Hi. My name is Emily. I'm having a mid-life crisis, & it sucks

Before you read on, I want to make clear that I didn't write this post in the hopes that people would give me hugs or enumerate all of my achievements, large and small, or try to make me feel better. Please don't feel compelled to do that. I know what I've done in my life that's good. Some days, a dark mood shadows and diminishes my achievements, while on other days, they shine with the promise of future success. I would, however, be interested in how other women of, ahem, a certain age might be feeling in the context of what I write below.

I've always been an ambitious woman. I don't think I'd've done too well in any age or society that might have suffocated my ambition or my intellect. It would have chafed me to death to be unable to pursue answers to all of my many questions, to have been unable to continue my never-ending quest for more and more knowledge, to have somebody tell me that I can't do something because--and only because--of my sex. Gaah.

My ambition goes back a long way, most of my 42 years. I can clearly remember resolving one day in my parents' living room, when I was about six, that my overarching goal for my life was to learn everything. And I really meant everything. Obviously, I didn't know much at the time, or I'd've known better than to set such an unattainable goal. Upon later and wiser reflection, I've modified it to learning as much as I can.

But that's not where my ambition ends. I want to write books about what I've learned, teach people what I've learned, learn from the people I teach, be an Author with a capital A, a teacher with...well, the lowercase there is fine. I'm not trying to be the Dalai Lama here, just...someone who, in my way, makes a difference in the world for the better.

And, as Cousin Charlotte might say in A Room with a View, in my own small way, I have made some differences in the world. When I was teaching, I referred to myself as sometimes changing the world one neuron at a time. I thought about what I was doing in science in my own peculiarly lingering liberal arts lingo, working on my own two inches of ivory, doing things in my own small way.

I earned, with a bit of travail, an advanced degree, along with more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications. But I love writing and teaching more than EDTA and thermocyclers, so I shifted to writing full time. I wrote a book, a trade sort of book but one that was all mine, teaching biology to college students in the way that I wanted to teach it. It's great to go to Amazon and see that book there, rising and falling (often falling) in the sales numbers, to see that one five-star review. But what does that book really do? Help a desperate student here and there, perhaps. Changing a few neurons at a time, possibly.

My ambitions, in short, lie unfulfilled. I am not an Author, I am a writer and an editor and have written a trade book that sells maybe a couple of copies a week. We're not talking gorgeous prose or even the tight, dense yet poetic prose of which, in my literary moments, I am capable.

And I'm freaking out a bit. I'm middle aged now. Officially. No way to equivocate, to claim that 40 is the new 30 or that I've got decades ahead, blah blah blah. I have to admit: I am feeling my age. I hate reading Vanity Fair's Bright Young Things entries and being reminded of how much I wasted my own youth wallowing in irresponsibility and 12 packs of bad beer instead of really doing something to make a difference in the world. I detest on reflection what a waste I made of my youth in so many ways and look at my age and wonder: How did I fall so far behind?

Yes. I am a woman having a mid-life crisis. I don't feel a terrible urge to go purchase a Porsche (although that'd be pretty cool) or take up with a man half my age (are you kidding? 21? They're still boys, for God's sake). But I have a strange and palpable urgency hanging over my head at all times. To sit and write the book--the literary book, not the trade science book--that I know is in me (really, there are several, I'm convinced). To get on board with nonprofits that make a difference, to write for them and use words to convince others to make their own differences in the world. To Be Somebody Who Makes a Difference.

Why do I not do these things? I'm a mother. I have three children, all young. I homeschool one of them and ferry the others around constantly. I'm with them literally 24 hours a day. I can edit and write about science and do the other jobs I do for my steady clients while war breaks out around me in my office, complete with light sabers and Lego swords. But I cannot be an Author or make excursions to a nonprofit somewhere and be what I think I've always wanted to be. Not now, anyway.

Instead, I work on these children, one neuron at a time. Only my three. Not making a huge difference there, but I had them on purpose and intend to do my best by them. I do not resent them in the slightest because it's my own damn fault that I frittered away my 20s in hops and hopelessness, and I owe it to them to be the best mother I can be, mid-life crisis, middle-aged mopes, and a couple of decades of regret notwithstanding. In general, I don't wallow in my regrets because I'm happy--doesn't sound like it from this, I know, but I am--and I know that all of my past was prologue to all the love I have in my life today.

Still, these regrets haunt me and the urgency whips me from behind, driving me to frustration. Even so, the world turns all around me, and indeed, neurons change every day. Perhaps my role in making change in the world isn't a large one. Instead, perhaps my destiny is to be a life of lingering frustration with a success that is more indirect, fine-grained, so fine as to be intangible. For some people, that's fine. For me, it galls, and I'm not mature enough to mentally soothe my way out of the irritation, to attain the wisdom of appreciating a life well lived but lived quietly.

I fear I am not alone in that.

The other evening, one of our little packs of neurons made an announcement to us. The pack of neurons in question was TH. Earlier in the day, we'd been discussing what his future occupations might be, and he enumerated a few, including entomologist, marine biologist, or failing those, mailman. He'd clearly been thinking about it throughout the day because that night, as we were watching Top Chef, he made his announcement.

"You know what," he said, "I don't really know what exactly what I want to be when I grow up, but I do know one thing I want to do."

"What's that?" I queried.

"I just know that when I grow up, I want to make a difference in the world."

You and me both, kid.