Mid-life crises can take many different forms but generally they all have one thing in common: reaching a period in the middle of one’s life and realizing that many of one’s life goals have not been reached, or “the big goal” was not reached or it was reached but wasn’t what you thought it would be; that one has lost sight, through going through a mindless daily grind, of the things that were important to them — a sense that life is rapidly passing one by and one has not made the most of it. Some people at this stage suddenly drop their current career and embark on “what they always really wanted to do” as far as a career. Some leave their spouses and try to hook up with a younger model who makes them feel “young again” and like they’ve now got some sort of second, “do over” chance. Some continue slogging on, feeling that there is nothing they can do about it now and life is just a bitch anyway. There are lots and lots of things that people do if they get hit by a mid-life crisis, some of them good and some of them bad, as they try to get a second lease on life.

I’ve actually been going through a rather different kind of mid-life crisis. Far from feeling that life has passed me by and I’ve missed out on the opportunities to do the things I “always wanted,” or that haven’t managed to achieve important goals, I’ve hit mid-life and realized that…I’ve done it all.

I’ve achieved every single really important personal goal that I’ve had in life. You know how you make those checklists of “things you really really want to do before you die” –my checklist has been checked off and it was not a short list. It had everything on there from little things like “learn to jump out of a plane” to “make a name for yourself” which I did by becoming known as one of the founders of a field of study. I didn’t dream of making the Olympics (being a bit of a realist, lol) but I did dream of training with Bela and Marta Karolyi –and my Ema should know that the loans she took out and the extra job she worked to allow that to happen gave me absolutely the best, happiest, peak experience of my whole life. Nothing else has ever come close. –competing internationally and taking a first on bars in a significant competition and I did that. But that is not to say that other life experiences haven’t hit pretty darn high on the experience-o-meter and even knocked the ringer off the top of it. I wanted to experience living in another country and immersing myself fully in that culture –and I’ve done it with not just one but three. I’ve visited every country (and there were a lot of them) that was on my “I’d like to see it before I go” list and even seen some that I never particularly wanted to see but enjoyed the visit nonetheless. I wanted to become “native”-fluent” in another language and I was in German when I was there regularly, getting good enough to give professional talks and to write a scholarly article but best of all, being taken for a German by other Germans. It’ll never happen with hebrew because becoming ‘native’ in languages, like gymnastics, can only be done when young. I’ll always sound like a foreigner with my hebrew. I was, and I guess still am lol, the first girl in my family to earn a doctoral degree. I jumped a fence on a horse, I didn’t become the next Katherine Hepburn but I did act in plays and commercials until I felt my acting goal had been fulfilled enough and I decided that I really didn’t care about being the next “Kate,” I dreamed of publishing and I’ve published, and many other goals, large and small. Making Aliyah was the last “my life would not have been fully complete if I got unexpectedly hit by a taxi” personal goal on that list and exactly 3 years and 8 days ago, I fulfilled it.

If I got hit by a taxi (knock wood) tomorrow, no one could say that my life was cut short or there were things left undone, that she “always wanted to () and now will never have the opportunity.” I feel like I’ve crammed in 3 or 4 people’s lives into my own. Everything from here is gravy. But I feel a little lost without those life-long things that sat about on the checklist waiting to be fulfilled. Goals now don’t really feel like “goals” but rather just adding to what has already been done, nice, great if achieved but not like, like….yeah.