In my case, at least, the melancholy I feel at this juncture isn’t about wanting to be 25 again. It’s not about wanting more excitement or shaking up the routine of my life, as is typically how the “mid-life crisis” is figured in the popular imagination. No, it’s not about the temptation of various forms of recklessness. Quite the opposite.
Although I’ve mellowed out considerably, I’m a born worrier. Maybe because the complexities of life seem so overwhelming to me, I always feel better when there’s a plan, when I know what’s next. Growing up has meant learning to accept the truism about best-laid plans and learning to live with the intrinsic uncertainty of the future. It has also meant having to revise certain ideas I’d had about myself, like that I’m spontaneous (ha!). When my close friend dubbed me “Sensible Soo” in our early college days, I’m not sure I liked it, but I recognized the truth that it captured.
I’m happily married and intend to stay that way, I like to keep the friends I make, and I hang on to the things I own far longer than is sometimes reasonable. Big changes and big decisions require lots of time for me to process and accept. So, the stability and comforts that are supposed to accompany middle age are a-okay with me. And that’s part of the problem.
The one area of my life where a sense of settledness still eludes me is work. I can’t even call it my career, because I don’t really feel like I have one, because its trajectory has been so jagged and its future direction is so unclear. I taught in university writing programs for a few years, but I have not gone on to become a scholar in Rhetoric/Composition, the disciplinary field that has developed around the teaching of writing and about which I have mixed feelings. I could say that I was “in writing program administration” for another couple of years, but I am not now a “writing program administrator.” Now, I do faculty development work, and that in itself is a field of expertise, with its own organizations, research agendas, publications, conferences, and leading figures. But will I make it my professional home? Hard to say.
Most of the people I know, including my husband, are professional scholars, academics, professors. And they’re all fully committed to their work and to their scholarly life. Despite disappointments and setbacks, they’re all on a track and they have a pretty good sense of where they want to be heading. I was once headed toward that track, but as I’ve written elsewhere, I felt great relief in not pursuing it. I’d be lying if I said I never have regrets about it, but having watched my husband struggle and persevere, I know why I didn’t do the same: I don’t love it the way he does. My scholarship never felt as compelling and necessary to me as his does to him.
Maybe if I weren’t surrounded by academics, I wouldn’t be worrying so much about my professional identity. At the conference I attended last week, I was surrounded by highly accomplished middle-aged women – professors, high level educational administrators, deans, provosts, and the like. Martha Nussbaum and Natalie Angier, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times, were speakers there, as was a tenured Political Science professor formerly of the University of Chicago and now at Princeton, who is all of 35. Such professional success seems to require a very clear-eyed view of what it is you want to do at a fairly early stage of the game and an unswerving dedication to that vision.
In S Shirazi’s recent post on “Learning Chinese,” he hits a similarly melancholic note about age and resignation that resonated with me:
He goes on to conclude:
Less honest than S Shirazi, I’m reluctant to say that I’ve failed as an academic—can you fail if you never really try? But fear of failure produces its own kind of failure. I have failed, I suppose, to find my place in the world of work, to find an identity in my work that might serve as a ballast against not knowing what’s ahead. My brother got into medicine almost accidentally, but once he was in it, he was of it, and at this point, he probably can’t imagine doing anything else. He will always and forever be a doctor; that’s just part of who he is now. That’s the kind of certainty I think I’m missing.
Maybe what I need to do at this mid-point is adopt the attitude of humility S speaks of, and accept that certain things are behind me now. Years ago, I saw a PBS documentary series that followed a group of doctors in their year as interns, all starting out on their careers with great promise. In a follow-up episode, we learn of one young doctor in particular who’d had a rough time. With a divorce and (I think) a change of specialty behind him, he was wary of being on film again. In a brief clip, he says something like, “it’s much harder to live an ordinary life,” and that has always stayed with me.
The great challenge of middle age, perhaps, is to learn how to settle into ordinariness without bitterness or despair. There are still big changes in store, no doubt, and I may still discover something to be passionate about that counts as a career. But if that doesn’t happen, preparing to live with reality seems like a good idea.
Next week, something less, um, whiny.
I am nearly your age, have never settled in a career that would provide a track limning the future, and fear, indeed, that I have failed. I think I have been much more successful in acquiring humility, for the reason that I am no longer capable of doing the things that would have assured me a career or a future. In such a position, it's nearly impossible to wish that one had done something else.
A post that rings several hundred bells with me, S L — from the nearness of forty, to the withered scholarly career, to the regrets, to the lack of regrets. At some point not so long ago, I had to define what career success meant for me, which is to say that I had to articulate the conditions of failure. And I've arrived at the conclusion you have as well — namely that my scholarship interested but never really compelled me in the way it needed to for me to survive (let alone succeed) in academia. Ultimately, I came to realize that success simply wasn't possible for me in that business. Cue the regrets.
Funny thing is, as my commitment to a scholarly career eroded, a solid wall between work and life emerged. And like a precious ruin recently unearthed, I've been studying and honoring it. It's hard to see from the inside how much of one's life gets shot through with scholarship, how much such a career demands that one be thoroughly “of it” (as you nicely put it). Being no longer of but outside it has been something like a revelation: these days, for example, I tend to write what, because, and when I want to, which is to say that I write more and with greater pleasure.
And but so I don't quite agree that the “great challenge of middle age” is learning “how to settle into ordinariness without bitterness or despair” — ordinariness is always measured with a ruler without marks. To both quote Emerson and to risk being maudlin: “around every circle another can be drawn.” That is, the challenge is instead something like making oneself larger by appreciating something larger than oneself, in all the OED meanings of 'appreciate'.
Sorry for sounding like such an old person.
(Happy birthday, S L Kim, by the way.)
Thanks to both for your thoughts.
R Meeks, I appreciate (no snideness intended!) your more positive note - I think that I keep teaching (and keep enjoying teaching, as challenging as it is) because that is a realm where I feel I'm part of something larger than myself. Of course, teaching can continue to be meaningful in this way because I work under fairly privileged conditions: small teaching load, small class size, lots of support.
There's something to be said, too, about that wall between work and life you mention, about being able to leave the office and feel that you have a life and a purpose outside of it. Some days, I embrace that and am grateful for it, and other days, I wonder if that's just the consolation talking.
And here's something from the NYT Wellness blog about the “mid-life crisis” as a global phenomenon, defined here more broadly as feeling depressed, rather than the more specific professional identity crisis that I was focusing on: http://well.blogs.nytimes.c...
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