I began my training as a therapist as “the old guy” at fifty-six, when I entered NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. Reinvention at this age starts with resilience. Not the flowery kind, but the kind you earn after life has already tested you. In an earlier post, I wrote about looking in the mirror and asking who I wanted to become. This piece is about what happens when that inner commitment meets the external world.

My first internship at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). The welcome was not soft. In my interview, I was told, “You ARE white privilege. Buckle your seatbelt.” My entire presence was reduced to a single phrase. Later, at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), where I completed my analytic training, I felt out of step with my younger, mostly female classmates. Some commented on the “force” of my voice or expressed resentment if I did not “join in” when emotions ran high. I was engaged, but my way of showing up did not match the group’s style. I felt present, but unaligned.

These experiences, and others like them, taught me something essential. A “second act” requires perseverance because the systems you enter may not recognize you right away. You will walk into institutions that were not designed with you in mind, absorb projections that have nothing to do with you, and move through generational assumptions you did not create. Age, gender, race, and professional background will all shape how you are received. Reinvention is possible and deeply meaningful, but it is not frictionless.

And yet whenever I sat with a patient, the entire landscape shifted. None of the institutional dynamics mattered. My age was actually reassuring to many. My “identity” did not matter. What mattered was the human encounter. I found I could earn a patient’s trust fairly quickly, not through performance but through presence. Two people in a room, opening each other’s worlds a little at a time. And my supervisors saw both my potential and individuality, which grounded me when the institutional atmosphere felt alienating.

For anyone seeking reinvention in midlife, whether in psychotherapy or any other field, I want to be honest. The journey is possible and profoundly worth it, but it requires stamina, humility and the ability to stay centered when the environment does not immediately understand you. At the same time, we bring strengths that only come with age: perspective, steadiness, reflection, and the capacity to stay with discomfort without being overwhelmed by it.

I am now fully on the journey toward a reimagined professional independence. Reinvention is not just about changing careers. It is about becoming more fully yourself in spaces that may not immediately recognize you, and trusting that eventually the people who matter will see you clearly.