Is This a Midlife Crisis?
I guess you'd say, what can make me feel this way? (The 1991 Hit Summer Movie) My Girl and Lisa Frank
One of my favorite movies as a kid was the 1991 movie, My Girl. In the movie Anna Chlumsky, plays Vada Sultenfuss a precocious eleven year old girl navigating friendship, puberty and grief. If you’ve seen it, you know that Vada’s mom has died in childbirth and during the movie her best friend, Thomas J. (played by Macaulay Culkin) dies too. It’s a beautiful and playful and completely heartbreaking story. (plus a soundtrack you do not want to miss)1
My husband and I sat down for a rewatch a few nights ago, and in the final scenes, as we watched Vada’s grief unfold, I lost it. I cried hard. I’m still not exactly sure why the movie hit me the way it did. Was it possible I was grieving a bit of my younger self? A self (or selves) I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — all the different people I’ve been — the little girl who daydreamed on her roller-skates; the earnest teenager who fell in love easily and expressed opinions readily; the college student with cat eye glasses who read modern feminist poetry and fancied herself a writer; and the woman who moved to Austin in her mid-twenties and created a life hours away from all she’d ever known.
Is possible that the tears during the movie were as much about my own loss of childhood as Vada’s? Was I remembering my own coming of age story? My own loss of innocence?
Recently, my sister-in-law noticed a new tattoo on my foot of a sunshine wearing sunglasses and said “very Lisa Frank2”. I laughed, but wondered: “am I having a midlife crisis?” I always imagined that people do impulsive things or make rash changes in midlife in an attempt to grasp at what is left of their younger self. What if we’re just trying to reclaim all those people we’ve been? All the people we are.
I recently read3, that the word crisis means to sieve, to sift, to decide what to keep and what to let go. When I looked it up, I found one definition to be a turning point for better or worse. Is that the root of a midlife crisis? Are we simply at a turning point, deciding what stays and what goes?
As I approach a new decade— a decade that people call over the hill, a decade, they say, that begins your second half of life — one hope is to reclaim parts of my younger selves. Maybe that looks like a Lisa Frank tattoo — I’m okay with that. What I want is to remember who I am and the people I have been. I want to honor them as sacred part of me. I want to daydream and fall in love and roller-skate right over that hill.
Spiritual Direction News
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Total Loss by Catherine Johnston
I love that definition of crisis! Here's to sifting and sorting and finding what stays. xo