One of the BEST benefits of being the Midlife Crisis Queen is being automatically mailed a few of the latest books published about midlife.

Being a librarian from way back, I ALWAYS appreciate a good read, and Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a midlife crisis is just that!

Any book about midlife crisis that can make you laugh and cry at the same time, is well worth reading.

From her love affair with Ambien to her midnight musings as she cruises the internet, Amy Ferris captures the deeper turmoil and confusion that only menopause can bring.

At first I thought her book would only be a light and sometimes hilarious romp through Amy’s own version of a midlife crisis with great lines like, “I no longer have a waistline!” and her compulsive need to Google old boyfriends and lovers.  She definitely kept me on my toes and laughing through her discussions about being a control freak even AFTER her own death.

But at the end of the book, Amy graciously shares her last days with her mother before she died.  No more touching words have been written about the passing of a beloved parent.

Unfortunately, for many of us, true authenticity can only come from finding ourselves in desperate situations.  I am speaking from personal experience here.

I recently spoke to a room full of newly unemployed people, folks who had never really known that kind of desperation before.  At the end, the first question was,

“Do you have to reach that point of feeling like you have very little left to lose, before you can begin to acknowledge and appreciate your own uniqueness?”

My only answer was, “I did.”  Before that point, I still believed I had all the answers.  I still believed in the traditional American dream and felt like it was working for me to some extent.  In other words, I was still willing to ignore my deepest personal need to become my best self, because I had some sort of marriage and job and that felt safe.  Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken!

But when that all crumbles before your eyes, when everything you thought you knew about yourself and your future is no longer true, desperation CAN lead to inspiration.

The same can be said about marriage.  If you have a mediocre marriage that meets a few of your needs and you feel safe, you may stay in it, because the alternatives look grim.  But when that marriage ends, you are forced to become much more creative when thinking about your future.  You realize now anything could happen, and that can be refreshing and terrifying at the same time.

But if you are willing to take the necessary risks and take the time to invest in finding a better future for yourself, help is available.  If you are certain you don’t want to go back to the same old, same old or your life feels like it has turned into a 9-to-5 way of dying, you are now ready to change for the better.

You may be ready to find the courage inside to explore what you were put on this earth to do!

Remember: do-overs are indeed possible before it’s all over!

Here’s a fascinating article about the latest Census data on divorce. Do you live in the divorce capital of the US?

This British study found that over 20 years, low self-esteem leads to obesity and not the other way around.

I believe low self-esteem leads to poor eating habits, especially the need to stuff yourself with sweets, which makes us feel the need to eat ever more carbohydrates to feel full.

It’s called stuffing your feelings instead of letting them out and dealing with them, and it can turn into a never-ending vicious cycle.  We stuff our feeling and try unsuccessfully to hide them.  Pretty soon they are showing all over our body!

“Only those who risk going too far, can possibly find out how far one can go.”  -T.S. Eliot

We all know what’s bad about a crisis. We are usually taken by surprise by a major change we didn’t see coming, one that is really tough to adjust to.

I can’t say I didn’t see my divorce coming,  I just wouldn’t accept it. Then one day my husband and I decided together that it was simply what  needed to happen, for each of us to find happiness in the long run.

But when I lost my job, I was taken completely by surprise!  At that time, no one could have convinced me that this was a good thing!   It was one of the worst times in my entire life.  I struggled mightily with myself and my fate.

But today, I see how I needed for these misfortunes to occur, for me to wake up and begin to live my life with more integrity.

So what’s GOOD about a life crisis? It quickly knocks us out of our comfort zone, and then demands more from us. When more is demanded, more is given.

If I hadn’t lost my job, I never would have started my dating service for those 40+.   I never would have had the experience of starting my own business, struggled with those circumstances and I probably wouldn’t have met my lovely new husband. Then I wouldn’t have moved, gotten the money from my old house, and used that to start seeing a career counselor who slowly talked me into doing exactly what I had always wanted to do.

We never know what one small change in our lives might lead to.  Sometimes we just need to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Life crises can force our hand, pushing us into a whole new world of risk and benefit. We may feel forced to take risks we would never have considered before, and in this way, learn much more about ourselves and our full potential.

The short answer is yes, but it takes us longer to accept the fact that we need to, and even longer to decide what’s next!

And then there’s all those irritating new tricks we are forced to learn because of unwelcome changes in our health, our employment status or our marital status.

I don’t know about you, but ever since I hit midlife it’s been change, change, change. I feel like I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into a whole new life, resisting it at every turn in the road.

I was scared to death to get a divorce, but I did it anyway.  Even more afraid of losing my job, but I also survived that somehow.  And you cannot imagine the terror I felt when faced with trying out a whole new career at 50! That turned out to be the most rewarding change of all!

Now I find myself unbelievably HAPPY, even though I didn’t even want to go down this road in the first place.  Explain that one to me!  I guess it’s just another one of those MYSTERIES OF MIDLIFE…

I’m now busy preparing to do a presentation with Katy Piotrowski for our Larimer County September Symposium on September 25th.  Our topic:  How to teach old dogs fabulous new tricks. Our goal is to motivate others to take a chance on changing their lives.

At the last talk I presented, the first question at the end was, do you have to hit bottom before you can really start changing your life?  My only response was, “I did.”  If those fortuitous misfortunes had not happened, I don’t know where I’d be now.  I apparently needed to get desperate enough before I could admit to myself that my life was not working, thus inspiring me to change everything.

At the risk of sounding pathologically optimistic, I now see just about every obstacle that I bump into in my life as an opportunity to learn more about myself and get better at something.

For example, divorce is simply nature’s way of telling you that you don’t quite have this whole marriage thing figured out yet.  But that’s OK!  Do-overs ARE ALLOWED!

Job loss is nature’s way of telling you that it’s time to change something major, and try to get it right this time.  Lucky us, our old job didn’t want us, now we get to go do something we might actually enjoy!

Thank goodness (and my toxic boss) I lost my last library job!  After twenty-five years, I REALLY needed a change!  And just imagine all the great things it did for my brain elasticity.

I just saw State of Play and loved it!  I found it to be an intelligent expose on investigative reporting, leaving the viewer wondering who will be doing this sort of in depth research into government and corporate corruption when newspapers are no more.

Set in the halls of Congress and the city room of a newspaper not unlike the Washington Post, this is a political movie about  corporate malfeasance leading to a number of deaths. Think Blackwater.

If an outfit like that would kill for hire, the plot wonders, would it also kill to protect its profits?  Or is it really about dysfunctional relationships and mental illness?

The plot keeps you guessing and moves along quickly leaving the viewer struggling to keep up with the mind of midlife reporter Cal played by Russell Crowe, as well as the background and developments in his relationships with Congressman Collins (Ben Affleck) and his wife.

I like a movie that MOVES  and challenges my mind, while also making me think about the demise of newspapers and hard core investigative reporting in America.  In this movie the reporter is far ahead of the police in the crime investigation, partly because he has personal relationships with a few of the major players in the story!

I hope this isn’t the last of the great newspaper movies.  If newspapers are on their way out, who will be paid to get the story beneath the story then?

It has been my lifelong experience that while friendships with women have always been one of my highest priorities and essential to me on so many different levels, my female friends generally have not valued our time together as highly if their relationships with men or family intrude, as reported near the end of this article.

Here’s some food for thought on that subject:

UCLA STUDY ON FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN
By Gale Berkowitz

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are.   By the way,   they may do even more.

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women.

It’s a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research—most of it on men—upside down.   “Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible,” explains Laura Cousino Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study’s authors. “It’s an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.”

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just “fight or flight.” “In fact,” says Dr. Klein, “it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress response in a woman, it buffers the “fight or flight” response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead.

When she actually engages in this tending or befriending,  studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men”, says Dr. Klein, “because testosterone, which men produce in high levels when they’re under stress, seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen”, she adds, ”seems to enhance it.”

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic “aha!” moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. “There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in to clean the lab, have coffee, and bond”, says Dr. Klein.  “When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.”

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake:  The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health.

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the “tend and befriend” notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. “There’s no doubt,” says Dr. Klein, “that friends are helping us live.”

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses’ Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidantes was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight!

And that’s not all! When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of one of the largest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate.

Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That’s a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls’ and Women’s Friendships.

“Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women,” explains Dr. Josselson. “We push them right to the back burner. That’s really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they’re with other women. It’s a very healing experience.”

“Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to WAKE YOU UP!   -Pema

I get many requests for information on the boundless anger which can arise out of midlife crisis.  Here I’ll try to explain further the connection between depression and the rage that often hides beneath it.

Underneath most sadness or depression is an inexhaustible fountain of rage stored up from decades of stuffing most of our feelings.  For women this usually comes from very early training which taught us that being pissed is not lady like.  Nice girls don’t feel and certainly don’t show rage.

For men the same is true, but it is definitely more acceptable for men to show righteous indignation than women.  When men get angry in our society, it is often seen as justified.  When women get angry they are just bitchy.

Most of us become extremely uncomfortable when we feel like our life situation requires some show of anger.  We fear that if we release any of our righteous rage at the circumstances of our life, it will all come roaring out and consume us and everyone around us.

When I was in training to learn how to release my anger in a healthy and controlled way, I would sometimes start hyperventilating at the very thought of really getting angry and expressing myself.  This may come from early learning where any show of anger was punished severely by our parents or others.

Even though most of us don’t have a very positive view of anger, it is actually our best measure of when or whether we are being abused.  Anger comes straight from our own body wisdom and warns us that the situation we face is contentious or perhaps unfair, and we need to react in order to protect ourselves.

Deciding how much anger is required and mediating its release is a method we must learn from carefully studying our own history with depression and anger.  I attended an excellent anger workshop back in the 1980s where I learned all about my own history with anger, and why I felt so uncomfortable accessing and expressing my own anger.  Depression and self-blame is so much more acceptable in our society, especially in women.

But to be healthy human beings we must have access to ALL OF OUR EMOTIONS.  When we are abused or treated unfairly, we must show a strong response to make it clear that this is not acceptable behavior.  Protecting ourselves and our right to be who we are is the beginning of true self-responsibility, self-empowerment and self-respect.

If we cannot access our anger, we also have no access to our joy.

I live in northern Colorado and yesterday I attended an all day conference provided for the recently unemployed, by our county’s workforce office, funded by stimulus package funds.

The idea was to provide information and encouragement to those searching for that illusive next job.

Essentially it’s purpose was to tell us not to give up on our present atrocious employment situation.

The first thing I noticed was that almost everyone there was in midlife or older.  They were my kind of people, those who have been around long enough to know that this economy is not their fault, but feel angry and cheated by those who have made a killing at our expense.

My heart broke for those in their 60s and 70s who may never find another good job again. It hurt to look around that room and feel the terrible struggles so many of those good, hard-working Americans were experiencing right now.  It brought back strong memories of my own long-term depression after I lost my job in 2004.  First my marriage crumbled in 2001, then I lost my job, and by early 2005 it looked certain that I would lose my home next.

The bright spot for me was a young (relatively speaking) woman I met in the afternoon.  She told me of her four young kids and her husband’s difficulties finding any kind of work lately.  She had worked as an admin assistant and a waitress before having children, but had no idea what kind of job she could get now.

I challenged her by saying:  “What would you absolutely LOVE to do for a living?” Her eyes brightened as she revealed her passion for making fancy baby blankets.  She even had some that were so nice she had kept them for herself.  With encouragement, she slowly realized that she might at least try to sale some of them on Craigs List or YouTube.  Who knows!  In the end she thanked me for reminding her that she had special skills that could bring joy to others.

That was when I again realized the power behind these words from an excellent morning networking workshop I had attended.  I focused on the simple phrase:

Ask for EXACTLY what you want!

Most might say this is simplistic nonsense.  But I know that in those unusual times when I have believed in myself and my needs strongly enough, and known that I DESERVED exactly what I wanted in that moment, I have received it.

My best example is the dating service I began in 2004 because I needed a job and a date!  I was so focused on love and believing in its power to transform lives at that time.  And sure enough, very inadvertently, I met the love of my life through my competition:  Match.com!

I find it fascinating how hard it is for most of us to simply ask for exactly what we want.  I guess we have been brainwashed to think that we can have something close to what we want, but certainly not have it all.  How selfish and narcissistic that would be!

But if we do not stand up for our own deepest needs and desires in this moment in time, who will?

is  an interesting Google search that got somebody to this website, but it left me wondering how loving a 50-year-old man is any different than loving anyone else.

So how DO we love another with enough closeness and distance and acceptance of our differences?  The first question is WHY we love any one else.  Is it only because they fulfill some of our needs?

Or because we find new and interesting parts of ourselves by hanging out with them?  Or simply because we feel good being around them.

When I first met Mike over four years ago now, we both immediately felt seen and appreciated in ways neither one of us had ever experienced before.  We also felt understood without much explaining necessary.  The best way I can describe it is that we created a unique energy field between us when we were together.

There was absolutely no question that we  completed each other in some very essential and yet indescribable ways, like we had been searching our whole lives and yet never really expected to find such a safe place to be in the same space with another human being.

How do we love each other?  By caring enough to notice everything about how each of us are feeling moment to moment.  By being sensitive to when we really need to be alone with ourselves, and when we need to be together to experience true connectedness.  By telling the other when we’ve had a bad day and crave extra attention and love.  By taking full responsibility for ourselves and our actions towards each other.

I now know more than ever that mature love is defined by being more concerned about the health and comfort of the one you love than yourself, but in a healthy way.  It’s called healthy interdependence instead of co-dependence.  I believe it is the highest level of human connectedness, feeling strong and loving enough within yourself to have something to offer others.

It’s probably best to think of learning to truly love yourself as your basic training ground for learning how to love others well.  How do you know when you are loved?  How do you feel about yourself right now?

Dear Keith and Maura,

How can I have a better relationship with my husband? We seem to be growing apart, with the stresses of life we just don’t have any quality time anymore. He loves to play video games and I feel so left out. We don’t do anything together anymore. I am so unhappy and I don’t know what to do. I love my husband so much, we have been together for almost 13 years and we have two beautiful daughters…

More…

I have been so touched by a few reviews I have received recently of my new book Midlife Magic.  I actually sold a copy to the woman at my bank when I went in to open my business account.  She has a great name: Laura Lee just like me!  So I asked her yesterday what she thought of it.

She said she loves to savor it during her “quality time” on her breaks from work.  Her main comment was: “Laura, you are very REAL in your book.  No mincing words for you!”  Loved it!

Then Brigit, a wonderful new Australian friend I made through this blog wrote:

“I’ve loved your book. ‘Hang on, it all changes,’ is a truth we so often forget when we are going through our tough times, and sometimes we need to be reminded of it.

Your book lives by my bedside. I can open it at any page at the end of a day, and go to sleep feeling positive.”

Brigit also took the time to write a more complete review on her own blog today.  Go see her cool blog: HotMiddlescence.com Brigit just lost one of her jobs so she definitely feels our pain!

I enjoyed her final comment:   “Midlife Magic has bits of magic on every page!“

I saw “He’s just not that into you” the movie yesterday.  I read the book in 2004 when it first came out.  I saw no similarities between the book and the movie.  In fact, they seemed completely unrelated.

The book was a snarky, smart ass advice book directed at young women who keep falling for all the WRONG MEN, and won’t give up on them even when they start to get abused.  It was a wake up call to all women to get a little self-respect and stop falling in love with total jerks.  It was also very funny at times.  Greg Behrendt certainly has a way with humor.

The movie was entertaining, but certainly not the book in any form.  No snarkiness.  The tone was more compassion for all of us who have been fools for love in our past.  I thought it was like an advertisement for my own philosophy of love: You get what you are.

Funny how especially in youth, we think we will attract the most beautiful, together mate when we ourselves are completely messed up.  We have no self-love or respect, we treat others badly, we simply haven’t gained the level of maturity which makes us good company.  But we still think a miracle will happen and the nicest, kindest person will choose to spend their life with us.

The other mistake we make with young love is we judge the book by the cover almost completely.  The way our lover looks is so much more important because we want to make others jealous.  Slowly we learn that a jerk is a jerk no matter how he/she looks, and they can break our hearts much more easily.

Expecting twenty-somethings to do love well is like expecting students untrained in math to ace their SATs.  It ain’t going to happen!  We all have to stumble around making difficult, painful mistakes until we mature and learn to know ourselves better.  When you know yourself and finally become honest about your own flaws, true love becomes much more possible.

That is why I found midlife love so refreshing!  When I met Mike I quickly saw that there would be no more nonsense in this relationship.  We each knew far too well our own flaws and had acknowledged our deep need to be close with another who could accept us unconditionally.  We had spent most of our adult years alone and consciously chose to make the gigantic effort to welcome another trusting soul into our lives.

This relationship has developed into so much more than I expected at the beginning of it.  I’m so glad I fought all the necessary battles within myself to get to this point in life.  The reward is so much worth all the times I searched for love and could not find it.

Just finished Wally Lamb’s third novel, and what a book it is!  I thoroughly enjoyed She’s come undone by Wally.  Could not believe how well he captured the internal life of an emotionally disturbed, obese young woman in that book!

This new one is the story of the ultimate midlife crisis.  In the midst of dealing with the common midlife issue of burying a beloved aunt who helped to raise him, Caelum Quirk finds himself working in the same school where the Columbine massacre occurred.  He happens to miss that day of  school because of his aunt’s funeral, but his wife Maureen, the school nurse, barely misses annihilation by hiding in a cabinet in the Columbine library.  There she develops a lifelong case of PTSD while listening to the killers shoot a number of her students to death.

To Caelum’s credit, he sticks it out with his damaged wife, moving back to his family farm in Connecticut.  This novel is the story of all he discovers about himself by loving his wife through thick and thin while also learning about his crazy family history in the process.

This is also the story of what violence does to people through time.  The violence others do to us, and the violence we do to ourselves through not acknowledging our own human frailty.

Caelum knows when he returns to the family farm in Connecticut, that there are far too many memories there for him.  His line:  “The place was radioactive with memories” was a standout.

But, to his credit, he stays and works through it all, solving many mysteries about how he came to be.  In the end, he is rewarded with a much better life.  He confronts the crisis instead of trying to run away from it once again.

Though definitely long and very convoluted, this novel is well worth sticking with to the end.

Oprah revealed the fascinating story behind her recent weight gain yesterday.  It seems she may know now what a midlife crisis is after all.

That’s part of the problem with us human beings.  We find it far too easy to deny we have a problem, especially an emotional one.

What usually ends up happening when we deny our emotional problems for too long?  They turn into physical problems which are much more difficult to ignore or deny.  We then may turn our focus to solving the physical manifestation of our emotional problem, and still deny the anger, frustration or depression underneath.  Aren’t we amazing beings!

One of the most enduring lessons I learned from the excellent counselor I saw for  a few years in my thirties, was how important it is to allow time and space to have our feelings; truly grieve our losses and feel the many joys life offers.

But, I can hear you  saying: “I don’t have time for that! I have a million things to do today.”

Well guess what?  It all catches up with you sooner or later.  Denial does not get rid of any of your problems.  It just delays and intensifies them over time.  And in the meantime it eats away at your physical health in very serious ways like heart disease, GERD, and cancers.

When you deny your true feelings about yourself and the life you are choosing to live right now, you are like a ticking time bomb, just waiting for some overwhelming, inciting disturbance to blow your fuse and lead to true chaos in your life.

These overwhelming occurences seem to crop up in our middle years, things like serious injury or illness, divorce, job loss, empty nest, etc.  This is our body telling us:  “OK, cut it out now!  Quit trying to deny you are human and have feelings and needs just like everybody else!”

That is why courage is essential in this stage of life.  We must have the courage to face our feelings, feel them at the deepest levels, and listen to their lessons.

When I am dealing with personal grief, I take days off from work to allow myself to feel everything that’s going on with me.  My ability to fake being a happy, well-adjusted human being is gone.  It is time to be honest with myself and others.

That is why I sometimes think those of us who finally breakdown and have a crisis are the lucky ones.  We cannot go on denying.  We are forced by circumstances to stop our life for a while and fix the problem.

I want to share with you some interesting thoughts from one of my favorite writers!

David Richo wrote the best book I’ve ever read on being with others called:  How to be an adult in relationships. Now he’s written: The five things you cannot change…and the happiness we find by embracing them.

This book starts from the guiding premise that we control very little of what happens to us in life.  One of our major difficulties is discovering how “reality refuses to bow to our commands…all our lives include unexpected twists, unwanted endings, and challenges of every puzzle kind.”

David Richo works as a psychotherapist and has found the same five struggles arise again and again with his clients.  These he calls the five unavoidable givens:

1. Everything changes and ends.
2. Things do not always go according to plan.
3. Life is not always fair.
4. Pain is part of life.
5. People are not loving and loyal all the time.

Each of these givens suggest questions about our destiny:

“Are we here to get our way or to dance with the flow of life?  Are we here to make sure everything goes according to our plans or to trust the surprises and synchronicities that lead us to new vistas?  Are we here to make sure we get a fair deal or are we here to be upright and loving?  Are we here to avoid pain or to deal with it, grow from it, and learn to be compassionate through it?  Are we here to be loyally loved by everyone or to love with all our might?”

The idea that struck me the strongest in his introduction was the most important given of all: Anything can happen to anyone of us at anytime. Most of us spend a lifetime dancing around this most obvious truth.  We imagine that very good or very bad luck is supposed to happen to other people but never to us.

But when we embrace the fact that anything can happen to us at anytime, we begin to let go of our ego’s privileged view of itself as entitled to special treatment, that some rescuer will come through just for us and grant us exemption from life’s hard knocks.

If  we finally accept that we are the same as everyone else in these basic uncertainties, we become humble and feel a consoling sense of belonging, no matter how difficult life may become.

I think David’s ideas have everything to do with midlife crisis.  For many of us this crisis in the middle of life is our opportunity to feel human and fallible and just like everyone else.  Circumstances change, life becomes confusing, and we must finally accept how out of control our life can be at times, and how fundamentally unsuperior we are in this world of troubled souls.

When I consider the truth: “Things don’t always go according to plan,” I see that my life would be much worse if they had!  I was married to the wrong man and pursuing a career I no longer enjoyed.  If things had gone according to plan, I would not have gotten a divorce, lost my job, and consequently found a life so much more suited to my needs and dreams.

I can highly recommend this thought-provoking book!

Do you want to see a midlife crisis in action, then watch the news this morning and see what happened in Covina, California on Christmas eve!

Forty-five year old Bruce Pardo decided he couldn’t take it anymore after a bad divorce and then job loss.  So he went over to his in-laws’ house and started shooting with a gun and a flame-thrower!

Need any more proof that midlife is a very tough time to negotiate?  We have an international study showing that the mid-40s is the worst time in every country in the world for clinical depression.

We have a recent Center for Disease Control study showing that suicides are rising dramatically among 45 to 55 year olds, and we have stories like this in the news.  Need more proof that this is a problem we should all be paying attention to?

I am particularly mad about this situation because I tried once again last week to convince my local newspaper that there truly is a story in what’s happening with Americans in midlife right now.

They blew me off as usual!  Interestingly, the young reporter I sent it to found it to be an important story, but the older editor Sara Hansen (a woman obviously in midlife herself!) decided it was totally unnewsworthy.

Perhaps it is a simple case that those that are successful in midlife don’t want to acknowledge what’s happening with those of us that are not.  “Who wants to think about those poor losers who got divorced or lost their job recently.  They must have somehow deserved their fate.“  Perhaps we all feel this way to some extent until it happens to us.

I just find it strange that I have acquired an international following with this blog, and almost 45,000 views, and yet a local editor can find no story of interest to her readership!

I think I see why newspapers are going out of business now…