mid-life transitions: the cog feeling

I've talked to two women in the past few days about being in our mid-fifties. Each of us is in a unique situation, but I'm not sure anyone is getting through this lightly. There are physical changes and life transitions and readjustments of expectations.

Since we're all unique, I suspect we feel alone, like we're each the only one going through this. But some things seem consistent. I keep hearing the same things: I thought I would feel different/better/more accomplished. More adult. I thought I would have done something significant by now. I thought I would feel more useful. I thought all this effort, all the gazillions hours of my self that I've poured into my kids, my job, my volunteer work, my music/writing/dance, whatever, would feel more worth it.

Instead, at least for me, I find myself feeling more and more like a cog in an enormous machine. Like everything I've done has mainly served to just move things along, keep the wheels turning. When I was studying theory in grad school, I read Althusser, who proposed that there is no such thing as individual identity. Instead, he thought we all occupy predefined roles (subject positions) in the massive machine that is our culture (the hegemony). When I first read that, I thought it was absurd, but now I wonder if he developed that theory in his mid-fifties, because that's how this feels some days.

(aside: it's entirely possible that was Gramsci and not Althusser. My brain is dying, and I don't care enough to go back and figure it out.)

I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days. This isn't depression-- as you know, I've been through that, and this feels different. Depression is like an endless well of blackness inside me. This doesn't have that black hole feeling, it's just ended up with me re-evaluating the things I do and jettisoning quite a few. I'm reconsidering what's really important to me at this stage of life, and aligning my activities to match.

Maybe the cog feeling only happens to those of us who were dreamers, who fantasized that we would really help change the world, that we would be part of something big. I believed that wholeheartedly when I was younger. But I've told you before, I'm convinced now that the only way we change the world is in the small things, the little ways that we connect with the people around us, the way we carry ourselves in the world.

So the only thing I've come up with so far to work on this is to adopt a defiantly positive attitude-- yeah, well, my life may be a boring and insignificant cog in a machine, but it's my cog, damn it, and I'm going to do the best I can with it.

As with all of these posts, I know this doesn't apply to everybody. There are plenty of people who hit their fifties at full stride and never look back (I see them on Facebook and I sigh with a tiny bit of friendly envy). But I suspect there are more of us uncertain ones out there than are admitting to it.

(This has been sitting in my draft folder for a couple of weeks now. I've re-written it at least three times. Maybe part of the re-evaluation thing is wondering if there's any point in posting stuff like this. But it's late, and I've missed posting on Tuesday for the past several weeks, so here you go.)