A Mid-Life Crisis on a Budget

I hit middle age the way some people hit black ice: one moment everything felt reasonably under control, and the next I was wondering how I got here and what happened to all the years.

Most of the classic symptoms were present, except I never found myself staring a little too long at sports cars online. I did, however, develop strong opinions about wristwatches I couldn’t afford. I briefly considered whether a man could solve an existential crisis simply by spending an irresponsible amount of money. As one does.

Tradition offered several options. I could buy a Lamborghini. I could make a series of terrible decisions involving people whose affection was measured by the hour. I could convince myself that what my life lacked was horsepower, attention, or a much more expensive version of something I already owned.

Rarely one for doing things as one does, I started writing.

This was not, at the time, a calling. There was no moment when I stared thoughtfully out a window and realized I had something important to say. Writing was something I had once loved and, somewhere along the way, mostly stopped doing. It was also basically free, unlikely to require antibiotics, and something I thought I might still be reasonably good at.

I thought Michael would approve.

Oops.

The first real problem in my low-budget mid-life crisis was figuring out what to write about. I knew I wanted it to be funny, or at least that I wanted to see if I could still be funny on paper. Fortunately, life had recently provided ample material.

When I started writing a couple of months ago, I was running for president of our small rural Chamber of Commerce. These events were mostly correlation, not causation. Mostly. By my fifty-fifth birthday my name was already on the ballot, and by the end of October I was elected. I don’t believe assuming responsibility for a volunteer organization was part of my mid-life crisis, although I admit that particular defense has weaknesses.

The Chamber is ridiculous, and I knew that going in. I say that with enormous affection. It is full of good people trying very hard to do useful things, which turns out to be one of the most reliable ways to generate absurdity. There are volunteers and festivals and old grudges. There are meetings that should have been emails and emails that should never have been sent. There are moments of extraordinary generosity occasionally interrupted by arguments over things no reasonable person would consider worth arguing about.

If I wanted something to write about, I was sitting on it.

I started by writing about how I had ended up here. That first story was easier than most of what came later because it already had a shape. It was memory, mostly linear, and I knew what happened next. I could start at the beginning and follow the increasingly improbable sequence of decisions that had somehow left me responsible for the whole damned thing.

Getting it onto paper wasn’t especially difficult. Getting it right was another matter. I wrote it, polished it, rewrote it, discovered that polishing and rewriting are not the same thing, and kept going until it finally sounded something like the story I remembered.

Then something unexpected happened.

Once I had written the first story, I started writing others. Some have been funny. A lot have been varying degrees of absurd. A surprising number began funny and refused to stay that way.

The more I write about the Chamber, the more I find myself interested in the things underneath the stories: why people show up, why they stop showing up, what makes them trust one another, what happens when they don’t, why loving a place can make people extraordinarily generous and occasionally impossible. And, ultimately, what the Chamber is doing to me.

That was the part I hadn’t anticipated. The Chamber had been the obvious thing to write about because it gave me material. Writing about it gave me something else entirely. It made me look at experiences I thought I already understood and ask what they actually meant.

That may turn out to be the dangerous part.

Writing gives me somewhere to put the questions that arrived with middle age, but putting them somewhere doesn’t make them go away. Quite the opposite. Once I put an experience into sentences, I can look at it, and once I can look at it, I can pick it apart. I can ask whether I remember it correctly, whether I understood it at the time, whether I understand it now, and whether the neat little explanation I’ve just written is insight or merely the latest story I am telling myself.

This is an extremely inefficient way to have a mid-life crisis.

I started writing because I wanted to see if I could still be funny. Instead, I find myself examining my own life with considerably more attention than I had intended. What matters? What did I get wrong? Which moments have changed me without my noticing? How much of the person I have become has been chosen, and how much has simply accumulated while I was busy doing other stuff?

Memory has turned out to be especially troublesome. I’ve always thought of memory as a kind of storage system, admittedly one with questionable filing practices. Something happens, your brain puts it somewhere, and years later you pull it back out, perhaps a little dusty but fundamentally intact. Writing makes that increasingly difficult to believe.

The more I write, the more I notice that memories change depending on what question I ask of them. A story I’ve carried around for years as funny can become sad when I look at it from another direction. Something I’ve considered insignificant can turn out to explain more than the moments I’ve consciously designated Important. People I thought I understood become more complicated when I try to put them on the page.

So do I.

None of this makes me younger. Fifty-five remains stubbornly fifty-five. My hair continues its campaign against its original color, and no amount of introspection produces the metabolism I had at thirty. But the panic embedded in Where did all the years go? has started to change.

The years haven’t gone anywhere. They are all over the place. They are in old decisions and old mistakes, in friendships that have survived me, and in stories I hadn’t realized were stories. They are especially in a little mountain town I hadn’t expected to care about quite so much as I do and in an insane little Chamber I have somehow volunteered to help run.

Writing hasn’t given me the years back. It has made me pay attention to the man they’ve made.

That’s better, although it is also considerably more disruptive than I had anticipated.

The Lamborghini would have mostly sat in the garage. Writing follows me everywhere. It makes me revisit old arguments and reconsider old certainties. It has me asking Michael how he remembers things from our life together, which occasionally produces the deeply irritating discovery that he’s been present for my memories and has copious notes. It makes ordinary experiences begin accumulating meanings they didn’t possess when I was simply living them.

Looking back, I’m not sure writing is what I’ve been doing instead of having a mid-life crisis. I think writing is the mid-life crisis. It just took me a while to recognize it because there was no sports car in the driveway and nobody needed antibiotics.

I turned fifty-five wondering where all the years had gone. I started writing and discovered they were still here, waiting to be picked to pieces.

I probably should have just bought the Lamborghini.

It would have been cheaper.