Looking for an Ending

A little over two years ago I started writing more regularly. It was all personal writing, filling pages of journals in both hard copy and electronic versions with details of what I was thinking, feeling, and experiencing. I was trying to capture what was to me clearly a midlife crisis. From the beginning I considered what I was writing to be a memoir, and I’ve had intentions of writing it for publication. But it has no ending, and this has been the huge boulder in my path. How can a person write a book with no ending?

More troubling, of course, is the fact that the actual crisis in my life has no ending. Forget about the book. Doesn’t the midlife crisis end? Isn’t it supposed to land a person in a new life of some sort? All of the stories I have read end with divorce, a new lover, an explosion of one’s career, a child, a different career all together… You know, those life-altering, world-shattering changes that indicate you were meant to go through this? One of the more stark characteristics of my midlife crisis was a deep-seated feeling that I have been living the wrong life. The problem has been that I do not know what the “right” life is. I’m too self-absorbed to want a child; I’m not sure what I would do if I weren’t doing psychotherapy for a living—not because I’m wed to this career but because I just can’t imagine an alternative; and deep from within my gut I know that there is not another romantic relationship out there for me. In addition to being the antithesis of a “dater” and having the usual baggage that we all carry around by the time we’re pushing forty, I have a few suitcases full of a chronic physical illness which are too heavy for a new relationship. So I’ve looked within for the changes. Maybe the life-altering shake-up would happen internally. Two years and lots of therapy later and my exterior life looks the same while my interior life is no more alive. It is beginning to look like change is inevitable though, and the changes I see in the near future will be triggered by events completely outside of my control.

I believe that we find ourselves exactly where we need to be in life. I have faith that I need to be here, experiencing the lack of “rightness” of my life and without a vision for the future, and I can trust that this is part of a grander plan. I also know that there are others who have gone through similar experiences, and this helps. If others out there have a perspective that makes sense of this or can help me begin to envision the ending of my book, I would welcome hearing from you.