How to Curate Your Own Midlife Crisis - by Steph Sprenger
Brene Brown says it’s not a crisis but an unraveling. She writes that it’s the part of life when “the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear: I’m not screwing around.” I recently heard Cheryl Strayed from Dear Sugar answer a listener question on a podcast. The caller was in her mid-forties, her kids were growing up, she wasn’t crazy about her current career, and she wondered if maybe she was having a midlife crisis. Cheryl told her, “In your twenties, you ask yourself the question, “Who am I?” But when we get to midlife, we ask ourselves, “But who am I really?”
We’ve all heard and read myriad quotes about what midlife means to women. In 2017, almost every Gen X woman I knew had a major epiphany after reading Ada Calhoun’s O Magazine piece, “The New Midlife Crisis For Women,” which inspired her 2020 book, Why We Can’t Sleep. When Calhoun wrote about how different midlife looks for men than women, and in particular, what it looks like now, for Gen X women, many of us sat up a little straighter. We were paying attention. I was only 38 when I read that essay—my children were five and ten years old. I was a different person then.
I had no idea what the next seven years would bring. I once jokingly referred to a rough patch in my mid-thirties as a “2/5 life crisis,” but at 45, it seems both optimistic and realistic to assert that perhaps this is the true halfway point. (Knocking on wood, god help me, I live in fear of inadvertently typing words that would read tragically ironic upon my untimely demise three hours later.) Making it to 90 seems like a good life goal. Fully embracing, really living, and truly enjoying the next 45 years? Even fucking better.
