Why We Can't Sleep. Ada Calhoun
I was a college student.
The other interview was for a full-time job paying far less than the one I’d held fifteen years earlier. It would be a huge demotion, working for a company that seemed not very stable. But what the hell, right? I knew the industry was in a bad place, and a job’s a job. The interview went well. On the way home, I wrestled with my hopes and dreams. I decided that I would go ahead and accept, overqualified though I was, shaky though the workplace seemed.
I didn’t even get a callback.
I resolved to broaden my search, explore all my options.
Options. We still have them in midlife, but they can start to seem so abstract. Yes, I could go to graduate school and get a doctorate, but where would I find the tuition? I could switch careers—therapist? Zamboni driver?—but at this stage of life, do I really want to start from the bottom, surrounded by twenty-year-olds? If I went on an Eat, Pray, Love walkabout, who would pick up the kid from school?
“Every decision you make in life sends you off down a path that could turn out to be a wrong one,” writes the British musician Viv Albertine in her memoir of midlife. “A couple of careless decisions somewhere along the line, that’s all it takes to waste years—but then you can’t creep along being so cautious that you don’t have adventures. It’s difficult to get the balance right.”25
“Difficult” is an understatement. How do you know when it’s time to give up a dream? How do you know if you’re like one of those success stories, the type who never surrendered in spite of everyone telling them they were deluding themselves, or if you’re a sap who needs to stop kidding herself, be realistic, and grow up already?
As my family enjoyed the summer, I brooded. I was sure that my career was over, mortally embarrassed to be in debt, and I couldn’t stop agonizing about what to do. My thoughts were dark:
If only I’d never gone freelance.
If only we’d stockpiled cash for a rainy day. If only my husband were a day trader.
We were dumb to take that vacation.
Each morning, I looked in the mirror and saw a very tired middle-aged person—no longer young, no longer vibrant. I was forty-one, but didn’t look, to myself, two years older than thirty-nine; I looked a century older. There were deep wrinkles around my eyes. My skin was ashen. The skin under my arms was loose. I’d been hearing “In middle age, you’re more likely to gain weight around the middle of the body” for a while; and now I knew what the magazines were talking about. I had widened, and I did not like it.
Some of this was vanity, but I also felt disoriented: Whose body was this?
Oh, and my very first mammogram showed an “irregularity.” Two ultrasounds, a biopsy, more than $1,000 in co-pays, and weeks of dread later, it proved to be nothing. But the experience felt like the first rattle of a car ready to be traded in.
And the periods! Sometimes they’d be two months apart, sometimes two weeks. Sometimes light. Sometimes so heavy I’d bleed through a tampon, a pad, and jeans. The cramps were apocalyptic. I found myself emotionally erratic, too, in a way that seemed out of proportion to the money and work pressure. I’d slam drawers, so irritated I could hardly look at my husband. A day or two a month, I would cry so hard it was as if someone had died.
I went to the gynecologist, who said nothing was physically wrong with me. She prescribed Swedish flower pollen delivered via online subscription at $40 a month for my mood, and evening primrose oil for breast aches, and she encouraged me to take a multivitamin with calcium and vitamin D. If none of that worked, she said, we could try antidepressants—something I resisted because while on them a decade earlier I’d lost my sex drive, gained twenty pounds, and didn’t want to write.
The supplements did not seem to be helping, though I took them every day and tried to convince myself that they were effective. Meanwhile, I followed every bit of reasonable advice the books and internet offered for someone hoping to feel better on a budget. I went for long walks outside in nature, took the stairs instead of the elevator, drank lots of water, cut back on alcohol and caffeine, ate vegetables, wore sunscreen, packed my lunches, planked.
I woke up every morning and showered and took care of my kid and went to the dentist and bought groceries and listened to my husband talk about his day and helped the neighbor girl with her high school applications and plucked my eyebrows. I read the books about how midlife was an opportunity in disguise. I watched TED talks and listened to advice shows.
“So,” my husband said, sounding distressed. “You’re a podcast person now?”
After doing everything I was supposed to do, I felt a little better, maybe? But there was still the money fear and the feeling that my career was over and the bone tiredness.
There were flickers of joy, particularly when friends came over. One night a friend texted me: “I need an OUTING.”
“Want a beer?” I wrote back. “YES,” she replied.
Minutes later, she was at my place, telling me about the fight she’d just had with her husband and how much pressure she felt being the primary breadwinner, her own ambitions often delayed to make way for her family’s needs. She told me that everyone at her job was younger and that after many years of being happy with how she looked, she’d started googling things like “noninvasive procedures.”
“I haven’t shot anything into my face—yet,” she said. “I’m still wondering if it’s better to go no-makeup-don’t-care or lots-of-makeup-making-an-effort.”
She thought spending money to look younger might pay off in the long run, because it could keep her from being pushed out by the Millennials angling for her job. The topper: she concluded she couldn’t afford to have anything done.
What I didn’t know that summer is that historic forces have been at work in the lives of Generation X women:
We were born into a bleak economy and grew up during a boom in crime, abuse, and divorce. We were raised “prespecialness,” which meant not only no participation trophies but also that we were shielded far less than children today from the uglier sides of life.
We started our job hunts in the early 1990s recession, which was followed by a “jobless recovery.”26 If you were born later into Generation X, you might have entered the workforce around the 1999ish stock market peak, but then the tech bubble started to burst, landing you in the 2001 recession. Yes, the economy began to recover, and by the mid-2000s you might have taken advantage of easy-to-get mortgages, but then in 2008 the sky fell. Now, in middle age, Gen X has more debt than any other generation27—a whopping 82 percent more than Boomers and about $37,000 more than the national consumer average.28 Compared with other generations, we also have less saved—and women have less than men. At the same time, we face a much higher cost of living than Boomers did at our age, particularly for essentials like housing.29
Generation X marks the end of the American dream of ever-increasing prosperity. We are downwardly mobile, with declining job stability. It used to be that each generation could expect to do better than their parents. New research confirms that Generation X won’t.
Many of us have delayed marriage and children into our thirties and forties.30 This means that we are likely to find ourselves taking care of parents in decline at the same time that we are caring for little children—and, by the way, being urged to ask for raises and lean in at work.
This stress is compounded by the hormonal chaos and associated mood swings of the years leading up to menopause. In a cruel twist, the symptoms of hormonal fluctuation are exacerbated by stress, while the symptoms in turn raise stress levels.
Meanwhile, we are bombarded with catastrophic breaking news alerts, social media’s curated images of others’ success, and nonstop work obligations—not to mention phone calls, texts, and email. Workers in upper management today spend an average of seventy-two hours a week making themselves available to work.31
Our lives can begin to feel like the latter seconds