Confession: I’ve been avoiding this blog. But it weighs on me—maybe not as heavily as an albatross, maybe more like a spunky crow, that squawks in my ear about how much money I paid to sustain this site, gives me ideas for posts, grunts that I’m not writing them, and if I’m writing them, that I’m not posting them. I know, I know, I insist under my breath, wishing the crow would let me be.
The truth is, I don’t like writing about midlife crisis. I find the whole notion of midlife crisis suspect. I named Legs to Stand On “A Midlife Crisis Blog” mainly in hopes the familiar, well-used term would help the site appear higher in search rankings. Also, labeling the crux of my present unhappiness a midlife crisis that my incapacitation from a knee injury last year only worsened was my attempt to lend a bit of self-deprecating humor to a blog about regaining footing when it seems you’ve lost it, both literally and figuratively. Since the phrase has found its way into our common vernacular, however, I’m trying to find a way to harness its energy—to consider how it might lend momentum to meaningful living rather than suggest a halting thereof. And so, with this spunky crow hopping, flapping, and squawking at me, this post aims to do that.
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase, “midlife crisis”? For me, it makes me remember a fifty-year-old man I knew, who’d bought himself a Porsche convertible of which he was, noisily, very proud. He’d rhapsodize in cliches to me about how he loved driving through nearby neighborhoods on Saturdays—top down, gear low, wind in his hair, sun on his face. What he liked best, he said with a sheepish smile, was “cruising for women.”
middle-aged man tooling around in a convertible, leering at women—usually much younger women. Usually there’s a wife resentfully tolerating this behavior, hoping it stops at chasing women and nothing more. Or there’s no wife, no girlfriend, only a long line of chased women who lose their luster as soon as they’re “caught.” The middle-aged man in his top-down convertible cruises up to the curb of my thoughts—balding; a little creepy; shaky bravado masking a vague aura of apology—when I hear the phrase, “midlife crisis.”
With that as my image, it’s hard not to roll my eyes inwardly at the word “crisis.” It sounds so dramatic for describing what’s going on with a middle-aged man in a Porsche convertible. What about all the people who never get to have a midlife crisis because they never make it to midlife, or they’re in a hospital somewhere, fighting for their life? How dare anyone complain about having the opportunity to age? But “midlife crisis” lacks the grim gravitas of “depression,” which can indicate a mental health crisis. Unlike depression, “midlife crisis” isn’t a mental illness diagnosis. It was a term coined by a psychoanalyst named Elliott Jacques in 1957 in a paper on the working patterns of people in creative fields, where he noted a drop in productivity or sudden change in style at middle age and surmised that these changes reflected the dawning recognition of one’s mortality.
This article in The Atlantic details how Jacques’ term captured the zeitgeist and was elevated to being presumed a developmental, even biological, inevitability between the ages of 35 and 42. But then as researchers began formally examining this presumption, their findings suggested midlife crisis was more a cultural construct than a biological imperative, and only a comparatively small percentage of people experience it. Yet the notion has persisted because in it lies the promise of self-actualization, i.e., “If you hate your life, you can change it”—which, as the article points out, might only truly be possible for those in the middle and upper classes, particularly those who are white, professional, and male. Which might explain in part why I associate midlife crisis with a white, fifty-something male in a Porsche convertible.
I mention in the About section that here on the blog I go by “Charlie” and pretend to be a non-binary dachshund (why not?), in order to revel fully in this blog’s pseudonymity. It might be one reason why, given I’m not a white, human male—even if I’m also not technically a dachshund—I’m uncomfortable applying the term “midlife crisis” to my ongoing mid-forties malaise. It’s not a given it’s a midlife crisis I’m having; it’s a superficial term, one that doesn’t even mean anything clinically or culturally (even Elliott Jacques, its progenitor, abandoned the notion in his later years); and yet using it to identify the dissatisfaction and frustration I’m experiencing in my life now connects me to those of you who are reading. It says I’m experiencing something others experience, too, and while it might not be statistically significant, it’s significant enough that it has a name that everyone knows.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau said—and the term “midlife crisis” perhaps might provide a way to connect in our individual desperation. Though it bears saying that nowadays we’re all joined together in the throes of a growing social, economic, geopolitical, and environmental crisis, and our “quiet desperation” seems ever less of psychological and more of social origin. Perhaps, then, speaking of one’s disappointment and frustration at midlife as the commonly known “midlife crisis” lends a sense of personal agency—illusory or not—to what really, in today’s climate, harbingers a larger, societal crisis.
Recently a friend, let’s call her Heather, sent me an email containing nothing but a link. The URL contained the phrase, “life goals,” and I clicked the link with interest, thinking I’d find advice for ambitious people, people with goals, such as how to clearly identify or work toward goals—something at which I’m always trying to be better. What I found when I clicked the link was the headline, from The New York Times, “Feeling Stuck? Here are 5 Ways to Jumpstart Your Life.”
You know that feeling when you’re going about your day, ho hum, and suddenly someone says something, or something happens, that feels as though a hand dove out of nowhere, straight past your defenses, clean through your ribcage to your heart? Sometimes it feels like a caress, or like you’re being lifted up in strong arms and spun in the air under the sunshine of an immaculate sky. Other times it’s a piercing, not injurious to the heart, just bursting the bubble that held back your tenderer feelings, shielding you from them as much as from the strains and onslaughts of the day. And then there are those times when the hand, usually unintentionally, jabs its fingers directly into one of the heart’s unhealed wounds and you stand there breathless, invisible blood pouring from an invisible, yet poignant, injury. Receiving this link from Heather was one of those times. I gasped for air for a good while afterward.
That it was just the link, with no explanation of why the article made Heather think of me, or what her intention was in sending it, made it harder. It left much to my imagination. Is this how Heather sees me—as stuck? I wondered. Then, when I read the article, I found it was written in the format characteristic
of the kind of quick-fix-tips, self-help pieces newspapers like to publish—written by a so-called “expert” on the subject (“expert” typically meaning, academic degree and research published in the area of the article’s focus), sharing the tips with bullet points, and each point quoting or referencing another “expert” to lend broader credence to the tip. Among the tips: share your goals with others; spend time on activities that align with your values; work to reframe negative thoughts by examining objective evidence for and against each thought.
These tips are hardly new. They can help. But they’re no match for the way many of us personalize the reasons things in our lives aren’t working out as we’ve hoped. I made the wrong choice when I _____. I should have tried harder to _____. Maybe I’m just not good enough. When I tell myself these things, they’re accompanied by feelings of shame, grief, self-blame, guilt, indignation, anger. Each one of these feelings lacerate my heart—leaving tiny cuts that open up older, deeper wounds, those pertaining to worthiness, lovability, and the significance of my presence in this world.
It’s these longstanding wounds that make the path from feeling stuck to feeling unstuck much less pat than quick-fix articles such as this one imply. Hence, perhaps, why people in the comments section called the piece “obnoxious pablum” and “simplistic thinking about the complexity of a human struggling”; another suggested that “maybe feeling stuck isn’t something we can get out of with five quick tips”; and another pointed out that “the U.S. government could make a significant impact in the ‘jumpstart’ of people’s lives by providing universal basic income, forgiving student loan debt, and ensuring every single person has access to free healthcare…. We need to demand…more from those in power before expecting individuals to ‘knock down internal roadblocks.’”
These opinions echoed mine, but when I first read the article and felt the sensation of those fingers jabbing into my heart’s wounds, I simply felt reduced—to my current circumstances, in Heather’s eyes; by the NYT piece, to a basic, clock-like mechanism that could be reset with a few tweaks. And my friendship with Heather felt reduced to one where vulnerabilities shared are responded to with second-hand quick-fix advice rather than companionship in the understanding that sometimes we end up entangled in a problem or situation that persists in spite of all our best efforts to work through it, because some problems simply are bigger than we are or are a darkness life has delivered to us, neither fairly nor unfairly, through which we have no choice but to pass.
“Thanks for the article,” I typed in reply to Heather, “but I’m not stuck!” I rattled through a tedious paragraph detailing all the ways I was not stuck—past accomplishments, current accomplishments, my latest efforts, my anticipation of future accomplishments. I said I wasn’t stuck so much as lonely. There I stopped, because it’s loneliness that lacerates my heart the deepest; it’s the tar pit in which, you see?—I’m trying my very best to swim. “You see? Please see,” my clunky email beseeched implicitly of Heather. Please see me. Her email with what we later referred to as “the stuck article” made me feel she didn’t.
At a summer camp I attended when I was around nine, a porch in back of the cafeteria kitchen had an industrial-sized sink where we’d wash our water bottles, mess kits, and camp cookware when we returned from backpacking trips. Hanging from one of the porch’s wooden beams was a long, wide strip of fly paper dotted with winged victims, all motionless but, I believed, still alive. How awful for a fly to be buzzing along happy and carefree and then land there, I remember musing as I scrubbed the aluminum skillets and bowls. I wondered what a fly might think and do when it discovers it’s stuck. No doubt it struggles, haplessly, to free itself. It flaps its wings, but its legs are stuck in the goo on the paper. It tries to pry its legs loose one at a time, to no avail. Maybe it signals somehow to the neighboring flies for help, but they’re stuck, too, and can’t help.
What’s certain, what’s all-encompassing, for that stuck fly is its stuckness. But it doesn’t focus on its stuckness or define itself by it: as a fly, it’s meant to fly. It knows this. Out of both panic and prudence, its sole focus is on making itself unstuck. All its hope is toward not being stuck. Every bit of life force it has left is solely engaged in becoming unstuck, even if we can’t see its struggle due to the extent of its immobilization. So if another fly buzzes by and observes, “Hey, buddy, you’re stuck”—well, thanks, Captain Obvious, and also, ouch.
I knew my friend Heather intended only help, not harm, but her sending me that article felt a bit like a “fuck you,” a breezy fly-by pointing out something about me, or rather, my current circumstances, of which I am all too aware. I live by the hope that my circumstances don’t define me now and won’t in the future, and that they’re changeable, and I can effect that change. I’ve tried a great many things already, and as there’s no quick-fix or even really good solution—or not one I can see—I work to change what I can while researching and planning my next move. I’m the fly whose legs are stuck but whose wings are not; it’s about setting the wings in motion in such a way as to free the legs, wipe myself clean of the sticky goo, and fly onward and upward to perhaps something better. That’s what we hope for, isn’t it? Something better, so that we can say with a contented grin, “It just doesn’t get any better than this”—like flies who’ve alighted on a choice piece of feces, garbage, or rotting meat.
For a fly, it truly doesn’t get any better than that. For a human, I think it’s the flying that stokes us, more than where we land. Do we ever obsess over that landing, though. I thought I was headed for a particular landing. I aimed for it, maybe not always as deftly as I could, but I did aim, and instead I’ve found myself adhered to this strip of fly paper.
The fly paper. My malaise. My stuckness. My midlife crisis that I felt compelled to create an entire blog about, and believe me, right here is why I avoid posting to it: I berate myself that it’s all just self-pity, because, you know?—it started when I was laid up after knee surgery, and I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Even so, I’d been in private psychic pain since long before my knee exploded—for much of the past 10 years—and it wasn’t depression: I experienced depression for about three of these 10 years, and this is not that. This is something else, and I created this blog to have a place to discuss and examine it. So here it is, the fly paper:
I feel, every day, like I’m not where I’m supposed to be. I feel like I don’t belong where I am. Beyond geographically, I feel like I’m existing in the wrong time, that I was meant for a different time. I like and care about people in my life, but though I try, I don’t feel particularly connected to any but a few of them. I don’t feel seen; I often say I feel like my whole life is a ship passing in the night and no one knows I’m here. I feel that people like me, but don’t care about me, really—with a few exceptions, where I know I’m loved. I could leave my whole milieu and it wouldn’t make a dent, and I wouldn’t feel a loss, either. Something is not clicking for me. There are moments when I do feel that enlivenment, a real connection, and they show me indeed I’m not crazy, something is missing; it’s not just in my head. I work very hard to be present, to absorb the many blessings I have and embrace where I am, but I feel I’m just lying to myself, whistling in the dark, when I know this chapter of life has ended and the new chapter starts with something internal that I struggle, privately frustrated to tears, to find. In all of this, I simultaneously feel a clarity of being like I’ve never felt before. I’m proud of the person I’ve become, even as I feel utterly invisible to this world, save for just a few people, who assure me that what I feel inside, and what I feel myself to be, really be, is real on the outside, too. I feel very powerfully, also to the point of tears, that my life matters greatly, but somehow I’m failing to manifest that mattering. I fear I might be failing, or have failed. I feel so very small, but also very real, very *here* and alive. I feel I have much to give and yet no one seems to want it–or they want to be entertained but I don’t want to be anyone’s entertainer because I want, and need, something more, so much more. I know I’m capable of connecting, and yet what I’m met with too often isn’t enough for me, and I struggle with much guilt over that. Shouldn’t what you’re given be enough? Yet occasionally, like a beam of sunlight teasing the underside of the window shade and insisting on showing its brilliant yellow self to the darkened room, someone or something reveals to me that I’m not asking for too much—that in fact, I continue to not ask for enough, from myself most of all. I don’t know if this fly-paper train of thought has glued itself onto me or I onto it, but this whole strip tugs at me all day every day; it’s a wonder I haven’t gone mad, though maybe I have and yet…how is it that I feel such incredible clarity amid the confusion…and so much confusion at the clarity?
The fly paper is for me an insistent, persistent feeling, a “song” without words with a melody like an anvil or a drill pounding and boring into my brain, a silken whisper enveloping me as though I’m insect in a web or maybe a chrysalis.
Yes, maybe a chrysalis—I’ll get to that momentarily.
The effort to assign words to this feeling, as I’ve done here, doesn’t begin to capture what it feels like. Where in the world, how in the world, and with whom, can we, do we, share feelings like these? That’s why, in my email response to my friend Heather, I said I didn’t quite feel stuck so much as lonely and stopped there, for fear she might personalize my loneliness and think her friendship wasn’t “enough” for me. Although I admit that with this fly-paper feeling in my heart that I scarcely can articulate even to myself, and the article Heather sent from the NYT not even beginning to acknowledge the existential pit “feeling stuck” truly entails, indeed I did feel very lonely in Heather’s presence in that moment. It’s not her fault; it’s not mine; it happens between friends sometimes, and I’m okay with that. Heather assured me that she doesn’t see me as a “stuck person,” but simply wanted to acknowledge that she heard me when I’ve said I feel stuck, hence her sending me that article.
“So I did say that to you, didn’t I?” I said to Heather. “That I feel stuck?”
“Yes,” she said. “Which I know, to your email’s point, isn’t the same as being stuck.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks for seeing the difference. And I appreciate you thinking of me and sending me that article.”
She was only responding to what I had said about my experience. I had been the one to use the word, “stuck.” I had been the “fuck-you fly” flying by and spying myself seemingly mired in something and saying breezily, “Hey, you’re stuck!” Heather had taken the words straight from my own mouth. Only when my own words were spoken back to me did I bolt up out of my fly-paper goo and insist, “No, I’m not! I’m not stuck!”
I said above that Heather sending me that article left me gasping for air for a long while. It did because it made me realize that I was the victim of my own words and notions, not Heather’s nor anyone else’s. I’d said I was “stuck” when that’s not what I really believe, even if the existential pain I feel feels, often, like being stuck. I’ve said I’m having a midlife crisis when we know there’s not necessarily any such thing. And yet there are feelings associated with these words that are very, very real—circumstantially as well as psychologically.
In the aftermath of Heather’s email and our discussion about it, I wrote this in my journal: “‘Stuck’ feels like a rather blanket judgment of ourselves and others when we encounter uncertainty, or external or internal barriers we might be working to learn how to surmount. Philosophically speaking, you could say there’s not a moment in our lives when any one of us is not ‘stuck’—we’re all stuck with the limits of our imaginations and the limitations on the scope of our perception, and as if that’s not enough we could be stuck by the limitations of others’ imaginations and their scope of perception, that all together funnel us into lives we might not have deigned to live had we known there was something more (which there always is—hence, we’re always ‘stuck’ and some of us might never recognize just how much). In this light, the ‘uncertainty’ often denigrated as ‘stuckness’ actually is a preferable position, because it means our minds are forced to open and our imagination must engage to work us out of where we are; it means we’re not complacent, which is the most ‘stuck’ place of all (if necessary at times–a ‘secure’ resting place)…not to mention boring and banal like cruelty, at times, can be banal.”
Maybe we’re only stuck when we’re complacent. If we feel stuck, it means some part of us is dissatisfied and therefore we’re not complacent. If feelings we might have at midlife pose something we’d presume to call a “crisis,” we’re not complacent. What are these feelings but the desire for something more, or a sense of grief and doom that there might be nothing more and we’re not sure we accept that? In these moments, we’re not stuck; it seems rather that we’re taking flight, or are about to. That’s why I drew a parallel above between being a chrysalis and being an insect caught in a web and wrapped by the spider in a silken shroud. We are insects stuck in the web of our time and milieu. We also are chrysalises, ever-emerging with wings and readiness to fly. Growing and dying sometimes feel like the same thing. Is it a midlife crisis, or a midlife awakening?
Perhaps the notion of midlife crisis reveals the paucity of our language, and therefore our thinking, in reference to growth. We hear a lot about growth associated with generativity and productivity, but very little about growth associated with uncertainty, fear, failure, despair, or confusion, which tend to be construed as antithetical to productivity, as endings, as deaths, rather than beginnings. Why do so many of us keep holding our lives against a model of linear growth? I feel like I hear this all around me in our discourse. “Midlife crisis” or “stuckness” might not be the words for it, but maybe our so-called “quiet” desperation doesn’t need to be so quiet. Maybe we’d all benefit from writing what I’m calling, “fly papers.” I shared my fly paper above; what’s yours?
Copyright ©2024 Legs to Stand On. All rights reserved. Top photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash.
I really appreciated the depth of this piece; especially in the flypaper, ” In all of this, I simultaneously feel a clarity of being like I’ve never felt before. I’m proud of the person I’ve become, even as I feel utterly invisible to this world, save for just a few people, who assure me that what I feel inside, and what I feel myself to be, really be, is real on the outside, too. I feel very powerfully, also to the point of tears, that my life matters greatly, but somehow I’m failing to manifest that mattering.” It reminds me of what the alchemists speak of as “utter darkness”, the necessary stage of deep suffering preceding profound change. Thank you
Dear Rex,
Thanks so much for reading. I find myself wondering a lot about the necessity of deep suffering–is that what we tell ourselves in pain’s midst, to try to give purpose to the darkness? What about profound change also being possible through joy, meaningful connection, even simple pleasure? I wonder lately whether it’s neither darkness nor good fortune that are necessary, but rather presence–the ability to remain alert and to feel regardless of whether we’re suffering or reveling. I wonder whether this period of life I write about here I’ll look back upon as a necessity or a nexus of circumstances where long ago I could have said, “You know, this just isn’t good enough,” and moved away, rather than worked so hard to move through. In sum, I question whether profound change requires suffering, or whether suffering might sometimes impede growth. I suppose like most things, it can go either way. It’s so hard to tell, when we’re living it, isn’t it? Thanks for your thoughts.