Empathy for the midlife-crisis man?
PLUS: Wake up a little more fabulous + the happiness U-curve
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The Midst Mornings: My 5 a.m. Chitown beauty and wellness routine
Wake-up time: 5 a.m.
City: Chicago
First thought: It’s a beautiful day to be alive! I LOVE mornings — the gorgeous freshness of each day, all the creative possibility, the simple moments of gratitude.
Before my boys (my teen son and partner) wake up, I care for my girls — Bella my Shih Tzu, Mittens my tabby, and Pączki my Pug — all rescues from PAWS Chicago. Then it’s me time: jazz on the record player, dark roast brewing, and one of my current nonfiction selections in hand before I grab my laptop to write and edit for The Midst. And along the way, I tap into this ritual of products, which not only benefits my health, but also makes me happy.
But first, electrolytes
After eight hours in bed, I head straight to the kitchen to rehydrate — flushing toxins and kickstarting my mental and physical energy. I add Hi-Lyte Electrolyte Concentrate, a tasteless concentrate of clean sea minerals, into a large glass of filtered water and chug it while making what I really want — my coffee!
Doubling down on dark chocolate
I begin each and every day with a piece of dark chocolate with my coffee. It's decadent, it's delicious, and it's actually quite healthy, packed with antioxidants, fiber, iron, and magnesium, and can even protect against heart disease. Just be sure to enjoy dark chocolate that's at least 70% cacao (the "chocolate" bean that provides these health benefits), like Taza Chocolate Organic Amaze Bar 95% Stone Ground, which uses direct trade-certified cacao.
Sunscreen every. single. day.
By now, we all know that sunscreen is the number-one way to keep your skin health and youthful-looking. But did you know that you can also get harmful UVA through windows when you're inside your home, car, or office? Even though I work from my apartment, I always make sure to apply sunscreen under my moisturizer du jour (currently Alloy M4 Face Cream), using a forumula with SPF 30 or more like my current fave, Supergoop! Unseen Sunscreen - SPF 40, an invisible, weightless, scentless formula with a lovely, velvet finish.
No-makeup makeup, aka, concealer
Many women ask me what concealer I recommend for mature undereye skin that doesn't crease or fade, and here you have it: IT Cosmetics Bye Bye Under Eye Full Coverage Concealer. So, even when working from home, after applying eye cream (a very important first step!) I use my fingers to dab it under my eyes and over my rosacea, then hit up any blemishes or surprises with a small concealer brush. The formula is water- and smudge-proof, and one tube seems to last forever.
No-PU dry shampoo
I'm VERY sensitive to particular, phony scents, so many dry shampoos give me more of a headache than head help. Still, I discovered COLAB Original Bergamot and Rose Scented Dry Shampoo, a cruelty-free and vegan-friendly dry shampoo that absorbs oil with no white residue — that smells simply pleasant. Since I wash my hair every few days, I make sure to comb my tresses and spray this puppy in it every morning to stay fresh.
But I’m naked without perfume
Working from home does not mean sacrificing fabulousness. Every day, no matter what I'm doing — or not doing, I spray myself with whichever fragrance from my collection speaks to me. Currently, with autumn rolling in, I prefer warmer, woody scents like classic Black Opium by Yves Saint Laurent with its notes of patchouli against fresh orange blossom and pear.
Pea over piggies for protein
Since I don't eat meat, I'm always looking for more ways to add protein to my diet. I'm particularly fond of Garden of Life Raw Organic Fit Vegan Protein Powder, which offers 28g of pea protein, 4g of fiber, probiotics, and organic "superfoods" in a yummy formula. I blend the chocolate powder with almond milk, a banana, spinach, and berries for a delicious morning treat when the blender seems easier than cooking a hormone-healthy meal.
This article was orginally published this week on the-midst.com here.
Sympathy for the middle-aged man
By Sarah Nardi
As a child of the ’80s, my understanding of a midlife crisis was largely formed around the character of Clark Griswold. The bumbling patriarch of the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, Clark was a man whose outsized expectations of life rarely conform to reality.
Despite a trusty corporate salary, a house in the suburbs, and a secure place in America’s middle class, Clark was always chasing a version of perfection that remained just out of reach. His attempts to engineer idyllic family experiences and cherished memories inevitably failed, leaving his wife and kids to treat him with a kind of bemused tolerance.
To cope, Clark would sometimes escape into little pockets of his imagination where, instead of a beleaguered family man, he was being seduced by a shopgirl, or riding shotgun in a Ferrari with Christie Brinkley. Clark never came across as lecherous or predatory in his fantasies about young women. His little fantasies read as mostly harmless — the pathetic yearnings of a hopeless buffoon.
Clark is just one instantiation of a tragicomic trope: the American male in midlife.
The cultural landscape is littered with examples, ranging from darker instances, like Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty, to parody, like the husbands of The First Wives Club. But growing up with repeated exposure to the theme, it seemed to me that the common thread weaving through the narratives was the fundamental inability of men to accept the fact of aging. Like Clark, they’re all clinging desperately to youth, attempting to escape reality through younger women and sports cars.
I rolled my eyes for decades at the absurdities of middle-aged men.
The bell tolls for me
That is, until my biological clock struck the halfway mark and my own absurdities pulled up alongside me. But instead of Christie Brinkley in a Ferrari, it was Jeremey Allen White on a fixed-gear bike — or, occasionally, Timothee Chalamet on a sandworm.
Suddenly, I was consumed by some pretty baroque thoughts about who I would consider to be much younger guys. Guys who, although fully formed human adults, have probably never manually rolled down a car window or dialed a rotary phone. And though the age difference might not relegate me into old-enough-to-be-their-mother territory, I’m definitely old enough to have been asked to babysit.
Finding myself fantasizing about younger guys was startling not just because it placed me on the same sad plane as Clark Griswold, but also because I’d previously always been attracted to older men. I spent the entirety of my 20s in relationships with guys who predated me by at least a decade, and I reveled in the role of ingenue, eager to sit at the feet of a dashing sophisticate and lap up knowledge of the wider world. Looking back, it’s clear that I believed they could offer me some kind of shortcut to evolution — a direct path to my highest self.
Although it was definitely misguided, there was nothing outwardly wrong about me dating older guys. The age gap between older men and younger women is so thoroughly normalized in our society that we even have a charming little term for it to dispel any potential ick: a “May-December romance.” No one bats an eye when a celebrity like Alec Baldwin or Brad Pitt hooks up with a woman from the May category, even when the age difference is approaching 30 years.
But like so many patriarchal standards, it doesn’t work both ways. Of course, women can and do pair off with younger men, but it’s much more of a cultural oddity. When a 41-year-old Demi Moore married a 25-year-old Ashton Kutcher in 2005, the world went bananas. And lest we think we’ve somehow evolved, Heidi Klum’s 2019 marriage is rarely referenced without mention of the fact her husband is 17 years younger.
All of this to say that my sudden fantasies involving younger men — one of whom barely looks old enough to vote — came freighted with a lot of psychosocial baggage. And as a chronic over-analyzer, I couldn’t stop interrogating myself over what these thoughts could mean. Was I unhappy in my marriage? Was I bored with my life? Had I developed a sudden kink for hot rodent boys?
What the fuck was going on?
How U doin’?
According to some studies, happiness in life tends to follow the bend of a U-shaped curve. It starts off high, but by the time we hit our 40s, we’re approaching the bottom of the U, where we’re left to wallow in the depths of dissatisfaction. Then as we move past midlife and into our sunset years, the U bends back towards happiness, eventually establishing us somewhere near where we began.
The theory has its detractors and a U-curve is certainly far too simplistic to describe the arc of all human existence. But as a visual reference for understanding my own experience, it comes in handy.
Because like a lot of women in their mid-40s, I am barely holding my shit together. The past few years have felt being pelted from all sides in a game of existential dodgeball.
I’m part of the squeeze generation, which means that in addition to a young child, I also have aging parents whose health I worry for and whose life decisions I question daily. (As in, no, you should NOT continue to feed nine feral cats, and yes, you SHOULD downsize to a home that isn’t a multilevel Victorian death trap.)
At 46, I’m experiencing the lowest career satisfaction of my professional life, partly because I’m constantly negotiating the incompatibility of childcare and full-time work. Money, which I assumed would be kind of magically sorted out by now, is a constant, looming concern.
I’m fortunate enough to have an amazing husband who I truly love, but I rarely have the time or inclination to focus on our sex life. And that must frighten me on a very deep level because I have a recurring nightmare in which he leaves me and I can’t figure out how to download Tinder.
On top of it all, I am perimenopausal. Hopelessly, ferociously, terrifyingly perimenopausal. So much so that until making the fraught decision to begin HRT three months ago, I was dealing with a brain fog so debilitating I could often not immediately recall my own last name.
And it is here — in the midst of all this shit that I would consider very centric to the experience of modern womanhood — that I began to develop a certain empathy for men.
Hear me out.
This article was originally published today on the-midst.com here.
That my best friend, she a real bad bitch …
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X, Lauria, Head of Editorial & Content at The Midst
The Midst is a woman-owned business on a mission to empower women in midlife.
Wow, beautiful, introspective work from Sarah Nahdi here—so well-done.