#Mid-Life Crisis

[xenon-guava]

I coveted that wind, I suppose.

[thatbadadvice]

Help! The Woman I Have Been Stalking for Years Is Disinclined to Engage With Me

Carolyn Hax, WaPo, 1 June 2023 (originally 11 March 2009):

Dear Carolyn: About five years ago, I began to realize that a woman I dated 25 years earlier was someone I had stronger feelings for than I was mature enough to appreciate at the time. I had questions for her about why we hadn’t blossomed into the kind of relationship I now think we both believe we were destined for. In the past five years, I’ve continued to have those questions, then dreams, etc., which led me to do a paid search for her address. I wrote her twice and left a voice mail. My messages have been about old friends I bumped into who reminded me of her, what I’ve been doing and how I’d like to hear from her. That is, nothing too serious or about what’s been on my mind. I haven’t received an answer. I’ve thought through the reasons she hasn’t corresponded, and why I needed to talk with her, and am still at a loss. Would asking her my questions directly in a letter be a way to coax her to reconnect? Telling her that, apart from this midlife crisis of mine, I’m happily married and successful, and that all I want are answers? -- A 30-year-old question

Dear 30-Year-Old Question,

One might expect a happily married person to do all kinds of things, but topmost among them is paying to find the contact information of an ex-girlfriend and sending said ex-girlfriend multiple unanswered messages, repeatedly and through a variety of means, over the course of many years in the hopes of deceiving her into heady conversations about the details of your long-ended relationship. Yes indeed, when the Bad Advisor thinks of "normal stuff a person who's very happy in their marriage would do," her mind immediately goes to "pretending to ask innocuous questions about old friends in the hope that a woman I dated 30 years ago believes I am solely and only asking her innocent questions about old friends, when in fact I am explicitly and admittedly not."

Women are famously unable to clock the intentions of men, who are very clever, extremely stealthy, and never creepy or dangerous to the extent that they would unsettle people from whom they have demanded interaction and who have time and time again ignored them. Probably this woman received your incredibly blasé letters and voicemail and thought: "Gosh, it seems like this dude who deuced out on me three decades ago is trying to rope me into responding to him multiple times despite my obvious disinclination to engage only and exclusively on the subject of our old friends, what a boring conversation, I shan't respond unless he sends me a lengthy bit of written correspondence detailing his many thoughts and feelings about how our romance ended, I simply can't imagine having a conversation with him unless I know for absolute certain he wants to rehash what happened between us, which is the only possible way I could fathom entertaining such a reconnection, one which I would never have reason to pursue otherwise, as I am so desperately in love with him and have been lo these 30 years but could not in good conscience find a way to broach the subject unless he sends me just one more letter finally making his bonerful intentions plain, that sly dog."

Might you have neglected to include a return address on the previous correspondence about which you were extremely desperate, but in a very casual way, to receive a response? Does your ex-girlfriend own the only cellular telephone on earth that does not log the return-call number of people who leave voicemails? Mayhap she simply does not know how to contact you after multiple attempts over half a decade! These are highly probable reasons she has not sought you out! Vastly more likely than the fact that she sees entirely the fuck through your pretenses and wants nothing to do with you whatsoever.

If you wish to receive a concrete answer about the status of your relationships, your best hope is to CC your spouse on any future correspondence. I think you can expect a prompt response.

[minnophee-draws]

You can't tell me this isn't a fuckin' mood…. I have this crisis everyday.

[gregor-samsung]

La Crise [The Crisis] (Coline Serreau, 1992)

[glynnisi]

LUCK

Someone... I guess she was tired? Offered some Barbie clothes in a Facebook Barbie group for $20 because they needed TLC and she just didn't feel up to it... and I spent the day doing little Barbie laundry and have recovered them up to a value of at least $200, so far. One of the outfits was only made 1969-1970 for Barbie friend "Julia" and was the whole reason I jumped on the deal and it's easily worth $65 even though it's missing the hat. I love good luck. :)

[dessertbird]

Daily Destiel 💙💚

Is ketchup a vegetable? Claire and Dean think so. 🍅🍔😂❤️

[atroposdelafere]

Husband heating up his leftover burrito:

-Do you think I should use knife and fork to eat it?

Me (not aware it was a decision requiring two people):

-I don't know. Is it firm? Can you hold it comfortably? Is it soggy? Is it hot? Does it leak?

Husband:

-You are asking too many unnecessary questions.

Me:

-Just use cutlery.

[keithrm]

I Will Not Lose Her

(Written August 25, 2016, edited in 2024)

When a cataclysmic storm rages between friends, we often look at the relationship itself.  What went wrong?  That is what I did with her.  I examined the relationship.  I am sure she did as well.  However, I think a deeper part of me had a better, though unclear, understanding.

It was not the relationship.  It was me.  I was changing.  I had changed.  I had begun to yell.  I hate yelling and confrontation.  I had become rude and aggressive.  I made her uncomfortable, and made her feel embarrassed around her friends.  I would commiserate over events for days.  I had become particular and fixed.  Meaningless things stuck in my craw.  That was not the me I had been before.

What happened to the person who bought her a flower every payday?  What happened to the person who played with her like a puppy, right in front of her family?  Where was the person who left little notes of affection?  Where was the young adult who sat and listened to music for hours?  What happened to the person who cherished the differences between peoples?  The person I always thought I was, the person I had been was gone, buried under spite and burden, and mostly confusion.

We often point our fingers at familiarity.  Routine steps in, and things get dull.  Certainly, this played a role, but simple commonness would not turn playfulness into argument.  Moreover, I had lost the ability to communicate with others, of greatest note my daughter.  Something else was at work, though I could not see the condition while being consumed by it.  I had changed.  I was changing.  The me I enjoyed had been lost, left behind like a forgotten piece of luggage.

I did not know it at the time, but andropause was eating away at the younger me.  The symptoms, as I read them, did not apply, but every physiology is different.  Moreover, severe Social Anxiety was also setting in, almost to the point of phobia.  I have always been introverted, socially anxious, and awkward, but I was sinking into a much deeper abyss.  Did changing hormones fuel the anxiety, or did the anxiety alter the andropause symptoms?  Who knows?  I can only see it now because it is all done and past.

I did not leave her.  Oh, I started the separation, but it was not her I was fleeing.  I was not abandoning the relationship.  I dragged myself away from her like a dying animal sulking away from the group for the group’s protection.  I pulled the yelling, particular, touchy lunatic I had become to a safe distance.  During a mid-life crisis, most men think of fast cars and young women.  However, I sought solitude.  I hated hurting her.  I detest myself for doing so.  I needed to reclaim the original me and kill the monster I had become.  I needed to punish myself and protect the world from my beast.

The love and affection has not faded.  It has always been there, though it had to be concealed.  I needed to find music again.  I needed to learn to communicate again.  I needed to understand parts of me I had never known, and rekindle parts that had been long gone.  I have learned I am emotionally broken and immature in so many ways.  I cannot reconcile love and sex.  Introversion and Social Anxiety have always been parts of me.  I am a dweeb, a dork, unable to be adult about the emotional and social qualities of life.  I can write a book, talk sciences, teach a class, and solve problems with the best of them, but I cannot properly handle human interactions.  The human equations, the personal qualities, are knots I cannot untie.  Autism, Asperger’s, perhaps there is a sprinkle of these in my matrix.  Looking in someone’s eyes is more frightening than revealing.

I miss her.  I always will.  I dream about her more than any other person or thing.  I wake up crying several times a year, and I do not see that changing.  My hormones have settled.  I have crossed the mid-life crisis, and understand myself.  I listen to music again, and play.  I let things go.  The tensions are gone.  Life’s difficult challenges are faced straightforward.  The love is there and always will be.  I will die with her name on my lips.

I have lost her presence, though I will not lose her.

[child-of-the-new-contagion]

Ecto-Containment System

.,.,.I wanted a place where I wasn't limiting myself by fear of certain potential readers. It's funny, cause they wouldn't probably read anyway, but the slight chance was inhibiting expression. My wife E is one of the feared potential readers, and I've given out links at times to people too close to me in real life, and that can cause headaches. I could of course just not post, but there's the thing about being potentially readable, even if it's a self-flattering fairy-tale, or even the thing about being theoretically readable far in the future by alien surveyors of the Sol information microcube archived before civilization got turned into a dead two-dimensional painting by hyper-dimensional travelers cleaning the Dark Forest of potential rivals like some roided-up sinophobic new american century project.

So I'm posting in a new way, just writing about things straight-forwardly, instead of coding and metaphors, although I'm trying to do this thing where I have my cake and eat it too, take trips on dxm yet have the happy marriage, be in a relationship but also be able to write, indulge in cryptic poetics and also just convey information, for the edification of myself, mostly, cause there's this sordid compulsion in the social media era, of exhibitionism, even if it's for no one.

So yeah, I'm being a goody good boy for the most part, and a good husband [pretty good at any rate], and faithful, but I also believe in drugs. Certain ones, a sophist's discernment, doctoring myself. I can never totally turn my back on the dextromethorphan sacrament, I'm the prodigal son, the lapsed catholic reclaiming my birthrite.

I think vaping is the new MSG. They don't want it to be OK. They don't want you to enjoy it. They. Them. You know.

It's hard to quit because the negative consequences are so few. Except the artificial expense. The Sin Tax, the mafia government's cut, whatever. Also, there's something creepy about turning myself into a glitchy machine whose functionality is dependent on the short nicotine timer. I don't like it when I'm impatiently pecking at the button with increasing, ever-more-futile efforts like a trauma victim in the hospital bed being weened off the morphine IV by the nurses.

And there's something troubling about the steep curve of diminishing returns, forcing me to take frequent tolerance breaks, like I fail to do anymore with caffeine. It's such a silly game. I'm wired up with what sometimes seems too many chemically dependent circuits, but then, it's all a chemical circuit in'it, some voice deep inside sooths me into believing. No, that's not all there is, there's magikscum of dissociative drugs, and there's the people I love, organic realness, and there's a society I don't know whether to be a martyr defending or shrug off, or just admit I don't know nothin about nothin, I'm just a confused old man in the woods.

There's the thing about never being very precocious, so middle age is gonna hit me late like most things, maybe I'm not even there yet, but oh boy, what a crash it'll be. If I can survive beyond 47, the most depressing age according to data, then maybe I'll get to the real don't give a fuck golden years and enjoy that, if there's anything left in the world to enjoy.

I can take tolerance breaks though, I can go on nic gum, boring responsible gum, and I can even get off that too and get nic free, and I can even get off zoloft, until I start feeling sadness too scary to bear, and run back to it. I can get off these things for a little while. I can get off booze almost all the time, and that is one of the really evil ones, so that's good. I can keep my fentanyl in a bank vault, open it telepathically with the auto-destruct command when needed, if last-ditch geo-engineering fails to fix the planet, and instead turns everything to ice, with the remnants of humanity left to fight it out on a never-stopping train circumnavigating the frigid world and serving as an emblem of wealth inequality.

One part of the movie Children of Men that I think of more and more, that I never gave its due, is the premise of the government-issued suicide pills that are advertised on TV, with the cheery slogan: "You choose when." And real life is rhyming with that close to home with all the hoopla about the Medical Assistance in Dying program in Canada, the assisted-suicide fast-track. I have complicated feelings about that.

I wonder if I can captive-audience someone through the thin gruel of emotional blackmail into reading my selfish words through laundering in what is professedly a letter to a friend, but is really just a blog entry, another wordwank. It might almost work, it's hard to quit something that almost works because it's so close, it might as well be working, burning the credits of long expired favours, like bunk acid.

Mostly I can keep vaping and being on SSRIs and trazodone the tranq because maybe I just breezed through the midlife crisis without even noticing, or maybe it's still waiting for me, but regardless, I can enjoy the benefit, having lived this long, of not feeling the dumb compulsion to be pure somehow, that's an idealism I can happily leave behind.

I'll also post the only music I can manage over the long lame lately, which is facile and clumsy improvisations. But there was something worth a novel or a series in the title: The Art of the Possible. Which is what they say politics is, but I'm trying to stay away from politics on this blog. But there's rich thematic resonance from the epigram that extends to many things. What I meant when I came up with it while playing stemmed from the obsessive thought, what can I possibly come up with, in tense real-time, with these hands of mine that are lagging so far behind my rushing thoughts? The limitations of technique and imagination. What sort of compromise do I have to make with reality, to serve others, like the mockingly theoretical readership, listenership, or public?

[haepii]

vent. (TW: mentions ED, death and mental illness).

I graduate high school in 3 days. Soon, I am no longer considered a child. I am 18 in January. I can drink, I can party, I can go clubbing. But I am not the person 11-year-old me thought I'd be. I do not look at the picture of my childhood self in the mirror and think "She would think I am awesome". I am still insecure about my body, I still have my ED, I still miss my aunt, even though she's long passed, and I don't think I'll ever fully recover from either the death or my ED. I don't have an abundance of friends, not that it matters, because friends rotate, you grow in seperate directions.

It hasn't even hit me yet, that the people I've been to school with for the last 6-13 years of my life won't be ever-present in my day-to-day. It hasn't hit me yet that I don't look at instagram because I feel as though I don't have a life like theirs. It's hasn't hit me yet that on graduation day I'll sob, cry, and wish I could turn back time. It hasn't hit me yet that I will no longer walk the halls of my high school, but instead will be the name of a plaque that students see for generations as Dux of the college, next to my one of my closest friends who graduated last year.

It hasn't hit me yet, that instead of sitting in the audience that I'll be on stage, collecting my diploma, and certificate, while my friends and family cheer. It hasn't hit me yet that my aunt won't be there, and that I won't see her proud face in the audience. It hasn't hit me yet that I'll only see her in photos, and memories. It hasn't hit me yet that home videos can only play on the old VHS will soon be unplayable. It hasn't hit me yet that I don't remember her voice, and will never hear her say she's proud of me.

It hasn't hit me yet that my locker will go to 7th years for the next 6 years. It hasn't hit me yet that the number I've worked 2 years for comes out on the 16th of December. It hasn't hit me yet that maybe my dream course isn't possible. It hasn't hit me yet that I'll unwrap my laptop for University on Christmas morning.

It hasn't hit me yet that childhood is ending, that my grandparents are ageing, that my father no longer spends time with me. It hasn't hit me yet that soon my photos will be old photographs and my learner's permit will soon be a full-fledged driver's license.

My aunt told me, when she passed from cancer back in the tenth grade, that memories exist in a place between space and time. They have no beginning or end. They exist in the dreams, the photographs, home videos, texts, voicemails, phone calls, trips, awards, jewellery, and other heirlooms. I hope childhood does too, that childhood is forever, and not just a temporary phase of my life. I'm not ready for this, not ready to move on, or let go.

I think it's hitting me. I think it's hit me and I am in denial, and that's okay. It'll be okay. I'll be okay. I'll make peace with her death, eventually, but I'll never accept it. I won't be complicit in the after, because I don't think that's possible. I only hope that living becomes easier, that smile come easily, and happiness follows. I'll make peace with my ED as an everyday battle. I'll cultivate a relationship with food that is positive. I'll get my dream course, eventually. The number that I've salved away for will mean nothing in 12 months. I'll travel the world, meet my soulmate, and get into law school. I'll do everything I wanted to do, I'll put my heart and soul into it, because that is what I do, and I'll do it with a smile on my face.

[clockwatchman]

Global Domination & a Porsche

Daily writing promptWhat does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?View all responses Speaking from a total loser perspective, one who has next to nothing for most of his life, I wouldn’t need much to be perfectly content. I am, however, saving for a Porsche to commemorate my mid-life crisis. I’m gonna get fat and go bald in style. I suppose literally having it all means attaining some…

[tracey-tobin-author]

It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To

For as long as I can remember giving conscious thought to this particular topic, I’ve wondered why people get so fidgety about certain milestone birthdays. I’d see the older folks in my life lying about their age and wonder who it was they thought they were fooling. I’d see people pretending to forget about their own birthday all together and wonder what exactly they thought they were…

[equalvision]

House Parties - "Mid-Life Crisis" (2023)

[scormey]

https://scormey.com/2023/10/midlife-halloween-frights/ I LOVE Halloween, it is by far my favorite holiday of the year. I love the spooky ambiance, the scary movies, the Trick or Treaters and their costumes. I love every single aspect of Halloween. That all said, as an adult, it's been a while since anything really scared me about Halloween, or Horror in

[newttxt]

44, 40, and 47

[the-eldritch-psychologist]

Last week I was having a mid-life crisis. Or quarter-life crisis, whatever. My entire life has been a crisis honestly

This week I'm continuing to learn Prokofiev's Toccata op. 11 which is its own type of crisis