I’m currently in the midst of my first, honest-to-dog, midlife crisis.
honest to dog
I’m only 36, so a few people have told me I’m imagining it. I’m not old enough to have a midlife crisis!
But what else do you call it when you have everything going for you, and your life built out the way you’ve designed it—and it’s working!—but you still feel discontented, off, and a little bit sad? And you can’t figure out why you’re not happier?
Discontentment is something I’m familiar with. Life is full of discomfort and I’ve put a lot of effort into adjusting my situation to be less rough, less achy, less filled with bumps and metaphorical rugburn.
Perhaps you’ve heard of cognitive dissonance? Yeah, I hate that shit. So my midlife crisis has been very irritating, to say the least.
Why am I not happier? Despite having the house that I wanted, the animals that I wanted, the life that I wanted? Why?
how could you be discontented with this chicken?
Why? Why? Why?
And if I look back on my life, why have I not been happier across the board? What is this deep, innate urge that keeps me dissatisfied, that keeps me pushing and changing?
Some might say it’s ambition. Others might suggest trauma. Others might suggest that it’s simply the state of being human.
Someone might irreverently suggest that I stop reading philosophy texts.
Whatever it is, it keeps me questioning.
And the questions? They keep me writing.
When I was in high school, I took Calculus, and my Calculus teacher was one of the smartest people I knew. So multiple times a week, instead of going to the cafeteria for lunch, I would go to his classroom and harass him (dog bless teachers, am I right?) with questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” “What is love?” “Why are we here?”
And he would bounce those questions right back at me. “What do you think?”
Of course, I did have thoughts. I always do. So I wrote them down and have pages and pages of scribbles about love and life and meaning.
But it wasn’t until well after I had graduated from high school and college both, had my first job, and ended multiple long-standing relationships that I realized I was asking the wrong questions.
“What is the meaning of life?” Too vague. Too broad.
“Why am I here?” Evolution? Because my parents had a baby? Too general and pointless.
Instead, I shifted my focus inward. The more meaningful questions were things like, “Why do I feel like this?” and “Why am I sad?”
Weirdly, the answers to these questions, while difficult to find, often shined a light on the answers to the bigger, broader, vaguer questions of life, love, and meaning.
“What is pain?” became a focal point for many of my questions.
And one of the things I learned is that writing is pain. But it is also relief.
this cat just had an entire leg non-metaphorically excised
It’s a conceptual excising. You cut open a part of yourself, withdraw what is inside, and splatter on the page for all to see. Then you close up the wound. And it hurts like hell. But it also heals.
Fiction is an especially useful tool for this kind of psychological surgery. Because you can share your experiences, your life, your pain with an audience, but mask it. You add layers of tales and fictions and weave your pain and soul within. And in that way, it captures the meaning that is so impossible to express, in a cage designed expressly for feelings, that others can then engage with an connect with.
When the reader sees your guts and blood spattered across the page, they recognize it. Because they also have blood and guts.
The longer I live and the more writing I do, the more I see that life is about connection. It’s not about utilitarian connection—connecting with the most possible people. It’s about deontological connection.
It’s in our connections to each other, to animals, to the world that we find meaning.
And that starts with getting to know ourselves.