Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  It is notoriously hard to make new friends in middle age. As one writer puts it: “As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.”³² I’ve found that one route to fixing this is to find companionship in drudgery. My friend Tara and I check in with each other a few times a week, when we have a couple of minutes, waiting or walking, to kill. “I only have friends who will go to CVS with me,” she tells me.

  One piece of advice I feel comfortable giving women of this age, besides to visit a compassionate NAMS-certified gynecologist the second you start having perimenopause symptoms: start a club. A book club gives you a reason to read and to get together with friends. But you can make a club around anything. A stitch and bitch. A going-out-dancing club. Margarita Mondays. A try-every-pizza-place-in-town club. A New Midlife Crisis Initiation Club,™ perhaps!

  If you’re having trouble finding women to go out with you, you can join one of the many networks springing up around the country, from meet-ups for middle-aged and older women to paid professional societies like Tiffany Dufu’s the Cru.³³ 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.”

  I’ve found it helps to pick two hours every month or two, like the third Monday of each month, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., at a spot like happy hour at a bar or potluck in a church basement. Not everyone will make every meeting, but with luck there will be a gang every time and all the members will show up at least a few times a year. My friend Biz, who has hosted many regular events, including a rollicking annual Kentucky Derby party with mint juleps and absurd hats, told me: “You have to find ways to make adulthood fun.”

  At my club nights, when we smile at one another, the room is full of lined faces—and, for a minute, no one cares.

  11

  New Narratives

  “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.’”

  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,” 1894¹

  I woke up at 4:00 a.m. last night as usual. Then—not so much later—I fell back asleep. I did not fill the space in between by cursing my sleeping husband. I did not dwell on my finances or job prospects—or on national politics. I did not dread the day to come. I just rolled over, and the next thing I knew my alarm was going off and it was time to make breakfast.

  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.

  I’ve assembled a team of helpers worthy of Ocean’s Eleven. I know a good therapist I can call on when I need her. I found an accountant who understands the vicissitudes of freelancing. My mother and I talked to an estate-planning attorney to ensure that everyone’s wills, health care proxies, and other papers were in order. I have a tailor to fix hems, an urgent care clinic for strep tests, and a teenage turtle-sitter for when we’re out of town. I 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.

  I began taking synthetic estrogen and progesterone—the same hormones involved in HRT—in the form of a low-dose birth control pill. I found the adjustment phase, which is said to take three to four months, rough. My periods became even more unpredictable. I retained water and became convinced I was gaining weight permanently. Then those issues went away and I found myself on a more even keel.

  Then, all of a sudden, my periods stopped. I wondered if it could be early menopause, but no, not yet. My new doctor—I left the one who prescribed bee pollen—explained that the pill suppresses ovulation. This means that nothing may build up in the uterus that needs to be expelled, so either there’s just spotting or there’s no period at all. I don’t miss it.

  With my body presenting less of a distraction, I’ve been able to think more clearly about my place in the world—not as the ingenue but as a mother, mentor, neighbor, or (dare to dream it) MILF. “Look at you walking!” I recently shouted to a newly mobile baby who lives on my block. Before, when I was engulfed in a haze of worry or self-criticism, that baby might have flown down the sidewalk on a skateboard without my noticing.

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

  I’m more patient, too. I know that perimenopause is tough on many women and also that it ends. In less than a decade, no matter what I do or don’t do, things will be different. I’ve made friends with some older women who remind me by their example that a more serene future is possible.

  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 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 comedian Tim Minchin said in a 2013 commencement speech in Australia: “We didn’t evolve to be constantly content. Contented Homo erectus got eaten before passing on their genes.”³ Oddly, knowing that I have every reason in the world to be freaking out has made me much more relaxed.

  For me, the first step to peace in middle age has been learning that the game is rigged. If we feel that things are tougher now, it could mean only that we’re paying more attention. This is a bumpy stretch in life. We should not expect to feel fine.

  “Women are not prepared to have ‘everything,’ not success-type ‘everything,’” writes Eve Babitz in Slow Days, Fast Company.⁴ “I mean, not when the ‘everything’ isn’t about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs off with the baby-sitter, there’s at least a precedent). There’s no precedent for women getting their own ‘everything’ and learning that it’s not the answer.”

  I know too well that it’s easy to turn these facts against women and to declare that feminism has made us unhappy. Ah, you do not like these possibilities? says the villain’s voice. No problem! We vill take them away!

  I’m not knocking choices, just saying that having so many of them with so little support has led to a great deal of shame. Being a full and equal partner both at work and at home, having a rich social life, contributing to society, staying in shape—doing all that is exponentially harder than doing any one thing. We asked for more, and did we ever get it. I firmly believe it’s fairer. Easier? No.

  One night in December 2018, the Tony-winning actress and sing
er 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.

  Listening to other women’s stories this year has given me confirmation, finally, that our expectations have been absurd. So many women I spoke with—objectively successful women—felt ashamed of their perceived failures.

  What if we’re not failures? What if what we’ve done is good? At any rate, maybe it’s good enough.

  “It used to be, you rated yourself on maybe three or four things,” says Jennifer J. Deal, senior research scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership⁶—“your looks, your house, your husband, and your kids. Now it’s all that, plus your career, your finances, how eco-conscious you are, how healthy you are, and on and on and on.”

  So many Gen X women have told me that they were raised believing that if you don’t care about everything, you’re squandering opportunity. They felt pressure to take advantage of all the chances their mothers and grandmothers didn’t have. And they’ve worn themselves out in the process.

  “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.”

  That’s what’s happening. And the message we’ve heard is that with enough ingenuity or willpower we can fix it.

  Again and again, I’ve heard women say that they were depressed or exhausted but were meditating, going to yoga, going to therapy, or going to church three times a week. Their higher power was Oprah. They were doing a cleanse. They were doing a retreat. They were going to spas, getting makeovers, getting plastic surgery. Soon, they knew, they would figure out which of their many missteps had brought them to this age without the life they’d envisioned, and they could get back on track.

  “The minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces,” wrote Taffy Brodesser-Akner in a story about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.⁷ “Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness … SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase ‘mind-body,’ meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked.”

  After spending months steeped in Goopiana, Brodesser-Akner had an epiphany: “We are doomed to aspire for the rest of our lives. Aspiration is suffering. Wellness is suffering. As soon as you level up, you greet how infinite the possibilities are, and it all becomes too awful to live without.”

  I eat reasonably well and try to get out in nature occasionally, but I am under no illusion that these things will fix the existential crunch that is middle age. The only thing for that is a new story.

  Here’s a real-world parable that has helped me:

  In the midst of a hectic day, a woman called a car. When she hopped into her Uber, she found it was messy. Of course: another annoyance! Could this day get any worse? She started cleaning up the back seat and handing the trash to the driver.

  He stared back at her without saying anything.

  She grew madder and madder. Here she was helping! All day, she’s been doing things for other people! He wasn’t even saying thank you!

  Then she looked out the window and saw a woman waiting to get in the car. And she realized this was not her Uber. She saw the woman and the driver making eye contact and raising their eyebrows at each other. This wasn’t an Uber at all. She had hopped into the back seat of a random car and huffily handed a man his own back seat trash.

  She explained her mistake and apologized.

  At this point, the situation could have gone in various directions. The man could have yelled at her. He could have mocked her. The woman waiting outside the car—the man’s wife, it turned out—could have been angry or suspicious. The woman having the bad day could have become abjectly embarrassed.

  Instead, something else happened: the man laughed. He got out of the car and told his wife what had occurred. She laughed. And then the woman herself laughed, too. The three of them could not stop laughing. Here they were, strangers laughing together in the middle of the day, on a city sidewalk. The woman went off to find her real Uber, still giggling. She found herself not only relieved of her earlier gloom but also delighted for the rest of the day. What made the difference? The driver reacted to her error with glee rather than judgment. She could accept her mistake.

  I asked my friend Asia, a therapist in New Orleans, to tell me why I like this story so much. She said it’s a good one for middle age, because it shows how helpful it can be to reframe a situation. So often, she says, we see the task of living well in a negative, self-punishing way: “I should be exercising more!” “I have to be the most mindful yogi ever!” “I have to eat perfectly vegan every second of the day!”

  “We take basically good ideas and turn them into something with which to self-flagellate,” said Asia. But the driver and the woman in the Uber story “both showed this ability to take that moment when you could have both been embarrassed or grumpy or angry and instead find it hilarious and lovable and adorable.”

  You could say this attitude comes down to the old cliché about “looking on the bright side,” but I think it’s more profound than that. It’s about telling the story of our mistakes, our life, in a new way, in which we’re heroines worth rooting for.

  When teaching memoir classes, I’ve talked about making meaning in the process of structuring a story. What’s the beginning, middle, and end? What are the key plot points? What are the 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.⁸ Many of the inspirational authors that women I talked to recommended to me, including Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Cheryl Strayed, speak of recasting and rethinking our lives. In a recent op-ed about midlife, 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 responsibility for our work or partners or children or parents. We should be proud of ourselves.

  I keep thinking about the 1980s–90s TV show Double Dare,¹⁰ in which child contestants had to find orange flags among obstacles such as mountains of slime. That, I think, is an excellent analogy for our generation in midlife: we’ve been glopped with slime, but somewhere in the mess there’s that little orange flag.

  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.

  Gen X might not live on an economic upslope, but perhaps we can make meaning out of our dip in prosperity, and say: We will be okay. If we don’t fix it all, maybe our kids will. Post-Millennials, also known as Gen Z, are likely
to be the most diverse and best-educated generation in American history.¹² There will be ups and downs in the future just as there have been in the past. Whatever comes, we know we can handle it.

  A woman I know who does a lot for other people told me she doesn’t mind that her husband is selfish while she is generous, because: “Look who has a richer life … I may do so much more, he may get away with sitting alone all day never doing anything for other people, but look what I get out of it. I have all these friends. I have the best life.”

  This past spring, I had dinner at a restaurant with a friend who lives in Florida. We stayed up late, so late the staff put chairs on tables around us but told us we could stay as long as we wanted (she knew the owner). She’d been through a divorce and a career change, but seemed happy. She’d found meaning in her work. She was proud of her sons.

  She knew she could feel bad. She had less money than she’d like. She was trying to make herself go to the gym more often. Still, she found herself feeling strangely hopeful.

  “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. What could possibly happen next, you know? It’s been kind of weirdly … terribly … fun. It’s like, terrible fun, you know?”

  To me, this is a transformative way of thinking about life, every day, all day—as a story in which the bad things are part of the plot and not random disasters.

  When I had a job writing copy for a home decorating magazine, I grew resentful of all the edits I would get: “What kind of wicker chair was it?” One day, though, I realized I needed the job for the money and so I had to find a way to like it. I started to think of my editor as a writing class teacher. I was taking a course in descriptive writing, and her notes were my assignments. “What kind of wicker? How about ‘sky blue, distressed, wide-binding cane’?” Once I started to think of it as a class I was getting paid to take, I could enjoy it and learn from it—at least until I was able to get out of there into a job that was a better fit.