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Maybe This Is a Midlife Crisis
A year of explosive creativity ends a long fallow period in my life, but what does it signify?
A little over a year ago, I started writing again after two decades of working and raising children. As a woman in my forties, I suddenly needed a creative outlet. What I had pushed away as indulgences became necessities: fiction, poetry, memoir. Why?
A lot of creative types must go through this lifecycle. We produce a lot of (often immature) work in our teens and twenties, then we “settle down” and get into the business of work and family life. All the artistic urges are set aside for some later date when we have more free time. Talent fades, passions subside, the light dims.
I suspect this hits women harder than men, given the intense investments they must make in their families, on top of work. Middle-aged women often step back into education and serious career paths, too, only after getting their children off to school. The years go by.
Then, as the burdens of childrearing begin to lighten, the poetic dreamers from high school wake up in their forties, or fifties, with decades’ worth of stories to tell and songs to sing.
Unfortunately, in a culture that elevates youth as a pillar of desirability, the door to commercial success…