dragon, and the Jersey Goddess. WritingJunkie was who I've always been because the desire to write has never left me. I started calling myself Frillie the Dragon, however, because I didn't know what to do with all the anger inside me and couldn't figure out why I was always blowing up at people. I'm a short woman but I would blow up at people in writing and in person in a way that would make people a foot taller than I am cringe. Then one night I had a dream about the frilled-neck lizard of Australia. I woke up thinking, "Hey, that's me!"

The revelation struck me as strange since I've always been afraid of lizards. Nevertheless, I also felt the dream contained personal spiritual truth and went online to look up this creature. As I researched frilled-neck lizards, I discovered that they blow up the frills around their necks and do a heap of hissing to make their opponents/predators believe that they are not a small reptile but a huge threat not to be taken lightly. However, these lizard are harmless and only bite if cornered. In fact, they run away shortly after making with the big scary frill and hiss. They generate drama because they are afraid.

Yeah, that was me. At the time I was a 40-something woman facing divorce, angry at the turn my life had taken, facing what I once thought was the love of my life in court as the villain of my world, and feeling alone because my mother, my life's biggest anchor, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and showed signs of demential. My life was in full-state flux, and I was terrified. Like the frilled-neck lizard, I blew up to make myself seem big and scary in a world that I suspected was out to get me.

I'm so glad that stage of my life is over. However, I'm also glad I identified myself as Frillie for a time. Frilled-neck lizards flourish after their habitats have been destroyed by fire. If I was that lizard, then I was also a survivor.

While accepting that I was Frillie the Dragon who needed to stop trying to fool people and admit she was scared but also that she was strong enough to make it through fire, I became the Jersey Goddess. That was a branding decision based partially on living in Jersey. Still, it was also me wanting to declare "I am here and I am wonderful no matter what anyone else says." The problem was I didn't believe that for one minute, at least not deep down, and most of what I wrote was a tongue-in-cheek poke at myself thinking I mattered in the world. Surprisingly, people, especially men, bought the act and started calling me "goddess."

Today my life is much more quiet, despite my elderly parents and two children living with me. But what does quiet time do but give you time to think? The blog I have today, Whose Shoes are These Anyway?, is not the blog I started to show I'd moved from Jersey back to Louisiana. That other old blog, now dead, was "Two Miles from a Dive," and indicated that I lived about two miles from Lake Pontchartrain and so could dive in any minute, always on the cusp of jumping, always on the edge.

I was back home in Louisiana, helping to take care of my mother, who'd broken her leg at the time and who was in and out of the hospital. I left blogging for a time. My whole life was too personal and my nerves twisted too tightly to write anything that meant anything. I wanted privacy and time to process the steps that had brought me to a life I didn't recognize.

This thinking through my life, however, was not conscious. The review was a pot bubbling on the backburner, while I juggled more changes that terrified me. In that pot boiled the expectations others had of me, a scrutiny of my parents, in particular the mother who no longer knows who I am. I considered also my brother's bizarre view of me as the golden child in my parents' eyes, an image I find ludicrous. A re-examination of what it means to be a mother also floated in the pot since my children no longer need diapers changed or help with homework and struggle to find themselves. Finally, whatever dreams of me in the future worthy that I could still entertain also stewed. And so, I went online and created a new blog, Whose Shoes are These Anyway?, but months went by before I added a post.

I would open the blog and gaze at its intimidating emptiness. I fretted that perhaps I am not the writer anymore. What did that mean? I've always written. Maybe I'm nothing, I thought, and I trembled also at my fragile memory. Where are my glasses? What did I do with my keys? Why am I in this room? Will I become my mother, a once-smart woman who doesn't know her own name?

I held a job in my old field for a hot minute. Hated it. Quit. And then I slept for a week, only emerging for my room to do what duties I could not escape, ignoring anyone who beckoned that I be a social creature, and felt guilty about hiding from life. The pot on the backburner bubbled and chided, "This can't be you. What do you love? Revive yourself, woman!"

So, I forced myself to make future-shaping decisions. I started posting to that empty blog and worked at exploring what other women have to say who are my own age. Through BlogHer, I discovered MidlifeBloggers and began reading the posts by bloggers who admit they're facing midlife. But that's not me, I thought. Midlife challenges and midlife crises, so cliche. If I were in a midlife crisis, I'd know it, and anyway, nobody pegs me anything. I'm just me.

It's weird. On one hand we hate being labeled but on the other we want to fit in.

Still, there the midlife bloggers were, talking about failing eyesight, how to dress after 40, dating at 50, recovering from divorce, making decisions that had other people thinking that perhaps they were crazy, and defining their experiences:

A midlife crisis is a wake up call to change the things that haven’t been working in our lives for years, but just seemed too hard to do anything about. Things like difficult emotions, spouses, and careers. It is a timely, natural awakening which tells us we only have so much time left, so if we’re going to change something..now is the time! It can also be an adventurous attempt at “do-overs” before it is all over. (Midlife Crisis Queen)

Oh-oh. That is me. Perhaps it's been hard to see because of the health crisis, and the divorce, the ex-created drama, Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, and all the upheaval in my family since, but I'm in midlife, and I'm looking at do-overs and how to make the right decisions for my own life and future.

Life's quiet at the moment. Maybe the crisis is over, but the midlife's still here, and I'm not Frillie the Dragon putting on a show when I'm scared. Neither am I pretending to be a goddess or seeking to prove anything to anyone other than myself.

During a course recently, I heard a good quote that the speaker attributed to Rita Mae Brown:

“A woman is like a tea bag… you don’t know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.”

I have been able to neither prove nor disprove that Ms. Brown said this, but I like the quote anyway, which brings me back to what the main character, Wesley Gibson, said in the movie Wanted, that he was there taking a beating because he didn't know who he was.

Do I know who I am? Yes, yes I do. I'm a woman in midlife who's stronger. Whatever the next crisis, I'll make it through.

Nordette is a BlogHer Contributing Editor whose personal blog is at this link.