Midlife

It’s fall here in the northern hemisphere. Feels like the fall of my life, too. Somehow midlife feels both like slowing down and also starting new things. I haven’t been in school for years now but fall still feels like back to school. Yesterday I just missed the subway on my way to a 5 pm appointment in the city. The display sign above ground indicated that the train was coming in 0 minutes, and the next one was coming in 9 minutes, which would have gotten me to my appointment at 5:04 pm (assuming everything else went smoothly, which at rush hour in New York is a 50/50 assumption). ...

Everyone loves summer. If you have to name a favorite season (which you absolutely don’t!! Who says you do?), summer is a non-controversial option. Bright sun, long days, beach time, et cetera. And spring is a close runner-up, with its warmer weather, greenery and flowers, and of course the anticipation of summer. If you want to be alternative and edgy (i.e., me in early adulthood lol), you’d cite fall (or 🍂autumn🍂, to put some extra sauce on it) as your favorite season, for its foliage, cider, pumpkin patches, sweater weather. ...

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). I also couldn’t really blame anyone for making the decisions that I did because I felt I had to; no one was forcing me to do these things. ...

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. ...