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

by Ada Calhoun

Asia Wong, now a clinical social worker in New Orleans, told me: “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.

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

2013 Johns Hopkins survey found that only one in five obstetrics and gynecology residents had received formal training in menopause medicine.22 That’s 20 percent of gynecologists.

was not about short-term hormone therapy for treatment of symptoms in women in their forties and fifties.

Get daily exercise, especially weight-bearing exercise; a good diet; and plenty of sleep.

low-dose birth control pill could help me with my perimenopausal symptoms.)

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 gives a younger woman this advice: “I’m just saying, I guess, there’s another version, after this version, to look forward to. Because of wisdom or hormones or just enough years going by. 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.”

“It feels less like free time when you chop it up.

Of the four generations polled, Gen X was the most distraught.

Second-wave feminist, activist, and writer Carol Hanisch, best known for popularizing the adage “The personal is political,”

Why can’t we be pudgy, grouchy, or uncontained?

“It’s not the worst thing in the world,” Houck said, “to be living with a body that’s a little bit out of control.”

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.”

“There’s this idea that women have to be superpowers, basically. On the one hand: ‘Of course we can do that.’ On the other: ‘Why? It’s ridiculous.’”

My expectations are way lower. I no longer believe that at this age I should have rock-hard abs, a perfectly calm disposition, or a million dollars in the bank.

helps to surround myself with women my age who speak honestly about their lives.

One of the biggest midlife problems I had to confront was anxiety paired with an abiding belief that I should not be anxious. That’s unreasonable. It would be weird, frankly, if I weren’t anxious. Human beings are wired to see situations as being unfair to us.2 As

Oddly, knowing that I have every reason in the world to be freaking out has made me much more relaxed.

“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.

most moving scenes? Deliverance from suffering in midlife could come from some outside force, but it could also come from reframing your life as being about something unexpected.

Ann Voskamp wrote, “Life doesn’t have to get easier to be good.”9

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.

Generation X women, who as children lacked cell phones and helicopter parents, came up relying on our own wits. To keep ourselves safe, we took control. We worked hard and made lists and tried to do everything all at once for a very long time and without much help. We took responsibility for ourselves—and later we also took responsi...

“I’m kind of interested,” she told me. “Interested in what my life is and how it’s evolving. Because it’s kind of like a weird little adventure.

It’s like, terrible fun, you know?”

Displaying “generativity” means caring about people besides just yourself and your family. That leads to helping guide the next generation, which often leads to a positive legacy.

Some psychologists are exploring the connection between being generative and telling our personal narratives in certain ways.

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.

Even padded with achievement or glamour or cash, midlife is very likely going to be challenging. Even if you don’t subscribe to the belief in a crisis point, you cannot deny the onset of new physical limitations and stressors.

“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.”

“Wow, it’s really quite impressively bad!”)

Anna Garlin Spencer, Woman’s Share in Social Culture (New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913), 231.