A classic midlife crisis

But not one where I buy a Ferrari

A strange thing has happened, I am middle aged. This must be some trick of time, because my parents are middle aged. I was just at my dad’s fortieth birthday party (I was ten) and I remember very clearly feeling some kind of pity for him. He was so old, I thought. Nearly time for him to embrace death. I’d be sad, I knew that. But at that great age, it was inevitable! A long life, a lovely birthday party, then a well deserved sleep (forever).

Middle age is an elastic term. It creeps up on you sometime after you hit forty, but can be used right up into your seventies if you’ve aged well and commit to never thinking or referring to yourself as old. It’s not a medical term, there’s no scientific meaning there. It’s more a sense of something. A signifier that you’re no longer going to stay up til three in the morning drinking cheap spirits, you won’t be wearing hot pants with abandon, that you might find yourself making a satisfied sigh when you sit down in a comfortable chair.

Does your brain ever really catch up with your age? My parents both say they feel decades younger mentally. I’m the same. I see people “my age” and realise that to them, I’m old and therefore probably invisible. I see people in their forties and I’m sometimes quietly shocked that these are my peers. It doesn’t help that everyone has their own definition of what “old” is. I remember having a cigarette in a country pub garden when I was about 33, and I got chatting with a stranger. This girl was 24 and had three kids. She asked me my age, and whether I was a mother. When I said no, she nodded and replied “so when did you decide you didn’t want them?” At 33, I was long past the idea in her mind. In mine, I was too young to even think about children.

I understand better now why humans created certain arbitrary life goals. Getting married, having a kid, buying a house, retirement. All these things are “supposed to happen” at certain stages, in part because of biology. But surely they’ve also served to give us markers of time, to tell our brains that we’re aging even when we don’t feel it. I have hit a few of these markers, and felt the weight of them, but I think being childless means missing out on that real step up to full adulthood. I will always think of myself as someone’s child, not as someone’s mother.

The leap from thirty to forty has felt enormous to me. It’s the difference between still feeling as though I’m at the beginning of life to suddenly being on the wrong side of a number (even if that number is just a random age I’ve ascribed meaning to). I find it genuinely frightening to tot up the years between leaving school and now (23 years) or the time between my first marriage and now (13 years). To have so much history in the rear view mirror, even if there is more to be made, is a dizzying feeling sometimes. What have I actually done with all of that time? What do I do now?

There is a nice Joan Didion essay in which she explains that she writes to understand what she thinks about something. As I write this, I see that there are two separate things going on here. One is my continual horror at how fast life goes by (and my melancholy nostalgia, which I’ve written about before). The other is how I see myself now that I’m “middle aged.” Both are uncomfortable! I long for my early adulthood, I dread being seen as old, both on a shallow level (do I just dread looking old?) and more deeply. At the same time, I am not so in thrall to rose-tinted memory that I forget how miserable a lot of my youth actually was. Nor am I so pessimistic as to deny that being the age I am now is actually nicer in many ways.

Every generation is adamant they will be different from the one which came before. We look at photos of long dead relatives and have a hard time seeing them as anything but old. My family joke that my grandfather looked middle-aged from about twenty one. By the time he actually reached that milestone, his face finally fit. But when I look at pictures of him at around forty, I see someone entirely different to me. I see someone who could be, well, my grandfather.

Me and my grandfather (he was thirty five here*)

We all think we’re growing old in a new way, hopefully a better way. I am doing Pilates and fervently using an LED mask. I am wearing jeans and can adequately handle new technology. I lift weights and reject gardening and refuse to wear trousers with an elasticated waist. You cannot lump me in with the middle aged, I won’t let you!

Except, of course, you can. It is undeniable, however much Pilates I do (surely even Bryan Johnson, the man who’s spent millions in his quest to not grow old, cannot deny he is clearly in middle age). And there’s something sort of charmless about people who refuse to grow up. Think of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House who makes a point of telling everyone that he is “as a child” in order to eschew responsibility of any kind. I don’t want to cling onto youth with my fingernails. I think I might actually be quite good at being old. It’s just this middle bit where I have one foot in both and belong to neither that I’m struggling with.

*Jokes jokes he was 64, which is coincidentally the age I look in this photo