Square Hole

Whenever I've heard of someone having a mid-life crisis, I've always imagined it to be a negative thing. The stereotype has always been of some guy, fearful of aging, losing his hair, losing his youth, who goes out & buys himself a Corvette in hopes of recapturing both.

But is that really true?

Maybe the mid-life "crisis" is really a mid-life awakening. Instead of being a desperate attempt to regain something lost, maybe the mid-life crisis is instead an attempt to gain something we never had: respect for ourselves, regardless of what our parents, our friends, society in general think of it.

I spent my twenties & early thirties trying to live the life that my parents raised me to live, being a "respectable" person with a decent job, a house, etc. But I somehow always wound up a little off the mark of what a "real" person was: no 9-5 job, no aspirations to motherhood, no 401K. A square peg in a round hole, so to speak.

I've come to the conclusion that there is a square hole out there. I just need to find it.