Middle Aged CRAZY
There is a thing that happens in middle age ... It's not a secret and it's not profound. It just is the way that it is.
Most of us at middle age, look at our lives and have strong feelings about the disparity between who we thought we would be and who we are.
Books and movies have been written about what happens next ...
Some people attempt to self-correct, choosing a new career or working extra hard at the one they already have, but what happens after you have a wall full of degrees and awards and you still don't feel validated?
It doesn't always end badly. IT's never to late to become what we might have been. I knew a Dr. who quit his medical practice and joined a medical missionary team and loves what he is doing now. Colonel Sanders was in his 50s when he started Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Most of us at middle age, look at our lives and have strong feelings about the disparity between who we thought we would be and who we are.
Books and movies have been written about what happens next ...
Some people attempt to self-correct, choosing a new career or working extra hard at the one they already have, but what happens after you have a wall full of degrees and awards and you still don't feel validated?
It doesn't always end badly. IT's never to late to become what we might have been. I knew a Dr. who quit his medical practice and joined a medical missionary team and loves what he is doing now. Colonel Sanders was in his 50s when he started Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Some people get divorced and look for someone new to help them feel those "fresh" feelings, but what happens after the "new" wears off and you find yourself feeling bored with this "soul mate"? I can't even begin to count the relationships I have seen come and go in the land of Middle Aged Crazy!
Some people choose to embark on an adventure. I have an uncle who retired and spent the next few years, traveling around in a RV. I have another uncle who sold everything, but what he could fit in a van and traveled around, buying and selling antiques for a living. I knew another woman who sold everything she had and bought a Harley Davidson and rode it across country.
Some people make a geographical move ... thinking they might find more inspiration in living by the sea ... or the mountains ... or North ... or South ... or East ... or West, but what happens when they realize that all they really changed was their geography?
Some people make little changes ... plastic surgery: a nip or tuck ... quit smoking ... quitdrinking ... change their diet or their exercise routine. They look better and feel better physically, but there's still something missing. What could it be?
Other people just go PLAIN CRAZY ...
I've been crazy too. If you are feeling a little "crazy" yourself, this article might be helpful to you:
Is midlife a quest or crisis?
Midlife Crisis? Bring It On! - TIME
What does a female midlife crisis look like, anyway? A big face-lift, a little red car, an overdose, an affair, an escape to the Galapagos Islands? Or none of the above?
It is both a stable truth and an unsettling one that our lives loop and twist from age to age. The baby toddles into childhood, the child erupts into a teen, then a woman, who by the time she has passed 40 is long overdue to shed her skin again. That shedding can be traumatic, treacherous, born of sorrow or stress; but to hear the prophets of personal reinvention tell it, it may also be an unexpected gift. With that endearing sense of discovery that baby boomers bring to the most enduring experiences--like growing up or finding God or burning out--women are confronting the obstacles of middle age and figuring out how to turn them into opportunities. Thanks to higher incomes, better education and long experience at juggling multiple roles, women may actually discover that there has never been a better time to have a midlife crisis than now.
Sue Shellenbarger was 49, living in Oregon and writing her "Work & Family" column for the Wall Street Journal, when in the space of two years she got divorced, lost her father, drained her bank account and developed a taste for wilderness camping and ATV riding that left her crumpled up on an emergency-room gurney. "People around me thought I'd taken leave of my senses," she says. A few months later, "I was in a sling, trying to type with my broken collarbone, on the phone with one of my editors, and we were laughing about it." At that point, she says ...
"I realized a midlife crisis is a cliche until you have one."
"I realized a midlife crisis is a cliche until you have one."
Fast-forward two years: this spring she published The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today's Women, which suggests that the national conversation is about to have a hot flash. The passage through middle age of so large a clump of women--there are roughly 43 million American women ages 40 to 60--guarantees that some rules may have to be rewritten and boundaries moved to accommodate them. That was part of the inspiration for Shellenbarger's book.
"I thought I could help other women see this coming in their lives, and not only avoid doing damage to others but capitalize on it."
"I thought I could help other women see this coming in their lives, and not only avoid doing damage to others but capitalize on it."
In fact, the very word crisis, while suitably dramatic, seems somehow wrong for this generation's experience. Unlike their mothers and unlike the men in their lives, this cohort of women is creating a new model for what midlife might look like. Researchers have found that the most profound difference in attitude between men and women at middle age is that women are twice as likely to be hopeful about the future. Women get to wrestle their hormones through a Change of Life; but however disruptive menopause may be for some women, the changes that matter most are often more psychic and spiritual than physical.
Talk to women about what happens when they hit midlife hurdles--whether divorce or disease, an empty nest, the loss of a parent--and very often the response is a surprise even to them. They may first turn inward, ask the cosmic questions or retrieve some passion they put aside to make room for a career and family and adult responsibilities. Take a trip. Write a novel. Go back to school. Learn to kite board. But then, having done something to help themselves, they have a powerful urge to help others. Best of all is when they can do both at once.
Among the growing ranks of female entrepreneurs are many who have sensed a massive Midlife Marketing Opportunity. Women are natural marketers, even of their worst fears. Their instinct when they get in trouble is to talk about it with other women. So once they have weathered the crisis, they are ready to become crisis managers. The hospice nurse opens a consulting firm to help women handle their aging parents. The escrow officer becomes a personal trainer specializing in older women. The Harvard M.B.A. with three kids opens a temp agency specializing in placing part-time manager moms. Or in the Extreme Makeover version, Martha Stewart emerges from prison kinder, gentler and declaring,
"Our passion is and always should be to make life better."
More and more people see not a crisis but a challenge--even an opportunity, observes Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University. "How are they going to spend the second half of their life? They know they're going to have lots of healthy years, so I think it's a period of making choices to live out one's dreams that got put on the shelf during younger years."
When Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques coined the term midlife crisis back in 1965, he was not talking about a man who, upon turning 40, wakesup the next morning afraid he is going to die, goes in for hair plugs, buys a Porsche and runs off with a cupcake. He was studying creative genius and found that for many artists productivity began to decline as they reached middle age and wrestled with their own mortality. Never a legitimate clinical diagnosis, it was more like a handy way of describing the perfectly predictable process whereby every so often people looked around at their lives and asked, often in loud and expensive ways, "Is this it?"
"Our passion is and always should be to make life better."
More and more people see not a crisis but a challenge--even an opportunity, observes Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University. "How are they going to spend the second half of their life? They know they're going to have lots of healthy years, so I think it's a period of making choices to live out one's dreams that got put on the shelf during younger years."
When Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques coined the term midlife crisis back in 1965, he was not talking about a man who, upon turning 40, wakesup the next morning afraid he is going to die, goes in for hair plugs, buys a Porsche and runs off with a cupcake. He was studying creative genius and found that for many artists productivity began to decline as they reached middle age and wrestled with their own mortality. Never a legitimate clinical diagnosis, it was more like a handy way of describing the perfectly predictable process whereby every so often people looked around at their lives and asked, often in loud and expensive ways, "Is this it?"
Or at least, men did. That was around the time that Betty Friedan was writing about "the problem that has no name," after she surveyed several hundred of her Smith classmates and found that most of them were unhappy in middle age. "If they had a midlife crisis, they didn't talk about it," says Jane Glenn Haas, founder of WomanSage, a nonprofit group that supports midlife women. "Women today realize that their mothers never had a sense of their options." Haas, now 67, shocked her family when she left her first husband 27 years ago. "They said to me, 'Why are you doing this?' I said, 'I'm not happy.' My mother said, 'Who told you that you were entitled to be happy?'"
The present generation of women tend to bring different expectations to their middle passage. "To the extent there is any midlife crisis, to women it does not come as an enormous surprise," says Tace Hedrick, a University of Florida associate professor of women's studies. "Men wake up at 45 and realize, 'I'm not 18 anymore.' But women, their biological clock is ticking. They are constantly reminded that they are aging." The regular reminders of fertility are replaced by the insistent signals of menopause. Anthropologists say male status is typically tied to money and power, which explains why the standard male midlife crisis is triggered by a career crack-up.
Women's turmoil often reflects events in their personal lives as well as the accumulated stress of years of ladder climbing, multitasking and barrier breaking.
WOMEN VS. MEN: HOW MIDLIFE IS DIFFERENT
Maybe the male midlife crisis stereotypically took the form of nifty new wheels because most men didn't grow up idealizing work. It was a means of putting food on the table and showing who was boss; actual happiness and satisfaction usually had to come from someplace else. In contrast, professional women, having fought so hard to break into fields that were once closed to them, often expect more from their jobs. If they are unhappy at 45, disenchanted with corporate politics or discouraged because they are not making a contribution to some larger good, they are typically willing to think of trying something completely new in a search for greater flexibility or challenge or satisfaction.
Maybe the male midlife crisis stereotypically took the form of nifty new wheels because most men didn't grow up idealizing work. It was a means of putting food on the table and showing who was boss; actual happiness and satisfaction usually had to come from someplace else. In contrast, professional women, having fought so hard to break into fields that were once closed to them, often expect more from their jobs. If they are unhappy at 45, disenchanted with corporate politics or discouraged because they are not making a contribution to some larger good, they are typically willing to think of trying something completely new in a search for greater flexibility or challenge or satisfaction.
So while some women may follow the classic male model in certain superficial ways--buying motorcycles in record numbers (up 34% in the past five years) and getting divorced (two-thirds of divorces among people 40 to 70 are initiated by the woman)--many realize that a new toy or a new lover can do only so much for one's sense of well being over the long term. Researchers have found that women tend to take a hardheaded look at how their lives are unfolding and where they want to be 10 or 20 years down the road, when they are more than twice as likely as men to be living alone.
Surveys find that middle-aged women think they will stay healthy longer. There is a kind of virtuous cycle created when women feel more confident about their coping skills.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung explained how in middle age people tend to drop the roles they were playing, outgrow their pretenses. Some women become more willing to take risks as they grow less concerned about what others think. Women who submerged their identity when their children were young may feel a sense of liberation once they are older. Even the death of a parent, while painful and a frequent trigger of midlife depression, can free women from the burden of expectations, as they ask, Who am I doing all this for anyway?
The dream for many women involves starting a business of their own. When they do the cost/benefit analysis of staying in a job they dislike or taking a leap of faith, more and more women are ready to jump. I think part of the elixir is the learning. Part is the control. Part of the reason is just the idea, I better take control of my own nest egg because no one else is going to.
THE NEXT GOLD MINE: MIDLIFE AS AN INDUSTRY
From coast to coast, women of all backgrounds are essentially opening up the Great Midlife Lemonade Stand, taking the bitter taste of aging and making it sweet, satisfying. This is both noble and shrewd. Women like helping other women, and as it happens, just as women reach their moment of self-doubt, they also ripen into the perfect market segment. "You can make a ton of money," agrees Shellenbarger. "Let's face it. These women with their fat pocketbooks approach the age of 50 and lose their inhibitions. Imagine that! That's a lot of spending. The other thing that research shows will open people's pocketbooks is sadness, and for a lot of people, midlife crisis can be quite sad. And if you strike out in new directions after your crisis, you spend. If you are pursuing a dream, your primary focus is not going to be frugality. You're going to be out there buying stuff."
For entrepreneurs with a smart answer, these are gold-rush days. "Anybody who is making pants with elastic waists is cleaning up," laughs Sharon Hadary, executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research in Washington. Curves International, a women's-only gym franchise aimed at the over-35 group, is the fastest-growing franchise of any kind in history, including McDonald's. Ninety percent of the franchise owners are women. "We lower cholesterol, blood pressure, help them lose weight," she says. "Some of these people, I don't know where they'd be if they hadn't started a program."
THE BEST ESCAPE ROUTES
When women find a key to solving their own midlife mysteries, they often want nothing more than to help other women do the same. That typically involves some kind of journey, often a literal one.
The notion that the way to launch a spiritual journey is to take an actual trip is fueling the adventure-travel market, especially since many adventure travelers are women in their 40s. Half the women who sign on for her trips are married, but their husbands aren't interested in taking cooking classes in Italy or visiting gardens in Savannah. "He likes the fact that she is safe, traveling with an escorted group and comes back happy because she has fulfilled her travel dream," says Golden. It's self-serving for me to say that Gutsy Women Travel does that. But some of these women have never been on trips on their own, without children and husbands. By the end of the first night, women are hugging each other and telling their life stories. You remember when you were young and had a pajama party? Well, we're only taller."
GUIDES FOR THE INNER JOURNEY
To serve women in need of ongoing support and guidance, there is the growing army of life coaches who, once again, are often women looking to turn their midlife experience into a career. Debra Engle, 48, and Diane Glass, 57, both high-powered corporate marketing executives in Des Moines, Iowa, had done focus groups with a financial-planning firm interested in offering workshops for midlifers struggling with retirement planning. In their focus groups, they had found that many midlifers didn't want to spend all their days working at something they disliked just so they could finance a 20-year vacation in their golden years.
Plus, there was the "Oprah factor," as they call it, a growing emphasis on women nurturing themselves and helping others recharge and reinvent themselves, often by finding spirituality.
Though the initial impulse for many women seems to be to do something for themselves for once, the renewal that follows seems to draw them back toward caregiving. Four out of five women over 50 said having a job in which they help others is important to them, according to a joint study by the Simmons School of Management and Hewlett-Packard. "All the studies on spirituality and religion in America show women have a much higher rate of participation in religious and spiritual activities, and they rank service to community as more important than men do," Shellenbarger argues. "You're going to tell me that's really sexist, but I show that research has documented it. No one can exactly explain this, but religion and spirituality compel one to reach out to others in service."
There is no telling the impact this generation is going to have as it reinvents what it means to get older and applies its many blessings and ingenuity to the pursuit of health and happiness.
"As we age, everything for our generation is going to be different," says Susan Johnson, 54, who quit her job as a Washington lobbyist to become a consultant to families with aging parents and complex medical problems. "We're staying in shape. We're eating healthier. We're Internet savvy. As we start to get into our golden years, we'll be on the Internet, investigating drugs and protocols. And we'll seek help when we need it. If we need a consultant, we hire one. If we need a coach to teach the latest exercise in Pilates or whatever, we hire people. We are a generation that will continue to invent. We won't just accept what's laid out ahead for us." Now that many Americans, according to a survey, think that full-fledged adulthood begins at 26, there is room for multiple midlife crises. There is the "quarter-life crisis" that hits at 25, the traditional one in your 40s and still another 20 years later. We are living too long and too well to stay settled even in a contented state for more than a few years at a time. And with experience, each new life-cycle crisis stands a better chance of looking like just another chance to start all over again.
With reporting by Melissa August/Washington, Amanda Bower and Deirdre van Dyk/New York, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Siobhan Morrissey/Boca Raton, Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines and Leslie Whitaker/Chicago
I don't know if you or someone you know is nearing mid-life CRAZY, but if you are, there is no need to be afraid. We have already experienced some gains and losses, successes and failures ... that got us to where we are now. Life has been preparing us and equipping us for this time. Whatever crazy thing we find ourselves in, trust that everything happens for a reason. We are being challenged by the one person we can't run away from: ourselves. We are asking questions and demanding answers of ourselves, and we can find them if we are willing to truly look ourselves in the mirror, take a moral inventory, change the things that need to be changed and accept whatever we see, wrinkles, gray hair and all.
Come grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be!
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