Oh, so THIS is what a mid-life crisis is
“It's not about what happened in the past or what you think might happen in the future. It's about the ride for Christ’s sake! There's no point going through all this crap if you’re not going to enjoy the ride. And you know what, when you least expect it something great might come along. Something better than you even planned for.” –Along Came Polly
I recently had a very important relationship come to an end. That's as much as I'm going to say about it, because I'm a private person. But, it had to be stated because it was the catalyst for an existential crisis that happened to come right around the mid-point of my life. So it goes. It is what it is. Shit happens. Choose your tired platitude, copy/paste for effect.
I'm 39 years old, which seemed too young for a mid-life crisis until I did some Googling and realized I'm getting old. Pretty rude way to find out. When I think of my family history, it actually checks out. Taylors seem to drop out of the race around 80 often enough.
The mid-life crisis is a pop culture favorite, a trope played out in cinema, television, music and more recently memes. In almost all cases, it's men who suffer from this indignity, not women. Usually we see it as a character dressing differently or dying their hair or buying a sports car. But I already had a sports car, so I went the other way and bought a van. Not just any van, but a converted campervan. You know, the kind that spent most of its life delivering water jugs or newspapers or mail. Then some young person buys it, slaps some flooring over the scratched metal, screws in some cabinets and a makeshift bed and sells their posessions to start living "van life". At least, that's the sterotype.
We don't know each other yet, so let me tell you a couple of things about me. I started traveling internationally in 2013 and fell in love with it almost immediately. After a couple of trips, I wanted a better way to capture memories of the cool things I was seeing, so I bought my first camera. In short order, I also fell in love with photography. So for me, travel and photography are inextricably linked. Fast forward more than a decade and thousands of photos later and I'd built up a catalog I thought maybe I could show off and even sell as a little side hustle. I kept that idea in the back of my head for a while, never really doing anything to pursue it. Enter the mid-life crisis.
At this point I think I should define mid-life crisis so we're all thinking about the same thing. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as: "an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence that can occur in early middle age." Yeah that feels about right. Let's look at an alternative definition from our friends at Webster: "a period of emotional turmoil in middle age characterized especially by a strong desire for change." If we combine both of those definitions, which are pretty similar, I'd say it hits the nail on the head for what I'm going through. It's kind of a kick in the head to go through your life feeling like you're an individual who does things differently only to realize you're so much like everyone else that you run into a common problem right on schedule and the basic dictionary definition makes you feel like "this Webster guy really GETS me". Life can be disappointing that way.
You can see where this is going by now. I ran smack into a period of emotional turmoil, with the whole checklist of symptoms. I felt directionless. Incapable. Bored. Uninspired. When I recognized what was going on, I said screw it, I'm going to embrace this thing. So I tried combining some things I'm passionate about in hopes that it would stir my soul and clear my head. I started learning about camper vans to understand what I wanted in mine. I mapped out a loose path to follow, based around visiting national parks. I bought some more memory cards, packed up my camera gear and embarked on a month long road trip. I decided that blogging about my trip as I was on it would be a great way to supplement the photo gallery on my shiny new website.
So come on. Let's point ourselves into the storm and experience this mid-life crisis together. Maybe you can learn something so you can have more fun with yours. Or maybe you survived one already and you want the opportunity to shake your head at mine. I'm ok with that. If change is what this crisis wants, then moving out of my nice, spacious, comfortable house and into a cramped van outta do the trick.