said, often, that I was very lucky and had no right to complain.
I’d been with my husband for seventeen years. Our eleven-year-old son had been accepted into a great public middle school. My twenty-three-year-old stepson was looking at physical therapy grad programs.
Workwise, I felt better than ever. I’d just published a new book and it had run the table on press coverage—the Today Show! The Washington Post! No less than Star called it a Hot Book.
From the outside and on social media, I knew my life looked enviable.
So why was I miserable? That summer I woke up every day at 4:00 a.m., plagued with self-doubt and anxiety. Lying there, I thought of all the things I really should do or absolutely should not have done until either I’d cycled through my full list of regrets or it was time to get up.
Before even opening my eyes, I would see a number: $20,000. That’s how much credit card debt we had. I walked around under a cloud of worry. That spring, thinking we had money coming in, we’d taken a family vacation to the Grand Canyon and done some home repairs. Three freelance gigs that were supposed to keep us comfortable until the fall and pay off our credit card debt had evaporated. One boss let me go right after I delivered what I’d thought was a completed project. Another replaced me with someone else. A third went AWOL. And now it was summer, the worst time to find work. We had only a month’s worth of cash on hand and it was disappearing fast.
After nearly a decade of freelancing, I began applying for job-jobs. When I’d left the full-time workforce following a layoff in 2009, I’d been making six figures, plus full benefits. Now I was looking for anything that would give me a steady paycheck and—dare to dream—insurance. Health insurance for my family costs us $1,186 a month. We have the cheapest “bronze” plan, with a deductible of several thousand dollars a year. (And, again, I’m lucky; a third to half of middle-aged people in this country go without necessary health care because of cost.)24
I’d always told myself that returning to a full-time job was my “fallback plan.”
Oh, fine! I imagined saying to the corporate world. You can have me!
Only, now that I was willing to fall back, no one was there to catch me.
As I frantically applied for jobs and fellowships, I felt like I was living in the children’s book Are You My Mother? I sent out dozens of résumés and was called in for two interviews. One was for a teaching job paying $600 for a six-week class. I took it, even though, between the time I spent prepping for the class and the time I spent marking papers, this worked out to less per hour than I’d made as an office manager when 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
