I am Having a MidLife Crisis

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." Ernest Hemingway

To my dearest friends and family, the declaration of my midlife crisis was most likely not a surprise. “You’re just figuring this out now? a friend besmirched, “We all assumed you knew.”

I suppose the signs were all there: sell business and thereby eliminate steady source of income; leave long term relationship; oh and the real kicker sell almost all of one’s worldly possessions and move with fourteen-year-old son to Portugal without ever having visited the country.

Funny that I didn’t see it.

That’s the thing about crises I’m afraid. Just like an addiction the hardest step is admitting you’re having one.

The challenge is that on the surface each decision had such beautiful logical rationalizations behind them.  Even the move to Portugal was seemingly based on a well thought out desire to leave the gun violence; polarized politics and cost of living of the US.  Surely, making this move doesn’t mean I’m having a midlife crisis. 

Yet, as I was walking on the cliffs by my house there was an energy circulating around me.  I watched a flock of birds take off and swirl in a synchronous pattern only to return to the same spot. As I walked, the energy built in intensity demanding to find a place to land.  It coalesced into a question that had been pecking at the edges of my consciousness for months.

“Now what?”

Just saying these two words evoked anxiety and dread not excitement and possibility as I might expect.

“Now what?”

Who knew these two words could be so scary?

After five years of fighting fires both literally and figuratively in my business and personal life I had unintentionally made the horrible mistake of allowing enough stability into my life to allow that question to take root in my consciousness.

How had I made such a rookie mistake of keeping chaos at bay for long enough to slow down and have the luxury of asking myself what I wanted to do next with my life?

I had even cleverly bought a house and immediately decided to start tearing down walls and renovating it.  If you’ve ever tried to get anything accomplished in Portugal you will marvel at my subconscious’ ability to create maximum distraction with minimal effort.

Yet now the house was finished, all the bureaucracy of settling in was complete and life had a safe and steady rhythm to it.

“Now what?”   

Before you think I sound like a spoiled, bored and self-absorbed middle-aged woman here is the second truest thing I can write.  I have no idea at 53 years old how to even consider what I might want for myself outside of the needs, wants and considerations of someone else… and that is deeply heart breaking.

“Now what?” is terrifying because for the first time I am trying to answer that question just for me, and I have no toolkit to know how to do that authentically.

I suppose this post could be entitled a “co-dependent reaches midlife”.

I’m not sure if I’m codependent or just a Gen X woman in her fifties.  You see, the privilege and the possibility that was handed to us as our birthright by the women that fought hard before us comes with it a unique burden.  We can’t use the limitations foisted upon women in history as our excuse for why we didn’t do this or accomplish that.

The privilege of being able to be who ever we wanted to be also carries with it a pressure. 

Expectation then was just one more “mouth needing to be fed” as many of us made decisions for who we wanted to be in the world.  Did I go into the business world because of a true sense of passion and purpose or because otherwise I’d be wasting my education, my talents, my abilities?

Looking back so many of my choices had the tinge of who someone else needed or wanted me to be. My father, my kids, my bank account.

So, what do you do if you’ve spent your entire adult life in some way considering the needs of your kids or your spouse or your parents - pretty much everyone else - and now at 53 you’re faced with the horrifying realization that you don’t know what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Worst of all you painfully realize that time is running out faster than you’d like.

Welcome to my midlife crisis.

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