The Midlife Pendulum

Actress Lily Tomlin, who plays Frankie in the wonderful Netflix show Grace and Frankie once said, “Middle age is when you finally get your shit together and your ass falls apart.” I love this quote. It sums up the perverse ironies inherent in midlife beautifully and provides a droll snapshot of the dual emotions that can run alongside each other during these tumultuous years. Although there are a plethora of studies online supporting a variety of hypotheses about midlife – some argue that women are happiest during this period, while others maintain we are more anxious and depressed than at any other time in our lives – I don’t believe there is any such dichotomy. For each one of us, midlife is a time of complexity, contradiction and conflicting emotions. It’s as confusing as puberty, but with responsibilities.

With every plus that comes in midlife, it can seem there’s a minus ready to bite us on the bum. By now we’ve stopped admiring and coveting the generic ideal of “body beautiful” and begun appreciating our own individuality, understanding at last that characterful is more intriguing, engaging and attractive than commonality. But by now, menopause has started having its wicked way with us, toying with and testing our self-belief, self-worth and sanity, forcing us to manage, understand and accept a whole new host of physical and emotional changes. It’s true a woman’s work is never done.

The late American professor of literature Joseph Campbell described midlife as “...reaching the top of the ladder and finding that it was against the wrong wall.” Whether we believe we’ve been successful in our lives or not, which one of us doesn’t sometimes wonder whether or not we’ve climbed the correct wall? I know I do, often. Working in media, an industry that has evolved beyond all recognition since I started out more than 20 years ago, it doesn’t feel so much that my ladder was against the wrong wall, but rather there was an elevator close by, in which a bunch of far more savvy individuals than me jumped into creating blogs, Instagram profiles and digital platforms. While they whizzed up to the top floor, I was still laboriously trying to get a leg up on the final rung of that ladder.

In our 40s we naturally take stock. We look at what we have achieved, at where others have succeeded, and at some point most of us feel a bizarre mix of pride and shame, contentment and dissatisfaction. According to psychologist Oliver James, we live in a society where we are constantly encouraged to feed our aspirations. But in an interview with The Guardian, he explained that we should, “...concentrate on looking downwards rather than upwards...we should look at people who have less and feel lucky.” Easier said than done in a world where social media profiles have become the benchmark for who we should be and how we should live. It’s impossible not to be impacted sometimes by the visions of perfection, success and affluence that pervade Instagram, for instance.

In an interview with The New Yorker in 2018, Kieran Setiya, author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, explains how he had often wondered whether he should have become a doctor rather than a professor of philosophy. It’s the shoulda, woulda, coulda little devil that sits on our shoulders after 40, prodding us with his fork to feel disappointed, disillusioned and downcast. Setiya says regrets and uncertainties about our choices are good signs as they reflect a healthy multidimensional approach to life. He adds, “To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it.” Do all those fabulous people on social media have an impoverished existence IRL? It’s much more likely of course that their lives are not everything they appear to be, because loss is an enormous part of midlife whoever you are.

Among all the freedoms we enjoy during these years – the freedom to accept ourselves just as we are, the freedom to say no, the freedom to enjoy the things we genuinely love doing rather than feeling shamed into spending time on activities we think we should or which others believe are right for us – the losses we experience are like shackles.

If middle-age can be compared to a hot air balloon, losses are the tether lines that hold us back from feeling entirely free, and happy.

The ageing and passing of our parents is just one of those profound losses. I’ve experienced both this year; the death of my Dad in January and the recent decline in my mother’s health. The experience makes me think of author James A Michener’s words: “We are never prepared for what we expect.” One of the most heart-wrenching realities of middle age (for me anyway) is that we finally understand and fully appreciate our parents just as they leave us.

While so many of us feel immense pride in everything we’ve done and achieved through our twenties and thirties, and relish the confidence in our abilities that comes with midlife, often it’s tempered by a fear that we may lose our usefulness, whether that’s because of ageist workplaces, debilitating midlife conditions, children gaining their independence, or the end of caring responsibilities. German philosopher Arthur Shopenhauer made the rather depressing assertion that life “swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom”. I disagree, but to borrow his analogy, I think the pendulum of midlife often swings between feelings of confidence and superfluousness.

In an interview with The Washington Post, author Ada Calhoun brilliantly describes the frustrations inherent in midlife, especially for women of our generation. She explains, “A typical Gen-X women in the year 2020 is working an intense, full-time job or is underemployed and frustrated about it, and is caring for some combination of ageing parents and other relatives and children in their young and teenage years while going through perimenopause…and her phone is blowing up with reminders and breaking news and demands...and she’s been told she is so lucky because men do more at home...” And this was in early February before Covid-19 presented a whole new set of contradictions and challenges.

Midlife is also when we begin to see individuals our own age get the kind of scary illnesses we used to think only befell “older” people. With that comes the realisation that we are in fact halfway through our lives; that there are probably fewer years ahead than have passed. Although at our most confident, we can suddenly feel intensely vulnerable. This can also lead to fears that “our best years are behind us”, that we’ll abruptly stop achieving, adventuring, experimenting – in other words really living – over the next (hopefully) 40 years. Of course, these midlife worries are universal, and that’s why platforms such as Heyday are so important because they bring us together and highlight that most of us are going through the same confusing stuff at the same time. Once we realise we’re not alone in our concerns – that this is in fact the reality of the midlife journey – our vulnerability recedes and our positivity intensifies.

It’s that midlife pendulum again, you see, and the thing is, we just have to swing with it; embracing the good and braving the bad as best we can.