Crisis in the Middle

Midlife crisis has always been painted in shades of flashy cars and infidelity. Or maybe that’s all I remember from a time when midlife seemed like an impossible eternity from my experience in the world. And now...now I am square in the middle of life. An apt place for a crisis of my own. Only mine doesn’t look like any of the templates I've watched in bad 80s movies.

Instead, my crisis sits at the intersection of grief and change.

Of course, with closer inspection, most midlife crises probably meet that same criteria. The only difference now is the preponderance of crises that are larger than what I can fold my arms around and trace my own steps to how exactly I got here.

Not that I can’t trace any parts. Some have my distinct dancing footprints in the sand.My choices, my consequences. But others...others wear a pandemic’s face mask and play the theme music for Red Dawn, re-heating the Cold War to temperatures I'd prefer not to experience.

There are the more mundane of midlife follies. The ones that no one will write about or remember when I die, or even next year if my life plays nice and stops straying so waywardly from expectations: sudden (though no longer new) unemployment, my dad’s surgery, trying to forge new friendships with my unsure footing.

The marvel of this moment in my life is that as hard as it feels, as fragile as I feel in it, most people are just as fragile. My woes are no greater and of no more importance than someone struggling with small children, grad school with a shitty professor, or adolescence as the world whirls feverishly on its axis (with second by second video updates on the turmoil). So many people are hanging precariously by a prayer (for the faithful) or bewildered tenacity (for the heathens) as the winds of circumstance tangle all our strings into complicated knots.

The reality is that a midlife crisis is only memorable for its timing. Unsure and unmoored in your 20s and no one blinks. Twenty-two, hell, even 28, are not ages where folks assume everything is figured out.

But 46?

As uncomfortable as this space I'm occupying is, I can’t say I'd do anything different.One thing different means everything is different and that seems excessive even in my midlife crisis fantasy life.

And still…and still…

There is no quick fix. Nothing to soothe the sorrow or quell the rage of this strange space I find myself navigating. There is laughter, and intermittent tears. There is more than fleeting uncertainty and equal parts trust that my world (if not the wider world mired in plague and war) will sort itself out and I'll find my way.

That doesn’t make this space in time any easier. Doesn’t make my daily frustrations and fear any less palpable. But it doesn’t make it any less important either. Even if it only means something to me. Even if it only matters in this brief moment in the greater expanse of my life.