wall of midlife crisis. when did you hit it and how did you make it thru. edited...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

60. Mine came earlier. I was in my early 40s and

teaching Japanese in a small college.

I had stopped believing in what I was doing, since it seemed that I was simply providing a service course for business majors who believed (despite what I told them repeatedly) that employers would fall down and worship them if they had Japanese on their transcripts. Not that they actually wanted to put forth the effort to learn the language or even to learn something about the culture, mind you. They just wanted an A or B in Japanese on their transcript. (I had some very, very good students, but only about 10% per class.)

In addition, the college didn't offer a major, so I was stuck teaching the same first- and second-year courses over and over. The other foreign language professors said that having majors and being able to teach upper level students was what really kept them going, and I didn't have that.

I also felt that I was not using the language at the level I was capable of. I had already been through a bout of depression, and my therapist had helped me see that several of my needs were not being met, among them being able to exercise my skills to the fullest extent.

I was up for tenure, and so I decided that I would get tenure and then try to find another job from a position of strength.

I was forced to take other action when I was denied tenure. That meant that I had one more year at the college before I had to leave. This is supposed to be the most devastating thing that can happen to an academic, but my first thought was, "I don't have to stay here."

Of course, there was still the problem of what to do next. Through a complicated series of events, I began free-lance textbook editing in my final year, and since I didn't need the money from that side job to live on, I put it all into savings. Then I found a cheap living space and moved up to Portland. Over the following year, I gradually transitioned into translation.

A few months after I moved up to Portland, a former colleague bought a house and invited me to the housewarming. A lot of my former colleagues were in attendance. After the party, the new homeowner phoned me and said that the other attendees had remarked on how relaxed and cheerful I looked.

All I could think was, "I must have been tense and gloomy before."

Sometimes I miss being in the classroom (there WERE some good times) or having lots of colleagues to hang out with, but the people I know well who are still in academia are all depressed, and the homeowner I referred to above took early retirement.

Translation is a good fit for me. I love to write, I love languages, and I enjoy working on all different subjects and expanding my general knowledge and Japanese vocabulary. Working solo can be a drag, but thanks to the Internet, I made many cyberfriends in the profession and have met them face to face at national and international conferences. They're from all different backgrounds, and with the exception of a couple of Libertarians, are fun and interesting people.

The upshot of it is that going through the midlife crisis, which really started in my late thirties and lasted for about four years, was extremely hard, but I was forced into making the decisions that got me out of it.