I recently got contact lenses, for the first time in 34 years, as someone who has required corrective eyewear since the age of 6. I have attributed the decision mostly to my ongoing midlife/existential crisis — as a way to prove to myself that I’m NOT set in my ways and I CAN do new things — and for whatever reason I had increasingly been thinking that my eyeglasses are my whole personality and I was interested in experimenting with a different look....
I spent a lot of time and energy in my life worrying about things I felt like I had to do for one reason or another. Either everyone else was doing the thing, or specific people were pressuring me to do the thing, or I never saw real examples or models of people who didn’t do the thing, etc. At some point I started to realize that, if I really challenged myself, I didn’t have to do some of the things I believed I had to in order to win at life (and I would include the idea of having to “win at life” on this list)....
For the last several months I have been experiencing something, first in the background and now very much in the foreground, and that thing is what many people would describe as a midlife crisis, although it doesn’t feel so much like a crisis mode and is in fact both exciting and exhausting, and fun and terrifying, and lots of other things. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, because I sort of thought I had already had my midlife crisis when I dramatically quit my career in my early 30s to TAKE A PRINCIPLED STAND and CHANGE THE WORLD and that from then on I would be sailing off into the sunset....