One wonders how one would know if a so-called “midlife crisis” were about to rear up on its metaphorical hind legs and make towards one, with every intention of eviscerating her. Are there trumpets which sound to herald this event? Or is it, as one suspects, a slow, creeping malaise, stealing over one like a sickly sunrise, that signals the beginning of The End?
Various pundits like to twitter amongst themselves about how “life begins at forty” but what if one has spent the ante-forty years fending off one set of disasters to come while attempting to recover from those already gone? What if one is waiting for Life, but Life does not deign to keep the appointment? What then?
What if one, having passed her fortieth birthday, begins to suspect (with a sick certainty born of disappointment and frustration) that Life has passed her by—that there is no more; that all goodness one could get has already been got; that the things of which she dreams are mere phantasms of the imagination?
And what if this same one, having worked for nigh on twenty years to perfect some skill of which she is an aficianada (she, being modest or perhaps slightly self-destructive, would not dream of claiming mastery) of a certain art form and has set loose upon the world some evidence of this—and this evidence is then blown back upon her like dead seeds before a desert wind?
What if a certain someone, being of “a certain age” (as the French say) is finally nerving herself to face the awful truth that, despite what early successes may have led her to expect, she is nothing special?
Does she then knuckle under and accept her less-than-stellar fate? Does she, as popular pseudo-psychology would insist, drop the rock?
Perhaps she is standing on a high place, listening to the wind and in this wind are a thousand fell voices moaning, “Give up, give up, you’ll never get there.”
What then? Two roads diverge, Gentle Reader. Which one? Continuance, with its promise of almost certain, heartbreaking disappointment—or Cessation, which will not entirely still the yearning heart, but which seems now to be the only option.
Of course Miss Dimity speaks only in hyperbole and metaphor, but still…at 41, one had hoped for something more than this…
