This is a little something that I wrote a few months back while working through one of my moods.
The Call of the Midlife Crisis
It’s not a whisper in my ear or a soft beckoning from afar; it is deafening. It is here now taking control of my every action, infusing it’s gray hued doubt into my every decision. Midlife should bring contentment, a time to reflect upon the fruits of our labor, not a time to panic, overanalyze each step along our journey. Midlife has turned into one never ending what-if for me. What if I had did this or that differently. Could I do something differently now and get a new and enlightened outcome? I am in the thralls of a midlife crisis like a ship trying to weather the heaviest of storms while out to sea. I am working double time not to get dashed against the rocks where the Sirens sing their sweet songs. Their songs are sweetest on a Sunday evening.
Would life be different if I went to the rocks where the Sirens perch? The reasonable person in me says I would be careened against the rocks and broken, but the person who is deep in the midlife crisis doesn’t care. I DON’T CARE.
But I do. That’s the problem with overanalyzing every decision. I can’t even be content to just give in and enjoy the ride as I hurtle toward the rocks all the while listening to the call of those wickedly deceptive Sirens. They lie but somehow to go back the way I came seems almost as destructive as riding the current toward them.
So I fight. I don’t give up. I persist. I exist.
Some may think that women don’t have midlife crises but we do. With so many expectations on us to keep up with our male counterparts in the workplace, all the while all too often still the primary coordinator of all things Family, is there any wonder that we develop fissures in our personas, question our actions, fall off the deep end, drown in our thoughts all right around middle age? We want more, we want less, we want someone to sweep us off our feet, we want to be independent and not need anyone. We want ... something, but I don’t know what it is.
To say I’m a planner is an understatement. Those around me know that I plan out almost every action in my life to the best of my ability. Well, it’s worked and not worked. I plan, I get an action that I am not happy with, I alter course. Most of us do this, right? But what happens when the system stops working or rather you are no longer happy with the results that you get?
The call of my midlife crisis is here, now. I can’t escape it so I try to outsmart it, but it seems to find me wherever I am, whatever I am doing. I hear it more going through the valleys of my roller coaster life but the call is there even at the peaks. I just don’t always hear it over the hollers and noise of the ride.
What is this midlife crisis of mine? I can make lists of the positive in my life and the positive far outweighs the negative when put on the scales of time and yet it is the negative that I focus on. It is the negative thoughts that fuel the beckoning of the crisis. What drives this crisis?
Alone. I am alone. This seems to be one of the driving factors behind the surmounting crisis in my life. The reality is that I’m not alone anymore than I ever have been. Are we ever really alone? Are we ever really with someone else? The answer is no to both questions. We are no more alone than the day we were born. We are not really with anyone regardless of the titles you might put on your connection to them. They are individuals just as you are. True we have people that come and go in our lives. Some stay for extended stretches. Some have brief stents in our lives. But to say we are alone is not true. We are social creatures and do better with others around us. So why do I feel alone when I am surrounded by people everyday?
The answer to that is simple. I may be surrounded by people but I am closing myself off to fully connecting with others. To say that I don’t connect with anyone would be false though. I have a couple close friends that I am truly open with. I can share my deepest secrets of my soul to them and only have love reflected back.
So why do I feel alone? This sense of aloneness is after all a driving factor to this midlife crisis knocking at my door.
I plainly see the answer to my question. I need more close friends, soul mates if you will. My soul is not resonating with most around me and it feels lonely. I have had two close friends move away from me in under two years. The connection with them was strong, brilliant if you will. In them, I found myself. I liked that person. I would very much like to find her again and this time keep her around for others to see.
While those two friends are always a phone call away and will always be in my life, I am now convinced that my soul is missing them. I miss them. Both came into my life truly without looking for them. I must add that gender is irrelevant to this story but one is female and the other is male.
Why can’t I connect intimately and wildly with new people and by intimately I don’t mean sexually. I am referring to connecting with those as my truest authentic self where I don’t have to hide who I am. I am just me without pretense, without self manipulation, without explanation. Me.
As adults, our intimate circles seem to get smaller with time. I think we don’t connect with others as easily as we did when we were children because life or what we perceive as important in life gets in the way. We make choices and choose to focus on our careers, our portfolios, our children, our bank accounts, our cars, our homes, but not the connections that our souls need to thrive. I could have all the money in the world right now and I would feel the exact same way. The call of my midlife crisis is getting louder. I hear it bellowing to me. I sometimes wonder how others don’t hear it.
This sense of aloneness is like a hole in my life. Sometimes it is gaping and the loss of something, and I don’t know what that something is, overwhelms me with a sense of impending loss or doom. Loneliness.
I have found that I can dodge the sense of impending doom by planning. There’s that word again. I am a planner. One would think that I should know by now that I can plan and plan and plan and I will still feel this way. True that I can sometimes plan out every minute of my day, filling it with this party or that party, this family event or that one, but until I STOP planning and just be in the moment, that midlife crisis will continue to chase me and I am definitely getting slower with age. It will catch me if I continue to run the same race, competing in my life as I have always done.
I must face it head on. I know this. I must show up for my life right now. I need to stop planning, connect with those around me. I must be here now. There is no tomorrow. It’s not here yet so there is no sense in worrying over it. I’m not saying that I should forego all planning for the future because I find that to be irresponsible but I am saying that it is irresponsible of me to not show up for my life which is right now.
