Should I have a Midlife Crisis?
It's time for revolution...
Welcome, seekers, to my new Substack on How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis. I’ve done three years of research into every aspect of your midlife revolution - mind, body and spirit - and more will be revealed every Friday, so let’s get straight in there: Should I have a Midlife Crisis?
Absolutely. It’s unfashionable nowadays not to have one, and we need to reclaim the territory from men with red sports cars and Rapha bike shorts and make it our own. Let’s just get this straight – women have much, much more justification for a midlife crisis than a man. For a start, our brains completely rewire in perimenopause and menopause, in our forties and fifties when our hormones go down the drain. We literally change character. We become whistleblowers on our own psyches. Some of us mourn the loss of fertility, while the rest of us are just overjoyed that we can wear white jeans every day without finding a surprise bloodbath in our pants. Then, for parents, there’s what people call ‘empty nest syndrome’ but I prefer to call ‘fuck-it-freedom’ – no longer will you have to clean out coffee mugs oozing mould from under their beds, or find illegal items in their fetid jeans in the washing machine. You just have to send them money (and occasionally love) more often than you’d anticipated. When they flee the nest, so should you. This is your next adventure.
I have written a proper book about all this, How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis, but I’m thinking that amid the relative privacy of Substack that we can have a looser, more louche and direct conversation. I’m keen to gather and disseminate your confessions of appalling midlife thoughts which you cannot politely express elsewhere. DM me your worst on @menoscandal Instagram or go public in the comments here. When I was researching the book chapter on couples and renovating relationships, one woman sent me this:
“I love my husband, but sometimes I watch him through the prongs of my dinner fork, and imagine him in jail.”
That perfectly expresses the ambiguity and complexity of the Middle Ages, which can begin anywhere across the chaotic continuum from your late thirties to your seventies. Please note that a series of midlife crises is absolutely acceptable too.
Every week, I shall help you navigate life and midlife by sending you an ironic and well-researched post on various matters, from gaining hormonal superpowers to upgrading your relationship, as well as exploring your vaginal microbiome, avoiding Midlife ‘muffin top’, divorcing with elegance, and the latest science on living a longer, healthier life. We will also consider more spiritual changes, such as psychedelic therapy, whether you should move to a modern commune, or take a long road trip in a van like the patron saint of this Substack, Frances McDormand in the Oscar-winning Nomadland (below).
Your task as we begin this journey is to take stock, and since we’re smart women, we can use professional tools to do this. Of course we can write in a journal about what’s wrong, what we want to change, and where we want to be in five years time, but I was more impressed by the life assessment made by Erin Keating, a brilliant American podcaster who was previously a TV comedy commissioner and overworked mother of twins. She created a PowerPoint presentation ‘just for me to express all the things I had been lying to myself about in my life’. It’s title? “OMG – So Much Bullshit”. After reading, she got divorced, changed job and found her authenticity again. Worth considering.
See you next Friday.
Coming soon: Am I having a perimenopausal sex surge?