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.

What it Costs

America is obsessed with time. Obsessed with not “wasting” time. All over the world --in countries America likes to compare itself to in terms of GDP, 9th grade math scores, and life expectancy-- students take a gap year, a time between high school and “what next?”. They travel.

Of course there are financial limitations to this rite of passage but it occurs to me that even among the wealthier in America, those that likely could afford such a luxury, the gap year has never caught on.

You could argue that Americans don’t "gap year" because we don’t travel overseas but I could argue that travel doesn’t have to be international, especially in a county as large as the United States. Maybe we have it reversed and we don’t travel because we don’t do a "gap year".

Whatever the reasoning order I think that logic is wrong, I think the issue is time.

Americans don’t take that year because then we’ll be “behind”. Behind who or what I am uncertain, only that whatever or whoever it is chases Americans throughout our lives. It is the reason people don’t take vacations even when finances allow, the reason we don’t take time between jobs – god forbid we have a gap in our resumes.

I fight the increasing volume of this narrative in my head everyday. A year out of the conventional job market while I traveled the map gorging on food and meeting interesting people, I worry I'm behind.  If I am, does the “lost” time trump the past year?

Fourteen countries this year: Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Japan, Netherlands, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Taiwan. A year of experiences. Was that really less valuable than a 9-5 that is really an 8-7?

I don’t think so.

I’m just ending my trip and beginning my job search. In a few weeks, maybe a few months, I'll begin to see if my decision to change up my life for a bit must be weighed not in the joy of the experience that I currently view it in, but instead in the context of loss...such a deficit-approach to living.

No matter what greets me on the other side of this year of living differently, I know that the “loss” Americans fear is double edged. The promotion, the job, the salary, are all potential losses...but I lost my dear friend Shoes, nine years ago. He was there one moment, laughing and drinking and making my life and the world a better place – and then...he wasn’t. Then he was gone. Medical school and studying and all the responsible things he’d done knocked off a motorbike taxi in the middle of Kampala.

Except he was in the middle of Kampala, Uganda; he’d traveled throughout India; he was living the life he wanted to live and not simply following the prescription counselors laid out before him. And so while I still grieve the loss of his unique brand of brilliant beauty in the world, I am also comforted that he hadn’t waited,  hadn't feared lagging behind...hadn’t waited to see or do or experience the world that was taken from him, that he was taken from, so suddenly.

This year has given me grace and laughter and perspective and friendship and challenges and tears and time and distance away from what is expected of me.

Back in America, searching for my "what next", I hope I remember what this year gave me instead of buying into the easy narrative of what it cost.

En Route: Taipei

No plan.

The view after the first leg: SFO

It occurred to me an hour into my flight. Hurtling through the sky swaddled in every layer of clothing I’d packed to ward against the cold I assumed I'd face on the plane, and still somehow inadequately equipped for despite my layers, it occurred to me that I had no plan.

I arranged this flight less than 12 hours before its scheduled departure, packed eight hours later, and at no point had I even paid attention to anything beyond the likelihood I’d make my connection in SFO.

So accustomed to the generosity of my cousin’s flight pass and my own whimsy, to eating the cookies while I bake them, it has only just now, 30,000 feet above the rest of the world, occurred to me that I don’t know where I'll stay in Taipei, or even how long I'll be there. A friend of a friend gave me suggestions, scrolling screens of foods and neighborhoods, national parks and lesser known cities, but aside from a list of tings I could do I have no real ideas about what I will do.

That realization doesn’t terrify me even as I feel a certain recklessness in it. Reckless not because I haven’t shown up to a place with no plan, this last year has mostly involved plan-less journeys into countries I've never visited, but reckless in some way I sense but cannot name.

Maybe it is the near routine of the last year, my new normal of not knowing what my days will look like. Maybe it is me settling into the liminal space between my chosen uncertainty that awaits me once 2019 counts itself into a new decade and my search for employment kicks into a more urgent gear.

Whatever the reason or rationale, the reality is me sitting in a freezing airplane cabin, blessed with three seats to myself to stretch out on and no idea where I might stay or how bustling Taipei will be at almost 9pm when I will be cleared through customs and released into a foreign city.

I haven’t even looked at pictures.

I imagine Taipei looks like Tokyo, a city I appreciate for its ease and abundance but dislike for its constant demands for my attention. Smaller, but as frenetic and thronged – and as safe. And if it is nothing like that? If it is nothing like that I will manage. I will manage and meld myself into whatever curves or angles the city offers and follow a path, or forge my own, for this final adventure of my year of living freely.

Sliding doors

“I haven’t been doing the work,” my mentee admitted to me over dinner.

Confused, I asked him what work. “Figuring out what to do with the rest of my life,” he answered.

I kept waiting for him to laugh and admit the joke. But he didn’t, it was meant as a serious confession to me. Keep in mind he’d just graduated from undergrad the month before.

“Oh sweetie,” I assured him, “you don’t need to know. And even if you did know, it is subject to change.” Then we had a conversation about the beauty of being 22. “Twenty-two is an age when the whole world is filled with possibilities and even mistakes are viewed as lessons rather than cataclysmic problems or personal defects you can’t come back from,” I told him.

Not like 42 for example. 

At 22, people backpack across Southeast Asia, WWOOF through Europe, or try out three different careers in 18 months. Sometimes they do all three!

“The beauty of your 20s,” I assured him, “is that you can explore everything and not be boxed in to a path.”

Technically, that freedom is everyone’s all the time. We can all have the right to shake things up. I met a friend when we were both journalists 20 years ago, a few years after we met she went to law school and clerked for a year. 

Then she quit. Law school be damned.

She’d always had a side hustle selling vintage clothing online and after getting a taste of the lawyer life she realized it wasn’t for her and she’d rather sell clothes. So she’s building an empire. She decided she wanted a different life than the one she’d been building for herself, a life different from the one everyone expected her to inhabit. I talked to her the other day…she doesn’t regret the change.

Still, most people, the older we get the less likely we are to shift. It feels scarier somehow even though we are equipped with more experience and often more money. It feels like there is more to lose; and in some ways there is.

In midlife, the sliding doors options for life are starker, the sacrifices more pronounced. For some there are spouses and children, for others there are career ladders with so many more steps to climb. And there is always money…and time. Usually too little of both. 

Fresh out of undergrad, before I joined the Peace Corps, I temped at a big maritime company. They liked me and my work and offered me a full time position- salary and benefits. My mother couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to take that solid paying gig instead of gallivanting all over Africa.

I didn’t hesitate; that sliding door option was easy for me to ignore. I didn’t want to be the communications person at some company I’d never heard of. I didn’t know enough about a 401k nor did I give a moment’s thought to retirement. Plus, I was certain that if I got offered one profitable gig at 23 then surely I’d be offered others later; so why not gallivant? And if I’m really being honest…I was sure that I was destined for bigger or at least more interesting things. 

I wasn’t wrong. I traveled quite a bit, worked in a zigzag rather than a linear career trajectory. And then, at some point in adulthood it finally felt urgent to make more substantial decisions. Choices that connected to each other. Plans that included retirement.

So I straightened my zigzagging line. 

There were a few hiccups. A few side excursions where life threw curve-balls I had to adapt to; but I finally hunkered down and started building my adult life. My “adult life”. The one my mentee thinks he’s supposed to have figured out at 22, the one I’m still  uncertain about 20 years his senior. 

The sliding doors don’t go away. Sometimes we learn to ignore them but they remain, tempting or terrifying depending on your perspective. 

About two years ago I began to lose my taste for the door I’d walked through. The “adulting” door with pre-tax deductions, life insurance, and reasonable paths to better paying jobs with fancier titles.

Now I stand with my toes peeking over the side of the unknown and I wonder what the hell I’m doing. Wondering if this sliding door is the stop I should be making. Wouldn’t accepting the next career marker that demonstrates my expertise in my field be the wiser move? 

Too late for uncertainty, I finally gave notice and selected another door to try out.

I quit!

In the middle of life. A crisis. Some would call it a midlife crisis. By the purest of definitions it was

that. Someone marching through life, maybe skating, maybe barely sliding by…but getting to some mid-point and maybe expecting something. Anything. Anything more than what they brought with them.

I find myself at that point. The general milestones of career checked off the list. Kind of. The more personal ones, less so but not abhorrently so. It isn’t a matter of “if only…” except, “if only I knew what the point is.” 

I don’t.

Years ago my head went through the back window of a car. There are skid marks where skin clung to pavement and the constant irritating reminder that I was lucky. Lucky to only have 33 stitches. Lucky to have been taken to a hospital- no matter how scary the hospital was. Lucky to not lose my eye.

“You’ll shoot your eye out kid.”

And in the aftermath of that accident I was sick on antiretroviral medications because there was too much uncertainty about where the needles that sewed me up came from. I lost 15 pounds in a month, a patch of hair larger than my hand, and the symmetry of my face that I’d taken for granted.

I vaguely remember a change in perspective on the world. But at 25 my perspective was relatively new so how much change could there have been.

Now, in my 40s, I question my perspective and contemplate crafting a new one. 

The thing no one really tells you about bucking convention is that it pays to be brilliant at something if you take that route. Straying from the well-worn path is amazing when you have vision and purpose. I have frustration and disinterest- not really things you can forge a path with. 

Still, I stand with my toes peeking over the edge of some unknown decision. Some path not yet taken, and keep taunting myself. “Do it. Do it. Do it.” I dare myself. I say it out loud to people so their knowledge of my plans might shame me, inadvertently into making it happen. 

I texted my sister a few weeks ago, “if I leave the country I’ll have to ditch my phone”. “If?!” she responded, “when” she corrected me. And I need that because otherwise the lack of an alternate plan to my current distress falls away as easily as tentative brunch plans. A last minute cancellation with the promise of a reschedule that may never come. 

Fear and laziness are at the core of so many lives that wanted more but didn’t manage to get it. I suffer more from the laziness than the fear – though the fear of retirement and unemployment and returning to exactly this same feeling do persist. But the laziness. 

Just write. Just plan. Just imagine.

It is paralyzing.

Maybe it is fear masquerading as laziness. Fear donning a different face to keep me off balance and uncertain. Whatever it is…today I ignored it. Today I walked into my boss’s office and gave notice of my resignation.

Come January I’ll fold my uncertainty and angst into the battered travel pack I’ve had since 2001. The one that has been with me to every country I’ve visited except Japan. I do not know what this jump into the unknown will offer up…only that the fear that grips me is reason enough to jump.