Mid-life

Today on the walk to work I had a realisation. All this time I have been mostly thinking of S's mid-life crisis, as part of the "Why, why why" process. He left me because: he turned 42, he had his first health problems (teeth), he felt his mortality, he went back to the B-word town and wanted to recapture his playboy 20's, he found himself with emotional and moral responsibilites to another human who needed to lean on him and freaked and ran, etc.

But today I realised that I am having my own mid-life crisis. I don't need his one! I am 43, I'm getting portly and matronly looking, I have a very average and ordinary life of boredom and 9-5 grind and struggle. I am nothing special. I am not a better writer, speaker, teacher or thinker than anyone else my age. This happens after 40, I think, I remember a professor of mine who had been a wunderkind, PhD at 24, and he was 40ish and having a very hard time of it, I don't know if he told me or someone else did but I remember hearing at the time that at that age everyone catches up to you and you're nothing special any more. 20 years of hard work catches up with pure effortless talent. So. There I am.

And financially, I realise that because I am nothing special I just have to live an ordinary life on a modest income and that if I want to be rich some day I will have to do it by saving tiny bits out of my very modest salary, like everyone else. Damn. These things won't be easy, I'll have to put some energy into coming to terms with them, but it did make me feel better, sort of empowered in a way, that I can have my own mid-life crisis. I was enough of a bright spark wunderkind that turning 40 can hit me hard, too. Hit with my own ordinariness. I don't need to live vicariously through his one.