Ask Harmonopoly: I Regret To Inform You That This is An Actual Problem
So what are you going to do about it?
“Being a vampire’s familiar is awesome. I love mindlessly serving a cabal of ghouls with no regard for my health or happiness, and the growing terror in the back of my mind that I am wasting my life on a promise that will not be kept is just a phase I am going through. Why the stake?…uh, don’t worry about it right now.”
Dear Harmonopoly:
I’ve been having a midlife crisis. I’m dissatisfied at work. My friendships aren’t meeting my needs for intimacy. My kids are nearly grown. My marriage is solid but I long for something that sizzles. We opened the marriage so I could pursue relationships with women. I had one anxiety-inducing relationship that ended after a few months. My husband is facing unemployment, which brings a lot of instability and keeps me stuck in my job with my toxic boss (though I enjoy the work). Now we’re all in global pandemic quarantine.
I haven’t found answers. I volunteer, I create things, I do everything you’re supposed to when you’re depressed. But nothing makes me feel alive, excited, engaged. We never bought a house. I’m getting older. I guess it sounds pathetic and that I’m just whining that I’m bored, but I haven’t found a way out of this feeling yet. My therapist said I’m going to feel this way until I don’t anymore. I read that even chimpanzees have midlife crises. I began to wonder if it’s not somehow a necessary step in evolution. Maybe artificial intelligence would also have midlife crises. What do I do?
OK, here is what I am reading in this letter:
You are unsatisfied with nearly every major part of your life.
This unsatisfying life seems to rely on unspoken sacrifices and a lack of autonomy to make changes for your own happiness. You don’t own a house...why is that? You have a toxic boss, but leaving your job isn’t up for debate? Hmm.
There are outside forces that are making you take stock of your life, and you’re realizing that what you have isn’t measuring up to what you want.
Instead of addressing the fact your life needs to change, you’re trying to compartmentalize this as a “mid-life crisis” and either rationalize it into not being a problem (It’s just a part of aging! Even Siri gets the blues!) or wait it out like a patch of shitty weather in the middle of a camping trip.
Ma’am. Are you sure you don’t know what the problem is here?
Listen, I am not trying to be unduly harsh. I just want you to understand that this isn’t some random patch of gloom or poor mental health. It is happening because of things that are so obvious that a relative stranger on the internet picked up on them from a paragraph you submitted to a Google form.
I don’t know you at all, but I would guess from your letter (and honestly, from the dozens of conversations I have had with other people in similar positions to you-- this is not an uncommon malaise!) that you are the kind of person who takes responsibility for everyone else's happiness and stability, routinely ignores your actual wants and needs, and blames yourself when a “perfectly good” life isn’t enough to make you happy.
My friend, I know this well! I am not just aware of this club, I am also a former member. If we were speaking in person I would give you the secret People-Pleasers Posse handshake, which is an awkward thumbs up and a ten-minute monologue about how “this is just how it is right now, it’s fine, I was born to suffer and labor so another could shine, this is how Alfred Hitchcock made his best movies and everybody loves The Birds!”
Alas, we shall never meet. But I know you, friend. So let’s talk about what’s making you miserable.
The way you talk about your life is the same way I talk about a car I ended up buying by accident a couple of years ago. This car came into my life because my old car was totaled, and myself and my then-husband needed reliable transportation to get to and from work. We only had my car between us, so I had no choice (I thought!) than to take the insurance payout and replace my previous car as quickly as possible.
The car I wound up with was a four-door beast of a Toyota Corolla in an icky gray-beige color that made it blend into parking lots and city streets. It made me feel like an old church lady every time I got behind the wheel. It also had low mileage, a perfect interior, a great stereo, and three years left on its warranty. It drove like a dream. It was easily the nicest car I have ever owned.
Reader, I HATED that fucking car. From the minute I signed the paperwork, I hated it. Driving it off the lot, I hated it more. Stopping at a red light was such an indignity I almost plowed on into the intersection anyway, just to punish the car for being my only good option in a time of crisis. But I did not feel I had the right to hate this car, because it was a perfectly good car that most people would have been grateful to drive into the ground.
So I spent almost a year trying to talk myself into liking it. I effusively praised the car for its obvious good points, as you would a mediocre child in a Christmas newsletter meant to spark jealousy in a distant relative. Look at the shiny hood! Check out that excellent gas mileage! And sure, it was ugly as fuck and so big that I had trouble parking it and 90% of the time I took the bus or carpooled anyway because my then-husband needed the car to get to work, but these are just the sacrifices one should expect to retain what is, by any metric, A Very Good Car.
Eventually, I broke down and admitted I hated the car. I told my then-husband I hated the car, I told my friends I hated the car, I told strangers and coworkers and the other people on the bus I was taking to work that I hated the car. For some reason, complaining at length about the car did not make me feel better about it, or solve the problem in any way! So weird.
Whenever anyone reasonably recommended I attempt to sell the car that I loathed for no reason, or hinted that car ownership is perhaps not the sole responsibility of only one person in a marriage where both people commute an unwalkable distance to their job, I would immediately reject it. Because the problem wasn’t the car! The car was fine! It was me, a weak human dummy that wanted things, that was causing the issues here.
Eventually my therapist, perhaps tired of the on-the-nose metaphor for my life that the car had become, recommended listing it on Craigslist just to see what happened. So I posted it in the vehicles section with the most overwrought, apologetic explanation anyone ever gave for selling their car. The car was fine, a beautiful car, perhaps one of the finest Toyotas ever built, but I was not morally strong enough to love it as it was. Who would release me from my unworthiness?!
Three days after I listed it, a man emailed me and said it was the exact car he was looking for. His newly-retired wife needed a reliable vehicle to ferry the grandkids around while he was at work, and she just loved Corollas. He’d been looking for this exact car at this exact price for months, and he was sure this was the best deal he could find, so he'd pay whatever I asked as long as the Blue Book said it was fair.
Reader, I sold the car to him that weekend. I ended up using the profits to buy a used car off of a friend of mine. It was much older than the Toyota, the air conditioner didn’t work, it had massive dents in the hood, and it needed new brakes within a month of purchase. But it was mermaid blue, and sporty-looking, and a hybrid to boot. Now I had a car I wanted to drive all the time! So I told my then-husband that the cost savings of sharing my car with him were not worth the frustration and added public transit expenses that I had been shouldering, and he would need to purchase a car of his own.
And believe it or not, he did buy his own car, and it was fine.
As for me, I loved my shitty new car! I loved that car so much that when it ALSO got totaled a month after purchase, I tracked down its twin sister at a dealership 40 miles out of town and essentially replaced it with itself. It is not the nicest car I’ve ever owned, or even a particularly good car, but it is exactly what I want and it is mine and those facts make it the best car in the world as far as I’m concerned.
Reader? You need to sell your car. It’s time. You’re out of other options. Nothing else is going to fix this. Sell that fucking car!
But here’s where the metaphor falls apart: I am not sure what, for you, is the equivalent of the sweet release I experienced from that car sale.
For example: your marriage seems like the most obvious point of discussion here. But I’m not qualified to tell you whether to stay married or not, because I am a divorced queer cat lady who loves being single and I don’t think marriage has any actual value aside from its convenience as a tax shelter. (If you need an advice columnist who will be all “BuT MaRrIaGe AnD FaMiLy ArE SaCrEd!!!”, look up Nicole Cliffe, but that’s her weird deal and not mine.) Maybe read this column, and then this one, and see which one resonates with you more?
But I don't think that another person telling you what to do is going to help you right now. More than anything else, I want you to stop accepting that feeling bad is a normal part of your life and focus on making yourself feel good. You have one wild and precious life, and this ain’t how you want to spend it. So stop comparing yourself to monkeys and robots, stop doing everything else you can think of aside from resolving the very real issues you have, and start unfucking your shit.
Here’s what I would like you to keep in mind:
You are going to have to be uncomfortable for a while. “Mid-life crisis” is an apt term for what you are going through. Like many people, you probably spent your twenties and thirties on the quest for adult stability. You got married, you had some kids, you built a life that made sense in your eyes and conformed to the general expectations of your peers and society at large. No shame in that; people love stability and the comfort it brings to our lives. We consciously or subconsciously make choices that bring more of it, especially if our childhood was neither stable nor comfortable (high five to my fellow Kids From Circumstances!).
A mid-life crisis occurs once all of that comfort and stability becomes something we can rely on. Once the boxes on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are checked off, and we still feel dissatisfied, that’s when some of us start to wonder if there may be a higher good out there than being comfortable. Not everyone goes through this, but who cares about everyone else? Unless you are a secret contestant in some sort of underground Shame Olympics, you are competing with nobody but yourself, and I strongly recommend you drop the fuck out of that race right now.
The problem is that this kind of mid-life crisis is not a developmental stage you can wait out. It’s…well, a crisis, and you are going to have to solve it. Changing this is going to require you to run away from “comfortable” and run towards “new and weird” for the foreseeable future. Just because something feels bad it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. I am not at all surprised that the first time you tried to date a woman as a married person it was weird. Dating is weird! Dating when you’re married is extra-weird, and queer dating is just the weirdness cherry on top of your anxiety sundae. My hope for you is that instead of saying “That was weird, never again!” you say “That was weird because it is different from what I am used to, but I deserve the chance to be happy and express and explore my attraction to women so... back to Tinder!”
I don’t want to downplay the difficulty of this for you at all. You’re going to have to break years of habits and cognitive patterns you’ve adapted to. A part of the reason I shared my car story above is because I know how hard it is to figure out what you actually want when you’re so used to putting other people first and telling yourself no. I sincerely did not realize I hated that car when I bought it. My hatred was a little voice in the back of my head screaming “FUCK THIS STUPID GRANDMA CAR” that I spent a long time tuning out, because I thought I wasn’t allowed to listen to it. Learning how to listen to yourself again is going to take time and patience. I recommend really focusing on this with your therapist. Get some concrete strategies in place, and practice as much as you need to. Be patient with yourself, because it will be a process, but you will get there in the end.
If this feels too big to start with, maybe focus on just de-cluttering your mind. Sort through your responsibilities, your avocations, all the mush and chatter that makes up your day-to-day brain. What sparks joy? Focus there. What doesn’t spark joy? You can’t toss a job out like a pair of old sneakers, but you can start putting the pieces in place to jump when the time is right.
If you aren’t sure if something feels bad because it’s new or feels bad because it’s...y’know, bad? Sit with that for a while. Mull it over with that therapist. The goal isn’t to invite havoc into your life for fun, it’s to get comfortable making big changes where your happiness is the main desired outcome.
You are an adult, surrounded by other adults (or near enough), and those people can care for themselves while you’re caring for yourself. I’m not saying you flip off your entire family and ride into the sunset, but you are going to have to find a way to balance your happiness with theirs. This involves having conversations with phrases like “I’m planning to do a Skype movie with my girlfriend this weekend, do we need to do any meal planning/kid arranging/etc. for that evening?” or “You know I have always wanted to own a house. When the kids move out, how can we make home ownership a reality?” or “I want to support you during your career transition but working for a toxic boss isn’t going to be feasible for me long-term, so how can we make these transitions together?”
Notice that in all of the examples above, we are stating our needs, we are assuming we will get what we want, and we are trusting the adults around us to do some work on their own behalf. Will this always go perfectly? No, it’s gonna be weird for a while. But it’s time to get the people who love you on board with making your happiness as important as their own. Be patient, keep trying, and maybe also practice with that therapist first.
Your choices will not always be ideal, but you will still be happier if you make them instead of resigning yourself to them. I’m not the one who is going to sit here and tell you The Secret is real. You can’t always trust the universe to give you what you want, and you can’t always make the ideal choice to resolve every problem. But you still have to try to solve your problems! The work thing, for example: a job with a toxic boss is not going to get better, and it is not a job you should resign yourself to keeping. And yes, it is a shitty time to be job hunting, and your choice may well be “We need the money and I am able to emotionally disengage from the weirdo that signs my paychecks, so I’m gonna make this work until one of the new jobs I’m applying for comes through.” Even that puts you in a better position than just sucking it up and hoping your boss doesn’t drive you nuts while your husband finds a new job.
You will always be happier if you are making choices and taking an active role in making your life into what you want it to be. If you make a sacrifice, make it consciously. Push on the boundaries of the roles you’ve assumed for yourself. What would your life look like if your happiness came first?
That's the question that needs to be answered here, and I am not the person who can answer it for you. So I'm kicking it back to you, with all the hope in my heart you find the solution to that riddle. Make your life a lived and intentional thing, and you will like it more, even if it doesn’t look the same as your old one. You will love it because you chose it, and because it is yours. Best of luck.
<3 Harmonopoly