The Truth of Mid

Derisive put-down aside, middle-everything is where the action is. Maybe too much.

Thanks to the internet, we have this ubiquitous new-ish insult, “mid.” It means mediocre, lackluster, devoid of bazazz. Mid is just OK. In a world where everything must be spectacular at all times, it’s un-striking, settled boringly somewhere between more fun extremes. It’s a fixer-upper rather than a gut renovation. It’s middle management. It’s middle age.

Middle age is when people start balding and stinking and sagging. We’re no longer vigorous, we might have stopped noticing when we have dandruff. Middle-aged women no longer spawn, and nature tells us what it thinks of that by robbing our bones of their density, our tissues of their moisture and our minds of their serotonin. Everything is deflating. No bazazz there.

Middle age is not a beige experience, though, however beige it might sound. It is an existential horror show, and if we middle aged people appear to be cloaked in a guise of mid, know that we are actually making it look glamorous compared to the real truth. You should thank us for having learned to be somewhat stoic about our decline, even if it’s because we have internalized shame about balding and dandruff and dehydration and don’t want to talk about it with you. If we were honest with you, you would go full Logan’s Run and hurl yourself into one of those Swiss death pods by the time you hit 37.

Nobody wants frown lines and yet here they are.

Middle age comes on with a crisis. Always. Our parents have either already died or are officially quite elderly. They need care at the exact same time that we see irreversible decline in ourselves. Our knees and lower back hurt, just like mom and dad’s did, and look what happened to them. Since we no longer simply have ideas about death, but lived, PTSD-enriched experience of it, and all of our friends have too, we now know what it means to see our own ends coming. No more fun philosophical ideas or theories, just inevitability, which is painful and horrifying and dark.

Buying a dumb car or having an affair or joining a cult is the least one could do, considering. People who do stupid things in a mid-life crisis deserve understanding, even if it is laughable.

I inherited my mid-life crisis from my ex, but it counted as much as if it were my decision. Anyone who has read this tale starting from Chapter One knows how that story went down, in the most cliché mid-life crisis fashion imaginable: at the age of 50, dude lost his mother suddenly and then left me for an implausible, much younger hippie bimbo with no prospects.

His mid-life crisis exploded my life from the center, and so it became my mid-life crisis too, because suddenly everything I had coasted on was gone and I had to rebuild myself with the knowledge that time was short, and more of my life was behind me than in front of me. That is the crucial ingredient in the shitty soup that is served to all 50-something year olds, no matter where the initial push into pain and silliness comes from.

You mid-tones contain multitudes.

So in the same way that after the glorious revolution, you have to elect a congress and argue about tax policy, once you get out of your exciting mid-life crisis, and the worst of whatever trauma has faded, you enter fixer-upper phase. This is tedious and detail-oriented and desperately mid. But this mid, too, contains an inner fire, because the point is to stave off the entropy you know you have only just tasted, but is coming full throttle eventually. It is mid filled with passion and fear.

Like my life, my house was gut renovated five years ago, and like my life, it has settled into a routine, and things I couldn’t attack before in a big way are making themselves felt. My front door needs an overhaul. There is drywall that needs patching. A roof that needs de-mossing. Now that I have the steely perspective of a mid-life crisis survivor, knowing death and loss and humiliation, I understand that there is no longer anything to be gained by procrastinating repairs. Nothing is urgent, thank God, but it still asks to be reckoned with. This is a very mid condition.

Please God we need to fix this door.

I am in human fixer-upper phase as well, which means getting vaccinations bang on schedule where once I blew them off. It means using eye drops twice a day and eating the fiber or worrying about it if I haven’t, and taking Advil at night because a simple visit to a plant fair on a beautiful spring day gave me a backache severe enough to need it. It means actually opening up the colon cancer self-test the French health services sends every middle aged person every year, and following its complex directions: pooping on a paper sling and scraping the pile and mixing the scrape with fluid and sending the test tube back correctly, for the not-simple pleasure of reading “negative” on the password protected website where they post my results. Doing your own stool sample expressly on a weekday so it doesn’t sit days at the post office is very mid. It is also potentially the difference between life and death. So, kind of exciting?

Middle age is also hopefully when you realize that your fixer-upper phase isn’t an imposition, as it might look when you compare it to youth, but a blessing, when you compare it to old age. And when you are middle aged you should compare yourself to old age all the time, because now that you are balding and shakier, and your gums are receding and your jowls are drooping, no one is going to thrust you into the spotlight anymore anyway, so you better start chasing the bright side yourself.

This fixer-upper realization hit me a couple days ago during a physical therapy appointment in Saint-Jouin, where I have been going since January to do supervised wrist curls to rehab the golfer’s elbow that came upon me after too-reckless daily vinyasas. Golfer’s elbow is a kind of tendonitis that flares up on the inside of your elbow joint. It is not the same thing as tennis elbow, which is on the outside. Tennis elbow sounds much sexier than golfer’s elbow, like short skirts and a taut Bjorn Borg rather than ironed collared polo shirts and fuzzy retirement.

Nothing lasts forever.

These PT visits take place in an unglamorous, fluorescent-lit cooperative run by four young bodyworkers. Samuel, my trainer, is maybe 31 and looks like a gently metrosexual version of Thurston Moore in his prime. He approaches my weakening body from across the divide of youth and so I feel like a lab rat when I see him every other week to try to rebuild my forearm strength. I want to return to the daily yoga I started vengefully at the very beginning of my inherited mid-life crisis, but I may not be able to. So I continue to go every other week where I share a workout room with mostly elderly people with what I assume to be more serious issues than my own. I feel lucky by comparison, even as I stare at my wrinkled neck in the mirror while lifting tiny, two kg weights in a show of absolutely minimal strength.

I was almost late to that visit the other day because I was reading a piece in the Guardian and I got distracted. It was on Ralph Fiennes, that ambivalent, bald, divorced paradigm of middle age. (Also maybe one of the best living actors?) The 62-year-old was talking about getting into shape for Uberto Pasolini’s upcoming adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, called The Return. For it Fiennes said Pasolini wanted him sinewy and not buff, “like a bit of old rope,” as a reflection of the thinning down and reduction to brass tacks that middle age and its trials engender. This is the movies, though, so they gave him a wig.

The Odyssey is the ultimate mid narrative, anyway. The most catastrophic action, the sacking of Troy, the bloodiest bazazz, has already happened, and now Odysseus is simply trying to get back home to his Advil and fiber. He is beleaguered and over it before the story even starts, and then a whole bunch of other crazy shit happens on his way back that makes war look like a walk in the park.

When I complain about insomnia and aches and other middle age bullshit to my mother, who is a quite glorious incarnation of 85 years old, albeit filled with anxiety over all of it, she likes to repeat an anecdote that may be apocryphal, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t find the source. “I heard this interview with Lauren Bacall once,” she says, “and they asked her if she could go back to any age, what would it be? And she says, ‘My fifties, because you still look good, but you have wisdom and experience.’ Or something like that.”

By the time Bacall was in her fifties, she had helped the much older first love of her life die from cancer, had given birth to three kids, divorced her alcoholic second husband, and clawed her way back from Bogie-imposed retirement into regular work hoofing on Broadway. She didn’t want to be 19 again, when she was a dipshit model and Howard Hawks gave her the role of her life in To Have and Have Not. She didn’t want to go back to her early 30s again, when she was relatively happy with Humphrey Bogart. She wanted to go back to a time when she had seen the other side of suffering, and still had some energy left to enjoy herself.

Maybe it’s just that it’s Sunday evening and I’m tired and some very mid Netflixy entertainment is calling, but I am in no mood to argue with her. I would rather save my energy for something that needs it.