grieving toward middle age
August 3, 2026
when you're both disappointed and deeply thankful
So much of middle age (!) is grieving, and lucky for me, it’s not as much the grieving of people, thank god, but grieving the life I thought or expected I would have. It’s an unplaceable kind of grief, because unlike with people you love who leave, I never really experienced for myself the life I grieve now. I had an idea of it from childhood and in adolescence and it was already fading by young adulthood, but I thought I could wrestle it into existence. And the grief is complicated by the fact that I am both disappointed and deeply thankful that I don’t have that life that I thought was a given.
One part of my new job is making deliveries of flower arrangements. I climb into a white electric Ford Transit van with the company logo on the side and navigate the subdivisions of Michiana, dropping off sympathy arrangements, Mother’s Day bouquets and two dozen longstem pink “we’re so proud of you!” roses. During my time in South Bend thus far, I’ve been oriented toward campus and downtown. I never had reason to venture to the developments and neighborhoods of the ‘suburbs’ to the northeast. Some of my friends with kids lived in them, I knew, for the good school district, but other than a holiday party here or there, there was no reason for me to be driving around Bridlewood and Quail Ridge and Terri Brooke. Now I’m mapping out the delivery routes for maximum efficiency.
These neighborhoods are versions of where I grew up. Sure, the lots were bigger in the northwest of New Jersey, and my own childhood home was only one of two, because the developer went bankrupt, but the concepts are the same: center-hall colonial, basketball hoop in the paved driveway, lawn like a fairway, maybe sidewalks, maybe not, but either way, white people walking their dogs. I knew growing up that there were different ways of living, different family configurations, apartment buildings, small homes, no yards, less money, no money; I knew we had so much that other people did not have. I knew people struggled, probably knew that too much for a kid, to be honest, because I listened to the grown ups too much and I read too much but that’s another post.
The veil of invincibility remained, gauzy due to my natural and trained cynicism, but still there. Other people struggled but _I_ wouldn’t struggle. Like having brown hair and eyes passed down from my parents with brown hair and eyes, I would also have what I perceived to be their upper middle class comfort and ease passed down. Of course, now, decades later, I see it wasn’t as easy for them as I thought it was. So maybe I’m grieving for them, too.
I deeply understand and acknowledge that I am better off than 95-99% of the humans on earth in terms of resources, education, freedom from oppression, etc. And that complicates the grief more, because I’m not objectively at a loss. But I am not where I assumed and expected I would be, and to be honest, who among us is? ‘Us’ being the highly educated, highly resourced, highly privileged people that are in my orbit. Marriages fall apart, people who want to have babies can’t, people feel trapped by their careers or their lack of careers, they are isolated, lonely, mentally ill, they’re self medicating, their parents or spouses or kids are dying, they are sick with cancer or autoimmune diseases, they’re in debt and they’re juggling a mirage and they’re afraid the mask will fall. And they also have in-ground pools and vacations and nannies and healthy marriages and happy kids and extended family. They have fulfilling careers or they don’t and don’t care to, they laugh and enjoy their flash of time on earth. It’s all happening at once, the good and bad, which like, duh, but somehow… this is a revelation to me now.
I talked to my therapist about the grief and my confusion about it, because while the grief is foregrounded, I also feel like I'm living the life I want. As usual with me, we had to talk about black and white thinking and the reality of the gray scale of emotions and life -- feeling grief doesn’t mean a person isn’t happy. Living authentically doesn’t mean a person won’t feel grief. I know the grieving needs to be done by or on behalf of my younger self. For the things I had and don’t have anymore, and for the things I did not have, despite having so much. For the things my parents did right for me, and the things they did their best on, but still did wrong for me. For the ideas about self worth and the attendant responsibilities my younger self took on and felt bolstered by, and in some ways built a personality around, or at least a way of being in the world.
I saw on tiktok (ugh, I confess) that people who are really good at intellectualizing their emotions instead of feeling their emotions tend to be people whose emotional needs were not met as kids. Like they learn that expressing emotions doesn't bring them what they need, so they will reason their way into what they need, or something close to what they need, at least. I can name emotions but I don’t let them be felt. When they bubble up in my body I put them directly into my brain. In a lot of ways, my drive to write comes from trying to make sense of the ‘why’ of my emotions: to narrativize my feelings, put a container of reason around them. And if not reason, at least the structure of words. So this summer, as I’ve moved away from the institutions that rewarded me for being reliable, rational, stoic and jaded, I’ve been trying to feel feelings as they bubble up, instead of putting them directly into my brain. I’m trying to believe that all parts of me are worthy of love, even (or maybe especially) the parts that are messy, unruly and uncouth.
