Confessing I've Become a Cliché

My Mid-life Crisis, Part 1

It's time to admit my mid-life crisis.

For those who fancy themselves as original thinkers and innovators, the greatest sin to confess is that their life has become a cliché. But I now confess: I am a cliché. My more recent story, banal as though it may be, follows below. Perhaps it will relate to your own experience in some way.

You may be like me, and when you muse about the mid-life crisis, picture a balding middle-aged man, fairly tubby about the waistline, making wild out of left-field decisions and life-changes. He might purchase a Harley-Davidson one day; a cherry red sports-car the next. He might quit his job or his marriage with little warning. He'll start esoteric hobbies like learning the electric guitar, tending to Bonsai trees, or get obsessed with artificial intelligence or virtual reality. He'll announce goals more fitting for a man half his age, like hiking a snow-peaked mountain or bicycling across the country. He'll switch careers or start pursuing a degree in a completely different field than his experience. He starts to wear clothes to get attention rather than blend in. He grows strange facial hair or dyes his hair. He is weird.

Precisely half of the proceeding paragraph is about me. The other half is not true; although I make no promises about the future, except for marriage—which is not up for negotiation, or at least that’s why my wife told me. But the profile fits. I've been in a mid-life crisis. You may know that I grew a big old beard and then quit my influential job, but below is something about me in the past two years I doubt you know because almost nobody does.

I had a severe medical crisis.

I didn't talk about it publicly, so this is likely news to you. I thought I was going to die two years ago, and so did my family. I had extreme pain. The kind of pain that makes you grind your teeth and groan and think dying might not be a bad option. For six weeks couldn't work, couldn't sleep, and couldn't eat.

Everyone was on videoconference calls for Covid shut down, but I couldn't even make it through a half-hour zoom call. I wore ice more often than clothes. I ate so few calories I lost 45 pounds in two months--an unhealthy decline. The few that saw me congratulated me on my radical diet working so well, little did they know that it was pain-fueled starvation.

I already knew how to cry a little, but in this season crying became as natural and involuntary as yawning or sneezing. At first I cried a few times a day. Eventually, every hour. I slept in another room so my situation wouldn't torture my wife along with me.

Every specialist I was referred to in the city couldn't figure it out. No expensive scan, random test, or bone biopsy uncovered the culprit of the many systems in my body that shut down. No prayer meeting did the trick. One specialist thought it might even be a new disease to track--and I told her if she identified it she should call it "LaGuardia" since that's the name I was using for my condition in the family, because I've always thought the infamous NYC airport sounded sorta like a disease of some kind.

But a reprieve was coming: my “LaGuardia” vanished as quickly as it started, without any diagnosis. I recovered, thankful for answered prayers of my family, friends, and microchurch who were all praying daily.

I also learned something survivors will teach you: once you are acquainted with the depths of pain, there is another level of angst that comes when you’re not in pain. It’s not worse, but it is a different kind of psychological pain. It is the memory of pain and the fear, the bone deep dread, that the pain will return.

Unfortunately, six weeks later the dreaded battle with intense pain did return. And it brought reinforcements. I developed symptoms that were even scarier than the first time that alarmed specialists and terrified my wife. I won’t list them all, because she dutifully kept pages and pages of notes of every weird symptom for specialist visits, so it’s too long to share (and it will cause people to spam me with googled suggestions for what the disease must have been). But I will give one example: I slowly lost all vision multiple times. Complete blackout as if I was blind. This happened more than a dozen times in at least one eye, a few times in both. Once I was feeling good enough to drive alone to yet another specialist's scan and I lost all vision in one eye. I pulled the car over to the side of the road as the other eye started to fade to black. I sat in the car on the side of the road till it returned. Thankfully I saw normally five minutes later.

Again, the pain stopped without reason beyond prayer a second time--for good. I'm happy to say that I'm 22 months out and have had no recurring problems. None. I'm entirely healthy and take no medicine nor ongoing treatment. Praise Him! LaGuardia is behind me, I trust.

However, as you might imagine, this shapes a person deeply. It shaped how I related to others experiencing pain and disease, those who experience not only longer but much worse in pain and suffering than anything I did. Just a taste for several months for me was enough to know they are better souls than I, and I admire them and learn from them. But it also shaped how I view the time I have left. It wasn't the reason I quit my job (I had already decided to do that, ironically, a month before the pain). But the pain was happening in the same season, and it's hard to divide the two things for me because of the timing. In one hand I had my medical crisis triggering my mid-life crisis. In the other hand there are major reasons that are tied up together that I’ll get to in part three of series.

Once healthy I went into a season of searching for a new identity. This is odd, because I've done a fair bit of life coaching for others--helping them forge a solid sense of their identity. I had confirmed that stuff for myself many times, in four phrases that encapsulate what I care about:

• I mobilize multipliers…

• I clarify ideas…

• I coach leaders…

• & I launch innovations.

In my mid-life crisis and beyond those four things still remain. But, of course, you can apply your passions and wiring and even calling in a variety of ways. Thus I began a quest to discover it for the back half of my life—the part I thought I might have lost when I felt like I was dying. I was given a gift to not die at the age of 46.

In search of something, I started to pursue some wild ambitions, including two really crazy ones almost nobody, even some of my close friends, know about. I’ll share those in part 2 here.

Also… I’d love to hear how you might relate to what I shared here. Start a dialog with me by leaving a comment.

The Crazy-Eyed Wild Ambitions Phase