about this blog

Welcome!

First, thank you for visiting! Legs to Stand On is a midlife crisis blog. While it discusses details from its author’s own avowed midlife crisis, my hope in starting this blog is that it will evolve into a community of people—you—who might also be in the throes of questioning the trajectory of their lives so far, pinpointing what they want to change or build upon, and trying to figure out how to achieve that.

There’s all kinds of self-help out there that offers tips on how to build the life you want. When I scroll through Twitter, it seems like everybody is offering soundbites on emotional well-being, self-care, and managing or banishing “toxic” relationships. And as of January 2023, a Google search for “midlife crisis” turns up nearly six-million hits. Everyone seems to know the phrase, “midlife crisis,” so you’d think it would be a regular topic of conversation among friends, colleagues, and family members. At least in my experience, however, it doesn’t seem that a midlife crisis is openly discussed at all. Legs to Stand On is dedicated to such discussion, with the intent that no one undergoing some process of intense introspection and self- and life-questioning and who finds their way here should have to feel alone.

Connecting instead of performing

It’s difficult to talk about midlife crises because by definition they involve a measure of dissatisfaction with where we’ve arrived in life, and sometimes, too, with who we’ve arrived there with or who we ended up with once we got there. People close to us might take it personally if we complain too openly about our persistent ennui or even despair. They also might find us too depressing to be around. At least for me, it has seemed safer to keep my discontent and restlessness close to my chest until I figure out what these feelings are telling me and what I need to do about it.

A few years ago, I felt so disappointed with where my life had ended up that I fell into a depression that lasted a few years. I didn’t feel like I could reach out to anyone. I felt like a misfit in my own life and in the small, rural community in which I lived at the time, like I wasn’t where I was “supposed” to be or doing what I was “supposed” to be doing. I didn’t want to call attention to how alien I felt. Everyone

around me seemed to belong and to be exactly where they wanted and were meant to be. Also, I simply didn’t know how to look someone in the eye and admit I felt so utterly hopeless, miserable, and like a failure.

I’d never been overwhelmed to such a degree by these feelings. Instead of communicating, I vanished from civilization as often as possible to restore myself with solo hikes and backpacking trips in the wilderness. It actually worked somewhat: Nature can be rough, but it accepts everyone, unlike how alienating our social milieu sometimes can feel, with all its myriad expectations and inequalities. I’ll talk about those solo adventures, and you probably can tell already that I love the outdoors given all of the outdoors-themed photos on this site.

Of course, it’s perfectly normal not to discuss our more vulnerable emotions or our desires or disappointments with acquaintances, and sometimes not even with our closest friends. We’re all performers to some degree. It’s how we get by. But the extent to which we rely on performing with one another with these myriad masks we’ve learned to wear is never more evident than when we’re questioning our lives and relationships, maybe feeling disappointment or even despair. It’s because when we’re down or privately in crisis, we have to work so much harder to perform, to appear as the person our social milieu expects us to be.

I want to do in this blog what I couldn’t do during my extended depressive episode. I want to share honestly my self-avowed midlife crisis with you, my readers, as fellow travelers who have crossed paths on our way to our respective destinations, wherever they may be. And if you feel moved to share your experience in the comments, I hope you will.

Writing as connection...and manifestation

The subject of writing is featured in Legs to Stand On because it’s my profession; it’s part of my midlife crisis because I regret not pursuing this profession when I was younger and knew I wanted to be a writer. Beyond that, writing is harnessed in this blog as though it’s wind power on a wind farm. One power of writing is that the more true the writer manages to be to the emotions behind what they’re saying, the more their words resonate with readers. My hope is that you might see yourself at times in what I write here, and find yourself thinking, “Me, too.” I hope you might find the comfort from my words and experience that I’ve found lacking from our social discourse generally amid my own midlife crisis.

Another power of writing is to change lives. Franz Kafka said:

“…we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

When we’re moved by what we read, whether a book, a blog post, a Tweet, a text—anything that’s written, that rattles us emotionally in some way—it’s like snow melting on mountaintops and feeding the creeks, lakes, streams, and rivers, raising them higher, moving them faster, nourishing all kinds of growth and life. Writing is manifestation. Things start happening in our lives when we’re moved by what we read and write. You no doubt already know this but I’ll admit that until I started writing what will be my first book a few years ago (more on that in the blog posts), I didn’t realize just how much really trying to tell a story you care about opens your eyes. You begin to see the story beneath the story, the story you didn’t know you were trying to tell. That’s the story that’s really happening inside you. And reading is an act of storytelling, too, where you’re simultaneously telling yourself the story of what you’re feeling and relating to, and what it “means.” Henry James wrote in a letter to a friend, “In the arts, feeling is always meaning.” This is true for writer and reader both, and it awes me, how powerfully true James’ maxim is.

So what I hope also to accomplish through this blog is to harness writing’s powers to write myself out of my midlife crisis. This isn’t a blog of wallowing, though I will be honest about the feelings of failure, frustration, and disappointment I often have. It’s a blog of hope, and beyond inspiration, maybe galvanization, at times. This is a blog where its author finds their “legs to stand on” (here’s my post about what inspired me to choose this blog title). I hope it helps you find your own legs, too—or, if already found, to stand more firmly on them.

Topics of midlife crisis

These are the categories I envision the posts on this blog will fall into:

Productivity and when enough is enough
Dreams, goals, and plans—building them, achieving them
The daily struggle to live up to who you want to be, and sometimes, just to survive
What is failure?
What is success?
Who gets to define what success and failure are?
Achievements—are they really so important and if so, why?
The spiritual, physical, and psychological benefits of outdoor recreation
Fitness
Injury recovery and illusions of immortality
Perfectionism
Writing—the craft, practice, struggles, and writings/authors that/who incite and inspire me
Being an artist in a world that often seems it could care less about art and artists
Relationships of all kinds and what standards we should hold
…and other things I come up with as this blog grows

Also, I welcome suggestions on topics and categories. If you think there’s some aspect of midlife crisis I should talk about that I haven’t yet, please let me know!

About me

Charlie is a pseudonym. This might seem counter to my intent for honesty, but if I’m going to share details of my life in the midst of questioning it, I want to feel safe to question and comment freely on my experiences and observations without people in my life, present, past, and future, knowing everything I’m thinking and feeling—especially because some of what I’m thinking and feeling could be about them. I don’t want to compromise anyone’s privacy—mine nor that of the people in my life nor of readers who comment here.

I chose a gender-neutral pseudonym because I like the idea of being able to exist in at least one space where I don’t have to reveal my gender identity, or be immediately presumed to be one gender or another by my appearance. That can be such a shackle. On this blog, I want to be known as my words, while their creator gets to be out in the world, anonymous. What I say at any given moment isn’t who I am, and that would be true even if I used my real name, bio, and photo here.

You’ll learn plenty about me in the blog posts. For now, here’s Charlie’s portrait. Just kidding, but one thing about me is that I love dachshunds, so while I’m under a pseudonym and my gender and sexual identities are unknown, it’s fun to pretend that I’m a cute [and very loquacious] little wiener dog—a wiener dog undergoing a wiener-dog midlife crisis. (Hmm…I just might have to write a post about a dachshund-style midlife crisis.)

One final note

You don’t have to be in midlife to have a “midlife crisis,” more generally known as an existential or life crisis. When I was thirteen, I wrote an essay for English class entitled, “Midlife Crisis at Thirteen-and-a-Half,” where I posed the question, Have I accomplished anything yet? I didn’t mean typical age-thirteen accomplishments like getting straight A’s or experiencing my first kiss—I was precocious there; I had my first kiss at age eight—but accomplishments that might make me matter in the eyes of the world beyond my middle school, family, and town. If I died, would I be remembered for anything? I wrote that I wasn’t sure, and that I’d have to live a long life so that I could accomplish a lot of things, and then I might be remembered. Then I might matter.

So from my own experience I know it’s possible to have what commonly is billed as a “midlife” crisis at any age. Whether you’re thirteen or ninety-three, you’re welcome here, as I imagine that perhaps many of the struggles and questions explored in this blog apply to any age. Each age might have its own wisdom in how it addresses the problem of existential crisis, and I’d love to hear from people from every age and walk of life who relate in any way to these blog posts.

Thanks again for being here, and for reading! I’m excited for what’s to come.