I'm only 47 but I feel like I'm 87

I'm in good phsyical shape and I've always been active (maybe too active). But I'm so tired I just want to stop the train or just jump off if it won't stop. I have found little ways to get through and pretend that I'm as energetic as ever but I am not. I do the things that are expected of a mid-lifer but the truth is I am so darn sick of it all.

I hear that it will pass but I'm still so bored and tired of living. The things I used to love, I still do but they're mostly tedious repetitions just to keep up appearances. I keep doing everything like I'm a robot but will there ever be another time in life to feel the passion and joy of living again?

Is this really just a phase with a second wind on the end of it?

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I posted the above rant on a forum for people who are over 50 years old. I was told I probably needed some sort of drugs or something...but I'm not fond of drugs.

And so, this is what another person, whose moniker is ccxcs, said (It made me laugh and smile a lot:-):

"Even in good shape, you lose interest in the things you liked to do - it DOES get boring - kinda like sex with the same person for 30 years.

The ONLY thing to do at that point is to shake up your live - reinvent yourself - say whatever you damn well please and who cares if someone is 'offended'

Get rid of ALL the 'toxic' people in your life who are critical and hateful - if that means a divorce, then so be it.

Strive to live in peace - no bickering, no arguments - even if it means you have to move into a furnished room - at least you will have PEACE and quiet and can do EXACTLY as you want.

Also forget about trying to 'please' everyone - the ONLY opinion that matters is your own.

When we get to age 50 and over, the coffin is a LOT closer and we KNOW our days are numbered.

Do not waste even ONE day doing anything you don't want to do, or being in the company of anyone who causes problems or makes you upset.

Get angry and say to hell with all the nagging whining bastards who try to control your life.

If it means moving away then do it.

I GUARANTEE this will resolve your dilemma."

Link


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Another poster, with the handle KKnv, said:

"By gollly you are right! I feel a lot the same ... due to my demanding friends, family. After reading your post, I got a phone call insisting that I go to some damn dumb party tonight -

I said 'No, the holiday stuff is wearing me out and I want to stay home and read my new book tonight'

Thanks - I feel GOOD!"

KKnv's link

I dreamt last night

about asking questions on a forum I visit regularly. It’s a women’s issues forum and I rarely ask questions there but mostly read to ascertain the anger and judgment, opinions, outlooks and ways of thinking around women’s issues. But in the dream I was asking questions. I rarely ask questions there because there is a lot of rage and resentment around the topics that regularly come up and I think it largely stems from people’s difficulty in communication. Communication seems to be a simple matter, but it’s not really as simple as it seems.

For example and to illustrate my thoughts, my partner this morning was looking through his squinted eyelids watching the sun filtering through his lashes from the window. The sun, he described, was making kaleidoscope colors and designs. As he was relating the colors dancing, I imagined a long ago scientist or mathematician deciding that he or she had to research why this happens. As a communicator, I would not necessarily try to figure out how or why it happens but explain it’s characteristics with words. But I can understand someone who feels compelled to count angles and lines and research compound reactions of light on dust particles on one’s eye lashes. I can understand the drive that a mathematician or scientist would feel. I have the same drive to communicate as the mathematician or scientist. The scientist or mathematician would have information that I do not have, information that he or she would have built up over the years, experience to build on that I do not have.

In the same way, after a lifetime of needing to communicate, I have built up over the years a way of doing things, experience to build on and a similar type of reliance, a type of faith, in the process that will lead me to the end result. And so, with my dream I know that I am in a questioning phase of my own fixation with words, ideas, inspiration, impressions and concepts. I do not have answers now but I know I’m trying to sort something out through communication with people on women’s issues, listening and asking questions. Of course a women’s issues course would be helpful but for the time being, I’m just looking for answers to questions I don’t even understand yet but I know if I just keep going, it will eventually make itself known to me (that--or I will have wasted more time--but that happens).

Thanksgiving Day Smolders

I don’t do Thanksgiving anymore. I haven’t done it in about 10 years or so. However, my partner and I are bringing a bird (chicken) to his elderly parent’s house because his mother just got home from the hospital. The family (my children, except for the youngest who is studying in Italy, her father‘s grandfather and grandmother’s homeland) are going to their Nana’s house to make a turkey but I think it’s going to be a lot different for them. Nana was big on holidays. Not like me. Well, that’s not true, when my children were young I spent hours and hours on holidays and their attendant traditions and decorum. But something in me had to stop, mostly when I divorced my children’s father.

Well, I never really divorced him back then because it was too complicated. We’ve just lived apart for the past 10 years and only recently went through the legal rigmarole. I started taking my children out to dinner or something for some of the holidays, trying to make a new tradition that fit more realistically into a family headed by a single mother who worked up to three jobs at one time. It just made more sense. But I can’t say it stuck.

Today though I’m pushing myself to put my own pursuits aside for a couple of hours; I will go to my partner’s parent’s house. I don’t like holidays because to me they represent so many things that I don’t much believe in. I wasn’t surprised either when my anthropology professor called Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for indigenous peoples of America. Somehow, I always knew that. But still, I’ll push myself to make an appearance and smile for others because Jack, my partner, bought a fully cooked chicken and potatoes from the grocery store so I am only cooking up some winter squash.

It’s not that I don’t like cooking. I cook everyday, like I did when the children were little, but I just have a problem with the holidays. Someday I may come to terms with them, understand why I dislike them so much, but for now, I’m just winging parts of them and pushing myself through other parts of holiday routines that just won‘t give up the ghost. But here’s one little anecdote that may express some of my feelings:

This morning Jack took a stack of ads out of the newspaper that is nearly two inches thick and left the wafer thin mint of newsprint on the coffee table. There is more stuff to sell than there is news to read. To me, that’s the best commentary on what the holidays have become. And I used to be a reporter and copywriter for seven regional newspapers. Commerce wins every time. As they say in journalism: follow the money when you’re investigating wrongdoing.

(On an aside, I’ll tell you the dream thoughts I had last night. I kept waking up dreaming about deleting this blog, especially my free-writing rants from the past two days. But instead, I’m just adding a new one. I suppose I don’t always trust all my dreams. I‘m pushing to find a new kind of writing even though I don‘t know exactly what it is. In the dream I was doing it right but I couldn‘t see what I was doing--because in real life I still don‘t know what it is.)

Pushing Myself to Post Daily

I’m thinking about writing my blog for my children. I often visit a women’s issues forum that is very heated and discusses lots of controversial topics related to women. I used to think women were all goddesses. This thinking got me into a few scrapes because I believed women could do no wrong. I’m pushing towards 50 now, though, and instead of just complaining about things all the time, maybe if I try to explain myself a little bit more and explain why I think some of the things I think on this blog, it might be better. But the truth is, even as I begin this free writing stream of consciousness (or unconsciousness as the case is), I don’t know what to say, so instead, maybe I’ll just open my daughter’s email and forget it for now. LOL!

Sometimes I’m so stupid. I had thoughts before I sat down to type but they’ve all disappeared now that I’m trying to write about them. Arrgh. Writing used to be my way through thinking but everything has changed in these last two years. I don’t really know why everything has changed except that my youngest child turned 18 two years ago (nearly three now as she’ll be 21 in less than one month). It’s strange how I can encourage younger women on the women’s issues forum but these days, blogging is just not compelling me to put it out there. But my youngest daughter has my blog URL and I’m trying to write something--partially for her--as I’ve nearly given up on the blogoshpere. Maybe I can go to the women’s issues forum to remember. Maybe I just don’t know what to do with my blog these days. So many of them have seemed like such a waste of time. I’ve started many different blogs. I feel a little crazy about all of this. Why do I need to leave so many blogs behind? What is it? Am I scared to say what I know? Am I scared to sound stupid?

The women’s issues forum surely has the capacity to make me feel stupid but recently, I think we’ve tamed the angry voices there. Some are angry male voices and some are hateful women’s voices. Yes, men are allowed there but are asked to respect that it’s a women-centric space. That is difficult to achieve, to say the least. I swear men are so angry but then again, they’ve always been. It’s not what we do that makes them angry. I know that now. I used to bend over backwards and it never made a dit of difference. The thing is, I am with a good guy these days and he doesn’t get angry at me the way men used to get angry at me. I don’t think it’s because I’ve learned to behave, either.

Maybe I’ll post this senseless rant just to keep getting used to not worrying about writing stupid things. I used to write political commentary, primarily. That’s probably why trying to write a woman’s blog is difficult for me, so post it I will, just to push myself in one area today--for the sake of pushing.

A Blogger's Rant

I don’t know how to do so many things. But how can this still be? I’m nearly 50 years old, I’m menopausal, have done a ton of things that impressed all kinds of people (and infuriated more), but still I just want to lie down and cry a river sometimes. I became tired of crying and for a while I didn’t cry anymore, but these days for some reason I just want to luxuriate in an ocean of tears again. That I feel this way now confuses me. I really have a wonderful life. I don’t understand this feeling. I’m going to try to blog it out of myself and maybe by the end of my blogging days, I’ll know a thing or two.

But even the thought of blogs scare me. Yesterday I had to look for an old story I wrote and I thought I wrote it in one of my old blogs. Looking for it made me cry. I have tried so many times, created some very nice sites but they’re all dead. They’re each dead for their own reasons, which I don’t want to get into right now, but their nonexistence made me feel like I have wasted so much time, like writing is such a waste of time; why is it I only want to do something that is such a waste of time?

Maybe if I luxuriate in some tears, I will know but for now, I’m just going to post another rant.