Louise O'Neill: 'Thirty-six is too young to have a mid-life crisis, isn’t it?'

"And now I’m the person in my thirties and I want to desperately say to anyone younger than me, I’m not old, okay? I’m not."

Sat, 15 May, 2021 - 07:13

Louise O’Neill

In February 2020 before – oh god, you know. Don’t make me spell it out for you again! – I had to travel to Birmingham, Madrid, and London in one week for work.

I wore the same pair of black boots because they would, as your grandmother might say, “go with everything.” Smart enough for an event but comfortable enough for airport security, these were the things we had to think about in the Before Times. Anyway, I got a blister on the fourth toe of my right foot in Birmingham which became increasingly infected as the week went on. By the time I was leaving London, I couldn’t walk on it, limping onto the plane. I went to South Doc on the way home from the airport (“What do you reckon of this whole Coronavirus thing?” I asked the GP. “It seems a bit overblown, don’t you think?)

She prescribed antibiotics, all was well… or so I thought. This week, I finally got to see a chiropodist who winced when she saw my feet. “You’re too young for this. Wait, what age are you?” she asked me, hopefully, as if I was going to take my face mask off and reveal I was secretly nine hundred years old. “Thirty-six,” I replied and there was a quick inhale of breath. “Why?” I asked. “What age are my feet?” She shook her head, something something ‘hammer toe’ and ‘collapsed arches’ and “I wouldn’t expect to see these kinds of issues on anyone under the age of sixty.”

And I am now living in mortal fear of what my feet will look when I am actually sixty. My only comfort is that it wasn’t my habit of buying vintage shoes that were slightly too small for me in my twenties that has done this but rather, it can all be put down to ‘genetics’ (looks at my father accusingly). Is this all I have to look forward to?

A life of orthotics and Birkenstock? Thirty-six is too young to have a mid-life crisis, isn’t it?

When I was in my teens and twenties, there felt like there was so much time. Every psychic I’ve ever visited has marvelled at my long-life line and I took that as carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. I took stupid risks because I had no fear; I was destined to live until I was at least 97, after all. But I also had no concept of ageing. I would look at people in their thirties and think – “yes, they are grownups. They know what they’re doing. They have it all figured out. They’re old.”

And now I’m the person in my thirties and I want to desperately say to anyone younger than me, I’m not old, okay? I’m not.

And I don’t even have the satisfaction of looking at people in their forties and think they’re old because I’m pretty sure they feel the same as me except with kids and more bills to pay. I’m trying to figure out what it is I’m afraid of – is it a fear of death? Somehow, I don’t think so. I believe in an afterlife, I believe there is something else after this. Is it ageing? Becoming invisible? Becoming irrelevant? I think of that Sylvia Plath quote often, “what horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” Maybe that’s the freedom of youth, all that potential – all the choices unmade, the roads untravelled, and your mistakes don’t seem to matter as much because you have so much time to fix them.

Maybe it is I who has too much time on her hands, and here I am, filling it with self-indulgent navel-gazing. I am tired, this week. The hours have been long, the work has been hard. I read a report saying that only seven counties in Ireland have property prices reasonable enough for people on median wages to afford to buy their own homes and I feel angry then too. I buy too many tickets for the lottery, hoping that my numbers are lucky and I can just give this all up.

I scroll through listings on Daft, looking at million-euro homes in Dalkey and Killiney, fantasising about ripping out this kitchen, and building a walk-in wardrobe in this room. The things I would buy for it – the cashmere sweaters, the expensive handbags, the spiked heels. (yes, yes, there would be sizeable donations to charity, lump sums given to friends and family – I’m not a complete monster) But I wonder too, if this that is what I am really craving. Once I bought all the stuff, how would I feel? What would I want? Maybe, in the end, all I really want is a break.

LOUISE SAYS:

Read: The Rules Of Revelation by Lisa McInerney. The final book in one of the best trilogies in modern Irish literature, this moves from the tragic to the hilarious with a dazzling deftness. It also examines post-Crash Ireland - and its hypocrisy in how it looks at class, art, and feminism - with a gimlet eye.

Read: I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay by Deirdre Sullivan. As macabre as Roald Dahl at his most twisted, Sullivan’s collection of short stories is beautiful and haunting in equal measures.