This midlife crisis (the overarching cliche) has started its sixth year. If I have to live this thing that us aware types can be arrogant enough to think we'll sidestep, can it at least wrap up? Can I at least bounce back to tolerable levels of dissatisfaction, despair, and self-criticism?
The studio is demoralizing. No idea or experiment - no thought - has more than fleeting possibility. Yes, this is the "normal" cycle of the studio: periods that feel excruciatingly nonproductive that are often periods of gestation that end with an outpouring of new work and gratitude, and leave behind a film of amnesia.
Still, this feels like a double hit - probably because of a seeping awareness that I have less time and fewer chances or choices to improve things. It sounds morbid, particularly to friends in their 20s and 30s, and it sounded morbid to me then. Now it's real. My father and mother died at about my age, so the possibility that life can end well before we're done with it is not abstract.
I've been sorting through family stuff - photos, letters, childhood drawings and essays, report cards, baby clothes, passports, newspaper clippings, receipts, worthless stock certificates, recipes. It's impossible to let go of even scraps of paper with cryptic notes when they're a way to meet my parents. The timing is no accident, of course. I can construe that poetically, or more ominously. I always knew my 50s would be complicated. I read an interview with an Irish novelist whose father died at the novelist's (middle) age, and he said he felt a kind of recognition.
Should I be making practical changes? Or is this internal state only loosely related to my day-to-day? Much of my frustration is wanting to do something to kickstart myself - as if one right action would unlock me - when possibly the only thing to do is not do and wait, actively.
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