[315/365] the portal

[cosmolinguist]

In the last couple of years I've found myself gradually collecting a lot of blogs newsletters by straight-ish USian women, somehow interested in this culture that's so familiar to me (I love Lyz Lenz's writing for that particularly, like this thing I finally read yesterday) at precisely the time that it's increasingly receding into the distance.

Today I read about the portal, “the weird spiritual / emotional / professional / transitional portal that women ages 37 to 45 are in.” It appears to be particularly hegemonic USian women, I hasten to add, and as always I found myself wondering how this applies to more marginalized groups, including ones I'm in.

The rest of Petersen's piece consists of short interviews with a number of people on the subject and I'm particularly interested in the first one.

In her work, Byock describes a broad “typology” for young people in our societal moment: there are “those who are more or less comfortable pursuing the social expectations for them, and those who are questioning too much or suffering too much to do so.” The first group she calls Stability Types; the second, Meaning Types.

It goes on:

within her work, she sees [the "midlife passage"] as the moment when “stability types, realizing they’ve climbed to the top of the ladder, see that they want more out of life. And so they search for meaning. The portal might be seen as the work of people who have participated in everything society expected of them on one level or another, and are finding themselves wanting more out of life — and want to find more purpose in life as change makers.”

Which is fine. But, as a very obvious "Meaning Type" in this framework, I immediately noticed that there was no equivalent midlife journey described here for us. I wonder if it works the other way too.

I think it always has for me: I went from "suffering too much" to "questioning too much" (while still suffering! questioning was an addition rather than a replacement!) and have spent my late 30s and now early 40s chasing stability: a bachelor's degree, a divorce and consequently a vastly improved living situation, my first white-collar 9-to-5 job... even, for all it can be destabilizing (what name will I be called at the hospital?), gender transition is in the longer term stabilizing for me too.

Gender transition (social, medical, administrative, to any extent someone pursues it) actually feels like a pretty good example of how seeking stability can be as much of an upheaval, a "portal," for us Meaning Types as seeking meaning can be for the Stability Types.