Begin Again
I am 39 years old, I live in the Midwest, I’m of the Millennial generation, sandwiched awkwardly between the cool Gen Xers and the too-cool-for-school Gen Z. As a 1982 child, I grew up running wild in a neighborhood without supervision, but also had an email address in college. Next week, I will start a new job in middle management, that will place me, for the first time in my adult life, in the middle class. All of these ways of being in the middle somewhere got me thinking about what “the middle” really means. Neither here nor there. Someplace people pause on their way elsewhere. But for many of us, this is where we live out much of our lives.
The middle, that just right for Goldilocks, feels like a strange state of being. I’ve spoken with many friends of similar age about how, if we’re single and child-free, there are really no models for what middle age ought to be. We get to make it up as we go, though, of course, there’s also a comfort in having a role model. Jack Halberstam writes about the strangeness of queer time, when we don’t hit the typical milestones of our cis-het peers, particularly if we have come out later in life.
I have no answers on any of these ideas, but these are musings I’m muddling over in my mind as I think about writing a newsletter, which a fair few have requested I do, missing, as they must, my blogging days of yore.
So what will you find in this newsletter? A mishmash of topics, for sure. I plan to write about good books I’ve read, pop culture I’m consuming, life in the Midwest as an aging Millennial, making the transition from academia to industry, and lots of other things, I’m sure. What would you like to read here? Let me know. And thanks for reading!