Get Your Hands Off My Midlife Crisis

Photo by dan carlson on Unsplash

If you are one of the lucky 387 who follow me on Instagram, you might be familiar with my puddle. I photograph it regularly. It is on what we like to call an arterial route just across the road from what we like to call police headquarters in what we like to call The East. It’s on a bend where vehicles battle to merge from two lanes into one. It’s also on my running route and so after a night of heavy rain when it will be at its most deep and threatening, I have to decide whether to be drenched from head to foot by it or instead negotiate a gap in the traffic and accelerate past it. I have lost count of the number of times this puddle has been filled in. I have no idea who alerts whatever department is responsible for puddle management to its reappearance, perhaps the constabulary are keeping an eye on it, but before you know it, like maybe a week or so, the water will be gone, replaced by a thin layer of sand. And I laugh knowingly. Because of course, this is only a temporary solution. The puddle will be back next time there is a precipitation deluge. The underlying problem causing it like a clogged drain or a build-up of leaves or the dissolving of the surrounding sediment or the collapse of the city’s plumbing infrastructure remains. The sand is what we like to call a sticking plaster.

And I often look at that puddle and I think, now there’s a metaphor if ever I saw one, because that puddle was once my life. Three years ago, when I started a career break and took the initial steps to leave my job, it was mainly because I could no longer slap a sticking plaster over a life that wasn’t working anymore. Even though I kept trying to fill things in and cover them up and put a layer of something over the top, these were only temporary solutions. They didn’t fix the underlying problem. And when I eventually made the decision to go, it was because I’d exhausted what I liked to call my extra-work affairs, the sidelines I’d put in place to try to satisfy my intellectual needs – another qualification, another postgraduate certificate, another development programme, another research project, chairing a board, leading a diversity network.

And for a while I called it a midlife crisis, this upping and leaving and tossing it all up in the air and starting all over again because people seemed to be looking for a rationale as to why someone would quit a perfectly decent academic position in the public sector with flexible hours and working-from-home before it became fashionable and a good salary and a completely unchecked leave entitlement and an office and a pension and a title, and I called it a midlife crisis because I was around the right age for one and I had definitely been grabbed by some sort of existential terror and intrusive thoughts like “is this it?”. And Susan Jeffers who wrote a book about feeling the fear describes how it isn’t fear of the unknown but fear of giving up the known, mainly fear of giving up the payoffs, that keeps us where we are. This “midlife crisis” had made me realise that the payoffs like the money and the holidays and the professional identity and the status and the lump sum were no longer enough, and it was eating at my soul, letting the payoffs continue to control me. And Hilary Mantel said in Fludd, “There are times in life when you must murder the past. Take a hatchet to what you used to be. Axe down the familiar world. It's hard, very painful, but it is better to do it than to keep the soul trapped in circumstances it can no longer abide”. And lots of people nodded their heads like they understood my rationale for leaving because midlife could be a funny old time when you realise you may be a bit part in your own life or playing the wrong part altogether and there is change happening all around you, massive change, yet you remain stuck. It is as if you are in the middle of the roundabout watching all the cars go past. And you worry a bit about that, everything passing you by.

On Sunday, I read an article in The Sunday Times. ‘A midlife crisis is so passe! I tried a midlife reset instead’ was the title. The writer had just turned forty and she said, “I feel like if you sliced open my brain, out would fly to-do lists, not poetry”. And so, she went for a ninety-minute MOT with a therapist to help her reflect on the cornerstones of her life from her friendships to her job satisfaction because that seemed better than being a cliché and buying a sports car which just masked something deeper. And this was a revolutionary type of coaching apparently that offered the chance to give yourself a midlife review and she had to look at a circle segmented into work, money, family, friends and so on and mark them all out of ten. And I thought stop, why are the forty-year-olds stealing the midlife crisis? It isn’t their time yet. Can the fifty-year-olds have nothing these days? There’s already an early menopause epidemic with the under-forties jumping on the trend and having an array of symptoms. And besides, you’re supposed to have to-do lists at forty. That’s just life and you’ll get the poetry back in another fifteen years. And then the article moved into how this midlife review had made her realise she needed to improve her personal branding, and I stopped reading, and I thought get your hands off my midlife crisis. A bit of branding isn’t going to fix it.

This week, I also read a novel called Wellness. I’m loath to recommend it because firstly, it’s 597 pages and secondly, the author also happens to be a researcher and he had tried to ram in every psychological study ever conducted to explain why the couple in it might be having a few marital troubles when it’s obvious they aren’t that suited to each other and are unfulfilled and have four dysfunctional parents between them including a narcissist, a hypochondriac, a conspiracy theorist and a psychopath. Plus, the book also tries to answer all the big questions like what is love and what is truth and what is beauty, and it was all a bit exhausting really. But my favourite study was the one that said children who resist eating marshmallows for fifteen minutes are more successful in later life because of their ability to control their impulses and delay their gratification. But then a new study looked at the underlying variables and came to a different conclusion. The children who waited fifteen minutes didn’t do so because they had better self-control. They were rich. They could get as many marshmallows as they wanted whenever they wanted. They could afford to wait.  

But on p47, Elizabeth tells Jack that she’s not unhappy or at least not abnormally unhappy because she’s as happy as she should expect to be at this stage of life and he says, “and which stage is that?” and she says “at the bottom of the U-shaped curve” and we get a bit of an explanation about how happiness over a lifetime seems to follow a particular pattern and people are most happy when they are young and when they are old and least happy in the middle. “It seemed happiness spiked around age twenty, spiked again around age sixty, but bottomed out in between, which was where Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicised “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon – only ten percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction”¹. 

And now I wasn’t sure if I was a rarity, one of the ten percent, when I upped and left and started again, or if I was just a cliché, at the bottom of the U-shaped curve, because I was around the right age for that too. And on p356, Elizabeth told Jack she had been doing some research and most of the studies showed that the secret to happiness at this particular moment in life, is simply to try new things, change the routine, have adventures, be seduced by mystery, go after it. And it wasn’t rocket science, and it definitely wasn’t branding, and it might involve ripping off the sticking plaster, and giving up payoffs, and it was probably hard axing down the familiar world. And I realised it didn’t really matter whether I’d had a midlife crisis or not, I’d done the research now and proved those studies about the secret to happiness were probably right.  

P.S. My book now has a working title ‘Everything I Know About Leaving’ and will cover my “midlife crisis” in depth, perhaps as deep as the puddle. Do subscribe if you want to be kept up to date on its progress or on the puddle if that’s more your thing.

1. Wellness by Nathan Hill.