My mid-life crisis

After 40, most of us start to panic about what we have (or haven't) accomplished. Me? I'm learning that there's more to life than being a famous writer.

- By Viet Thanh Nguyen

I'D SEEN THE WORD ON SOCIAL MEDIA. MID. THE SHOW WAS MID. The song was mid. The rapper was mid. So many shows, songs, rappers, and more are unknown to me, trees in the now-bewildering wilderness of pop culture that the young navigate effortlessly.

But I rapidly deduced that mid is not good. Mid is mediocre. Middle of the road. Meh.

And then I realized-I am mid.

The pandemic made my midness unavoidable. Until then, I could convince myself that I looked ten years younger than I was, and looking good is halfway to feeling good.

But in the Age of the Mask, my face of denial was shrouded. Suddenly all I saw were eyes. Nothing I did to my visage or hair could perform a trompe l'oeil and camouflage how my age was now inscribed in the lines and wrinkles around my eyes, underlined emphatically by a duo of bags that got heavier every year. The young, in contrast, showed off their youth effortlessly with the smooth and unblemished canvas framing their eyes. Every moment of fleeting eye contact with both young and old reminded me of the threat of mortal illness as well as the inevitable slow motion of aging.

Funny how I trembled when I turned 40, more than a decade ago. How youthful 40 now seems.

But I remind myself that at that middling age, when I wanted nothing more than to be a novelist, there was no published novel. I also had not wanted to be a father, that death sentence, yet that is what I became. When my son was born, my life, as I knew it, was over.

I was 42.