Am I In My Millennial Mid-Life Crisis?

Incomplete thoughts on finding myself by getting a little lost in the wilderness

Recently I was attending a zoom training and the facilitator said something that stuck with me: “Find your forest and walk through it.”

Now, I was laying on the couch, no pants, with my laptop camera off—mind you. But these words spoke to me because I feel like I’m fumbling through the forest these days. I’m seasonally depressed. Who isn’t? I’m having trouble enjoying things—which I have no problem over-intellectualizing. It’s called anhedonia, everyone. Your welcome. And listening to music is supposed to help.

Photo by Alexandre Barbosa on Unsplash

Regardless, experiencing high-functioning depression is a doozy. It means breezing past to-do lists in a state of numbness. It’s scary—scary when things are changing, scary when there’s so much uncertainty in this country. But that’s the life of Reagan-Era baby, and I’m glad I don’t have to go at it alone. One of the breakthroughs I had was realizing how much pressure I put on myself. No, really. I need to work on that. I need to go lay down somewhere, so I can mid life crisis in peace.

Instead, I do the most. I performed in a comedy show recently, and the morning after, I flew to across the country to Boston for the weekend for a retreat. Around the same time, a horrible tropical storm called Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica. I was concerned for my family for a few days—thankfully, they turned out to be okay. Still, I had a panic attack on the plane. I hid it by weeping in the cramped bathroom. I’ll probably use this material in my next self-deprecating comedy set. I swear I’m not trauma dumping right now. I have a point, I promise.

The point is, however it may look on the outside, I’m actually all up in the forest right now. Deep in it.

It’s frightening, difficult, but also full of necessary truths I’ve been avoiding. I’m facing things I’ve suppressed for a long time—like how much PTSD I have from being an artist for so many years, especially as a musician. There’s been more than a handful of betrayals (self betrayals mostly), years I struggled under debilitating debt (still do), times when being my weirdo-self felt like an uphill battle. I’ve felt the need to suppress my creative and visionary side. Contorting into boxes is no bueno. I’ve felt misunderstood for much of my life. That’s pretty heartbreaking stuff. It’s okay for me to say that my heart is broken—it hurts—and it’s okay to grieve. All of this is Ronald Reagan’s fault though. He’s directly responsible.

Graphic by Thomas Gokey

Silver linings? Always. Zohran Mamdani won in NYC and I recently went to Día de los Muertos in the Fruitvale and the Mission. It was beautiful to be there—it’s my favorite holiday—and I was again reminded that grief is hella complex. I’ve even written about this truth over and over. I fail to take my own advice though. Again, grief isn’t mere sadness. Grief is rage, it’s a punch line, a celebration, it can be transcendence and years of longing. I guess that’s why Zora Neale Hurston said “there are years that ask questions and there years that answer.”

When Hurricane Melissa was barreling towards Jamaica, I transcended my physical state while thousands of feet in the sky. Suddenly I could see my auntie, the tiny wrinkles on her face, her church hats, her cement house and pitch black hurricane laden clouds overhead. The uncertainty about how I’d live without her, how to prepare for that possibility, filled me with grief—but love too. Isn’t it wonderful to love people so deeply? It requires such vulnerability.

As I write this millions of Americans are at risk of losing SNAP benefits, ICE raids are still ripping families apart, everywhere you look there’s suffering. How are we supposed to respond? If you’re in one of the stages of grief then that’s fine. Grief is powerful; it lives in the marrow of our bones, it can even become part of our DNA. It doesn’t have to mean, “shit, now I’m traumatized forever.” Grief is part of being fully alive. Even in a utopian world, people would still die, accidents would still happen. So the questions become: how to respond and how to shift?

And nowadays, one of the shifts I’m working toward is trusting my visions. I’m learning to ask the universe for what I want, to take steps that fill my own cup, to act with intention rather than out of obligation. I’m trying to reconnect with desire, with meaning. I’ve realized I carry deep wounds around unworthiness—wounds I thought I could pressure myself out of feeling. But that’s not how life works, honey. Go figure.

I don’t have all the answers yet, but I feel good about where I’m at. I’m content with feeling hard things. I’m finding my mid-life crisis forest. I imagine it to be dense, the leaves have changed to fall colors and the canopy is blood-red, tangerine and even fuchsia. Plants are decomposing, but all the roots of the trees are buzzing with information. They’re communicating, telling ancient secrets. Meanwhile, I’m using my wild imagination to walk through this wilderness. Sometimes I become a sloth on a branch. Other times the weeping willows embrace me with their limbs.

“You found us,” they say.

Thank goodness.