When I was 22 I had a midlife crisis

When I was 22 I had a midlife crisis. (Having now turned an august 23, I can admit this here without...ahem...too much pain). First came the epiphany that I was far, far from where I wanted to be. Then came the crash. And by crash I mean tears. Lots and lots of tears. Endless tears. Big fat sobbing into the pillow, ugly blotchy face puffy eyes the next morning tears. This wasn’t the midlife crisis. This was only the fairly damp process leading up to it. After the tears. No, let me be honest, when the tears had subsided enough to allow the headache behind my eyes to clear up long enough for me to know I had a brain left, I got out. Fast. Like a bat out of hell. Like a man on the run. Like a bullet from a barrel. Like our kitten. Tulare when the bath water goes on. Claws out. Hair sticking straight up. Eyes wide. Out. Fast.

Then came these long, grateful, blustery days of calm. Home days. Tea Days. Prayer days. “Thank God for everything I still have and leaving everything I left behind me” days when the puffy white clouds (I was noticing clouds again) floating across the blue Pacific sky bellowed down “AMEN” so loudly that I kept looking around to see if anyone else on the beach had heard them. This wasn’t the midlife crisis either. This was the period of grace that the blessed Lord above gave me before the midlife crisis came. (Although I admit I am almost always sarcastic, this is not. It was [and is] grace and it was [and is] the blessed Lord above.)

But there is one thing none of us can run from. Not a bat, not a man, not a bullet, not even sweet little Tulare who is so cute she has been able to wheedle three consecutive bowls of milk out of us just by meowing. Certainly not me. The only difference between them and me is that I care and they do not. I concern myself with the answer to the question that every well-intentioned, concerned, loving, sympathetic, single person (including myself) asked after I bolted out of law school and all that it implied: “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NOW?” And in that single question, the mid-life crisis was catalyzed.

Doubtless every person who asked the question had a good reason for doing so. Some were practical. My parents had been making my car, insurance, and phone payments my entire life and though, to their extreme credit, they have never even so much as suggested that they would rather make do without extraneous multi-hundred dollar monthly payments, they had, I’m certain, allowed themselves the smallest amount of personal interest in the idea that in three years I’d be earning enough to make my own payments and perhaps a few of theirs.

Furthermore, my father, God bless his over-worried soul, had always assumed that his youngest daughter (me) in all her English-y glory would eventually proclaim her intentions to build a hovel in a field somewhere and make novel-writing her career. He didn’t worry about her now. He worried about her when she realized that the world didn’t have an extreme amount of sympathy for a mediocre writer who lived in a hovel and had no other life experience and when she also realized that despite her most stolid convictions, you in fact did need money to survive after all. When I announced I was going to law school he was cautiously optimistic that perhaps I had finally chosen an actual profession. When I got accepted to law school he allowed himself actual joy at the prospect that one of his very own daughters would be a lawyer.

And then I quit. And further to his extreme credit he accepted this. Never has a single person who has made such a sumptuous mistake as I made ever had more support from the people around her than I have had. And so, the question, when it comes, is not in all capitals, as I hear it when it is asked. It is tentative and gentle and concerned. It says “I love you” even while it stops me cold in my tracks. Even while I stand there tongue-tied, like a prisoner in an interrogation room, it is not accusatory. It’s an open door and no handcuffs. It’s a question that says, “you don’t have to answer me.” But it echoes back on itself, “but eventually life itself will demand that you do.” The echo is all I hear.

The echo, perhaps, is me more than them. Because when I ask myself the question, I ask it in all caps and I mean for it to be answered. And there is perhaps no more frustrating and difficult state of mind to inhabit than the one in which you must look yourself square in the eye and admit that you don’t know. Because you will inevitably wonder, “THEN WHO THE HELL AM I?" And that question is the fuel on which the mid-life crisis runs.

Some people, mostly acquaintances, ask out of what they assume is kindness. They think it will be helpful for me to talk about what I am doing now. They think it will inspire me to remind myself that though I am a failure at law, I can be a success at something else. They want the opportunity to encourage me to follow my dreams. They want the opportunity to tell me that law is not for everyone so that I have the opportunity, since I am clearly one of those people, to explain to them what is for me, what I am if I am not the “lawyer type.” I am extremely adept at foiling their plans. Bless them. When they find out that, apparently, I have no dreams at all, they assure me that I will find my way. It takes all of us time to find our way, they tell me. And I agree. Except that not all of us waste thousands of dollars and nine months, break a few hearts and a couple of contracts, and discover they have no identity in the process. The mid-life crisis snuggles down into the nest she has created in my life and sips a cup of tea. She is not going anywhere.

If a person could make a living out of loving many things, I would banish the mid-life crisis from my life. I would wield my weightless, mud-luscious sword beneath her self-satisfied nose and cry out something profound and wonderful, like, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” And though she wouldn’t understand what I meant, she would leave. Because a person who has made a living exclusively off of loving many things does not have the doubt it takes to nurture a mid-life crisis.

If I were less fickle, if I felt less like a whirligig beetle and more like an Oak tree, if I didn’t have five million plans for the next five years and a fear of death, if I didn’t want a career that was everything to me and that I could also pack up and leave at a moment’s notice, if I was less like me and more like someone else (a lawyer, perhaps), I would have transitioned from knowing what I was doing to finding something else within a normal spectrum of time and perhaps the mid-life crisis would have passed me by, would have glanced my direction, realized I was a mere 22 years old and still relatively permitted to royally, fabulously mess things up, kindly put me down on her list for 25 years down the road, and passed me by. But instead I am me.

So now that I am 23, you ask (if you have gotten this far, perhaps you still care) – so now that I am 23, has my mid-life crisis passed? As with most questions, I have no answer to this. I have neither shiny red Corvette nor beach-front property to show for my crisis. I have no defined answers to any of my questions: what am I doing now? who am I? can a person make a living off of loving many things?

I have tried yoga (for which I am too impatient) and meditation (during which my legs inevitably fall asleep). These techniques are too sophisticated for me. They are not, it seems, at peace with the philosophy-of-Roya as it is. I still have times when my life flashes in front of me and it is blank with random moments and actions and dreams rolling about disconnected in different directions and it still makes me catch my breath and wonder about San Diego. I still don’t know what’s next. But despite knowing so little, I am extremely happy. Perhaps we have grown more used to each other, my mid-life crisis and I. Like two old neighbors who gossip officiously to one another day in and out but would still miss each other if one of them left. Perhaps she is biding her time. But perhaps I am biding mine as well. This was not, after all, meant to be a story of inspiration.

Finding myself unemployed and now only an echo of a scholar, I have taken time from my busy schedule of battling demons, sketching a map of my brain, and avoiding online application forms to learn an important phrase in six different languages (okay so I already knew it in a couple, but let’s not split hairs). This phrase, my ohm, if you will, is my defense against the unanswerable questions, the mid-life crisis, and, indeed, myself, having several times in the past few months been on the brink of understanding myself and then suddenly finding that I am afraid to know:

peu à peu
chotto zutsu
poco a poco
yavash yavash
nach und nach

little by little.

...goodbye 22; it's been lovely...

Today I’m 23. My birthday always feels rather more like a new year than January 1st does and though I never make resolutions either on the national new year or on my own new year (why set yourself up for depression the following December 31 [or in my case, October 31] when you realize that, after all, you’re only human and the year, though wonderful, was just a year), here is what I hope becomes of me this year:

I hope to delight in getting to know 23. I hope that this new year I am braver and stronger, that I learn how to love better and to be less judgmental but more honest. I hope at 23 that I find the words, whatever and wherever they may be, and that I do many things.

A new age never comes without having to say goodbye to the old one. In some ways, 22 truly kicked my butt. I experienced, for example, my first mid-life crisis (more on that later), discovering, in the mean time, that who I was at 17 is not who I am today no matter how much I loved that girl. I realized also that I still lack any form of wisdom, in its broadest and narrowest senses, officially placing me in the age range of “too old to be wild and free and too young to be over the hill.” Having once been in the age range of “old enough to know better but still too young to care,” I can tell you that reaching this new plateau is, to put it nicely, an extraordinary disappointment. I don’t care how romantic it is to be a song lyric, there is nothing romantic about much of growing up.

Still, 22 is tucking itself away in a corner of my heart and I am sad to see it go. Why? Because 22 taught me something else about growing up. It doesn’t stink as much as I thought it did. Okay so it’s not romantic, but some things still are.

For the first time, at 22, I felt like perhaps I wanted to be an adult, wanted to view relationships and events in my life from that perspective and act accordingly. And for the first time I felt that being an adult may be beautiful in that you never lose the child that you were because it was she who brought you to this place and because you and she are one and the same. The five-year old, big cheeked, enormous imaginationed Roya is still in me, the eternally eight Roya, the wildly happy 11 Roya are too, even the 17-who-I-am-not Roya is still something I was, and so something I am today. Growing up, perhaps, doesn’t mean losing childhood entirely; it means having the strength built up from all those ages you were to create who you have become.

At 22 I began to learn how to slow down, to discover happiness in waiting and stepping lightly and moving forward only a step a day instead of in leaps and bounds. I learned about ties and how to have stronger and better relationships. I have never been more successful, in fact, in the past have failed miserably, at holding up my end of a friendship, or a loveship. I began to grow into myself. Cranberries became my new thing. I organized all the old letters people have sent me throughout my life.

And now, here comes 23 and this is what I have come to realize:

• I now have only five years left during which to acquire a horse and a piece of land on which to put it.
• I am the same age as my mom was when she got married.
• I have yet to learn to play guitar, learn Spanish, or learn to surf.
• This just may be my year to write the next great American novel...but the pressure has never been greater.
• I am still afraid of crabs.

In light of these realizations, and others, I have gathered together some quotes that I hope will guide me through 23 – some profound sayings that remind me that I have never said anything this remarkable, but also that there is always hope...

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” ~Matthew 7:7-8

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” ~Blaise Pascal

“President Roosevelt once said, ‘speak softly and carry a big stick.’ I say to you, ‘yell loudly and swing a yard stick.’” ~Jason

“I defend myself against failure in my main design by making every inch of the road to it pleasant.” ~Emerson

“So damn easy to say that life’s so hard. Everybody’s got their share of battle scars. As for me, I’d like to thank my lucky stars that I’m alive and well...And today you know that’s good enough for me. Breathin’ in and out’s a blessing can’t you see. Today’s the first day of the rest of my life and I’m alive and well.” ~Kenny Chesney, Dean Dillon, & Mark Tamburino

“There are instincts for all the crises of life.” ~Victor Hugo

“I heard what was said of the universe / Heard it and heard it of several thousand years; / It is middling well as far as it goes – but is that all?” ~ Walt Whitman

-R.A.