Large

My life is large. I live in a big city (well, the outskirts of a big city), and I work in an office (normally), and I commute through traffic. I go to a gym, and I make a lot of goals that I feel that I need to accomplish. I’m (too) hard on myself. I do the things that need to be done, not because I want to, but because someone needs to do them. I have difficult people in my life who are not kind to me. And in the past, I have tried to make them like me and treat me better.

I have competed. For jobs, for affection, for approval. I have made excuses for people who were cruel. Who were selfish. Who were untrue. I have filled up my life with so many things and reasons and habits and routines that I don’t genuinely like. I have tried to be successful without asking how I defined “success.” I have done the things I was told to do, and I did most of them well. But I never asked if I wanted to do them. I thought that I should.

“Should” has taken up a lot of room in my life. I should be nice to people who aren’t nice to me because I will be the “bigger person.” I should try to accomplish more, I should strive to be my best (rather than just be). I should take care of those around me. I should give. I should give more. I should give even more.

My life has gotten large because I have filled it with so many things that I don’t need. And I don’t want a large live. I want a small life. I want less goals, and less demands, and less shoulds. I want do things I enjoy, just because I enjoy them. I want to befriend people who I like, rather than people I “should” to “network.” I want to exist without constantly having to prove my right to exist.

I’ve been thinking about this for the past week, and today I was introduced to the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese.” It begins like this: “You do not have to be good./ You do not have to walk on your knees/ for a hundred miles through the desert repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”

If that’s not permission to clean house, I don’t know what is.

And Soon You'll Turn 43

No one tells you how to be middle aged. It just happens one day. You wake up and realize that you’ve lived half of your life. For most of your life, your life was ahead of you—a mystery, an unknown variable. You could be anything, do anything. You had so much time left, you couldn’t even imagine living past 30.

And then you did. And you lived further. And some of your friends died. A shocking number of your friends had cancer. You tried to reach out more, and you became a better friend, and you let go of the people that weren’t very good friends to you. And you thought about cancer so much that becoming diagnosed with cancer became one of your biggest fears. And your parents got older, and ill (with cancer), and your friends’ parents got older, and some became ill, and some died, and you felt mortality coiling around you and squeezing. You’re not ready for your parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends’ parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends to die. And there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable tides.

You develop a prevailing awareness of death.

And you always thought you had time to have kids, and then you found yourself in a fertility clinic listening to a specialist, one of the best in the state, tell you that it was too late. You had gone into early menopause, and the only option was a donor egg, IVF, and hormones that would cost over $30k for an 11% chance of carrying to term. And you couldn’t stop weeping for the loss of something you never had. You wept at your friends’ children, and you wept at Shazam! (of all things), and you wept at old home movies, and you wept to your mother and your husband, who told you that it was okay, that you weren’t defective. But you still aren’t sure you believe them.

Your body continues to betray you, and although you knew it was going to happen, although you knew that things would start to hurt and creak and crack and pop and stiffen, you didn’t expect it to be your left knee. Or the ball of your right foot. Or that place beneath your left shoulder that becomes so knotted that when you hold things over your head, you hold them at an angle.

You expected to have a mid-life crisis where you would buy a ridiculous car or go on an expensive trip or at least get a completely different sort of haircut, and instead you question if you’ve done enough, if you’ve done it well, if you’ve done the things that you wanted. You question how much time you have left to do all the things you still want to do, and realize that you’re going to have to choose between them. You’ve reached a strange place where the opinions of other people matter less, but your aren’t sure what you think of yourself and your life and how your values have changed and how your goals have changed. You think things like if you adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? If you don’t adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? And since adoption starts at about $30k anyway, and you’re already in the hole about $130k for student loans, and you have a mortgage, then you think that maybe mid-life is about realizing that not only can you not take anything with you when you die, but how much you’ll actually owe instead.

And on second thought, maybe it’s a really good thing you didn’t have a mid-life crisis where you bought an expensive car or went on an exotic vacation because you couldn’t afford any more debt anyway. Retirement isn’t going to save up for itself.

No one prepares you for mid-life. No one is interested in mid-life accomplishments. Everyone is focused on the 30 under 30, or the 40 under 40, but no one writes about the 45 at 45, or the 50 in their 50s, the 60 in their 60s, or the 70 in their 70s. And no one cares if you’re 80 or 90 or 100, but if you’ve managed to live the longest, 104, or 108, or maybe even longer, then you get a feel-good news story about how you did it, and you can attribute your lucky longevity to whiskey and scrambled eggs and always owning a dog.

Sometimes, you find yourself writing in second person even though you always hated when people did that. Weirdly, it’s not so bad now.

You are surprised at what you know. You know how to argue against companies, and you know how to demand fair treatment, not just for yourself, but for the people around you. You’re very good at wrangling. You’re fairly savvy with money, and surprisingly organized, considering that once upon a time you never wrote anything down (who were you then?!). You have a strange affinity for rules and order that shocks the everliving ebejezus out of you when you find yourself complaining about jaywalkers.

You seek out seats at concerts and are delighted when bands start early. The idea of being out past midnight exhausts your soul.

You sometimes wonder if you will ever develop confidence in yourself.

You also sometimes wonder if you will ever develop a taste for anchovies. You are surprised that Skittles don’t taste as good as they used to. You marvel at some of the things you used to eat, and are not surprised that your tooth enamel isn’t better.

Your range and breadth of emotion has deepened and expanded, and you feel things now that are so complex and nuanced you cannot find adequate words to describe them. You find a picture of your old living room and you feel happy/bitter/sweet/nostalgic/yearning/loss/forgiveness/gratitude/delight and you don’t know what to call it. You feel things like that all the time now. You are surrounded by this nuanced ocean of emotional sensation and resonance. You are overwhelmed by the constant complexity of it.

You weren’t prepared to discover that old friends that you had lost touch with became addicted to drugs and are homeless.

You realize that your grandparents died 20 years ago. You have never stopped grieving their loss. At the same time, you can still feel them with you.

And you realize that everything from your childhood has changed. Your grandparents’ house. Your grandmother’s condo. The house where you grew up. The magnolia tree that your mother planted is gone. The fence that your father built is gone. And although these things are gone, you remember them, bright and vividly, like you could travel to where they were and they would still be there, exactly the same.

But you can never, ever remember to wear your reading glasses.

And you realize this is all okay. Life is more beautiful and precious and ephemeral than you ever realized. And although you already knew that life was amazing and precious and brief, you didn’t know that life was amazing and precious and brief. Only the accumulation of time has been able to teach you that in way that reaches the bone of your bones. Every moment matters more than you could ever have possibly realized before you were middle-aged. Life has a different savor. Like learning to taste the different notes in coffee. No one told you that time is transformative. You had no idea that mid-life would be a time of growth. You can feel the uncomfortable shifting of being in chrysalis, and you are delighted that you have the capacity for so much more change and potential than you ever knew.

Memory piles up thick and deep, like stacks of books. Little things remind you of other little things, and before you know it, you’re knee deep in the past. And every time, the past pulls you deeper into the present. Into this miraculous, flicker-short life. Into the sheer fantastic impossibility of existing as a being of consciousness. Becoming middle-aged is like becoming a banker, but not one who deals in currency, but one who invests in the daily miracles of being alive in this world. The miracle of breath. The miracle of grass. The miracle of rain. The miracle of motion. You have so much more than you ever thought you’d have.

And you’ve lost so much more than you ever thought you could lose.

No one told you that time is cleansing.

No one told you that mid-life was a time of incredible growth. That it’s painful and heavy and glorious and liberating and sad and adaptive and strange. But most of all, it’s learning. And accepting. And being.

You have no idea why people don’t write more about mid-life. Or make lists of accomplishments from middle-aged people. Or, perhaps more appropriately, lists of insights.

Being middle-aged is nowhere near as boring as you thought it would be.

And no one told you how grateful you would be to be here for it.

And you begin to think that, regardless of the amount of time you have left, it doesn’t really matter. Because the only time that matters is now. And now is all you have.

Now is all you ever had.

On Redemption (NOTE: THERE ARE RISE OF SKYWALKER SPOILERS BELOW)

I agree with Rainbow Rowell on this one. Or with her character, Wren, rather. In the book Fangirl, Cath, a college student who writes fan fiction, contemplates killing off one of her characters in a big redemptive arc. Here’s the abbreviated scene (and also, I should note that THERE ARE FANGIRL SEMI-SPOILERS IN THIS POST ALSO):

“I never thought I would kill Baz,” Cath said. “Ever. But it’s the ultimate redemption, you know? If he sacrifices himself for Simon, after all their years of fighting, after this one precious year of love . . . it makes everything they’ve been through together that much sweeter.”

[Cath goes on to argue:] “But it makes him the ultimate romantic hero. Think of Tony in West Side Story, or Jack in Titanic—or Jesus.”

“That’s horsehit,” Wren said.

Cath giggled. “Horseshit?”

Wren elbowed her. “Yes. The ultimate act of heroism shouldn’t be death.”

[Wren goes on a bit, then ends with] “Happily ever after, or even just together ever after, is not cheesy,” Wren said, “It’s the noblest, like, the most courageous thing two people can shoot for.”

And that is why I think the redemptive arc of The Rise of Skywalker is crap. Let me clarify this very important point first. I REALLY enjoyed this movie. I’ve seen it twice already, and am getting ready to see it in the theater a third time. I’m not here to nitpick the narrative choices, and I’m not even here to argue that Kylo Ren/Ben should have lived (although I think he should have lived). The story works, and I’m satisfied. But the reviews I’ve seen (and while I will look up and quote Fangirl, I’m far too lazy to look up reviews I don’t like in order to quote them) discuss how the redemptive arc and death of Kylo Ren is the best part of the movie. And it’s not. It’s a cop-out. It’s a cop-out I accept, but a cop-out just the same. The redemptive death is easy. The character doesn’t have to live with their past, their choices, their errors, their atrocities. The character doesn’t have to strive to be better, to learn, to change, to grow, on a daily basis (which is what real change is—that’s why it’s hard). The character just wakes up one day, sees a memory of his murdered dad, throws away his light saber, and sacrifices his life because it’s easier than having to look at himself in the mirror each morning. It’s easier than having to see the memory of his dad every day. It’s easier than having to commit himself to loving someone else instead of only himself. The redemptive death isn’t redemption. It’s escape.

In this case, though, it’s convenient for the plot. Can you imagine the post-fight party scene? Rey gets out of the x-wing, everyone is cheering, and then Kylo/Ben steps out from behind her. Hey everyone. Sorry about all that before. Btw, I love ya girl here, hope that’s not a problem. The movie suddenly becomes much more complicated, right at the very end. Hard to end a three movie story arc there, that’s for sure.

So the choice makes sense. But I don’t like seeing it praised. I don’t like this cultural idea that the redemptive death is a heroic death. If we believe that people can change, that people can be redeemed, than we need to give them room to live, to continue their arcs, their growth, their uncomfortable trajectories of change. The redemptive death is more of a belief in a moment of change, a shift of consciousness, than it is in lasting, permanent change that requires work and dedication and effort to continue. Which means that maybe belief in the redemptive death means that we don’t really believe that people can change at all. We believe they can have a change of heart, but not a change of life.

And that’s really sad, when you think about it. But it fits where we are culturally right now, too, where we want to punch people who are wrong, rather than try to change them or educate them. We believe that monsters are intrinsically monsters, that they were born monsters or at some point made into monsters, but that once someone is a monster, they can never be anything else. The best thing they can do is die, and ideally they will die redemptively and heroically. Gender is constructed, but monsters? They’re innate.

It’s uncomfortable to think about, isn’t it? It’s a bit hypocritical of us to think that we can punch a Nazi in the face because there is no hope for them, but that a person can choose their gender identity separate from the biological sex that they’re born with. If we can change, but they can’t, that excuses our own atrocities and justifies our behavior. And that’s a dangerous line. That’s how good guys become bad guys. That’s how Thanos destroys half the population (NOTE: There’s Infinity War spoilers here, too). We, the good guys, have Othered a group of people by believing that they cannot change, but we can.

That’s what so great about Wonder Woman (NOTE: Yes, and Wonder Woman spoilers). She doesn’t destroy Dr. Poison, Dr. Isabel Maru, in the movie, even though Dr. Poison’s actions directly contribute to Steve Trevor’s death. Wonder Woman destroys Ares, her actual enemy, who is trying to kill her, rather than the enemy that could change.

Obviously, I’m not saying we need to cuddle monsters or Nazis, and I’m certainly not apologizing for the terrible things that terrible people do. Terrible actions deserve consequences. And some people won’t change, or can’t change, or refuse to change. And no one can be forced to change. And it’s not your job to make people change. But what if instead of punching someone in the face, literally or metaphorically, what if you tried to educate them first? What if you accepted that maybe you weren’t the one to convince them to change, but someone else could? What if instead of believing that monsters were innate, we believed that they could change, and gave them that chance, helped them with that chance. Maybe we should only condemn people who are irredeemable AFTER giving them an opportunity be redeemed.

Real redemption isn’t death. It isn’t sacrificing yourself. It’s living a good life. It’s changing. It’s living with what you’ve done, with who you’ve hurt, and facing that pain, and choosing to be better, each day. It’s hard and painful and scary. And helping someone find redemption can be hard and painful and scary, too. But that’s a true heroic arc. Living, as best you can, one day at a time.