Insight from a Psychotherapist: The Pandemic broke my Gen X brain.

I had plans once. I was starting pilates. I had an office I drove to. The President in 2019 scared me but I had hope that we could correct for that. Was it all a perfect scenario, of course not, but it was a life.

In 2022 everything scares me.

Working from home has made for agoraphobic inducing anxiety when I have to leave. I exist in this overpriced home/office and can’t justify spending money on renting another office but can’t afford to buy a bigger home.

During the pandemic so many people decided to make Florida their primary or secondary residence now the people who have been living here can’t afford to stay. People seem to have so much money. Where’s my money? I sit on the sofa and watch Jeopardy, wondering if that is a way I could pay off my student loans. I’m not motivated to take the test.

I’m 48 now. A Generation X woman who is tired and flabby. I’m invisible to anyone under 40 and yet too young to retire. I know there are women my age living their best lives; there is a billion dollar industry that wants my money to achieve a modicum of it, but I’m just nostalgic and annoyed.

I thought we had figured this out in the nineties. Or at least we knew where we were going: forward. Yet, I have watched as that progressive energy has ebbed and flowed and now we appear to be drifting backwards. Corporate greed and people’s value, equating more to the size of their financial portfolios than their humanity, has consumed all of us, as we stare into the screens that contain our complicated feelings and curated facts.

I am adrift. Too young to have benefitted from affordable housing and economic prosperity and too old to not feel like a twat on TikTok. The mid-life crisis is very much a thing. My social media is full of ads for depression treatments and hormone supplements.

I felt this in previous decades. Every stage of development brings about a crisis of identity and mine, according to Erikson, is currently Generativity vs Stagnation. This stage feels especially resonant as my search for meaning and purpose has only deepened with age. Yet, emerging from a global health crisis, into a global recession, fueled by a foreign war and the climate crisis, just as I enter perimenopause….well that just feels cruel.