Today’s depressively ominous laundry list of symptoms is brought to you by Elliott Jaques, the Canadian-born psychoanalyst and social scientist who introduced the term “midlife crisis” into the Western lexicon in the mid 1960s:
The compulsive attempts, in many men and women reaching middle age, to remain young, the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern, are familiar patterns. They are attempts at a race against time.1
I have to admit, this sounds a lot like my first year of widowhood, sans the religious concern. Of course I also happened to be middle aged when my husband Steven died, (I was 54), so maybe it was a combination of his death and my advanced years that had me acting all crazy.
It could be a coincidence, but I’m beginning to wonder if the midlife crisis is just plain old everyday grief. If you were bombarded with messages to fight a losing battle, to actually stop the signs of aging, you’d be grieving too. It’s exhausting, not to mention expensive as hell.
There’s a growing movement among my midlife women friends to redefine this period as a time for self-reinvention, rather than a time of crisis in need fixing. Many of them are thinking about what comes next now that their kids have gone off to college, and their lives are no longer child-centered. Honestly, that sounds exhausting and expensive too.
Take heart, it’s not all bad news! A whole world has opened up for us since we’ve become invisible to men. Yes, I post sexy images of myself on Instagram, but that’s my virtual life. In my real, three dimensional life, I fly completely under the radar. Walking down the mean streets of New York City no one gives me a second look.
Just like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said, midlife women are reclaiming our time, and giving less fucks about what others think of us. We’re asking ourselves, what do we want to do now, in this moment of our lives, and thinking about which dreams have we let slide because we put everyone else’s dream before our own?
Grief taught me about duality in life. It’s painful, and it can be a tremendous catalyst for growth. I mourn the person I was when Steven was alive, and I’m excited about the person I am becoming. Normalizing aging and death may not prevent us from grieving, but we can refocus on growing into the lives we want to live, rather than fighting to stay in lives that no longer fit us.
E. Jaques, ‘Death and the midlife crisis’, reproduced in E. Jaques, Work, Creativity, and Social Justice (London: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 38–63, at p. 59.
This Midlife Woman Is Sick Of Your Shit