I Am Legitimately Having a Mid-Life Crisis
CW: death anxiety; internalised fat-phobia; PTSD self-diagnosis; cat death; cancer; just generally heavy shit. Read with care xx
Hello, my name is Jess, and I am 40. F O R T Y. I was 30 yesterday, 21 the preceding afternoon, 17 that morning, and a child the day before that. Humans don’t live very long do we?
I am not sure where to begin, as life has been a lot lately. I don’t live in a war-torn country; I don’t have a terminal illness; I am not planning a big life event; I am not on the poverty-line; I am a white “middle class” cis woman in a loving relationship with a cis man in the same boat, and we have no dependent children. On the surface I have no real reason to complain. I have recently come to the realisation though, that I probably have PTSD from a variety of sources; and I do have actual diagnosed ADHD and clinical depression, probable mild dyspraxia, and obvious (to me) death anxiety.
With the loud good comes the quiet bad.
I have two goals from writing and publishing this post: 1) to process some shit and hopefully feel a bit better; 2) to show anyone who may have similar experiences that you are not alone.
Since I added the content warnings to the post before writing it, one thing is fresh in my mind - I definitely have internalised fat-phobia. I remember vividly a Facebook post I made when I was 30, about how although I was curvy and BMI-overweight, I was fine just the way I was thank you very much. That was 22 kilos ago and I no longer feel that way; I am now BMI-obese (Click here to read all about why BMI is a load of BS that was never meant to be used as a medical measurement). To be perfectly open and honest, I am 173 cm and 100 kilos at the time of writing. I have wide-set hips, so even though I was “BMI-overweight” at 78kg, I was definitely realistically healthy and fit enough, meaning I felt healthy and was capable of doing most things with my body. I now sadly hate my body more than I ever have. I think I look like I’ve had five kids, and I’ve had none.
I know I have friends who may read this and feel hurt because if I hate fat on me, I must hate it on them, right? I feel that logic, I really do. I don’t hate fat on anyone else though. I know fat is not an inherently bad thing, and I know that you can be self-proclaimed fat and be fit AF. Friends who self-identify as fat: I don’t hate you or your body. I love you, and what you look like is so irrelevant to that. I only care about what you think of you. If you call yourself fat and you hate it - I am here in solidarity. If you call yourself fat and you love it/accept it/are indifferent to it because it’s in no way shape or form a value judgement - I am here wishing I felt that way about me too.
I have most certainly, 100% absorbed society’s beauty standards and I apply them to myself all the time. I stopped leaving the house without eyeliner many years ago because every time I did, someone (usually a dude) would tell me I looked tired. I have been getting my eyebrows tinted professionally for a few years now, and recently sold something so I could afford to have them permanently tattooed on using a technique called microblading. I feel like I exist now because I “have” eyes and eyebrows. If I hadn’t absorbed the standards I have seen around me since I was a little girl, I wouldn’t care. But I do. And right now I feel fat and uncomfortable and unsexual because of my body fat. I know I “shouldn’t” feel that way, but I fucking do.
Ten years ago, while I had my internal constant knowledge that I was proportioned differently to most people, for the most part I wasn’t upset about my weight and I felt like I looked mostly okay. Then I moved to Auckland and stopped walking everywhere. By November 2019, even though I had since moved to Hawkes Bay, I was 36 and had reached 100 kg for the first time in my life - and I did not look healthy in my opinion. I think the turning point was when I had a bath and I struggled to get out of it. I sat there feeling helpless but not wanting to call out to my partner to help me get out because then he would see me. I bought a Fitbit, started religiously counting calories and walking more. I started going to the pool across the road and aqua-jogging. Come mid 2020, and despite not being able to go to the pool anymore (thanks pandemic), I had kept up the lockdown daily walks and lost 12 kilos. I felt and looked so good!
What I was doing was working!
And then my cat died. I grieved hard. I decided that the pandemic and my grief were so stressful that I could let myself off the hook and drop the ball a bit with my weight-loss regime. I would pick it up again that summer, probably. But then my partner got cancer. It was a whole thing, and I found myself in very dark places - my cousin has since pointed out that it was a period of trauma and I probably now have PTSD from it. My partner had an operation and recovered well and was in remission and we made plans to get fake-married and life was good. I didn’t quite get back on the regime, though I tried numerous times, but life was safe. I got glasses for the first time later in 2020, and an ADHD diagnosis in early 2021. I started taking stimulants (to quieten my brain and improve my focus) and working harder on my mental health in general. I had my ups and downs. In 2021 started a job at a much more progressive place with a better culture, better pay, and actual perks; I still work there. Last year, in 2022, my partner’s cancer came back but I had access to EAP this time and I got counselling, and I got through it without going back to those dark places. He had another operation, and chemo, and is now in remission and has been since April this year. All that was excellent, but I was back to 100kg again. I was about to start jogging again, I swear.
Then, in late April, I broke my toe running into my bed-leg, turned 40 in early May, and all of a sudden I wanted to do ALL of the THINGS. My toe was finally healed by late June, but then, of course, last week I gave myself a (probable) mild concussion somehow in my sleep?????? So I can do NONE of the THINGS. I feel like I have nothing to look forward to even though I have big “plans”. Here is a list of what is exploding out of me wanting to get itself done:
I want to learn to play the Yamaha keyboard I have in my possession
I want to write more (yay I am working on that now)
I want to go back to the pool
I want to give our bedroom an extreme makeover
I want to go overseas for the first time in my goddamn life
I want a more challenging, more fulfilling, better paid role at work without having to leave my company
I want to do proofreading as a side-hustle
I want to eventually become an Accountant (5 year plan)
Then I want to have my own practice where I do accounts and proofread for a living (10 year plan)
I want to get down to 75kg (still above the recommended BMI weight, btw)
I want to make music with my new keyboard skills and my innate singing voice, and maybe get some lessons to improve that too?
I want to maybe make music with my partner who has a long-unplayed clarinet and a musical background
I want to draw comic strips of my cats
I want to be thankful for all of the amazing wonderful things I already have, without feeling that dark cloud hanging over me.
These things are all doable, with time and money, right? Taking stimulants and using routines has helped me build better habits. I was able to finish an Accounting diploma while working full time. I now brush my teeth most nights (you do not want to know how bad my dental hygiene was before this year). I am doing really well at my job. I have heaps of lovely friends who care about me. I have two living parents and so does my partner. We got fake-married and it was wonderful. We own a frikken house!
So why do I feel like I have nothing to look forward to? Enter death anxiety.
I am not religious or spiritual. I like to think ghosts are real but I also think they can probably be explained by future discoveries in physics; something something failed energy transfer bla bla whatever. IDK, I’m not a scientist. I am inclined to believe the inevitable death of the Earth is a thing because that’s what scientists have found evidence for (though, side note, wouldn’t it be cool if multiple worlds were a thing and we just go to another world when we die and science hasn’t gone far enough to work that out yet?). I have experienced death anxiety since I was a kid, and I think I can pinpoint it to one event; my Mum found a real human skeleton near where we lived and after she called the relevant authorities, she let me go to the exhumation. I have only just realised that this, combined with seeing the Iceman in a National Geographic, was trauma and probably gave me PTSD. I will be honest, and beloved parents I am sorry if this hurts, but I wish you had not let me see that. When I was younger I would often bargain with the skeleton’s spirit that if it would stop haunting me I would give it my first-born. I never had a first-born. Do I owe it something? Oh that’s right, I don’t really believe in malevolent spirits from the beyond. But I sorta wish I did. I wish I believed that when we die our consciousness carries on somehow, because I cannot fathom no longer existing. It can’t be real because it’s not allowed to be. I have had anxiety attacks about this for most of my life but it’s getting a bit more real now.
Essentially, 40 is about halfway through my life if I am fortunate enough to have a long one; maybe 45, but nevertheless it has begun. The crisis. The death anxiety attacks are much more frequent. These consist of me realising that one day I will no longer exist, like really realising it, trying to comprehend it; just not being in existence and there not even being nothingness - me being so unaware of the nothingness that there isn’t a nothing to know about. Like, I feel like I could almost handle it if I could be in limbo floating in space aware of the endless nothing, but there won’t even be that. I don’t remember what happened before I was born because I was not there, and when I die I will not be there to know I’m not there. Those thoughts repeat a few times, and then I feel a tightness in my stomach and I start breathing fast and I HAVE TO stand up. I have to get up off my chair or out of my bed, and I have to walk around in a circle and repeat to myself, out loud, “it’s okay, it’s not real because it can’t be real”. I then force myself to think about something completely separate and put up a kind of mental block. This doesn’t happen every day, but I do think about death every day.
I fight the anxiety attacks by papering them with beautiful shiny denial.
It’s the only thing I can do, the only way I know how to stop them. Even now, writing about it, knowing it’s real, I am not letting it sink in, because I cannot.
Then there are all of the things I want to do with the time I have left. I watch myself do nothing even though there is so much that I want to do. That’s fairly standard for adults with ADHD, and sometimes I can move past it and do the thing; and by george that is glorious! Now though, I feel frozen. I feel like a fat lump of not-particularly-useful human because I am 40 with 2 degrees, 2 diplomas, numerous certificates, a massive student loan, and a job that until yesterday paid $54k per year and now pays a whopping $56. I feel ripped off by ADHD because without it, with my intelligence, talents, and skill learning ability, I would be doing so much better. I would have fewer qualifications and a much smaller student loan but somehow a much more rewarding, better paying job. I know I would. But there is no getting rid of adult ADHD, so I have to work with it. Meds help, but I need to find other things to help too, and being angry at the hand I was dealt will not change it.
So yeah, I think I can safely say I am now in the throes of a mid-life crisis. I don’t know how not to be, I don’t 100% know what I will do, but I know I need to do something because it’s not fun. This has been the whinge of a relatively privileged person going through some pretty run-of-the-mill human stuff that we will likely ALL go through at some stage if we haven’t already, so please do not feel sorry for me. You have your own shit to deal with; some will intersect and some will not; but I see you. I know you are a human who also has complex feelings and doesn’t always know how to deal with them. Don’t waste any energy feeling bad for me, please. If you do have any tips for dealing with any of this shit though, the comments, and my DMs, are open.