Gaslit by Mid-life

Mid-life is like that country that you always knew existed, but were so uninterested in it that it could just not have existed … this is when you are young, when you re so young that it looks like your immediate problems of what social scenes will be popping this weekend, and of how to get the latest thrift dress which would just no questions asked fit on your skinny body, despite the very unhealthy diet of bad food, cigarettes and stress eating corn chips and drinking soda. (Veering into confessional mode)

Then, a cliche descends.

Time rolls by. Spurts of worry & anxiety about crossing through to mid-life are managed, suppressed, distracted, numbed, cest-la-vie’d through and when nothing works, there is Dolly Parton … a woman in her 70s, who looks like she could start selling the Happiness Soda tomorrow and make a killing.

She is just excited to be here, who won’t love her. So, various coping mechanisms are used.

Some abused. Eventually, one reaches the station of mid-life. And there is a slow, subtle, yet strong sense that something has shifted.

Forever.

Is it the way your body feels?

No longer the jazzed up energy, which one starts to even forget the memory of the more one owns their citizenship in mid-life land. (I’m sensing this is getting to be so dismal, that I m wracking my brain to immediately come up with a cute comment or a joke … but buckle your seatbelt folks, we are going into the abyss with this one).

The body announces the end of the comforting delusion that age is nothing but a number, and that biological age is different than your chronological age (applies if you woke up at 5 am forever, never smoked, drank & did yoga since you were 3 OR you are milind soman maybe) ….

Despite the best reasonable efforts to stay in shape without becoming a fitness nut whose early death would give people some deep satisfaction to never exercise (won’t that be funny & tragic?) … the joints creak, the energy ebbs and flows many times in the day, the bones get stiff, sleep comes early and often, or for some erratically … akin to being in a situationship with zero predictability of when it will hit you … and eye sight begins to start forcing you to pay attention to narrower field of things than ever before. And for women, there is the arrival of menopause, but first there is peri menopause. My mother passed away when I was 17, so not having someone give a heads up about how things go with women’s plumbing was not an option. Neither did I have another older woman to guide me through such things. All I knew was that it will happen some day.

But speaking to women friends, I realise that even those with mothers were not prepared for what will hit them. It’s now becoming a trendy thing … and it’s a good thing, that talking about the mental & physical pressures of menopause are things that are becoming more open, and not hush-hush. But no one prepares you to be signalled now not being able to produce babies, which is in some sense a hard-coded definition of being a woman. This ability stops at a particular moment in time for women.

Did I not see this coming? I knew of it, but my feelings about what would happen … have been vastly off-center.

This has also been something that had panicked me immensely, and now I realise that I m going through with it. Nothing much has changed in life on the outside.

I had previously side lined the fears & anxieties fantasising for other flourishing-life story aspects that would be flowing through my life as I experience it, off setting the grief and change that is coming … and I ll feel like it made sense.

But, none of this has happened for me. And I’m trying to lean into this unfolding of my life.

Mid life also brings with it a version of a mid-life crisis which happened to me and my friends (some of them). None of us over hauled their lives in massive ways. Rather, what happened was more of a quiet making sense of how things didn’t make sense … making sense of the losses, the bets that blew up in the face, the hard luck hand that is inevitable unless your luck can break rules of being human frankly.

No one met their full ambitions.

No one was as sure of things as they were when they started. By things I mean ideologies, what is important, what one built their identity around … freedom, impulsivity, honesty, throwing away worldly gains for a piece of the soul … for a moment to feel alive to have dreams unfold and magic tempted to appear just because one believes in it.

Not having enough money to afford nice things, and lack of regular emotional support turn out to be more painful than any cosmetic issues of how old you look or when someone called you aunty (or uncle).

The musicians and celebrities you crushed on are now visibly old. They have money to spare, and they get treatments but the human face is the human face. Newer generations are trendy.

And you have tried to keep up with the trends, but after a few years of this effort, which was a little effort when you started the slide … now, the effort it takes is enormous and you begin to soak in the ironic comments on age to check out of the pressure to keep up with pop culture narratives.

Did we not know this would happen?

How is it that we were so ill prepared for all that mid life brought?

I suppose that is all of life.

One is frequently left feeling stupid — how could I not see this coming? A common refrain.

In a lot of cases, we could.

Behavioural economists would have some logic, where they will tell you how rational mind is a big myth. Older people will say, we told you … you just won’t listen.

None of it removes the sense of disorientation one feels at the horror show of being in mid-life.

The rosy reality of life is over now. It’s not dystopic like mad max, but it’s worse.

It’s real. It’s illogical. It’s life is unfair. It’s ‘patriarchy can be attacked, but it won’t go away hitting at you’.

It’s ‘idealists are romantics’.

Romance is a pursuit of an illusion. Cynicism which in my case hid a closet romantic, hoping to be proven wrong and then rejoice and turn around in a snap and come out of the cynical closet, seems to have been a right reading of reality.

But even the mistakes that some thorough romantics made of marriages made and dissolved, children had and bets played seem more heroic than outward cynicism and inner romantic.

Compassion is a word one now hears so often. Compassion for self.

Fighting with the disorientation of arriving in this unfriendly foreign land with a body that is announcing its mileage & emotional baggage that you will have to pay for to travel with. Could life be indeed so joyless?

Is there no chance of redemption now?

Worries and worrying seem to become exhausting. Relaxing and being in the moment also is uncomfortable.

I settle into feeling being alive is uncomfortable.

The fluid social life you experienced when you were in your 20s is now a parallel universe that you won’t be allowed a visa to visit.

You don’t drink any more for good reasons, but the social mobility of being a fun drunk is also gone. You have become boring.

Health oriented, worried about your nervous system, the parasympathetic system, gut health, sleep quality, acidity issues, stubborn fat loss, hair troubles … you are now a new citizen, with new causes to align with.

Writing this is making me feel depressed, but I also don’t feel it’s fair in the spirit of the reality-lovingness to make this out to be some sort of a ride to hell, with no end in sight. So, let me turn over to the other side.

Self-awareness of who you are, how you deal with problems, sometimes in ways that make them worse, what makes you provide for yourself even when the external markers of doing well are taken away, a deep inner resource that is all yours that you never had to cultivate must now be nourished.

It’s an invisible practise.

That doesn’t make it any less difficult than say lifting 100 kilos deadlift or running an ultra marathon.

This is private.

This is done for self with self. It’s a deep question of faith.

Whether it’s spirituality, intuition, a sense which one cannot put in words, a feeling, a knowing that despite your lessons in idealism feels like a sense of stuff that you trust … something beyond what held your life together in yours 20s begins to emerge.

The perspective on life gets bigger.

You get to define things differently, and risk things differently and hope differently and celebrate differently.

Some say you become more of who you are.

Some say you mature.

I honestly don’t know what maturity really means beyond the usual aspect of being considerate and not impulsive and dodgy etcetra, those seem opposite of maturity.

I m writing this so that those of you are still to enter this terrain get a sense of what lies ahead. At the same time, I know that you may make a mental note of it, but life will swoop in and once you enter midlifeland, you will wonder how come no one told me shit?!

And you’ll use the latest word that goes for gaslighting to throw your hands up and excavate to remake a new you.