My Mediocre Midlife
Rachel examines her midlife crisis in contrast to the straight, white, and male version that’s become the sort of normative American default idea of what a midlife crisis looks like and so gets more than the lion’s share of our cultural attention.
I don’t see myself in that picture… but I do relate to the underlying feelings of inadequacy and a dull sense of slow impending doom about not having accomplished enough by XYZ milestone in life, and feeling like my body is changing without my approval.
My own stereotypical views of the midlife crisis include not only the above default but are tied to the idea of the person experiencing the crisis being in some fashion a professional, and the crisis linked not just to a general milestone of years but an at least subtextual unease with one’s career.
I’ve never really thought about what a midlife crisis would look like through other lenses, and while I’d be interested to learn about such crises in other demographics beyond the normative, I also wonder about such crises in terms of class. Do people who are working two or three, low-paying, dead-end jobs to make ends meet, nonetheless also receiving various types of support from public programs, experience a midlife crisis, per se, or would such a thing if it even existed just be subsumed beneath the more general, ongoing crisis of daily living?
As someone who never had a career and whose job history is spotty and sporadic and who didn’t discover until his mid-forties that the reasons for this were to be found in having gone for decades as an undiagnosed autistic, my midlife has been defined by that retcon.
My midlife almost entirely has been about that pivot, from not knowing why I was a failure and a fuckup to discovering that in fact I wasn’t and that what failed and fucked up were the systems and structures around me that left me to languish. What’s more, this midlife has been about discovering that while these explanations are helpful, they don’t actually solve the underlying mismatch between me and normative society that is my inability to work and be financially self-sufficient.
Mostly, if I have a midlife crisis it’s informed entirely by establishing that the second half of my life (or, you know, potentially less) almost certainly will be so much worse than the first.
What’s interesting here, though, is that the first prong of Rachel’s two-prong crisis is “feelings of inadequacy and a dull sense of slow impending doom”, and while in the seven years since my diagnosis I’ve mostly dispensed with the internalized ableism that had me feeling inadequate, the reality still is that my capacities are insufficient for society’s demands. There’s a reason for my sense of impending doom and that sense is not a dull one.
None of this is meant to diminish the midlife crisis of Rachel or anyone else, although I recognize that as I blather on about myself here it’s going to seem that way. I just find it interesting, both the differences and the parallels.
I mean, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve also been “feeling like my body is changing without my approval”, and in fact not too long ago during the end of summer when the weather got too hot for me to get in my daily walk for almost two weeks, I noticed the changes in my body even just from that amount of time without exericse.
My therapist and I spent maybe a third of a session getting into the idea that there’s a mental conception of what my body feels like, looks like, and is that’s described and defined almost entirely by what my body actually felt like, looked like, and was back in my twenties and thirties—and there’s certainly no question that my body then and my body now do not agree with each other.
For years now, since my diagnosis, my tagline has referred to a “mediocre midlife”—the current, full version as seen as my homepage describing me as “the unsupported use case of a disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife”. While I do believe in reclaiming mediocrity writ large as a weapon against normativity, I’ve described myself as a mediocre autistic for a reason, and it’s because I can’t help but feel like I’m slowly falling through the cracks.
The funny thing about to some extent reclaiming that mediocrity is that, as I’ve also discussed in therapy, whenever I’ve done any mood tracking, I’ve tended and trended toward weaving back and forth around a basic midline. In my original tracking app, I had this labelled “Meh”. Now that I’m tracking at the end of each day on my Apple Watch, I select “Neutral” more than anything else, and only fill out the succeeding screens with emotions or causes if the deviation is strong enough in one direction of another.
What I mean by funny here is that, as I said in therapy yesterday, I feel like if an outside, third party looked at my mood tracking they’d assume that we needed to do something get me above that midline. Whereas I think that maintaining that midline is my goal. Whenever I have an extended period (by which I mean, say, a week straight) of making “Slightly Pleasant” or even “Pleasant” on my watch, I know that one or another of the weeks that follow are going to dip the other way.
That, of course, averages out to put me squarely back at the midline overall, and I admit to some skepticism of anyone who claims that they are happy or would mark their days as “Pleasant” most of the time. I don’t look at my habitual midline as a drawback. I think I see it as part of what resilience I do have. (That’s an entire other blog post, the idea of resilience, and it’s coming at some point next week, I think.) It’s okay to remain lower decks.
Anyway, as I cross one midline halfway (or more) through my life, I guess what I’m saying in the end here is that I’d be perfectly “happy” if my second half were allowed to remain mediocre in the sense that midline of my daily moods.
I don’t need to win the lottery or stumble into a surprise inheritance—although I’d welcome either one—but I also don’t need to end up so surplused that I’m left to the streets or worse.
I’m strongly aware of the irony here: while Rachel contrasts her crisis to that of the straight, white, and male American, of course I am a straight, white, male American. I’m aware, too, that these facts about me are the very reasons why I’ve been able to go all the decades of my life without yet being so surplused. As strong as that insulating privilege has been, however, it’s going to run out.