Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has said in a study and a TED talk that the increase in the human life span is good news, because stress, worry, and anger all decrease with age. This is known as the “paradox of aging,” because, technically, being older is more difficult—health and energy usually decline, for starters—but people tend to be happier toward the end of life than they are in their forties.8

If Gen X women are haunted by a vague feeling that things are terrible and might not get better, it could be the U-curve. It could be perimenopausal depression. It could be temporary, situational stress. It could be a feeling left over from childhood that the other shoe is about to drop. And it could well be the pressure of decision making.

In the documentary, sociologist Amy Hsin points out that as far as how a child turns out, the amount of time spent interacting with a mother is a drop in the bucket compared with other factors like the child’s parents having a good education, the child’s school’s quality, and growing up in a safe neighborhood. Those are all things that a woman with a career can help make possible.

The whole “throw money at the problem” solution is awkward also because it suggests that fixing rich or middle-class women’s problems requires poor women’s work: the manicurist, the takeout delivery person, the night nurse, the Uber driver, the masseuse. Talk about invisible labor.

Gen X men’s fictional avatars made not caring look sexy. “It was this cool new Gen X model of masculinity,” said a friend. These were guys who didn’t sell out or settle or do anything they didn’t want to do. They were free. “But then a lot of us in this generation actually went out and married guys like that,” said my friend. “And it’s cute at twenty but at forty it is incredibly irritating.”

Briallen Hopper writes in the funny essay “How to Be Single”27 about how you should defend your singledom, even if that means filling your home with newspapers and feral racoons. (“Do not rule this out just because it’s a cliché. It works.”)

In the coming decades, single Gen X women will find creative ways to navigate old age while maintaining their independence. I know quite a few women who are planning to have a “bestie row” of houses with their friends in old age or to live together Golden Girls–style.

Our generation are the beta-tested victims of the Boomers’ record-high divorce rate. We may be late to marry in part because we are terrified of divorcing, doing to the next generation what was done to ours.

“It’s not just that marriage makes you give things up,” she told me.7 “Life makes you give things up.” It’s sort of depressing and sort of consoling: Everything is a trade-off, not just marriage.

women’s midlife suffering comes in two forms: “One I have called misery, which has no useful function and should be avoided, and the other grief, which is wholesome, though painful, and must be recognized.”

“When I, as a clinician, talk to people about depression, we talk about how three things contribute: your biology; your inner landscape or psychology, which we can work on in therapy; and then your life circumstances. If your life circumstances really suck, you are going to be sad most of the time. You’re going to feel anxious and overwhelmed. If you say, ‘I’m taking care of my aging parents, and I’m working full-time, and I have these little kids, and my husband still has some traditional gender-role stuff,’ you’re going to be sad. Not because you ‘have depression,’ but because your life is debilitatingly difficult. And what I think has changed is that we used to think this was true for poor people. And now it feels true for all of us.”20 In

menopausal killer whales—yes, killer whales go through it, too—are the ones that lead others in their pods to food.

2019 memoir, Deep Creek, Pam Houston

If you live long enough you quit chasing the things that hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.”34

Psychotherapist Amy Jordan Jones told me,35 “This is the time of life when we learn that we don’t have to be pleasing; the work now is just to become more ourselves.”

That was when she realized that we are the only generation to overthink communication. “Our parents and grandparents have always sent newspaper clippings without worrying that people would find them annoying. Now kids send memes without a second thought. And you know why? Because they’re not joyless. They aren’t subjecting themselves to constant self-scrutiny. Meanwhile, we would agonize over a mixtape for weeks and then hand it over saying, ‘It’s nothing. It’s fine if you hate it.’”

The fashion industry caters to the thin, though the average American woman now wears size 16–18.23 In the Washington Post, Project Runway host Tim Gunn writes,24 “Many designers—dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk—still refuse to make clothes for [plus-size women].”

You want more medical attention, because you have significant problems. But once we start attracting medical attention, we get more than we asked for. The unintended consequences of medical attention are always complex.”

Nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves. And yet: “The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable,” as Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

Put another way: “Those who try to refuse suffering,” wrote W. H. Auden in an essay about characters in Shakespeare, “not only fail to avoid it but are plunged deeper into sin and suffering.” Everyone suffers in Shakespeare’s plays, according to Auden. The difference is that in tragedies, suffering leads to “self-blindness, defiance, hatred”; in comedies, it leads to “self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, love.”28

Second-wave feminist, activist, and writer Carol Hanisch, best known for popularizing the adage “The personal is political,” told me that in some ways life for women in the 1970s had advantages: “Whether women have it better now is debatable. Certainly, there are more women in professional jobs, but on the other hand, we weren’t pressured to shave our genital area and wear spike heels.”29

“It’s like at forty you decided you wanted more women in your life and you just manifested them,” my husband said.

Most ambitiously, this year, two author girlfriends and I started a bar night for women nonfiction writers to talk shop, play the arcade game Big Buck Hunter, and engage—in the words of the classic Onion article about what really happens when girls go wild—in “validating the living shit out of each other.”

“I only have friends who will go to CVS with me,” she tells me.

It may seem counterintuitive to add one more thing to a full calendar when the problem is feeling too busy—like putting on a scarf when you feel overheated—but it’s worthwhile. “Middle age, especially for women of a generation that stayed young for a long time, is a weird place,” one friend of mine said. She calls the midlife club “a menstruation hut of your choosing.”

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday that she had thought with a shudder that life might be long. —Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” 1894

Writing this book cured my midlife crisis. I’ve given up on a magic bullet that will make this age easy, but I’ve learned that there are many things that make it harder or easier, and I’ve made changes accordingly.

started and joined clubs so I would be guaranteed regular contact with people in my field and community whom I enjoy.

On the micro level, I’ve figured out what makes me feel worse (drinking too much, looking at social media) and what makes me feel better (eating three meals a day, walking around in fresh air), and try to behave accordingly—or at least not to be blindsided if I feel despair the morning after a party or the evening after a day in front of the computer.

Note: none of what I’m saying falls under the umbrella of what’s commonly called “self-care.” Short-term perks like spa days or facials are like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. Our problems are beyond the reach of “me-time.” The last thing we need at this stage of life is self-help. Everyone keeps telling us what to do, as if there is a quick fix for the human condition. What we need at this stage isn’t more advice, but solace.

One night in December 2018, the Tony-winning actress and singer Tonya Pinkins talked onstage about her experience of menopause, adding: “Things are so much better than they were decades ago, but they can be bad and better at the same time.”5 “Bad and better” is one way to think about our prospects at this stage of life, too.

“The people I know who are happy realize they can’t care about everything,” says Deal. “You have to decide what you care about. If everything matters to you, you’re going to go nuts.”

It’s about telling the story of our mistakes, our life, in a new way, in which we’re heroines worth rooting for.

Maybe the Generation X story need not be: We’re broke. We’re unstable. We’re alone. Maybe it can be: We’ve had a hard row to hoe. We’ve been one big experiment. And yet, look at us: we’ve accomplished so much.

One of my favorite studies is about how children benefit from hearing an “oscillating family narrative.”11 The researchers found that what helps build resilience in children is a story like this: “Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.” That kind of tale fosters self-confidence—more, even, than one in which the family has been on a steady upward climb.

Post-Millennials, also known as Gen Z, are likely to be the most diverse and best-educated generation in American history.

Almost every story I’ve heard of a Gen X woman pulling herself out of a midlife crisis has involved, in one way or another, the letting go of expectations.

“It cannot be too soon realized that in the lives of women there is capacity for a second youth,” Anna Garlin Spencer wrote long ago, in 1913.17 My friend Barbara, who grew up in Mexico, said something similar: “The thirties are the adolescence of your adulthood, and when you reach fifty, it’s a restart—empieza de nuevo—a second chance.”

One CEO I know, a Gen X woman who grew up in southern Illinois and now oversees huge swaths of American farmland, said she hires Gen X women to do the hardest jobs at her company because they show tremendous resilience.20 “They are the best,” she said. “They can have six screens open at once and not miss a thing. They’re not crybabies. They’re capable. They will work long and hard for you. They have zero sense of entitlement. They hold people accountable and they speak up.”

Two of the best reporters I know are women in their fifties. They look so friendly and nonthreatening, if you notice them at all. They can lurk in any room without usually wary people remembering to keep their guard up. Then they write devastating whistle-blowing articles. The world ignores middle-aged women at its peril.21

When the tough things happen—parents get sick, relationships go sour, careers stall—we might ask ourselves if the situation is a prison or a school: a place to escape or one in which to learn.

My choices may have brought me debt and uncertainty and a lot of people depending on me. But they’ve also brought me a family that will wake up early to decorate the house and friends coming over to eat and drink and make jokes and the capacity to appreciate a clear sky on a cold day.

Assuming we keep living, there will be a next year and another year after that. There will be tears and money stress and caregiving pressure, but also moments when we might walk through a supermarket parking lot and feel the sun on our face and think, out of nowhere, What a lovely day.

Gordinier, Jeff. X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking. New York: Viking Penguin, 2008.

Thomas, Susan Gregory. In Spite of Everything: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2011.

There are many opinions about what counts as Generation X. The Harvard Center’s years are 1965–1984.

Pew Research Center: Silent Generation 1928–1945, Boomers 1946–1964, Gen X 1965–1980, Millennials 1981–1996, Generation Z 1997–2012.

Kimberly Lankford, “Generation X: Time Is on Your Side for Retirement,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, January 3, 2019.

Brené Brown says women do one of three things: move away from the shame (shrinking), move toward the shame (overfunctioning), or move against the shame (try to make the other person feel shame).