The Mid-Life Crisis compels corniness and indignity upon you, but that’s part of the torment. More materially it puts you on a beachhead of pain that your cliche has created. But later you see that there was a realignment taking place, something irresistible and universal, to do with you changing views about death (and you ought to have a crisis about that. It is critical to have a crisis about that).
so writes Martin Amis (Experience)…..
I particularly like this quote because it partly resonates with views I hear, time and again. Many of us resist experiencing something that that seems ‘textbook’ or cliched (wish I could work out acute accents) – we like to think we are or should be different to the rest of humanity: braver/more resistant than the rest. I often hear stories of painful experiences ebbing away in their description or even trashed entirely because the storyteller believes its psychological maths is too ‘easy’ – such as a shaky self-esteem isn’t allowed to connect with a pernicioius bullying experience. We are indeed all so very different, but we are all the same too.