The Messy Middle: Part One - Body

7 minute read

In my creative writing class, I will very often teach a class entitled the “Messy Middle.” It’s a phrase I coined when I was writing my third novel because, by then, I realised that the middle was the trickiest part, in many ways the most treacherous. In the beginning, you have your exuberance to guide you – that energy that comes from the idea that inspired you to write in the first place – and as you get into the last, say, quarter of the draft there is a different kind of momentum as you work towards the finish line. But in the middle, the start and the end are too far away to see, let alone offer any kind of guidance and this is where things get messy.

Thinking about mid-life, it seems to me that the same kind of thing happens. In our teens and twenties, the focus is all on who we will be, and what our lives will look like and in our 30s, we are busy going about making that happen – or maybe reinventing some other version of our lives that has become more appealing. Either way, the balance is still ahead. For people who are older – I’ve observed this with friends of mine in their 60s or 70s – there seems to be a different type of energy that comes from planning for retirement, having more time, more freedom, a new beginning of sorts.

But in the middle of our lives – our 40s, 50s – the balance we had before has shifted; we might have the same amount of time ahead that we had before, but maybe we won’t. Acknowledging and embracing this shift can be messy – at least it can be for me – and it impacts our bodies, our minds and our spirits. In the first of a three-part feature on this topic I’m going to tackle the messiest of all first – I’m going to tackle the body.

For me, my body was something I learned to really value, to take care of, in my 30s. In my late 20s, I started eating a bit healthier and going to the gym but it wasn’t until my 30s that I began to do these things for me, because I wanted to, not because I “should”. When I started to run outdoors in my 30s, I realised that I actually had always hated the gym and that my regular runs by the sea – combined with a few yoga classes a week – were, if not the key to happiness, then pretty damn close. As my physical strength grew, it felt like my mental toughness did too, and with that strength came a suppleness, a feeling of being able to handle whatever life had to throw my way.

At 34, I took my first extended trip to New York, working for a month on my second of two as-yet unpublished novels and there I discovered the Brooklyn Bridge Bootcamp. The bootcamp – as the name suggests – was a group of people who worked out on Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise and sunset, starting and ending with a run over the bridge itself. I joined the evening group and the first time I walked up to meet them I realised in a nano-second that I was the oldest there by quite a long way – at least a decade older than the instructor herself. Competitive as I always have been, this made it all the more thrilling to be first to cross our imaginary finish line at the end of the workout, to be less out of breath than most of the others. Looking back, it was more about proving my own strength and fitness to myself, not to any of them. Looking back, I was in the best shape of my life.

At 41, two months after my wedding, I had my first serious running injury – a seemingly benign ankle roll on Montauk Beach that led to months on crutches and eventual surgery. As my recovery dragged on, older friends of mine had a tendency to share how their ankles, knees, hips – fill in the blank – had forced them to give up running. As they enthusiastically shared the joys of cycling, rowing, tennis, and even pickleball, these stories didn’t comfort me, in fact, they did the opposite. I wasn’t old, I certainly wasn’t old enough to give up something that was such an important part of my life. I was determined to get it back.

And I did get it back. At 43 I ran my first post-surgery 10km race on an ankle rejuvenated by my own stem cells aided by my own dogged determination and the equally dogged determination of one of New York’s top ankle surgeons – a fellow Dub, as it happened. But five years later, I am writing this gearing up for another surgery – a bigger one this time, on my knee. This time, I’m noticing more doubt creep in, less confidence in the outcome, a feeling that there is more “at stake.” This back and forth in my brain, is, to me, a manifestation of the “Messy Middle.” At 41, saying “yes” to surgery was a no brainer, but at 48, I know there will be setbacks and how hard it was to recover before. I wonder sometimes if I am chasing my youth – a past version of myself – at a time when really, it makes more sense to let her go?

When I’m in this state of mind, I can tell myself it’s a time just to give thanks for all the runs my knees gave me – across Brooklyn Bridge, through Central Park, on Dun Laoghaire Pier, by the 40 Foot in Sandycove – and head down to the cycling shop on 96th Street and buy a bike. I could do this of course – there is nothing wrong with that option - but every time I think about it, every time I hold that possibility in my mind, there’s another voice there, a voice that says I’m not ready, a voice that reminds me of the people I see on my races in their 60s, 70s, maybe even older. And I remember the kind of person I am – the kind of person that by now I’ve learned that I am – and I know that even if for some reason the surgery doesn’t work, I need to be able to know I gave it my all. I need to be able to say I tried.

body image

A related area, to this, of course – a whole other “Messy Middle” of its own is the topic of weight and body image. I note I wrote how I started eating healthily in my 20s and – no offence to my 20-something self – I see now that I didn’t really have much of a handle on what healthy eating was back then. Lucky as I have been that I’ve maintained a pretty steady weight for most of my life, I took for granted the burgers, the pizzas, the wine, the beer, that I could polish off without too much impact. Certainly, later, with all the running, not only was I striding over the Brooklyn Bridge, I was striding all over New York sampling the best ice-cream, pizza, and Chinese food. So it came as a bit of a shock a few years back to realise that my jeans were getting tighter, that when I caught site of myself half dressed in the mirror – never a good thing – that “messy middle” was taking on a whole new meaning. Like all good strategies for dealing with change, I started with denial and continued eating and exercising the way I always had, thinking maybe that the number on the scale was temporary – something related to holiday eating, or the heat of the summer, or my period, or all of those things. And the number on the scale was indeed temporary, I was right about that, except it only went one direction – higher.

Like thousands – probably hundreds of thousands – of women in mid-life I eventually found myself joining a programme to lose weight, committed to going to meetings and downloaded an app to track my food. At first, I resented it, even though my wife and I signed up to do it together. Sure, the people in the meetings were nice, sure there was a certain kind of fun in planning meals and cooking together and sure – most important of all – the pounds were coming off. But it was something that for a while, I still felt, I shouldn’t have to do; I wanted things to be the way they’d been before.

Thankfully, at 48, I am beyond that now, accepting as I do that this happens to most people and honestly, there are much worse things that I could be having to deal with in my 40s.

And it turns out that what I learned about weight loss – the acceptance that more effort is required to achieve basically the same outcome – can also be applied to other areas of my life. It turns out that this approach can be applied to my sex life.

When my wife turned the big 4-0 – a few months before me – someone gave her a joke present, a book titled Sex After 40. When she opened it, the pages were blank, giving us all a good laugh, as was intended. But thinking about that moment now, some of the banter and the jokes, there was something else at play too, maybe some kind of knowing, or acknowledgement among the older couples in the room.

Eight years on, I am happy to report back from the field that just because you are over 40, the pages don’t have to be blank. But if I am truly honest – and why write this and not be honest? – as two women in perimenopause with seven surgeries between us during that time period, the equivalent book of our sex life would be a volume that’s a little slimmer than the book of our 30s. How could it not be? All of the “messy middle-ness” of the body – physical pain and weight gain and changing libidos – does not provide the perfect setting for spontaneous bursts of sexual desire and that’s without taking into account work schedules, family demands and the variety of amazing shows to be binge-watched on any number of streaming services.

But, just like other areas of mid-life, the key has been to let go of what things “should” look like or what things were like and instead to begin by accepting what is. And what that has meant for me – for us – is that sex is less often driven by spontaneity (though that does happen) and more often by closeness and commitment to maintaining space for something in our relationship that is important to us both. Like I said, there are parallels to the weight thing, but it’s much, much more fun...

midlife in the mirror

The last thing I want to touch on – a final middle ground that has been messy for me – is skincare, okay, I’ll just say it: it’s about wrinkles. There’s nothing quite like looking at your own face in a Zoom camera for two years alongside boxes with other people’s faces to fuel my sense of “compare and despair.” How had I never noticed those wrinkles on my forehead before? How come they seem deeper, more visible than that other woman on the call who I think is around the same age as me? Is it the lighting? The camera angle? Or is this really how I look?

Late one night, I found myself Googling Botox– something I can honestly say I have never looked up before. I was the kind of person – when I was a younger kind of person – who scoffed at these things, I wondered why people would even consider injecting all these chemicals into their faces. But now, it seems that I’m a different kind of person, that even though I decided I didn’t want to go down that route – not only the chemicals but fear of needles and the ongoing cost – I understand why people do and I’ve (thankfully) lost my judgement around it. My Google search – naturally – resulted in a flood of reels in my Instagram feed of women with dewy skin advertising every kind of skin care remedy under the sun. Of course, it is all unproven – I am not old or young enough to believe everything I read on the internet – but, perfectly curated as it is, this advertising is designed to set off my “Messy Middle” alarm of looking old, which is does. And so I find myself spending about the same as what I make writing this column on a serum that I’ve been using for about a year now. I can’t tell you that it works, but I can’t tell you that it doesn’t work either. I have noticed that my obsession with my wrinkles seems to have lessened. It could be the serum, or it could be that I’m doing less on Zoom as we get back to real life. It could even be that holy grail of acceptance. But whatever it is, I’ll take it.

Today, walking back from a pre-op appointment at my surgeon’s office, I heard the Baz Luhrmann song Sunscreen, a song I love, a song I haven’t heard for a long time before today. As I listened to the words anew – the reminder that I, too, will get old – it reinforced the thoughts that had been taking shape in my head for this article, that all of this starts with acceptance. I may not like the changes to my body, I might want to turn the clock back ten years, or more, but until I accept these physical changes until I accept where I am, I will spend my time in resistance, looking back to a version of myself that is no longer who I am.

The truth is I am not young anymore – my body has been on this earth for 48 years and there are consequences of that – but I am not old either. I don’t have to be in the past and - unless it’s planning for my financial security or a longer-term goal - I don’t have to be in the future either. I can stand here on my 48-year-old feet – feet that look the same as my 28-year-old feet did, just saying – right where I am, in the middle, with all its messiness.