Tag: midlife crisis

Another Word For It

“People may call what happens at midlife “a crisis”, but it’s not. It’s an unravelling- a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re “supposed” to live. The unravelling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.” – Brené Brown

I believe that I truly started “unravelling” when I turned 40 and the Great Recession started the ball rolling for me, in a big way. Unravelling can be painful, but it can also be so liberating. And it’s funny, we sometimes smugly think that we get to a point of being completely “unravelled”, but then we realize that we still get all tangled and tied up in knots, reminding us that we still have a long ways to go.

Our middle son is in medical school, and we were Facetiming with him last night. He is currently working and learning in the Crisis Trauma Unit in a major hospital in a major city in our country. He has seen and witnessed more in a few weeks than I hope to ever experience in my lifetime. (Those of you who are in the medical arts, thank you for heeding your calling. Thank you for putting your incredible talents towards the healing of others. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.) I asked our son last night if anything really unnerved him the most about his experience. Was there anything that really gave him pause, more than anything else that he had experienced? He told me that it was surreal to see a patient die who had been all “done up” for the day. Their makeup was in place, and their nails were freshly done. It struck him deeply that they had no idea that this would be their last day alive on Earth.

Maybe we are all just balls of yarn, unravelling. We will unravel until we come to the end of our own line of string. Our string gets intertwined and tangled up with others, throughout the days of our own unravelling, making patterns and connections, and then sometimes it rolls on, in a line, all by itself. We have no idea when or where our own ball of string ends, so we may as well enjoy our own unravelling. We may as well get all made up, get a manicure, and roll on with our days with purpose and curiosity and gusto, until one day, much to our own surprise, we reach the end of our string. We are completely unravelled. We are no longer twisted in knots. Our own unique line has been added to the blanket of Life. And we are free.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2319. Do you prefer vertical or horizontal stripes?

I Ain’t Mad

Fortune for the day –“Never blame your neighbor until you have been in his place.” – The Talmud

I’m struggling with some writer’s block this morning. Nothing is particularly striking out at me, to write about, or stirring up in the inside of me, to write about. I feel kind of “meh” and listless today, if I am going to be perfectly honest. So, I googled “What do middle-aged women want?” What I got back was a whole bunch of rants (albeit some them very poignant and funny) about how we middle-aged women are ignored. We are ignored by the beauty and fashion industry, in the corporate pay scales, by entitled children (except when they need something), etc. etc. One article was even complaining about the fact that middle-aged women are even ignored by sexual harassers. So then it seems, we middle-aged women get hurt and pissed by being largely ignored, and thus, we get grumpy, indignant and stand-offish. And who doesn’t want to stay clear of a grumpy, stand-offish, hormonal, middle-aged woman with a resting bitch face that could stop a tiger in its tracks? So essentially, we are made to feel that it is our fault that we are ignored. And that really gets our goat. Thus the vicious circle has us trapped. I don’t know what the answer to this is, ladies. I just write it as I see it. Sometimes it is easier to watch, than to engage.

Image result for funny memes about being a middle aged woman

The Happiness Curve

Above are pictures of charts that I took from an interesting book that I read over the weekend. The book is called The Happiness Curve Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch. The author is an award winning journalist, who set out to do some research as to explain what used to be known as the “midlife crisis”, which the author himself prefers to call a “slump.” The book sets out to show the interesting fact that in a time period in life where people have achieved a fair level of success in everything that they had set out to do: their careers, their families and relationships, hobbies, etc., many of us midlifers seem to feel a confusing, unexplained level of dissatisfaction. As shown in the above charts, our life satisfaction ratings are at the lowest that they will ever be, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a real reason for it. As the author writes “I’m dissatisfied with my life right now because. . . .(yet) there is nothing after the because.” The author starts the book offering these heartening statements:

“First, midlife slump (not “crisis”!) is completely normal and natural. Like . . . adolescence, it is a healthy if sometimes painful transition, and it serves a purpose by equipping you for a new stage of life. You may feel dissatisfied, but you don’t need to feel too worried about feeling dissatisfied.

Second, the post-midlife upturn is no mere transient change in mood: it is a change in our values and sources of satisfaction, a change in who we are. It often brings unexpected contentment that extends into old age and, yes, even into frailty and illness.

Third, by extending our life spans, modern medicine and public health have already added more than a decade to the upturn. . . . . Some sociologists call this new stage of life encore adulthood. Whatever you call it, it is a gift the likes of which mankind has never known before.”

What I liked best about the book was the positive reassurance. The book reassures us that it is normal and natural to feel that way that we do (science shows that even primates go through a midlife slump), during such a huge transitional time period in our lives. Just like we give a little more understanding to our teenagers, knowing they are going through a lot of big changes all at once, we have to offer that same kind of leeway and comfort to ourselves. While the book showed all of the research proving that this time period is an emotionally fraught period, it also showed the research that proves that this tough phase passes into something that is reportedly to be, many people’s most satisfying life periods ever. While we are in the trough, the author recommends that we normalize our feelings by opening up to spouses and partners and friends, who are likely feeling the same malaise, to interrupt our internal critics and stop with comparisons, to take care of our physical bodies with good nutrition, exercise and rest, to practice staying in the present moment, and to step (do NOT emotionally leap) into changes that you are wanting to make. He says in order to avoid impulsive moves that you might regret, you should make lateral moves in an incremental, constructive and logical manner. However, the author says that “the most important wisdom of all” is to wait and to sit in the knowing that it gets better. He says this:

“In the Voyage of Life, you are a plaything of forces larger than yourself, borne upon a stream you cannot control. So relinquish control. Trust the river. Trust time.”

The author speaks of walking with a fellow writer, a man whose life and work he had always admired. He was shocked when his friend admitted that he, himself, had experienced a midlife crisis/slump. His friend had this to say:

“Midlife crisis begins sometime in your forties, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about ten years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually this is pretty good.”

The author ends the book on this hopeful note:

“If I had to explain the upside of the U in just three words, the words I would use are these: Gratitude comes easier. That is the hidden gift of the happiness curve.

It is worth the wait.”

Big Balls

So, I did something really strange this week. (perhaps regular readers are used to me doing strange things) An electrician doing work in our house, was listening to the radio and AC/DC was playing. The song was “Big Balls.” This triggered a memory.

For those of you who are not familiar with “Big Balls”, here are the lyrics to the chorus:

I’ve got big balls
I’ve got big balls
And they’re such big balls
Dirty big balls
And he’s got big balls,
And she’s got big balls,
But we’ve got the biggest balls of them all!

The memory that got triggered by this interesting song is that the first time that I heard the “Big Balls” song is when I was introduced to it, late at night, at a sleepover, when I was in elementary school. We were giggling a lot, listening to it, and I am sure that my eyes were the size of saucers but I probably pretended that I already knew the lyrics. What bad-ass little kids, my friends and I must have been! Ha!

So, I thought about the friend who hosted the sleepover. She was one of my best friends in elementary school but we lost touch after that, as we never went to the same schools after elementary school. I remember her being daring, brutally honest and smart as a whip. Now, I don’t go on to Facebook very often, so I decided to just “Google” her name and the first site to come up, was her professional website. Turns out that my elementary school friend is currently a successful tax attorney in Chicago. Even though we haven’t seen each other in 40 years, I immediately recognized the piercing, “see right through you” expression on her face, on her professional, attractive, lawyer-ly picture that came with her bio.

Now, here comes the crazy part. I emailed my friend, at her law firm email address and I entitled the email “Blast from the Past.” I admitted, in my email, that the reason that she came to my mind was because of the “Big Balls” song. I gave a little blurb about my life and I asked how she was doing, hoping that she remembered me and then I sent it before I rationally thought about how weird and desperate and stalker-like the email could come across. (and I sent it to a lawyer . . . )

And then I waited. And then I started thinking rationally and feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing. I mean, people expect you to reach out on venues like Facebook and Instagram and Linked In, but sending a random email to someone you haven’t had contact with, in over 40 years, to their place of employment, discussing a song called “Big Balls”, started to seem a bit “out there”, even for me, the lady who doesn’t embarrass all that easily.

So then I started rationalizing. I allowed myself this crazy blip. This was perhaps, just an unfortunate lack of judgment. I have been very stressed, having my house swarming with workers and dust clouds. I’m probably in some kind of mild midlife crisis. I miss my kids. . . even the kids who still live here. (those of you with teenagers, know what I mean)

I had just finished reading a great book, a thriller, and I got to thinking that even if I didn’t hear back from my elementary school friend, I could turn this whole scenario into an excellent start of a psycho-thriller novel. A bored housewife reaches out on a whim to an old, intriguing friend, who still lives on the edge (remember she’s the one who introduced me to “Big Balls” when we were probably only nine or ten years old) who ends up working for a “law” firm, which secretly does espionage work for the government or the mob or the Russians. And somehow the bored housewife innocently gets involved in all of the intrigue, and has to outsmart the government (easy) or the mob or the Russians (less easy and more dangerous). I realize that this makes for a great premise of a best-selling novel. (and someone out there who is better at writing fiction than me, should definitely steal the idea – it has Hollywood written all over it) Anyway, I started getting overwhelmed thinking about all of the research and fiction writing classes, a book like this would entail, when I noticed that I had a new email message.

It was from my friend, of course. And she remembered me! And she was thrilled to hear from me! And she was glad that I didn’t look for her on Facebook because she, like me, has dropped off of that scene for the most part, too. The best part of the email was that she had recently heard a different AC/DC song (Dirty Deeds) and when she heard that song, she said that she thought about our fifth grade picnics and she reminded me of a few more people that were good childhood comrades who I had long forgotten about. She laughed about us listening to “Big Balls” at her house and she said while she doesn’t remember the instance, she now realizes that it was “wildly inappropriate”. (her words) I thought about that and I thought that probably a less “wildly inappropriate” song would not have stuck in my memory and I would not have likely reached out to her, forty years later and experienced some really nice email exchanges and fond laughs and impressions, about shared childhood memories.

I think that this is how the Universe works. The Universe does not know time. The Universe does know that “wildly inappropriate” can be used in wildly appropriate ways to bring joy and remembrance and connection to people, perhaps when they need those feelings the most. At the very least, I don’t regret my “Big Balls” decision to email my long, lost friend.