THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES IN OUR TWENTIES BECOME REAL IN MIDLIFE
In her book The White Album, Joan Didion wrote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That is true of all people, but especially of young people. In our 20’s and early 30’s, we have plans. We tell ourselves a story about our future and what we will become. Our stories are really fantasies that serve as the foundation of our self-esteem. Most of us weren’t very much in our 20’s and early 30’s, but we were very sure that we were going to become more. Because we were so confident that we were going to get better, we felt generally ok with ourselves and who we were. Our self-image was based on a story we created about our future self. In our 40’s, those fantasies disappear almost immediately and we are left face-to-face with who and what we really are.
In Career Change in Midlife, I said that I was going to write about my midlife career change every step of the way. I have taken some big steps since that time and not much writing has happened. It’s hard to write when you are laying face down in an emotional gutter.
I have been on two successful interviews. I was not selected as the final candidate for either position, but I did get some great observations out of both experiences.
The most significant observation I had was that being unmarried with no kids in my 40’s is hard to pullover on the women my age who are interviewing me. I think they assume I am gay and maybe I should just let them. Being a lesbian might be easier for them comprehend than the fact that I just didn’t want the same life they have.
We get wiser with age, but time does leave us behind in some ways. School is harder. I got a master’s degree 17 years ago. I did better in graduate school when I drank every night in my 20’s than I do sober in my 40’s. The cliché nontraditional student who can’t keep up with the younger students is my reality. The stories I created in my early 20’s didn’t involve becoming average.
Midlife should be a time of contemplation where we resolve the issues that plague us in order to move through life with a sense of peacefulness. I think our goal in midlife should be to just be. I spend my time today embracing my wisdom rather than my intelligence. I try to heal the wounds I left on other people rather than focus on the wounds that were done to me. I no longer tell myself stories about my future. I hope to ride my motorcycle around the country with the man I love and continue to pour my soul onto pages that no one reads, but I am not convinced that will happen. It isn’t a story about what my future will be, it’s just dream of what it could be. And maybe that is the real answer to a successful midlife, to dispose of the ego, grow the heart, deepen the soul, and walk through each day with no preconceived stories about who and what we will be in the next stage of life.
