“Midlife Crisis or Eternal Weltschmerz? Journalist Jeroen Reflects”

It must be the midlife crisis. If it’s not stress or the bottle, or a lot of uncertainty, then that’s it. They are not my words, but those of the late Robert Long. He sang them in 1988. Then I was hope and already 14 years old and a midlife seemed like an exotic beast. Something that happened to very old people. On a sigh of 50 I wonder these weeks if I might have that beast among the members. And whether I am a very old person now, of the rebound.

For COVID-19 or possible pregnancy you can buy a rapid test in supermarkets and pharmacies. A few drops of snot or urine later you will know if you have won. A midlife crisis is somewhat more difficult to detect, although it is said that it mainly affects people between their 40th and 65th year of life, a period in which they are sometimes attacked by questions of meaning that throw them off balance.

Now I’ve been a bit off balance all my life. It’s innate. Characteristic. People who know tell me that it may have something to do with hypersensitivity and giftedness. If you are above average sensitive and also think about it above average, it is a bit more difficult to stay balanced.

As far as those questions of meaning are concerned: I have been asking myself these since almost kindergarten. They really exploded after the death of my godmother and grandmother on my mother’s side. The year is 1987, a year before Robert Long’s modest radio hit. I remember sitting in the church and I could almost touch the coffin. I found it oppressive that that box housed my grandmother.

Not because of her dead body, but because I’ve been struggling with claustrophobia ever since an unfortunate adventure with a stuck elevator somewhere in my early childhood. Being locked in a coffin seemed like the ultimate nightmare to me. That same day I decided that cremation would be my portion: nice and warm and then nice to travel, carried by wind and weather.

But I digress. So the midlife crisis. Do I have them or not? Or plays my eternal World Pain bother me? I decide on the latter. I am, after all, a melancholic. A poet. A feeler who thinks too much and a thinker who feels too much. Which is why everything is always tossing and turning. Round and round, round and round. The fact that I don’t feel any urge to buy a convertible or to impress women who could be my daughters confirms my conviction: this is not midlife, but character at work.

Although I keep dreaming of a retro motorcycle or vintage Vespa. Someone whispered to my son that these are two very lethal means of transport and he wants to wear me out alive for a while. That’s why I’m holding off the boat for now. Even though the time shrinks between the now and the irrevocable grave, and with it the chances to taste all that you still could, all that you still wanted.

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