Exploring Midlife Mirth

Or what it means to be female and fifty

Menopause hit me in the middle of Covid. It started with sleep issues. I’ve never had a problem falling asleep, but suddenly I was finding myself awake in the middle of the night full of anxiety and existential woe with no way of getting back to sleep. When I first mentioned it to my doctor, she prescribed me an antihistamine. When that quit working, we turned to Xanax. From there, the sleeplessness turned into true panic, feeling like all the mental health whispers I’d felt my whole life but been able to keep at bay were finally getting the best of me. All the feelings began to take hold, mostly in the middle of the night. Doom. What is the point to anything? I have failed as a mother/person. My life is over. And so on and so forth.

I was prescribed one anti-anxiety/depression medication after the next. Over several years. Many ideas were thrown around to explain my general feeling of great unease including my doctor asking if I thought I might be bi-polar. At no point during any of this did the word MENOPAUSE come out of her mouth. During Covid I was lax in going to be my GYN, so I leaned heavily on this primary care doctor. In the end, what amounted to three or four years of menopause symptoms were misdiagnosed as a mental health crisis.

Now, getting away from home is a good reset when you are starring down the barrel of a major life change. Being surrounded by a different landscape and weather profile has definitely helped me recalibrate to no longer working, but it’s also opened up conversations with the women I don’t get to see very often about a number of things. Most notably menopause and work. It’s not exactly that this generation is the first to talk openly about menopause, but perhaps we are the first to complain about why there is no support. No education. No understanding unless you happen upon a doctor who knows what the hell is going on. So many females friends have thought they were losing their minds or gravely ill because something so different and thoroughly indescribable was going on with them that disease could be the only explanation.

Now that I am on the other side of it (I think), I am finding that I am turning into the best version of myself. The mood swings and PMS are gone. The monthly unraveling of normalcy that culminates in several days of pain, rage, and insanity. I am sure of myself. I don’t need a monthly reset. Everything is even and clear. Crisp and cut and dry. And I am more likely to cut myself a break. Less likely to put up with misogynist bullshit that might have sidelined me earlier in life. I am looking around to realize a good many of my female friends are beginning to come out of a menopause haze to discover how incredibly capable they are of pretty much anything.

In many ways, I feel like the 50s could be peak working years for women. If I was a man, that would already be the assumption. Yet, at the same time, in the midst of this mid-life liberation, I am surrounded by women who have been laid off from their jobs (in their 50s) and are having a hard time finding work. Female executives that are great at their jobs, skimmed off the top for making too much. Passed over because their resumes are too full. Forced to live too early off nest eggs they spent a lifetime building up. And what will be left when the real retirement years begin?

Having these conversations has made me question my current path. Why didn’t I just stay the course? Ride out another ten years + and retire, secure, happyish. What happens when I take this time for myself, and I can’t make writing work? What happens when I don’t sell my novel? What happens if I sell my novel, but my novel doesn’t sell? What happens if in the AI generation, no one cares about books anymore? What happens if I need to go back to work fulltime but work is no longer waiting for me? Why be worried about finishing an education that won’t mean jack shit in three years when nobody wants me?

The injustice of it all is that age shouldn’t matter. Gender shouldn’t matter. But they do. As a living, breathing person, it is easy to see that the world has some even bigger problems to contend with. Like the oceans turning to plastic. Climate change. War.

I guess the answer is that it doesn’t matter. At least, for me right now.

I am not for one second taking it for granted that I am lucky enough to be in this position. Lucky enough to take a leap of faith and hope for the best. Lucky enough to have a partner and a safety net to help me on this path. At the end of the day, I am returning to school because I want to. I love learning more than any degree will ever prove. I am buoyed by watching a generation of young people search to find hope in world that’s pretty fucked up and growing more and more nihilistic by the second. I am buoyed by the fact that these young people are questioning all of the gender bullshit in a way that might finally be able to defeat it. Hopefully, there will be a physical world left that is habitable enough to celebrate that in.

I have given up a secure day job to try and find the promised life I always wished for myself. I don’t want to be hopeless.

I have resigned myself to having less for the sake of finding more.