It was just suggested to me (via the book I am reading) that "midlife crisis might be a response to life having run out of novelty." Why, yes, Mr. Smith: I believe you are correct. That is exactly the condition of my life, though I'm not sure it has much to do with the "mid-life" part - more the "conditions" of my life. If I do my job right and really pay attention and stay on my toes, teaching high school never has to be boring. The rest of the bullshit - the aging, paunchy husband, the children who railroad me, paying bills, being a maid, and so on - sucks. There is so much "unhappeningness" every day that I want to run out the door screaming. Unfortunately, I don't know where to run, because there's nothing interesting anywhere near me. Life has become depressingly predictable, and I'm not sure what the remedy for that is.
Midlife stages a confrontation between one's older and one's younger self, with the former apologizing to the latter and begging for a second chance. I didn't have the highest of expectations in my youth, but I never would have put my future self in a shitty marriage with ennui eating away at me every day. So my "remedy" to the nothingness is to paint things and rearrange them and make stupid lists of petty things which will occupy my mind (and my time) enough to (kind of) forget the nostalgia for a life I never really had in the first place. Every self-help guru on the planet would tell me that my remedy is not only a huge waste of the limited time I have on this earth, but also slightly delusional, in the sense that I am trying to systematically murder time until I can just die and be done with all this petty nonsense.
It is not healthy to sleepwalk through life, and I think I might be doing it every day. The only hopeful potential in this tale is that this "midlife crisis" is not yet a "tragedy". I might be able to find a new path or discover myself again. I don't know though; I spent so many years losing and forgetting myself, that I don't even know who to look for anymore.
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